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Books you hate

Wildy

Adelaidean
Wildy
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I did what I think was a very bad search so I don't know if this has been done or not, so if it has, apologies in advance.

We all seem to enjoy a good book here and we have threads that express that.

What I want with this thread is probably to compile some sort of list of books that you wouldn't suggest to someone, a book that you would give to someone you hate, or a book that you would be willing to burn if you were trapped in a shuttlecraft stuck on an ice world and you need to survive*.

Or you could list a book that has put you off a certain author.

Please also give a reason.

Anyway, since I started the thread I guess I have to go first.

I honestly despised the book Lockie Leonard: Human Torpedo by Tim Winton. I had to read this about 5 years ago for school, it had a mediocre plot, generally unlikeable characters (I am pretty sure that we are supposed to like the main character for his moral character as well but I didn't), I found that the father was my favourite character, but that was because he was a minor character but he didn't really do anything.

Tim Winton is apparently an award winning novelist, however that book was so bad that I couldn't and still can't pick up and willingly read something written by him.

Your turn...

*This is a joke ok, so no comments accusing me of being a Nazi or a Communist etc.
 
Moby Dick is a gigantic waste of time.

And, most of Chuck Palahniuk's books are really rotten. I enjoyed Fight Club, but I suspect that I enjoyed it because I was a man of the right age when I read it. I read Haunted last year and had to force myself to finish it. I won't bother picking up another of his books.
 
The Alchemist, first of all. What a vile dollop of newage platitudes. Sprinkled with finely shredded Celestine Prophecy.

Life of Pi. I hate the way it is pushed everywhere as a "must-read". I did not finish it- too preachy.

Foundation by Isaac Asimov. Definitely hated it. Pompous idea, repetitive, unlikeable characters you can never identify with.
 
Any Sword of Truth book, but especially Naked Empire.

Ender's Game.

Interview With a Vampire.
 
Mission Earth - bloated, obvious, clichéd.

The Survivalist series - pulp fiction crap with one character and a cast of cardboard cut-outs.
 
Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo. I was forced to read it in college. It made no sense. It had no plot. It was boring. Thirty years after the fact, I still pause occasionally and think about how much I hate that book.
 
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Allow me to add "Le petit sauvage" by Alexandre Jardin, which I was forced to read in high school.
 
Bridges of Madison County - As I've posted before as much of it as I read was just Waller's ego-masturbation fantasies. As was the blurb about himself on the dust jacket.

The last Wheel of Time book I finished. Robert Jordan was a hack and borderline plagarist, and that is compared to other fantasy authors, who as a general class (with a few notable exceptions *cough*rebbecabradley*cough*) have been picking at Tolkien's corpse for fifty years.

I enjoyed Ender's Game, althought the short story did it better. I read the next two and was unimpressed, but I did not hate them. Card's Hart's Hope, on the other hand... It starts out with the brutal, torturous rape of a little girl- in public- and didn't have a single sympathetic character in the first three chapters- not even the rape victim. I gave up on it at that point.
 
Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco. Colossal waste of time. Pretty much the same plot as The da Vinci Code, except that it pretended to be some kind of intellectual exercise.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Supposed to be the magnum opus of the "beat" generation. I've never understood why the "beat" generation was supposed to be so significant. Where are the beatniks today? All dead, gone, and largely forgotten, having barely left a ripple on the water. This book is simply a monologue about a bunch of losers roaming around the country getting drunk or stoned and stealing from or freeloading off anyone innocent enough to spend any time with them. Truman Capote famously remarked about this book, "That's not writing; it's just typing."
 
BPSCG said:
Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco. Colossal waste of time. Pretty much the same plot as The da Vinci Code, except that it pretended to be some kind of intellectual exercise.
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Nonsense. It's a satire of conspiracy theories. Did you not get to the part where the secret plan for world domination turns out to be a laundry list?
 
NotJesus said:
Nonsense. It's a satire of conspiracy theories. Did you not get to the part where the secret plan for world domination turns out to be a laundry list?
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Evidently I gave up before that. About halfway through, I found myself saying, "Where the @#$% is this going, anyway?"

ETA: BTW, I love Moby-Dick. What wonderful use of the English language. "Speak not to me of blasphemy; I'd strike the sun itself if it offended me!"

Not that anyone actually talks like that.
 
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BPSCG said:
Evidently I gave up before that. About halfway through, I found myself saying, "Where the @#$% is this going, anyway?"

ETA: BTW, I love Moby-Dick. What wonderful use of the English language. "Speak not to me of blasphemy; I'd strike the sun itself if it offended me!"

Not that anyone actually talks like that.
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I've had dinner with you. You talk like that.


;)
 
I work in a bookstore and run into books on a daily basis that I wouldn't recommed to anyone. Big on my list is anything by Ann Coulter. If I had to pick a single book I guess it would be Darwin's Black Box.
 
Books That I Hate:

1) Any book wherein the "poems" lack both meter and rhyme.

2) Any science-fiction that relies on either "Deus Ex Machina" or "Deus Est Machina."

3) Any book which the highlights therein consist solely of graphic descriptions of sex and/or violence.*

4) Any cookbook which the recipes therein include ingredients that are unknown outside a culinary institute or an aboriginal culture.*

5) Any book of fiction that is in reality nothing more than a thinly-veiled diatribe against people of any one culture, nation, or religion; or a thinly-veiled praise piece hailing the virtues of any one culture, nation, or religion.

(* - Please, correct the grammar and/or punctuation!)
 
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La Nausee, by Sartre. It really did just make me sick.

Second the Alchemist - see coment above.

Any book by Douglas Coupland - pretentious, ponderous piffle.

The Lord of the Rings - although this is more of a reaction against the bunch of drippy cults that have sprung up around it.
 
BPSCG said:
On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Supposed to be the magnum opus of the "beat" generation. I've never understood why the "beat" generation was supposed to be so significant.
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Because they realised they weren't. And lived like it.

Where are the beatniks today? All dead, gone, and largely forgotten, having barely left a ripple on the water.
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Um. Sure. They only spread Jazz and the Blues outside of the Black community and popularised it among Whites, so if you want to ignore the last fifty years of American music as "barely a ripple" I guess you are right. Oh, and the civil rights movement grew out of their rejection of the leftover conservativism at the end of WWII. So, yeah, let's call that "largely forgotten".

This book is simply a monologue about a bunch of losers roaming around the country getting drunk or stoned and stealing from or freeloading off anyone innocent enough to spend any time with them.
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You say that like there is something wrong with that. You also say that like a person who has never finished the book, because that's pretty much the conclusion to which Sal Paradise comes at the end, but he still loves them all, himself included, regardless.

Truman Capote famously remarked about this book, "That's not writing; it's just typing."
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Everybody trots this out. What about Capote leads you to value his opinion, other than he agrees with you?
 
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