books you don't like

[rocklobster]

Even though I'm a regular bookworm, I've encountered some books I didn't like. Here's just a few:
The Da Vinci Code
most of Ernest Hemingway (he's just so blunt!)
Left Behind

[Atria35]

Agreeing with the Earnest Hemmingway (though for different reasons)
And I don't like Left Behind either.
I'm also not a big fan of Tolstoy- very heavy reading. I hate to say that, since I was reading stuff like Catch 22 and Brave New World in Jr. High (and liking/understanding them!), but I could never get into Tolstoy!

[bkilbour]

hm... books I don't like?

I couldn't stand the last three "harry potter" books,
I didn't enjoy reading The Lord of the Flies,
And if I had a dime for every submarine technical manual I've had to go through, and will have to go through... ugh...

[steenajack]

Hmmm......A book I don't like?............
http://i623.photobucket.com/albums/tt315/megnificentest/twilight.jpg
http://tengossip.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/twilight-graphic-novel.jpg
http://www.msnden.org/twilightlive.org/images/twilight/twilight-movie-poster.jpg
:rant::rant::rant::rant::rant::rant::rant::rant::rant::rant:

(no offense to any Twi-lovers)

[Atria35]

Hmmm......A book I don't like?............
http://i623.photobucket.com/albums/tt315/megnificentest/twilight.jpg
http://tengossip.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/twilight-graphic-novel.jpg
http://www.msnden.org/twilightlive.org/images/twilight/twilight-movie-poster.jpg
:rant::rant::rant::rant::rant::rant::rant::rant::rant::rant:

(no offense to any Twi-lovers)

LOLZ! I was waiting for someone to post these! (but seriously, the books aren't half as bad as the FANFICTION of it! ><")

[MightiMidget]

I have to agree with Lord of the Flies. House by Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker. I love Frank Peretti, but it was a horribly poorly done, put together book and story with a predictable ending.

[Mr. Hat'n'Clogs]

Lord of the Flies is amazing and no harm should be spoken of it.

Also, the Twilight graphic novel will earn buttloads of money for Yen and they can release more Yotsuba&!. Therefore, it is a great thing.
On topic:
Inheritance Trilcleogy
Anything by Gary Paulsen

[Warrior 4 Jesus]

The Inheritance Trilogy - (seriously obese and bad writing, boring characters)
The Killing of Mud-Eye - (dark and depressing to the endth degree - the message was life sucks, end of story, also a source of personal bullying)
The Great Gilly Hopkins (depressing and pointless and the source of some personal bullying)
The Left Behind series - (read the 12 books. Some good moments and characters but overall really bad writing and sermonising. Even Jesus return is deadly dull)
Any number of crap required reading (high-school)

There are lots more but I can't think of them at the moment.

[Hohenheim]

Books I don't like? Well, though I haven't read the series, I know the content and gist of them, so I'll cite the Left Behind Series.

There is also a book I had to read last semester called Spud. It is one of those books that is supposed to appeal to "my" generation, but it was just filled with crude and vulgar situations that made me feel dirty just for reading it. Honestly, the only redeeming part of it was the ending, and even that wasn't very good. Whatever meaningful and pertinent message that the author wants his readers to get out of that book is going to be lost in all of the lewd and stupid situations that the characters keep getting themselves into. Enough said.

[Htom Sirveaux]

In order for me to find two good fantasy series (Discworld and The Black Company), I've had to spend a few years wading through a ton of crappy & uninteresting ones. Too many to list.

[Mr. SmartyPants]

Anything by Bertrand Russell. While I appreciate authors like Nietzsche and Camus (who are very atheist, however I appreciate their angst in their reasons) but Bertrand is just a jerk and an elitist who thinks he's got everything figured out. His book "Why I Am Not a Christian" is just... dumb and annoying, lol. There are far too many other authors who can make stronger cases than Russell.

And for some reason I did not like A Wrinkle in Time. Granted I read this in elementary school, so I need to read it again to make another opinion.

[Etoh*the*Greato]

Anything by Bertrand Russell. While I appreciate authors like Nietzsche and Camus (who are very atheist, however I appreciate their angst in their reasons) but Bertrand is just a jerk and an elitist who thinks he's got everything figured out. His book "Why I Am Not a Christian" is just... dumb and annoying, lol. There are far too many other authors who can make stronger cases than Russell.

And for some reason I did not like A Wrinkle in Time. Granted I read this in elementary school, so I need to read it again to make another opinion.

I have a lot more sympathy for atheist writers like Nietzsche than I do for Russel, Dennett, etc. Not that they exactly want said sympathy, but whatever.

The very very top of my list contains two books:

The Color Purple,
Watership Down.

[Cap'n Nick]

Moo by Jane Smiley. I read it, hated it, tried to sell it on Amazon and found out that the going price was already $0.01 with free shipping.

[Nate]

I once read a third-rate biography of Copernicus that I found at the bus station.

[Radical Dreamer]

Watership Down.

Really? How come? I only ask why because I've been looking into reading it lately. XD

As for my own list:

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrisson (OMG)
Election by Tom Perrotta
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (his writing style just strikes me as SO dry. XD)
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt

Those seem to be the only ones I read that left an impression. XD They were all books for high school, except for the first two, which were college (no high schooler should EVER have to read those books XDD).

[bigsleepj]

Books I hate? I try to forget them, actually. But I really hated "The Shadow of the Wind" by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. It started out well and has very good memorable characters, at first, then slowly goes pear shaped. The "explanation" of the novel is easy to guess, then it shifts into what can be called "lame allegory", something screenwriters like to use. Basically a villain appears who embodies everything the author hates about Francoist Spain with no particular nuance or complexity, and is comfortably anti-intellectual to the point where he enters the story (set around bookstores), he picks up a book and says how he can't see what use they are and why people like them. Said villain then goes and uses his influence to harass the main characters. When he's defeated, everything starts going right magically, and the police somehow stop harrassing them despite the fact that one of their men went missing while investigating them (which, in Francoist Spain, might have gotten our main characters tortured). But because somehow a blow against a small-time but influential cog in a fascist machine symbolizes a direct blow to the machine itself and mirrors its eventual downfall, which was still years away, it magically works out okay because Spanish fascists in Zafon's universe have ADD. That's just lame and convenient. That's just one of the things I hated about it, and the book started so well..

Edit: And I liked Watership Down.

I once read a third-rate biography of Copernicus that I found at the bus station.

Now you're dog's gonna run away!

[ShiroiHikari]

I hate pretty much anything by Chuck Palahniuk that isn't Fight Club.

I share Corrie's hatred of Great Expectations, and so does pretty much everyone else I know. XD

I also hate most of the Stephen King stuff I've read. He has some good ideas; he just really needs an editor.

I absolutely despised the first couple of chapters that I read of Twilight, and hate the rest of the books on general principle. >_> One thing I can say about it is it made me feel a heck of a lot more confident in my own writing skills. XD

Also, I almost could not stand Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. <_< I finished it, but I didn't enjoy it. That was the last Harry Potter book I read.

[TheSubtleDoctor]

I gotta represent for Watership Down and Bertie Russell. I thought WD was a wonderful adventure/epic, and I really cared about all of the characters. Also, compared to his work on epistemology and metaphysics, Russell spent relativly little time devoted to writing about philosophy of religion. Too often his entire corpus gets dismissed out-of-hand because a small fraction of it is poor, but he made a lot of great contributions to philosophy. If it's the atheist bit that annoys you, then choose another one of his works to read because it doesn't permeate everything he writes.

What Russell have you read, MSP, apart from "Why I am Not a Christian" (acknowledged by Russel scholars to be the weakest of his many works)? I would recommend taking a look @ an essay of his called "The Value of Philosophy" printed in his Problems of Philosophy. Actually, that whole book is quite good.

Books I don't care for...

While I got some enjoyment out of Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, the final volume, The Amber Spyglass was pretty poor. If you're writing fiction, you should be, you know, subtle in getting across your ideas.

Silas Marner. Admittedly, I read this when I was 13 or 14, and my tastes have changed and developed since then. But this one was just so slow and ponderous.

Finally, I'll lump together a couple of philosophers from divergent traditions who share nothing in common except an inability to write. Their ideas have merit, but their construction is awful. John Rawls - A Theory of Justice and G.W.F. Hegel - Phenomenology of Spirit. Ugh.

[Cognitive Gear]

Books I actively dislike:

The Anita Blake Series (or anything by Laurell K. Hamilton, really)

The 48 Laws of Power- A more accurate title would be The Idiot's Guide to Being a Huge Jerk

I, too, share a dislike of Great Expectations. Dickens work in general really bores me.

[goldenspines]

I've rarely met a book I didn't like in some shape or form. Though, there are a few on my "Don't read again" list.

I didn't like Robinson Crusoe very much (too boring, oddly enough. The pacing was just blah).

Twilight Saga (not only because the writing left a lot to be desired, but because the books wanted to be taken seriously, and they really could not be, at all. Had the books been comedy, I would have loved them, most likely)

And, I didn't care much for any of Fyodor Dostoevsky's work, either, especially Notes From Underground.

[Makachop^^128]

I really didn't like East of Eden by Steinbeck, it was really depressing, defiantly wasn't boring lots of stuff was going on at the same time, but it was dark and depressing and not in a good way.
Also Lord of the flies, weird book
and the Left behind series

[Htom Sirveaux]

I hate pretty much anything by Chuck Palahniuk that isn't Fight Club.

I feel ya. Some of his stuff's okay, but he's not yet done better than Fight Club. And it's a shame, considering that was his first book.

As for Stephen King, I can understand that, too. I was doing fine with the Dark Tower series until I hit Wizard and Glass and ran out of steam. I might have read all seven books if it wasn't for that stupid Susan Delgado Story. And it took me fully a year to read The Stand. Also, I really wanna read IT, but I stalled out like 300-some pages in. It's a good story but there's too much there and I kind of resent him for that.

[rocklobster]

makachop, Steinbeck loved to write depressing stuff. Take it from someone who's read quite a few of his books.

While I got some enjoyment out of Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, the final volume, The Amber Spyglass was pretty poor. If you're writing fiction, you should be, you know, [b]subtle /B] in getting across your ideas.

This. The books were well-written, as long as Pullman didn't get out his axe. Did a priest mistreat him when he was little or something?

[Makachop^^128]

makachop, Steinbeck loved to write depressing stuff. Take it from someone who's read quite a few of his books.

lol that seems to be the case, from reading a couple of his books.

[Atria35]

Great Expectations seems to get a lot of hate around here- and while I agree that it wasn't the best Dickens book (actually, I don't care for most of them), I have to say, reading the original ending instead of the one that was serialized brought it up two notches for me. Why?
[spoiler]The protagonist doesn't get the girl in one of the most contrived endings ever! Woo! Only reason that ending didn't get published was because the editor thought that the public wouldn't want to read an ending like that.[/spoiler]
I'm also not fond of... Tedd Dekker! I have read three of his books, and each time, I have been utterly disappointed by the writing and plot. Even the one considered one of his best, Three. I saw the end coming by the end of the third or fourth chapter.

[ich1990]

While I don't make a habit of reading bad books, I have had the occasional misfortune to come across a few:

The Hole by Guy Burt

I get what he is trying to do with this story, and I admire the general idea. Unfortunately, that general idea requires that he pretend to write a bad book while secretly writing a good one. As it turned out, his execution was quite flawed, and he pretty much just wrote a bad book.

Chosen and Infidel by Ted Dekker

I spent many a teenage hour reading Dekker's books, and I grew quite fond of the guy's works during my less guarded years. Now that I have gone back to read a few that I missed, however, I find myself sadly disappointed. These two are the first and second in his series for teenagers, and they represent pretty much everything I dislike with the teenage fantasy genre. I think I can just leave it at that.

Silas Marner by George Eliot

This has already been mentioned, but I think I will second it. I was forced to read it in middle school, and didn't care for it at all. Looking back, I would probably like it now that my reading tastes have matured, but every time I consider doing so (or reading any Eliot for that matter) old memories resurface and find something else to read.

[rocklobster]

I find being forced to read a book tends to make one not be as interested.

[Etoh*the*Greato]

Really? How come? I only ask why because I've been looking into reading it lately. XD

As for my own list:

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrisson (OMG)
Election by Tom Perrotta
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (his writing style just strikes me as SO dry. XD)
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt

Those seem to be the only ones I read that left an impression. XD They were all books for high school, except for the first two, which were college (no high schooler should EVER have to read those books XDD).

Ditto on Great Expectations. Actually I hate all Dickens. The dryness is bad, but it's not nearly as awful as his stories. I've described them as "Awful people doing boring things."

Watership down is exceptionally violent. Actually, I think my distaste for it has less to do with the book itself and more the circumstances in which I've been exposed to it. When I was in the fourth grade our teacher gave us a movie day. I guess she saw it at the movie store and said "Oh, it's a cartoon about bunnies. This is safe!" And then showed us this thing that had rabbits maiming eachother and nightmare sequences where OCEANS OF BLOOD wiped out everything. Also, old king rabbit dude gets burried alive by heavy bulldozers.

I didn't know the name of what we watched, though, and I got hardcore into Redwall a few years later. Most of the redwall books at that time had the review tagline "In the tradition of Watership Down!" so I thought, hey! More Anthropomorphic Knights in Shining Armor! And then I picked it up and went through the whole thing aaaalll over again.

Yeah, it's probably a really good book. I just think I've been led to a bias against it.

[Atria35]

I didn't know the name of what we watched, though, and I got hardcore into Redwall a few years later. Most of the redwall books at that time had the review tagline "In the tradition of Watership Down!" so I thought, hey! More Anthropomorphic Knights in Shining Armor! And then I picked it up and went through the whole thing aaaalll over again.

Yeah, it's probably a really good book. I just think I've been led to a bias against it.

Definately merely a bias. I think I'd feel that way, too, if I were forced to see Watership Down. Redwall is.... If you can have an anthropomorphic opposite of Watership Down, that's what Redwall would be. It's like an old knight's tale as told by small critters. Far better stuff (though I'm actually a bigger fan of Guardians of Ga'Hoole, even though it's for a younger age set )

EDIT: And what responsible grade-school teacher continues to show a film like that all the way through?! If ANY of my teachers back then had put that in, then seen what it was really about, the TV would have been turned off and we'd be given a free period!

[Etoh*the*Greato]

Oh yeah. As an adult I totally know that. WHY they kept saying the two were similar right on the cover...? Maybe book reviewers are just bad at this.