Books you regret reading

[Terratina.]

Snip

I was told that constantly by my English Lit teacher. Too bad there wasn't a showing when I studied it or the school would take my class there on a trip. For the reason I dislike it, I'll point you to a good saying:

"Familiarity breeds contempt"

I agree it has its moments though. Too bad Priestly ended up using The Inspector as a bit of an Author Avatar. though.

 

[Jack Nief]

The Baldur's Gate Trilogy. Yeah. Apparently its totally OK to have an unlikeable protagonist, change characters' appearance and personality, and have them be either a sex object (Jaheira, what the hell) or another notch for the bodycount, completely omit other, more interesting characters, and with the exception of the protagonist, murder them all, violently.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, they say the book's events are the canon ones.

Fuck those books.

 

[370999]

The Da Vinci Code. Just really bad writing. I felt a little bit more stupid after finishing it.

Why even read it in the first place though? Why?

I think it's hard for me to pick a book I actively regret reading. There are plenty I didn't enjoy but I usually stop when I don't enjoy them.

I will say though some of the History books about Operation Barbarossa have been a hard read. To see such barbarism erupt out does make you quietly shudder and ask, "How could so much pain of happened?".

 

[Esotera]

The Wasp Factory, it's a brilliant book but just made me feel sick inside and I couldn't sleep for the entire night.

As for books I regret reading, probably 'The Fighting Pit'. It only cost me 50p, but yeah, it wasn't nearly awesome as the blurb made it look...

Spoiler

 

[Shodan1980]

Dan Simmons "Hyperion" Read it off the back of his "Ilium" and "Olympos" which weren't great but good enough to want to read more of his work and "Hyperion" was just boring. A pointless story that was interesting enough to read at the time but afterwards just left me completely cold. Not bad books but just.....I'd just rather in retrospect spent the time re-reading something better like anything by Peter F Hamilton.

Also "Tides of Darkness" by Aaron Rosenberg may be the worst piece of excrement ever printed to paper. Its a Warcraft book so I wasn't exactly expecting much but even then I felt like I needed to bleach my brain afterwards. Blizzard's installation screen story texts are better written.

 

[Shadowhawk77]

The Steven King/Peter Straub Black House...it ruined The Talisman for me in the first like 10 pages...something about how the greatest adventure in his life that gave him the power to teleport between worlds being forgotten made me throw the book away instantly

 

[Alssadar]

As a person who finds literature interesting and reads the books, the only book I regret trying to read was Cold Mountain. One hundred pages in and nothing happened--I only chose it because it involved the Civil War, so I thought it might actually have some action/STUFF THAT HAPPENS.
But, I've also found some books rather annoying to read, particularly The Jungle (The later half) and Turn of the Screw, because 18th century "proper woman" perspective is boring when I normally talk to my friends about Batman instead of AP English.

In retrospect, I definitely should have chosen The Road. I mean, the movie of it starred freaking Aragorn.

 

[Something Amyss]

Twilight and Eragon. Both boring books with pacing problems, although I let the latter fly because the author was 17 at the time.

Good God, when I first read Eragon, my first thought was "EDIT!" I know he was 17, but surely this book was read by someone before publication.

I couldn't get through the sample of Twilight on my Kindle.

Let's see...

The Great Gatsby. Forced reading, one of only two books I never finished in school.
Book one of the Hungering Saga. It's sort of like Eragon in the sense that it's boring and poorly paced.
Catcher in the Rye. I tend to like the classics, but I HATED Holden.
Left Behind.

I think I blocked out several.

 

[Adapth]

The Anita Blake series. All 20 books.

Spoiler

These books just tear me up, because there was so much I liked about them. The writing was never great, but they fulfilled several deep seated needs. First, I'd been looking for a good book about necromancy. It seems like everything in the fantasy genre leans towards a very sanitized version, talking to ghosts and laying the dead to rest, etc. I wanted the gory version, blood sacrifices and flesh eating zombies and all. The books never go all the way, but we get the occasional human sacrifice.

Second, I think they are the only books with a female protagonist that I own. Laurell K. Hamilton once said: "The men got to cuss, the women rarely; the men got to kill people and not feel bad about it, if the women killed someone they had to feel really, really bad about it afterward and it had to be an extreme situation; the men got to have sex, often and on stage and very casually, but if the women had sex it had to be offstage, very sanitized. I thought this was unfair." And, at first, she succeeded in writing a strong female character.

Unfortunately the series promptly went to shit.

Most people point a finger at all the sex in the latter books. That actually isn't my problem. If Anita had a flavor of the book, like say James Bond, I'd be fine. The problem is, in a subversion of trying not to write an overly feminine character, Anita has to have actual relationships with all these men, at once. So now instead of reading a detective/adventure story with a few romance scenes, I'm slogging through a book that is 1/4 plot, 1/4 boring erotica, and 1/2 Anita dealing with her relationship woes.

Besides that I don't actually like any of the men she'd involved with. These books went wrong the second she didn't kill Jean Claude for messing with her head in the first book. Add to that the "sex or die" plot device, acceptable in only in bad fanfiction, and the increasingly silly power upgrades, and I want the time I spent reading these books back.

Apparently I'm a bit bitter.

TL;DR It's a trap!

 

[SuperSuperSuperGuy]

I would like to second (third?) Catcher, with the same reasons. I also hated it because Holden tended to gloss over things that may be seen as rather important. Did you know that he was sexually molested by other guys before? Neither did I. It's brought up all of once, VERY VAGUELY, and then completely pushed aside for something else. Characters are introduced with little closure for them and the story, as a whole, is tragically quaint; it's that stupid teenage angst thing that's been done over and over again. It's like "oh, ANOTHER one of these? [sarcasm]I wonder how this one will turn out.[/sarcasm]" Maybe it's because I don't get it, like people tell the OP, but if people don't get your book when they read it, you have done something wrong.

Also, The Book of Negroes is one of the worst books that I have ever read. The characters are ridiculously unrelatable. The worst part is that it's hilariously dated; perhaps I could relate if I lived in slave-era America, but I am living in contemporary Canada and little to none of the things that happen in the book happen here. And it's a recent novel. How a recent novel could be dated, I would not have known if not for this book. It was an ordeal to read for English class, even more than Catcher.

 

[Chalacachaca]

"The Secret", because my mother told me to read it and I didn't have anything else to read while taking a shit.
Since it was plain unrealistic, I decided to stopped reading it, and now I'm reading "Did someone stepped on the duck?" which suits better.

 

[peruvianskys]

I would like to second (third?) Catcher, with the same reasons. I also hated it because Holden tended to gloss over things that may be seen as rather important. Did you know that he was sexually molested by other guys before? Neither did I. It's brought up all of once, VERY VAGUELY, and then completely pushed aside for something else. Characters are introduced with little closure for them and the story, as a whole, is tragically quaint; it's that stupid teenage angst thing that's been done over and over again. It's like "oh, ANOTHER one of these? [sarcasm]I wonder how this one will turn out.[/sarcasm]" Maybe it's because I don't get it, like people tell the OP, but if people don't get your book when they read it, you have done something wrong.

The important thing to remember is that Catcher in the Rye was the first book to really focus on a teenager's view of the world - there wasn't "ANOTHER one of these" when it first came out. That's partially why it's so famous; it was the first book to ever really treat a teenage boy as a real character instead of a stock plot piece or stereotype.

Secondly, I love the book because[i/] Holden glosses over things like that; he's biased and jumbled and real instead of being the usual first-person narrator that speaks and acts in ways no human being ever really would when relating a story. Characters pop in and out and events get glossed over and warped because that's what teenagers do. As a look into a teenager's mind, it's one of the best character studies I've ever read. You're right that it is dated, but for the 1950's it wasn't, and if you keep that in mind, it's a great read.

 

[Sticky Squid]

The hunger games.
With the way everybody was talking about it I thought it would be at least great but I found it ridiculously dull.

 

[Total LOLige]

The Wasp Factory, it's a brilliant book but just made me feel sick inside and I couldn't sleep for the entire night.

As for books I regret reading, probably 'The Fighting Pit'. It only cost me 50p, but yeah, it wasn't nearly awesome as the blurb made it look...

Spoiler

That blurb made me laugh, sounds like something I'd have written when I was a small boy.

OT: I don't read enough to have books that I regret reading. I'll try and read more I promise.

EDIT: Recommendations welcome. No erotica.

 

[Griffolion]

I enjoy all the books I read. Maybe I'm doing it wrong or something.

 

[Harkonnen64]

The worst one I've ever finished, however, is "Catcher in the Rye". I keep hearing a lot of people telling me that I "just don't get it". I get it, all right. It's about a whiny kid being a whiny kid, while telling the world he is the only one who has it right, even when he doesn't. I have never disliked a main character as much as Holden Caulfield. The real phony is the author acting like they are being deep.

I think that may have been the point. Holden is a depressed, disgruntled youth. He's whiny, narcissistic, think's he's deep and intelligent, curses excessively and believes the world is out to get him. In other words, he's a teenager, and to that effect I believe it's one of the most accurate portrayals of an angry teenager in media. Now whether that's enough to hold it up as a book is another issue (and it seems many people don't think it does.)

 

[Simonoly]

The Da Vinci Code. A tortuous read. Gave up around half way. No point finishing a book that makes me want to drown a cat.

 

[Zeckt]

I read the first 4 books of the Wheel of time series after being suggested to it by someone who likes them. I can't believe I got that far, suddenly expecting it to get interesting. It was probably the most boring accomplishment in all my life, its just pages and pages of throwaway characters you don't care about bickering about stupid crap.

 

[Flutterbrave]

Silas Marner

Another case of a book being forced on an unwilling student, not helped by the fact that the book was shit. It was less a novel, more the condensed diary of an old man.

Life of Pi, now that was a mind-blowing book

 

[VoidWanderer]

The Hunger Games...

First flag of warning: Stephanie Meyers recommendation taking nearly as much space as the title on the book cover.

Second flag: Once the characters go to get ready in the Capital City place.

Third Flag: The bizarre 180 the main character took after the event.

I just sat and stared at the back cover and wonder

'WTF did I just read?' followed by 'Twilight might be worse than this!?'