Books you've thrown across the room in rage (open spoilers likely)

Cafe Society
81

I recently read a ghastly book called Going Overboard: The Misadventures of a Military Wife by the sadly misnamed Sarah Smiley. Yuck. I have a weakness for domestic memoirs (Jean Kerr, Shirley Jackson, Erma Bombeck) and I am, myself, a military wife, so I was excited to find this book and expected to enjoy it.

I hated it. A lot. With the exception of books about serial killers, I don’t believe I’ve ever read a book with a protagonist I liked less. 260 pages of whining. No empathy for anyone: poor Sarah always has it worse. Her mother (an admiral’s wife) comments that deployments used to be worse back in the days before email. No, says Sarah, email is worse because there is more disappointed anticipation. ?!?

A friend suffers a miscarriage and Sarah has to be literally shamed into going to help her (Sarah doesn’t like blood, you see). Nowhere in the remainder of the book is there an inkling of sympathy for this woman (also a military wife) who has had three miscarriages, the last one while her husband was deployed. It’s all about Sarah (who has to babysit for the woman’s older child).

Another friend’s husband is sent home from the deployment and their family must relocate to California (from Florida) in a month. The reasons for this are not specified, but I can tell you that an officer isn’t sent home early from a deployment for good behavior. Sarah’s response? First, jealousy that her friend’s husband is coming home; second, discontent that she (Sarah) will be losing her friend!

The worst, though, is her treatment of her husband, whom she is pissed at throughout the entire book. To use one example only: Sarah’s husband sends her an email – one that would have broken my heart had my husband sent it to me – in which he writes sadly that he will miss seeing their new baby’s first smile, just as he missed seeing their older son’s. Sarah’s response to this? To be pissed because that was the only email he sent her that day.

I finished the book because I was hoping she would grow up! Nope, though. She was just as self-absorbed and whiney on the last page as she had been on the first. I went to Amazon and read the reviews and found several people who said something like “I don’t know anything about the military, but now I have an understanding of what military wives go through.” I hate the idea that people will read this tripe and think it is in any way representative of me, or of any of the fine military spouses I have known!

And this was a memoir! I can’t imagine writing a book in which I acted like a spoiled twat from page 1 to page 260 and allowing it to be published with my picture on the front! Of course, Sarah doesn’t think she is a spoiled twat – oh no! Sarah pisses champagne and shits gold bricks and is the white-hot center of the universe…

I was going to burn this piece of crap in the fireplace, but it’s hot as a crotch here this week, so I didn’t want to start a fire. Instead I threw the thing in the garbage. Yep, the garbage. Usually I donate books I don’t want anymore to the library, but that didn’t seem final enough in this case. So it’s on its way to the York County Waste Treatment Facility right now. And I’m not a bit sorry!

82

interesting thread; many books I’ve disliked have already been mentioned (Ayn Rands; Madison County; Hannibal; Lovely Bones).

But the one I hated and threw is one I know a lot of Dopers enjoyed: The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman. Yeah, yeah award winning blah blah. I found it utterly pretentious and unreadable. What really made me angry I think was how overpraised it was. I can understand folks having different opinions - that’s what makes the world go round. But the love for this book I will never understand.

83

So, am I the only person on the planet who liked Hannibal?

84

I know you’re all going to laugh at me.

I know you will.

I feel so stupid.

I did throw The Great Gatsby - away. I hated it - I hated every character in it - and since it was a college assignment, I told my professor how much I hated it. She said she hadn’t ever seen such vehemence out of a student about a book.

Got an A on the paper, though. :smiley:

85

I’ll 22nd “Hannibal.” Harris hates women; it’s obvious.

And I’ll nominate that piece of dreck “The Horse Whisperer.” Evans built a complicated story of love and friendship, but then (IMO) had no idea how to write himself out of the corner he’d written himself in. So he took the fantasically easy way out and had Tom (the title character) killed off…by a horse! You know, the guy who spent months using their common love of horses to draw a girl out of her shell after she got into a freak accident on her horse!

Holy horse shit! Who’s going to counsel the poor, traumatized girl NOW? Someone send me that book. I want to throw it against the wall again.

86

First book in the 3 part series was OK, the rest “not so much”.

87

I thought of another one – Leaving the Saints. It’s a memoir about a woman who is raised Mormon, the daughter of a respected Mormon apologist and scholar, who leaves the LDS church.

Now, with all due respect to all the Mormons who may be reading this, I’m no fan of the LDS church. I would have been very interested to read a decent book that addressed some of the issues in the Morman faith that strike me, as an outsider, as being very problematic. But it ends up this woman left the church due to claimed sexual abuse by her father, which she discovered through recovered memories as an adult.

I don’t usually question self-proclaimed victims of abuse, but the things this woman said her father did – ritually abusing her on an altar, that sort of thing – just set off my BS meter. Plus it had all come crashing back on her through suddenly recovered, very detailed and explicit memories, which somehow she had managed to entirely suppress for decades. Since I think recovered memory is mostly BS, too, she had totally lost me by that point.

I didn’t throw the book, but I didn’t bother to finish it, either. I didn’t know if the author was being intentionally untruthful or if she really believed what she was saying. But I didn’t believe what she was saying and, having lost my belief in the narrator’s truthfulness, I wasn’t at all interested in what else she might have to say.

88

Incident at Twenty-Mile, by any chance? After The Eiger Sanction and The Loo Sanction and The Summer of Katya, I was ready for some more Trevanian! Then I read that. Closest I’ve ever come to using a book for kindling.

89

No, but I wasn’t going to say it until someone else did, so thank you for going first. :slight_smile:

I suspect Harris laughed all the way to the bank after writing it, but I liked it anyway.

Clothahump, I loved Incident at Twenty Mile, but I didn’t take it seriously. It was supposed to be another Trevanian spoof, wasn’t it?

I would have tossed The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, but it was too heavy.

90

Don’t think so. It’s been 20 years or better. I looked up Trevanian’s works on the web after that post and began to suspect the book I set aside may not have been Trevanian’s after all. I just remember having read Shibumi around that same time and that the book I got so annoyed with had the same style cover (black with gold raised lettering) and somehow conflated that with Trevanian.

I saw the Eastwood movie The Eiger Sanction long ago and was impressed with it. I saw the first little bit of it again recently and switched channels. Never read that book, but can imagine it being a better book than movie.

91

I’ve done it twice.

The first time was with Cal Thomas’s The Things That Matter Most. At the time I was a Dittohead (Hey, sue me! Misguided youth, and all that.), so when I saw that Rush Limbaugh had written the introduction, I snapped it right up.

Big mistake. Cal just piles the usual outrage over indignation crap over and over again, and then he went a few steps beyond Rush Limbaugh.

He dissed the Enlightenment (Yes, the actual period in history), because it took us further away from God. He went on to post the same old shit about all that crap on TV, and then proposed laws restricting the first amendment to bring back decent America. I forgot what he called those laws, but whatever it was gave me a chill. This guy was–and is–a fucking asshole.

Across the room and into the garbage can in one shot. I still think that screaming “Pig-felching hamster-fucker” actually helped the book fly further.

Throwing the second book made me sad, because I actually liked the author. It was Cynthia Heimel’s Advanced Sex Tips for Girls. Now I had followed Cynthia for almost ten years at the time. In fact, the first book I read was the original Sex Tips for Girls, and it rocked. Cynthia struck a chord in me. Her advice on dating was dead on for men as well as women. The advice in her various books to stop caring about what others thought about you and just follow “your own crazy star” inspired me to break out of various ruts I’d gotten trapped in.

But that was Cynthia 20 years ago. Somewhere in the past couple of decades, Cynthia sort of weirded out. I mean, she’d always been weird, but man she was raving in that last book. Gone was the cynically sharp-eyed social critic and your-best-friend-in-times-of-breakups. She cursed and ranted about her latest marriage and none of her advice made sense. I got about halfway through, and then I tossed the book. I swear, one of the major signs that I was getting older was watching Cynthia lose it in that book. I realized that all your idols fall away.

92

Wow, I actually like about 1/4th of the books mentioned. Oh well.

As for actually, literally throwing a book at a wall, I’ve only subjected two books to that punishment. The rest I’ve hated I’ve just stopped reading and glared at. Hard.

  1. The Hobbit. Oh my god, I thought I’d choke on the thick, strangling, prose. This is supposed to be a kids’ book?! I even tried reading it as a teenager, when my pointlessly purple prose tolerance was far higher than it is now.

  2. Wuthering Heights. I love Jane Eyre, and I figured, how different can the writing styles of two sisters be? Clearly, one Brontë is not like the other. The whole young character/adult character thing made the book nearly impossible for me to follow. Were the “young” characters offspring or flashbacks? I couldn’t read far enough to find out.

93

My problem with Wuthering Heights was the weirdly placed punctuation. I didn’t get far enough in to answer your question. The book was unreadable.

94

Yeah, he’s GROTESQUE.

95

Cell by Stephen King. Why did I waste my time? It had no redeeming qualities whatsoever. And way to kill off the one character I could relate to. Jeez. Also, the protagonist made the connection between the cellphones and everyone going crazy a little too soon. I’m pretty sure he figures it out on page 14. Yeah, no. Bleh… the weird thing is that I want to like Stephen King. I do.

You two have just rocked my world. I didn’t think it was possible to not like Wuthering Heights. It’s been, like, my favouritest book EVER since I first found a copy of it in my Aunt’s old stuff as a child. I always thought it was one of those universally loved novels.

96

You know I got some enjoyment out of that one. Good and thick. I was glad I took it on vacation to Asia, because the giant bugs wouldn’t squash with a sandal. Nothing as satisfying as gooshing a giant cockroach from across the room, and not feeling obligated to clean the roaches off the pages, because their interesting intestinal patterns were much better than the actual text.

What a load of dreck, with lousy, predictable, cliche characters. Yuck!

97

I can say one thing nice about "The Mists of Fucking Avalon" :stuck_out_tongue: - the movie was worse. :stuck_out_tongue:

98

Hey, he’s lost weight! Good for him.

99

I had to draw myself a little diagram the first time in order to keep the relationships straight, and I liked it fine after that. But I much prefer Jane Eyre.

You may have better luck with his early stuff. They let him publish anything he wants now.

100

I had the exact same reaction. I tend to be a bit skeptical of recovered memories in general, and hers were just… extremely unlikely, with enough mystical experiences to make me think that she wasn’t at all a trustworthy narrator. I finished the book feeling like it was just exploitative and unpleasant.