Least Favorite Novels

[2mm and 99 others]

Ayn Rand - Fountainhead (I like the idea that art and architecture should speak clearly for themselves, but I don't fucking care about your fucked up dating schemes and rape fantasies, FFS). Apart from that, everything about her writing is extremely autistically serious, with no sense of humor, sarcasm and hyperbole. Her lolbertarian fandom is a perfect reflection of that.

100 years of solitude, for the reason said right above me. Did not finish, but it left foul taste in my mouth and I feel unclean just by thinking about it.

China Miéville - City & the City - After the Perdido Street Station, man had decided to write the most boring book ever. Iron Council was disappointing, too political and less engaging than I was expecting, but this is an another level of boredom. Say ''breaching'' once more....

Clifford Simak - The City. Man was so awkward he couldn't come up with a single female character. He had imagined a distant future of Earth and mankind, and wrote a book about that, but couldn't even imagine a female animal, female-like android, let alone a girl or a woman, save for a passing remark about a nagging wife. Maybe that was for better, after all, but what a fucking nerd. Lol. If anyone thinks I am too DEI for saying that, imagine a book that has only women in it, and sure anyone would ask, why there seem to be no men, with no explanation.

 

[Squanto Airi]

Life of Pi. Your parents are fucking dead, along with an entire ship and her crew and you decide to lead the investigators on a false story about you surviving with animals? What a smug piece of shit. Say that in front of the families of all those crew members, ya prick!

Sounds in line with what a Jeet would do though.

TAX:
Non-classic book - there was this YA novel I read back in high school about this high schooler who had terminal cancer, which was discussed in the first chapter. The rest of the book read like a Redditor's wet dream, where he gets onto the high school football team, catches the winning touchdown against their rival, gets his crush to be his gf, has sex with said gf, "owns" the neocon history teacher, has his gf "own" the neocon history teacher, and names a street in his lily white town after Malcolm X.

Classic Book - Lord of the Flies. I had to read it twice in high school and college, and found it retarded. Oh, some kids get stranded on an island with no supervision? Let's just have them mentally deteriorate and become schizo rather quickly.

 

[Van Darkholme]

Man in the High Castle was an absolute slog to read through, feels twice as long as it actually is.

 

[SpumbleSplabloo]

Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. I get that it's supposed to be some examination of tragedy and Victorian class divide, but so much tragedy happens to Tess that it ended up leaving me apathetic and incredibly bored. I had a high school English teacher that loved the book and I still don't understand why.

 

[Dendyy]

American Gods fucking sucked and Neil Gaiman is a hack.

 

[Not Quite Retarded]

Sounds in line with what a Jeet would do though.

TAX:
Non-classic book - there was this YA novel I read back in high school about this high schooler who had terminal cancer, which was discussed in the first chapter. The rest of the book read like a Redditor's wet dream, where he gets onto the high school football team, catches the winning touchdown against their rival, gets his crush to be his gf, has sex with said gf, "owns" the neocon history teacher, has his gf "own" the neocon history teacher, and names a street in his lily white town after Malcolm X.

Classic Book - Lord of the Flies. I had to read it twice in high school and college, and found it retarded. Oh, some kids get stranded on an island with no supervision? Let's just have them mentally deteriorate and become schizo rather quickly.

The author of Lord of the Flies wrote it in response to a story with a similar premise except all the kids work together and survive. If Lord of the Flies was to be realistic at least 90 percent of the kids would've died instead of just the 3 that are mentioned.

 

[raspberry mocha]

Wuthering Heights. I don't get it or the fascination people have for its femcel author. The other sisters were better writers.

 

[McMitch]

Wuthering Heights. I don't get it or the fascination people have for its femcel author. The other sisters were better writers.

I always get this one confused with Finnegan’s Wake, a novel that is so far up it’s own ass in esoteric references to be nigh unreadable. When your concept gets mogged by House of Leaves (a book I enjoyed the one time I read it, which is how many read-throughs it warrants) then you wrote a less-than-mid book.

 

[Blissed]

Here are the big ones I despise:

The Ice Storm by Rick Moody - Boomer, middle-class, "Dark Side of the American Dream"-malaise trash. I think the only reason it got mildly popular was because a swinger party with average people was the core premise. And there's a weird underage sex scene for some fucking reason. I deeply regret reading this abomination.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck - This was a massive slog and by the end of it I wanted to blow my brains out. I get it, it just wasn't anywhere near worth it.

Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger - I loved this book as a late teenager and I reread it close to 20 years later and now I realize what a retarded little shit I was to have liked it. Holden is just an asshole who needed to get beat by his father once or twice. He grew up and is now the reason society sucks.

I couldn't get through House of Leaves. I know people swear by it but early on I just thought "I understand the concept, I'm just not really willing to do this," and put it down and never went back.

Great Gatsby, everyone just kind of sucks.

There's been others, but honestly, it's books where I should have known better or looking at a photo of the author would have accurately told me to stay away.

 

[2mm and 99 others]

I couldn't get through House of Leaves. I know people swear by it but early on I just thought "I understand the concept, I'm just not really willing to do this," and put it down and never went back.

Ah yes, that one. My reading experience was likely corrupt as it was a pirated e-book as physical copies are unavailable here, but maybe the visual dimension not being there helps to see the novel as is, in its pure form.
And I am not interested in lengthy descriptions of some repulsive guy's promiscuous sex life. I am there for the super mysterious house. It was like a frustrating fever dream that doesn't get to the core. (Did not finish)

Man in the High Castle was an absolute slog to read through, feels twice as long as it actually is.

It's double as frustrating, when in the described footage from the alternative timelines, it shows the autor knew how to write an engaging and thrilling book, he had just chosen not to.

 

[Questions are a Burden]

I despised Blood Meridian. I thought it was a pile of barely readable, incomprehensible garbage.

Yet I liked No Country For Old Men, which I read some time later.

 

[DocAwe]

This may not fit but Bram Stoker's Dracula.
I love the story, I just hate reading it.

 

[gobbles]

This may not fit but Bram Stoker's Dracula.
I love the story, I just hate reading it.

It’s epistolary, isn’t it? I really liked the telling, but I read it as a teenager on vacation, so it was a big, fat, spooky tome that lasted a couple days on the beach.

Mansfield Park (Jane Austen) sucks. It’s her weakest book, behind even the freshman effort of Northanger Abbey. People really don’t need to read beyond P&P and Emma, but I recall enjoying Persuasion quite a bit.

Similarly, Great Expectations was a drag, but I loved ATOTC.

All of Alexandre Dumas’ books are good, even the bad ones. No complaints.

 

[booklover]

Life of Pi. Your parents are fucking dead, along with an entire ship and her crew and you decide to lead the investigators on a false story about you surviving with animals? What a smug piece of shit. Say that in front of the families of all those crew members, ya prick!

I could not get into that at all. I also thought "The Handmaid's Tale" was a terrible book; I don't care what it was about.

As for non-classic literature, "The Deep End of the Ocean" was hands-down the worst book I ever finished. I figured out all the plot twists 50 pages before they happened.

 

[booklover]

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.

Are you actually referring to this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Absolutely_True_Diary_of_a_Part-Time_Indian

 

[D-X-G-X]

Great Gatsby, everyone just kind of sucks.

Came in to say this.

Rightfully deserved to fail for being a book about fucking nothing with no real purpose behind it.

No amount of revisionist Americana history is going to change the fact it only ever gained any sort of windfall was because the American military grabbed the book en masse to hand out to troops as downtime amusement.

To quote from Wikipedia, "When Fitzgerald died in 1940, he believed himself to be a failure and his work forgotten." Good, rest in piss, bozo.

 

[DocAwe]

It’s epistolary, isn’t it? I really liked the telling, but I read it as a teenager on vacation, so it was a big, fat, spooky tome that lasted a couple days on the beach.

Mansfield Park (Jane Austen) sucks. It’s her weakest book, behind even the freshman effort of Northanger Abbey. People really don’t need to read beyond P&P and Emma, but I recall enjoying Persuasion quite a bit.

Similarly, Great Expectations was a drag, but I loved ATOTC.

All of Alexandre Dumas’ books are good, even the bad ones. No complaints.

I remember it being a series of journal entries each one written by a different character.
I just remember it feeling disjointed.

 

[Iron Jaguar]

The Stand - King, fucking awful.

I really enjoyed it. I think it is his best work.

I find Dickens unreadable. Meandering and dull.
I guess it's that he was writing for contemporary readers, but some cultural touchstones are not relevant after 150 years.

 

[2mm and 99 others]

This may not fit but Bram Stoker's Dracula.
I love the story, I just hate reading it.

There is a substack Dracula Daily, that sends the book per log or letter, in the day it was written. Sometimes you don't get any mails for weeks because nothing happens, some days are intense and you get a wall of text every day. But still, the language is really dated, and having it dosed helps. Next round begins in May.

 

[Pedophobe]

Anything by Dean Koontz but especially Twilight Eyes. You know how at the end of the story the heroes have a plan to kill the monster and it all goes horribly wrong and they have to improvise and rely on their hidden strengths to pull off a desperate victory by the skin of their teeth at great cost? Dean Koontz books aren't like that. In his stories the heroes come up with a plan and it works flawlessly the first time with no complications or surprises then they're immediately showered with all the rewards they ever dreamed off and live happily ever after. It sucks.

There was also that YA fantasy novel that I thought would be a cool story about adventurous unicorns and stuff but it turned out to be the saga of a naive girl who keeps stumbling upon people having sex or masturbating and mistakes their howling and writhing for agony and thinks they're being painfully tortured. It was so uncomfortable I think I threw it out, despite the really nice cover art with the unicorn and stuff.