Books you hate

[Shoogar]

Everything by Heinlein from Stranger in a Strange Land on, with the exception of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. If I wanted to be lectured I'd find a time machine, go back 35 years and find my dad. Very annoying.

 

[Senex]

No, it doesn't make me happy. As a rule, I don't tend to cheer people on to commit suicide!

And I'm willing to admit that I require likeable protagonists, which may or may not be a weakness on my part. I read non-fiction for information, but I read fiction for entertainment (with some information thrown in, if I'm lucky), and I'm not entertained by disagreeable "heroes."

HG

I would slash my wrists in a heartbeat if I could leave behind a Pulitzer Prize classic like "A Confederacy of Dunces." Mock John Kennedy Toole if you must. That book is brilliant.

 

[proxywar]

I found A brave new world to be utterly disappointing. I Should of went with 1984.

 

[alfaniner]

Shadow Puppets by Orson Scott Card. The third? fourth? book in the side-series to Ender's Game. I've since concluded that EG was the only one in this universe worth reading (and reading again), with the possible exception of Ender's Shadow.

The rest of both series is totally lacking in any realistic characters, humor, or interesting and believable situations. For Shadow Puppets, every time I picked it up I'd think, "Now, why am I reading this again?" I am almost certain there will be more in that series or universe, and just as certain that I don't care to read any more about it.

 

[BPScooter]

I did have to fight through several waves of "dislike" in order to allow DH Lawrence to affect me. Mainly it's a deal of trying to understand how such writers were stretching themselves so far for so little effect. "The Plumed Serpent" by DHL is a work I would like to hear discussed seriously by any modern politician. After that I went to "Sons and Lovers" by DHL and it was indeed captivating, well written, but part of the problem is that our more-recent taboos and such are not in the book. His old ones are sort of ho-hum to us now so unless the reader really wants to join the author in time and place it will be an unsatisfying experience. Same with Thomas Hardy "Jude the Obscure"--it will break your heart but it's not really the kind of thing that will top the charts today.

 

[Polaris]

I got I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell a selection of short stories about the adventures of a self proclaimed a-hole as he chases and beds women, drinks too much and his just being smarter and cooler than everyone else. I was given this because my buddy says that Tucker (the writer) reminds him of me. After reading it I may have to kill him.

I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but your sense of humor is dead.

I hate In the Wake of the Plague by Norman F. Cantor. I wanted to read a history of the Black Death and its effects on Medieval Europe. Instead I got a history of the sexual preferences of the rulers of the time.

 

[bruto]

Late to this thread, I'm having trouble thinking of any books I really hated, but then recollected a couple that I found so annoying I put them down unfinished. To be hateful a book has to be worse than just dull or not to my taste. I've never been compulsive or guilt-ridden about setting aside a book if I just lose interest in it. But some get put down with a bang, for other reasons.

One of those was J.P.Donleavy's The Ginger Man. Supposed to be a classic, I know, but I found the central character so irritatingly irresponsible in a selfish and nasty way, while it was obvious from the tone of the writing that he was being celebrated, that I quit fairly early into it.

I don't mind a flawed protagonist, or even a crazy one - I had no such difficulty with Confederacy of Dunces, for example. But Donleavy just rubbed me the wrong way.

Another author who rubs me the wrong way, to whom I even gave two chances, was Robert Coover. I tried The Public Burning, which was well reviewed, and seemed like a really good idea at the time, considering the degree to which I loathed Richard Nixon. The problem was that he mixed fiction and history in such a way that I found it terribly annoying having to try to sort it out. Of course that's a part of his point, but to me the facts in Nixon's history were too truly important to fool with, and I was continually sidetracked trying to determine which parts were made up and which not. So I dropped it. I gave Coover another chance with his short story collection Pricksongs and Descants, and he pulled the same kind of post-modern trick again, with a story in which he kept changing the account of a series of incidents. I found myself practically screaming "but what really happened?" and realized that this was Coover's point again: that nothing "really" happened, because it's fiction. It was a kind of authorial "gotcha" that struck me as insulting to the reader and to the art of fiction. Other so-called post-modern writers like John Barth play around with fiction in a self-referential show-offy way, but when they do it, they seem to be saying something like "wow, this is fiction! Isn't it cool?" When Coover does it, he seems to be saying, "It's just fiction, sucker." To hell with that. At some point when I was selling surplus books I sold Coover off with no regret.

 

[NotJesus]

Another author who rubs me the wrong way, to whom I even gave two chances, was Robert Coover. I tried The Public Burning, which was well reviewed, and seemed like a really good idea at the time, considering the degree to which I loathed Richard Nixon. The problem was that he mixed fiction and history in such a way that I found it terribly annoying having to try to sort it out. Of course that's a part of his point, but to me the facts in Nixon's history were too truly important to fool with, and I was continually sidetracked trying to determine which parts were made up and which not.

I thought it was pretty easy for the most part but, in case you were wondering, Nixon didn't really make out with Ethel Rosenberg in her cell at Sing Sing, and the Rosenbergs weren't really executed in Times Square.

 

[bruto]

I thought it was pretty easy for the most part but, in case you were wondering, Nixon didn't really make out with Ethel Rosenberg in her cell at Sing Sing, and the Rosenbergs weren't really executed in Times Square.

Well, yeah. It was the minor stuff that bothered me. It's been a long time since I read what I did of it, but I found myself bothered not by the obvious divergences, but the gray areas in between. I found myself wanting to know what Nixon actually did and didn't do, and found it difficult to deal with him as a fictional character. Maybe now that he's really dead it would be easier.

 

[Arkan_Wolfshade]

The Great Gatsby
Little House on the Prairie

Both can moulder away in book hell.

 

[Danai]

Anything by Anne Rice, the Da Vinci Code, and that carthorse Iain Banks, he the M. Night Shyamalan of literature.

 

[HistoryGal]

I would slash my wrists in a heartbeat if I could leave behind a Pulitzer Prize classic like "A Confederacy of Dunces." Mock John Kennedy Toole if you must. That book is brilliant.

I don't want to mock the dead.

May I mock you instead?

HG

 

[NotJesus]

Well, yeah. It was the minor stuff that bothered me. It's been a long time since I read what I did of it, but I found myself bothered not by the obvious divergences, but the gray areas in between. I found myself wanting to know what Nixon actually did and didn't do, and found it difficult to deal with him as a fictional character. Maybe now that he's really dead it would be easier.

In the unlikely event you ever want to give Coover another try, I would recommend The Universal Baseball Association. It's about a man who invents a tabletop baseball game that ends up taking over his life. Less experimental than some of his other stuff and relatively short. (And no Dick Nixon.)

 

[bruto]

In the unlikely event you ever want to give Coover another try, I would recommend The Universal Baseball Association. It's about a man who invents a tabletop baseball game that ends up taking over his life. Less experimental than some of his other stuff and relatively short. (And no Dick Nixon.)

Thanks. I think I may actually have that deep in my library archives (read "barn"). I suspect Coover of being a good writer when he's not wearing his post-modern hat, so I'll keep that one in mind.

 

[roger]

It's weird, the first time I read Confederacy I swooned it was so good. it's worth noting that this is a tremendous comedy - the protaganist shouldn't be taken at all seriously. I was just rolling with laughter. It's like watching John Cleeves in Fawlty Towers - a totally unlikable character in a very funny comedy.

But then years later I went to reread it. Oh my god was the thing dull and trying!

I still stand by my first reading, though. I think your mind has to be receptive to the books tone. If it isn't, even though you "know" what it is supposed to be, it's a dreadful read.

So, I guess it's a first class novel that I hate?

 

[CptColumbo]

I dislike when there is a bad book in the middle of a series that I otherwise like or when a long series suddenly goes bad, but I still want to know how it ends.

 

[BPScooter]

Hey all,

Just so we know some anchors or boundaries to the hate/dislike end, give us for help a positive anchor. Love/really like at the positive end. And only dealing with the books for reading value, not anything else.

I was captivated by Bonfire of the Vanities and that goes high on my list of good reads. I read it many years after it was famous, and loved it. Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion also same. Different purpose, but the Cadfael books by Peters and the Inspector Morse books hit me in print as very pithy and powerful.

 

[Madalch]

I dislike when there is a bad book in the middle of a series that I otherwise like or when a long series suddenly goes bad, but I still want to know how it ends.

I can't imagine any series like that.

I wish Matt were here- he'd know what books you were talking about.

Pardon me- my wife is folding her arms under her breasts and sniffing, which means I have to give her the computer.

 

[jimbob]

I found one in a charity shop "Mysteries of the Ancient World" ("As seen on TV") by Charles E Sellier.

I like many woo archeology books, because some of them are splendidly barking (did you know that the Seige of Troy took place in Norfolk for example?).

However this book didn't even have that pleasure. It was the "literary" equivalent of a pub bore* saying "and another fing they don't-tell-us-there's-a-face-on-Mars, you-know-next-to-the-pyriamid-but-NASA-kept-it-hush-hush-and-did-you-know-that-Cairo-means-Mars-too-so-that-shows-something-but-I-can't-remember-what-it-could-be, you're-my-best-friend...

"THE DARING INVESTIGATIONS THAT UNCOVERED THE AMAZING TRUTHS!"

It has all the horiest chestnuts. The bit about Nostradamus was quite amusing, except the author obviously expected his writing to be convincing that there was a mystery.

Next chapter: Edgar Cayce...

*ETA:

Who believes in pixies

 

[leftysergeant]

Fountainhead. Anthem made the point and didn't waste trees.

That it made the point is part of what annoyed me aboput Anthem. Never have I been so pointlessly depressed by so few pages of political banalities with such a small minded "moral."

"EGO," my butt.