Books You Hate

For yet another week, I'm drawing a blank as to what I want to discuss. Luckily, I had another post saved - Megan at Read It, See It wrote about books she was embarrassed to have hated.

I don't get embarrassed about disliking a book. Some books are just meant to be hated. Not by everyone, but by me. We all have our personal preferences and we all have the the right to absolutely despise certain books because of these opinions.

These books aren't necessarily bad. In fact, they're usually well-liked, or at least well-respected, by most people. They could very well be your absolute favorite books. Still, I would give anything to get back the hours I wasted reading there torturous books.

18. Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
What can I say? Through the Looking Glass was pure gibberish disguised as classic literature.

17. Death Qualified by Kate Wilhelm
What was this book about? Damned if I know. I read it. It was some sort of legal/sci-fi mashup of sorts. I can't even begin to explain what was going on, so needless to say - I didn't "get" it.

16. The 13th Warrior by Michael Crichton (aka Eaters of the Dead)
I have a strong love/hate relationship with Crichton books. His works are so varied that it was inevitable that I would strongly dislike some. This one, with a Muslim man joining the Vikings on a mission of some kind, was not my thing at all.

15. The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton
Another huge Crichton miss for me. Historical fiction about - big surprise - a train robbery. I actually thought I might enjoy this one, but it was one of the more boring contemporary books I've ever read.

14. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
I loved the first Vonnegut book I read (Galapagos). Ever since, none of his books have spoken to me strongly. Mother Night was by far the worst, taking Nazis and World War II and telling a story in his quirky way. Vonnegut's style can work well in books that have a subject I'm interested in. When I'm not, his voice is one of the most grating I've experienced.

13. Everybody into the Pool by Beth Lisick
Non-fiction is hit or miss for me. I usually choose to just avoid it all together. Lisick's book sounded like a fun bunch of wacky true stories, but managed to only make me wonder why she didn't get her act together rather than write a book about it. Not one thing in this book was the least bit funny.

12. Mirror Mirror by Gregory Maguire
I've enjoyed a few of Maguire's fairy tale re-tellings, so I had pretty decent expectations of Mirror Mirror. It was almost completely unrecognizable as a re-telling of Snow White and managed to make a good fairy tale unbelievably dull.

11. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Checkov
The first on the list of required reading. I had to read this for some college class that I don't even remember. The in the play names were all long and similar. Nothing actually happened that I could call a plot.

10. The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer
I read this because I knew Stephen King was behind it. Even my love for him couldn't save this book. It was a haunted house story (which I almost always hate) told as a supposed true story. I tried to like it, but it failed as either fiction or non-fiction.

9. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking Glass was classic gibberish, but Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is somehow over-the-top beloved classic gibberish. Having known the story going in, I thought I was prepared for how messed up it was going to be, but there was no way I could have truly prepared myself for whatever the hell this was.

8. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
How could anyone care about Pip? He was so bland. So what if he got the girl or not? Did it really matter who his mystery benefactor was? It just kept on going on and on and on.

7. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
My very first Dickens. I'm surprised I ever gave him another chance. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" it began, and then pummeled me with another of my personal bore me to tears topics (the French Revolution this time) providing to some of the very worst reading times of my life.

6. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert Humbert is a wannabe pedophile (he's fallen in love with a twelve-year-old girl) and he tells us all about it. It's okay though, because Dolores, that little Lolita, is just asking for it. It's truly her fault. Are you freaking kidding me? This is a classic? This is considered good literature because of it's symbolism and metaphors, but really? Just eww.

5. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Fanny Price has to be the most dreadful Jane Austen character ever. She's just such a doormat. I was unable to care about her and the end was both predictable and very awkward.

4. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo
The Hunchback of Norte-Dame was less a novel and more a Parisian tour book. The description was so heavy that multiple chapters would go by with nothing relating to the story mentioned whatsoever.

3. Beowulf
Another required reading title, this time from high school. It was an epic poem about, um, something? Yeah. I don't remember, but to be honest, I didn't know back then either. And I had a teacher holding my hand, explaining every word to me. I'm not a fan of poetry, but I don't let it scare me away from a book. I should have this time. Beowulf was definitely no Dante's Inferno.

2. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
I've read my share of erotica as well as books that are nothing short of in-your-face vulgar. My dislike of Lady Chatterley's Lover has nothing to do with the the sexual content. The real problem is Lawrence tried to make the book deep. Instead of just writing a book about an extramarital affair, he wrote in a flowery way that was constantly trying to point at the inner meaning behind each action. While that might appeal to some, it was an unbelievably huge turnoff for me and has kept me from even thinking about picking up another of his books.

1. The Sonnets by William Shakespeare
I love Shakespeare. While everyone struggled in high school to decipher what he was trying to say, I was picking up some easy extra credit writing papers about the plays. Shakespeare was my chosen literature elective in college and The Sonnets almost caused me to tank the class. Why, oh why, did he need to write some god-awful, ridiculous poetry? And for what reason do people actually believe that The Sonnets match the literary merit of his plays?

Did you have the same reaction to any of the books on my list? A very different reaction? What are some of the books that you've read that you wish you had skipped?