This thread brings to mind a column by the late great Chicago columnist Mike Royko. Royko was a die hard Chicago Cubs fan, and once wrote a book review of NY Mets player Keith Hernandez’s book “If at First”. Royko’s column was headlined “A Very Solid Book” which Royko said meant that the book’s binding and construction held up to being repeatedly and violently thrown against the wall.
Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. I started a thread on this travesty around here a few months ago that probably better expresses my rage and disgust than I could now, after I’ve had a few months to settle down. I only finished reading it because a friend asked me to. We’re supposed to care about the daily life of a spineless, soulless cipher of a girl whose only reason for living (and I do mean only) is to get the attention of the BMOC as she drifts through prep school. There is not a single moment of joy to be found within these pages. Nothing comes of anything. Nothing she does makes the slightest difference on anything. Nothing matters. AAAAAAAGH.
The Dive from Clausen’s Pier by Ann Packer. Another spineless, soulless girl (hey, coincidence?) runs away from one problem (paralyzed fiancé in Wisconsin) to New York, and then runs away from the problem in New York (creepy older guy who loves[?] her) back to Wisconsin. No joy, no humor, nothing comes of anything… (rage building…must settle down…)
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Coincidence after coincidence, followed by extremely unlikely coincidence, and then more coincidence. Too much for me – across the room it went.
Some romance novel set in the 1850s that pissed me off because the characters spoke they were from the 1990s, which included saying things, “I find you so sexy” and “I want to have sex with you.” WRONG! You’re writing a romance novel, lady – here’s your chance to have people say all the overblown, highflown sappy things no one in this day and age would ever say (with a straight face). Seize the moment!
Was it, perhaps, Prime Directive? In which the bridge crew* of the Enterprise-no-suffix, in the last year of their mission, all get cashiered for violating General Order Number One and causing a nuclear war?
Yeah, McCoy was quite the ass in that one. Good book, though.
*I hate that term, damn it. The most junior person in that group is Chekov, who’s a freaking ensign. They’re not crew.
Cane River by Lalita Tademy. I liked the book early on. It is a historical novel looking at the author’s ancestors. The problem is, she follows the characters in great detail, but then seems to realize there is more than one book can handle. At the 4/5 point of the book she speeds up her telling of the story, giving the impression she has to go somewhere in a hurry.
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. A friend of mine sent me the whole series, telling me I had to read it, that it’s so scientifically accurate in how one would terraform Mars. Keerist was that a bad book! Filled with inaccuracies, characters who spent years wandering around the surface of Mars for no reason at all, and just general shit that it was practically unbearable. I only kept reading after the first couple of chapters because I knew that my friend would bug me about the book. Thankfully, about a hundred or so pages from the end, the kittens shredded the book when I wasn’t home. Yeah, they got some extra treats that night. 
I threw Atlas Shrugged across the room many times, finished the bastard and then, 2 years later, read the damn thing again. It was like having a toothache which you couldn’t stop prodding.
Maybe others are ashamed to admit this. (I know I am). But the book was Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief Histry of Time”. :eek:
Yes, it is almost sacrilege for anyone to say they didn’t like it.
It starts out great, explaining the prevailing theories about the unbelievably small things (with emphass on Max Planck) to unbelievably huge things (with emphasis on Albert Einstein). This goes on pretty well for about 3 chapters (if I remember correctly). Then Mr Hawking goes on to discuss other dimensions or infinite dimensions or dimensions within dimensions … ARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHH !!!
I gave the book away to someone I work with and she gave it to her husband (a medical student). He got disguted at the same point I did. (I’m glad I’m not alone).
I beleive that book is referred to as “Bought by millions; read by hundreds”.
I didn’t actually throw thse books, as they were library books :
The Gap Into Conflict : The Real Story by Stephen R. Donaldson. Some reviewer described it as “unpleasant people doing unpleasant things to each other”; that sums it up.
Out of This World by Lawrence Watt-Evans. It wasn’t clear that it was a trilogy, so it ended abruptly - after the protagonists wife and young daughter are enslaved, raped and murdered. I skimmed the other two books; it’s a litany of despair and futility.
By David Brin, The Postman and Glory Season. The Postman because it was so damned depressing; I found myself wishing that everybody, everywhere had died in the war. Glory Season is set in a feminist “paradise” - apparently one Brin largely approves of - that in my mother’s words would be better off being carpet bombed with neutron bombs.
Hey, me too! At the point where Brown was explaining that Disney’s The Little Freakin’ Mermaid was really all about Mary Magdalen and the divine feminine.
:eek:
So what you’re telling us is that you’re a COMMUNIST. A Middle-eastern sissy tree-hugging gay-marrying communist who hates America.
“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
-Dorothy Parker
The Awakening by Kate Chopin.
Whiny, selfish, irritating, irresponsible woman. I’ve never thrown a book across the room before or since, but when she drowned herself I was filled with rage at both her and her creator. Just thinking about that book makes me angry.
Let me second Hannibal. In fact, I hated it so much I picked it up just so I could hurl it across the room again.
The only book I’ve never finished is Dawn of Amber - ye gods, what drek!
Skald
Wow, did my book-throwing antics convey that much about me?
Well, I’d better be more careful in my postings.
[Tommy Fla-nay-gan]
Ah yeah now that I think of it, I have read that book - several times. I did that when I was studying er … teaching advanced astrophysics at CalTech … er MIT. Yeah that’s the ticket !!!
And I’ve slept with Nicole Kidman - several times.
[/Tommy Fla-nay-gan]
Oh, and I didn’t so much throw Joyce’s Ulysses as toss it on a pile of stuff I was going to donate to charity. The meandering narration sounded too much like an autistic demon had taken up residence inside my head. I rid myself of it well before I got to the last section which consists of nothing more than run-on sentences sans punctuation. What a piece of shyte.
I don’t think that was it. It was a kind of crossover, wherein Kirk was recovered and revived after his death in ST: Generations; members of the TNG and DS9 crews showed up, and McCoy was snotty to them in a particularly hateful way. As I recall, the tone I got from it was that the author seemed to think the readers must naturally be die-hard TOS fans and would automatically take a TOS character’s side against one of those later series interlopers, no matter how much of an ass the TOS character was being. I’m generally fond of Dr. McCoy, but this was far from the case here. Characterization of the TNG and DS9 people was particularly thin too, as if the author had never watched either show and only read a series outline about them (which is why I tend to think it might’ve been a Shatner novel.)
I read this, as far as I got with it, for a review some years ago. It is certainly not in my house anymore.
Seconded, wholeheartedly.
And I had to read it for a class. Sigh.
Son of Rosemary, sequel to Rosemary’s Baby. The original is a classic, and I was looking forward to the sequel, but it was soooo incredibly stupid it ruined not only itself, but heavily tainted the original as well. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
*The Mists of Fucking * Avalon. I. Hate. That. Book. With the fire of a million, trillion suns. I read it in high school and I threw it, as hard as I could, screaming, across the room about a third of the way through it. Come to think of it, I threw it back and forth across the room a couple of times. I felt mildly guilty for breaking the spine on a brand new library book (I worked in the library and had first dibs on it) but I figured the book deserved it. I don’t know why I tried to read it in the first place, I utterly despise, loath and detest the whole Arthurian cycle. There are no, have never been, and never will be, any good stories in the Arthurian cycle. There, I feel much better now.
Another book that I threw across the room was some futuristic fantasy, set in Boston, I think, where the author tortured the protagonists throughout the book and in the end, they were right back where they started and about to do it all over again. It was all for naught.
Curious Notions by Harry Turtledove. Family runs a cross-time retail business, selling advanced electronics in exchange for produce in a alternate history run by a German military dictatorship (we lost world war one). They have no cover story prepared. Yep. The Secret Police ask them where they get all the amazing stuff they sell, and the answer is umm… I dunno. Too stupid for words.