So I know this is a bit strange, but since I've seen 'What's your favorite book' threads, I thought, why not have the opposite? Anyway, do you have a book that you just absolutely hate?

For me, I can't STAND Lord of the Flies, I can't explain why, but the writing style and just the plot in general made me hate it so much I want to punch my monitor. I know it's a bit extreme, but eh.

I think this thread is going to be full of "I was forced to read X in high school and I HATED it"

Never read a book I hated :shrug:

If I don't like it, I don't read it.

Sure, but none that we could discuss on these forums.

My reply was going to be, "Yes, every book I was forced to read in HS"

But honestly, I never have understood why certain books are considered classics when so many people hate reading them.

Hah, most of what I read in HS I loved, the only book I hated was LotF. However, thanks to HS required reading, I fell in love with The Great Gatsby, Animal Farm and Shakespeare.

I think the reason so many people hate reading them is because they were forced to read them when in their "I AM INDEPENDENT AND MUST REBEL" teenage years and just hate it by association (Or just in general don't like reading). I don't know many people that hate all the classics. There are ones I never got into, but I don't hate any of them

No offense to anyone still in those years, we all are guilty of experiencing them

Moby dike

:cold:

Also, it didn't help that it was my teacher's favorite book. He had a tattoo of the Pequod and a 1st edition in a glass case at his house.

Amazing teacher.

Well see that's the thing, I wasn't a rebel in HS at all. I just couldn't stand that one person or a group of people got together and told me what I should be reading.

It's like forcing everyone to go see a Michael Bay movie or perhaps a Quintin Tarantino movie. Some people love those movie makers and others can't stand them. It doesn't have anything to do with being a rebel or not. It has everything to do with taste.

I can't think of a particular book that I hate with a passion, but The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova probably comes the closest.

I'm not a big fan of vampires to begin with, unless they're chiropteran monstrosities or other horrors, so I'll admit this book wasn't for me. But it was still awful. Some sections were supposedly hastily written letters . . . but in his haste the writer apparently had time for ponderous descriptions of various locals and plenty of extraneous details. It's one thing to disregard the "show it, don't tell it" line, but to show the opposite of what you're telling is just bad writing. I kept hoping that there'd be some twist and this wasn't a boring book about vampires and Dracula wanting a top notch librarian . . . but no. I didn't even get half way though, which is rare for me.

Jeff Long is a close second. I picked up Year Zero because I liked the introduction, and grabbed his earlier book Decent before going any further. Both were awful, and I'm actually surprised I finished either. Both books are just . . . well they're extremely gratuitous. So often it felt like things were going into lurid detail for no other reason than to go into lurid detail, with no real substance behind it.

If you are going to take a film appreciation class you're going to be "forced" to watch films too :shrug:

The point of "making" you read a bunch of books is to help you find books you like. While maybe it doesn't apply to you, a good many people wouldn't pick up a bunch of the classics if it wasn't mandatory reading (or any book for that matter...).

You also pretty much did do what I said, you didn't want to read those books because "the man" told you you had to.

Sums up what I was going to say.

I think you just summed up the reason I cant finish Atlas Shrugged. Good book from the parts I've read, but Ayn Rand describes EVERY.LITTLE.THING. It gets tedious after a while.

I don't really read anymore. Eragon is the only book I can recall that I didn't like enough to finish. I don't think I disliked any of my HS required reading either.

And also some books I can't mention.

What? I wasn't in a book appreciation class, it was English class and I was forced to read them or suffer down turn in my grades.

I'm all for helping people find books they like to read and helping them learn that reading can actually be quite fun. Forcing everyone to read the same book is ridiculous and lazy teaching and it's time that it ends.

My feelings about "the man" developed after numerous years of suffering through yet another horrible story or poorly written text all because some "the man" said I should. I tried numerous times and yes, I didn't hate them all. However, looking back I do believe that the vast majority of them could have been avoided without the slightest bit of impact on my advlt life.

Hmmm, i liked Lord of the Flies and other dystopian books for that matter. Favorite one is A Brave New World

As for the book I've hated the most and one that I've read was Catcher and the Rye. Even though I understood the anology of who the main character was, I just didn't like his hallucinations throughout the book. And I didn't care who or what Phoebe was.

The Oddyssey I've read epic poetry for fun. I've enjoyed it. I don't have a problem with the format. What I have a problem with, is Homer's horrible writing style, and the flatness of the characters. There were precisely two sections that I enjoyed reading: The Spartan King's recollection of his wrestling match with Proteus (because, I realized, that meant he could out-wrestle a man who could become fire) and the slaughter of the suitors (because, I realized, Odysseus strips naked when he assumes his natural form, and then never puts any new clothes on, so the entire time, he must just be awkwardly naked)

All of the Holocaust books I had to read earned my ire. It's remarkable that we've managed to take the stunning, inconceivable atrocity of the Holocaust, and transform it into a dull cliched genre of literature that we force on young children who can't even comprehend what tragedy is.

The Book of the 1001 Nights I both love and hate. I love it, because it's crazy, historically significant (contains the oldest murder-mystery!) and has some awesome language ("thus spake the tongue of the situation"). I hate it, because its long, padded, and repeats itself.

I went to a high school with an art focus for one year, and I was in the creative writing department. The teacher was a poet, and for those of us interested in prose all she ever wanted were descriptions. Plot? Characters? Dialogue? None of these really concerned her. The few students she liked who did prose were basically just writing ponderous, meaningless, paragraphs describing scenery.

When the year was over I went to a one-week writing conference with Madison Smartt Bell and Chris Offutt, and both commented on the importance of keeping descriptions brief and to the point - it was like a breath of fresh air. Offutt actually talked at length about how distracting it could be to describe a scene when the reader should be focusing on something else, like dialogue, and it's not like his stories didn't come to life when he read them.


It never did anything for me either. I've had a few people tell me I should re-read it, but I thought the point was it was a meaningful book for students to read.

Caulfield would say, "that's phony" and I'd go, "yep, so?"

I did like that Caulfield didn't realize his potential and ability, and I think that was well handled (and included subtly enough that it didn't feel preachy). But overall it bored me.

the classics show a lot of literary usages not found in other books as well as in general having many of the key points an English teacher may want to teach, it makes perfect sense to use them as a teaching instrument :shrug:

You also can't really effectively teach and grade everyone when everyone is reading different books :shrug: Yeah, it would be great if you had more choice in what you were to read, but the public school system just wouldn't work in such a way.

It was also labeled as a banned book for a time and I never understood why. Caulfield just says sonuva[female dog] liberally throughout the novel.

I have to agree with not liking all the Holocaust books. I can't say I approve of one of the worst crimes against humanity being used as a plot device.

I don't hate the books I was forced to read in High School.. I hate the ones I am forced to read in College! I am paying to learn landscaping, so why the hell I am I being forced to learn ART HISTORY? (Its extracurricular) Which I took 4 times in highschool as part of Art Class. I also hate my English book, full of stupid novellas such as "The Awakening."

One book I hate that isn't school related is Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile. The first book, Day by Day Armageddon is good.. but Beyond Exile :banghead:

I think the most hated literary work I've ever had to read was not a book, per say, but a short story. Think it was called Coming of Age, or some other banol nonsense. Don't remember who the author was, don't care. It was about some young boy who looks up to his older brother, a soldier who has recently gone to Vietnam coming to terms with the fact that said brother has died. It's one thing to plod through a story that is absolutely boring. It's another when you find the material downright insulting. For page, after page, after page, the prose drones on with this kid being too [censored] stupid to realize what the [censored] "missing in action" entails, and what the [censored] death really is. Yes, I said [censored] three times, my hatred for this story runs that deep. The author really didn't seem to understand children at all, or if he did and was just putting us into the head of a particularly slow one, then reading it was just as frustrating an experience as actually dealing with such a person.


To be fair, the writing style's not necessarily Homer's fault, but the translator's. Poetry never survives the translation process. And hell, it's likely not even meant to be a story that you read, but one that you hear recited.


Heh, that, or an easy way for a filmmaker to win an Oscar. And I kinda' have a similar opinion on the Civil Rights Movement, and the prejudice blacks have faced throughout American history. Had to go through a number of books on that subject. After reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, I finally snapped, and carved Maya Angelou's name on a chainsaw.


Regardless of how important reading classics are, people don't need to like them.

Agreed, if it's a fiction book and set in WWII Nazi Germany or a Concentration Camp I pretty much sigh, close the book and never read it again, and you know why? Because 9/10 tthat book will be about the cliche struggle of men seeking freedom from a cruel and oppressive power. Yes, it's a touching theme, but it's so generic and over done in film and literature that you can clearly see who's good and bad. In truth it's bunk because in reality a freedom fighter isnt some white knight against evil. I can safely bet you that most of the time a freedom fighter or whatever is a shades of grey pragmatist that puts aside their morales for five minutes if it furthers their agenda.

Henry Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods