• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

What books have you hated?

HermioneWeasley said:
i'm not sure what you expected from 'gothic novel' but it's not a modern vampire story where everyone dresses all in black. AT the time this was written, this was an entire genre meant to be romantic and slightly scary(although to modern readers it isn't). I think the biggest problem for you was that you expected it to be something that it wasn't, because you're used to reading things that are more modern.
Click to expand...
Not if you know the history of the word, which I do, thanks to What is Goth? by Voltaire. First it was used to describe a Germanic tribe who were considered barbarians for taking over "civilized" Rome. Then it was used to describe a type of architecture that wasn't classical and at the time was considered barbaric, so it was compared to a barbaric tribe. Later, when gothic novels came out, they were also considered barbaric and dark, so they recieved the name gothic. Later some of those books, like Dracula, were made into movies and were called gothic movies. Apparently, this little offshoot of the punk scene that dressed in black adopted some of the makeup and clothing styles seen in gothic movies. So they became known as gothic people, or as goths. I'm sure there are fictional books somewhere out there that focus on modern gothic culture, but I can't say for sure what they are.
 
Uh oh........brand new and I'm already in the doghouse!:eek: I read about 300 pages and just kept waiting for it to take off and it didn't. I just could not figure out what all the fuss was about, to be honest.
 
Underworld by Dom Delillo. It was painful to finish - but I did. I can never not complete a book - even if I hate it. Its like an obsession! But this one stunk! Way way way too convuluted, boring and he just tried too hard to make it an intellectual work. It just put me to sleep!
 
What's Underworld about? I ask because I'm looking for my next DeLillo novel. I enjoyed Libra a lot, mostly because I like cold war paranoia and conspiracy theories about JFK, and detested White Noise. But I'm trying not to give up on him yet.
 
Hated books

School assignments can definately make you hate books that otherwise would be a pretty good read.

When I was in highschool, we had to read Tess of the D'urbervilles. I HATED it back then. Years later (about 15 years), I reread it and LOVED it. In fact, it is on my top 10 list of favoriate Classics.

Pride and Prejudice was the same thing. Read it in highschool and was VERY annoyed and couldn't possibly understand how the novel was considered femenist for it's time. Now, I completely understand the point Austen was trying to make and LOVE it.

The book I found most painful to get though (although it has some of the best imagery I've ever read) is Beloved by Toni Morrison.
 
Heteronym said:
What's Underworld about? I ask because I'm looking for my next DeLillo novel. I enjoyed Libra a lot, mostly because I like cold war paranoia and conspiracy theories about JFK, and detested White Noise. But I'm trying not to give up on him yet.
Click to expand...

"Underworld" is one of those books where it's kind of hard to say "It's about this and that". Basically it's a parable on life in the US during the cold war, from the early 50s to the 80s, but it sprawls almost Pynchon-like, with a baseball in place of a V2 rocket, veering from religion to marxism and from Lenny Bruce to J Edgar Hoover, lots of digressions on the subject of power and only loosely centered around a few characters... I absolutely loved it, it's very high up on my re-read list.
 
Heteronym said:
Ahhhh, sounds wonderful :eek:

But baseball? I'm sure it's a great game... for Americans. But I bloody hate baseball!
Click to expand...

As do all thinking people. But it's not so much baseball as A baseball, which forms a sort of metaphorical frame for the whole story. It's not like you have to read 900 pages of baseball results... ;)
 
Heteronym said:
Ahhhh, sounds wonderful :eek:

But baseball? I'm sure it's a great game... for Americans. But I bloody hate baseball!
Click to expand...
Nope, the intelligent world here in the US of A hates baseball, too. Me, I hate anything where all you do is sit and watch a bunch of overpaid middle-aged men chasing after a little ball like they're in the first grade. I like karate and thigns like that, but sports just confuse me.
 
loves2read said:
Uh oh........brand new and I'm already in the doghouse!:eek: I read about 300 pages and just kept waiting for it to take off and it didn't. I just could not figure out what all the fuss was about, to be honest.
Click to expand...
I agree that it did start of slowly, but it more than made up for it with the rest of the book. Jamie is probably my all-time favourite character, and for once I actually liked the female lead (usually I find them a bit annoying). You should definitely try and finish it if you didn't manage to the first time!
 
Cell

So I really like Stephen King, a lot of his older stuff is excellent. Like Bag of Bones and his Dark Tower series. But I read one of his most recent books, I actually bought it unfortunately to read it, and it was not very good at all. It was honestly just horror for horror's sake. It just was really predictable and kind of lame. I was really disappointed in Stephen King. But I am reading The Stand by Stephen King. His older books definately make up for some of his new books. Well that's the most recent book that I really hated.
 
I've read a few books that were a drag to get through, but I usually finished them eventually. ( 'Portrait of a Lady' springs to mind.) The book I least enjoyed reading was 'Number of the Beast' by Robert Heinlein. The characters, to me at least, were dull and the dialogue was very lame. The repetitive mention of physics and math actually perked the story up. And I hate math and physics.

Luckily I was homeschooled, so I didn't have to read any books for classes, but generally the ones that poeple mention as ones they hated reading were my favorites to read for fun. Probably because I didn't have to read them.
 
The only thing that really bothers me is overly pretentious descriptions and bad/rushed endings.

A book that falls under the first category is James Agee's A Death in the Family. The first chapter (or maybe it was a prologue) was so painful to read that I almost wanted to put lit cigarettes in my eyes.

The second category goes to Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson and The Partner by John Grisham. In fact, to hell with John Grisham.:lol:
 
Trail of Tears - the true account of Mary Ingles and the mandatory migration of Native Americans... was that her name? I don't remember. It made me morbidly depressed and I still have flashbacks of the chapter where she gives birth in the woods and chews through the umbilical chord. Yuck!
 
I really, really hated The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Bloated, plodding, lacking any attempt at characterization, poorly researched, and full of cockamamie plot contrivances.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top