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Book Anti-Recommendations


Karst

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What books did you dislike so much that you would advise others not to read them?

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Grumpy Alien

Lord of the Flies

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Red Badge of Courage. Most boring book ever written.

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Captain_Tass

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Controversial, but I didn't like this book. Haven't read it in quite a long time, but I remember that I could barely sit through it. Especially hated the epilogue.

 

Also, does the Cursed Child count as a book? I'd bought it as a book, so I'd say it counts. Don't waste your money on it folks!

 

Might revisit this thread when I remember some more anti-recs of mine.

 

Just now, KiannaKitter said:

The Bible 😂

Seconded!

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Nutshell by ian McEwen

The alchemist by Paolo coelho

Vernon subutex by Virginie despentes

Portnoy's complaint by Philip Roth

Platform by Michel houellebecq

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RoseGoesToYale

The original Peter Pan by JM Barrie. Had to read it in fifth grade. "Good form! Bad form! Good Form!" Aughh!

Also The Crucible (can't stand the book but I love the movie)

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AceMissBehaving

Oliver Twist! I loved reading the books for English lit class, but daaaaamn did I hate this one. 48 chapters of Oliver crying instead of taking action, and other people suffering for his passive ineptitude.

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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I've read it twice now, once in high school and again because I'm a silly person. Several years ago I listened to the audio version because I'd read other people's reviews of rereading books they read in high school/college and having their viewpoints change as adults. This second time, though I understood the historical things going on in the book, I actually came to actively hate all the characters in the book by time I got done - they were empty people living empty lives. I'm at a loss as to why teachers still keep jamming it down the throats of teens every year.

 

Also:

Tess of the D'Ubervilles & Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Depressing doesn't even begin to cover either of these books.

 

31 minutes ago, Life Of Tass said:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Controversial, but I didn't like this book. Haven't read it in quite a long time, but I remember that I could barely sit through it. Especially hated the epilogue.

A lot of the problem with this book is all the time spent running around the moors hiding from the Ministry of Magic and the dragging plot that doesn't pick up until halfway through the book. I did like the prologue. It fits in with something Harry always wanted but never got with his aunt, uncle and cousin.

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The Martian. It sounded so interesting! I'm all for space dramas. But I tried to read it, and I found that main character was not vibing with me. And it's kind of important to vibe with him, as he's all alone out there.

 

I gave up barely a quarter of the way in. I couldn't take any of his basic bro language seriously in conjunction with the events that were happening. His humor felt like nails on a chalkboard to me. I thought about trying to stick it through to see if it got better later, but then I asked myself, "Why am I torturing myself like this?"

 

So I put it down. Same feelings as Ready Player One and Armada

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Anything by Dickens, likewise Shakespeare 

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Phantasmal Fingers

"Freewheelin'  Frank", Frank Reynolds. (The memoirs of a Hell's Angel. Read Hunter S. Thomson instead.)

 

"The Naked Lunch", William Burroughs. (Sump oil for the mind. I did enjoy "Junky" though.)

 

"Philosophical Essays", Mao Zedong. (But "The Red Book" is in parts unintentionally hilarious.)

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Rockblossom
58 minutes ago, Evren said:

Red Badge of Courage. Most boring book ever written.

You must not have read Moby Dick. 

 

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24 minutes ago, Grimalkin said:

The Martian. It sounded so interesting! I'm all for space dramas. But I tried to read it, and I found that main character was not vibing with me. And it's kind of important to vibe with him, as he's all alone out there.

 

I gave up barely a quarter of the way in. I couldn't take any of his basic bro language seriously in conjunction with the events that were happening. His humor felt like nails on a chalkboard to me. I thought about trying to stick it through to see if it got better later, but then I asked myself, "Why am I torturing myself like this?"

 

So I put it down...

:lol: You got farther than I did. I knew I didn't like it during the first chapter (for the same reason you mentioned: the character's language didn't vibe with me; also, all of the paragraphs and paragraphs of technical descriptions of space stuff wasn't interesting to me and, for me, made the plot seem as though it was going anywhere) and gave it up after skimming through the second chapter (I thought, perhaps, I'd just needed to read further and that maybe I'd eventually like it).

 

One book I didn't like and gave up trying to read was James Joyce's Ulysses. The stream-of-consciousness, with long sentences and no punctuation made it very challenging and frustrating for me to read, trying to figure out what was going on.

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everywhere and nowhere

A certain book - I don't even remember the author's name now, but anyway it's a Polish book not translated into English. A bad example of queerbaiting. I read it because it used motifs from the life of Maria Komornicka / Piotr Odmieniec Włast (1876-1949) ("odmieniec" can be translated as "misfit", "changeling"), a queer Polish modernist writer. Very talented, at some point (around the age of 16) considered a child prodigy of new Polish literature. In 1907 they burnt their female clothes and demanded being treated as a man, spent 10 years in a lunatic asylum, later lived until 1944 in their family's estate - treated as a weirdo, but being able to live a generally calm life. Unfortunately, the book turned out to be very heteronormative. The story of Komornicka / Włast was mostly an excuse - the protagonist feels fascinated by the poet's biography and wants to write a screenplay based on their life, but it was so heteronormative and also... so classist... I felt disgusted when reading about the protagonist and her friends ordering wine for 30 euro or something - I anyway hate alcohol and never drink it, but I felt disgusted in the name of myself and all other people for whom 30 euro is a large amount of money. Have you heard about "Law and Justice" (PiS; in fact they should be called Lawlessness and Injustice for the way they treat the Constitution and the rights of everyone except themselves) party which now rules in Poland? Pro-social almost-far-right. In fact, I support social redistribution and only decry that this part of PiS programme is being done in a way which buys poor people's votes instead of empowering them. But I thought: and these are people like the protagonist who are making PiS seem so attractive to poorer, simple people...

 

By the way, at least the poet's grave has been designed in a fairly sensitive way. It's a family grave which has been renovated after their nephew, general Stanisław Komornicki, was killed in the Smolensk air disaster (the same in which the president was killed). The epitaph for Komornicka / Włast reads:

Maria Komornicka-Lemańska

poet, "Piotr Włast"

25.7.1876-8.3.1949

You have given me a strange soul and a strange body, so that I could enjoy mysterious happiness

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Rockblossom

The Oxford English Dictionary.  Interesting details, but I could just never grasp the overall plot.

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I normally don't read much for pleasure but I joined a summer book club. It was then I came to realize American novels are very much like American movies. A classic is created only once a generation and the remainder of the time it and/or other classics are repackaged under other labels. It seems Whitehead's The Underground Railroad is a good case in point. It contains elements of Roots, Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Diary of Anne Frank and even a bit of Shelly's Frankenstein. There is an overriding amount of Uncle Tom's cabin throughout the book thus far.  The railroad being an enormous subway system was clever and the book makes for a good drama, but it suffers the same flaw that Stowe's book did.  America was even more divided in the 19th century than it has become in the 21st century. Like the president, Stowe played to her base, rabid packs of anti-slavery abolitionists. It appears she depicted slavery as something far more hellish than it actually was. The book I'm reading does the same thing. Runaway salves that get caught are tortured horribly to death in front of a cheering white audience.  Consider this : if your horse escapes its corral only someone insane would put a bullet in its head once they caught it. Roots probably depicts slavery in a far more realistic way. Captured slaves were flogged but were far too valuable to kill. Lynchings did occur but were usually due to allegations of sexual assault by black men. 2/3 through the book. Enjoy the railroad. Enjoy the suspense. Try to ignore the cabin...

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Ulysses.

Pretentious, boring, and overstuffed.

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Duke Memphis

The Great Gatsby. Almost every character in that book is a pompous idiot. Nick is the only one with some sense, and even he's a bit of a moron.

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acearchivist

The Catcher in the Rye and The Scarlet Letter. Two critically acclaimed books that are absolute trash lmao. 

 

Ender's Game. Could not get over how arrogant and obnoxious Ender is. 

 

Eragon. I get the guy was like 17 when he wrote it so I should cut him some slack, but just...no.

 

So many more I can't think of rn lol. 

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KuraTheChibiSleepingBeauty

All the Eragon books.

 

In Cold Blood.

 

Catcher in the Rye. 

 

The Handmaid's Tale. :evil:

 

Since plays apparently count: The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, and Titus Andronicus. 

 

1984.

 

Anything that romanticizes abuse, victim blaming, gaslighting, stalking, taking anything as a sign of consent, and so forth. 

 

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45 minutes ago, acearchivist said:

Ender's Game. Could not get over how arrogant and obnoxious Ender is. 

Pretty sure it’s on purpose to contrast him with his siblings. If he’s just all “everyone’s life is so precious”  no one would see how much like his brother he is. Plus it’s about his internal journey as much as it is about mass genocide. At least it’s better than a whiney pacifist or a military worshipper. 

 

 

The original Jekyll and Hyde if you were looking for a cool story about transformations and murder this isn’t for you. Instead it’s about his buddy trying to investigate without actually asking him or actively doing much at all, and then trying to cover it up afterwards. 

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Custard Cream

There are only 2 books I couldn't force myself to finish. The Silmarillion (OMG that is truly dull...) and Tristram Shandy (Life is just too short for that much twaddle)

 

However, controversially, despite having a degree in English Lit, I can't abide Dickens. Yes I know it's classic. It's also truly awful. Sorry.

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Fifty Shades of Grey.  The premise sounded ridiculous to me, but I read it because everyone kept saying it changed their lives and all of that.  It was worse than I'd expected.  Not only is the writing atrocious, it encourages women to stay in abusive relationships and try to change their abusive significant other.  Just awful.

 

The Magicians.  Several people told me this was "Harry Potter for adults," and I couldn't understand why because everything about the story, characters, humor, etc. came off as juvenile to me.

 

The Girl on the Train.  Really predictable thriller with no likable characters.

 

When Harry Became Sally. This odd title (reference to a film I've never seen) caught my eye, and when I saw that it concerned being transgender, I was interested because I'm always reading queer books.  Well, this is one to skip.  It attempts to disguise itself as a compassionate text and paints transgender and other gender nonconforming people as mentally ill and not to be taken seriously.  Brought to you by the Heritage Foundation, which should have told me it would be a very biased text, but I wasn't aware of the Heritage Foundation when I picked it up.

Edited by bare_trees
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2 hours ago, Dr. Beat said:

Thinner by Stephen King. Just don't touch it

Anything by Stephen King other than the shining. Especially not IT.

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Moby Dick. An 800 page book about a guy who hates a whale (basically). Mostly just filler and random whale facts.

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Crazycrazycultist

Of Mice And Men was a chore to read through. I hated mostly everyone in the book. Especially Lenny! He was obnoxious!

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The DaVinci Code. Cardboard characters chasing after a chalice that's never existed, except in mythology. You want predictable? Here's predictable. What's more, I'd long since read the same book, better written, many years before called Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the authors of which tried to sue Dan Brown for copyright infringement (and lost because they all used the same sources of information to tell a similar story, except one claims to be true [HB,HG] and the other is a piece of fiction [TDC]).

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