# What books would you like to erase all memory of from your brain? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [July 2, 2009, 11:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-books-would-you-like-to-erase-all-memory-of-from-your-brain/501752 "2009-07-02T23:25:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 8
**Author:** ![Sitnam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Sitnam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sitnam)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2009, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-books-would-you-like-to-erase-all-memory-of-from-your-brain/501752/141 "2009-07-27T17:08:44Z")
> [@KRC](#): > > Ethan Frome, a book so bad that one of these days I’m going to rewrite it. Everyone hates this book and I understand the criticism, but when I read it in Middle School there was something refreshing about a love affair repressed. It seemed to me then that thats what life is really like. Still, some part of me wanted to chuck the book against the wall after the sledding scene. ---
**Author:** ![Ferret\_Herder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e47774/32.png) [@Ferret\_Herder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ferret_Herder)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2009, 5:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-books-would-you-like-to-erase-all-memory-of-from-your-brain/501752/142 "2009-07-27T17:52:07Z")
> [@Sitnam](#): > > Still, some part of me wanted to chuck the book against the wall after the sledding scene. Was it because of the unlikelihood of the plan actually working? Because that was my thought at the time. ---
**Author:** ![PoorYorick](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecccb3/32.png) [@PoorYorick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PoorYorick)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2009, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-books-would-you-like-to-erase-all-memory-of-from-your-brain/501752/143 "2009-07-27T18:16:23Z")
> [@kelly5078](#): > > However, the absolute worst dreck I’ve ever read is Wallace Stevens’s poetry. It’s everything you’d expect in poetry from an insurance company lawyer, and less. I had the misfortune of taking Honors English my freshman year of college from a professor who was enthralled with Wallace Stevens, who wrote his damned dissertation about Wallace Stevens. And, no, I still have absolutely no idea what in the hell _The Emperor of Ice Cream_ is about or even what the point of the title is. _Last Exit to Brooklyn_ by Hubert Selby Jr.; it took years to get the bad taste out of my mouth from that one. The world is a horrible place populated by horrible people. I get it already. ---
**Author:** ![GargoyleWB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gargoylewb/32/199_2.png) [@GargoyleWB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GargoyleWB)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2009, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-books-would-you-like-to-erase-all-memory-of-from-your-brain/501752/144 "2009-07-27T18:16:50Z")
I’m one of only a handful of people that read all ten books of L. Ron Hubbard’s **Mission Earth** series and lived to tell about it. I did it on a dare 🙂 Erase me please! ---
**Author:** ![PeacePlease](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/71c47a/32.png) [@PeacePlease](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PeacePlease)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2009, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-books-would-you-like-to-erase-all-memory-of-from-your-brain/501752/145 "2009-07-27T18:43:22Z")
> [@GargoyleWB](#): > > I’m one of only a handful of people that read all ten books of L. Ron Hubbard’s **Mission Earth** series and lived to tell about it. I did it on a dare 🙂 > > Erase me please! Unless you received a million dollars for this dare, I simply cannot imagine putting yourself through that kind of torture. IMHO you immediately move to the front of the erasure line. ---
**Author:** ![Risha](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/5fc32e/32.png) [@Risha](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Risha)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2009, 8:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-books-would-you-like-to-erase-all-memory-of-from-your-brain/501752/146 "2009-07-27T20:40:59Z")
> [@GargoyleWB](#): > > I’m one of only a handful of people that read all ten books of L. Ron Hubbard’s **Mission Earth** series and lived to tell about it. I did it on a dare 🙂 I only made it through the first four or five, so you have my admiration for this feat. (It was another slow summer at the local library, IIRC, and they had all ten available.) I think that I might have thought that #1 was okay, but I can’t recall enough of it to be sure. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Economist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Evil\_Economist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Economist)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2009, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-books-would-you-like-to-erase-all-memory-of-from-your-brain/501752/147 "2009-07-27T20:55:24Z")
I was interested in a woman who liked Laurell Hamilton, so I read all the Anita Blake books. They actually started out decent, but they quickly became the worst trash I have ever read. The woman wasn’t interested, so I have no need to remember those awful books, so lets get rid of them, even the first few decent ones–if i remembered them I might want to start reading the series again. ---
**Author:** ![GargoyleWB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gargoylewb/32/199_2.png) [@GargoyleWB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GargoyleWB)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2009, 9:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-books-would-you-like-to-erase-all-memory-of-from-your-brain/501752/148 "2009-07-27T21:02:28Z")
> [@PeacePlease](#): > > …I simply cannot imagine putting yourself through that kind of torture… Mission Earth was merely laughably terrible, like a novelized Highlander 2. The Dragonlance books were actually more painful reading to me, since they pretended to a higher level of literary legitimacy and fans of the books that recommended them. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2009, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-books-would-you-like-to-erase-all-memory-of-from-your-brain/501752/149 "2009-07-27T21:37:39Z")
> [@Evil\_Economist](#): > > I was interested in a woman who liked Laurell Hamilton, so I read all the Anita Blake books. They actually started out decent, but they quickly became the worst trash I have ever read. The woman wasn’t interested, so I have no need to remember those awful books, so lets get rid of them, even the first few decent ones–if i remembered them I might want to start reading the series again. Foolish human. The neuralizer’s settings already cover remembering only the good ones but avoiding the bad. ---
**Author:** ![lizardling](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f4b2a3/32.png) [@lizardling](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lizardling)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2009, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-books-would-you-like-to-erase-all-memory-of-from-your-brain/501752/150 "2009-07-27T22:00:38Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > _Foucault’s Pendulum_. Read it when the world was Umberto-crazy and everyone said I oughta read that book. > > Simply awful. I still haven’t finished that book either. I thought it’d be a cool premise, and I heard that the first X number of pages were there to weed out the faint of heart, so I kept at it. But I found that it was dreary as hell and convoluted as well with no real sense of tension. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-books-would-you-like-to-erase-all-memory-of-from-your-brain/501752.md?page=7)