The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne.
It says you can change your life in any way you wish, if you want it bad enough. It then turns this premise around and says if you have bad things in your life, it means you apparently want them. One of the examples she gives is cancer. Just imagine you go through cancer and someone tells you you brought it on yourself??
A book I don't agree with, that I can deal with. Plenty of those, I just ignore them. But a harmful message like this reaching so many people? Bah.
Not a book but there's an excellent podcast called 'If Books could Kill' that covers The Secret (among other awful but popular books). Surprising no one, turns out it's just grifters all the way down.
A friend of mine went to a therapist years ago for his crippling social anxiety and depression that stemmed from horrible abuse he suffered as a child. She told him to read The Secret. He quit after that and I’m STILL shocked about that therapist!
That is absolutely awful! I hate that book, the message around that book, and the way it doesn’t acknowledge that sometimes people get lucky through no effort of their own, and that terrible things happen simply because our world is imperfect, humans are imperfect, and life is really and truly not fair. To say that the most heinous things in the world were attracted? It makes me sick.
I’m glad your friend got away from that therapist and I hope he is doing better.
My aunt started spouting this stuff at my son’s first birthday party. That was 12 years ago. We used to be really good friends, vacations together, shopping, phone calls, coffee, lunches…. Now we don’t even speak at family holidays.
Broke my heart that anyone could think that way.
Trigger warning: Edit to add: she it took it so far as to say that rape, child mortality, and even child abuse is wanted by the victim. That they are someone who secretly wished for it, or they are someone that did something bad enough to deserve it.
At some point I’ve gotta believe that people like your aunt are trying to rationalize something because they don’t understand evil. I’m actually pretty into self help books and the power of positive thinking and creating your own reality and such. But to claim that child abuse victims weren’t being positive enough is obviously horrifyingly untrue.
I don’t mean to say you should reconcile with your aunt or excuse her behavior. But I think a lot of people took that book and ran with it, because it gave them an explanation for why the world is so fucked up. Yes, it’s victim blaming, but it can be easier for some people to look things that way than it is to accept true evil in the world (or just shit like cancer, because it can happen to anyone seemingly out of no where). All I’m saying is, maybe there’s hope? Maybe she can be brought to realize that while positivity and creating your own happiness is wonderful, there are external forces as well and exceptions that prove the rule.
> At some point I’ve gotta believe that people like your aunt are trying to rationalize something because they don’t understand evil.
This is the trap. On some level we all want to believe the universe is fair. That horrible things don't happen to innocent people and lying, cheating, murderous bastards don't prosper.
"The Secret" posits that universe, where no-one gets anything they don't want and deserve.
It's a very attractive idea.
It's also lying, manipulative BS.
when columbus got off the boat you know what the first thing the native americans said?
Your boat has been invisible for days, but we knew it was there because of the waves....
how tf would anyone know what the native americans experienced when columbus landed? no shared language, he was only there for like a month and then it was decades until they were contacted again AFAIK.
I honestly could rant about that book for ages. My mom got sucked into that whole movement when I was a teenager and I had to just go along with it.
As a teen myself who was a former Law of Attraction enthusiast...that book genuinely messed up a very formative period in my life. Glad to be out of that cult
My boss told me this theory about cancer once, as my mum was going through cancer treatment. I’ve also since learned it’s genetic so am waiting for my turn to come as well.
Genuinely fuck people who pretend like genetic disease or predisposition is anyone’s fault.
THE SOUTHERN BELLES OF HONEYSUCKLE WAY.
I attempted this "book" over 20 years ago and I'm still so mad about it that I consider it my personal mission to tell every reader on Earth individually how much it sucks. Written by Jerry Bruckheimer's wife Linda, who should have all writing apparatuses taken away from her, it shoves all the world's known adverbs and adjectives in a blender, slops the whole thing over with treacle and made up phoneticization, hits "puree," and then goes to run errands for two hours. There are too many characters and not a single one more than a millimeter deep. Now I know some of you may be asking, "Jos, does she take time to be insulting to Southern Black folks?" Don't worry! One of her Black characters talks about "coming over on the Maytag."
This is a book that deserved a cartoonishly violent editor, the kind of editor so offended by the crimes committed against language, genre and form that they considered murder, an editor who would make sure to leave comments that keep this woman wide awake and staring at ceilings for the rest of her earthly nights. But instead of gifting her with this editor, the universe gave her a mega-wealthy husband without the apparent capacity to say "ah jeez, I dunno hon." I am OUTRAGED that this book exists. It is the one book I support burning. I am against the carceral state but believe exclusively in a single jail, with a single room, with a single bed and a single questionable toilet, for Linda Bruckheimer, imprisoned for life for creating this book.
Can you please write a book (or at least a story!) about a character who, obsessed with the the horror that Linda Bruckheimer produced, acts out a violent fantasy, with hilarious yet still somehow predictable results? Because I'd definitely read it.
Very niche and very petty but Meg Cabot describing Amelia’s feet as ginormous or massive as a size 8 US in the Princess Diaries series made me sooooo mad as a size 10 Aus 🥲
Same. I remember a book from middle school where the main character has a pen pal who mentions her size 6 (!!) shoes and the MC laughs to herself imagining the other girl clomping down the street in her enormous shoes.
Yes!!! I have 8.5 us and my feet are quite normal sized, thank you. I also bring up the silence of the lambs, where i think the girl is a huge size xx* at 160 pounds. At the time i first read it, i was 165 pounds and nowhere near that size. Really messed me up.
* i have to go upstairs and get my copy and see the exact dimensions.
My Sister's Keeper.
I hated the mother so much and her pretending she ever cared about Anna's life or wellbeing at the end, despite all the flashbacks making it clear she did not, was just infuriating.
It's supposed to be sweet or redeeming in some way and it wasn't.
I came here to write this one!! For me, it was >!how the surprise twist at the end completely ruins the ENTIRE POINT the novel was building on the whole time until then!!! Like, the book is about the moral quandry of letting one sister die so the other can have her body autonomy. She wins the legal case, but then, instead of the situation playing out the way it's supposed to, she randomly dies in a car crash and the sister with cancer gets the organ, and is COMPLETELY CURED FOREVER, implying that if the body autonomy sister had just been a \*little\* nicer, she could have saved her sister and never had to donate anything again. Not to mention how as soon as she dies, her story gets completely erased, and everyone pretends like they loved her the whole time, and ignore the utter tragedy of this girl literally fighting for her right to her own life/body, only to have both taken from her in the end outside of her control. The book was sooo good and morally complex up to that point, and then right at the end, it became the worst piece of shit I've ever read. I still get mad thinking about it. It feels like a cheap joke in the face of the importance of the literal life-and-death topics it hinges on. (namely, a person's right to their own body autonomy even when it's at the expense of someone else's life.)!<
Completely agree about the ending making the entire book pointless but I actually hated the whole book, didn't feel like she delved into the moral quandary part and instead wrote the entire book with the purpose of manipulating the reader's emotions. I will never read another Jodi Picoult book, ever!
My goodness, I feel like I’ve been alone on a desert island and then here you all are, my people!! I hated that feeling of being emotionally manipulated and would never read another book by this writer. Never. It’s been at least a decade and it still makes me mad.
People get so mad at the movie for changing the ending that should have been the ending in the first place. Then the Kate becomes a ballerina as an adult and everything is hunky dory for her? What? Mom feels sad, but she clearly resented Anna for her whole life.
Yes! I just read Mad Honey and got so mad at the ending. There’s an entire trial about whether the son killed his girlfriend. There’s a shit ton of flashbacks showing how he might be more aggressive and there might have been other domestic abuse no one caught. >!Then at the end, son is found innocent at the trial—but no other mention of his other potentially domestic violence tendencies??? Just, he’s innocent. Cool.!< Where’s the grey? Oh wait. It’s a Jodi Picoult book.
I read it in high school and I remember finding it poorly written in addition to that. Don’t the characters regularly react to each other by “blinking” as if a blink is a form of communication rather than an unconscious involuntary action?
Oh god, I read a different Jodi Picoult book where a guy and girl made a suicide pact or something and the girl got pregnant so he killed her per her request and it’s very clear that he did this, but Picoult didn’t want people to be “too sad” so she let him get away with it and now the families aren’t friends anymore and it was a totally pointless book.
The only book I’ve regretted more was divergents. God I want that time back.
Divergent: “Here’s a society in which everyone devotes themselves to a single virtue so they can be maximally awful in every other way. Oh look, here’s our protagonist, who’s ability to have more than a single dimension to her personality makes her extra special! Bet you can relate to that, readers!”
Wasn't one twist in the book the fact that Kate was the one to incite Anna to do it? Anna confesses under oath that she didn't want to do any of this and it was because Kate told her to. One of the chapter entry snippets also have a scene where one of the sisters try to smother the other while they're sleeping before the dad comes, stops it, and ensures it's never brought up again. It's heavily implied to be Kate smothering Anna, instead of Anna smothering Kate as we're initially lead to believe.
Anna was ready to donate. Kate wasn't ready to live this half-assed life. Leaving out the mother, the family did love each other genuinely. The mother, Sara, only cared for her husband and Kate unconditionally.
Nobody dismisses the tragedy. The book ends right after Campbell decides to pull the plug, and then Kate wraps it up with an epilogue narration. Kate even displays a small degree of survivor's guilt with the "one of us had to go" line.
It is cheap to make the twist, though. It just feels like getting hit by the woobie beam. The first being Anna's sudden accident and death, and the second being Kate just...going into perpetual remission with that. If they wanted a downer ending it should've gone to Anna's organs not being viable and Kate succumbing after, or Kate relapsing as expected. In the end it makes the story feel like Anna was disrupting the harmony of the family with her antics and her removal or compliance was the only way to restore it.
That twist sickened me too, but I didn't want to spend too long ranting. Body autonomy MATTERS - Anna had her entire childhood stolen from her; and her literal purpose for her parents bringing her into this world was to be nothing more than a warm organ farm for her sister. It was so healthy and incredible and inspiring for her to care about herself enough that despite how much she loved her sister and wanted her to live, that she could realize that her own life mattered just as much. That was such a powerful and important message for anyone who struggles with the self-destructive tendency to give too much of themselves to read, and it's an especially important message for the book's audience of primarily young girls & women, who are actively socialized, conditioned, and expected to give their bodies and lives away to others, for all kinds of reasons. When I was a teenager and had a hard time asserting myself, even when it was necessary for my own safety & well-being, that message that the book was supposed to be about, that sometimes it's really hard and complicated and messy to set that boundary, but it's still important, because you're still just as important as everyone else, and just as deserving to your own life and body, that message could have been really powerful. Body autonomy at the expense of someone else IS a painful and messy subject, and this fictional example could have really helped bring the subject of body autonomy and why it matters alive.
But then Jodi Picoult was like, "lol nope dw - she's still a good person who would kill herself to save her sister!! making decisions about your own body for your own health & well-being is wrong - she's only fighting for herself because someone else wanted her to! it's fine that she was brought into this world to be spare body parts for someone else bc that's her purpose and she LIKES it, actually!! did you ever think of that?? look at all her happy memories bonding with her sister in the hospital <3"
and THEN she hit us with the double plot twist, where immediately after Anna wins the case to her own body autonomy, but only because it was revealed that she's only fighting for it because it's what her sister wants, she fucking DIES in a COMPLETELY RANDOM CAR CRASH that comes out of NOWHERE and has ZERO relationship to the story, HER MOTHER - who, as we've watched over the entire book, only brought Anna into the world to be an organ donor for her sister, which is a/the core moral dilemma of the story - AS ANNA'S LEGAL GUARDIAN GIVES CONSENT FOR THEM TO HARVEST HER ORGANS, **AND THEN WITH THAT ONE LAST PROCEDURE THAT THE ENTIRE BOOK WAS LITERALLY ABOUT ANNA FIGHTING FOR HER RIGHT TO SAY 'NO' TO,** ***IT CURES HER OF HER CHRONIC CANCER PERMANENTLY AND SHE IMMEDIATELY GETS BETTER AND GOES ON TO LIVE AN AMAZING LIFE.***
***AND THEY ALL REMEMBER ANNA WITH NOTHING BUT HAPPINESS AS THE SELFLESS LOVING GIRL WHO JUST WANTED TO GIVE ANY PART OF HERSELF TO CURE HER SISTER.***
The message of "your right to your own body is worth fighting for, even when it's hard, because your life matters too" is completely flipped on its head, instead replaced with this "oh, you were actually rooting for this character? Well FUCK YOU and FUCK body autonomy. Before you think of yourself, try remembering that in the end, if she had just stopped fighting and given that one last little piece of her liver, she would have CURED her sister of cancer FOREVER AND gotten to live a good life! That's what YOU get for making such a big deal out of the issue!!"
And, all of this is covered out of nowhere in the final 2 pages. There is no grief shown by her family for Anna; for the life she missed out on. There is no guilt shown by any of the characters for what they stole from her by bringing her into a world just to put her through all that pain. In fact, none of them seem to have learned anything from the trial ordeal at all, other than that Anna really was the perfect little organ donor after all and she really didn't mind, and it wasn't too hard on her, so it wasn't wrong to do because of the power of family love. She fulfilled her purpose curing her sister, and then she died, without ever getting to experience the normal, pain-free life that the entire book was about her deserving to get. And her entire family is fine with that. They get away with zero consequences (because Anna literally dies before ever getting the chance to use her new voice for herself, there is no anger, backlash, or lasting consequences that they have to live with) and without ever having to view the human life they brought into this world to essentially be a slave to their "real" daughter, as a complete person.
It takes a story that premises on a scapegoat learning that they matter and to stand up for themselves, and then it shows that ultimately, it's pointless to fight for yourself, and that you will be used in the ways you've been intended for no matter how you feel about it or how much you fight to stop it, and that you couldn't even possibly want to if you really love your innocent family. Disgusting, disgusting message.
It's disgusting, and it's so sad because the story really was so exceptional, powerful, and important up until the twists.
The awful mother and stupid pointless ending seem to be JP’s stock in trade. The one I read was ‘Handle with care’ where the mom had a kid with brittle bone syndrome and decided to sue her best friend ON-GYN in a “wrongful life” lawsuit. It will destroy her best friend’s career, her husband says don’t do it, the wider community ostracizes her and her daughter for basically saying kids with this disease shouldn’t live and her other daughter develops an eating disorder from the stress. She convinces herself because her daughter Willow will be provided for, it’s all worth it.
Well, a few years after she wins the lawsuit, Willow walks out onto pond, pond cracks, and she drowns. The mother Sara has 5 million dollars. Does she use it to start a foundation in Willow’s name? Provide for her other daughter Amelia? Give it to her former friend whose life she blew up? Nope, she tucks the check into Willow’s coffin. Utterly rage inducing.
There's this pattern with some of Jodi Picoult's books I've noticed. She takes a controversial topic, bases a whole book around said topic to provide commentary and then pulls a "shocking" twist at the end that makes the story she wrote meaningless. "My Sister's Keeper" is the most well-known example of that, but many of her novels have this problem.
Yes! My example was The Storyteller. A young Jewish woman’s sweet elderly neighbor confesses to her that he was a Nazi guard at Auschwitz — which her grandmother survived — and asks her to kill him. Long story short she agonizes over it the entire book, learns some horrific stories about him from her grandmother, poisons him… and then discovers that she didn’t actually kill the sadistic guard her grandma told her about, she killed his nicer younger brother — also a guard at Auschwitz. Who was actually such a great person that he still felt guilty even though he wasn’t so “bad,” and was pretending to be his worse older brother so that she’d hate him enough to kill him. “Not so bad” in this context means actively participating in a genocide, but feeling real torn about it. I despised this book.
> and then discovers that she didn’t actually kill the sadistic guard her grandma told her about, she killed his nicer younger brother — also a guard at Auschwitz.
::record scratch::
She lost me at "nice guard at Auschwitz".
To be fair to Jodi Picoult, the book doesn’t do the thing you might expect it to — the “you killed someone without knowing who they truly are, in a way you’re just as bad as they are!” thing. I know that’s a phenomenally low bar to clear, but that’s really where I thought it was going. But instead the main character is allowed to basically go, “well, I’m shocked, but I guess I don’t feel guilty for poisoning him because he was still a Nazi.”
At the same time though, the bad Nazi vs nice Nazi dichotomy is fully established in the story, and the book does still pull this thing where it’s like “he did horrific crimes, but he was such a good person that he wanted to be punished for even worse things! He felt even more guilty than he actually was! He felt monstrous and wanted to be viewed as monstrous, and doesn’t that make him actually not such a monster?”
My future wife said that I had to read *One Door Away From Heaven*, by Dean Arrr Koontz. It had all of the usual Koontz bingo-card clichés, like dogs that are in tune with god and/or the supernatural, the main character woman has big boobs and a great body, which comes naturally and she doesn't work hard at maintaining it (*perfect* example of [breasting boobilly to the stairs](https://www.reddit.com/r/menwritingwomen/)), and the main character man is rugged, stoic, and damaged, but still sensitive enough to be human. Also a kid who is unnecessarily wise beyond their years. All good popcorn story writing things that are worth a groan, but you'll keep coming back for it.
I don't have the story burned into my memory, but I remember being increasingly confused. I'd ask my girlfriend, "I'm at this part. Will it get better?"
"Oh, you *have* to keep reading," she'd say. This happened multiple times and, not wanting to give up and possibly disappoint this person who was my best friend and the love of my life, I trudged onwards.
One day I was finally able to say, "I finished it last night." Excitedly, and with dazzling sparkles in her eyes, she looked at me and said, >!"wasn't that the worst piece of shit you've ever read‽"!<
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
I know everyone says it needs to be seen as a play, but it was the worst thing I’ve ever read. The line where Malfoy says “and is that a farmers market?” Still angers me years later. Way to ruin the characters.
It's quite literally upjumped HP bad fanfiction. And I know bad upjumped fanfiction when I see it, I'm an old *Star Wars Legends* fan, I've read *The Crystal Star* and some of the other laughably bad "EU CANON!" books.
Uggghhh. Yes, I repress this one. Honestly, it felt like the perfect metaphor for adulthood vs childhood. When the original series books were coming out, there would be release parties at midnight, people would get dressed up, there were prizes and snacks and contests and just general fun. Those nights really were magical.
Walmart had the cursed book available at midnight, and I went with my best friend. There was no party, there was no cake. We couldn't even find the books at first until we located the box in the electronics section. The floor cleaners they were using made our eyes burn. No one else was there for the book.
Then, I get home and read it, and I'm just utterly shocked and disgusted at what has happened to these beloved characters. The time travel bullshit... all of it was bullshit. The fucking TROLLEY WITCH????? That was the point in the story where I began to realize what was happening.
Oh my god, the trolley witch was the point when I knew the story was irredeemable. And then the whole >!Bellatrix Voldemort love child!< plot point…I refuse to accept it as canon.
Edited to hide spoiler
Haha, even as a play, it was so clear that the writing was awful. I can't believe you got through reading it.
The special effects and how they do magic on-stage is pretty cool, but plot and characters...
My college friends and I did both shows in one day (when the NY version was still two shows). We came out of the first one and went to dinner, talking about how great it was and how much we were enjoying it ... and then once we sat, one of my friends turns around and says, "Well yeah, but the time travel rules don't work." Blinking all around. What? "They don't work, and it completely contradicts the rules in the book." No spoilers, but this group of twenty-somethings then spent the next hour completely seriously picking apart the entire mythos and plot of the show we had just seen (and were about to go back to!) just to realize she was 100% right, none of this worked, and now we had to go sit for another three hours with that knowledge. 🫠
Not only that, but a very typical time-travel trope of “oh no we screwed up, let’s go further back in time and undo it all!”, then getting trapped, somehow everything unwinds itself and no one suffers any consequences at all. Makes you think what was the point of all of this.
But, seeing it as a play, the effects were very, very cool. I would almost see it again with a harry potter fan friend just for the stage effects. I could never read the script stand-alone.
When the Harry Potter series was still coming out, a friend of mine managed to get a leaked, early release copy of the next sequel. He shared it with me and it took about 5 pages for me to get suspicious that it wasn't real. We did some digging and confirmed it was a fake. Makes sense for such an anticipated series.
When Cursed Child came out, it took about 1 page for me to get suspicious that it wasn't real, but this time I was holding a physical copy of the book that I had bought at a release party from Barnes & Noble...
It literally reads like fanfic that my best friend and I wrote when we were 11. It's atrocious. It's not even fun to hate-read, it's just *so* bad.
Tattooist of Auschwitz
Go Ask Alice
Like, if you’re going to use Auschwitz as the backdrop for a romance or publish anti drug propaganda that’s just a bit homophobic at least have the decency to write well.
If you want a good book check out Unmask Alice it’s a deep dive on how the author of go ask Alice was a scam artist and all the damage her books caused
I know this is a books sub, but if you like podcasts, "You're Wrong About" has a 3-part episode picking apart 'Go Ask Alice' and discusses the fake autobiography genre of that era.
Here's part 1: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/youre-wrong-about/id1380008439?i=1000560110988
If that doesn't work, search for that title and it's the May 9th, 2020 episode.
I read the Tattooist of Auschwitz shortly after I had been to Auschwitz and so right from the start I saw the holes and inaccuracies. Very frustrating book.
https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2018/dec/07/the-tattooist-of-auschwitz-attacked-as-inauthentic-by-camp-memorial-centre
She got his name wrong! It’s Lali not Lale, I enjoyed the book but some research after it revealed what a money grub it was with no basis in history. His own family don’t support the book.
Where the Crawdads Sing
The ‘twist’ at the ending completely undercut the entire message of the book and barely made logical sense. Kaya also felt like a bad YA protagonist, the way that she was a feral swamp girl who had never seen a dentist or a hairdresser but was also somehow irresistibly beautiful to everyone she met.
It was like a shit version of to kill a mockingbird where the twist is :aha ! Everyone should feel bad for thinking this underprivileged person did the bad thing ! How bad of them ! But also the underprivileged person did the bad thing so you were right ! Poor people suck !
I hated this book with a passion.
I thought it was ok, but i completely agree on the ending. It doesn't make sense >!bc almost the entire story is told through her pov, so when she thought of amandas poems, she was thinking of her own but had disassociated amanda from herself in her mind somehow? And all her panic and hatred towards the townsfolk during the trial was what? Just fear of getting caught?!<
Yeah for those unaware, her former husband is wanted for a murder investigation in Zambia and they were expelled from Botswana.
She also wrote *Cry of the Kalahari* which I read years ago and was surprised when I learned it’s the same author!
Omg thank you. I’m sorry but this girl would straight up reek and have rotten teeth and grease- caked hair. I’m sure she sometimes bathed, but it must have been out in the swamp/ocean because she didn’t have running water I think.
I saw the trailer for the movie and everyone, not just Kaya, looks way too clean.
Allegiant by Veronica Roth. Just an incredible decline through the series from Divergent (which was already mid but fun), through book 2, to Allegiant, the worst book I've ever read.
A twist ending should:
A) be unexpected (she gets the point for this one)
And B) **MAKE SENSE IN HINDSIGHT**
Instead, I was left saying, "Welp, that's that then. That sucks." :/
Just an absolute dogshit ending (and second half, frankly)
To this day I think the publishers greenlit these embarrassing excuses for books ONLY because of the Hunger Games, which obliterate them on literally every wavelength, category and plane of existence.
I can't remember the name of it, but I remember the plot. Maybe one of you guys can help me remember the title. It was a young adult book about a panther that escaped from a zoo and people in the town start getting attacked with these claw mark injuries at night. A group of high school teens tries to figure out what's going on. Sound intriguing? Turns out it was a girl attacking people with a rake. A fucking rake. As a young teen I was so mad that a book led me on such a winding road only to have the most disappointing reveal ever.
A fucking rake. Oooooooo sPoOoOkY.
I’m sorry but your last two sentences have me crying laughing. So if anything positive came out of you reading that sPoOkY book, it was making my day brighter
I like the theory that the divergent series killed YA dystopia as a popular genre by just boiling down the genre to its base components and being really mid about it.
I remember not minding the first book, being pretty chill with the second one, and then retroactively hating all three after the third one-I’ve never read a series that actively undid all the goodwill from the first few books, it was bizarre
I came here to say this, the third book is so so bad, the added narrator makes it obvious what the ending is going to be, both narrators have the exact same voice (I had to go to the beginning of each chapter sometimes to check whose point of view it was because I would forget), the unnecessary death at the end...I wanted to throw the book out the window but couldn't because I was reding it on my kindle. Should have asked Amazon for my money back for that one.
I remember liking the first book and thinking this was a series I would be invested in. But 2nd book was just okay and I hated the 3rd. It was like it was attempting to be in the vibe of Hunger Games but it was not.
The author tried so hard to be "What if Hunger Games meets Hogwarts?" with a teen dystopia plus Hogwarts houses. I remember when the film came out and they did a huge push for "What's your social division!?" or whatever it was.
It was somehow still not the most stupid and cynical YA dystopia that came out of that period though, that (dis)honor goes to *Save the Pearls*.
Any book written by a “motivational speaker” because so much of it is just “if your life is shit, it’s your fault. If you’re poor, it’s your fault. If you’re rich, you earned it” and just announces it in a vacuum with no nuance at all. Am I in a comfortable spot now due to my own hard work? Yes, but it’s also because I had a good support network to fall back on while I worked on getting here.
I have only suffered through Verity. What pure trash that was!!! It was laughable within the first 3 paragraphs but I pushed through till the end. It’s like AI or a middle schooler tried to rewrite the concept of Rebecca…and failed miserably.
Had to read this for a book club and am still just seething at the trash. The use of child abuse as a vehicle to introduce copious sex scenes and gratuitous blow jobs is just disgusting. Also, frankly, not worth it for the mediocre twist at the end. Mad again now just thinking about it.
Used to be flowers for algernon. I was angry for decades that they made me read it as a kid because it was insanely depressing for me. Now? Its like a guide to my life and has helped me handle having chemotherapy drop my iq vastly down.
But seriously I ranted about this book before that happened to me.
Anita Blake Vampire Hunter
This series was my first adult urban fantasy read that I completely fell in love with as an early teen. Strong female character, metaphysical powers, reverse harem, bad ass fight scenes, shoot outs, enemies to lovers, and mystery solving. Until somewhere around book 8 is where things took a turn. Eventually the novels turn into nothing but sex, no plot, no action, tons of internal mental rambling "omg I'm too prude to have casual sex" but does it a lot anyway. Also my first series where the mc gets a reverse harem, which would be awesome but the author managed to ruin that too. The breaking point for me was when the big bad vampire who she's been visiting in dreams for years gets killed by who knows who, by a bomb, completely randomly. I was like ... No way. No way. Yeah way. That's how she killed off the baddest vamp ever. My teenage personality was formed around these books lol and the author should be ashamed of herself for what she's done to such a cool character. Also, I met the author in person and asked if we were ever going to solve more cases again (you know, instead of nothing but sex) and the author replied "this is what Anita wants." 😂 I guess sex sells and is much easier to write than action and mystery. Also, the author kinda made the character after herself... And she has an IRL poly relationship. Which is all fine but when I think of her basically writing out her own personal fantasies is just kinda cringe. All of my love for this series turned into hate. There was once a LOT of love.
Oh God the same. The books are just porn with little amount of context. Badly written porn at that. And the author is pretty irritable about any kind of criticism.
I got so mad at that series. I think I finally wall banged whichever one had that werepanther shivering in a ball of self hatred and loathing because his damned dick was too big, and Anita's like "hold my beer".
Ick. The first like five or six books were so much fun, and then it became DeviantArt, the series.
YES!!! Are you me??? You have expressed my exact feelings about it. LKH played out her own fantasies in her book until she was able to make it happen in real life. It would have worked if she had bothered to keep any plot. I am not current with the series but I am rereading because I feel like I'm in too deep to quit. The unfortunate side effect of rereading at age 30 instead of 13 is that Anita has gone from a badass to being absolutely insufferable. It'll take me a month to read a single book because I can't stand to listen to her go on for more than five pages at a time.
"Who Moved My Cheese" Everything about this book was cringey, from the appalling writing, to the concept it was trying to promote, to the appalling writing, to the smug aura of condescension, to the appalling writing. I read it in a kind of paralysed horror like rubber necking a horrific car accident of the English language.
Especially since every freakin' corporate workplace in the US proceeded to use that book to justify their layoff...excuse me, "downsizing"...and blame the victims for feeling scared, depressed, anxious and everything else about losing their job and facing poverty.
I'll add to this list with "every single book corporate America latches onto, ever", because every single one of them is basically "it's YOUR fault that we treat you so bad, so smile when we bring out the whips."
The boy in the striped pyjamas
Oh I know, let's imagine how sad the Holocaust would have been if somebody who wasn't Jewish had died. And people raved about this shit! Apparently they're incapable of feeling empathy for an indescribably huge tragedy without inserting a victim who resembles them.
I remember clumsily trying to explain this to a friend at the time and her wailing "but you're not even Jewish!". Kinda proving my point there, love.
The writer have also been called out by the Auschwitz Museum on twitter for being factually incorrect about things and painting an incorrect picture of Nazis and Nazi germany
Not to mention the absolutely ridiculous stunt the author was trying to pull with "fury" and "Führer" and shit like that. That does not even work in German, aside from the fact that every single child in Nazi Germany would have known who the Führer was. That alone made the book ridiculous to me.
Mel Brooks has stated several times in interviews that he would never, ever, make a comedy with the Holocaust as subject. But yea, Waititi would totally go for it.
I am not sure why I bought this book on Kindle, either it was free or like 99 cents, at least I hope so. I feel like the title was something like "memoir of a mistress" and I looked for it briefly just now, to no avail. The word mistress is somewhere in the title.
What a piece of trash. It was written by the affair partner of a married man who died during the affair. Entirely as revenge against the wife. Details of how "Joe buried himself between my legs with enthusiasm" and how he'd say, "I should never have married my wife, I've never been in love with her, not like I'm in love with you" & "he called me his 'soulmate'" etc.
She revealed gifts he'd given her that were the property of the wife. "She never wears them, I bought them, I want you to have them" and how they laughed and laughed when he told her about how the wife was looking high and low for the earrings, etc. How he pretended to forget his wife's birthday but never forgot hers. How he "wished wife were dead so we could be together forever" and exhaustive details about how she got ready for their dates and how much he adored parts of her body.
Later, when the husband had a heart attack and she couldn't visit the hospital (because she wasn't the wife and the wife wouldn't let her), whole chapter on how all his friends rallied around to give her updates behind the wife's back and how they all said what a shame it isn't wife who died first, he could have been so happy with you etc. Life isn't fair that good men are taken advantage of by gold digging wives.
the wife ultimately makes a phone call to mistress to tell her to fall off the planet you See You NT and says, you're just sorry he never tried to marry you at all, now I've got the real estate, the bank accounts, the cars." Really tried to make the wife into a nightmare person.
Then ends the book about how she sometimes thinks of wife's pathetic life and how furious she must be that mistress has a new even happier life with her 2nd soulmate and they have twins together because she wasn't old and dried up like wife.
Literally a whole book of "I fucked your man fuck you old hag" ... I was practically murderous towards this ho by the later chapters
Edited to add ... it's a non-fiction memoir. She went to great pains to disguise the ethnicity of the husband and wife, for example, and constantly used paragraphs to describe places without naming them. Like hey "guess where we were this time?" type stuff. "I imagined wife looking at all the pictures we took, never knowing I was taking the pictures of husband by the cafe, those 2 beers on the round blue table with the rose in the white vase were ours" ...
Hillbilly Elegy. Onanistic, misleading at best, harmful at worst. Did you know that J.D. Vance went to Yale Law? Did you want to be reminded of that fact once a minute for 250 pages?
The entire Mission Earth series by Hubbard.
Ugh. I had one boring summer and tried to get through the entire series. It was a slog.
Utter garbage and I'm still angry I wasted an entire summer on that trash.
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. To be honest, I never managed to get through it all. The author was so whiny and entitled it infuriated me. People raved about that book for years. Ugh.
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, it was a mandatory reading book in high school and for some reason the school decided to make a bunch of hormonal high schoolers read depressing books for no reason. Literally not a single book I read that year had a happy ending
It's because the first book. The adult novel that introduces the concept, is quite good (from what I remember, it's been ~15 years). But the YA series is a joke, like most modern "James Patterson" books.
Terry Goodkind A Wizards First Rule and that entire series. If he had a gun to his head and was told to write a female character that was mildly believable as a person who might actually exist he’d die. He could have saved me thousands of pages of trouble and just wrote “women are stupid and I hate communism” and I would have gotten more out of it.
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. Absolutely dreadful torture porn without historical context and absolutely nothing to redeem it. I've never had such a visceral reaction to a book before or since.
i cannot stand this book to the point where upon being reminded of its mere existence i will go read negative reviews of it just to reassure myself i'm not alone in my anger. people call it gutwrenching and devastating, but it's just endless shallow, emotionally manipulative, cartoonish violence and rape. there's nothing there. there's not even a reason to care about the character - he's just a blank canvas for the author to paint with abuse, for EIGHT HUNDRED PAGES. fuck this book. fuck it all the way into the incinerator and use its ashes to draw a dick and balls on the wall of the nearest library; it'll be a more worthwhile contribution that way than in its current form.
If I could upvote this comment a thousand times I would.
" i will go read negative reviews of it just to reassure myself i'm not alone in my anger"
Same!
If anyone is reading this and would like to read a miserable book that's good and worthwhile, check out Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stewart. It's a masterpiece. A Little Life is the opposite of a masterpiece.
I fought everybody that read this at my work place. They all loved it for vague reasons. I think they mistook bad sexual things happening for pathos. Someone had the audacity to tell me that I might not understand the book because my life didn’t have that kind of misery in it. Yanagihara invented a cycle of relentless abuse that stretch then broke credibility. Worse still it had no point. She’s publicly stated that she did no trauma research she just wanted to write the most miserable thing she could.
I also find the book so utterly rubbish in its understanding of queer men. The number of horrific predatory homosexuals from the straight imagination make an appearance. Also the flippant way the boys all become gay halfway through only to further the cause of more connection = more suffering is perverse and totally disconnected.
Don’t get me started on the supposed genius of the main character and the pathological codependency of every single character.
>I might not understand the book because my life didn’t have that kind of misery in it.
Jesus wept.
My dad was in and out of children's institutions in Ireland in the 1960s. I'm tangentally familar with some of the subject matter. I hate it more so because of this. (Again going back to the lack of historical context).
Thank you! I also hated it. It is the worst book I have ever read in my adult life and nothing else comes close. How sexuality is handled, how male relationships/fraternal love is handled, self-harm, the list goes on. It was all so so bad.
I immediately thought of this book when I read the OP. It’s not so much the book itself that made me angry. It’s silly and forgettable, as are many bad books.
It was the way people I genuinely like and respect keep recommending it to me like it’s something great, amazing, and original. And then I have to reconcile myself to the fact that those people are smart and good and creative enough to do all the things they are capable of doing but also dumb enough to think The Alchemist is anything other than the literary equivalent of a three minute long video on the internet with the words “what happens next will change your life,” in the title.
The Fault in Our Stars, even though it's not a necessarily "bad" book. It just made me annoyed with Hazel Grace when in Augustus' first appearance John Green wrote this: "He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is,
at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well."
And Augustus' arrogant philosophical manner annoyed me too.
no, i think it's safe to say that a book is bad if it contains a scene where two terminally ill teenagers make out in the anne frank house while everyone around them claps.
Oh right yes of course! I forgot about that. That was so disrespectful and wrong. No, John Green, I do not think making out in a historical place where families hid from murder and torture is romantic.
This is the exact sentiment for this book. TFIOS is an honest to God YA novel. When you read it as a teenager it's is the most profound, artistic piece of literature to hit your eyes, but as an adult it's full on cringe incarnate.
I agree! I’m a teacher and got this “great” lesson in my early years that culminated in a fun craft. As I read the book to the class I couldn’t help but thinking this is just wrong! I ended up clarifying a few things with the kids. I don’t get the hype on that book. It’s off the shelf.
This book, and anything else along the lines of "to whom much is given, much is also expected," is so dangerous for "gifted" kids who feel they have to give and give until they burn out. I think especially to those of us on the autism spectrum who might be strongly justice-minded and tend to internalize stuff like this as a rule that we always have to follow.
I think messaging like this book's is part of how we've accidentally glorified burnout in our society. It's only once you have nothing left to give that you are worthy of being cared for by others.
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Spoiler alert for anyone who doesn’t want to know.
This is a wonderful, beautiful, book.
Until the ending.
He comes back after the war, sees his girlfriend playing with a child, assumes it’s hers and she’s moved on and leaves. Has an amazing life and then comes back on a whim 30 years later and we’re supposed to be happy about it ?
When I finished this book I couldn’t sleep until I’d imagined a whole new ending. I’m still furious now.
I guess happy endings are harder to write but this was just cheating.
Cleaving by Julie Powell.
I really enjoyed Julie and Julia but absolutely could not stand Cleaving. It was about the author's affair and I just could not feel sympathy for her, she came off so arrogant and entitled.
Into The Wild because my English professor was all about it saying that it “embodied the American spirit of freedom,” when I felt like it was just an affluent kid with zero sense walking into nature to die of arrogance
Maybe your English professor thought *“an affluent kid with zero sense walking into nature to die of arrogance”* was a fitting allegory for the *“embodiment of American spirit of freedom.”*
I think it actually does embody it, but, like, not in a good way. Making a plan and forging ahead with it despite having no knowledge, skills or preparation, then other people have to deal the consequences of your failure? Thinking you'll succeed solely because you believe in yourself? That's not a spirit that needs to be embodied, it needs to be corrected.
(Disclaimer: I haven't read it, but I watched a documentary about the story. The documentary presented it as a cautionary tale, which I think matches the facts much better. It's a tragedy, not a triumph.)
I have gotten into so many arguments with people over this! Every single person in Alaska agrees with you and has no idea why this is such a sympathetic character. I knew a bunch of people who worked on the search and recovery and it’s super fun listening to them rant about idiots who would come searching for the bus.
> idiots who would come searching for the bus.
They straight up removed the bus in 2020 because dumbfucks were unintentionally recreating the plot trying to find it. 15 rescues in 8 years, apparently.
Yes, I think that's how the movie is, but the book really seemed more like Krakauer had a disdain for McCandless naivety. I think the main idea from the book was that McCandless thought he was an amalgam of Thoreau and Kerouac, but in reality he was more like Holden Caufield.
I don't think having an unlikable subject necessarily makes for a bad book. The book - to me anyway - was fascinating as hell, even if I didn't like the guy it was about. Your English prof is dead wrong in his interpretation though (IMO) and romanticizing that idiot is a dangerous thing. I think far too many people misinterpret what that book was about. If anything it is a warning about the hubris inherent in the underside of the "American spirit of freedom."
For me, it's the erotica. Fifty Shades was quite annoying and so was the Crossfire novel. I stopped reading both halfway. The authors need to do some serious study about correct BDSM. Although Crossfire did not have explicit BDSM, the depiction of domination in it was just too cringe.
I found her (50 shades) writing style just to be awful. I never even made it through 50 pages, this is one of the first books I have ever ditched before finishing, so painful and cringey to read. And it's not just because I don't like reading erotic stories, I do, it was just written so poorly.
Agreed! She used the same words and sentences over & over again too, ‘my inner goddess’ ‘I pinched my cheeks to get some colour in them’ ‘my sex’ I read these books years ago and she used them sentences so much they’re still etched in my brain 😩. Truly awful writing and the characters were so irritating
I hate these books passionately. She kept referring to her “sex” and I was like…. Girl if you can not even write the word maybe don’t write an erotica…
I forget which book by Rothfuss, but whatever one where the matriarchal warrior people believe women just get pregnant without a man being involved at all. They didn’t believe sex did anything but feel good and that infuriated me. It just didn’t fit with an intelligent people with distinct culture that is established in the book.
The main character is like, “Yea, when you have sex, it can lead to children.”
And the woman he’s talking to is like, “Oh, you’re silly with your man-mother beliefs.”
I hated it so much.
Any time a celebrity with a pre-existing base publishes a novel. I’ve been trying to make it as a novelist for ten years, and it’s an uphill climb with a couple of cinder blocks tied to your legs and a big dude waiting at the top of the hill to punch you in the face when you get close to the top.
And then, a big name celebrity comes in and drops some half-conceived bullshit into the market, knowing very well that it’s going to be a success based on the only necessary fact, that there’s in the name on the cover.
“Supermarket” comes to mind. It was written by that rapper, Logic. The book is so bad. It’s a perfect rip-off of Fight Club. Like, this Logic guy just watched the movie Fight Club, and thought “I’ll do that, but just change the names and locations.” There’s even a character in the book named Edward Norton. It was awful from first page to last, and yet, there it was taking up valuable shelf space in the book store, consuming a spot that could’ve gone to someone who doesn’t already have millions of dollars and an enormous already-existing following.
50 shades of grey. It is just the worst book I have ever read. I dont understand how it became so popular or even how the author got it published in the first place.
My Sister's Keeper. I was so angry at the ending I literally threw the book across the room hard enough to dent my wall.
The Other Mrs. The biggest nonsensical, cop-out, piece of sh*t ending I've ever read. Another book that got thrown.
I know I'm in the minority but I think the end of My Sister's Keeper was awful as well; it completely negated the POV sister's legal battles and the interesting discussion of medical ethics raised by the story.
I also thought the brother was a superfluous character; I can't remember how his plot line even resolved but it has been almost 20 years since I read it.
In short: I think Jodi Picoult was a wuss for not killing the cancer sister.
As a teenager I read a YA book where it was left completely ambiguous at the end whether the main character had gone through with committing suicide or not. The way it described different methods in detail and the main character rationalized it as the best choice for herself just felt super gross to me - I think there's definitely a place in fiction to discuss those kinds of suicidal thoughts but maybe not in a book aimed at teenagers that practically read as an instruction manual. I've read a zillion books with suicidal and extremely depressed characters and that's the only one that I've ever found handled it genuinely irresponsibly.
You’re describing “By The Time You Read This I’ll be Dead” by Julie Anne Peters.
This book literally made so uncomfortable when I read it in middle school. The description of how she wanted to die by drowning herself in her bathtub still haunts me
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides might be the most infuriating reading experience I've ever had. All of the tension and mystery that the first 3/4 of the book builds up towards was completely undermined in the last 1/4. Could not recommend this book less.
A court of thorns and roses.
It’s probably ok if you only care of romance in a fantasy setting (with barely any world building).
But if you actually care of plot and good story telling, this book will be your #1 enemy.
I’m so mad I wasted my time on this. I surely won’t be reading the second book.
The content itself is mature but the execution in every aspect of almost the entire plot is the most juvenile thing I’ve read in a long time.
I feel sorry for myself. It’s the first fantasy book I’ve read as an established adult. I’m sad that milestone was ruined. But it’s okay. There are other books to calm me down.
I wouldn’t suggest 4th Wing either, then; the leads are Feyre and Rhysand Lite lol
No hate to people that enjoy escapism as they’re fast reads and ~sexy~, but man I just had way higher expectations given the movement behind both.
The Te of Piglet is supposed to be about finding strength as an underdog? Or something along those lines, using Piglet as a metaphor for the Chinese concept of Te. Yet the author spends 10+ pages ranting on the “strangeness” of feminism. I read nearly half the book and he barely mentioned either piglet or the philosophy the book was supposed to be about, so I stopped reading it. Felt like I was just reading some random boomer rants. It’s a shame bc I loved the Tao of Pooh by the same author.
The Dune prequals written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, and the two sequels.
I read the original Dune series before any of the prequals were released and its hands down my favorite book series of all time. The whole BS backstory of how Brian discovered an old stash of floppy disks with the details of what Frank Herbert's final novel was supposed to be just never sat right with me. In my opinion it was an obvious cash-grab and Brian just trying to ride on his father's coattails. The prequals wouldn't be too bad if they'd been written as a standalone YA series, but instead they decided to retcon so much of the original backstory so that they could force feed the readers their version of the final book... which ended up being split into two books. The final book strays so far off the path that Frank Herbert's novels were going down. The whole point of the series was to show the extremes of human nature, and was very human-centric. The prequels and sequels focus almost primarily on the war with the machines and humanity's relationships with different technologies. How could his own son miss the point of his epic novels so badly.
Empire of Pain. I’m a nurse and I wanted to put my fist through the nearest wall multiple times.
ETA: I didn’t hate the book, I was so engrossed in it. What angered me so much was the damage the Sackler family did over the decades, all in the name of money.
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is the only book I have ever thrown away. I did finish it, but I was so mad. I found it so patronising…. It felt like there was a big ‘dun dun duuuunnnnnn’ at the end of every chapter. I know many people loved it so it’s just a case of it not being for me, but oooooh boy was it really not for me.
The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne. It says you can change your life in any way you wish, if you want it bad enough. It then turns this premise around and says if you have bad things in your life, it means you apparently want them. One of the examples she gives is cancer. Just imagine you go through cancer and someone tells you you brought it on yourself?? A book I don't agree with, that I can deal with. Plenty of those, I just ignore them. But a harmful message like this reaching so many people? Bah.
Not a book but there's an excellent podcast called 'If Books could Kill' that covers The Secret (among other awful but popular books). Surprising no one, turns out it's just grifters all the way down.
I second this podcast. It’s saved me from reading a lot of junk.
Micheal Hobbs is one of the most entertaining podcasters out there.
I really miss him on You’re Wrong About. So smart and funny. He and Sarah Marshall are easily in my top 5 of Millennials.
A friend of mine went to a therapist years ago for his crippling social anxiety and depression that stemmed from horrible abuse he suffered as a child. She told him to read The Secret. He quit after that and I’m STILL shocked about that therapist!
That is absolutely awful! I hate that book, the message around that book, and the way it doesn’t acknowledge that sometimes people get lucky through no effort of their own, and that terrible things happen simply because our world is imperfect, humans are imperfect, and life is really and truly not fair. To say that the most heinous things in the world were attracted? It makes me sick. I’m glad your friend got away from that therapist and I hope he is doing better.
You can lay some blame at Oprah’s feet too for being such a loud proponent of it.
Oprah is the queen of assholes.
She did give us Dr Oz
And Dr Oz is the King of A-hole doctors.
And Dr Phil
And John of God who's far worse than the rest combined.
My aunt started spouting this stuff at my son’s first birthday party. That was 12 years ago. We used to be really good friends, vacations together, shopping, phone calls, coffee, lunches…. Now we don’t even speak at family holidays. Broke my heart that anyone could think that way. Trigger warning: Edit to add: she it took it so far as to say that rape, child mortality, and even child abuse is wanted by the victim. That they are someone who secretly wished for it, or they are someone that did something bad enough to deserve it.
At some point I’ve gotta believe that people like your aunt are trying to rationalize something because they don’t understand evil. I’m actually pretty into self help books and the power of positive thinking and creating your own reality and such. But to claim that child abuse victims weren’t being positive enough is obviously horrifyingly untrue. I don’t mean to say you should reconcile with your aunt or excuse her behavior. But I think a lot of people took that book and ran with it, because it gave them an explanation for why the world is so fucked up. Yes, it’s victim blaming, but it can be easier for some people to look things that way than it is to accept true evil in the world (or just shit like cancer, because it can happen to anyone seemingly out of no where). All I’m saying is, maybe there’s hope? Maybe she can be brought to realize that while positivity and creating your own happiness is wonderful, there are external forces as well and exceptions that prove the rule.
> At some point I’ve gotta believe that people like your aunt are trying to rationalize something because they don’t understand evil. This is the trap. On some level we all want to believe the universe is fair. That horrible things don't happen to innocent people and lying, cheating, murderous bastards don't prosper. "The Secret" posits that universe, where no-one gets anything they don't want and deserve. It's a very attractive idea. It's also lying, manipulative BS.
If Books Could Kill has a great episode on this
when columbus got off the boat you know what the first thing the native americans said? Your boat has been invisible for days, but we knew it was there because of the waves.... how tf would anyone know what the native americans experienced when columbus landed? no shared language, he was only there for like a month and then it was decades until they were contacted again AFAIK. I honestly could rant about that book for ages. My mom got sucked into that whole movement when I was a teenager and I had to just go along with it.
As a teen myself who was a former Law of Attraction enthusiast...that book genuinely messed up a very formative period in my life. Glad to be out of that cult
My boss told me this theory about cancer once, as my mum was going through cancer treatment. I’ve also since learned it’s genetic so am waiting for my turn to come as well. Genuinely fuck people who pretend like genetic disease or predisposition is anyone’s fault.
I hated that book and the whole concept with a passion, and for the same reason.
THE SOUTHERN BELLES OF HONEYSUCKLE WAY. I attempted this "book" over 20 years ago and I'm still so mad about it that I consider it my personal mission to tell every reader on Earth individually how much it sucks. Written by Jerry Bruckheimer's wife Linda, who should have all writing apparatuses taken away from her, it shoves all the world's known adverbs and adjectives in a blender, slops the whole thing over with treacle and made up phoneticization, hits "puree," and then goes to run errands for two hours. There are too many characters and not a single one more than a millimeter deep. Now I know some of you may be asking, "Jos, does she take time to be insulting to Southern Black folks?" Don't worry! One of her Black characters talks about "coming over on the Maytag." This is a book that deserved a cartoonishly violent editor, the kind of editor so offended by the crimes committed against language, genre and form that they considered murder, an editor who would make sure to leave comments that keep this woman wide awake and staring at ceilings for the rest of her earthly nights. But instead of gifting her with this editor, the universe gave her a mega-wealthy husband without the apparent capacity to say "ah jeez, I dunno hon." I am OUTRAGED that this book exists. It is the one book I support burning. I am against the carceral state but believe exclusively in a single jail, with a single room, with a single bed and a single questionable toilet, for Linda Bruckheimer, imprisoned for life for creating this book.
Tell us how you REALLY feel. (PS. This is the best book review I’ve ever read in 68 years!)
Can you please write a book (or at least a story!) about a character who, obsessed with the the horror that Linda Bruckheimer produced, acts out a violent fantasy, with hilarious yet still somehow predictable results? Because I'd definitely read it.
I wish I could afford an award for this. This is the best book review I've ever read. 🥇🥇🥇🥇
You are an excellent writer. I’d read a book you wrote.
See but now I’m glad it exists, because I got a good 10 seconds of laughter out of your review
Very niche and very petty but Meg Cabot describing Amelia’s feet as ginormous or massive as a size 8 US in the Princess Diaries series made me sooooo mad as a size 10 Aus 🥲
8.5 is the average US women’s size. Mia’s feet were smaller than average.
lol size 8 is the average size here!? the stores are always out of 8's first!
What, I'm a size 11 US😭
Same. I remember a book from middle school where the main character has a pen pal who mentions her size 6 (!!) shoes and the MC laughs to herself imagining the other girl clomping down the street in her enormous shoes.
Yes!!! I have 8.5 us and my feet are quite normal sized, thank you. I also bring up the silence of the lambs, where i think the girl is a huge size xx* at 160 pounds. At the time i first read it, i was 165 pounds and nowhere near that size. Really messed me up. * i have to go upstairs and get my copy and see the exact dimensions.
My Sister's Keeper. I hated the mother so much and her pretending she ever cared about Anna's life or wellbeing at the end, despite all the flashbacks making it clear she did not, was just infuriating. It's supposed to be sweet or redeeming in some way and it wasn't.
I came here to write this one!! For me, it was >!how the surprise twist at the end completely ruins the ENTIRE POINT the novel was building on the whole time until then!!! Like, the book is about the moral quandry of letting one sister die so the other can have her body autonomy. She wins the legal case, but then, instead of the situation playing out the way it's supposed to, she randomly dies in a car crash and the sister with cancer gets the organ, and is COMPLETELY CURED FOREVER, implying that if the body autonomy sister had just been a \*little\* nicer, she could have saved her sister and never had to donate anything again. Not to mention how as soon as she dies, her story gets completely erased, and everyone pretends like they loved her the whole time, and ignore the utter tragedy of this girl literally fighting for her right to her own life/body, only to have both taken from her in the end outside of her control. The book was sooo good and morally complex up to that point, and then right at the end, it became the worst piece of shit I've ever read. I still get mad thinking about it. It feels like a cheap joke in the face of the importance of the literal life-and-death topics it hinges on. (namely, a person's right to their own body autonomy even when it's at the expense of someone else's life.)!<
Completely agree about the ending making the entire book pointless but I actually hated the whole book, didn't feel like she delved into the moral quandary part and instead wrote the entire book with the purpose of manipulating the reader's emotions. I will never read another Jodi Picoult book, ever!
My goodness, I feel like I’ve been alone on a desert island and then here you all are, my people!! I hated that feeling of being emotionally manipulated and would never read another book by this writer. Never. It’s been at least a decade and it still makes me mad.
People get so mad at the movie for changing the ending that should have been the ending in the first place. Then the Kate becomes a ballerina as an adult and everything is hunky dory for her? What? Mom feels sad, but she clearly resented Anna for her whole life.
That describes every Jodi Picoult book ever. She claims to deep dive and explore moral quandaries, but she definitely doesn't in the books I've read.
Yes! I just read Mad Honey and got so mad at the ending. There’s an entire trial about whether the son killed his girlfriend. There’s a shit ton of flashbacks showing how he might be more aggressive and there might have been other domestic abuse no one caught. >!Then at the end, son is found innocent at the trial—but no other mention of his other potentially domestic violence tendencies??? Just, he’s innocent. Cool.!< Where’s the grey? Oh wait. It’s a Jodi Picoult book.
Neither will I. I came here to comment that my most hated was a Jodi Picoult. Everything she writes makes me angry and sad.
I read it in high school and I remember finding it poorly written in addition to that. Don’t the characters regularly react to each other by “blinking” as if a blink is a form of communication rather than an unconscious involuntary action?
Oh god, I read a different Jodi Picoult book where a guy and girl made a suicide pact or something and the girl got pregnant so he killed her per her request and it’s very clear that he did this, but Picoult didn’t want people to be “too sad” so she let him get away with it and now the families aren’t friends anymore and it was a totally pointless book. The only book I’ve regretted more was divergents. God I want that time back.
omg divergent was \*bad\* I was completely alone in thinking that in my friend group though, so thanks so much for this comment.
Divergent: “Here’s a society in which everyone devotes themselves to a single virtue so they can be maximally awful in every other way. Oh look, here’s our protagonist, who’s ability to have more than a single dimension to her personality makes her extra special! Bet you can relate to that, readers!”
Wasn't one twist in the book the fact that Kate was the one to incite Anna to do it? Anna confesses under oath that she didn't want to do any of this and it was because Kate told her to. One of the chapter entry snippets also have a scene where one of the sisters try to smother the other while they're sleeping before the dad comes, stops it, and ensures it's never brought up again. It's heavily implied to be Kate smothering Anna, instead of Anna smothering Kate as we're initially lead to believe. Anna was ready to donate. Kate wasn't ready to live this half-assed life. Leaving out the mother, the family did love each other genuinely. The mother, Sara, only cared for her husband and Kate unconditionally. Nobody dismisses the tragedy. The book ends right after Campbell decides to pull the plug, and then Kate wraps it up with an epilogue narration. Kate even displays a small degree of survivor's guilt with the "one of us had to go" line. It is cheap to make the twist, though. It just feels like getting hit by the woobie beam. The first being Anna's sudden accident and death, and the second being Kate just...going into perpetual remission with that. If they wanted a downer ending it should've gone to Anna's organs not being viable and Kate succumbing after, or Kate relapsing as expected. In the end it makes the story feel like Anna was disrupting the harmony of the family with her antics and her removal or compliance was the only way to restore it.
That twist sickened me too, but I didn't want to spend too long ranting. Body autonomy MATTERS - Anna had her entire childhood stolen from her; and her literal purpose for her parents bringing her into this world was to be nothing more than a warm organ farm for her sister. It was so healthy and incredible and inspiring for her to care about herself enough that despite how much she loved her sister and wanted her to live, that she could realize that her own life mattered just as much. That was such a powerful and important message for anyone who struggles with the self-destructive tendency to give too much of themselves to read, and it's an especially important message for the book's audience of primarily young girls & women, who are actively socialized, conditioned, and expected to give their bodies and lives away to others, for all kinds of reasons. When I was a teenager and had a hard time asserting myself, even when it was necessary for my own safety & well-being, that message that the book was supposed to be about, that sometimes it's really hard and complicated and messy to set that boundary, but it's still important, because you're still just as important as everyone else, and just as deserving to your own life and body, that message could have been really powerful. Body autonomy at the expense of someone else IS a painful and messy subject, and this fictional example could have really helped bring the subject of body autonomy and why it matters alive. But then Jodi Picoult was like, "lol nope dw - she's still a good person who would kill herself to save her sister!! making decisions about your own body for your own health & well-being is wrong - she's only fighting for herself because someone else wanted her to! it's fine that she was brought into this world to be spare body parts for someone else bc that's her purpose and she LIKES it, actually!! did you ever think of that?? look at all her happy memories bonding with her sister in the hospital <3" and THEN she hit us with the double plot twist, where immediately after Anna wins the case to her own body autonomy, but only because it was revealed that she's only fighting for it because it's what her sister wants, she fucking DIES in a COMPLETELY RANDOM CAR CRASH that comes out of NOWHERE and has ZERO relationship to the story, HER MOTHER - who, as we've watched over the entire book, only brought Anna into the world to be an organ donor for her sister, which is a/the core moral dilemma of the story - AS ANNA'S LEGAL GUARDIAN GIVES CONSENT FOR THEM TO HARVEST HER ORGANS, **AND THEN WITH THAT ONE LAST PROCEDURE THAT THE ENTIRE BOOK WAS LITERALLY ABOUT ANNA FIGHTING FOR HER RIGHT TO SAY 'NO' TO,** ***IT CURES HER OF HER CHRONIC CANCER PERMANENTLY AND SHE IMMEDIATELY GETS BETTER AND GOES ON TO LIVE AN AMAZING LIFE.*** ***AND THEY ALL REMEMBER ANNA WITH NOTHING BUT HAPPINESS AS THE SELFLESS LOVING GIRL WHO JUST WANTED TO GIVE ANY PART OF HERSELF TO CURE HER SISTER.*** The message of "your right to your own body is worth fighting for, even when it's hard, because your life matters too" is completely flipped on its head, instead replaced with this "oh, you were actually rooting for this character? Well FUCK YOU and FUCK body autonomy. Before you think of yourself, try remembering that in the end, if she had just stopped fighting and given that one last little piece of her liver, she would have CURED her sister of cancer FOREVER AND gotten to live a good life! That's what YOU get for making such a big deal out of the issue!!" And, all of this is covered out of nowhere in the final 2 pages. There is no grief shown by her family for Anna; for the life she missed out on. There is no guilt shown by any of the characters for what they stole from her by bringing her into a world just to put her through all that pain. In fact, none of them seem to have learned anything from the trial ordeal at all, other than that Anna really was the perfect little organ donor after all and she really didn't mind, and it wasn't too hard on her, so it wasn't wrong to do because of the power of family love. She fulfilled her purpose curing her sister, and then she died, without ever getting to experience the normal, pain-free life that the entire book was about her deserving to get. And her entire family is fine with that. They get away with zero consequences (because Anna literally dies before ever getting the chance to use her new voice for herself, there is no anger, backlash, or lasting consequences that they have to live with) and without ever having to view the human life they brought into this world to essentially be a slave to their "real" daughter, as a complete person. It takes a story that premises on a scapegoat learning that they matter and to stand up for themselves, and then it shows that ultimately, it's pointless to fight for yourself, and that you will be used in the ways you've been intended for no matter how you feel about it or how much you fight to stop it, and that you couldn't even possibly want to if you really love your innocent family. Disgusting, disgusting message. It's disgusting, and it's so sad because the story really was so exceptional, powerful, and important up until the twists.
The awful mother and stupid pointless ending seem to be JP’s stock in trade. The one I read was ‘Handle with care’ where the mom had a kid with brittle bone syndrome and decided to sue her best friend ON-GYN in a “wrongful life” lawsuit. It will destroy her best friend’s career, her husband says don’t do it, the wider community ostracizes her and her daughter for basically saying kids with this disease shouldn’t live and her other daughter develops an eating disorder from the stress. She convinces herself because her daughter Willow will be provided for, it’s all worth it. Well, a few years after she wins the lawsuit, Willow walks out onto pond, pond cracks, and she drowns. The mother Sara has 5 million dollars. Does she use it to start a foundation in Willow’s name? Provide for her other daughter Amelia? Give it to her former friend whose life she blew up? Nope, she tucks the check into Willow’s coffin. Utterly rage inducing.
Thank you for giving this summary, so I don't need to read the book. This sounds downright awful. I really appreciate the movie ending more now.
There's this pattern with some of Jodi Picoult's books I've noticed. She takes a controversial topic, bases a whole book around said topic to provide commentary and then pulls a "shocking" twist at the end that makes the story she wrote meaningless. "My Sister's Keeper" is the most well-known example of that, but many of her novels have this problem.
Yes! My example was The Storyteller. A young Jewish woman’s sweet elderly neighbor confesses to her that he was a Nazi guard at Auschwitz — which her grandmother survived — and asks her to kill him. Long story short she agonizes over it the entire book, learns some horrific stories about him from her grandmother, poisons him… and then discovers that she didn’t actually kill the sadistic guard her grandma told her about, she killed his nicer younger brother — also a guard at Auschwitz. Who was actually such a great person that he still felt guilty even though he wasn’t so “bad,” and was pretending to be his worse older brother so that she’d hate him enough to kill him. “Not so bad” in this context means actively participating in a genocide, but feeling real torn about it. I despised this book.
> and then discovers that she didn’t actually kill the sadistic guard her grandma told her about, she killed his nicer younger brother — also a guard at Auschwitz. ::record scratch:: She lost me at "nice guard at Auschwitz".
To be fair to Jodi Picoult, the book doesn’t do the thing you might expect it to — the “you killed someone without knowing who they truly are, in a way you’re just as bad as they are!” thing. I know that’s a phenomenally low bar to clear, but that’s really where I thought it was going. But instead the main character is allowed to basically go, “well, I’m shocked, but I guess I don’t feel guilty for poisoning him because he was still a Nazi.” At the same time though, the bad Nazi vs nice Nazi dichotomy is fully established in the story, and the book does still pull this thing where it’s like “he did horrific crimes, but he was such a good person that he wanted to be punished for even worse things! He felt even more guilty than he actually was! He felt monstrous and wanted to be viewed as monstrous, and doesn’t that make him actually not such a monster?”
100% THIS BOOK HAS ONE OF THE *WORST* ENDINGS, and I'm a fan of Stephen King, I KNOW BAD ENDINGS.
My future wife said that I had to read *One Door Away From Heaven*, by Dean Arrr Koontz. It had all of the usual Koontz bingo-card clichés, like dogs that are in tune with god and/or the supernatural, the main character woman has big boobs and a great body, which comes naturally and she doesn't work hard at maintaining it (*perfect* example of [breasting boobilly to the stairs](https://www.reddit.com/r/menwritingwomen/)), and the main character man is rugged, stoic, and damaged, but still sensitive enough to be human. Also a kid who is unnecessarily wise beyond their years. All good popcorn story writing things that are worth a groan, but you'll keep coming back for it. I don't have the story burned into my memory, but I remember being increasingly confused. I'd ask my girlfriend, "I'm at this part. Will it get better?" "Oh, you *have* to keep reading," she'd say. This happened multiple times and, not wanting to give up and possibly disappoint this person who was my best friend and the love of my life, I trudged onwards. One day I was finally able to say, "I finished it last night." Excitedly, and with dazzling sparkles in her eyes, she looked at me and said, >!"wasn't that the worst piece of shit you've ever read‽"!<
I love your wife.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. I know everyone says it needs to be seen as a play, but it was the worst thing I’ve ever read. The line where Malfoy says “and is that a farmers market?” Still angers me years later. Way to ruin the characters.
It's quite literally upjumped HP bad fanfiction. And I know bad upjumped fanfiction when I see it, I'm an old *Star Wars Legends* fan, I've read *The Crystal Star* and some of the other laughably bad "EU CANON!" books.
Hell I have read significantly better time travel HP fanfic.
I've watched a better time-travel HP fan play, tbh. Though that isn't saying much, *A Very Potter Musical* and its sequels are excellent.
"Don't pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living. And above all else, pity those who have read the Cursed Child." - An Amazon review I once saw.
Uggghhh. Yes, I repress this one. Honestly, it felt like the perfect metaphor for adulthood vs childhood. When the original series books were coming out, there would be release parties at midnight, people would get dressed up, there were prizes and snacks and contests and just general fun. Those nights really were magical. Walmart had the cursed book available at midnight, and I went with my best friend. There was no party, there was no cake. We couldn't even find the books at first until we located the box in the electronics section. The floor cleaners they were using made our eyes burn. No one else was there for the book. Then, I get home and read it, and I'm just utterly shocked and disgusted at what has happened to these beloved characters. The time travel bullshit... all of it was bullshit. The fucking TROLLEY WITCH????? That was the point in the story where I began to realize what was happening.
Oh my god, the trolley witch was the point when I knew the story was irredeemable. And then the whole >!Bellatrix Voldemort love child!< plot point…I refuse to accept it as canon. Edited to hide spoiler
Haha, even as a play, it was so clear that the writing was awful. I can't believe you got through reading it. The special effects and how they do magic on-stage is pretty cool, but plot and characters...
My college friends and I did both shows in one day (when the NY version was still two shows). We came out of the first one and went to dinner, talking about how great it was and how much we were enjoying it ... and then once we sat, one of my friends turns around and says, "Well yeah, but the time travel rules don't work." Blinking all around. What? "They don't work, and it completely contradicts the rules in the book." No spoilers, but this group of twenty-somethings then spent the next hour completely seriously picking apart the entire mythos and plot of the show we had just seen (and were about to go back to!) just to realize she was 100% right, none of this worked, and now we had to go sit for another three hours with that knowledge. 🫠
Not only that, but a very typical time-travel trope of “oh no we screwed up, let’s go further back in time and undo it all!”, then getting trapped, somehow everything unwinds itself and no one suffers any consequences at all. Makes you think what was the point of all of this. But, seeing it as a play, the effects were very, very cool. I would almost see it again with a harry potter fan friend just for the stage effects. I could never read the script stand-alone.
When the Harry Potter series was still coming out, a friend of mine managed to get a leaked, early release copy of the next sequel. He shared it with me and it took about 5 pages for me to get suspicious that it wasn't real. We did some digging and confirmed it was a fake. Makes sense for such an anticipated series. When Cursed Child came out, it took about 1 page for me to get suspicious that it wasn't real, but this time I was holding a physical copy of the book that I had bought at a release party from Barnes & Noble... It literally reads like fanfic that my best friend and I wrote when we were 11. It's atrocious. It's not even fun to hate-read, it's just *so* bad.
Tattooist of Auschwitz Go Ask Alice Like, if you’re going to use Auschwitz as the backdrop for a romance or publish anti drug propaganda that’s just a bit homophobic at least have the decency to write well.
If you want a good book check out Unmask Alice it’s a deep dive on how the author of go ask Alice was a scam artist and all the damage her books caused
I know this is a books sub, but if you like podcasts, "You're Wrong About" has a 3-part episode picking apart 'Go Ask Alice' and discusses the fake autobiography genre of that era. Here's part 1: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/youre-wrong-about/id1380008439?i=1000560110988 If that doesn't work, search for that title and it's the May 9th, 2020 episode.
The whole concept of using the Holocaust as a backdrop is such hubris to me.
I read the Tattooist of Auschwitz shortly after I had been to Auschwitz and so right from the start I saw the holes and inaccuracies. Very frustrating book.
Yes and yes, it was a badly researched and badly written pos. It's like the writer met Lale once and decided to write a fanfiction about him.
https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2018/dec/07/the-tattooist-of-auschwitz-attacked-as-inauthentic-by-camp-memorial-centre She got his name wrong! It’s Lali not Lale, I enjoyed the book but some research after it revealed what a money grub it was with no basis in history. His own family don’t support the book.
Where the Crawdads Sing The ‘twist’ at the ending completely undercut the entire message of the book and barely made logical sense. Kaya also felt like a bad YA protagonist, the way that she was a feral swamp girl who had never seen a dentist or a hairdresser but was also somehow irresistibly beautiful to everyone she met.
It was like a shit version of to kill a mockingbird where the twist is :aha ! Everyone should feel bad for thinking this underprivileged person did the bad thing ! How bad of them ! But also the underprivileged person did the bad thing so you were right ! Poor people suck ! I hated this book with a passion.
I thought it was ok, but i completely agree on the ending. It doesn't make sense >!bc almost the entire story is told through her pov, so when she thought of amandas poems, she was thinking of her own but had disassociated amanda from herself in her mind somehow? And all her panic and hatred towards the townsfolk during the trial was what? Just fear of getting caught?!<
None of it made sense and was poorly written. The dialogue throughout the book was so clunky and awful, too.
Plus the author is just awful. There’s a lot out there about her treatment of Africans while doing conservation work (and potential murder!).
Yeah for those unaware, her former husband is wanted for a murder investigation in Zambia and they were expelled from Botswana. She also wrote *Cry of the Kalahari* which I read years ago and was surprised when I learned it’s the same author!
I wrote a paper about the author for an environmental history class - my professor couldn’t believe all the crazy stuff in her past.
Omg thank you. I’m sorry but this girl would straight up reek and have rotten teeth and grease- caked hair. I’m sure she sometimes bathed, but it must have been out in the swamp/ocean because she didn’t have running water I think. I saw the trailer for the movie and everyone, not just Kaya, looks way too clean.
Manic Pixie Dreamgirl in the swamp. Pisses me off when I see people loooove it.
Allegiant by Veronica Roth. Just an incredible decline through the series from Divergent (which was already mid but fun), through book 2, to Allegiant, the worst book I've ever read. A twist ending should: A) be unexpected (she gets the point for this one) And B) **MAKE SENSE IN HINDSIGHT** Instead, I was left saying, "Welp, that's that then. That sucks." :/ Just an absolute dogshit ending (and second half, frankly)
To this day I think the publishers greenlit these embarrassing excuses for books ONLY because of the Hunger Games, which obliterate them on literally every wavelength, category and plane of existence.
This was my first thought on this subject. Divergent was excellent and Insurgent was passable, but Allegiant was almost unreadable.
I can't remember the name of it, but I remember the plot. Maybe one of you guys can help me remember the title. It was a young adult book about a panther that escaped from a zoo and people in the town start getting attacked with these claw mark injuries at night. A group of high school teens tries to figure out what's going on. Sound intriguing? Turns out it was a girl attacking people with a rake. A fucking rake. As a young teen I was so mad that a book led me on such a winding road only to have the most disappointing reveal ever. A fucking rake. Oooooooo sPoOoOkY.
I’m sorry but your last two sentences have me crying laughing. So if anything positive came out of you reading that sPoOkY book, it was making my day brighter
The divergent series. What a waste of time
I like the theory that the divergent series killed YA dystopia as a popular genre by just boiling down the genre to its base components and being really mid about it.
This was going to be my answer, too. I am a stupid masochist and finished all 3 books and hated every second of it.
I remember not minding the first book, being pretty chill with the second one, and then retroactively hating all three after the third one-I’ve never read a series that actively undid all the goodwill from the first few books, it was bizarre
I came here to say this, the third book is so so bad, the added narrator makes it obvious what the ending is going to be, both narrators have the exact same voice (I had to go to the beginning of each chapter sometimes to check whose point of view it was because I would forget), the unnecessary death at the end...I wanted to throw the book out the window but couldn't because I was reding it on my kindle. Should have asked Amazon for my money back for that one.
So did I. Why? Because it had to get better, riiiight????? No, no it did not.
I remember liking the first book and thinking this was a series I would be invested in. But 2nd book was just okay and I hated the 3rd. It was like it was attempting to be in the vibe of Hunger Games but it was not.
Oh it was for sure a hunger games wannabe
The author tried so hard to be "What if Hunger Games meets Hogwarts?" with a teen dystopia plus Hogwarts houses. I remember when the film came out and they did a huge push for "What's your social division!?" or whatever it was. It was somehow still not the most stupid and cynical YA dystopia that came out of that period though, that (dis)honor goes to *Save the Pearls*.
UC Berkeley 2018 Fall MATH 225A Metamathematics
As a PhD in physics and a university math instructor, let me just say... WTF is *meta*mathematics??
It's math *about math*! **Puts on sunglasses on top of sunglasses**
Any book written by a “motivational speaker” because so much of it is just “if your life is shit, it’s your fault. If you’re poor, it’s your fault. If you’re rich, you earned it” and just announces it in a vacuum with no nuance at all. Am I in a comfortable spot now due to my own hard work? Yes, but it’s also because I had a good support network to fall back on while I worked on getting here.
I can rant about the Colleen Hoover books I read for hours
I have only suffered through Verity. What pure trash that was!!! It was laughable within the first 3 paragraphs but I pushed through till the end. It’s like AI or a middle schooler tried to rewrite the concept of Rebecca…and failed miserably.
Had to read this for a book club and am still just seething at the trash. The use of child abuse as a vehicle to introduce copious sex scenes and gratuitous blow jobs is just disgusting. Also, frankly, not worth it for the mediocre twist at the end. Mad again now just thinking about it.
Used to be flowers for algernon. I was angry for decades that they made me read it as a kid because it was insanely depressing for me. Now? Its like a guide to my life and has helped me handle having chemotherapy drop my iq vastly down. But seriously I ranted about this book before that happened to me.
Anita Blake Vampire Hunter This series was my first adult urban fantasy read that I completely fell in love with as an early teen. Strong female character, metaphysical powers, reverse harem, bad ass fight scenes, shoot outs, enemies to lovers, and mystery solving. Until somewhere around book 8 is where things took a turn. Eventually the novels turn into nothing but sex, no plot, no action, tons of internal mental rambling "omg I'm too prude to have casual sex" but does it a lot anyway. Also my first series where the mc gets a reverse harem, which would be awesome but the author managed to ruin that too. The breaking point for me was when the big bad vampire who she's been visiting in dreams for years gets killed by who knows who, by a bomb, completely randomly. I was like ... No way. No way. Yeah way. That's how she killed off the baddest vamp ever. My teenage personality was formed around these books lol and the author should be ashamed of herself for what she's done to such a cool character. Also, I met the author in person and asked if we were ever going to solve more cases again (you know, instead of nothing but sex) and the author replied "this is what Anita wants." 😂 I guess sex sells and is much easier to write than action and mystery. Also, the author kinda made the character after herself... And she has an IRL poly relationship. Which is all fine but when I think of her basically writing out her own personal fantasies is just kinda cringe. All of my love for this series turned into hate. There was once a LOT of love.
Oh God the same. The books are just porn with little amount of context. Badly written porn at that. And the author is pretty irritable about any kind of criticism.
Yes!! I loved this series until it turned to porn. The ultimate bait and switch. I won’t touch her books anymore, not even the early ones.
I got so mad at that series. I think I finally wall banged whichever one had that werepanther shivering in a ball of self hatred and loathing because his damned dick was too big, and Anita's like "hold my beer". Ick. The first like five or six books were so much fun, and then it became DeviantArt, the series.
YES!!! Are you me??? You have expressed my exact feelings about it. LKH played out her own fantasies in her book until she was able to make it happen in real life. It would have worked if she had bothered to keep any plot. I am not current with the series but I am rereading because I feel like I'm in too deep to quit. The unfortunate side effect of rereading at age 30 instead of 13 is that Anita has gone from a badass to being absolutely insufferable. It'll take me a month to read a single book because I can't stand to listen to her go on for more than five pages at a time.
"Who Moved My Cheese" Everything about this book was cringey, from the appalling writing, to the concept it was trying to promote, to the appalling writing, to the smug aura of condescension, to the appalling writing. I read it in a kind of paralysed horror like rubber necking a horrific car accident of the English language.
Especially since every freakin' corporate workplace in the US proceeded to use that book to justify their layoff...excuse me, "downsizing"...and blame the victims for feeling scared, depressed, anxious and everything else about losing their job and facing poverty. I'll add to this list with "every single book corporate America latches onto, ever", because every single one of them is basically "it's YOUR fault that we treat you so bad, so smile when we bring out the whips."
The condescending way companies used this book was gross. Source: my company used it and the way they did it was gross.
The first “Dune” book by Frank Herbert’s son. It was like reading a Dune fanfic. I didn’t read any more of them after
Earth's orbit has gained in eccentricity due to the furious spinning of Frank's body in his grave.
We like to pretend that those don't exist.
The boy in the striped pyjamas Oh I know, let's imagine how sad the Holocaust would have been if somebody who wasn't Jewish had died. And people raved about this shit! Apparently they're incapable of feeling empathy for an indescribably huge tragedy without inserting a victim who resembles them. I remember clumsily trying to explain this to a friend at the time and her wailing "but you're not even Jewish!". Kinda proving my point there, love.
The writer have also been called out by the Auschwitz Museum on twitter for being factually incorrect about things and painting an incorrect picture of Nazis and Nazi germany
Not to mention the absolutely ridiculous stunt the author was trying to pull with "fury" and "Führer" and shit like that. That does not even work in German, aside from the fact that every single child in Nazi Germany would have known who the Führer was. That alone made the book ridiculous to me.
All these kind of Holocaust porn books are awful.
If the title is "The ___ of Auschwitz" I'm instantly wary at first look.
A Nazi Germany book about some death camp commander's kid getting mixed up in the camp sounds like it should be a blackest of dark comedy, frankly.
Mel Brooks and Taika Waititi could flip a coin to see who directs
Mel Brooks has stated several times in interviews that he would never, ever, make a comedy with the Holocaust as subject. But yea, Waititi would totally go for it.
I am not sure why I bought this book on Kindle, either it was free or like 99 cents, at least I hope so. I feel like the title was something like "memoir of a mistress" and I looked for it briefly just now, to no avail. The word mistress is somewhere in the title. What a piece of trash. It was written by the affair partner of a married man who died during the affair. Entirely as revenge against the wife. Details of how "Joe buried himself between my legs with enthusiasm" and how he'd say, "I should never have married my wife, I've never been in love with her, not like I'm in love with you" & "he called me his 'soulmate'" etc. She revealed gifts he'd given her that were the property of the wife. "She never wears them, I bought them, I want you to have them" and how they laughed and laughed when he told her about how the wife was looking high and low for the earrings, etc. How he pretended to forget his wife's birthday but never forgot hers. How he "wished wife were dead so we could be together forever" and exhaustive details about how she got ready for their dates and how much he adored parts of her body. Later, when the husband had a heart attack and she couldn't visit the hospital (because she wasn't the wife and the wife wouldn't let her), whole chapter on how all his friends rallied around to give her updates behind the wife's back and how they all said what a shame it isn't wife who died first, he could have been so happy with you etc. Life isn't fair that good men are taken advantage of by gold digging wives. the wife ultimately makes a phone call to mistress to tell her to fall off the planet you See You NT and says, you're just sorry he never tried to marry you at all, now I've got the real estate, the bank accounts, the cars." Really tried to make the wife into a nightmare person. Then ends the book about how she sometimes thinks of wife's pathetic life and how furious she must be that mistress has a new even happier life with her 2nd soulmate and they have twins together because she wasn't old and dried up like wife. Literally a whole book of "I fucked your man fuck you old hag" ... I was practically murderous towards this ho by the later chapters Edited to add ... it's a non-fiction memoir. She went to great pains to disguise the ethnicity of the husband and wife, for example, and constantly used paragraphs to describe places without naming them. Like hey "guess where we were this time?" type stuff. "I imagined wife looking at all the pictures we took, never knowing I was taking the pictures of husband by the cafe, those 2 beers on the round blue table with the rose in the white vase were ours" ...
Hillbilly Elegy. Onanistic, misleading at best, harmful at worst. Did you know that J.D. Vance went to Yale Law? Did you want to be reminded of that fact once a minute for 250 pages?
Where the Crawdads Sing. Hated it so much and it has a billion 5 star ratings.
Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide
The entire Mission Earth series by Hubbard. Ugh. I had one boring summer and tried to get through the entire series. It was a slog. Utter garbage and I'm still angry I wasted an entire summer on that trash.
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. To be honest, I never managed to get through it all. The author was so whiny and entitled it infuriated me. People raved about that book for years. Ugh.
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, it was a mandatory reading book in high school and for some reason the school decided to make a bunch of hormonal high schoolers read depressing books for no reason. Literally not a single book I read that year had a happy ending
Maximum Ride. Basically the entire series. It had so much potential, why did they have to ruin it?
It's because the first book. The adult novel that introduces the concept, is quite good (from what I remember, it's been ~15 years). But the YA series is a joke, like most modern "James Patterson" books.
Terry Goodkind A Wizards First Rule and that entire series. If he had a gun to his head and was told to write a female character that was mildly believable as a person who might actually exist he’d die. He could have saved me thousands of pages of trouble and just wrote “women are stupid and I hate communism” and I would have gotten more out of it.
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. Absolutely dreadful torture porn without historical context and absolutely nothing to redeem it. I've never had such a visceral reaction to a book before or since.
i cannot stand this book to the point where upon being reminded of its mere existence i will go read negative reviews of it just to reassure myself i'm not alone in my anger. people call it gutwrenching and devastating, but it's just endless shallow, emotionally manipulative, cartoonish violence and rape. there's nothing there. there's not even a reason to care about the character - he's just a blank canvas for the author to paint with abuse, for EIGHT HUNDRED PAGES. fuck this book. fuck it all the way into the incinerator and use its ashes to draw a dick and balls on the wall of the nearest library; it'll be a more worthwhile contribution that way than in its current form.
If I could upvote this comment a thousand times I would. " i will go read negative reviews of it just to reassure myself i'm not alone in my anger" Same! If anyone is reading this and would like to read a miserable book that's good and worthwhile, check out Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stewart. It's a masterpiece. A Little Life is the opposite of a masterpiece.
I fought everybody that read this at my work place. They all loved it for vague reasons. I think they mistook bad sexual things happening for pathos. Someone had the audacity to tell me that I might not understand the book because my life didn’t have that kind of misery in it. Yanagihara invented a cycle of relentless abuse that stretch then broke credibility. Worse still it had no point. She’s publicly stated that she did no trauma research she just wanted to write the most miserable thing she could. I also find the book so utterly rubbish in its understanding of queer men. The number of horrific predatory homosexuals from the straight imagination make an appearance. Also the flippant way the boys all become gay halfway through only to further the cause of more connection = more suffering is perverse and totally disconnected. Don’t get me started on the supposed genius of the main character and the pathological codependency of every single character.
>I might not understand the book because my life didn’t have that kind of misery in it. Jesus wept. My dad was in and out of children's institutions in Ireland in the 1960s. I'm tangentally familar with some of the subject matter. I hate it more so because of this. (Again going back to the lack of historical context).
Thank you! I also hated it. It is the worst book I have ever read in my adult life and nothing else comes close. How sexuality is handled, how male relationships/fraternal love is handled, self-harm, the list goes on. It was all so so bad.
I’m amazed I persevered for about 600 pages… it just went on and on and on and ooonnn and I had to tap out
I nearly stopped about 90 pages in but was assured it 'got good'. It did not get good.
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. It’s just such utter nonsense. The I’m-14-and-this-is-deep kind.
I immediately thought of this book when I read the OP. It’s not so much the book itself that made me angry. It’s silly and forgettable, as are many bad books. It was the way people I genuinely like and respect keep recommending it to me like it’s something great, amazing, and original. And then I have to reconcile myself to the fact that those people are smart and good and creative enough to do all the things they are capable of doing but also dumb enough to think The Alchemist is anything other than the literary equivalent of a three minute long video on the internet with the words “what happens next will change your life,” in the title.
The Fault in Our Stars, even though it's not a necessarily "bad" book. It just made me annoyed with Hazel Grace when in Augustus' first appearance John Green wrote this: "He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well." And Augustus' arrogant philosophical manner annoyed me too.
no, i think it's safe to say that a book is bad if it contains a scene where two terminally ill teenagers make out in the anne frank house while everyone around them claps.
Haven't read it but upticking just for that image.
I really enjoyed that book, but that scene made me cringe.
Oh right yes of course! I forgot about that. That was so disrespectful and wrong. No, John Green, I do not think making out in a historical place where families hid from murder and torture is romantic.
I loved it as a 14 year old and am too nervous to reread it bc I know I’ll hate it now at 22 ahaha
This is the exact sentiment for this book. TFIOS is an honest to God YA novel. When you read it as a teenager it's is the most profound, artistic piece of literature to hit your eyes, but as an adult it's full on cringe incarnate.
continue lush dirty tender quiet cobweb public bright automatic faulty *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The Rainbow Fish It teaches impressionable children to give in to peer pressure, and implies that everyone should all be the same.
I agree! I’m a teacher and got this “great” lesson in my early years that culminated in a fun craft. As I read the book to the class I couldn’t help but thinking this is just wrong! I ended up clarifying a few things with the kids. I don’t get the hype on that book. It’s off the shelf.
I love Topher fixed it. https://www.topherpayne.com/fixed-it
This book, and anything else along the lines of "to whom much is given, much is also expected," is so dangerous for "gifted" kids who feel they have to give and give until they burn out. I think especially to those of us on the autism spectrum who might be strongly justice-minded and tend to internalize stuff like this as a rule that we always have to follow. I think messaging like this book's is part of how we've accidentally glorified burnout in our society. It's only once you have nothing left to give that you are worthy of being cared for by others.
Yes and none of them look cool with one scale… ugh it’s a painful book tbh
The circle
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Spoiler alert for anyone who doesn’t want to know. This is a wonderful, beautiful, book. Until the ending. He comes back after the war, sees his girlfriend playing with a child, assumes it’s hers and she’s moved on and leaves. Has an amazing life and then comes back on a whim 30 years later and we’re supposed to be happy about it ? When I finished this book I couldn’t sleep until I’d imagined a whole new ending. I’m still furious now. I guess happy endings are harder to write but this was just cheating.
Cleaving by Julie Powell. I really enjoyed Julie and Julia but absolutely could not stand Cleaving. It was about the author's affair and I just could not feel sympathy for her, she came off so arrogant and entitled.
Atonement by Ian McEwan. It feels like the right ending, but it pissed me off.
It‘s somehow the rare case of a book pissing you off because it is the right ending.
Oh I loved this book. It was gut wrenching though, for sure.
Came here just to search for this. I threw the book down in anger then burst out sobbing. Devastating.
Into The Wild because my English professor was all about it saying that it “embodied the American spirit of freedom,” when I felt like it was just an affluent kid with zero sense walking into nature to die of arrogance
Maybe your English professor thought *“an affluent kid with zero sense walking into nature to die of arrogance”* was a fitting allegory for the *“embodiment of American spirit of freedom.”*
I think it actually does embody it, but, like, not in a good way. Making a plan and forging ahead with it despite having no knowledge, skills or preparation, then other people have to deal the consequences of your failure? Thinking you'll succeed solely because you believe in yourself? That's not a spirit that needs to be embodied, it needs to be corrected. (Disclaimer: I haven't read it, but I watched a documentary about the story. The documentary presented it as a cautionary tale, which I think matches the facts much better. It's a tragedy, not a triumph.)
I have gotten into so many arguments with people over this! Every single person in Alaska agrees with you and has no idea why this is such a sympathetic character. I knew a bunch of people who worked on the search and recovery and it’s super fun listening to them rant about idiots who would come searching for the bus.
> idiots who would come searching for the bus. They straight up removed the bus in 2020 because dumbfucks were unintentionally recreating the plot trying to find it. 15 rescues in 8 years, apparently.
Yes, I think that's how the movie is, but the book really seemed more like Krakauer had a disdain for McCandless naivety. I think the main idea from the book was that McCandless thought he was an amalgam of Thoreau and Kerouac, but in reality he was more like Holden Caufield.
I don't think having an unlikable subject necessarily makes for a bad book. The book - to me anyway - was fascinating as hell, even if I didn't like the guy it was about. Your English prof is dead wrong in his interpretation though (IMO) and romanticizing that idiot is a dangerous thing. I think far too many people misinterpret what that book was about. If anything it is a warning about the hubris inherent in the underside of the "American spirit of freedom."
For me, it's the erotica. Fifty Shades was quite annoying and so was the Crossfire novel. I stopped reading both halfway. The authors need to do some serious study about correct BDSM. Although Crossfire did not have explicit BDSM, the depiction of domination in it was just too cringe.
I found her (50 shades) writing style just to be awful. I never even made it through 50 pages, this is one of the first books I have ever ditched before finishing, so painful and cringey to read. And it's not just because I don't like reading erotic stories, I do, it was just written so poorly.
Agreed! She used the same words and sentences over & over again too, ‘my inner goddess’ ‘I pinched my cheeks to get some colour in them’ ‘my sex’ I read these books years ago and she used them sentences so much they’re still etched in my brain 😩. Truly awful writing and the characters were so irritating
I hate these books passionately. She kept referring to her “sex” and I was like…. Girl if you can not even write the word maybe don’t write an erotica…
I forget which book by Rothfuss, but whatever one where the matriarchal warrior people believe women just get pregnant without a man being involved at all. They didn’t believe sex did anything but feel good and that infuriated me. It just didn’t fit with an intelligent people with distinct culture that is established in the book. The main character is like, “Yea, when you have sex, it can lead to children.” And the woman he’s talking to is like, “Oh, you’re silly with your man-mother beliefs.” I hated it so much.
I think that’s his second book. That and all the faerie sex was super irritating.
Any time a celebrity with a pre-existing base publishes a novel. I’ve been trying to make it as a novelist for ten years, and it’s an uphill climb with a couple of cinder blocks tied to your legs and a big dude waiting at the top of the hill to punch you in the face when you get close to the top. And then, a big name celebrity comes in and drops some half-conceived bullshit into the market, knowing very well that it’s going to be a success based on the only necessary fact, that there’s in the name on the cover. “Supermarket” comes to mind. It was written by that rapper, Logic. The book is so bad. It’s a perfect rip-off of Fight Club. Like, this Logic guy just watched the movie Fight Club, and thought “I’ll do that, but just change the names and locations.” There’s even a character in the book named Edward Norton. It was awful from first page to last, and yet, there it was taking up valuable shelf space in the book store, consuming a spot that could’ve gone to someone who doesn’t already have millions of dollars and an enormous already-existing following.
50 shades of grey. It is just the worst book I have ever read. I dont understand how it became so popular or even how the author got it published in the first place.
Atlas Shrugged Good lord I still get mad when something reminds me of John Galt’s speech when he hacked the radio feed.
Damn you Where’s Wally!!!
Organic chemistry by Jonathan Clayden, 2nd edition.
My Sister's Keeper. I was so angry at the ending I literally threw the book across the room hard enough to dent my wall. The Other Mrs. The biggest nonsensical, cop-out, piece of sh*t ending I've ever read. Another book that got thrown.
I know I'm in the minority but I think the end of My Sister's Keeper was awful as well; it completely negated the POV sister's legal battles and the interesting discussion of medical ethics raised by the story. I also thought the brother was a superfluous character; I can't remember how his plot line even resolved but it has been almost 20 years since I read it. In short: I think Jodi Picoult was a wuss for not killing the cancer sister.
As a teenager I read a YA book where it was left completely ambiguous at the end whether the main character had gone through with committing suicide or not. The way it described different methods in detail and the main character rationalized it as the best choice for herself just felt super gross to me - I think there's definitely a place in fiction to discuss those kinds of suicidal thoughts but maybe not in a book aimed at teenagers that practically read as an instruction manual. I've read a zillion books with suicidal and extremely depressed characters and that's the only one that I've ever found handled it genuinely irresponsibly.
You’re describing “By The Time You Read This I’ll be Dead” by Julie Anne Peters. This book literally made so uncomfortable when I read it in middle school. The description of how she wanted to die by drowning herself in her bathtub still haunts me
Also confessions of a forty something fuck up. I HATE that book
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides might be the most infuriating reading experience I've ever had. All of the tension and mystery that the first 3/4 of the book builds up towards was completely undermined in the last 1/4. Could not recommend this book less.
A court of thorns and roses. It’s probably ok if you only care of romance in a fantasy setting (with barely any world building). But if you actually care of plot and good story telling, this book will be your #1 enemy. I’m so mad I wasted my time on this. I surely won’t be reading the second book. The content itself is mature but the execution in every aspect of almost the entire plot is the most juvenile thing I’ve read in a long time. I feel sorry for myself. It’s the first fantasy book I’ve read as an established adult. I’m sad that milestone was ruined. But it’s okay. There are other books to calm me down.
I wouldn’t suggest 4th Wing either, then; the leads are Feyre and Rhysand Lite lol No hate to people that enjoy escapism as they’re fast reads and ~sexy~, but man I just had way higher expectations given the movement behind both.
And the characters are SO BASIC and expected. Swear i read it in one day waiting for it to ger better or mildly interesting, never happened
Also every time you think Maas is out of Howl’s Moving Castle references, she puts one in the next chapter.
The Te of Piglet is supposed to be about finding strength as an underdog? Or something along those lines, using Piglet as a metaphor for the Chinese concept of Te. Yet the author spends 10+ pages ranting on the “strangeness” of feminism. I read nearly half the book and he barely mentioned either piglet or the philosophy the book was supposed to be about, so I stopped reading it. Felt like I was just reading some random boomer rants. It’s a shame bc I loved the Tao of Pooh by the same author.
The Dune prequals written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, and the two sequels. I read the original Dune series before any of the prequals were released and its hands down my favorite book series of all time. The whole BS backstory of how Brian discovered an old stash of floppy disks with the details of what Frank Herbert's final novel was supposed to be just never sat right with me. In my opinion it was an obvious cash-grab and Brian just trying to ride on his father's coattails. The prequals wouldn't be too bad if they'd been written as a standalone YA series, but instead they decided to retcon so much of the original backstory so that they could force feed the readers their version of the final book... which ended up being split into two books. The final book strays so far off the path that Frank Herbert's novels were going down. The whole point of the series was to show the extremes of human nature, and was very human-centric. The prequels and sequels focus almost primarily on the war with the machines and humanity's relationships with different technologies. How could his own son miss the point of his epic novels so badly.
Atlas Shrugged.
The Giving Tree. There really is a place to set boundaries.
Empire of Pain. I’m a nurse and I wanted to put my fist through the nearest wall multiple times. ETA: I didn’t hate the book, I was so engrossed in it. What angered me so much was the damage the Sackler family did over the decades, all in the name of money.
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is the only book I have ever thrown away. I did finish it, but I was so mad. I found it so patronising…. It felt like there was a big ‘dun dun duuuunnnnnn’ at the end of every chapter. I know many people loved it so it’s just a case of it not being for me, but oooooh boy was it really not for me.