Books You've Thrown Away

[Deleted]

I did something similar when I read Good in Bed right after finishing Oryx and Crake. The whole wish-fulfilment fantasy felt very flimsy after that.

[ivy]

spinachspark said:

Then there was Divine Secrets of the YaYa Sisterhood which everyone seems to love except me.

I haven't read that one, but I read Little Altars Everywhere which is about the same characters and I thought it was cheesy as hell. In fact I didn't even read the whole thing, I skimmed the last half of it to see if it got better, but it didn't.

Then again, I hate the "We're quirky southern folk, y'all! Watch us be sassy and outrageous!" theme.

[Margo]

The Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller has the honour of being the only book I stopped reading after fewer than ten pages. It was unbearable to me. There's no buried treasure further along in this work, right?

[heyalice]

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers Home in New England was a piece of shit. Not a damned thing funny about it at all.

I finished Abstinence Teacher so I can say I read a Tom Perotta novel and will never do so again. Not terrible, but not the frickin' genius everyone made it out to be.

[Deleted]

I didn't actually throw this away. I finished it, because I'm sick like that. But Ten Days in the Hills by Jane Smiley? Snore. They didn't have the book she won the Pulitzer for (which I figured would have to be a decent read at least), so I got this one instead. All the characters lie in bed and have sex and talk about their sex, then go downstairs and sit around the breakfast table and talk about the Iraq war. And then they talk about themselves talking about things. None of them are that interesting, so it's basically like listening to a bunch of really conceited pseudo-intellectuals compliment themselves on how smart and forward-thinking they are. And one of the main characters is a film director who wants to make a 90-minute indie/porn movie called My Lovemaking With Elena, all about him and his girlfriend having "deep" conversation in bed before and during sex. It was so unbearably pretentious. Probably true to life for some conceited Hollywood types, but not the kind of conversation I want to eavesdrop on for 400 pages. There's a bunch of sex scenes thrown in, but none of them are sexy. And I got really sick of Smiley's mouthpiece blabbing on about Iraq, even though we're on the same political side - it wasn't anything new or insightful, just the "oh my God the government LIES" type stuff you'd hear from a college freshman who just discovered politics (at least for awhile; after that I started skimming, because: boring). And the film people blab about moviemaking, and even as a movie geek I was still bored. I guess Smiley's gotten to that point where no one edits her or something. Bleh.

[Smilla]

I did something similar when I read Good in Bed

Good in Bed is possibly the worst book I've ever read. Aside from the perpetually victimized character who seems to demand that you validate all of her choices, even the profoundly irresponsible ones, who is also painfully, irredeemably STUPID, the cop-out cliché of an ending and the stultifyingly bad prose, it was manipulatively marketed. I actually saw it reviewed as a "beach novel." Yeah, if your ideal beach reading is that which is likely to make you puke from disgust.

I'm tempted to go start a "'Works' of Jennifer Weiner" thread, just to rip the shit out of them now.

[BinkyBetsy]

margo said:

The Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller has the honour of being the only book I stopped reading after fewer than ten pages. It was unbearable to me. There's no buried treasure further along in this work, right?

Are you me? I found a copy of that in my MIL's house. Actually, I took it from a box of books she was going to donate. Read about five pages, went downstairs and dropped it back in the donation box.

And ivy, I hate that genre (I think it is an actual sub-genre by now) of what I call Hysterical Southern Women Wearing Polka-Dots.

And PolyGal, has The Things They Carried ever been subjected to any kind of scrutiny, a la A Million Little Pieces? Though I suppose, since O'Brien was not lying about having been in country, and is not making outrageous claims like having killed 10 VC with his bare hands, it's no great crime for him to have repeated a few vet legends. AMLP was, in my opinion, reprehensible because Frey slandered Hazelden; his own claims of badassery merely make him look pathetic. Still, I regarded TTTC as the ramblings of the drunk on the next barstool. Except for the beginning (and only the beginning) of the titular essay. Very moving. The rest of it? Yeah, I really believe that Green Berets would mentor some chick from Ohio.

And since I've been wording everyone else, here's one of my own: Ellen Foster. A co-worker asked if she could borrow it. I told her to keep it.

[octoberwitch]

I have thrown away the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. I don't understand why it was a best seller. His writing is atrocious.

[tabby]

His writing is atrocious.

Believe it or not, Da Vinci Code is not even Dan Brown's worst book. Deception Point may have that honor - it holds a level of suckitude that I previously did not believe possible.

[abbynormal]

If not for the fact that it was a school book, I would've gladly thrown away A Separate Peace. And word on that piece of shit known as The Da Vinci Code.