It’s not just the ENDING that sucks in that book, FriarTed. The whole things reads like something from the “Mirror, Mirror” universe–and not in a good, Starling & Mapp make hot lesbian love way, either.
The Shanara series, by Terry Brooks. Talk about fantasy cliches. Unfortunately I just HAD to see how the stupid thing ended and bought all four books. One day I will gleefully burn them and scatter their ashes to the four winds.
Sarah Douglass is another fantasy author that makes me growl.
I tried five times to read War and Peace before shoving it into my bookcase. Now I refuse to even look at it.
Ah, throwing bad books. A cherished hobby of mine.
The first book I ever threw was The Players Come Again. It’s a murder mystery in which the murderer doesn’t even show up until the second-to-last chapter. The rest of the book is written about boring people who have boring conversations and boring intrigues.
I’ve also thrown The Catcher in the Rye and Franney and Zooey because J.D. Salinger is a self-obsessed prat who needs to stop being so <vile profanity deleted> self-righteous.
The book that suffered the most at my hands was Thomas Wolfe’s 700-page snorefest Look Homeward, Angel. I read the whole thing thinking that it couldn’t possibly get worse. I was wrong. It got worse and worse with each successive page. I not only tossed that one across the room, I stomped on it several times. I would have torn it into bits and burned them, but it was a library book.
I respectfully submit that I love Arthurian fantasy, including TMOFA, but there are two sections in the book that can be ripped out without damaging the rest of the story:
the threesome with Arthur, Gwenhwyfar, and Launcelot
and
when Gwen gets raped by her half brother who is then stabbed by Lance and then she has sex with him to celebrate
I’ve actually marked the chapter where the second spoiler happens so I never damage my brain by reading it again.
That’s it, pistols at dawn. Gormenghast and Titus Groan were the best fantasy novels of the last century, although Titus Alone was pretty piss-poor: Steerpike and Doctor Prunesquallor were great characters and splendid adversaries, Titus himself was a whiny git.
The last book I think I actively flung away was Caleb Carr’s SF novel Killing Time. I like Caleb Carr. I thought that The Alienist and Angel Of Darkness were excellent historical thrillers, really evocative of 1890’s New York. But Killing Time, Jesus - it read like it had been written by someone who had never actually read any SF but had only heard it described and thought he’d give it a bash over a weekend.
The character that made me completely lose my block was … a nanny, I think… with a stupid name. “Suck” or “Whinge” or something equally bad but also accurate. I just wanted to set her, Titus, and - most particularly - the author alight.
Perhaps we can agree to meet halfway on this, and settle for fried eggs and bacon at dawn? Because really, other than this *completely *inexplicable respect for an author whose books desperately need stomping on, setting alight, and ritual purification by a young priest and an old priest… I actually rather like you, Case Sensitive. 
Chuck on arson goo.
… I wish I knew what that meant. 
ARGH! I started reading the first Wayfarer book, loved Faraday, loved Faraday and Axis as a couple, hated Azhure from the start, and about halfway through I went onto Amazon to check the names of the next books and reviews, and found out…yeah. I chucked the book across the room, then went back and skimmed it for what little Axis/Faraday there was left.
It’s a more or less phonetic rendering of “Chacun a son gout”, or “Each has his own taste”. Or “Everybody has gout”; my French is a little rusty.
There was one audiobook that my sister, her husband, and I seriously discussed throwing out the car window and backing over several times, but, alas, 'twas a library book and they didn’t want to have to spend money on it. It was some Nicholas Sparks novel they picked up for a long car trip. The main character’s wife had been killed on a lonely country road and her killer was never found. MC’s son began having problems at school. MC meets Sexy Dedicated Teacher who keeps son after school to help him. MC and SDT fall in love. We gave up on it shortly after my sister and I started arguing over whether or not MC and SDT’s love was exactly ethical and we ended up asking our cousin the solution to the mystery. We had figured it out on the first side of the first tape.
Needless to say, we found other things to listen to on the way home.
I absolutely LOVE bad puns – but those books are excrable. Someone suggested them to me and I couldn’t ge through so much as 50 pages of that thing. I’ve tried to read other thing by Anthony, but I have no clue as to what makes him an enduring prolific writer.
I have a theory that he turned out so many books so quickly that they all saw print before anyone realized how bad they were.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I know that altered versions have been released many times, and some may be better than what I read. I couldn’t tell you which edition I read, because I have since thrown it out. The whole way it was structured, with the letters and the overlapping points of view made it longer than it should have been IMHO. It bored me to the point where I could only read about 50 pages at a time, and then I would just mentally tune out what I was reading. About half way through I had a theory that I could skip 100 or so pages, start reading again, and feel as though I missed nothing. Guess what? I was right.
I’m another of those people who will finish a book I don’t particularly like just for sake of completeness. These are the only books I couldn’t get through in the last few years (I don’t usually buy books until I’ve read them courtesy of the library, so no throwing):
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (humor): picked it up because of multiple recommendations by writers I respect. Maybe it improves miraculously after the first 25 pages, but the part I read was dreck, and not funny at all. I can’t believe it won a Pulitzer.
Hopscotch, Kevin Anderson (science fiction): picked it up because it was the first decent-looking thing on the SF shelf at the library which I hadn’t already read. For some reason I thought it was a first novel, so I was cutting the author a lot of slack in regards poor characterization, bad plotting, improbable behavior, etc. Then about a third of the way in I read the author’s blurb, and if I remember correctly it was his eighth book (which goes to show that those Star Wars serial things don’t actually count as writing). Stopped reading right there.
I used to love the Xanth novels as a child. This is why 9-year-olds are not allowed to vote. You’d have to pay me major moolah to get me to read anything by Piers Anthony these days.
A book I finished but hated: some pop-sci “evolutionary psychology” (in quotes because it was crap, not because I don’t believe in evolutionary psychology) book that made a bunch of claims about human sexuality and why women secretly wanted to get pregnant by rapists and so forth. What drove me over the edge was that although trumpeting “scientific research” at every turn, there was no bibliography, no notes, no references, no support for the author’s assertions whatsoever. If it hadn’t been a library book I’d have burned it. I’ve blocked any memory of the author and title, obviously due to posttraumatic stress syndrome.
JRB
This is exactly how I felt about this book when forced to read it in high school. (Or rather, forced to pretend to have read it.) Insupportably tedious.
Some 12 years later I actually did read it - and found it to be excellent. Either the book changed or I did.
Ladies:
Try The Manipulated Man, by Esther Vilar
My curiousity is overwhelming me. Let me know how you feel.
(Don’t say I didn’t warn you)
The only book that I can remember ever honoring this way was Mine. The opening scene where the crazy militant hippy puts her baby on the grill made me hurl the damn thing in disgust. Since I seem to have a constitutional inability to not finish a book, however, I eventually picked it back up and read further, where I found that the incident was a delusion. It ended up actually being a pretty decent book.
I hated the Thomas Covenant book, Lord Foul’s Bane, too. I actually don’t mind anti-heroes, or loathsome protagonists, but the writing, the overuse – hell, the outright abuse – of the thesaurus, the implausibilities even within a fantasy of the characters and their motivations, and the utter pointlessness of the whole thing caused me much pain. The rape was almost the HIGHLIGHT of the whole mess. I skim-read the last 2/3 of the thing hoping it would get better. It didn’t.
Oh! I guess I’m a little late, but The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler. I have no idea how popular it actually is; I only heard of it because it was based on my high school. But what a god-awful piece of steaming crap. Not only did the story and characters suck ass, but the fake ‘discussion questions’ and annotations (“look! remember this dialogue here, it becomes meaningful later”) were just grating in the extreme, not fun, subversive or deliciously sardonic. Plus, it’s not like I’m a giant fan of my high school, but his digs at it were unrealistic and mean-spirited. Not funny, just obvious.
Got to add Patricia Kennealy’s Blackmantle to this list too. She wrote it as a fictionalized version of her life with Jim Morrison, in other words, fiction like her memoir Strange Days is, but set in her Keltic outer space world.
I staggered through this over several years and threw it across the room numerous times. Most of the characters have anagram names of the real ppl they’re named after so the reader knows who PK is talking about. The whole thing is way over done with Kennealy’s writing talent (describing the Janis Joplin character as being “a bronze-lunged woman”) gets completely shaded by the absolute Mary Sueishness of it all.
The heroine has to literally go through Hell/the Underworld, to bring the Jim Morrison character back to life to live happily ever after with her (of course.) The writing is as leaden as her other books, which I could never manage to get past the first chapter. The romance novel cover painting is the crappy icing on top of a pile of crap.
The Bridge, by D. Keith Mano.
I didn’t merely throw it across the room, I launched it off our balcony into the alley.
That was a disgusting read.