Books You've Thrown Away

[Smilla]

Oh, God, Willa Cather. Count me in as someone who couldn't finish My Antonia or anything else by her. And you didn't have to write a paper on Nebraska landscapes, did you? Not truly? I feel for you.

[dwanollah]

Heh, sperm. Barrels and barrels of sperm. I'm twelve.

Dude, so was Melville! Moby Dick is THE GAYEST BOOK EVER! Read it with nuthin' but homoeroticism in mind, and you will enjoy it MUCH better.

Oh, and The Bishop? Hee hee hee! The Bishop! HAW HAW HAW!

[prickle]

Watch Your Mouth by Daniel Handler. I wanted to love it. I love Lemony Snicket! I loved Handler's first novel, The Basic Eight! I love his style!

But oh....words can't describe how just downright weird and disturbing that book is. It's set up like an opera. Lots of sweaty, stained-sheet type sex (and not in a good way AT ALL). Incest! More incest! A golem! More incest! Boyfriend sleeps with his girlfriend's mom! Incest! Did I mention lots and lots of incest?

[Deleted]

Glue by Irvine Welsh... The dialect was inpenatrable to me. About 30 pages into the book I realized that if someone asked me to recap the book up to that point I wouldn't be able to tell them a thing! I'm glad I finally quit because in an Amazon reader review someone mentioned animal torture that happens somewhere along the way, and I can't stand that stuff. Of course, chances are I wouldn't have been able to understand a thing that was going on anyhow.

[Smilla]

The Sand Pebbles, by Charles McKenna. Rule of thumb: any book that starts with a line as terrible as "'Hello, ship'" is probably not going to be the most engrossing thing you have ever encountered and for me, this was so true. Most boring novel ever. Can't believe someone managed to make it into a movie (and they kept that title for it! Worst title ever!). Seriously, if you're ever struck by insomnia for which prescription sleep aids are of no use, that is the remedy for you.

[Auroranorth]

John Grisham's The Pelican Brief. I normally like suspense novels and wanted to try this one, but I folded half way in.

SPOILER: Click to show

Darcy (the second year law student) was supposed to be brilliant, but she kept doing things like using her credit cards when she was supposed to be hiding out. They can trace your credit history, you nitwit.

Sitting there yelling at the character "You total moron, lose the frelling credit cards!!" was doing nothing for my reputation for being sweet and demure and was also unnerving other so I quit before my blood pressure rose any higher.

[tinyshoes]

Eat Me by Linda Jaivin. Erotica my ass! I pretty much skimmed it to get to the good parts, and the good parts? Not so good.

A Darker Place, by Laurie King. So much description that I couldn't make it past chapter 3. It's called a Delete key, lady. Use it.

Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts. Damn you Oprah's Book Club! And that was one of her happier selections.

Little Alters Everywhere by Rebecca Wells. I liked the Ya Ya Sisterhood (there, I said it), so I figured this one would be good too. Boy was I wrong.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Didn't she write the same book about ten times? Read Anthem instead, kids. It's a lot shorter.

[kostgard]

Count me in on the Bridges of Madison County hate. I checked out from the library in college and it only took about 30 minutes to read - 30 minutes of my life I am never, ever getting back and I am deeply bitter about it. I would feel better about myself if I had spent those 30 minutes watching paint dry or picking a scab.

The Horse Whisperer I actually threw across the room when I finished, the ending was so freakin' stupid.

Most of the other stuff mentioned here I've been able to avoid, except Willa Cather. I had to read O Pioneers! in high school. There was one or two passages I actually liked, but for the most part it was extremely painful getting through that book.

[Deleted]

Oh, god! I forgot all about The Horse Whisperer! I was liking it okay (nothing great, but I wasn't hating it) right up until the end:

The whole phenomenon that this guy represents is that he communes with horses, and that all horses respond positively to him. Then he dies by getting kicked in the head by one? It totally contradicted the premise. Plus, how many times did the author have to hit us over the head to make us "get" that the woman's baby was the horse whisperer's? (You know, by mentioning the color of the eyes repeatedly, etc.?)

And I have a very strange reason for never having been able to finish My Antonia. Well, first of all, I thought it was boring. But also, my whole life I've thought the name was pronounced Antonia, and on the very first page the guy carefully explains that it's actually pronounced Antonia. After that, I stumbled every time I came across the name. It just totally threw me off.

[kostgard]

This is what really ticked me off about the ending of The Horse Whisperer:

SPOILER: Click to show

What I hated was the way she got pregnant - the fact that she had an IUD that magically disolved or whatever and the doctors couldn't find a trace of it. Not that she had unprotected sex, not that she was on the pill and it didn't work, not that she thought she had already gone through menopause. No. Instead, a chunk of copper wire decided to just move out of her uterus on its own. Or maybe his magical horse whisperer sperm destroyed it.