Books you regret reading

[Muspelheim]

Like many else, it seems, I didn't like Catcher in the Rye. I can understand why it was a bit of a watershed when it came out and that it has a place in literary history, but... No, I'm just not a part of that same era, I can't "Feel" the book. I just found it flat and stale. Still, was worth having a look, I suppose...

And while I don't regret reading it... Christ, A Clockwork Orange... Dear. Oh, dear me... I wasn't right for days after reading that. It's just so... Cruel, almost to a pointless degree. It makes me feel like a monster just to have taken part in it by reading that story.
Furthermore... Alex sucks. He ought to have been taken out the courtyard and killed by neckshot. And what's worse is, there's thousands of him. What on earth happened to Alternative Nadsativerse London?!
Also, I'm now the sworn arch-enemy to any and all Alex-apologists. Kubrick did the right thing when he did a self-imposed ban on the film version in Britain after he learned some wastes of air tried to emulate it. Oh, dear, oh dear... I can't really stomack to look at it.

Another odd book I sort of regret reading was a strange sort of memoir work I found in my bookshelf from... Lord knows where.

It's "I Fält" (In the Field) by a certain Gilbert Hamilton, some sort of noble fancypants person who join a German cavallry corps during the first world war. Now, I thought I'd find it fascinating to see his perspective, but... Gilbert is such a self-righteous, pompous wanker that I get irritated half a page in. It's all "Ahrr, nobility is awesome, Germany is great, Poles are poor and dumb and Bolsheviks are all satan. If only the conscripts would stop dying in their ratholes so I got a chance to ride down some Russians on my steed!", which only gets worse when he start complaining about his lodgings and lack of supplies when you know full well that the conscripts less than a kilometer away have it much, much worse.

He's the sort of person who got the Great War started in the first place, and it's a bit difficult from a 21'st century perspective to not want to put a fist up his gob. Well, at least there's many interesting pictures.

The Necronomicon by Abdul Alhazred. It changed my life, forever. And killed all my family, and turned me into a mass-murdering monster. I cannot unsee the horrors in that book. They are burned into my mind, and into my blood and DNA.

I know what you feel... It took me a long, long time to put my experience with the Devil's Bible behind me... I knew I shouldn't have done it, I knew I shouldn't have pried... But what can you do? The urge to turn page after page is... Irresistable.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Devil_codex_Gigas.jpg

It... It should have remained hidden away in Prague... How many more will It claim?

When will the wound heal?

 

[Psykoma]

The only one I can think of was for school.
Don Quixote.
No-one agrees with me, I thought it was just too dumb.

 

[iLazy]

Twilight...

Really wish I wasn't such an impressionable youth. I was convinced that it was good.

I was wrong... so very, very wrong. Oh well, what's in the past is in the past.

 

[Reiper]

the hunger games series

the first book was OK, 2 and 3 were god awful. She honestly could not capture the scale of feel of war at all

 

[piinyouri]

Any of the Drizzt books beyond the first three.

I was already in the story so I pushed forward, but it never really recovered.

 

[renegade7]

Everything I had to read in high school. Let's see...

The Catcher in the Rye. A story about what seems to be a 16 year old pedophile's break from reality. I understand why that one guy went nuts and killed John Lennon after reading this shit. It was REALLY terrible.

Things Fall Apart. A "Tragic" and "Moving" story about the European occupation of Africa in the 1800s. Sucked.

And Frederick Douglass's autobiography ( I forget the exact title ). Don't get me wrong, slavery was horrible but this was just dull.

We translated Commentarii de Bello Gallico in third year Latin (over the course of the year). If it weren't for all the nights and weekends I spent keeping up to date on my translation, I actually might have found that interesting.

And the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. All 6 volumes. Look, it's nice being able to look and act like a smug intellectual, but just stay away unless you absolutely have nothing better to do with about 3 weeks of your life.

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

God of Clocks by Alan Campbell, the last book in the Scar Night series, what a massive pile of garbage. That whole series went to shit after the first book.
I also regret reading all of the Dragon Age books because each one somehow managed to top the last one in how bad it was.

 

[Riddle78]

I'm assuming that Twilight is off the list by default,correct? DAMN,thet book sucked. Personally,I regret reading any book that I dislike. Twilight because it looked like it was written by a ninth grader in Locally Developed English. I also regretted reading The Great Gatsby. So dry. So banal. So PREDICTABLE.

 

[Krion_Vark]

Only book I have ever had to force myself to finish is Shadowmancer. Its also the only book that I did not like reading in the least bit.

 

[BrotherSurplice]

I can't say I've enjoyed Lord of the Flies. Can't exactly remember what it was that I disliked about it considering I haven't read it since my sophomore year in High School. All I remember was that I just didn't like it.

I'm in agreement with you there pal. We (my class) had to read it for our English Literature GCSE and . . . I just didn't feel it. I get that its supposed to be about humanities' inherent inhumanity, but to me all of the psychotic shit that the hunters do just seems to come out of bloody nowhere. Also, I would have never ever spotted any of the little references and allegories to WW2 and such if our teacher hadn't pointed them out to us.

It was a couple of years ago mind you, and I only read through it once, so take from that what you will.

 

[YuriRuler90]

Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan

They took the lore, squiggled around with it, and then fucked up one of the most awesome characters in the Star Wars universe so that they could make a tie in for the shittiest MMO in history.

Yeah, I mad.

 

[dancinginfernal]

I regret starting the Horus Heresy W40k series because I enjoyed the first two so much I have to buy the other 16 or so that are on the market presently.

That's probably around $100 down the drain. Fucking Warhammer, stop being entertaining.

 

[MrBenSampson]

"The Cellar," by Richard Laymon. It started off as a cool story about a house with a killer monster in it, but it featured a lot of sex scenes involving the creature and various women. Another two scenes involved an ex con raping a little girl... Why the hell did I read the whole thing????

 

[Saulkar]

The only alien on the planet.
I really, really did not like that one. From the description on the back to the first few chapters gave an incorrect impression of the content of the book which left me very bitter because it implied something far better than it really was. (at least the edition I read)

 

[brinvixen]

Haven't regretted reading many books actually. There's a lot of books I've actively disliked as I was reading it, but at the same time, I love to read. Just the action of my eyes rolling over words and comprehending characters and plots and imagery (whether they be good or bad) relaxes me. So my love for reading usually trumps my disappointment for poorly crafted works.

Also, sometimes a terrible read is a good weapon to have in your arsenal when discussion about books does come up. For example, when I say I hate Twilight, it's not because it's overly hyped, or because the movies are terrible, or because it's everywhere ... it's because I read the books and actively disliked the main character through the entire series (along with a host of other things).

That being said, I might vote Angels and Demons as a regret. Only because Dan Brown has one formula and uses the same twist in every single one of his books, and I had read three of his other before I came upon Angels and Demons. So it was more like I felt foolish for reading it, when I knew EXACTLY how it was going to end (and good ole Dan Brown did not disappoint ... *sigh*)

 

[Shoggoth2588]

The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I loved The Hobbit but I hated the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Fellowship was promising and I liked how it set things up well enough. Two Towers though completely lost me and my interest. I tried to get through that thing three or four times before I finally made it through that bastard. Return of the King just wasn't satisfying after Two Towers. I remember wanting to wait until I'd read the books before I watched the movies but since Two Towers was already on DVD before I was even half-way through that book I figured it wasn't going to happen. I made it through the film adaptation of Fellowship but, like the book, Two Towers put me to sleep. I figure if I didn't try to read the books, I wouldn't have gone into the films with the bias I had been carrying and, may have even watched Return of the King.

Couldn't stand that freaking trilogy...

 

[Paradoxrifts]

Book one of the Anita Blake series.

In it's own trashy endearing way Guilty Pleasures was a real guilty pleasure for me. And yet if it had just been a simply a shitty book then I would've been spared the horror of series's slow descent into Mary-Sue furry necrophilia BDSM fetishism.

 

[Cabo Setek]

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.

Everything about the book just bored me to tears. The boring characters, the almost nonexistent plot, the dry writing. . . gah! Just thinking about it makes me want to create a time machine for the sole purpose of making sure Hemingway never writes it, it never gets approved by the school board as mandatory summer reading, and I never have to read it.