Books you hate that are always praised?

[isabbbela]

Beautiful Disaster by Jamie Mcguire. Every girl seems to have loved it, and I really disliked it. I couldn't even read the whole book, I got so bored. The characters are so annoying. When I was younger I read the Series of Unfortunate Events, and while everyone loved it I absolutely hated it!

 

[BaltimoreJay]

Atlas Shrugged. People who like that book are like a cult and consider Rand some sort of goddess like pinnacle of human thought. I read the whole book and just thought it was like sixteen-hundred pages of cynical garbage. The whole big soapbox John Galt speech left a bad taste in my mouth and just made me think Rand was maybe not such a nice lady.

 

[Joker99352]

Dune is always regarded as an epic sci-fi masterpiece, but it's so dense and has so many pages. It just moves at such a slow pace, and I don't really care for books like that. I also don't like having to learn every single little detail about the society in which the characters live, which is a problem I see with some of the more elaborate science fiction stories.

 

[mintyfish]

I had to read The Scarlet Letter in high school, and I'm assuming because it's a classic that the majority of people in academia consider it to be a great work of literature, but I absolutely hated it. The writing was horrible; Hawthorne's sentences would go on and on until by the time I got to the end, I couldn't even remember what he had said in the beginning of the sentence.

 

[illusion]

Sum of All Fears. I bought that book a few years ago. I got about 100 pages into it and realized I didn't even know what the plot was by that point. Clancy jumps around so much. One paragraph is in DC, the next is in France, another is at the Vatican. It was so scattered. I got tired of it, and have never gone back. Don't know why everyone else thinks it's a great story.

 

[Catavenger]

I was just going to add Atlas Shrugged myself. I'm a conservative but I find it hokey.
As for Dune spot on it's a long dull book.

 

[Joker99352]

I also thought of the Ender's Game series, especially Ender's Shadow which I thought was horrible. I may have read it at the wrong age, but I later found out that Orson Scott Card is a massive d-bag so it kind of ruins it for me. I know that his being a jerk doesn't automatically mean his books are bad, but I can't read them now without thinking about it.

 

[Spade]

Well I didn't see it written anywhere. Mockingjay, or the 3rd book in the Hunger Games series. But that series in general (along with Divergent) left me wanting a different kind of main character. I just couldn't connect with Katniss and had to sit the book down when she'd go run and hide to cry and freak out. She's one of my least favorite characters of that series and I think the book(s) don't hold up that well because I'm stuck in a first person point of view of someone that irritates me so very much. I have almost the exact same reason for despising Catcher in the Rye as well.

 

[MMMMatilde]

Twilight, hunger games, 50 shades of grey. I don't think I need to go into why.


Matilde.

 

[juliaintheclouds]

I see that I'm not alone on this one, Charles Dickens! I started a tale of two cities, I was bored to death. I started Bleak house (I think that was the title) and it was pretty bleak, I couldn't even force myself through it. I may try to read a tale of two cities again now that I'm older I may have a different perspective but I found him very long winded.

 

[jartist]

The Bible, anything by Ayn Rand, ditto Anne Rice, The Scarlet Letter, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, all the Dune sequels, the Little House on the Prairie books, 50 Shades of Gray, the Twilight series.....and that isn't even getting into the "literary classics" that were foisted onto me in college. Some of it is just being impatient with the literary convention of the time, and sometimes the taken for granted racism, classism, and sexism of the time is just too annoying to get around and makes it impossible to get into the story. Oh, and I forgot the Sword of Shanarra series, where the author's poor writing habits just killed what could have been a pretty good story. Oddly, I actually enjoyed Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series, even though his habit of referring to eyes as "orbs." EVERY TIME he mentions them made me want to hunt him down and write the word "eyes" on his forehead in indelible marker.

 

[xTinx]

I'm surprised no one ever mentioned about Fifty Shades of Grey. The book received a lot of hype lately and there's even a movie to be released this Valentine's Day. Honestly, as someone fond of literature, I find the book's plot and prose utterly bland. No offense to the author but if not for the raunchy parts, no one would have heard of that book.

 

[magnus2022]

Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. I hate wasting my time reading that book. A total waste of time and energy. Nonsensical suspense!