Asklemmy

Of the ones I tried to read, Atlas Shrugged, and it's not even close.

Rich dad poor dad. Rich dad never existed. It’s all made up grift and, consequentially, people fall for it and make expensive life investment decisions after it.

Catcher In The Rye

What a miserable experience reading the whiney thoughts of that little shithead.

Maybe it would have been more relatable if I read it at 15, but I read it at like 28 and it was insufferable.

A close second is The Great Gatsby. I kept waiting for something interesting to happen and then just like that it was over.

The Bible!

Foundations by Isaac Asimov. It's a great story but it's a tough read. Way better as an audiobook.

the scarlet letter. I found it extremely unrelatable, and generally boring. I think The Crucible play by ~~the same author~~ arthur miller* conveys the same overarching principles about religious hypocrisy and herd mentality in a much more interesting way.

Bible.

Of books I've completed, Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. Read it at school, hated it (as well as Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the D'Urbervilles) - full of ridiculous coincidences. And also utterly miserable to boot.

I started reading The Da Vinci Code, but gave up after the very first page.

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yaos. I was expecting a nice fantasy story with dragons and shit. But the romance part of it was just so annoying. "Oh look that dude is so hot..." at every. single. occasion. I could've known beforehand that this book is more targeted towards female readers, but sometimes I just like to go to the book store and buy a book based on the blurb. Since then I made the new rule to keep my distance to books that mention TikTok or #BookTok on the cover.

Charles Dickens wasn't fun, back when we covered it in school

A tossup between books 7-10 of the Wheel of Time series. I gave up half way through book 10 and resent the time that I wasted on the series. 20 years later I still recall the desperate hope that the next chapter/book would advance the storyline, only to be greeted with more subplots, stupid things happening because of characters inability/unwillingness to communicate, and overly verbose descriptions of every little thing.

I hear the final books, written by a different author, were much better.

"Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer. I read it in high school so maybe I wouldn't hate it as much as I do if I wasn't forced to read it, but the plot is basically about a booksmart kid who decides to leave his rich parents and society behind to live in remote Alaska. The book follows Chris McCandless along his journey from the Eastern part of the country, through the South, and finally up the West coast and to Alaska (hitchhiking mostly). When he gets to Alaska, instead of actually being prepared and realizing the risk, he goes into "Into the Wild" incredibly unprepared - he ends up having to stay at his remote camp well into the spring because he didn't consider all the snow melting would render the river blocking his path back to society completely uncrossable. He ends up dying because he ruins most of a moose by failing to properly smoke the meat, and eats a poisionous plant out of desperation. Obviously this could have been avoided by just doing the proper research or bringing extra food (he only brought a few pounds of rice, and the guy who drove him to his final stop literally told him it was a bad idea to do this with so few supplies and only a .22 rifle). Basically his horrible death could have been easily avoided if he wasn't such an idiot.

The author clearly had a ton of respect for the guy, because he spent a year or two peicing all this together. He spoke about Chris (the unprepared trancendentalist wannabe) with a great deal of reverence, acting like he was a martyr for a cause unclear to me. Why you would want to spend years of your life in an attempt to immortalize an idiot, I am not sure. The author also decided to randomly interrupt the main story with a few chapters about his own moronic adventures, which made an already bad book worse.

David Weber, Out of the Dark.

The book has an excellent premise: an alien invasion by technologically superior forces where not even asymmetrical warfare (guerrilla warfare) works. Humanity was getting it’s arrogant arse kicked all over the planet.

I guess David realized he bit off more than he could chew, because the premise was working itself into a multi-book series. So about halfway through that book he employed a Deus ex Machina by pulling the most perfect opponent to the alien invasion out of his arse: vampires.

Yes, vampires. a force that so perfectly neutralized all of the alien’s advantages that the second half of the book amounts to teenage revenge wish fulfilment as the vampires steamroll the aliens back into orbit - and then eliminate them in orbit - by riding on the outside of their escaping shuttles. Because vampires don’t need to breathe.

I got so disgusted at the lame-arse way of avoiding a truly great story that I nearly threw the book across the room. I forced myself to finish the book to see if it got any better. Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

And now, a decade-plus later, he’s released two sequel books.

smh facepalm bridgepinch sigh

I just noped out of a book called "Exquisite Corpse" by Poppy Z. Brite. It's torture porn with necrophilia and sadism by the ton. It's actually well written, but I just got sick of it.

Harry Potter. I tried to read first book but couldn't, the cringyness was high and the naming convention was straight up from 90's bad fantasy book parody. It's like one of the few books i not finished after i started, and i read a lot. And while the others are just forgettable experiences, HP is constantly in my face in media, reminding me of it.

I recently hate-read Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. I had started reading it twice and stopped after a few chapters. I am aware that the book is meant to be satire, but the point of satire is to be to the point instead of having to slog through 600+ pages of drivel.

I thought Their Eyes Were Watching God was really rough to read through because Hurston was trying to phonetically write out how her characters spoke and it was painful to read through.

And I like how it is somewhat discussed in American Fiction through the different writers and their approaches to black literature.

For me personally: Triton. I remember reading it 25+ years ago. I really had to fight through it, after circa half of it I put it away and never touched it again.

So remarkably not my favorite book that I still feel the exhaustion when thinking about it.

Can't remember the name but there's a novel set in Ireland in the not-too-distant future

Synopsis implied it had become a surveillance state but didn't gave up before confirming due to the literal writing style

I swear every sentence was written in the passive voice (poorly remembered examples):

"It was made known through the clothes he wore they were sent from the department of security"

"As she walked outside the smell made Spring's arrival clear"

Totally fine normally but do it every single sentence and it becomes a mystery novel where the mystery is what the hell you just read!

... Or idk, Harry Potter 5 is pretty meandering

Court of Thorns and Roses. It came highly recommended by my sister and many others.

I get the appeal, an adult retelling of classic fantasy. But it felt like it was written just to be edgey, sexy and proactive. Which is fine if that's what you are wanting, lots of media does this. I was just hoping for a new angle or dimension on Beauty and the Beast, not just a sexy B&B. I guess that does count as a new angle, but not one for me.