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What books have you hated?

brookiedawn said:
Oil by Upton Sinclair. I saw the movie...There Will Be Blood, and my boss offered me the book to read. Not only were they completely different stories, but I just could not get into the book. It took me ages to read.
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Same thing happened to me! I loved the movie, but it is not based on the book at all. I never got through that book...

I really hated the last in the Harry Potter series - but my hatred probably began because I only disliked it after I read it, but when everyone started professing their love for it my dislike for it increased. Also Twilight (which I shouldn't really say I hate, considering I've only read the first few pages).

I suppose as something more literary, I really didn't like Of Mice and Men. I can't figure it out. I read it for class, and most people enjoyed it, so I asked them why they liked it, genuinely. No one could give me a good answer (I want one!)
 
Didi_Gogo said:
My disgust and loathing for The Red Badge of Courage by Steven Crane burns as a dangerously intense wildfire whose only desire is to mercilessly consume anything pure and good that crosses its path...

I also didn't like All Over but the Shoutin' by an author I can't remember. He was just a whinner...
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You should talk to my oldest daughter about Red Badge of Courage. She hated that book so much that when she went away to college, she took her paperback copy and used it for a personal journal.

All Over But the Shoutin' is by Rick Bragg. I liked it, but I can see your issues with Bragg's tone. I particularly liked his descriptions of his extended family. Some of their remarks sounded just like things I've heard from my great aunts, who were from Georgia. Made me laugh.
 
abecedarian said:
You should talk to my oldest daughter about Red Badge of Courage. She hated that book so much that when she went away to college, she took her paperback copy and used it for a personal journal.

All Over But the Shoutin' is by Rick Bragg. I liked it, but I can see your issues with Bragg's tone. I particularly liked his descriptions of his extended family. Some of their remarks sounded just like things I've heard from my great aunts, who were from Georgia. Made me laugh.
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Haha... yeah. I kinda wanna give The Red Badge of Courage to Chamblins but I feel very bad for the poor person who might buy it next. It's sort like the video from The Ring. You REALLY wanna get rid of it but you feel an overwhelming guilt for it's next victim.

I felt All Over but the Shoutin' was a picture of yet another disfunctional southern family. Though I live in the south, I live SO far south that it's not even "southern", colloquially speaking, so I don't have a real conection to a real southern backgroud which may have tied me to the book more. Though I'm still trying to understand it The Sound and the Fury is a much better and more interesting look at a family in turmoil.
 
Didi_Gogo said:
My disgust and loathing for The Red Badge of Courage by Steven Crane burns as a dangerously intense wildfire whose only desire is to mercilessly consume anything pure and good that crosses its path...
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:lol:

I didn't like it either.
 
I hated Cocaine Night by JG Ballard,but read Drown world after his recent death and liked it.
Now on a different scale i deeply dispised Ulysse from Bagdad by Eric Emmanuel Schmitt,klenexx literature.Some sort of a light tale about an epic trip from Bagdad to London by a young Iraky,so light as to be stupid and inconsequent.Bio writing,0 calories 0 meaning 0 qualities.
 
I hated Moby Dick, The Last of The Mohicans, and anything college professors usually view as early American classics. I may be an English major, but doesn't mean I have to like these so-called classics... Now, if English classes had us read Frankenstein, Dracula, Jules Verne, or HG Wells, that would be cooler.
 
I was lucky--I took a 19th century Lit class and I got to read not just Frankenstein, but Dracula as well :D. Of course I also had to read Treasure Island and The Coral Island back to back. That was pretty rough.

ETA: I agree with you on Last of the Mohicans. I didn't find that book to be exciting or adventurous at all.
 
I gave up on Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen. I just couldn't get into it. I took it with me to the airport and spent hours upon hours reading it, but it was slow going. This week, I finally called it quits at 340 pages (out of 900ish), and this is the first book that I can remember giving up on in YEARS. It finally occurred to me that I was avoiding reading, and that's just not cool.

Too many details, too many characters, too much narrative. I'm all about a challenge, but ugh.
 
I had a flash back. Bridges of Madison County.

My MIL let me borrow it when we were visiting her so I read it all the way through (I felt obligated.) I really disliked this book. Neither of the characters seemed sympathetic. A roaming photographer shacks up with some disillusioned housewife who's family is out of town for the weekend. It was supposed to be the romantic epic of our time? All I could think of was how much I hated the housewife character. I just couldn't see her as anything other then a ungrateful ho who betrayed her family. The male was incidental, just looking for a warm place to put it and he found it.

I guess I have a really different concept of "romance." It's usually accompanied by "honor" and "dignity" and all them old fashioned silly ideas. JMHO.
 
Well, War and Peace to me was painful... Like reading a phone book for the city of Moscow... I absolutely had so much mental energy tied up in trying to keep all the characters straight, that I had nothing left to try and follow the plot... The sheer number of characters was only exacerbated by the fact that each character was addressed by several different titles/honorifics depending on the audience... Anyone out there want to try and convince me to try again on that one?..
 
brookiedawn said:
Oil by Upton Sinclair. I saw the movie...There Will Be Blood, and my boss offered me the book to read. Not only were they completely different stories, but I just could not get into the book. It took me ages to read.
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I felt the same way. Everything seemed so pointless. It's one of the only books that I couldn't actually finish. I got about 2/3rds of the way done. I was waiting for it to pick up, but it never did.
 
I just tried to read Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk. I have really liked most of his other books (although Fight Club did not thrill me...) but this one was a huge disappointment! The language tricks he plays through every single sentence were ok for the first page or so but get really old after that. The whole book seems to be just the author saying, "Look how clever I am..." Plot is slow as molasses. Even the "clever" language becomes predictible and boring. I always finish books but this one is still waiting to be finished. I just don't care how it ends. I feel let down by a usually good author...
 
Hmmmm, let me think.

In the Twilight Series, I highly disliked New Moon and Breaking Dawn. I plain don't like the main character, Bella, just annoys me to no end! Not to mention the way the stories were written and how they played out. If it wasn't for the fact that my mother brought all the rest of the series, I probably wouldn't have read after Twilight.

Eragon I thought was okay but it definitely wasn't the best story ever! Eldest was even worse! My parents brought me the third and I have yet to read it. I will eventually.....:whistling:
 
TahlaT said:
Hmmmm, let me think.

In the Twilight Series, I highly disliked New Moon and Breaking Dawn. I plain don't like the main character, Bella, just annoys me to no end! Not to mention the way the stories were written and how they played out. If it wasn't for the fact that my mother brought all the rest of the series, I probably wouldn't have read after Twilight.

Eragon I thought was okay but it definitely wasn't the best story ever! Eldest was even worse! My parents brought me the third and I have yet to read it. I will eventually.....:whistling:
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Stewart would disagree.
 
Twilight. New Moon. Eclipse. Breaking Dawn. The entire Twilight series. I was given the set of four books as a present, and as appreciative as I am of the thoughtfulness shown to me by someone taking the time to shop, purchase, wrap and present the gift...being burnt at the stake might have been a less torturous alternative to reading 'Twilight the Saga'.

Oh, and Jaws. The only instance that comes to mind where I have loathed the book, but delighted in the film. The book was an horrendous affair.
 
Wuthering Heights - made to read in school, am 99.893% positive it is like one of the first literary soap operas.
The Old Man & the Sea - also made to read in school. I like to fish, so it kills me what happens and that someone could write about it like that.
Michael Crichton books - so far, all the ones i've read. Can there be anybody so intent on giving you so many details and yet leaving each book feeling there are tons of questions left unanswered?
 
Davyd said:
Wuthering Heights - made to read in school, am 99.893% positive it is like one of the first literary soap operas.
The Old Man & the Sea - also made to read in school. I like to fish, so it kills me what happens and that someone could write about it like that.
Michael Crichton books - so far, all the ones i've read. Can there be anybody so intent on giving you so many details and yet leaving each book feeling there are tons of questions left unanswered?
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You mean you weren't hooked?:whistling: I have it read a few times in my life. In high school, I think the larger meaning was mostly lost to me as I had other thing on my mind at the time. A man obtaining the respect of his fellow fishermen who help him salvage the fish at the end wasn't one of them. Sometimes education is "wasted" on youth.
 
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