Books You've Thrown Away

[aims]

I bought 'Ghost' by Danielle Steel at a used book sale for $1. I read it...then promptly gave it away to the local library. The main character made me want to scream. What a whiny little baby!

[Deleted]

aims said:

I bought 'Ghost' by Danielle Steel at a used book sale for $1. I read it...then promptly gave it away to the local library. The main character made me want to scream. What a whiny little baby!

Aren't all her female characters these fragile but spunky little doe-eyed things? One time I had to go home sick and someone in the office gave me a handful of her books to read in bed. I couldn't get through a single one of them. They almost made me sicker than I already was!

I didn't throw this away, but I struggled most of the way through The Poe Shadow (by the guy who wrote The Dante Club). I had maybe one chapter left to go. Then my boyfriend gave me the whole collection of Lemony Snicket books for Christmas and I started in on those immediately and never got around to that last chapter of The Poe Shadow. That was the end of December, so if I haven't felt compelled to find out how the book ends it clearly didn't have me riveted.

[nadia]

I recently picked up a copy of The Mystery by Ray Comfort at my plasma donation place, because I forgot my book. That's the last time I pick out something from there.

The book wasn't bad until the last couple chapters when it got really heavy handed with religion. Spoiler: It's about an atheist who has a shitload of bad luck happen to him and finally he welcomes God into his life, which would be nice and fine if it wasn't so damn condescending and emotionally manipulative at the same time. Especially towards a "woman's right to choose to take the lives of millions of unborn Americans", with comments like "holocaust of legalized abortion", etc. It really tries to hammer home lust is equal to adultery and looking at a person and finding them attractive is a sin and you better fear God because he is not merciful! His daughter almost died in a fire that was set by a Nazi sympathizer, his sister was almost raped by a Nazi that he had to shoot to death, his dad was killed, he was shot, his grandmother was sent to Auschwitz, his wife died of breast cancer. And what was especially eye roll worthy was the main character's son, who was a heroin addict and dealer who stole cars to support his habit when he wasn't hanging out in his dealer's strip club, got all morally offended when his drug addicted stripper girlfriend wanted an abortion.

Even before it became all about sinners are gonna burn!!!OMG!!11 it was ridiculous because every major event that happened since WW2, the main character was involved in. D-Day, Auschwitz, striking oil in Texas, Lucky Luciano and the mafia, Kennedy's and Oswald's assassinations. He even infiltrated the Nazis while in the French Resistance and gave the Allies the locations of all the Nazi bases all by himself! It was like the author tried to include everything he knew about history into this one story. [/end spoiler]

[intlschizo]

nadia said:

Even before it became all about sinners are gonna burn!!!OMG!!11 it was ridiculous because every major event that happened since WW2, the main character was involved in. D-Day, Auschwitz, striking oil in Texas, Lucky Luciano and the mafia, Kennedy's and Oswald's assassinations. He even infiltrated the Nazis while in the French Resistance and gave the Allies the locations of all the Nazi bases all by himself!

I remember that book...Forrest Gump, AMIRITE???

[Smilla]

After going through my shelves for books I literally need to throw away, I came across a stray copy of possibly the worst, most overrated piece of pop fiction I've ever tried to read (and that includes Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones): Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost. That shite was non-sensical.

[Deleted]

I didn't throw this away because it was loaned to me. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. A friend of mine and I exchange books frequently and once in awhile, loan one another something we didn't like to sort of get a second opinion of what was bad about it. We both hated this book! It's about 2 sisters who are orphaned and go through a series of care-givers and ultimately end up with an eccentric aunt who, up until her tenure as a guardian, was a vagabond. Okay, how do you take a premise like that and turn it into a boring book? Well, she did. There are intriguing characters that just get dropped and a thousand directions the plot could have gone that got wasted. Instead, she spends 3 pages describing a mother pondering the "softness" of her children's faces and endless pages describing a lake. Every time the lake was mentioned I braced myself and thought, "Okay, get ready for a virtual eternity of reading over-wrought descriptions and metaphors."

I noticed that on the Amazon reviews it's definitely a "love it or hate it" book. I also noticed it's one of those books where the people who loved it stated that if you didn't like it, you didn't "get it." One thing that amused me, one reviewer wrote a 5-star review and was all condescending toward people who didn't like, and thus, didn't "get" the book and mentioned she held a degree in comparative literature and taught English -- And there were 2 glaring misspellings in her review.

[SGleason]

Ooh, but I loved the film. Christine Lahti. I won't try to read the book though!

[garnet927]

sgleason said:

Ooh, but I loved the film. Christine Lahti. I won't try to read the book though!

One of my favorite 80's movies, actually.

[hamhock]

The Ruins draaaagged for me. This might be one of those rare instances where the movie is better than the book.

[Mugsy]

The Ruins is a movie? What's it called? When did it come out? Are you talking about the book about the tourists in Mexico who go on a hill looking for a lost friend and this evil vine traps them?

Anyway, I read my first - and last - Danielle Steele book. I'm not a book snob, just the opposite. I love all the popular fiction authors - Sheldon, Higgins Clark, Fielding, Grisham, Koontz. I don't care what y'all think; I enjoy an entertaining yarn. So I picked up "Coming Out" by Steele and good gawd, what badly written stuff it was. How does this woman have 50 bestsellers?

Story synopsis: Woman has two daughters from prev. marriage to society snob and they are invited to be debutantes. She's excited because she thinks it'll just be fun, not all old-fashioned or anything. Daughters are twins (of course) and one is all girly and thrilled while the other is all earthy and ironic and pissed about it (of course). They have an older brother who is just perfect (of course) but he's bothered by something throughout the book, which isn't revealed until the end. Can you guess? Woman is a great lawyer, fantastic cook, marvelous mother, snappy dresser and rather attractive (of course) but this whole coming out thing is just throwing her into a tizzy because her second husband, a Jew (of course) is offended by it. She decides to take her salt-of-the-earth (of course) Jewish mother in law and wise (of course) black best friend instead. In the end, son reveals his angsty secret, society snob ex actually acts like a human being and all is well.

Throughout the book, which wasn't very long for a novel, Steele must have had her character mention once per chapter that her husband wasn't attending the event because he was offended as a Jew. She also repeated ad nauseum how shallow and self-centred her ex and his new dippy wife were, and how great the children were. It's like she couldn't even write an entire novel on this weak premise and had to pad it with repetition. Is this a typical writing device for Steele?