Books you threw across the room (maybe spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

Ever read a book that so annoyed you that you tossed the damn thing against the wall?

My choice was “Memoirs of an Invisible Man” by H.F. Saint. The big issue was the fact that the protagonist had an IQ in the low single figures.

Consider:

  1. Hero turns invisible. Evil Military Man suspects invisible hero may exist, but has no proof. Moron of hero confronts EMM for no particular reason, thus confirming what EMM suspected. Now EMM can use all the resources of military to track down hero.

  2. On the way to becoming invisible, Hero has sex on a train with a woman who works for NY Times. When EMM goes after hero, hero refuses to ask her for help. He even considers the matter, but decides not to bother her, since their relationship isn’t that serious (?!). Hello? Don’t you think the NY Times might be interested in publicizing this? Don’t you think that publicity would be useful as protection against EMM? Don’t you think that a woman who is willing to have sex with you two days before might just like you enough to help you out? (I never finished the book, but I suspect that the woman and the NY Times figure prominently in the solution, and Saint had to resort to this sort of handwaving to keep it from being an 80 page book).

  3. Hero is in his apartment. He sees EMM beginning to surround it. Hero watches for at least half an hour as EMM slowly cuts off all avenues of escape. Only when every option is apparantly cut off does Moron Hero decide to try to leave.

That’s when I tossed it.

What are your nominees?

2

Cataclysm by Don Pendleton. Really bad Science Fiction by someone who obviously doesn’t know the genre. Honorable mention to The Null-Frequency Impulser, which escapes first place bt being entertainingly bad. Ditto to the works of Pel Torro (and all his other noms de plume).

My most recent entry in the category of throw-across-the-room is Jack Chalker’s The Sea is Full of Stars. This book smacks of Contractual Obligation, or maybe he just got tired of writing it. The strongly-written main characters from the beginning virtually disappear partway through. Major issues go unresolved, and he superficially ties things up at the end in a few pages. He also ignores things he said he was going to examine in the introduction to the book. Chalker’s one of my Guilty Pleasures, but this was a sore disappointment.

3

Not from annoyance, but when I finally finished 1984 I sat in stunned, depressing horror for about five minutes and then threw it away as though it burned my hands.

[shivvers]

4

That’s basically what I was here to say. I read the end and said “FUCK IT” and threw it against the wall. What a book.

5

The Fourth Guardian (The Eternal Guardians, Book 1) by Ronald Cross. A humorless, obnoxious ripoff of The Illuminatus! Trilogy (which many people find humorless and obnoxious in itself.) I got about a third into it and then said, “Enough.” Tossed it on the floor where it stayed until I sold it to the book store.

Cats Have No Lord by WIll Shetterly. I don’t remember much about this book. It was loaned to me by a girl I had a crush on, so I felt obligated to read it, but I couldn’t stand the thing. Things with her never went anywhere, so I never had to pretend I’d finished it.

6

Ha! The literary equivalent of a fake orgasm!

7

Never actually threw it, but George Eliot’s ** The Mill on the Floss wore me out to the point that maybe I should have. Too bad, too, because it’s fundamentally a good book - very well written (Eliot’s prose is, as always, unimpeachable - I mean no offense against her talent for writing), interesting social ideas, and so on.

I’d even go so far as to say it was revolutionary; giving a voice to young women in a society that traditionally repressed them, and all. But I think it may have had a better effect if ANY OF THE CHARACTERS HAD ANY REDEEMING QUALITIES WHATSOEVER. But alas, they did not. Maggie, who was supposed to be this scrappy, clever, darkly beautiful heroine was so busy being a heartbroken little puppy of a girl, that she drove me absolutely batty. And furthermore, I have to wonder if it hurt her cause; when she’s supposed to be a Strong Woman, and she spends the entire book waxing eloquent on the subject of her own misfortunes. I know I was supposed to be all sorry at the end, when she-

SPOILER–

-drowned, but I was actually kind of glad. I felt like she was finally being put out of her misery.

Philip, the humpbacked love interest, was so incredibly gloomy and depressive that I couldn’t see why Maggie would even want to be around him, especially given her own consistant unhappiness.

Granted, it’s not supposed to be an uplifting story, but I wish there were at least one character that I could sympathize with. As it was, Eliot droned on and on and on for 600-odd pages, fleshing out a whole slew of unlikable personalities and frequently stepping out of the actual story to throw in a socio-political essay, or to do some uneccessary namedropping from classical literature.

In short, The Mill on the Floss is a Great Book, that went horribly wrong somewhere between the pathos and the political commentary, and for that reason, begs to be tossed.

8

Heeheehee. Funny little coding error, there. I wonder if I was trying to make that title bold or underlined?? Sorry to interrupt. Carry on.

9

Catcher in the Rye. I honestly can’t see what’s so good about it.

10

Grendel I had been warned that this was “the first existentialist novel”. I was curious(in much the same way a five year old is curious about touching the stove after being told they’ll be burnt). Things were alright for a while. Sympathy for the devil aspect, humans are idiots. One big revelation comes while watching a bull charge a tree over and over. Then, came the dragon. I can accept many kinds of dragon. I can even accept many interpretations of the dragon/firedrake from Beowulf. I cannot, and will not, accept one who lectures in philosophy and actually says “Where’s your free will and intercession then?”.

Prince Of Anwynn by Evangiline Walton. Walton wrote novels based on a four part cycle of Welsh mythology. IIRC she wrote them out of order- 4,2,3,1 . In the first three adaptations, she was very careful to stay true to the source material. In her third book she goes so far as to add a long footnote explaining that she removed a castle from the story because she believes it was a later addittion by monks. Then, I read her fourth book and the first part of the cycle.

  It's preachy as hell. There are long tirades about the patriarchy and God as a father.  Her writing style hasn't changed, but she has. Apparently, she now has no qualms about sticking her agenda into the mouths of characters from ancient myths.

Frankenstein I had to read this 3 times in school. It’s predictable. The characters are cardboard cut outs. It practically beats you over the head with moral lessons. I have no idea how it became a classic.
-Frankenstein only notices how hideous his creature is when it comes to life!? How do you miss mummy-yellow skin that’s stretched too tight over grotesquely large muscles for the months it took to build this thing?
-The creature is some 7 or 8 feet tall, weighs hundreds of pounds, and can survive on a few handfuls of nuts and berries!?
-The creature is smart enough to teach itself to speak French, English, and a few others by eavesdropping. He teaches himself to read Latin, Greek, and a few others. But he can’t figure out a plan to hide his appearance or get a human to trust him!?

11

oh god DAMN. I can’t believe you actually titled this OP this way, because VERY LITERALLY, once I finished The Magus by John Fowles, I growled in disbelief and THREW IT ACROSS THE ROOM. The book ties up NOTHING, leaves a mystery HANGING, and ends, almost in the middle of a sentence.

It is bizarrely unsettling and MAKES ME FRIGGING ANGRY.

J

12

Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams.

Read the last page, hurled the book, and just missed the open window. I would have shredded the book if it belonged to me.

And I’m a guy who preserves the spines of paperbacks, just to give you an indication of how sacred the written word is to me.

13

Congo by Michael Crichton. After about the third time the woman who ran the expedition magically pulled something out of her ass like a satellite phone, I trashed it. I still don’t know it ended, nor do I care.

And I usually like Crichton, too…

14

I just finished The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd. Great title, right? And it’s gotten some good reviews. What a stinker. It’s about students in a graphic design course and the wacky professor who changes their lives. I couldn’t figure out if it was supposed to be a cariacture of the asshole who thinks he’s a guru, or whether the author actually thought said character was a guru. Unfortunately, I suspect the latter.

SPOILER:

When the wacky professor’s art project consists, literally, of shit in a box, I tossed the book.

15

I didn’t actually throw Anne Rice’s The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned across the room, but I did lose it under my bed for several months. I started it and apparently put it down at some point. It got shoved under the bed. I found it weeks later and realized that what I had read had left so little impression that I didn’t even miss the fact that I’d been reading a book that vansihed. So I don’t read Anne Rice any more. That plus the turgid slopfest that was Queen of the Damned put me off her for this life and the next.

16

I wish * I * knew how to pull a satellite phone out of my ass. Great party trick.

17

I feel much the same way, so I’ve never physically thrown a book. That being said, there’s plenty that I refused to finish. For my money, the chief offender was Noam Chomsky with his Rogue States. THere’s alot of hype around Chomsky and maybe his early work deserved attention, I don’t know. Having never read Chomsky, I picked up RS because it was a recent work and the events he talked about were current and therefore I wouldn’t have to tax my memory too much to know what he was talking about. It’s not a long book, but he only had about three pages worth of material. After the third time he quoted the same previous chapter, I just couldn’t take anymore.

18

Time Enough for Love got the toss when Lazarus Long banged his Mom. I vowed i would do that as soon as he went back in time, knowing full well that was going to happed, as she was the last female character he hadn’t slept with. (i then walked across the room, picked it up, and finished the book.)

19

I would have thrown Thorton Wilder’s The Eighth Day but I had to preserve the spine as it’s an endangered species (out of print, or at least it was last year) and I was reading it for English class. Gee, I wonder why no publishing company wanted it…

So dull, so pointless, and tries to be big and important. But the thing is, you have to have interesting people, not boring, petty, bod-fearing ones who work hard and are industrious! And it DOES end in the middle of a sentence, literally. Plus it could have been fun- it was about a murder, and murder usually makes a book good. Thorton Wilder messed up a murder mystery- in my opinion, no good writer should be able to do that. He screwed up.

God, I hated that book. HATED HATED HATED…

20

Kind of a similar thread here. I actually did throw Plum Island by Nelson DeMille across the room.