I have liked some of Jodi Picoult’s work well enough, but I thought *Change of Heart *was reprehensible.
*The Chamber *by John Grisham.
*Ironweed *by William Kennedy and *Martin Dressler: The Tale of An American Dreamer *by Steven Millhauser. Those ^%&%ing books won Pulitzer Prizes!
Steven Brust has written a fantasy series about a gangster and his adventures. The narrator (OK, in at least one book he’s not the narrator) is a thoroughly nasty guy. That seems to be the point. He’s almost completely unlikable. The only reason I read most of the series is that my daughter adores it, and I was bored.
Anti-Mary Sues are just about as bad as Mary Sues.
It’s probably already been done, but I’ll add on ANYTHING by Dan Brown. What a hack. Furthermore shame on me for giving him multiple chances.
My dad had a series of westerns when I was a kid. I don’t remember what they were called or who the author was. They were frontier stories, like 4 of them in a series. Similar in theme to Little House on the Prarie (which I always hated watching), but even more boring.
I read anything I could get my hands on as a kid, but these huge western frontier books stopped me cold. I got about 20 pages in on the first one and gave it up. It was all about surviving in the wild west and all seemed really dry to me.
I wish I had that time back to read something else, but barring that I want to forget all about reading that book in the series.
Also Scarlet Letter. Had to read that for English class my sophmore year in high school. Our teacher was very detailed, we had to describe like every single paragraph and its themes and situations in extreme detail. I’d be better if I’d never heard of that one.
I wish I had never read Pride and Prejudice. Hours of my life, gone forever. It was a decade ago, and I still regret it.
I remember being really disappointed with Ishmael, the one about the talking gorilla that was supposed to challenge all of my notions about the environment and evolution and creationism and the world as I know it. I got to the end and felt so let down.
Incestuous?
Oh I guess you could see it that way. :o I never did, but I think either way you’re not supposed to be comfortable with the “utopia” they discover. Vonnegut’s books have a strange way of making me both upset with humanity and optimistic about the human spirit. All the people in that society are really very miserable but the twins do discover that the one thing that brings them joy is the connections they find with each other.
Breakfast of Champions was actually my very favorite because in the midst of all the horrible things people were doing to themselves and each other
Kilgore Trout gets to have the incredible experience of being transported to other worlds and seeing things he thought he only dreamed of. So there is beauty in the world and the virtuous are rewarded.
To keep this from being a complete hijack, I wish I could forget (even though I think it is one of the best novels ever written) the racist and homophobic portrayals of two characters, and the very ‘ew ew gross get it out of my head’ scene where
Trout gets his feet encased in toxic waste and they keep getting hotter and hotter and sweating until he can be cut free.
I read Sybil when I was twelve. Oh, God. That book messed me up!
I read a lot of adult books when I was too young to really handle the adult material in them, but this was the only one that really freaked me out for years afterward.
Dostoivesky, Cortazar, Dante, Balzac, Flaubert, Hemingway, Faulkner and God are repeated offenders.
By God I mean every one of his books except parts of the Bible, which are truly beautiful.
Geek Love.
I don’t wanna talk about it. 
Hmm. Yeah, this is in the category of books I was too young to read. Super-Folks. Given that the memory eraser would presumably take the memory of reading the book away (it had a super hero on the cover. I thought it would be fun. The super hero was using his x-ray vision to watch the babysitter have sex with her boyfriend. I never read a book with sex in it before.) without taking away my subsequent love for the genre busting comics of Alan Moore et al, I’d be perfectly happy to keep the consequences and lose the book.
Yes, please don’t! Add this to my list too.
I’m torn between wanting to be purged of the Sparkly Vegan Vampires of Angstville that is Twilight and wanting to use it forevermore as a teaching method of craptacular writing, plot, character developement, EVERYTHING for teens.
My hatred for this book makes me want to take a hostage and I kinda like the hatred I have for this book. In a twisted way, it comforts me.
I agree with (several) people regarding Lord Foul’s Bane, a book I did not care to finish.
Young and stupid, I tried out ‘Chick Lit’ and wish I hadn’t. Bergdorf Blondes, I’m looking at you. The main character and the entire supporting cast were repulsive leeches. I still want the main character to trip and die.
Hopefully she’d then become a zombie and finally getting a chance to eat something. (Because for most of the book she wasn’t, anorexia ‘you look so ana! tee hee!’, being all cool like that…)
Because of that book I will not read Chick Lit or anything with shopping, shoes or elongated women in ‘trendy’ dresses on the cover.
Incarnations of Burned Children, by David Foster Wallace.
It’s the most horrifying short story I’ve ever read, and I’d be very happy if I’d never read it.
Mine have already been covered, but I’ll list them again. These are the only three books I have ever snapped closed and pitched across the room.
Hannibal. Vile piece of crap that completely betrays the character of Clarice Starling as her character was established in Silence of the Lambs. I gave that one away and never bothered to ask for it back.
Silas Marner. Okay, I lied. I didn’t actually pitch it across the room. We had to read this in tenth grade. After taking my final exam on this book, I marched up to the teacher’s desk and proceeded to rip the book to pieces in front of him and threw it in the trash, where it freaking belongs. He grinned and said, “Hated it that much, did you?” but I think I actually hurt his feelings a little by destroying that garbage.
American Psycho. I just found that so disturbing from a writer’s perspective: what sick fuck thunk up this tripe? How completely off the rails is Bret Easton Ellis anyway? I’m afraid to read anything else of his. The movie was slightly less disturbing because the film maker graciously skipped over some of the more violent homophobia that was in the book, but I had to see the Batman movies before I could see Christian Bale as anything other than Patrick Bateman.
Can I get an extra shot of “stop reading things to see if they’re really as bad as you think they’re going to be”?
***Interview with the Vampire ***(picked it up in an airport–didn’t get further than a few chapters before I got so frustrated at the terrible prose I had to put it down)
***Da Vinci Code ***(read the whole thing despite the poor writing to see if the characters were going to stay as stupid as they started–they did)
***Twilight ***(read the whole thing to see if the writing got better or less sexist–it didn’t)
I’m currently in the middle of ***The Shack ***and have been terribly disappointed so far because while there’s some interesting theology, it’s wrapped up in a package of writing that sounds like it came out of a high-school creative writing class.
It is selfish of you to wish to wipe your memory of that book, Shirley. If you do not remember it, how will you be able to warn others?
My memory of Ian McEwan’s first novel, The Cement Garden, is ripe for the neuralizing. I don’t know what it is with this guy, but I insist on proving to myself that reading his work will be good for me, much in the same way I insist on feeding myself tomatoes even though I don’t like them.
After trying to read Atonement four times and…whatever the book about the hot air balloon accident was, I went with The Cement Garden because it was McEwan’s first novel and I was hoping he hadn’t yet developed the irritating tendencies his later work revealed. I can’t say whether those qualities were in the first novel or not, because I was distracted by the emotional disturbance the book was causing in me. It’s about family of four kids, two of whom are incestuously inclined, whose mother dies and then they bury her in their basement and cover her with cement, only they don’t cover her well enough and the scent of her decomposing body wafts throughout the house, and the boyfriend of the eldest girl figures this out, and then he watches his girlfriend have sex with her brother and that’s how it ends. On the last page, the brother and sister are finally having sex. Thanks, Ian.
The other one is Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm. I read it maybe 13 years ago and to this day, memories of the scene involving the photo with the rat in the woman’s vagina intrude on my consciousness. Please, Skald, help me out here…I’m scarred for life.
How about that! Someone disagreed with you! 
There are probably plenty of the Teeming Millions who are posting to this thread who don’t agree with my blanket condemnation of Stephen King. How about THAT! 