My reason may surprise you, and I'll get to it, but first let me get this out of the way: A book being terrible would be the first reason to wish to have not read it. It's really the wish to have your hours or days or whatever back, time wasted, time that could have been used in reading something else that would have been more enjoyable, informative, and fulfilling. I get that. Someone mentioned a book by Ayn Rand. It was a long book so I think that just makes a worse. So that's why we got book reviews and why people ask around before making the commitment to read a book or series.
But there are a lot of other reasons I can give for wishing I had not read a particular book. I mean the wonderful feeling of reading a book you really liked cannot be repeated. You already know what's gonna happen and can't just forget the main story instantly. Unless you don't read it like for 20 years and never think about it.
For me, it's a certain book that I can't remember the title to but it basically went into really graphic details about where our food comes from and it kind of made me not want to eat food for a long time. It wasn't just about meat, but about farming and how restaurants prepare your food and I so wish I had not read any of that. For a while I tried to find out the truth of the book's claims but then I gave up because I was learning other things that kind of made me go live in a cave. So perhaps a book being too informative was my reason? I don't know if that makes any sense.
by beastinsideabeast
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The Cursed Child. It has cursed my life since I read that monstrosity.
As I Lay Dying. Hated every minute of it.
Neuromancer
The biggest reason I wish I never opened a specific book was if the ending was so abhorrently atrocious that it made the rest of the book feel like it was deliberately wasting your time. Hurry Sundown is the leading example for that category.
But I also wish I never read Lair of the White Wyrm by Dracula author Bram Stoker. Because it was such a feeble decline in quality to his masterpiece of Victorian gothic horror, showing the decay of talent.
“ulysses” was a huge waste of time. i read it thinking “wow, what a pretentious piece of garbage.” reread it again, later, and thought the same thing. i understood it completely. i just think it wasn’t a good book. the 1st time i read it i looked up chapter summaries to make sure i was understanding what was being written. i understood everything that was going on in the book. it was just… not great.
Any Adam Silvera book, I’ve only read two and both read like gay misery porn. If not him then Legends and lattes, in terms of fantasy it felt like that book was written to personally annoy me, but at least I understand why people like it.
I really like Keigo Higashino, several years ago I read The Name of the Game is Kidnapping.
My memory is a bit hazy but there was a paragraph or so about high school girls (maybe also middle school girls?) selling themselves for sex and the guy was talking about how they have no idea the value of what they are selling is, but they sell it so cheaply, and it might have been in particular about virginity of the young girls…
I found it so disgusting (in part because I guess it’s true and how it was written) that I could not read a Higashino Keigo book for years after (there might have been other things in the book as well that me off Higashino for awhile, I don’t remember clearly anymore). ~_~ Like, I’d rather have lived without that knowledge…
Verity by Colleen Hoover. Literally had to skip pages just to get the book over with.