I'll start.
I HATED Contact by Carl Sagan. I felt like it dragged on endlessly and homeboy cannot write a female protagonist and should have just not even tried. I hated the pointless tangents and the completely unnecessary love story. The glowing reviews are bewildering to me and I say that as a bonafide sci-fi neeeeerd
Also, I loathed The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde. I love me a good faustian bargain story but god damn was this one a let down. How was this book only 254 pages? I swear it felt endless. This book takes such a cool concept and executes it in the most dull and lifeless way possible. It's like reading wannabe edgelord tweets from a brooding 14 year old. Armchair philosophy and half-baked shower thoughts. Insufferably pretentious with no right to be.
by peppertoni_pizzaz
31 Comments
Okay, I didn’t *hate* it, but Dungeon Crawler Carl is pretty fuckin bad.
I’ve known far too many people like Ignatius Reilly to ever enjoy A Confederacy of Dunces.
Just mentioned it in another thread recently, but *House of Leaves* was not for me at all. I’m not sure exactly how far I made it into the book but it didn’t seem to be going anywhere and just kept telling me over and over again that this book within a book or whatever was weird. It felt like it was taking forever to get anywhere. And as much as I liked the idea of the disjointed footnotes and abstract way of telling the story, it often just ended up feeling like a chore with no real reward for turning the book sideways or flipping back and forth to check notes.
ACOTAR was one of the worst god damn books I’ve ever read. I wish I could take back the time and bill the author for the expense.
I will die on the hill of ‘Dorian Gray is meant to be like that’ – Harry’s tedious edgelord shit and Dorian’s dull anhedonia are character problems, not author problems. But I also appreciate that not everyone actually wants 250 pages of them.
My anti-recommendation is ‘The Dispossessed’. Sorry. I’m not an anarchist and I think anarchists are boring and all their problems can be solved by “stop thinking anarchy is a workable political philosophy.”
All Fours, by Miranda July. This book was absolutely awful and I cannot for the life of me understand why it was so popular. Aside from the bizarre sex stuff, it was horribly written, the plot made no sense, the protagonist was a terrible person- I hate-finished it just to see how much worse it would get and it didn’t disappoint.
I started Project Hail Mary the other day and found the writing so obnoxious I put it down before getting through the first chapter
I was mostly enjoying Snow Crash, despite some overly explanatory exposition throughout, but there was a scene towards the end that completely flipped my opinion of it. If you’ve read it, it’s that scene between YT and the much older dude. Just the way it was written and that it lasted for 5 pages…absolutely disgusting.
I powered through the rest of it because of the sunk cost fallacy but man. That scene was incredibly unnecessary and went on for WAY too long. With prose that didn’t seem to realize how fucked up it was.
In case you haven’t read it and are curious: >!YT is a 15-year-old girl that has sex with a grown-ass man. And it’s written as if it’s an intimate sex scene between two consenting adults.!<
I don’t see it get called out enough for that scene enough on the book rec subs I follow.
“The Ministry of Time” by Kaliane Bradley is an actual slog. I really want to love this book as I love the premise of it; time-displaced people figuring out and adjusting to life in the present-day. But the main character is one of the least interesting protagonists that I’ve come across in years. And Bradley’s style of writing is exhausting to read at times. On the bright side, when I try to read it at night before bed, I fall asleep in minutes so at least there’s that.
A lot of folks around me were obsessed with Ted White & Royal Blue. I couldn’t finish it. I wanted to slap the main character immediately. It just wasn’t enjoyable for me AT ALL.
Someone else will probably mention *The Castle* for me so I will say *Katabasis*. I really hated every aspect of that book–the magic was boring and unimaginative, the setting was completely wasted, the MC fucking sucks, the story was so dull. Just honestly trash from start to finish.
This is a somewhat guilty rant because of the book’s topic, but I hated The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Its much lauded beautiful imagery was completely incoherent with many nonsensical similes. The main character had nothing special about her. The fact she loved words and books was not nearly compelling enough to make Death, the narrator, pick her out of billions of people and avidly follow her life story. The story takes place in Nazi Germany, and the main character is a young German girl who lives under the stresses of that particular time. Only I never once felt moved by *anything* the book depicted. Not by the main character, not by her friends and family, not even by the victims of the Third Reich. I feel horrible saying that, but Zusak’s writing was SO inert, contrived, and tried too hard to be deep. I dislike the book so much I plan to give it away to get it out of my library.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and some of my favorite books are dystopian. This one is just brutally depressing with no hope.
I hated Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet and didn’t finish it. The characters were cheesy and unrealistic and I’m sick of this book being like the #1 recommended for historic fiction.
The Secret History. Bit cumbersome.
100 years of solitude, im sure the story itself is fine but the prose for me is painful my first DNF, was irritated this was recommended as a complimentary book to east of eden
Always surprised when people recommend Gone Girl. The twist was obvious and the writing was subpar. If any book is compared to Gone Girl, it’s an automatic skip for me.
Lowbrow entry: I read The Notebook about 20 years ago and hated it so much I literally threw the book against the wall. I refuuuuuuse to debase myself by watching the movie, my hatred for that book runs so deep. I don’t even remember what I hated so much by now, just that I hated it. It wasn’t romantic; it just sucked.
Your reaction to Dorian Gray makes me sad, but I get it. I rather enjoyed that one myself and continue to be fascinated by modern takes on the ideas from that book.
My most memorable frustrated reading experience was with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I grew up in the generation that this book was written for and everyone who had an opinion I respected in regards to books insisted that this one was a must read, that it would blow my mind, open my eyes, etc etc.
I abhorred that book, loathed it. I literally threw the book across the room in anger in one of my several attempts to get through the preachy narrative. This was long enough ago that I can no longer provide specifics as to why it frustrated me so much. I can say that the gist was that while many of the conclusions the author came to were things I generally agreed with, his reasons and arguments for getting there were severely lacking. The book was filled with over stretched metaphors, oversimplified explanations, woo nonsense, and a generic plot that failed entirely to entertain. I found neither insight nor enjoyment in reading it and so found it to be a painful waste of my time.
That so many others my age loved this book so much made it that much more difficult to finally put it away and stop trying to force myself to the end. It’s the first book I allowed myself not to finish. I still find it difficult to put an unsatisfying book aside but doing so with this one opened whole new doors for me in that arena.
It gets a lot of good reviews in the horror scene but The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones was just such a slog to get through to me.
ACOTAR was too many pages of NOTHING and clichés.
The Inheritance Games has an interesting premise but the romance and execution is mid at best.
Ulysses…I tried to break into it a couple times and I am convinced that unless you are very deeply Irish this book just isn’t actually for you and you are just pretending to like it to seem smart
Same with Remembrance of Things Past but replace Irish with French
Gideon the Ninth. I DNFd it about halfway through because I couldn’t stand another word of edgelord snark.
I’m still angry about Where The Crawdads Sing. The author obviously did absolutely no research ( no swamps in NC ) and the thought of an entire town leaving a six year old child to ” raise ” herself made no sense . I threw it across the room when she goes shopping in Asheville which is on the opposite side of a long state. NOPE !
An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Col. Chris Hadfield.
The first few chapters just go in and in about his idyllic childhood and how he had this priveleged upbringing and life that led to him being an astronaut. I’ve struggled my entire life with trauma and disabilities so I had to resist the urge to throw the library copy of the book across the room.
I have DNF’ed like 5 books in my life and this one only made like 3 chapters.
“A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy”
Haven’t read anything else about Stoicism, but this dude’s take is “remember that nothing really matters” and “if you feel bad, remind yourself why you logically shouldn’t”. For William Irvine, Stoicism = Avoidance, and we’d all be far better off if avoided our feelings more. He comes off as an obnoxious parent “oh well but you shouldn’t feel this way!” Absolutely complete and total BS, should be burned. Repressed dudes are gonna read this and make themselves yet worse off.
The only metric by which the high rating is fathomable is confirmation bias.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow & Lessons in Chemistry, both sold as if they were going to be about women subverting patriarchal expectations, but turns out they actually ended up making all their decisions based on men…🙄
the god of the woods, so many different POVs and so many time jumps. I was so bored, might just not be my kind of genre but my god I HATED that book. one of the very few I’ve DNF’d.
I have hated everything I’ve read by Mark Twain.
Rose Madder by King….dragged on and bored me to sleep
The Wheel of Time. Hate is maybe a strong word, but it was a slog to get though. It is just soooo drawn out and the endless descriptions of what every character is wearing or what various type/breed/color of horse everyone is riding drove me bonkers. A 14 novel series that probably should have been half of that.
Ultimately glad I read it just to say I did but never going to re-read it.