Ask Lemmy

A series, but The Wheel of Time becomes insufferable around book five. There's like five chapters of lore/world building for every sentence that moves the plot forward. Also, the worst protagonist in the history of book writing. The side characters are the only reason I made it to book five.

Every time i read the water babies my grandfather had a stroke.

Atlas Shrugged.

There are very few books that have left me with a "This is the face of evil" impression. I tried to give it a fair shake, but this one did, alongside the fact that it devolves into stimulant-addled ranting.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not inherently opposed to stimulant-addled ranting - I like On the Road, for instance - but it just left an awful taste in my mouth.

On the other hand, I enjoyed the Fountainhead, but I was young, usually stoned, and took away an 'integrity of artistic vision' interpretation that resonated. I do not know if this would survive a re-read.

a short story i forgot the name of.

the writing style was poor in a way that instead of the narrator persona narrating (3rd person), it is conversing to you instead (2nd person).

The Last of the Mohicans

Read it in high school because it's "classic American literature." If I remember right, a number of the main characters are killed off towards the end. It was a depressing story.

I don't remember what book it was but I walked into a metal pole reading it. I wasn't seriously injured or anything but it was pretty embarrassing.

Okay nobody said His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman. So that's my hated reading experience.

The first book was okay, seemed promising, the rest got worse and worse by the page. I've picked up lousy books and I can quickly tell if they would be a waste of time, so I drop them early. I have no beef with those books. But His Dark Materials? What a disappointment. I want my time and money back.

Thankfully I can't remember the title or author of the book. I only got six pages into it before I put it in the "return to the library" pile.

I think it was supposed to be a fantasy novel set in a medieval European alternate world.

It was first person and the MCs train of thought was trope and cliché filled drivel, including a multi paragraph description of an alcoholic drink made from potatoes and turnips. The author called it "voka."

That was the final straw.

Id would have to say Lolita. The way humbert humbert is super manipulative and gaslight-y about the worse things a human can do is why I had to drop the book halfway.

I guess that would be fucking Kierkegaard's Either/Or that used to give me what I believe was some sort of physical panic. I couldn't finish it, great book.

The Stone Angel.

It's a miserable story about a dying old woman regretting all her life choices. It's also required reading in Canadian high schools because the author is Canadian.

And then, on top of all that, my teacher absolutely insisted that its only major theme was "hope" and docked marks for having any other interpretation.

I don't know if it's my worst ever reading experience but... Im trying to get through Narcissus and Goldmund right now. Holy shit do I hate this book so far, and I usually enjoy Hesse's work.

I think it was called "the horror of remson high" or something like that, that we had to read in high-school. Imagine being a teen, already struggling with the changes of one's own body and then reading a book about tentacle aliens coming out of the pimples of the students, to wreak havoc in the town. It even started with one alien killing the family's dog and growing to its size.. Didn't even bother finishing it and gladly accepted a bad grade for doing so.

I've really wanted to get into Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and bought the first few books. I've never managed to make it through the first one, The Gunslinger, even though I've given it probably five or six attempts. I always make it to the same part in the book where Roland and the kid are using the hand-cart through the tunnels, and it just takes so. fucking. long. to get anywhere and for anything to happen, and my mind starts drifting as I'm reading and then I start missing things and have to go back... That section of the book is so frustratingly boring that I can't make it through.

I remember struggling so much to get into Inheritence that I gave up, not sure if it was because of the writing or I was still annoyed at the end of Brisingr.

Been rereading all the books I can ever remember having read in school lately. For the most part they are actually more enjoyable as an adult.

The Scarlet Letter still doesn't hold up though. It's so dry, so boring, so archaic. I crawled through it a few pages a day for like three months because I didn't have the motivation to do any more than that. The movie was even worse.

The Great Gatsby was kind of a slog at first - I actually just gave up on it at some point. But when I eventually came back and started from the beginning again it was fine and reasonably enjoyable.

For those curious, the "books I can remember having ever read in school" are A Doll's House, A Modest Proposal, Animal Farm, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Ghost Cadet, Hatchet, Holes, I am the Cheese, Inherit the Wind, Lord of the Flies, Maniac Magee, Night, Number the Stars, Of Mice and Men, Pygmalion, The BFG, The Great Gatsby, The Kid Who Became President, The Man who was Poe, The Metamorphosis, The Most Dangerous Game, The Old Man and the Sea, The Pearl (?), The Scarlet Letter, Crash, To Kill a Mockingbird, Bud Not Buddy, The Lottery, Fahrenheit 451, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Crucible. Plus a lot of Shakespeare. So far I've reread all of those before Mockingbird, and none of them from Mockingbird. This only includes books we were made to read, or which our teacher read to us in earlier grades (BFG, Hatchet, Mixed-Up Files, etc)

Mein Kampf - it's borderline unreadable.

Papercuts

The Wheel of Time series.

Great story; bad books. Literally, the books fell apart while I was reading them. Cheap-ass paperbacks...

The majority of the books we read in school. They almost seem like the only reason they're promoted in school reading class was as a deal by the authors and the schools to save the book from disinterest. However, I tend to get a lot of flak for it, especially when I bring up Of Mice and Men and A Christmas Carol. No matter how I read the first one (since everyone keeps telling me I'm reading it wrong), all that rings in my head is a plot demonstrating the struggle of two individuals in an old crochety version of rural America that leads up to a justification of euthanizing based on weaknesses that shouldn't have been set up to show in the first place, and a Christmas Carol is just an old man being bullied by three ghosts who could be out solving some of the world's biggest issues but somehow think some random old man who did the crime of refusing to give generosity to someone is the world's biggest priority.

It's a common meme to compare the aesthetics/style/ethics/accuracy of a book to the Twilight saga like the Harkness Test (e.g. "wow, the Quran has worse ethics than Twilight" or "this Harry Potter story might be misguided, but at least it's not Twilight"), and I wouldn't exalt the majority of the books I've had to read in high school above the Twilight books.

This was, oh, a decade ago or more. Was reading a book on polyamory and ethical non-monogamy. I can't remember the title, but it was one of the early "big" books on the topic.

It actually made me angry. Not because of the topic, I'm fine with the topic or I wouldn't have picked it up in the first place.

But the author said such STUPID shit like "There's no such thing as a 'reverse gangbang'." And I'm like "Well, shit, man, your search engine must suck!"

It made me angry that he took an important topic and got it so thoroughly and completely wrong. And that people held it up as like this "Important" work on the topic.

Some books are not to be set aside lightly, they are to be thrown with great force.

Dropped the book on my face scratching my eye

A 1200 page book on architecture too

We read Macbeth in high school, but they dragged it out over a whole year. It was so painful!

When I realized there are a lot of dumb people out there, 1984 by George Orwell.