It’s probably wrong to get so much satisfaction every time I saw something on my Hated Books list get mentioned in this thread.
Strangely enough, I think I have only literally thrown three books I have read, and they are all books that I like:
Stephen King’s IT
(this one is so flagrant that I have to use a spoiler box)
When Eddie dies – how cruel is that? Stephen, you heartless bastard, you killed Eddie! What did Eddie ever do to you? Absolute hysterics and book-flinging on my part. I did crawl back over to it almost immediately to finish it.
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
When I got to the end and realized you don’t get any satisfication about what happens to anyone. I was getting a little nervous as the book neared the end because things weren’t getting wrapped up, but it was hard to gauge because so much of the back of the book is taken up with the footnote section. That’s a big book to throw, broke the spine and everything. It was mostly annoying because I wanted David Foster Wallace to be in the room with me so that I could deliver a long satisfying (to me, perhaps not to him) lecture on all my complaints. Overall though, I did (grudgingly) like the book and while I don’t agree with many of the choices he made as a writer, I respect his willingness to push boundaries.
Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon
To offset all the well-deserved criticism of Hannibal in this thread, I think Red Dragon might be the scariest book I have ever read in my life. I get nervous just thinking about it. Because I am a complete and total moron, I read Red Dragon while I was home alone one night. I was so wigged that at a crucial plot moment, I had a little spaz out and flung up my hands, inadvertently tossing the paperback into the air. I did the “hot potato” thing with it for a few moments, juggling it around, and then gave it one final toss and volleyball-served it across the room as hard as I could because at that particular moment in my life, the scary book had to be as far away from me as possible.
Wow. I’m reading this book right now and it’s moved onto my top ten list. Maybe the second half sucks, but so far it’s fascinating and very readable. I love the digressions and the snarky prose style. He’s like Pynchon, but without Pynchon’s contempt for the reader. I know Stephenson has problems ending his books, so I’ll wait to finish it before rendering final judgement, but I’m enjoying it so far. My favorite bits aren’t the computer stories but rather the WW2 adventure with Bobby Shaftoe and Goto Dengo.
I’m thinking of giving the Baroque cycle a try, something I was sure I wouldn’t do.
I actually enjoyed this series lol. Anyone who bothers to read more than the first two can’t complain too much. Granted, I read this in High School. And I wasn’t yet aware of the whole Scientology thing (altho I was very curious about the fact that he was still writing five years after his death). And part of my motivating factor was that there was a book reading contest and a decology helped put me over the edge (I won btw). But whatever subtext there was from Hubbard went completely unnoticed by me and I just enjoyed it for the sci-fi adventure and larger than life heroes and villians who were fun to root for and against. And the fact that the entire series was written from the villian’s point of view just made things more interesting.
Be warned, I loved Crytonomicon and Stephenson’s older books but I gave up on Quicksilver. Soooo rambling and unfocused. There’s a lot of neat stuff along the way, but I found it very hard to follow.
I’ve been a fan of war and espionage thrillers since I was in high school. One of my favorite writers in this area is Ken Follett. Eye of the Needle, The Key to Rebecca, and The Man From St. Petersburg all rocked. Good stuff. So it was with great enthusiasm that I bought and set out to read his novel Night Over Water.
Promising beginning. Interesting setting. The obligatory sex scene was nicely written. About two-thirds of the way through the book, though, the damned thing just fell apart. Stupid, stupid, stupid! It’s rare that I don’t finish a book if I’m more than 100 pages into it, but I was sorely tempted with each additional chapter to chuck this one aside…only my faith in the author’s talents, as testified by his previous works, kept me at the task. When I did finish the thing, I was so disgusted that I did – quite literally – fling it across the room.
As a result, I avoided Follett’s works for a number of years. It was only with great trepidation that I picked up another book of his and gave it a chance. And I’ve very glad I did, because Pillars of the Earth is among my top 10 favorite books of all time. I like to think that the reason Night Over Water turned out to be such a piece of shit is that he lost interest halfway through, having come up with the idea to write PotE, but had to finish it for contractual reasons.
Yes! At last! Somebody else who hates that sorry waste of trees (not that I agree with you about arthurian stories. There are some decent ones).
Ninteen-sixties hippies masquerading as first-century barbarians. In the real post-Roman world they wouldn’t have survived five minutes.
Other books I threw - that ‘global warming is a myth’ thing by Michael Crichton. (I’ve even blanked the title). Pure propaganda and badly written to boot. I booted it.
Oh, and (like all people with an IQ larger than their shoe size) I chucked the only Xanth novel I ever attempted to read somewhere around the hundred and sixty-second vile, shitty pun. i.e. somewhere around page fifteen.
I felt the same way the first time I read Quicksilver, but I’ve made a second attempt now, and I enjoyed it much more this time around. When I finish the series, I’ll no doubt post a long-winded overly analytical explanation as to why that no one will bother reading.
Only one I can think of at the moment and that was Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath- it just ends, and you never find out what exactly happens to the family, do they go home, do they eventually find decent work, do they stay together etc tec. That really annoyed me especially after I staying up half the night to see how it would end.
I almost threw the latest Sword of Truth book across the room. But then I decided that they might frown upon that at the bookstore. I had picked it up to read the synopsis, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t be yet another version of his “hero & heroine are separated by some kind of misunderstood magic that he will solve quite easily in the last 20 pages” but there it was. I went home and threw away all of the previous books except “Wizard’s First Rule” which I thought was relatively clever plus had cool sadistic chicks wearing leather.
Terry Goodkind, I hereby sentence you to being locked in a room for all eternity with Robert Jordan, forced to read each other’s shitty unending series’ while the souls of all your betrayed readers feast upon your flesh.
There were not enough rolleyes in the world for that waste of perfectly good hedgehog litter. It was all Pwecious Spunky Gurl Makes Good And Has Romance Pasteded On Yay. Granted, there are authors who can get good mileage out of that and not make the average teenage girl roll their eyes, but this author was not one of them. I’ve seen better writing from the romance novels at the dollar store.
Most of these books, I can’t remember the name of. And I didn’t throw them across the room, since they were library books and my room is full of things I’d rather not break.
(I may have some details wrong, since I haven’t read these books in ages…)
A Star Trek DS9 book where the writer seemed to be inserting death and maiming on minor characters simply as a way to spice things up. The descriptions were, naturally, more detailed in those sections than any of the others. Plus she wrote half the characters as morons, assholes or both.
The ending was the worst;
The true villain brings out a character, an old lady, and threatens the secondary villain with killing her. Something or other happens and the old lady gets her throat slit. Then the villain’s ship is blasted and one of the few likeable characters in the whole thing, the main villain’s friend, is hit in the head and killed. The good guys go across to find the main villain holding his dead friend who, if I recall correctly, has brains dripping out.
A victorian-era lesbian romance between a woman and a jailed psychic. Everything is leading up to a good ending, and then…
It was all a trick. The psychic escapes to paris with her true lover, the woman’s maid, and leaves the woman to either be outcast (she’s already sent off a letter explaining to her family what’s going on and not to worry, so they know she’s a lesbian) or kill herself. In the final paragraph she opens the window and looks down at the river… and the book ends. It just about killed me.
Two different horror novels by the same guy. The plots, setting, etc. were different but in both, all the female characters turn out to be evil and bla bla bla. Terrible, mysoginistic, wrecked half the things he’d set up in the beginning in order to turn the female characters evil… and at the end of one, the main male character wakes up in a hospital with his daughter, who’s talking to the nurse. It turns out she’s pretending to be his wife and intends to have incestuous demon-babies with him. Oooookay then.
The Sword of Maiden’s Tears, by… who knows. It was an excellent book but the ending… well, let’s just say that the ending turns out badly for all the characters. I believe there was a sequel promised but I’m afraid to look for it. One of the few books that ever made me cry and I DID fling it across the room.
Some mystery novel. I flung it in the trash right about the time one of the characters we’re supposed to be siding with starts going on and on and ON about various racist, homophobic crap. Maybe I was wrong, maybe we weren’t supposed to side with her. But I never made it far enough to tell.
… you know too much about me now. I’ll be over there hiding.
One that I’d blocked from memory until Boulter’s Canary mentioned the hippy stuff: Cassandra by some East German bitch. It’s the Iliad told from the Trojan’s perspective, with the Greeks being vile evil bastards who’ve come to sack Troy, even though Paris showed up with some other chick instead of Helen (apparently, she knew the novel was going to suck and refused to appear in it). The whole thing is this whiny bullshit about what happy, loving people the Trojans were before the way, and how the war changed them. One of the characters whines for like ten pages about how military discipline is destroying the individuality of the soldiers. God, I hated that book and I never would have finished it if I hadn’t had to read it for a college English course. Oh yeah, after the Berlin Wall came down, it turned out that the author was a snitch for the East German secret police. Damned commie pinko sow.
Both of them flung across the room, and in the case of Gormenghast, I think I actually jumped on it after. Wretched writing, completely unlikeable characters…just generally abysmal.
I mentioned these in a previous thread way back and was told that Of Mice and Men is a work of genius. I continue to disagree.
No, you’re not. I enjoyed it in part because I could imagine the cries of outrage at the ending. I was NOT surprised that Jodie Foster immediately opted out. Nor that the ending was changed for the movie (tho I do wish they’d filmed it, tho even more, I wish they’d kept the subplots of Lecter’s childhood and Gary Oldman’s
character’s sister.
