Books you really, really **HATE**
 

Those of us who love to read run into some books we love, some we are indifferent to, and some we don't like.

But then there are those books that suck the life from us. Books that for some reason we finish reading despite the revulsion we feel page after page. Books that bring up hatred for the author, publisher, and everyone involved. Books that make you never want to read again.

Every aspiring writer should save a book that is so bad that when you read it, you are filled with the knowledge that anything you could possibly write will be better than that book. (I can't remember the author who I paraphrase here)


Don't point out piddly books that are just mediocre. I want you to point out books that are EVIL, WRONG, and very badly BROKEN.


The one book on my all time hate list is Michael Crichton's Sphere. This book started out okay, but the writing, the plot, the characters were all average or below average. The book has Crichton's typical philosophy of anti-science, but he has written before good science cautionary tales - Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park for example.

But what propels this book into its unique position of number one on my shit list is its ending. It was not just a contrived ending, it was an ending that had zero respect for the reader. It was so bad I finished the book and felt cheated. The ending was an insult to the reader's intelligence.

This one used bookstore in Montclair has outside several bookcases with the reject books they are trying to unload for a quarter each. While waiting outside for a friend, I counted about ten copies of Sphere scattered in the bookcases. I was tempted to buy them all and burn them in a bonfire.

Oh, and when I had HBO, I tried to sit through Sphere the movie to see if a typical Hollywood mangling of a book would cancel out Crichton's original mangled writing. Good God that movie sucked! They managed to keep the essence of the book and add to it the most wooden acting I have ever seen. Dustin Haufmann, the one actor I recognized, should have known better than to be in this movie.

Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.

I liked early Vonnegut; Cat's Cradle was good, and I thought Mother Night was terrific. But BoC isn't a novel; it's a meta-novel, writing about writing about writing, with a disjointed plot and a truly stupid ending.

I followed this up with Galapagos to see if it was an aberration, and found that novel to be boring as hell, but it was at least marginally coherent, instead of being a 20th-century Tristram Shandy knockoff.

“The Hiram Key”

It purports to be a scholarly look at the history of the Free Masons, written by two masons, of course. It ends up ”proving beyond doubt!” that free masonry began at the building of Solomon’s temple, that the Essenes of 1st C Palestine (Dead Sea Scrolls guys) were actually an enclave of free masons, that Jesus was a free mason (no kidding!), and that it was actually James, the brother of Jesus, who was crucified ….

Yeah. So. Go read it. It’s about as ‘scholarly’ as the Duh Vinci code.

-sm

I really liked Breakfast of Champions. Oh well.

Do I really need to express my hatred for the "Wheel of Time" series again?

"Eyes of the Dragon" by Stephen King. I was forced to read this pile of shit in high school. I'm not a fan of Stephen King, but I can understand his appeal. But this tripe, this book-bound mess of broken plotlines and contrived text, this... book... I cannot begin to express my loathing. I HATE this book.

House of Sand and Fog

Sucked. Really, just awful.

I liked Breakfast of Champions, but Galapagos was the only Vonnegut book I have had to quit reading because of pure boredom.

Eyes of the Dragon I wasn't impressed with, but I will tell you one thing that annoyed me about it. The blurb on the back dressed the book up as another Stephen King horror story, but it is a straight fantasy piece, not horror at all.

I can imagine seeing the book publishers little wheels spinning when they got this book 'but how do we market this to King's regular crowd? Aha! Let's make it look like all his other horror stuff, they won't know the difference!'


Edit:typo

I read the first 30 pages of that book and it was all I could do not to slit my wrists. My wife is Persian and got all excited when the movie came out and couldn't go soon enough. I told her I wasn't going because the story was too depressing so she took her sister. They didn't like the movie any more than I liked what little I read of the book.

Anything by Jane Austen or the Brontes. Let's just get that out the way right now, then move onto individual books.

The Fourth K by Mario Puzo. I picked this up out the library as I am a great fan of Puzo's work, and this looked like a good read. I slogged through it, hoping he would wave a wand and fix everything, but it never happened. The whole book - characters, plot, every base element of the work was impractical and unbelievable. Normally, I can submerge myself in anything Puzo writes, but this was almost a work of fantasy than drama. If you've read anything else by him - Godfather, The Last Don, The Sicilian, Omerta, The Family, anything - and think you have a good handle on his style and his voice, avoid Fourth K.

To this day, I don't believe the man really wrote the book, it was some cousin or whatever slapping his name to get an entry into the bookstores.

"Eyes of the Dragon" by Stephen King. I was forced to read this pile of shit in high school.

Dude, you got to read Stephen King in high school? I'll trade you "Eyes of the Dragon" for "The Scarlet Letter" any damn day of the week.



Anyone can hate books that everyone hates. But *I* hate a book that everyone loves. Ok, everyone ready to verbally abuse me?

I HATE "Catch-22." Quit after only a couple of chapters. It felt so contrived, so beating-you-over-the-head with the symbolism, and so NOT FUNNY.

I refuse to read anything Clancy, I've tried but for some reason I can not stand his style of writing.

Nope, had to read the Scarlet Letter too. My English teacher tried a bunch of different books to see what worked well with kids at that age. "Lord of the Flies" was one that I enjoyed, as was "Huckleberry Finn". She actually confided in me once during my senior year that she hated the book too, but it was a hit with most students, so she kept it.

As expected there are a lot of "hates" here that are other people's likes ... (I liked Breakfast of Champions, and enjoy Clancy, but can only take so much of him at one sitting)

I read a lot and luckily have managed to pick more winners than losers over the years. I'm magnanimous enough to forgive Michael Crichton books like "Sphere" when he has given us things as wonderful as "Eaters of the Dead," "A Case of Need (which I read BEFORE it was revealed to be Crichton)" "The Terminal Man," and "Airframe."

On the other hand, no matter how much I like "Dune," can I get beyond the awfulness of all of the sequels. (both the real ones, and the raping my father's literary legacy for the cash ones)

Books I hate, usually beyond redemption, include

Romance Novels. Anything with Fabio on the cover, or that can be described as a bodice ripper. I do like the "male equivalent of a romance novel," i.e., the Hairy Chested Men's Adventure Novel ... Particularly "They Call me the Mercenary," "Saigon Commandos," and "The Survivalist."

I will confess that I DID like The Raj Quartet (series of romancy type books that the PBS series "The Jewel in the Crown" was based on, but I honestly don't think they count as romances. The story is too richly detailed for that. And besides, it's British.)

Interview with a Vampire, or anything else written by Anne Rice.

Slow. Tedious. Lousy Plotting. Ick.

"Novelizations" of movies, rather than books that movies were based on.

Even well written novelizations RARE!!! tend to be based on early versions of the scripts, and leave out important bits of the movie, or go on tedious tangents that are of great interest to the author and pretty much no one else and don't do a damn thing to further the plot.

I know I'll come up with some specific examples of bad, horrible, evil books as soon as I end this ...

Oh. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy.

Had to read it in college. So bad that I threw darts at it. A lot.

Didn't have access to a firearm at that time, or I would have shot it.

I had a slow day at work a few years ago, and read Sphere that day. Oh my. What a terrible book. You're right about the ending. It's kind of like those bad TV episodes where the main character is having a horrible day and at the end you find out it was only a dream. A weasel way out for a writer. It's a fast read though. Not difficult at all. Kind of like Steven King.

Dune was my favorite book for a while in my youth. I was able to get through the first sequel, but couldn't stomach the rest. They were pretty lame. Admittedly, I only tried to read the third one, and never bothered with the rest.

The book that sticks out in my mind was one I read not too long ago: The Tremor of Forgery by Patricia Highsmith. It's a critically aclaimed book, but it was horrible. She can write well, and is able to build suspense, but she just leaves you there in suspense, and never really resolves it. She's a tease. You get a feeling of uneasyness as you are reading the book, and keep expecting something very bad to happen, but nothing does. Then the book is over. I read it on my wife's recommendation. She loved it, and kept asking my how I liked it as I was going along. Maybe that added to my dissapointment.

CHARLIE-BROWN-AAAAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!

That book was EXECRABLE. I, too, had to read it in college and had to fight the urge to vomit on it before returning it to the campus library.

I don't remember ever hating a book, though I'm sure I must have at some point in school, but I gave up on "The Greenlanders".

I enjoyed "the Autobiography of Malcolm X", but got pretty sick of it when an ex-Black-Panther English teacher spent a semester on it. I also ended up seeing the movie twice (once with the class, and once with friends).