Books you can't bloody stand...

Rand wrote books to showcase her philosophy, which is best described as rabid anti-communism. All her characters hate each other, and rightly so because they're horrible. Who'd want to read about that? Not me.

Oh I like Ayn Rand although I thought the two that I read got a bit long in places.  I've read the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.  I didn't like the long long speeches the characters made that she basically used to describe her beliefs.  But I liked the stories quite a lot.

Which book(s) have you read of HP?

You don't have to read it to know you're NOT going to like it.

You don't have to read it to know you're NOT going to like it.

 

More for us, then!

This is easier than the books you like one ,

Catcher in the rye (what is all the fuss about? awfully dull its only merit is, it is a quite short book)

Harry Potter (I keep trying too like them but they are just kids books)(not that kids books are bad try enid blyton "The magic faraway tree" for a kids book with excitement humour and properly crafted, or Narnia)

Wheel of time series (great for insomnia)

Most things by Steven King (he infuriates me to hell because he writes 2/3 of a great book nearly everytime then seams to get bored and throws in something at the bottom of a dissused chinese clay mine or some such nonsense.  (some of his books are great).

I also can't stand anything by James Patterson.  At first I really liked his books, but he has seemed to have developed a "formula" and basically they are all the same, with different character names and maybe different settings. 


I love the HP books as well.  I'm so excited that I am going to be in England when the last one is released.  Dorky, yes, but I can't help it.

Anything by Dan Brown, Toni Morrison, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maitenence and Wuthering Heights.

One of the reasons I love Jasper Fforde is the whole pro-kath revolutionaries who keep trying to kill off Heathcliffe.  Heh.

They try to kill Heathcliff?!  Man, I've got to read that.

I personally love the Harry Potter books.  Book 1 is pretty much a kid's book, yes, but the later ones are lots more complex and interesting, IMHO.  The last book in particular was really really good.  I'm sorry, but I had to snort when you said that Narnia was better crafted . . . um.  I disagree.  I like the Narnia books, but just NO.  Just my opinion, though.

The only book I ever really hated was "Return to the Secret Garden" by Susan Moody.  Absolute bullshite.  It ended up as a shim for my unstable chest of drawers.  I didn't even want to sell it for fear that someone else would buy it and, horror of horrors, read it.

They try to kill Heathcliff?!  Man, I've got to read that.

Yes, there is a whole pro-Kath movement who keep trying to free her.  It is pretty funny.

Anything by Dan Brown. Interesting topics, terrible writer.

I was an English Lit major at college, and I'm pretty picky about books.  If I start reading something I don't like, I tend to drop it because life's too short and there are plenty of other books I'd like to read before I die.

The one book that I absolutely loathed but was forced to read all the way through coz it was for an English Lit course was Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.  The horror, the horror!!!!

I was an English Lit major at college, and I'm pretty picky about books.  If I start reading something I don't like, I tend to drop it because life's too short and there are plenty of other books I'd like to read before I die.

This is exactly my philosophy. If it doesn't grab me in three chapters, I pick up something else.


And I agree with the Dan Brown dislikers... I just couldn't get through DaVinci Code. I bought it at an airport to read on a plane when it first came out and I couldn't get through the first chapter. It was written in such an.. illogical way. I can't explain it, it just felt like he kept thinking "oh wait! I forgot to mention this, which was referenced a couple pages ago, but instead of editing it there, I just added it in extra over here!"

Modified to add:

I totally forgot to throw in my pick:

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

The book is okay until you get about halfway in. Then it just drones on for 100+ pages with the most boring drabble I have ever experienced. It was so bad that I went on Amazon to find out if anyone else had experienced this, and lots of the reviewers said "skip such and such pages and just go to the end" or they even said "if you want to know the ending so you don't have to put yourself through the misery, here's a spoiler."

I tried, I really did. I ended up reading the spoiler and giving up, and once I read the spoiler, I was annoyed that the ending was so predictable!

I worked at B&N when it first came out and it was super popular. I was just in a Borders two days ago and it was on the bargain rack for $4.98. 

The Left Behind series.

This series came highly recommended (and most importantly, free) from a relative.

It was literally painful to read.  The writing style is just...gratingly awful.  These guys would simply not have cut it in my high school English classes. I hear it gets really bizarre in the later books, though.

I read somewhere that somehow, this is the top-selling American series of all time.

The one book that I absolutely loathed but was forced to read all the way through coz it was for an English Lit course was Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.  The horror, the horror!!!!

I'm not the only one!!  I had to force myself to read it for a class as well, and I'm still bitter about it.

The Historian[/u] by Elizabeth Kostova

The book is okay until you get about halfway in. Then it just drones on for 100+ pages with the most boring drabble I have ever experienced.

Yep. I read all of it but finished the book thinking, "That's it?" So . . . Dracula. Yeah, wow. There he is. What a hoot! I wasn't enthralled by the writing, either.

The Left Behind series.

I second that! I didn't make it through the first book. It was so corny! Very poorly written, and pretty wild that most of the readers think it is a good representation of a future reality!

I just read "The Last Disciple" by Hank Hannegraf (which is the antithesis of Left Behind, exploring the book of Revelation from a vastly different eschatological viewpoint) and the plot was fairly interesting, but the writing style was just as bad or worse than LB! It was seedy, sleazy pulp fiction type of writing with lots of incomplete and run on sentences.

Along the same vein, my SIL recommended "Christ the Lord" by Anne Rice. I haven't gotten around to it yet though.