Shit Books

think of this as Oprah's book club if Oprah had the capacity to hate things

i love to read. nearly anything i can get my hands on is fair game whenever i get a few minutes of free time. unfortunately some of what i read isn't as good as other stuff e.g. Paradise Lost vs. [random medieval poetry]. there are still other things that, in my own twisted while approaching 20/20 vision, should have been burned by the publishers before the manuscript even reached the printing press.

My least favorite book that i'm being forced to read right now (for probation) is called Character is Destiny by some fella named Gough. its 14 point font and double spacing were the most noticeable at first, but then i started reading it. to put it nicely, let's just say it was a bad read.

for worst books of all time, the award goes to Johnny Tremain. i dont think that it was actually a bad book, but i was forced to read it when i was in the 3rd grade and i've hated it ever since and i have refused to revisit it, not sure why.

 

Heart of Darkness was my nemesis. I absolutely despise that book.
And there's not another book I can say that about, period.
I don't like a lot of popular authors these days, but I'm more likely to put a book down now
and walk away than to continue torturing myself with a bad read.
My reading-for-pleasure time is very limited these days.
Let me say though, that there hasn't been a book on Oprah's book list that I actually liked
if I hadn't read it before. And at that point, I like to think that my good taste influenced hers.

 

The Ask comes to mind immediately.
One of the NY Times favorite books of the year, blah blah blah.
Took it out of the library and thought it was crap.
If a 9th grader handed it in for English class it would merit a C at best.

 

i don't keep up on the Bee Queen's book club either but i remember when A Million Tiny Pieces came out, i read it, and then it turned out that James Frey or whatever was lying to the bulbous black one and she was super offended

 

I hated Catcher in the Rye. Even read it twice to make sure (once in 8th grade, once in 12th.) Holden Caulfield seriously just annoyed the shit out of me the entire book.

I also hated Lord of the Flies.

 

Not shit but so very annoying - Robert Jordan books after the first 3. It started off really good but then they really slowed down. The next 7 or so books could easily be edited to 3 books. It is shit that such a good idea and series was destroyed by poor editing and slowing the story right down. Really wish that someone would go back and redo them.

 

I'll take crap for it, but I hated Grapes of Wrath. So depressing, every time something good might be around the corner, bam. No upside.

My latest author to hate is Neal Stephenson. I'm torn because I love the writing, I love the setting, and he is incredibly intelligent. Every book of his I read I get to the last chapter and suddenly it is like he dropped a ton of acid and wrote the ending high as a kite because it goes in completely different directions that don't make sense.

 

I tried to read Catcher in the Rye, and never made it past 20 pages. I think I read Lord of the Flies, but didn't care for it either way. It's a rare book that I won't finish...

Did not enjoy anything by Hemingway. Sun Also Rises, meh

 

Three off the top of my head:
Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (I thought since I enjoyed the movie with Bing Crosby so much, the book must be that much better)
Nope, it bored the hell out of me.

Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" (A book with sorcerers and magic, England's fight with Napoleon, and some sea battles thrown in. Should be a grand adventure)
Boy was I disappointed. It was 800 pages of boring.

H. Rider Haggard's "She" (I enjoyed King Soloman's Mines and Alan Quatermain)
This was another bore-fest for me.


/bored now

 

I hated The Old Man And The Sea. Holy shit, what a boring, repetitive book. I don't remember how many pages it was but it felt like 5000, all filled with either apologies to a fish, an old man complaining about how tired he was, and those ever so subtle religious deep hidden meanings that my teacher skirted around.

Now that I'm no longer required to read literature for school, I have no qualms setting something down that I don't like. Too many good books out there to get to without wasting my time on the bad ones.

 

Any book where the author's name appears equal to or larger than the title on the front cover of the first edition.

 

give orson scott card a break Hektore

 

Anathem and the Big U are the only two books of his that I thought had satisfactory endings. But I enjoy the rest of the books so much I don't really care.
--- merged: Nov 2, 2011 5:06 PM ---
I loathe Hemmingway, but I can't say he's an awful writer. I don't care for his themes, but he says what he means to say.

What really makes a shit book for me is someone who writes too cleverly to be understood. Wallace's Infinite Jest, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Joyce's entire corpus, Delaney's Dhalgren, most of Dick's work.

And Choke. Chuck says right up front, "You will not like this book." He's right.

 

i can't speak to you anymore

 

Sorry, man. Both bored the crap out of me inside 300 pages.

 

Hemingway's far from a bad writer. My problems were mainly thematic in nature.

I can't remember any of these off the top of my head, but I have read books, that were well written, and good books, that were terribly hard to finish. Oh wait, Stephen R Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series was very hard to finish. It was so hard because the main character was so adamantly flawed, that he couldn't enjoy being godlike in an alternate universe, because he was afraid he'd wake up and be a leper, and helpless. Very well written series though.

I will occasionally go back to books that I thought were crap, years later, and give them another shot. Sometimes maturity, or life lessons will bring into focus what aggravated me to start with.

Crap books, anything by Stephen Koontz... ( they are all the same story, pretty much )

 

I used to love Dan Brown books, but then i hit the 8th grade for the exact same reason Cayvmann doesn't like Koontz books. they're the same goddam book over and over.