# Books you threw across the room in disgust **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [July 18, 2000, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006 "2000-07-18T19:15:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Shirley\_Ujest](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shirley\_Ujest](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shirley_Ujest)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/1 "2000-07-18T19:15:44Z")
Feeling pressure to have a quality thread and given the societal atmosphere I have around a toddler and infant, I have been searching for a good subject so as not to besmirch my good name in Dopeland and end up having a title like, " What’s in your belly button" drivel. Alas, I found a thread I think many can get up in arms ( or feet about) and it is completely stolen from an AMAZON email. Plagerism is the sincerest form of flattery, don’tchaknow. \*\*Have you ever thrown a book across the room because you HATE HATE HATE it? \*\* I have thrown a few Harlequins across the room and then proceed to write “WTF were you thinking when you accepted this manuscript?” to the book publishers. ---
**Author:** ![SwimmingRiddles](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/43a26b/32.png) [@SwimmingRiddles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SwimmingRiddles)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/2 "2000-07-18T19:20:23Z")
A little piece of crap called “The Bridges of Madison County.” As my goddess, the Divine Ms. Dorothy Parker said, “This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” Amen, Dottie. ---
**Author:** ![SSgtBaloo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ac91a4/32.png) [@SSgtBaloo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SSgtBaloo)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/3 "2000-07-18T19:20:44Z")
Yeah, I know everybody loves the movie, but the book is hosed! The plot, such as it is, has no direction, the main character just floats along, doing many “cute” things because he’s a mouse, abandons his family, passes up romance, and drives off into the sunset. What a piece of (mouse) shit! The movie, despite language inappropriate for younger tykes, was fabulous. I’m glad they didn’t try to stay true to the original. ---
**Author:** ![Odieman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/a87d85/32.png) [@Odieman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odieman)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/4 "2000-07-18T19:20:45Z")
Twice; Once was “Moby Dick”. The worst part was that it was a library book and I realized after I threw it that I would have had to pay for it if I damaged it. ☹ The second one was a textbook that I have mercifully forgotten the name of. It was about integrating people with disabilities into the community. I ran a reading comprehension test on it and it said it was written at a post-doctoral level. Keith ---
**Author:** ![Max\_Torque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e9bcb4/32.png) [@Max\_Torque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_Torque)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/5 "2000-07-18T19:20:54Z")
Haven’t thrown any fiction so far. Must be lucky. The only things I’ve thrown have been textbooks. My Circuits I textbook got thrown many many times. When homework consists of five problems, and each takes an hour to do and a half-hour to verify, and the verification fails…well, the blood pressure rises. Recently, I’ve thrown the Blue Book, the little reference manual that tells lawyers how to format their citations to authorities. DAMN, that’s a poorly-written and stupidly-organized book. I recall telling my teacher once that I hadn’t thrown the book yet, but “I’ve set it down **very firmly** a few times.” ---
**Author:** ![Catrandom](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/7bcc69/32.png) [@Catrandom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Catrandom)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/6 "2000-07-18T19:24:28Z")
John Sandford’s “Rules of Prey” is the last one I remember. Sandford gives the most revolting play-by-play of each murder, which is not a style I’m fond of in any case. But he’s an okay writer and I was tolerating it, right up until he started in, with every evidence that he was going to go into glorious detail, on the torture/murder of a woman in a wheelchair. I quit reading. Catrandom ---
**Author:** ![JosephFinn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/3bc359/32.png) [@JosephFinn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JosephFinn)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/7 "2000-07-18T19:25:08Z")
Catcher in the Rye. I know, I know - I’m going to be pilloried over this. But I have never been able to understand why this drivel about the whiniest character in 20th century literature (Holden Caufield) gets such acclaim. Ooooohhhhh, somebody wrote “fuck.” Wow, that’s like, deep. Please. And yes, I still keep the book around to remind myself how good otehr literature is by comparison. ---
**Author:** ![Eve](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Eve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eve)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/8 "2000-07-18T19:25:36Z")
Besides my own? Couldn’t plough through that award-winning recent bio of Colette, and there is a new book about the film “All About Eve” that’s so full of errors I never got through it. And don’t get me STARTED on Kenneth Anger’s “Hollywood Babylon!!!” To paraphrase Lillian Hellman, “Every word in it is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” ---
**Author:** ![voguevixen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/b5ac83/32.png) [@voguevixen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/voguevixen)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/9 "2000-07-18T19:36:04Z")
Off the top of my head: “Deep end of the ocean,” “A Simple Plan,” and most recently something called “The Cove” which has the single most IMPROBABLE plot I’ve EVER read. Ugh. ---
**Author:** ![Balance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ccd318/32.png) [@Balance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Balance)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/10 "2000-07-18T19:36:16Z")
Battlefield Earth. Yeah, it sucked worse than the movie. I normally treat books with respect bordering on reverence, but that one went out the window and into a mud puddle–and I considered apologizing to the mud for sullying it. As for “great literature”: The Reivers by Faulkner–a teacher assigned me that piece of fermented rat tripe for a book report. I read every 6th chapter, did the report, and she couldn’t tell the difference. That’s because _nothing happened_ in the skipped chapters. Nothing of any note happened in the chapters I _did_ read, for that matter. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Cynical](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ee59a6/32.png) [@Mr.Cynical](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Cynical)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/11 "2000-07-18T19:40:01Z")
Dean Koontz : Tick Tock. 'Nuff Said. ---
**Author:** ![SisterCoyote](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/958977/32.png) [@SisterCoyote](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SisterCoyote)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/12 "2000-07-18T19:43:38Z")
Crichton’s Sphere - “We’ll believe it never happened?” Guess what, buddy, I’m smart enough to recognize “and then they woke up” no matter how you try to disguise it. ---
**Author:** ![matt\_mcl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ab992/32.png) [@matt\_mcl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/matt_mcl)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/13 "2000-07-18T19:43:45Z")
One time I was doing a paper on some book with a gay subtext (was it “Dr. Jekyll” or “Streetcar Named Desire”? I forget.) Anyway, my fabulous gay English teacher gave me this book called _Epistemology of the Closet_ by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. I had the feeling I was wading through molasses. ---
**Author:** ![Moe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/moe/32/2972_2.png) [@Moe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moe)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/14 "2000-07-18T19:44:24Z")
Seriously, does it? Because I’m bored out of my skull. I’ve been reading this boring, extremely slow piece of americana for over a month now (it’s only 250 pages) and I just feel like I have to finish it because, well I just do, but some days I just want to rip the damn thing to shreads (I wish you posted this in the pit so I can really let loose, but as it is I will try to stay civilized). In it’s defence, the only thing I like about it are the passages about jazz, which are few and far between. ---
**Author:** ![Gazelle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/b4bc9f/32.png) [@Gazelle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gazelle)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/15 "2000-07-18T19:46:21Z")
I used to subscribe to an e-mail list called Corgi-L. One of the people on it was an author named Emily Carmichael. She wrote a book called Finding Mr. Right, about a mean-spirited woman who dies and returns as her best friend’s corgi. Her mission is to find Mr. Right for her friend. If it had been classified as juvenile fiction I could have enjoyed it. But it was a romance. Yeccch. I love corgis, but that thing was 150 pages of crap. ---
**Author:** ![Edward\_The\_Head](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/ce73a5/32.png) [@Edward\_The\_Head](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Edward_The_Head)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/16 "2000-07-18T19:47:59Z")
I’ll have to agree with Odieman on this one. I still haven’t finished Moby Dick yet and don’t think I will. I never finished Dracula either and I did a report on it in HS! nor have I gotten even halfway though On the Road, and have about 10 pages left in The Invisible Man. that’s about it though. ---
**Author:** ![Saint\_Zero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c4cdca/32.png) [@Saint\_Zero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saint_Zero)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/17 "2000-07-18T19:49:01Z")
Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers. I think it’s by Harry Harrison. I figured out the end of the book about half way, checked to see if I was right, then chucked the book in disgust. I’m not sure if the book was trying to be a parody or what, but it got dull and boring. That’s about the only book I regret finishing. ---
**Author:** ![yojimbo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yojimbo/32/232_2.png) [@yojimbo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yojimbo)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/18 "2000-07-18T19:56:44Z")
I’ve actually have thrown one book across the romm **but** not because I hated it . **1984** When I read the last line : " I love big brother " , I just say “fuck , the bastards got him” and threw the book across the room . ---
**Author:** ![Demo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/demo/32/8472_2.png) [@Demo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Demo)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/19 "2000-07-18T20:00:56Z")
_The Sound and The Fury_, by Faulkner. (High five, Dave!) I read a little over half of it. What a pile of crap! Literature? Hah! I don’t think so! Also, a calculus textbook I had. I ended up having to buy a different book and teach myself out of it! ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2000, 8:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006/20 "2000-07-18T20:05:23Z")
Well, I have to admit that I’ve never thrown a book in disgust, but there are some I wish I had: Anything by Henry James. Yes, I know he’s supposed to be a great writer. But his ponderous sentences go one for days. “Turn of the Screw” has to be the most boring ghost story ever. “The Beast in the Jungle” is a novel where nothing happens. The whole POINT of the book is that nothing happens. But it takes a hell of a long time to not happen. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-threw-across-the-room-in-disgust/26006.md?page=2)