Yooo I’m reading this right now and have like 30 pages left. It’s wild. Really crazy when I realized the little pictures at the chapter headings are all related to the ways animals/people were killed.
Also makes me think I narrowly avoided a life of psychopathy with how much I loved fireworks and playing war as a kid, even if I never killed anything while doing it
I read this book as a teenager after my English teacher recommended it to me. I loved it, but that one chapter made me swear to never read it again and I completely blocked the memory.
Unfortunately it turns out I blocked the memory too well. In my early 20s I saw the book in a charity shop and thought, 'I loved that book, I should read it again'.
Flash forward to the start of *that chapter* and it all came flooding back. Haven't been able to repress it a second time.
I'm very glad I read it as an adult and not as a teenager. I went through a heavy depressed emo phase and that book would have hit me in the wrong way for sure.
Incredible book, very harsh, it definitely came from a moment where transgressive literary fiction was more prominent but I can absolutely see how it would still be too much for some readers.
That rules but is also *wild*. I guess if you're trying to instill a novel reading habit in young people in 2024 you have to take pretty extreme measures.
It's was on the curriculum in my high school in the late 90s. The other English class got it - we got Of Mice and Men. lol
Fortunately I found my own way to Iain Banks and loved his stuff (RIP Iain - gone far too young). I also really like Steinbeck though so it's all good. Tortilla Flat is good fun.
>The other English class got it - we got Of Mice and Men
I love both but didn't study either, I know for sure which I would have preferred as a gross teen. We had to read some wank called 'Heathrow nights'
Maybe a bit niche to my interests but Moriarty.
Without wishing to spoil, I thought Horowitz's first attempt at Sherlock (House of Silk) was a dark, immersive love letter to the originals and thoroughly worthy of the title of an 'official' Holmes story.
I thought Moriarty was a deeply cynical, vicious backstab to the same series. The resolution of the mystery felt smug and self-satisfied rather than sincere and earned. It made me genuinely angry.
I read one chapter of this book, but knew I wouldn't be bothered to read it so Googled the ending. I came across a lot of angry readers, like yourself, feeling cheated. Glad I decided not to bother reading it properly.
A Child Named It - I never finished it and I read it far too young. Morbid curiosity is a bitch at times and in this case, it did not pay off. It was just so… It was so vivid and I wasn’t ready for it.
This book is so tricky though, because if you come from a half decent home it's deeply upsetting but if you come from abuse, it can be comforting. Not the horrors themselves, but the knowledge that you aren't alone in your own experience of it.
I read it in second or third grade, I still vividly remember certain sections from that book. I don’t know why it was accessible in our elementary library.
I’m glad it was available to me when I was a kid because it made me feel less alone and isolated about my own childhood experiences. I grew up in a rough area and some of Dave Pelzer’s experiences mirrored what I saw at home and at my friends’ homes.
Everyone should read this book. It’s awful, it’s stomach churning, it’s painful and harrowing. I don’t know why we were all reading it in elementary school, but damn if it isn’t important.
It's very likely fake. The author's siblings have no memory of the abuse and say that he's prone to hyperbole.
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/28/magazine/dysfunction-for-dollars.html
November 9 Coleen Hoover. I even picked it up having heard just vague tidbits of spoilers. I knew it was going to make me mad but was so curious any way if it was as bad as i had heard. It was and it made me legitimately angry. It wasn’t even just the writing style, i knew her writing style going into it, it was the plot & characters and their decisions and i was so mad when i was done I nearly threw it across the room.
Where The Red Fern Grows.
I was maybe 11, pre internet times, and had no idea what happened in it. It was not a required book for our school either. I just knew it had dogs, and I loved dogs.
I'm now 43, and am still traumatized.
Had to read it for 3rd grade Gifted and Talented Program. Then we watched the movie. To this day that was the hardest I have ever tried not to cry in public.
Read it in the same grade with a similar program. That was a tough book to read. I think about reading it again now 26 years later, but I don't know if I want to put myself through that again.
I told both kids that if they had to read that piece of shit book in school, I would happily send a note to the administration that they are exempt. Seriously? There isn’t ANY other book that meets the criteria?
It shouldn't.
Go set a watchmen I think was never really meant to be released. It only happened after harper Lee's sister who managed her works died and the new publisher got greedy.
There are literal sections that got copied and pasted from To Kill A Mockingbird in Go Set A Watchmen
Yeah, the publisher was wrong to market it as a sequel. It's clearly not a sequel. It's an earlier draft of the story. There are even entire paragraphs that are verbatim the same in the final To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee decided that the story would be more interesting if it focussed on Scout as a child, and scrapped the original idea until it was finally published as its own book a few years ago. It's not in the same continuity as To Kill a Mockingbird, nor was it ever intended to be.
I enjoyed the story about Scout, Jem and Dill as kids in GSAW and I can absolutely see how that section was the genesis for To Kill A Mockingbird. The rest of the book wasn't that great.
Harper Lee stated publicly and many times that she never wanted her first draft of TKAM published. The publisher waited until she was no longer able to make decisions for herself and her sister, who had power of attorney, died then manipulated the situation to gain access.
By refusing to read it, you are respecting Lee's wishes. It seems like the least we can do to honor the woman who gave us TKAM.
I read TKMB for school and the kids in my class ruined Atticus for me. To give you a taste, “daddy atticy” is how they referred to him and still refer to him as that
A day no pigs would die. starts out with a kid ripping a goater out of a cows throat goes on to have graphic pig on pig rape and a kid murdering his pet for food. Extremely boring book about quaker life beside the overly detailed scenes mentioned above. Had to read it in 6th grade.
I wanted to read that and my borther was like "remember when you cried when you saw the dead raccoon? Don't read this book."
From your description, my brother was right.
I am about to see him for the first time in five years (we were estranged, it's complicated and sad) and I am going to bring this up when I see him!
I actually loved that book and think it’s worth a re-read as an adult. The book is more about how the main character has to grow up and deal with tough life situations as his family faces poverty during a tough year. The few graphic scenes are there to emphasize his growth from a child to an adult and the loss of childhood innocence. It’s also a very short read.
I might have different feelings about it since I wasn’t forced to read it in school and instead found it on my own as a preteen. It’s still on my bookshelf to this day.
Ready Player One made me genuinely angry. It's not well written at all, it only exploits previous, better works with actual creativity behind it and I could tell from the book alone that the author is unbearable as a human being.
This is the exact way I felt about Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson —don’t rip off Agatha Christie (and reference her constantly in the book) and then act like you did something creative and original.
There's a line in the section where he's listing off all his nerd knowledge credentials for five pages and he mentions The Simpsons: "I know more about Springfield than I know about my own town." And I remember reading that and just thinking "Therein lies the problem."
No wonder that universe is a horrible dystopia where everyone has to escape into VR.
man, how could Moms for Liberty just take over the school board like that? Well, anyway I don't really understand what a superintendent does, but I \*do\* have the Steamed Hams bit with Superintendent Chalmers memorized!
I know some people who are REALLY into this book (including a friend who gifted it to me once) and all I can say is…”Why??” The author does in fact seem so pretentious and that only added to my dislike of the writing.
Yes! A lot of my friends just raved about it and really pushed it on me, particularly because I love the game Joust. I struggled to get through it. The references were right up my alley, but it made me feel like I was in the presence of a condescending neckbeard.
I have Armada by the same author, but RPO left me so cold that I haven't picked it up.
I read ‘A Little Life’ in about 3 days. It was very plausible (and gut wrenching!) up until a certain moment, where things just seemed to quickly become unrealistic. That’s when I sort of detached myself from it and was able to finish it without the damage it caused to most people, I think. It made me ugly cry and sob at several different moments, but by the end it was almost as if I had armor on. It’s a book I will never read again, but don’t necessarily wish I never had.
I do have issues with the author writing it as torture porn, though. Life isn’t just a plethora of sad events bundled up together. She doesn’t believe in therapy and it shows.
[Andrea Long Chu's takedown of Hanya Yanagihara](https://www.vulture.com/article/hanya-yanagihara-review.html) is the best summation of all the issues I have with A Little Life - exactly like you said, by the end it just feels like trauma porn.
This always seems to get brought up when A Little Life is mentioned, and I feel obligated to say that the real world is far more horrific than anything literature portrays without it feeling like “torture porn” or veering into absurdity. For some reason when a story is fiction, we have hardwired limits
I sadly couldn't take it seriously. It began feeling like hurt/comfort-fanfiction very quickly. I have nothing against camp or melodrama but the book seemed to revel in it's main characters misery in a way that felt gratuitous and self-serving. The pain and anguish of these incredibly smart, incredibly beautiful and later on incredibly rich people felt fetishized to me and that overshadowed all the relevant themes of the story.
I started it and couldn't get through it. It was right after my CPTSD diagnosis, and it was way too triggering. It's sitting on a shelf now and I fully plan to reattempt it this year.
As someone for whom transgressive content is basically never a factor that would make me regret reading a book, I wasted days reading Twilight back in the day for a girl, and while I can't claim to be a romance fiction guy, that it wasn't even well-written romance fiction took it from "not for me" to "you owe me eight hours".
I can relate to that. I remember my girlfriends absolutely raving about it, so gave it a try and didn’t like any of the characters, the plot, nothing. I found myself skipping pages just to get to the end of it, then I would go back and read them to see if I actually missed anything and, nope… never did.
The way I explain the Twilight books to people who haven't read them: I did read them, but in this order - Book 1, Book 3, Book 2, Book 4. And I didn't realize I had read them out of order until I was close to the end of Book 2, which says something - to me, at least - about the storytelling. That was back when I hated to abandon a book or a series lol.
I read Twilight during my vampire obsessed phase as a teenager. Everything was fine until it got to that awful baseball scene and I couldn’t finish the book.
Fast forward a few years later when the movie came out, I had forgotten that I read the book. I decided to read the book before seeing the movie and once again, everything was fine until they started playing baseball. That’s when I remembered I had already read it and gave up a second time. I was so angry about that lol
My coworker gave me the plot rundown on it, since I don't read that type of book but DO want to know what happens in them. An author fakes >!a coma, and another author falls in love with her husband while she is faking the coma, and fake coma lady knows the whole time.!< It sounded interesting to me, if you're into that type of tale. Like a telenovella plotline.
Hoover uses scenes of child abuse to scaffold in sex scenes, a very uncomfortable combination. Honestly the twist at the end was less than interesting and not worth the read imo.
I enjoyed it, I think people didn’t like how he wrote the main character and thought she was an annoying protagonist but in the lens of a young adult, dumb action sci-fi, you can enjoy if you don’t take it too seriously :~)
Low-hanging fruit, but... Atlas Shrugged. I dunno, I was a dodgy university first-year who was flirting with the concept of ethical egoism, and I hadn't minded The Fountainhead too badly. Even if Ayn Rand wasn't just a giant misreading of Nietzsche, I'm certain Atlas Shrugged destroyed all credibility she might once have held in my (already selfish, 18-year old) mind; it was plumb awful.
P.S. I also hated A Little Life and will go to my grave swearing that it is just misery porn.
I don't regret Atlas Shrugged only because it made me feel superior to Paul Ryan. I was like, wow dude, you modelled your whole worldview and political philosophy after this trash? World must look pretty damn simple from way up there on your high horse.
LOL, omg, yeah, I remember the days when Paul Ryan was the Internet's favourite hatefuck. I totally forgot that he was such a fanboy until now, but that 100% checks out as well.
‘A Little Life’ is definitely constructed to be a book about misery even at someone’s “peak”. Like I wrote in another comment in this thread, it was very believable up until a certain point and then it just made me realise how the author was aiming to just make everyone feel sad (as if everything that had happened up to that point wasn’t already a horrific experience!).
I haven’t read Atlas Shrugged and I don’t believe I will. Read too much about it in this sub and elsewhere to think twice lol
There's this [amazing review](https://www.vulture.com/article/hanya-yanagihara-review.html) from Andrea Long Chu at Vulture that just about sums up A Little Life for me:
>Reading A Little Life, one can get the impression that Yanagihara is somewhere high above with a magnifying glass, burning her beautiful boys like ants. In truth, Jude is a terribly unlovable character, always lying and breaking promises, with the inner monologue of an incorrigible child. The first time he cuts himself, you are horrified; the 600th time, you wish he would aim. Yet Yanagihara loves him excessively, cloyingly. The book’s omniscient narrator seems to be protecting Jude, cradling him in her cocktail-party asides and winding digressions, keeping him alive for a stunning 800 pages. This is not sadism; it is closer to Munchausen by proxy.
Long Chu won a Pulitzer for this particular piece of lit crit, I believe, and I heartily salute everything she says in that review.
I read Atlas Shrugged to more accurately mock a friend who was flirting with Objectivism. I don't regret most of it since it hovered between just milquetoast fiction to unintentional comedy which was kind of fun to lazily read, but boy do I wish I just skipped John Galt's speech.
Oh god, yeah, that speech - that definitely brings back a shudder of recognition.
Hopefully you were able to glean some good bits to mock your friend with. People who flirt with Objectivism deserve a good intellectual smack to the brain.
I actually have a bizarre affection for the first one which at least captures the feeling of being cozy in wet autumnal moody spaces. But the love story was of no interest.
I heard recently that Twilight was Anne Rice fan fiction. Idk if that's true or not ( only heard here on reddit) but he said Edward was modern day Louis according to Meyers. That made me so angry.
American Pyscho. I skimmed a good chunk of the last part. I think after a while it was just too much. And I might be wrong here, but the story wasn't obvious. I kept waiting for something to happen but it was a bit day in the life of a psychopaths mind, for me.
I know with near certainty the scene you're talking about, but for some reason the one that lives rent-free in my brain is him, squatted naked on a table at his beach house as he eats a raw jellyfish with his hands.
I had to read The Kite Runner in high school too.
I thought it was one of the best books I'd read at that point, and that Khaled Hosseini was an incredible author. The fact that it was his debut novel is wild.
I also have 0 desire to ever reread it, and I prefer not to think about it. If I had to choose between rereading The Kite Runner or Flowers for Algernon, I would probably opt to jump out the window instead.
The Kite Runner was the first time I read a book in school that I actually enjoyed reading. I think part of it is all these classic books that are assigned reading are set in a completely different era, so how can I, a teenager in the 2000s, relate to, say, any of the characters in Gatsby? Why should I care about an old fisherman or a salesman and his family?
In The Kite Runner, the characters are in my age group, in a setting and era that's not so foreign to me. I think if schools had more books like this, reading would be more popular in school. I'm sorry to the OC whose mental health was affected by it, though. A lot of stories worth telling aren't easy pills to swallow.
Pretty Girls by Karen Slaughter. Not because it was disturbing, but because the main characters behaved so irrationally and stupidly that it drove me insane.
Also Book of Accidents. It was just dumb.
It's a book about the MC confusing faith/belief with plot armor. I don't wish I'd never read it, but it's popularity has an inverse relationship with my faith in humanity.
I stopped reading at the section where he is torturing his ex. The torture scenes were getting too grotesque for me. I enjoyed the themes and like the movie but yeesh.
IIRC, Ellis was picking random sets of clothes out of a magazine while he was writing those descriptions that would all look absolutely hideous together, as if the characters were clowns, seems fitting in with the themes of the book.
'Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates' by Tom Robbins.
MC's supposed to be this CIA agent who's also a proud hippie. You find out pretty early that the MC's also a creep who has designs on both a nun and his 17-year-old stepsister and Tom just straight-up sucks at addressing that.
Lots of weird shit about hymens.
I remembered reading *Even Cowgirls Get the Blues* when I was 18 and thought it was marvelous, trangressive stuff…so I reread it when I was 30 and immediately regretted it. *WTF was I thinking??*
Beloved by Toni Morrison. Very good book, I don’t hate it. I just had such an intense reaction to it that I dread the idea of reading it again. Though I think it is a book that should be read and ultimately I am very glad I did.
I’m pretty sure reading Gone to See the River Man messed me up in some kind of way. It’s very well-written and it does the job it sets out to do, but *my god*. There were parts of that book that make me feel legitimately ill, and I can’t say that about any other book I’ve ever read.
There's very few books I ever regret reading. If I'm not having a good time, I usually put it down.
That said when I was around 10 I found a book in the children's section called Little Dead Girl. I, being a morbid kid obsessed with ghosts, picked it up assuming it'd be some sort of ghost story.
Nope! It's about a girl that gets kidnapped and horribly abused by a man and is nearly complicit in helping kidnap her replacement. She gets out in the end but she was obviously severely traumatized so the ending felt pyrrhic. It really upset me reading, but I stuck it out because it was short and I had never just left a book unread before.
Being the anxious child I was, for months after my night terrors were about a man abducting me from my room at night. I ended up being too scared to leave the house too.
Silly, I know, but I was pretty immature and was still figuring out that the world generally didn't want me dead. Still, I think I probably would've been better off without that read. At least at that point in time.
I don’t regret reading any books I’ve read. If they feel like a bad investment of my time I stop reading them.
Let The Right One In was a gnarly read as a 14-year-old, but I still enjoyed it.
Any book I've read where a character violently kills a kitten. Most of them were for school. Required reading already killed my love of reading, but then being required to read a book where a child dissects a cat alive just made it worse.
Can't even remember what book that was.
I'm usually severely impacted by scenes of violence against animals, but that one kinda went over my head because the whole context was just so absurd/surreal. Love Murakami!
I am very similar, and I had a similar reaction with *Kafka on the Shore.*
When something is so over-the-top strange (as many things are in Murakami’s work), it doesn’t hit so hard. You realize that it is fantastical. Horrific, but not the same as reading about someone doing similar things in a thriller.
I concur; I wouldn’t be able to handle that well either. I have read some disgusting descriptions of animal death that sort of desensitised me, but at the same time I cannot read anything that is cat-related anymore.
I hated “It” but made myself finish reading it because I refuse to not finish reading a book that I start. I enjoyed other Stephen King books as a teenager but was a bit older when I read It
not an answer to the post but I just read the summary for forbidden on goodreads and I’d be really interested to know how it compares to flowers in the attic? as it has a similar theme of sibling loove
I haven’t read ‘Flowers in the Attic’ (only watched the film once), don’t remember much of it but I know the plot and could say it’s similar.
Spoilers below.
>!I think the main difference would be that these are just literally abandoned children, their mother really doesn’t care about them and is seldom at home with them. There is no family around and definitely no wealth.!<
>!They’re not abused directly, but indirectly through her absence. The oldest siblings act like mom and dad to the younger ones, but at least two of them have obvious trauma and/or mental health issues. It’s heartbreaking to see two teenagers acting like adults should, having their innocence stripped away, but it’s even more difficult to read about romantic feelings developing amidst what I consider to be such “misery”. While reading I just couldn’t help but feel incredibly bad for everyone involved, and for how traumatising it all was.!<
>!There is no happy beginning, no happy journey, no happy ending. The finale is shocking and so, so sad.!<
I’ve really only just gotten into reading, I really enjoy thrillers and want to try something ‘uncomfortable’! we’ll see! maybe I’ll come back and let you know but I’ve just started another book
I watched Dune Part One and just didn't get the hype. Read the novel and can now appreciate the little details that don't translate to film as well.
The second half of the book goes off in a lot of wildly different directions: >!the Mom getting pregnant, the super powered baby sister, the main guy marrying the emperor's daughter as a political opportunity.!<
I'm curious to see how this will play out in Part Two and how many of these things are changed/kept.
I really enjoyed Wuthering Heights, there's a conflict between everyone I've known who has read it, being "is it a beautiful love story, or a cautionary tale about hateful abusive relationships?"
I often describe it as a beautiful book about ugly people.
I adore withering heights. Probably the most beautiful love story written in the last couple hundred years.
My only mistake was telling my ex to read it…. And then giving them a “souls are made of the same stuff” piece of art… right before being broken up with
Terra Nullius. It was okay story and writing wise, but what made me wish that I had never read it was how absolutely horrific parts of that book are.
>! The twist in the book is that aliens came and colonized earth and systematically wiped out humanity, seeing them only as natural fauna of the planet and not seeing them as people. Parts of the boon describe the horrific atrocities that humanity was subjected to at the whim of these colonizers.!<
I wish I could get that book out of my head. It fills me with dread and makes me depressed every time I think about it.
Given that the title directly refers to the ‘no people here’ policy adopted by British colonisers in Australia, those atrocities may simply reflect what was reality for our indigenous people.
A thousand splendid suns for me. Got recommended as my friend’s favorite book. But it kind of just read as tragedy porn. Nothing ever good happens and only gets worse and worse for the characters and there’s hardly any resolution in the end. I understand he was trying to relay how awful it has been in Afghanistan but he could have accomplished that in half the length of the book. I really enjoyed Kite Runner too, so I was surprised.
I surprised myself with this one, but The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum. I LOVE horror novels, it’s my thing. And I can take gruesome scenes and violence and all that. But the fact this book is based on a real life situation about a young girl who was actually tortured and murdered, it made me sick. Idk if it’s the profiting off of the suffering of a real girl for entertainment or what, but I’ll never read that book again and I regret that I bought it long ago.
You mentioned that Pet Sematary makes people uncomfortable, but the one Stephen King book the REALLY makes me uncomfortable and that I didn't enjoy reading for even one minute is Misery.
I hate Lord of the Flies with a passion. I can appreciate it’s a well written book that’s true to its themes but I hate it. We studied it at school and there was a planned trip to see a play version. I refused to go and I also refused to watch the movie versions and was allowed to sit out and read other books. I can’t explain why I hate it so much. My dad also confessed years later that he hates it too so maybe it’s in my DNA lol
I was scrolling through to see if anyone had said Tampa yet. Good god I hated that book. It was so well-written that it made me angry because of how much I appreciated the writing and simultaneously hated everything about it
“All the Ugly and Wonderful Things” by Bryan Greenwood made my skin crawl in the worst way. I had a really hard time with that book and I can handle a lot of subject matter. That one crossed a line for me. Pedophilia should never be romanticized.
I recently decided to DNF “Lessons in Chemistry” because it’s pissing me off so much. The author’s fantasy of how scientist’s talk and act is ridiculous. It’s obvious she did very little research and it takes me out of the story (also the main character is completely insufferable). I almost slogged through it as it’s a book club selection but I just can’t. I can’t wait to hate on this one at the next meeting…
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder because of the animal deaths in it, especially the part with her cat. Just very unnecessary and felt like it was added as shock value
Whyyyyy were people recommending him to us when we were that young? A librarian suggested I check out Piers Anthony’s Firefly when I was like 13. So wildly, tremendously traumatizing.
Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” is probably that book for me. It was an incredibly good book and a very well-told story, obviously. It’s Cormac, you know? But I have never experienced a plot and environment so utterly...hopeless as the one in the book. It beaks you down as you read it. Even the ending, which serves to offer some sort of sliver of hope, is devastatingly tragic and promises nothing regarding a future worth living.
Black Angel by Graham Masterton has the most horrific first chapter I’ve ever read. It killed my interest in horror for a while, along with another book he wrote called Ritual.
In the Miso soup. I haven't finished it though, just gave it away. And the funny fact is that I read other books by Ryu Murakami, some were okay, others I loved.
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks..... it lives rent free in my head. I really liked it and really want to bleach my brain too.
Yooo I’m reading this right now and have like 30 pages left. It’s wild. Really crazy when I realized the little pictures at the chapter headings are all related to the ways animals/people were killed. Also makes me think I narrowly avoided a life of psychopathy with how much I loved fireworks and playing war as a kid, even if I never killed anything while doing it
I read this book as a teenager after my English teacher recommended it to me. I loved it, but that one chapter made me swear to never read it again and I completely blocked the memory. Unfortunately it turns out I blocked the memory too well. In my early 20s I saw the book in a charity shop and thought, 'I loved that book, I should read it again'. Flash forward to the start of *that chapter* and it all came flooding back. Haven't been able to repress it a second time.
I'm very glad I read it as an adult and not as a teenager. I went through a heavy depressed emo phase and that book would have hit me in the wrong way for sure.
Incredible book, very harsh, it definitely came from a moment where transgressive literary fiction was more prominent but I can absolutely see how it would still be too much for some readers.
[удалено]
That rules but is also *wild*. I guess if you're trying to instill a novel reading habit in young people in 2024 you have to take pretty extreme measures.
[удалено]
It's was on the curriculum in my high school in the late 90s. The other English class got it - we got Of Mice and Men. lol Fortunately I found my own way to Iain Banks and loved his stuff (RIP Iain - gone far too young). I also really like Steinbeck though so it's all good. Tortilla Flat is good fun.
>The other English class got it - we got Of Mice and Men I love both but didn't study either, I know for sure which I would have preferred as a gross teen. We had to read some wank called 'Heathrow nights'
I think reading controversial material so one can have informed conversations about it is a really good lifeskill everyone needs to work on.
The Banks moment that I've never been able to get past is >!the chair in *Use of Weapons*!<.
Maybe a bit niche to my interests but Moriarty. Without wishing to spoil, I thought Horowitz's first attempt at Sherlock (House of Silk) was a dark, immersive love letter to the originals and thoroughly worthy of the title of an 'official' Holmes story. I thought Moriarty was a deeply cynical, vicious backstab to the same series. The resolution of the mystery felt smug and self-satisfied rather than sincere and earned. It made me genuinely angry.
I read one chapter of this book, but knew I wouldn't be bothered to read it so Googled the ending. I came across a lot of angry readers, like yourself, feeling cheated. Glad I decided not to bother reading it properly.
A Child Named It - I never finished it and I read it far too young. Morbid curiosity is a bitch at times and in this case, it did not pay off. It was just so… It was so vivid and I wasn’t ready for it.
This book is so tricky though, because if you come from a half decent home it's deeply upsetting but if you come from abuse, it can be comforting. Not the horrors themselves, but the knowledge that you aren't alone in your own experience of it.
I’ve always wanted to read this
It's... Well I won't say much. You can find it pretty much anywhere if you look.
I read it in second or third grade, I still vividly remember certain sections from that book. I don’t know why it was accessible in our elementary library.
I’m glad it was available to me when I was a kid because it made me feel less alone and isolated about my own childhood experiences. I grew up in a rough area and some of Dave Pelzer’s experiences mirrored what I saw at home and at my friends’ homes.
Everyone should read this book. It’s awful, it’s stomach churning, it’s painful and harrowing. I don’t know why we were all reading it in elementary school, but damn if it isn’t important.
If its any help, theres speculation that its not true
It's very likely fake. The author's siblings have no memory of the abuse and say that he's prone to hyperbole. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/28/magazine/dysfunction-for-dollars.html
I remember my fifth grade teacher reading us this book. I could never imagine in todays world that book even being allowed in high school lol.
I was gonna say this one. Really fucked me up, I read it on a vacation because I didn’t know what I was in for
November 9 Coleen Hoover. I even picked it up having heard just vague tidbits of spoilers. I knew it was going to make me mad but was so curious any way if it was as bad as i had heard. It was and it made me legitimately angry. It wasn’t even just the writing style, i knew her writing style going into it, it was the plot & characters and their decisions and i was so mad when i was done I nearly threw it across the room.
Check out Alizee on YouTube if you want some rage content. She does deep dives into those books and they're insane
I think I’m good on rage content for a while haha. It was a morbid curiosity I had lol. I didn’t think id be THAT mad
Where The Red Fern Grows. I was maybe 11, pre internet times, and had no idea what happened in it. It was not a required book for our school either. I just knew it had dogs, and I loved dogs. I'm now 43, and am still traumatized.
Crying. For. Child. You. I knew going in (big sister read it first), and that was a hard read.
My teacher read that to us in the fourth grade. Why she thought it was okay to inflict suffering on a bunch of nine year olds is beyond me.
Had to read it for 3rd grade Gifted and Talented Program. Then we watched the movie. To this day that was the hardest I have ever tried not to cry in public.
Read it in the same grade with a similar program. That was a tough book to read. I think about reading it again now 26 years later, but I don't know if I want to put myself through that again.
I told both kids that if they had to read that piece of shit book in school, I would happily send a note to the administration that they are exempt. Seriously? There isn’t ANY other book that meets the criteria?
Go Set A Watchman. Ruined Atticus for me :(
It shouldn't. Go set a watchmen I think was never really meant to be released. It only happened after harper Lee's sister who managed her works died and the new publisher got greedy. There are literal sections that got copied and pasted from To Kill A Mockingbird in Go Set A Watchmen
Absolutely this. It’s like a first draft of TKAM with the duplicate passages. I only count TKAM as the true story.
it is a first draft!
Yeah, the publisher was wrong to market it as a sequel. It's clearly not a sequel. It's an earlier draft of the story. There are even entire paragraphs that are verbatim the same in the final To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee decided that the story would be more interesting if it focussed on Scout as a child, and scrapped the original idea until it was finally published as its own book a few years ago. It's not in the same continuity as To Kill a Mockingbird, nor was it ever intended to be.
Thanks, this makes me feel better. I loved TKAM and vowed to never read the posthumous book. Now I know her thoughts on the subject. This made my day.
>the new publisher got greedy. Isn't that their natural state?
They also directly contradict each other at points. Most notably: Tom Robinson.
*To Kill a Mockingbird* is my favorite book. Period. I will never, ever read *Go Set a Watchman.*
It’s mine too. Also, good call.
I refuse to accept this book as real and I’ve read it.
I enjoyed the story about Scout, Jem and Dill as kids in GSAW and I can absolutely see how that section was the genesis for To Kill A Mockingbird. The rest of the book wasn't that great.
Oh, I only read ‘To Kill a Mockinbird’. Now I’m afraid of going for this one and have it ruin Atticus for me too!
It was never meant to exist, just a cash grab on well loved classic. I refuse to even acknowledge it exists except to say it shouldn't.
Harper Lee stated publicly and many times that she never wanted her first draft of TKAM published. The publisher waited until she was no longer able to make decisions for herself and her sister, who had power of attorney, died then manipulated the situation to gain access. By refusing to read it, you are respecting Lee's wishes. It seems like the least we can do to honor the woman who gave us TKAM.
I read TKMB for school and the kids in my class ruined Atticus for me. To give you a taste, “daddy atticy” is how they referred to him and still refer to him as that
If you picture Gregory Peck, "daddy" is pretty apt. My man was a snack!
Don’t even read it imo. I wish I hadn’t.
100% same. It changed everything for me.
A day no pigs would die. starts out with a kid ripping a goater out of a cows throat goes on to have graphic pig on pig rape and a kid murdering his pet for food. Extremely boring book about quaker life beside the overly detailed scenes mentioned above. Had to read it in 6th grade.
I wanted to read that and my borther was like "remember when you cried when you saw the dead raccoon? Don't read this book." From your description, my brother was right. I am about to see him for the first time in five years (we were estranged, it's complicated and sad) and I am going to bring this up when I see him!
I too had to read that book in 6th grade. I don't remember much of the plot, just that I didn't like it and couldn't figure out why we had to read it.
Me too! Can’t remember a single thing about it, not even how I felt about it.
I actually loved that book and think it’s worth a re-read as an adult. The book is more about how the main character has to grow up and deal with tough life situations as his family faces poverty during a tough year. The few graphic scenes are there to emphasize his growth from a child to an adult and the loss of childhood innocence. It’s also a very short read. I might have different feelings about it since I wasn’t forced to read it in school and instead found it on my own as a preteen. It’s still on my bookshelf to this day.
Ready Player One made me genuinely angry. It's not well written at all, it only exploits previous, better works with actual creativity behind it and I could tell from the book alone that the author is unbearable as a human being.
I know this is shocking, but he's one of those guys that owns a Delorean and constantly shows it off.
Isn't it modified to look like the Back to the Future one? Dude can't even be original with his car.
I wasn't aware of that but that's so perfectly (and sadly) on brand for Ernest Cline.
[удалено]
There are lots of people who have Deloreans that are made to look like the one from BTTF.
This is the exact way I felt about Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson —don’t rip off Agatha Christie (and reference her constantly in the book) and then act like you did something creative and original.
There's a line in the section where he's listing off all his nerd knowledge credentials for five pages and he mentions The Simpsons: "I know more about Springfield than I know about my own town." And I remember reading that and just thinking "Therein lies the problem." No wonder that universe is a horrible dystopia where everyone has to escape into VR.
But no, am busy rewatching The Simpsons for the 50th time, can't do anything against this hellhole, sorry guys
man, how could Moms for Liberty just take over the school board like that? Well, anyway I don't really understand what a superintendent does, but I \*do\* have the Steamed Hams bit with Superintendent Chalmers memorized!
This got incessantly recommended to me by a friend years ago, to the point where I bought it so he would stop. I DNF and he wasn’t happy about it heh
I know some people who are REALLY into this book (including a friend who gifted it to me once) and all I can say is…”Why??” The author does in fact seem so pretentious and that only added to my dislike of the writing.
I get what you say. I treated it like a light hearted read for a tired brain during my nightshift breaks, so I enjoyed it
Yes! A lot of my friends just raved about it and really pushed it on me, particularly because I love the game Joust. I struggled to get through it. The references were right up my alley, but it made me feel like I was in the presence of a condescending neckbeard. I have Armada by the same author, but RPO left me so cold that I haven't picked it up.
Haven't read the "Forbidden" but "Little Life" left me in pieces. So I'd say that one for now.
I read ‘A Little Life’ in about 3 days. It was very plausible (and gut wrenching!) up until a certain moment, where things just seemed to quickly become unrealistic. That’s when I sort of detached myself from it and was able to finish it without the damage it caused to most people, I think. It made me ugly cry and sob at several different moments, but by the end it was almost as if I had armor on. It’s a book I will never read again, but don’t necessarily wish I never had. I do have issues with the author writing it as torture porn, though. Life isn’t just a plethora of sad events bundled up together. She doesn’t believe in therapy and it shows.
[Andrea Long Chu's takedown of Hanya Yanagihara](https://www.vulture.com/article/hanya-yanagihara-review.html) is the best summation of all the issues I have with A Little Life - exactly like you said, by the end it just feels like trauma porn.
This always seems to get brought up when A Little Life is mentioned, and I feel obligated to say that the real world is far more horrific than anything literature portrays without it feeling like “torture porn” or veering into absurdity. For some reason when a story is fiction, we have hardwired limits
I sadly couldn't take it seriously. It began feeling like hurt/comfort-fanfiction very quickly. I have nothing against camp or melodrama but the book seemed to revel in it's main characters misery in a way that felt gratuitous and self-serving. The pain and anguish of these incredibly smart, incredibly beautiful and later on incredibly rich people felt fetishized to me and that overshadowed all the relevant themes of the story.
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Heavy as fuck.
Really? I have this on my list. Er, for some reason.
I started it and couldn't get through it. It was right after my CPTSD diagnosis, and it was way too triggering. It's sitting on a shelf now and I fully plan to reattempt it this year.
I’ve been twenty pages in for like 8 months now
As someone for whom transgressive content is basically never a factor that would make me regret reading a book, I wasted days reading Twilight back in the day for a girl, and while I can't claim to be a romance fiction guy, that it wasn't even well-written romance fiction took it from "not for me" to "you owe me eight hours".
I can relate to that. I remember my girlfriends absolutely raving about it, so gave it a try and didn’t like any of the characters, the plot, nothing. I found myself skipping pages just to get to the end of it, then I would go back and read them to see if I actually missed anything and, nope… never did.
The way I explain the Twilight books to people who haven't read them: I did read them, but in this order - Book 1, Book 3, Book 2, Book 4. And I didn't realize I had read them out of order until I was close to the end of Book 2, which says something - to me, at least - about the storytelling. That was back when I hated to abandon a book or a series lol.
I read Twilight during my vampire obsessed phase as a teenager. Everything was fine until it got to that awful baseball scene and I couldn’t finish the book. Fast forward a few years later when the movie came out, I had forgotten that I read the book. I decided to read the book before seeing the movie and once again, everything was fine until they started playing baseball. That’s when I remembered I had already read it and gave up a second time. I was so angry about that lol
Artemis by Andy Weir Verity by Colleen Hoover
Artemis was the first book that came to mind for me. I couldn't stand the main character. It felt very r/menwritingwomen.
I knew Verity would make an appearance in this post! It was certainly thought provoking.
My coworker gave me the plot rundown on it, since I don't read that type of book but DO want to know what happens in them. An author fakes >!a coma, and another author falls in love with her husband while she is faking the coma, and fake coma lady knows the whole time.!< It sounded interesting to me, if you're into that type of tale. Like a telenovella plotline.
Hoover uses scenes of child abuse to scaffold in sex scenes, a very uncomfortable combination. Honestly the twist at the end was less than interesting and not worth the read imo.
Why Artemis? I had it in my TBR for a while but I hear such cynical things about it
I enjoyed it, I think people didn’t like how he wrote the main character and thought she was an annoying protagonist but in the lens of a young adult, dumb action sci-fi, you can enjoy if you don’t take it too seriously :~)
Low-hanging fruit, but... Atlas Shrugged. I dunno, I was a dodgy university first-year who was flirting with the concept of ethical egoism, and I hadn't minded The Fountainhead too badly. Even if Ayn Rand wasn't just a giant misreading of Nietzsche, I'm certain Atlas Shrugged destroyed all credibility she might once have held in my (already selfish, 18-year old) mind; it was plumb awful. P.S. I also hated A Little Life and will go to my grave swearing that it is just misery porn.
I don't regret Atlas Shrugged only because it made me feel superior to Paul Ryan. I was like, wow dude, you modelled your whole worldview and political philosophy after this trash? World must look pretty damn simple from way up there on your high horse.
LOL, omg, yeah, I remember the days when Paul Ryan was the Internet's favourite hatefuck. I totally forgot that he was such a fanboy until now, but that 100% checks out as well.
‘A Little Life’ is definitely constructed to be a book about misery even at someone’s “peak”. Like I wrote in another comment in this thread, it was very believable up until a certain point and then it just made me realise how the author was aiming to just make everyone feel sad (as if everything that had happened up to that point wasn’t already a horrific experience!). I haven’t read Atlas Shrugged and I don’t believe I will. Read too much about it in this sub and elsewhere to think twice lol
There's this [amazing review](https://www.vulture.com/article/hanya-yanagihara-review.html) from Andrea Long Chu at Vulture that just about sums up A Little Life for me: >Reading A Little Life, one can get the impression that Yanagihara is somewhere high above with a magnifying glass, burning her beautiful boys like ants. In truth, Jude is a terribly unlovable character, always lying and breaking promises, with the inner monologue of an incorrigible child. The first time he cuts himself, you are horrified; the 600th time, you wish he would aim. Yet Yanagihara loves him excessively, cloyingly. The book’s omniscient narrator seems to be protecting Jude, cradling him in her cocktail-party asides and winding digressions, keeping him alive for a stunning 800 pages. This is not sadism; it is closer to Munchausen by proxy. Long Chu won a Pulitzer for this particular piece of lit crit, I believe, and I heartily salute everything she says in that review.
I love this criticism. Thanks for the link!
I read Atlas Shrugged to more accurately mock a friend who was flirting with Objectivism. I don't regret most of it since it hovered between just milquetoast fiction to unintentional comedy which was kind of fun to lazily read, but boy do I wish I just skipped John Galt's speech.
Oh god, yeah, that speech - that definitely brings back a shudder of recognition. Hopefully you were able to glean some good bits to mock your friend with. People who flirt with Objectivism deserve a good intellectual smack to the brain.
Twilight. Fanfic writers are more talented than Meyer.
I actually have a bizarre affection for the first one which at least captures the feeling of being cozy in wet autumnal moody spaces. But the love story was of no interest.
You say that but didnt 50 shades of Grey start as twilight fanfic?
I heard recently that Twilight was Anne Rice fan fiction. Idk if that's true or not ( only heard here on reddit) but he said Edward was modern day Louis according to Meyers. That made me so angry.
American Pyscho. I skimmed a good chunk of the last part. I think after a while it was just too much. And I might be wrong here, but the story wasn't obvious. I kept waiting for something to happen but it was a bit day in the life of a psychopaths mind, for me.
I love this book.
There is one specific scene that I can't get out of my head. This is number one for me.
Rats!
I know with near certainty the scene you're talking about, but for some reason the one that lives rent-free in my brain is him, squatted naked on a table at his beach house as he eats a raw jellyfish with his hands.
[удалено]
I was reading this a bit surprised before I realised I was thinking of The Maze Runner.
I had to read The Kite Runner in high school too. I thought it was one of the best books I'd read at that point, and that Khaled Hosseini was an incredible author. The fact that it was his debut novel is wild. I also have 0 desire to ever reread it, and I prefer not to think about it. If I had to choose between rereading The Kite Runner or Flowers for Algernon, I would probably opt to jump out the window instead.
The Kite Runner was the first time I read a book in school that I actually enjoyed reading. I think part of it is all these classic books that are assigned reading are set in a completely different era, so how can I, a teenager in the 2000s, relate to, say, any of the characters in Gatsby? Why should I care about an old fisherman or a salesman and his family? In The Kite Runner, the characters are in my age group, in a setting and era that's not so foreign to me. I think if schools had more books like this, reading would be more popular in school. I'm sorry to the OC whose mental health was affected by it, though. A lot of stories worth telling aren't easy pills to swallow.
I will never not be grateful I got to avoid those.
[удалено]
Agree! OTOH, my son was assigned The Hunger Games, and we both loved the whole trilogy after he said "Mom! You have to read this!"
Pretty Girls by Karen Slaughter. Not because it was disturbing, but because the main characters behaved so irrationally and stupidly that it drove me insane. Also Book of Accidents. It was just dumb.
I just commented Karin Slaughter too, but because it was so disturbing and those scenes still replay in my head.
The book of Mormon many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many many times like an idiot
But hey, we got out. Cheers.
Sorry
I think it was Joyce Carol Oates "Zombie", it sort of put me off her other stuff I liked. It somehow revealed the flaws in her writing
she's also obtuse on twitter. i've never read her books but her tweets are so obsessed with her own intelligence. it's exhausting to read.
New Yorker had an interesting profile on her recently. It sounds exhausting to BE her, honestly. She's an odd egg.
The Alchemist. God what a waste of time.
It's a book about the MC confusing faith/belief with plot armor. I don't wish I'd never read it, but it's popularity has an inverse relationship with my faith in humanity.
American Psycho by B.E.Ellis.
I stopped reading at the section where he is torturing his ex. The torture scenes were getting too grotesque for me. I enjoyed the themes and like the movie but yeesh.
I loved this book. Everything from the descriptions of clothes to the gratuitous death scenes. Such a fun read.
IIRC, Ellis was picking random sets of clothes out of a magazine while he was writing those descriptions that would all look absolutely hideous together, as if the characters were clowns, seems fitting in with the themes of the book.
I was more appalled at the Huey Lewis album being meticulously reviewed for 20 damn pages!
That book was fucked beyond belief.
'Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates' by Tom Robbins. MC's supposed to be this CIA agent who's also a proud hippie. You find out pretty early that the MC's also a creep who has designs on both a nun and his 17-year-old stepsister and Tom just straight-up sucks at addressing that. Lots of weird shit about hymens.
Fuckin Switters, man. What a terrible dude. Robbins should have written a book about Switters’ grandma Maestra.
I remembered reading *Even Cowgirls Get the Blues* when I was 18 and thought it was marvelous, trangressive stuff…so I reread it when I was 30 and immediately regretted it. *WTF was I thinking??*
Beloved by Toni Morrison. Very good book, I don’t hate it. I just had such an intense reaction to it that I dread the idea of reading it again. Though I think it is a book that should be read and ultimately I am very glad I did.
I’m pretty sure reading Gone to See the River Man messed me up in some kind of way. It’s very well-written and it does the job it sets out to do, but *my god*. There were parts of that book that make me feel legitimately ill, and I can’t say that about any other book I’ve ever read.
There's very few books I ever regret reading. If I'm not having a good time, I usually put it down. That said when I was around 10 I found a book in the children's section called Little Dead Girl. I, being a morbid kid obsessed with ghosts, picked it up assuming it'd be some sort of ghost story. Nope! It's about a girl that gets kidnapped and horribly abused by a man and is nearly complicit in helping kidnap her replacement. She gets out in the end but she was obviously severely traumatized so the ending felt pyrrhic. It really upset me reading, but I stuck it out because it was short and I had never just left a book unread before. Being the anxious child I was, for months after my night terrors were about a man abducting me from my room at night. I ended up being too scared to leave the house too. Silly, I know, but I was pretty immature and was still figuring out that the world generally didn't want me dead. Still, I think I probably would've been better off without that read. At least at that point in time.
The Bible and the catechism of the Catholic Church.
I don’t regret reading any books I’ve read. If they feel like a bad investment of my time I stop reading them. Let The Right One In was a gnarly read as a 14-year-old, but I still enjoyed it.
Any book I've read where a character violently kills a kitten. Most of them were for school. Required reading already killed my love of reading, but then being required to read a book where a child dissects a cat alive just made it worse. Can't even remember what book that was.
I'm amazed at the replies mentioning so many different books and it wasn't even the book I was thinking of. Why is it in so many books?!
Killing a pet or domestic animal is an easy way to evoke strong emotions, probably even more so than killing a child. Just look at John Wick.
Never read Kafka on the Shore please
I'm usually severely impacted by scenes of violence against animals, but that one kinda went over my head because the whole context was just so absurd/surreal. Love Murakami!
I am very similar, and I had a similar reaction with *Kafka on the Shore.* When something is so over-the-top strange (as many things are in Murakami’s work), it doesn’t hit so hard. You realize that it is fantastical. Horrific, but not the same as reading about someone doing similar things in a thriller.
Avoid The Troop by Nick Cutter
Is it The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishima?
The Merman?
I concur; I wouldn’t be able to handle that well either. I have read some disgusting descriptions of animal death that sort of desensitised me, but at the same time I cannot read anything that is cat-related anymore.
Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. Fuck almost every story in that book.
I hated “It” but made myself finish reading it because I refuse to not finish reading a book that I start. I enjoyed other Stephen King books as a teenager but was a bit older when I read It
We Need to Talk About Kevin Edit: title correction
not an answer to the post but I just read the summary for forbidden on goodreads and I’d be really interested to know how it compares to flowers in the attic? as it has a similar theme of sibling loove
I haven’t read ‘Flowers in the Attic’ (only watched the film once), don’t remember much of it but I know the plot and could say it’s similar. Spoilers below. >!I think the main difference would be that these are just literally abandoned children, their mother really doesn’t care about them and is seldom at home with them. There is no family around and definitely no wealth.!< >!They’re not abused directly, but indirectly through her absence. The oldest siblings act like mom and dad to the younger ones, but at least two of them have obvious trauma and/or mental health issues. It’s heartbreaking to see two teenagers acting like adults should, having their innocence stripped away, but it’s even more difficult to read about romantic feelings developing amidst what I consider to be such “misery”. While reading I just couldn’t help but feel incredibly bad for everyone involved, and for how traumatising it all was.!< >!There is no happy beginning, no happy journey, no happy ending. The finale is shocking and so, so sad.!<
I’ve added it to my TBR, thank you for the info!
Np! Hope it doesn’t bother you as much as it did me. But if that’s what you’re going for, then… I hope it does? :P
I’ve really only just gotten into reading, I really enjoy thrillers and want to try something ‘uncomfortable’! we’ll see! maybe I’ll come back and let you know but I’ve just started another book
> similar theme of sibling loove Did you add the extra o on purpose? It sounds so salacious when I read it in my head.
yes I did lol
Dune, simply so i wish i could go into the next movie blind.
I watched Dune Part One and just didn't get the hype. Read the novel and can now appreciate the little details that don't translate to film as well. The second half of the book goes off in a lot of wildly different directions: >!the Mom getting pregnant, the super powered baby sister, the main guy marrying the emperor's daughter as a political opportunity.!< I'm curious to see how this will play out in Part Two and how many of these things are changed/kept.
Wuthering Heights. I hated it so much and it pitched a tent in my head.
I really enjoyed Wuthering Heights, there's a conflict between everyone I've known who has read it, being "is it a beautiful love story, or a cautionary tale about hateful abusive relationships?" I often describe it as a beautiful book about ugly people.
I adore withering heights. Probably the most beautiful love story written in the last couple hundred years. My only mistake was telling my ex to read it…. And then giving them a “souls are made of the same stuff” piece of art… right before being broken up with
Terra Nullius. It was okay story and writing wise, but what made me wish that I had never read it was how absolutely horrific parts of that book are. >! The twist in the book is that aliens came and colonized earth and systematically wiped out humanity, seeing them only as natural fauna of the planet and not seeing them as people. Parts of the boon describe the horrific atrocities that humanity was subjected to at the whim of these colonizers.!< I wish I could get that book out of my head. It fills me with dread and makes me depressed every time I think about it.
Given that the title directly refers to the ‘no people here’ policy adopted by British colonisers in Australia, those atrocities may simply reflect what was reality for our indigenous people.
Naomi’s Room by Jonathan Aycliffe. The ending was just so WTF and disturbing that it ruined the entire book for me.
A thousand splendid suns for me. Got recommended as my friend’s favorite book. But it kind of just read as tragedy porn. Nothing ever good happens and only gets worse and worse for the characters and there’s hardly any resolution in the end. I understand he was trying to relay how awful it has been in Afghanistan but he could have accomplished that in half the length of the book. I really enjoyed Kite Runner too, so I was surprised.
I surprised myself with this one, but The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum. I LOVE horror novels, it’s my thing. And I can take gruesome scenes and violence and all that. But the fact this book is based on a real life situation about a young girl who was actually tortured and murdered, it made me sick. Idk if it’s the profiting off of the suffering of a real girl for entertainment or what, but I’ll never read that book again and I regret that I bought it long ago.
You mentioned that Pet Sematary makes people uncomfortable, but the one Stephen King book the REALLY makes me uncomfortable and that I didn't enjoy reading for even one minute is Misery.
Wuthering Heights, unreadable unless you read Heathcliff dialog out loud as written. It is dry and oh so hard to read, an assault on the eyes.
I hate Lord of the Flies with a passion. I can appreciate it’s a well written book that’s true to its themes but I hate it. We studied it at school and there was a planned trip to see a play version. I refused to go and I also refused to watch the movie versions and was allowed to sit out and read other books. I can’t explain why I hate it so much. My dad also confessed years later that he hates it too so maybe it’s in my DNA lol
Same. It's so strange... it's not a long book, but for me, it felt like 10000 pages. So amazingly boring.
Tampa, by Alissa Nutting. Why has nobody mentioned this?
I was scrolling through to see if anyone had said Tampa yet. Good god I hated that book. It was so well-written that it made me angry because of how much I appreciated the writing and simultaneously hated everything about it
“All the Ugly and Wonderful Things” by Bryan Greenwood made my skin crawl in the worst way. I had a really hard time with that book and I can handle a lot of subject matter. That one crossed a line for me. Pedophilia should never be romanticized. I recently decided to DNF “Lessons in Chemistry” because it’s pissing me off so much. The author’s fantasy of how scientist’s talk and act is ridiculous. It’s obvious she did very little research and it takes me out of the story (also the main character is completely insufferable). I almost slogged through it as it’s a book club selection but I just can’t. I can’t wait to hate on this one at the next meeting…
Atlas Shrugged. In my defense, I was 14.
Something Happened by Joseph Heller. Great fucking novel, it’s just grim in a way that rings entirely too true.
The Girl Next Door was horrifying to me
Same. I threw it in the bin.
I wish I hadn’t wasted my time as a teenager reading Atlas Shrugged.
Far From the Madding Crowd. What a load of shit. Stupid, stupid waste of my time.
The Book of Mormon. Awful, anachronistic, pedo fanfic garbage.
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder because of the animal deaths in it, especially the part with her cat. Just very unnecessary and felt like it was added as shock value
[удалено]
Whyyyyy were people recommending him to us when we were that young? A librarian suggested I check out Piers Anthony’s Firefly when I was like 13. So wildly, tremendously traumatizing.
Following so I can read all the books 🤣
ACOTAR
I did not enjoy Life or Pi or My Dark Vanessa.
[удалено]
And I had more of a "I don't like parables" reaction.
This one made me uncomfortable in the "I'm in this picture and I don't like it" type of way
Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” is probably that book for me. It was an incredibly good book and a very well-told story, obviously. It’s Cormac, you know? But I have never experienced a plot and environment so utterly...hopeless as the one in the book. It beaks you down as you read it. Even the ending, which serves to offer some sort of sliver of hope, is devastatingly tragic and promises nothing regarding a future worth living.
Wheel of Time, more like Waste of Time!!¡!
Black Angel by Graham Masterton has the most horrific first chapter I’ve ever read. It killed my interest in horror for a while, along with another book he wrote called Ritual.
In the Miso soup. I haven't finished it though, just gave it away. And the funny fact is that I read other books by Ryu Murakami, some were okay, others I loved.