Least Favorite Novels

[SirThomasMaloryII]

To Kill a Mockingbird (I don't read a lot btw). I had to read this in school and it was fucking boring. The only entertaining part was the white woman accusing the black guy of rape and the part where the black guy got shot up near a fence.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a WAY better race-related-issues book than this boring piece of shit. Sure, it aged pretty poorly, but the message of "actually, black people DO have feelings" is done in a more entertaining way than in To Kill a Mockingbird.

 

[Neverender]

Iron Council, by China Meiville. Some faggot and his hangers-on go in search of a communist train collective to overthrow the fash. The only reason Perdido Street Station was any good was because it was an adventure story first.

 

[ShahOfIran1979]

I read a book called "Ender's Game" when I was young and for some reason, I absolutely despised it. The pacing was terrible, much of the plot was contrived and pointless, and the ending sucked for me. I liked the weird subplot of the protagonist's siblings taking over the US through a proto-Reddit, even though the book was from the 80s.

I haven't read many fiction books since I went to school, so I have practically missed most big fiction books of the last couple decades.

 

[Positron]

L'etranger (The Stranger) by Albert Camus. Psychopath murdered someone because "the sun got in his eyes", and we are supposed to sympathize with, perhaps even applaud, him because he unloads his nihilist bullshit on the prison chaplain?

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

If it's actually just least favorite novel, then those old Star Wars novels, which are merely commercial pulp for stupid preteen readers (like me).

I have a copy of Splinter of the Mind's Eye sitting around, the second Star Wars novel ever if including the novelization of the original film by the same author:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinter_of_the_Mind%27s_Eye

Splinter of the Mind's Eye is a 1978 science fiction novel by American writer Alan Dean Foster, a sequel to the film Star Wars (1977). Originally published in 1978 by Del Rey, a division of Ballantine Books, the book was written with the intention of being adapted as a low-budget sequel to Star Wars in case the original film was not successful enough to finance a high-budget sequel.

Splinter of the Mind's Eye was the first Star Wars novel with an original storyline published after the release of the original film, and is thus considered, alongside the Star Wars newspaper comic strip and Marvel's 1977 comic series, to mark the beginning of the Star Wars Expanded Universe.

I liked the weird subplot of the protagonist's siblings taking over the US through a proto-Reddit, even though the book was from the 80s.

They posted pseudonymous screeds online and gained political power. If some random pseudonymous Redditor or somebody like Catturd becomes World Dictator, that subplot will have been totally vindicated. Pseudonymous online accounts have gained a lot more influence in the past decade, but there's a long way to go and few original thoughts anymore. Maybe an AI artilect will pull it off.

 

[Gravekeeper's Vassal]

Room by Emma Donoghue

I liked the premise, but anything that could've been interesting was sanitized away and all that it ended up being was a 5 year olds retarded babble for hundreds of pages.

 

[fist_of_khonshu]

Frankenstein, it was oppressively boring; Gothic literature drones on for too long about insignificant things and this is one of those books people praise for the THEMEs but not the execution. It was somehow both verbose and vague, and I've given up on reading it twice out of tedium.

This is the mentality I have with Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde even though i do kinda like the story of Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde. What ruins it for me is that I already know the twist and the mystery (the entire appeal of the book) is ruined so I cannot properly enjoy it as intended. It's one of those books where the material is referenced so much, and so incorrectly, in media that I just couldn't enjoy myself.

 

[holyhandgrenade]

I read a book called "Ender's Game" when I was young and for some reason, I absolutely despised it. The pacing was terrible, much of the plot was contrived and pointless, and the ending sucked for me. I liked the weird subplot of the protagonist's siblings taking over the US through a proto-Reddit, even though the book was from the 80s.

I haven't read many fiction books since I went to school, so I have practically missed most big fiction books of the last couple decades.

I know you're being a troll but Ender's game is great. So is the sequel Speaker for the Dead. Who wouldn't want to be a three thousand year old dude hanging out with portuguese pigs?

 

[Taser Confetti]

Stephen King's The Stand, it's honestly one of the dumbest and anti-climatic endings I've ever read.

 

[Super Mario Brothers]

Low hanging fruit, but since it wasn't mentioned yet: Twilight.

Basically the reason I read this start to finish was back in the late 2000's, the concept of having a vampire sparkle in the sunlight was hilarious to me (and it still is.) I thought I was in for a ride for a hilariously bad novel. But it wasn't. If there was one word to describe it, it would be: boring. The whole book is about obsessing over a mysterious vampire character who... isn't even that interesting, actually. He's a vampire and invincible and obsessed with the protagonist to the point where he stalks her and uh... I forget. Even the shirtless sparkle scene happens once and I don't think it's ever brought up again? Honestly every other character except for Bella and Edward are not even that interesting, not because they couldn't be but because every character is like a background drop to serve what is the really uninteresting relationship between Edward and Bella. (Yes, even Jacob). There is... like no real conflict in the story and that's the main issue. I never read any of the books after it and I don't think I'd want to.

Hating on it has been overdone for at least a decade, but I don't think I can hate this book enough for inadvertently starting Fifty Shades and the romantasy trend. Ironically, I think any other romantasy would have been more interesting because watching paint dry would have been more interesting anyway.

 

[Stephanides]

Stephen King's The Stand, it's honestly one of the dumbest and anti-climatic endings I've ever read.

The Shining was also kinda mid.

If I had to make some kind of autistic comparison, I would say that Grimes made better music while binging on amphetamines than King's coke-fueled writng. I'm saying this as someone who doesn't like her as a person too.

 

[Not Quite Retarded]

Here's one you probably haven't heard of. "My Life as a Teenage Indian"

Some backstory for why I had to read this shit. I was in summerschool one year since I failed one of my English classes in highschool due to not turning in assignments. The teacher had us read this in class, thankfully not at home.

It's about a kid who grows up on a Native American reservation and he goes to highschool somewhere OFF the reservation, and the story is in the first person perspective. I don't remember that much about it but I'll list some things.

-About halfway through his uncle (who I'm pretty sure isn't even mentioned up to this point,) is shot dead by a drunk guy, and the kid draws a fucking Diary of a Wimpy Kid style drawing of the scene.

-Same old trope of making friends with bullies you stand up to

-Something about a highschool dance

-The worst part, the kid goes on a multiple page tangent on how much he likes to look at magazines he finds and jerk off. I'm not kidding. Keep in mind we read this shit in class.

 

[Stephanides]

Here's one you probably haven't heard of. "My Life as a Teenage Indian"

I read a book similar to that in my sophomore year in high school. It was some Sword Art Online inspired YA novel about an Ojibwe girl living on the Rez and a Chinese kid who is a massive chud (that's how he was actually written, to act like a right-wing racist chud). My English teacher thought it would be a good idea to have my class read it and do projects on that shitty book entirely.

 

[Philly Phunk Machine]

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It's supposed to be like this big self-help and motivation guide but it reads like he's giving a therapy presentation in front of a crowd at the conference room in a Hilton. He frontloads the book with a bunch of thought exercises and insists that his method has helped countless people, trust me bro.

 

[AskNotForWhomthePozLoads]

On The Road - Keroac, truly, brain rottingly fucking awful.

I tried reading Kerouac's Subterraneans once. Biggest pile of dogshit ever printed, literally threw it in the trash 2 pages in.

 

[Hyper Vigilant Dumbass]

"Atlas Shrugged". I dropped it after the first chapter. In high school my English class had to read "The Great Gatsby" and I thought it was a slog of a read and most of the characters were just pieces of shit, but maybe that was the point. I'm not sure.

 

[Grand Duke Snowfall]

In high school my English class had to read "The Great Gatsby" and I thought it was a slog of a read and most of the characters were just pieces of shit, but maybe that was the point. I'm not sure.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that was the point, it’s been a while. I hear a lot of people say they hated The Great Gatsby, but honestly I didn’t mind it.

 

[MerriedxReldnahc]

I got about 100 pages into Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell before tapping out, I couldn't tell you a single thing that happened in that span of the book. I'll give a book a pretty lenient span of time to grab my attention, but if we're that far in and I'm still bored it's time to surrender.
I muscled through half of The Dragonbone Chair 's 600 pages before giving up, that probably would have been a much better book if the author wasn't such a wordy motherfucker.

Low hanging fruit, but since it wasn't mentioned yet: Twilight.

I read Twilight back in the early days of the craze because all my friends were reading it, I learned an important lesson about peer pressure that day!

 

[Dendyy]

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It's supposed to be like this big self-help and motivation guide but it reads like he's giving a therapy presentation in front of a crowd at the conference room in a Hilton. He frontloads the book with a bunch of thought exercises and insists that his method has helped countless people, trust me bro.

I knew an old dude who loved that book even though it clearly didn't help him. He died in massive debt.

 

[Turquoise]

100 years of solitude and it's not even close. No overarching story; just a collection of inconsequential mini-stories and 30 characters with the same name because post-modernism.

Other shit books:

Catcher in the Rye
Fear and Loathing in LV
Grapes of Wrath
To Live (Chinese "classic")
Murder on the Orient Ex