I'm also not going to include any books that I had to read for school, rather, these are all books I read on my own, either voluntarily or for book club.
And since I have this weird compulsion to finish reading every book I start, these are all books I actually suffered through to the end. Occasionally there have been books that I hated at the beginning but which actually grew on me as I read them. But the books below are books I finished and still hated. I don't mean disliked, but HATED, and which still inspire me to feelings of white hot hatred!
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides - I'm going to start with this one because my hatred for it seems to fly in the face of the opinions of the rest of the world. Most of my friends loved it, really loved it, in a one of their favorite books ever kind of way. And it won the Pulitzer Prize. But yet I hated it so much. I found it too long and so boring, and I couldn't get into the characters. And while it was most famous for having a hermaphrodite character, something about the way the book treated hermaphroditism really bugged me. Plus perhaps the fact that everyone else fell over themselves with love for this book made me hate it that much more, because it was so disappointing.
The Panopticon by Jenni Fagler - Words cannot express how much I hated this book. First, this book was just so unrelentingly dark, with so much violence, drugs, mental illness, misery etc, all of it relating to young teenagers since it is about troubled kids in some kind of institution. Before reading it, I thought this was some kind of dystopian book, but no, it is just about how awful the actual world is. Second, it is written in a Scottish dialect, like "tae" instead of "to," "umnay" instead of "am not," etc. Aside from being generally annoying, it prevented me from getting swept up into the book as it was very distracting.
Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler - This was one of the most buzzed about books in the media two summers ago, and apparently has been adapted into a TV show coming to Starz next month. But I thought it was just ridiculously over-hyped, pretentious, and boring. So overwritten, just about every paragraph has either dialogue or description that screams "look at me, I'm so literary." I think a bunch of the hype was based on the fact that the author was a server at Union Square Cafe, and this book is about a server at an unnamed but not at all thinly veiled very obviously Union Square Cafe. But other than that, pretty much nothing happens in this book. Young somewhat naive woman comes to NYC, gets a job at a restaurant, consumes too much alcohol and drugs, and likes a semi-damaged boy who is kind of mean to her. Who cares?
The Dinner by Herman Koch - I read this one for my book club, and as I mentioned in my recent post about book club books, the rest of my book club loved it while I hated it with a burning passion. This book is about two couples at a restaurant who are having a very awkward dinner - it takes a while before you find out that it is because both of their sons were involved in a horrifying crime. Super boring for most of the first half, then weird and just got more and more disturbing. The characters were all awful, and so was the book.
All That Man Is by David Szalay - Read this one for book club too. (Sorry Karen, who picked this and might have picked "The Dinner" too!) An unappealing, unenjoyable collection of short stories. Other than the most minute elements, the stories are completely unrelated, with each one concerning a different man in a different city in Europe, and each character is older than the character in the previous story's character, from 17 to 70s. What they have in common is that they are all various shades of annoying to awful. If the title is supposed to represent some kind of statement that these characters represent "all that man is," then I guess the author thinks men suck.
Fifty Shades of Gray by E.L. James - I'm not embarrassed to admit I read this book back in 2012 - everyone was talking about it and wanted to see what the fuss was about. Slogged through and finished it, and I have to say I just don't get why people like it - seriously one of the worst books I have ever read. The writing is just incredibly, amazingly bad, as if she didn't have an editor at all. (And maybe she didn't, since apparently this was first self-published as "Twilight" fan fiction.) Then there is the plot - the Christian character is just so totally creepy and unappealing, while Anastasia is a total twit. Nor did I understand why everyone seemed to find this book so titillating - the sex scenes got boring after the first few - not to mention how absurdly unrealistic they were. I didn't even find this book entertaining on a trashy level, and I declined to read the two sequels.
Who Stole the Funny by Robby Benson - A very dark satire on life in Hollywood, which perhaps was meant to be completely over the top but instead came off like the author is just an extremely negative person. And not funny either even though it was clearly meant to be. Like when a book is a thinly veiled tale about celebrities, it can be kind of fun where you are trying to guess what real people the author is riffing on and how much of it is true. But this was so beyond that as to be not-at-all veiled but just ridiculous and mean. Like calling the show in the book "I Love My Urban Buddies" when the biographical information in the back of the book said the author directed "Friends," naming actresses on the fictional show "Janice Hairston" and "Betty Balz" (clearly meant to be Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox), etc. that it really seemed excessively spiteful. But some stranger on Goodreads felt compelled to comment on my review that the author is a really nice person in real life. That may be, but he sure wrote a nasty book!
By the way, I find it hilarious, looking back at my Goodreads reviews of these books, that most of them ended with me just saying "UGH!"
So, what about you, readers? Do you my share my hatred for any of these books, or do you think I'm way off base? What are the books that you have hated the most?
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