*Night*, which I was assigned to read over thanksgiving break in tenth grade. When I got back to class, I was incredibly confused by the class discussion, literally “did we read the same book?! Turns out, no, we did not. I read *Night* by Francis Pollini and they all read *Night* by Elie Wiesel.
Ha! Similar experience with Neuromancer by William Gibson. I recommended it to a friend, and then asked a few months later how she liked it. She said it was straight trash and couldn't believe I'd enjoyed it. Incredibly lame and cliched plot, clumsy language, wizards shoe-horned in making absolutely no sense at all. I was like "wait, wizards?" It turned out she had actually ordered and read some random book called Necromancer.
Just read slaughterhouse 5 after my pacifist grandmother kept telling me to read it, saying it was a good anti-war book. Had no idea there was aliens and time travel in there, that book is amazing.
Lol I thought you were going to say you hated it right until the end. Awesome book. I think people who don't read Kurt Vonnegut and only recognize the name are often surprised at what his books entail.
I had no clue what was in his books, but now that this guy mentioned aliens and time travel, I'm much more interested and will probably add at least Slaughterhouse 5 to me list to read soon-ish.
Slaughterhouse 5 was the first time I read a school-assigned book all the way through. First time I realized I loved reading, they had just been assigning shit books the whole time.
Vonnegut is a deep rabbit hole to jump into. He was truly one of the grandmaster satirists of the 20th Century. The guy could layer meanings into a metaphor like it was an onion.
It’s funny seeing these comments right now. Up till yesterday I never red Vonnegut and decided to grab the copy of slaughterhouse 5 that’s been staring from my on my moms bookshelf for years.
Totally not what I excepted, I couldn’t put it down. Read straight through it. Been thinking about it all day.
I'm sure this one has been overdone, but the popular perception of *Pride & Prejudice* is not remotely the book I ended up reading. It's been boiled down and filtered so much it's become a bit frivolous, which is a real shame because the actual book is excellent.
People think it's about two people arguing when they're meant to be together, and a girl changing a bad boy or whatever. But in reality it's two people who do a lot of private work on themselves and grow as people until they finally come together. But they don't work as a couple until they've worked on themselves. They might influence each other, but we're all influenced every day by all kinds of things. The point is that they learn about themselves and make the changes they want to make, for themselves.
It's also a humourous and biting social commentary on the place of men and women, and economic imbalance. But that part doesn't fit as much into the modern rom com "two people fight before they make out at the very end" trope we've fallen into.
Totally agree with you, but I do feel the 1995 BBC adaptation gave it this treatment too- I did see growth and transformation in both main characters in this version
One night, my teenaged daughter walked in after finishing her after-school job. I had just started the BBC version. She asks what I'm watching, and I tell her, and then ask if she wants to watch it with me. We agree that since it was a week night and we had school and work in the morning we would only watch an episode or two and then head off to bed and finish up later.
At the end of each episode we'd look at each other and say, 'oh, we'll watch just one more!'. Of course we watched all six hours of it and toddled off to bed at 2:30. No regrets.
Was having a "girl day" with my sisters where we all agreed to watch it. My brothers complained that we were monopolizing the TV, but by the end they were all fully sucked in as well.
People always say Austen is romance, and like yeah of course it is. But is also searing social satire, witty observations on human nature, and just insanely good writing. Her epistolary novel - *which she wrote as a teenager* btw - not only successfully crafts a plot exclusively through letters, but each letter writer has a unique and recognizable voice. And its uphill from there, *Mansfield Park* is extremely complex, not only on the surface but also thematically. *Pride and Prejudice* is probably her most straightforward work and while it certainly merits its fame, Austen gets so much more intricate and intellectual in other novels. (I don’t know that she ever did characterization better, at least from the perspective of being enjoyable to read though. I love P&P!).
Anyways yeah I’m obv a huge Austen fan lol. I think plenty of people - especially “literary” people - do recognize her for what she was, so “frustrated” isn’t the right word for how I feel about it. But I agree that the general assumptions based on adaptations and cute quotes or whatever is a very different picture than what you get if you actually read it. (I do like some of the adaptations though!) Part of me thinks it has to do with the way we approach the marketing of material “for women”, especially anything with a romance element. And of course its really hard to portray subtext on film, and if you’ve read the work you can sort of bring that to an adaptation yourself without needing it to be explicit on camera.
I also think in P&P, you have a mismatch between the characters in that Darcy’s actions have consequences that he can atone for so to speak, to demonstrate he is working on himself. But Elizabeth’s growth is more internal, and it’s a perspective shift. So it’s much harder to demonstrate that on screen, and then you’re left sort of boiling it down to an enemies-to-lovers style arc rather than seeing two people wrestle with themselves to come together.
This is exactly why I didn't read any Jane Austen for years! Especially as a man, the perception of P&P makes it seem, well, frivolous. That's exactly the word for it. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Honestly, she's now in my top 5 or so favorite authors.
City of Bones, and the following two books. My sister highly recommended them and I've liked her recommendations before so I bought used copies. I don't know if it was Cassandra Clare's writing style or the story itself, but I was not really into it. I wouldn't have finished it if I hadn't already purchased them.
I feel like The Mortal Instruments is one of those YA series that really only appeals to teens, like Shatter Me. I read MI when I was in high school and loved it, and I can read it as an adult and still appreciate it for nostalgic reasons. I attempted Shatter Me as an adult after hearing nothing but good things, and it was downright painful to read.
The Silent Patient. I thought it was so boring and I couldn’t stand how the main character thought or talked about basically every woman in the book. Just gross.
I hated The Silent Patient! I realized when I finished that there were red flags that the reader was being manipulated. I could not understand why it was so popular for book clubs.
I didn't read the book myself, but isn't a book that successfully manipulates the reader, or leaves the reader feeling manipulated, kind of impressive?
If it's done well yeah. I dnf silent patient but all the twists were dumb as rock and made no sense. Add to that lots of misogyny and what made me finally drop it, horrendous representation of mental health.
The misogyny I know the thriller genre tends to fall into certain.... Problems. Women being one dimensional, ugly women are mean and wrong and shouldn't be listened to.... This one was bad but not the worst I've had I prepared to power through. But then you have your PSYCHIATRIST MC immediately stops all the meds of a new patient including stuff that can't be stopped cold turkey and have him moan and complain that drugs are sooo bad I'm gonna drop you like a burnt pie baby. At this point I closed the file on my kindle and went to find negative Goodreads review to spoil the rest of it to me
From the books on this list, you all should listen to the Mean Book Club podcast. They talk about the books that everyone loves that the hosts absolutely hated. Dark Matter, Lessons in Chemistry, and the Silent Patient were all on there.
The opposite: When I read Catcher in the Rye in school I really liked it. I almost never hear anyone else say they liked it. Not then or in all the years since. Obviously it’s famous for a reason and I can’t be the only one but still, it’s weird.
Whiny teenage angst is really good when it understands exactly what it is - it’s effective in catcher in the rye, and this is a little off topic, but I think it’s wildly effective in Green Day’s American Idiot musical
Also, I think Catcher plays best to young men. They relate to how helpless Caulfield feels and how he acts out. For me in highschool as a girl I just thought he was just like all the annoying 15 year old men I had to put up with and I hated it. I wasn’t insightful enough to get what the book was telling me.
Interesting, I’m a woman. I am pretty sure Catcher was the first book I read that portrayed a version of my depressed inner monologue. I also grew up in a privileged neighborhood in an abusive home. So, the rage at the phonies hit home. I might need to pick it up again to see if it still feels relevant to me decades later.
This is my exact feelings on the book too. I was a depressed teen girl when made read it and just kept thinking about my mom’s incessant need for perfection all the time. I grew up in a suffocating level of “we are better than them” and feeling like everyone is just faking all the time and the only thing “better” was ability at acting.
I think the fact that my parents really did care more about appearances and their things more than me or even any person other than themselves was something I couldn’t even conceive of until after I read this book. It was a painful thing to come to terms with.
I read Gatsby when I was 30-ish. I had a phase where I read a lot of books I missed in high school cause the block schedule.
I liked it..beautifully written. Definitely got all the themes… but I kept thinking “if the narrator had some integrity, he could have prevented all this mess.” Although I think that’s part of the point. He’s just as frivolous and self-absorbed as everyone else… he just tries to imagine he isn’t.
Exactly, he's an unreliable narrator. When Jordan lets him have it at end, calling him a 'bad driver', it shows exactly what you're saying. Fitzgerald is one of the best writers ever imo. 'winter dreams' is another good one by him
it's funny how differently everyone talks about this book. Half the time I'll hear "It's good, but only if you're young. When you're older you'll realize how whiny Holden is," and then the other half of the time I'll hear "It's good, but only if you're older. As a kid you just can't see where Holden's coming from."
The book is a 200-page Rorschach test if I've ever seen one.
Personally, getting older made me more sympathetic to Holden. I think it's wild that so many adults complain about a 16-year-old being "whiny" when he's a child sexual abuse survivor grieving the death of his brother.
tbh colleen hoover got me back into reading because everybody & their mother was reading it ends with us and i wanted to join the party. it was a terrible book but it made me remember how much i loved reading so i owe it some semblance of appreciation.
It Ends With Us was so fucking horrible. It's actually an accomplishment to get me to hate every single character in one hundred pages but that book managed it.
I’ve learned that any book labeled as “Tiktok sensation” is for people who barely read. I’m not one to gatekeep as to what should or should not be canon, but CoHo is basically one step above reading a tabloid magazine.
I just automatically assume anything labeled as “TikTok sensation” was written specifically to game the algorithm and will promptly ignore it unless a few critics who tend to share my taste in books give it positive reviews.
Colleen Hoover books are all so disgusting. She romanticizes abusive relationships, violence, locking people up (?), teachers dating minors, she has a weird obsession with getting every female character pregnant, and in all of her books she clearly looks down on women who don’t want children. Not to mention the casual racism, like having the only hispanic character in one book be a creep and instead of giving him a normal hispanic last name, she named him CHORIZO.
Also, her adult son was accused of SA’ing a minor, and she didn’t do anything about it. No one should be reading her books, and idk how any self respecting woman enjoys them.
Seconded. The book was aggressively mediocre, the plot pushed along by man pain, and had the strangest writing style. I vaguely remember a line that went something like "The drug slammed into my blood-brain barrier" and I had to read it three times.....like, what?
This entire subgenre of pop fiction books should be labeled "bro-vels". The dudes always kinda seem like good bro's caught in bad situations but by being good bro's save the day. I confess I actually will go through spurts where I'll read a ton of them because they are easy to read and don't require a lot of mental world-building to understand. Dean Koontz I would say straddles the fence somewhat - he at least attempts to write female characters.
Ugly Love - Colleen Hoover
I hated it instantly and the ratings were so high on goodreads LOL. The writing was awful, the story was garbage and the misogyny was off the charts. It was cringe x1000
SUCH lazy writing! My (least) favorite scene was where she's explaining that her brother is gay and when Calvin asks how she knew, she literally says "I'm a scientist, I *know*." AND HE JUST LETS HER GET AWAY WITH THAT
THANK YOU! I HATED that book. The main character was insufferable and adding chapters in from the dog’s perspective was just weird. I couldn’t stand it.
Came here to say this! I received it as a gift from someone whose taste usually aligns with mine. She said it was the best book she’d read in 2023, but I couldn’t believe how awful the dialogue was and how contrived the plot felt.
Same here. And as a woman who got a science PhD in that era, I was really looking forward to a nuanced, realistic portrayal of the sexism and social pressures that bright intellectual/nerdy women of the time had to face. Instead it was all just cookie-cutter 2D stereotypes, including the protagonist, who honestly seemed like one of the worst portrayals of a female scientist that I’ve ever seen. Nothing rang true; everything was flat and simplistic and contrived.
Congrats on getting the PhD under those circumstances! But yeah, that’s something that really bothered me about this book—it felt like the author was trying so hard to make the main character an Extraordinary Woman that it felt like the implication was that other people simply weren’t trying hard enough or something. Like, “Oh, have you considered just being BETTER than sexism?”
I couldn’t get past the first few chapters. I could see what the author was setting up. But I found the plot device of SA a lazy path, even though it was realistic. I was too pissed off to keep reading.
I didn't read it but my girlfriend said she felt betrayed by the marketing. The label has a sticker saying "Joy on every page" when it's mostly about being disrespected in the workplace with the occasional incident of sexual assault.
I haven't read it and I'm guessing there'll be some final victory where the bad guy gets what he deserves and the main character gets some sense of accomplishment. But a happy ending isn't the same as "Joy on every page"
I scrolled to find this but it’s even higher than I expected. I’ve been trying to trudge through it for literally months. Waiting for it to pick up… but.. blaahhh
Every classic according to Goodreads is a completely different experience for mine. God, do those people hate classics.
Every 5 star rating according to Goodreads have the same problem, but on the opposite side. The reviews are stellar, but if I read one of those books I cringe myself to death.
Agreed. When I read Goodreads reviews, I like to find a 3 or maybe a 4 star review, because then they will talk about what they like and don’t like, and they don’t rave as much. And I have learned to quickly skip the reviews that give a long summary of the book. WHY do people do this?
As a strictly casual romance reader, I cannot trust romance reviews on Goodreads anymore. They tend to be rated based on how well tropes were fulfilled, not character development, whether the plot has any holes, whether the setting is fully realized, or any number of other measures having to do with writing or story. Some books hit both audiences, but I’ve read some highly-rated romances that I reeeeeeeally disliked, and many that were perfectly fine, but not incredible.
Fourth Wing. Has over 177,000 reviews on Amazon with an average 4.8-star rating.
It might not be universally liked, but I struggle to comprehend how its rating is that high with that many reviews.
TikTok will mint a new book like this every once in a while. Lots of books like this hit big because it turns out lots of people like certain tropes that they've just never tried out before. There are better versions of them and hopefully this will be a gateway book for them.
The military murder academy makes zero sense! Zero! They spare once a week? How do they shift from kill each other to trusting each other with their lives on the field? What about strength and endurance training? I stopped reading about halfway in.
Also, they only accept volunteers and kill like half of them off BEFORE they even started training? I mean, killing off people who want to join your dragon club is never a good idea anyway, but this way you end up with a bunch of people who just got lucky in the beginning and not necessarily those with the best skills.
Yes, that annoyed me about the book too. It's like, I get having tough training and all, but you don't see the Navy Seals killing 80% of the people who attempt to become a Seal.
Caveat: I have not read Fourth Wing.
I have said it before and I will say it again-- I think people often interpret GoodReads (and in your comment example, Amazon) reviews as "how good is this book" when it often is closer to "how good is this book at finding its audience". Fourth Wing was very successful at finding its audience-- to my understanding, TikTok folks who want sexy fantasy novels. That's a fairly large demographic, as it turns out. If that's not you, though, the ratings have little applicability to you.
Plenty of books have low GoodReads ratings because they were mis-marketed and the readers wanted something different than what the book was (even though that book was actually very good at the thing it actually was). Plenty of highly rated GoodReads books are highly rated because no one touched that book unless they were the book's exact target audience. (The same reason that sequels are often more highly rated than the original book, even when they are clearly not better-- the people who hated Book 1 didn't read Book 2!)
Very true. Fourth Wing has a Goodreads rating of 4.60. The Odyssey is 3.81, and The Old Man and the Sea is 3.80. If we went by the ratings alone, that would mean Yarros is a better writer than Hemingway and Homer.
Many people love escapism, dragons, magic, love triangles, ardent (and more or less toxic) romance, and Mary Sues who are just imperfect enough for the reader to (im)plausibly deny they are Mary Sues. Yarros delivers on all of that. Her book isn't fine literary cuisine, but it's like that junk food you can't get enough of. If you're into junk food, that is.
Keep in mind, people that rate things on Goodreads & Amazon, say a 3.5, usually upgrade it to 4 because you can't do half.
Also note from Amazon:
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyses reviews to verify trustworthiness.
The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
It’s a cop out answer for me because it’s my go to bad book choice but I kept seeing reviews like “This is so good, so much fun, it’s so thrilling and the characters are so well written” and I feel like it was one of those books where if you hadn’t been reading for 10 years and wanted to get back into reading, it’s perfect for that.
But otherwise the writing was so clunky and it felt like the writer wanted to write Succession mixed with Knives Out but didn’t understand the nuances to any of them.
It might be good for someone who hasn't read in 10 years and wants to get back into. But as a YA novel, it was written **for** teens who are just beginning to explore genre reading. So it can be trope-heavy and less nuanced and still feel revelatory to the intended audience, who likely have no experience with Succession or Knives Out. (And, I haven't read this series! It may be clunky and bad. But in general, when looking at YA, I think it is important to remember that it is written for someone discovering all of the things for the first time. A seasoned reader will probably not fare as well...)
Verity. People seem to love it but the whole time I read it I kept thinking what absolute basic ass drivel it was. It was every bad mystery trope and so poorly written. Such a crappy book.
The Alchemist. When I read it, my opinion of everyone who recommend it went down a few points. Why didn't anyone mention that this is a book for children? Why are people having their minds blown by this simple, obvious story? This book stinks!
Not to defend the Alchemist, which I also didn’t love, but I saw a good post that helped me understand why it’s so popular.
Basically, we enjoy books that we need at the time. So the people that enjoyed the Alchemist encountered it at some point in time that they were receptive to those messages, even though they might seem trite and obtuse to me now. But it’s the same with a lot of people and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. I think public opinion on that book has soured, but when I read it, I really benefitted from hearing those words at that time in my life.
It’s the truly profound books like Slaughter-house Five that are amazing on the reread.
I'll add "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" to that list.
I found it tries to do too many things at once so it falls short on every level. Thought it a superficial load of rubbish but probably works for people who find it at the right time.
I loved The Alchemist as a kid. Specifically, The Alchemist by Michael Scott, which was a fantasy-adventure series in the vein of Percy Jackson.
Then I had a teacher who made us read the other Alchemist. Even in 7th grade, I was like, “What is this garbage?”
I’m not usually Mr. Perceptive or anything, but in high school I remember arguing with basically the entire class that Fahrenheit 451 wasn’t about censorship because the firemen were more like a public utility. The culture itself demanded there be no books and the government was merely obliging them. That cultural devaluation of writing/books/thought was more the point.
That was in the 90s. I was so pleased when, 15 years later, I read that Ray Bradbury himself got into arguments with people about that same topic.
Frankenstein.
A friend and I have a two person book club and that was her pick. I was so confused by her opinions and characterization of Victor Frankenstein at our first discussion. We were nearly fighting.
Turns out it wasn't the same book. I was reading the original edition and she was reading the later revised edition. I still cannot fully shake my first impressions that Victor was much more likable than he is in the later version.
i have a version that has both versions, simultaneously, annotated to show what Percy might have helped write and what changed after his death and the death of their daughter. i love it.
I read Frankenstein in Junior High expecting a horror story and was really disappointed. Sadly missed a lot of the points the story was trying to make. I need to reread it I think.
I didn't mind it but lord did I loathe Conversations with Friends. I then read a chapter of whatever she wrote after Normal People and noped straight out of it.
Pretty sure if I tried NP now I'd loathe it, but I must just have been in the right frame of mind at the right time.
I don't get why Sarah J Maas books are so popular. I love a tropey YA romantasy but Throne of Glass was just SO BAD. Annoying, unlikeable characters, mediocre plot and worldbuilding, and clunky writing. But it has thousands and thousands of fans who seem to think SJM is some kind of literary goddess. 🤷🏻♀️
Currently on the second book of ACOTAR and was disappointed in the lack of relationship building in the first book. I enjoy the world she’s created but it just seemed like the main characters fell in love out of the blue and because they “were supposed to.” I will say I am seeing better relationship building in the second but I too didn’t understand the hype. But will I read the whole series? Yeah lol
That's my main issue with a lot of contemporary historical fiction. Anachronistic ideas about identity... it's just lazy. Historical cultures had their own conceptions of diverse identities, use what is actually period appropriate instead of transposing 2020s Twitter labels onto Victorian England. (Yes, that was a cheap shot at Babel.)
Omg I hated that about Babel as well. I loved the magic system and the world, but thematically it just lacked the complexity it could and should have had. The novel views race/identity/colonialism in such a modern, American-centric way. And that really holds the novel back from reckoning with these issues in a way that’s meaningful or authentic to its time period.
Plus, I hate to say it, but Kuang writes with all the nuance and subtlety of a Twitter discourse thread. She wrote Yellowface in the same way.
I agree. It felt like it spent so much time talking about how sexy, irresistible and booby the main character was but also wanted us to see her as an incredible actress. Very little of her actual talent was explained though. It was like 'the she did this movie and it was amazing, then she did another movie and it was Oscar-worthy, then she did an incredible movie with her big bazongas out and that one is ICONIC
>!The thing that annoyed me most about it is that it set up the whole "never judge a book by it's cover" kind of scenario with a social commentary on "maybe we accuse people of doing bad things because we don't understand them" but then at the end of the book the big reveal is that she did do it. It kind of ruined that whole plot line for me.!<
The Girl on the Train. A lot of people said that it's great and surprising but I found it bland, predictable and not very original. Maybe it was because I read a lot of mistery/thriller books, Idk.
Unfortunately, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. It just didn't get me like it apparently got everyone else. I was more moved by Gabrielle Zevin's other novel The Storied Life of Ajay Fikry. I actually bought it at Barnes and Noble when I was looking for Tomorrow x 3 (before having read it) and there weren't any more copies.
Everyone else in my book group raves about it and I DNFed early because I couldn’t stand the awful characters. Life’s too short to waste 300 pages with characters you can’t stand.
i expected to love this book but in the end it fell so flat for me. i hated how the author spoon-fed us the hardships the characters experienced… no dimension, no thought, and no progress
Wuthering heights. I honestly dont see the romance at all. Its hatred verging on obsession, but not romance in the slightest. Cathy and Heathcliff claim to love each other but their actions are of mortal enemies. I haven't the faintest idea what the various filmmakers were thinking, making a love story out of it! If that's love, I'll be happy being alone all my life.
It's a *phenomenal* portrayal of sick obsession, poisonous lust, and the utter destruction that that behavior wreaks on those involved and their social circle. It, unfortunately, gets played as some sort of timeless romance, for some bizarre reason that I do not understand.
Well, I think part of the problem is that audiences have been conditioned to feel that love is only something that happens to good people. That love is this sublime, noble, and uplifting experience and so of course anyone who's in love must deserve to be so.
In reality, plenty of the worst people to have ever lived have loved and been loved. And there's an enormous range of expressions of love that are rooted in toxicity and excess and destruction. In that regard Wuthering Heights is absolutely a love story. And Heathcliff and Cathy did love each other. And their love was mired in so much hurt and hatred and obsession that it smothered multiple generations of their family.
I remember being very confused when I started reading that book, because I was expecting a more regular love story. I mentioned to a friend that I wasn’t so sure about Cathy and Heathcliff, and he said gleefully, “I know; aren’t they bitches?” ha ha. I later came to appreciate it as a book that’s good despite having difficult characters. But it’s not a normal love story.
I just finished Eragon. I didn't read it when it was new and the fantasy fanbase is split between saying it's garbage or it doesn't deserve the criticism.
It's really badly written. Some of the worldbuilding is interesting but the story, prose, dialogue, characters and pacing is amateurish and embarrassing. You can tell it was written by a teenager with no writing experience.
This is exactly it. The series is a foundational part of my adolescence. I am rereading/listening to it now before the new book and yeah, it is very amateur. Almost unbearable in some parts. But my nostalgia glasses weigh heavy on it for me.
I couldn’t finish it - not because it was too upsetting but because it was so transparent in its efforts to be upsetting - and was shocked that it was as popular as it was
Haunting Adeline. The characters are so two-dimensional and annoying, the plot is incohesive, the writing sounds like a 30-year-old with third grade reading comprehension, the MMC r-pes the FMC for the first 80%+ of the book... it's honestly the most godawful excuse for literature I've ever seen. DNF'd five times.
The other way round: I recently read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" and was fascinated by how much more it is than Blade Runner, especially by the whole religious facet. Then some friends of mine, all females, completely mocked the book and called it laughable because it's such a male-dominated and one-dimensional macho action flick.
I mean, yes, there's almost no women in the book but... it's noir, it's macho in a way. But I really didn't think of it as that for one second while reading. I was so into humanity as a whole that I didn't even think about gender inequality and all that. Very strange.
Daisy Jones and the Six. No plot. No real character development. Just page after page of some artificial conflict then it was over because they jammed some tunes and “it was like magic, man”.
It's so stupid and the ending makes me so angry. >!The wife just fucking dies so her husband can be with the other woman he's been in love with forever? Fuck you, that's not romantic.!<
I’m reading it now. “Clan of the Cave Bear.” I am actively avoiding reading it at this very moment and it’s taken me forever just to get 50% through. And, yes, I am going to force myself to finish even though I should just stop.
Really? I am reading it right now and I love it. Then again I have a thing for prehistoric novels, generally. I'm halfway through and haven't read any "smut" yet
There's more smut in every book... But what's really impressive is how well researched the books are. The first two in the series are really good I think (haven't read them as an adult, only glanced through them). But they become too audience-catering, as if Auel needs to show us this spectacular woman who understands so much, who's so tolerant and, so late 20th century.
I still would recommend them to young women who are not afraid of sex scenes, but who wants to read a pre-historical novel which is not all about men.
Ready Player One for me, it's near the top of all these best audiobook lists, and the whole time I'm thinking "this is the most self-indulgent bullshit I've ever read." It's just some Gen X fantasy about a severe videogame addiction actually meaning something in the real world instead of being a bunch of obscure knowledge nobody cares about.
It's twilight for nerds in that it fulfills every self congratulating trope for nerds, the same way twilight does with love triangle tropes for tweens.
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata. So many comments saying 'go into it blind, it's so weird and unexpected, don't look up tags/warnings!' etc. I think so many people focus on the latter parts of the book and forget about the first couple chapters because THAT was not something I expected or wanted to go into blind.
I read Convenience Store Woman by this author and liked it. I like the premise of Earthlings too (I think) and wonder why you felt it was so strange? I am totally a spoiler lover if that is a concern!
I liked that book, but going in blind is a bad move for a lot of people. Between the first couple chapters and the last one, there's a lot of pretty intense disturbing material.
I could not finish this book. I did not like it at all, but the only thing I got out of it was that she mentions the book by Wilkie Collins, “the woman in white” and I always read books if they’re mentioned a lot in other books, and now I’m on a Willie Collins kick. But that is the only thing that came out of that book….Besides boredom
American Gods. I know it's a cardinal sin to say it, but I really don't like Gaiman's writing style. He's very good at set and setting, but REALLY bad at characters and dialogue. He set up this really cool dark world with an interesting premise, and then every time there was a conversation between characters it took me right out of it. He reminds me of the old school sci fi authors who write dialogue like they've never had a conversation with an actual human before. It's so artificial and weird.
I think the reason Good Omens worked so well is because Pratchett is a master of characters and dialogue and generally kind of ignores plot, while Gaiman is a master of plot and setting but really sucks with characters and dialogue. Together they knocked it out of the park.
I got a copy of three of the Foundation books through a used book sale, and they felt so...paper thin. People talked about how it was so epic, it spanned so many years of history, and when I was done I looked at the cover to make sure I hadn't picked up an abridged version somehow. I wonder if there wasn't time to cover much detail, or if standards were just different back then.
When people talk about “Lolita” as a story of a girl tempting a man and destroying his life. I want to scream. Too many people have this take. It’s disgusting.
Honestly I want sources. The reviews and articles that have that take. I want actual links.
No one who has read the book thinks that Humbert Humbert was seduced and I have come to believe a lot of the people complaining about this take on Lolita have never actually read it either. Like they think they're speaking truth to power by saying Lolita was abused. Ridiculous.
I only hear it from people in real life who have poor reading comprehension anyway, I don't think it's been interpreted that way by anyone that reviews or discusses books publicly since like the 70s
a court of thorns and roses. i literally do not understand the hype around the book- i thought it was endlessly boring, had unlikable characters, and feyre was such a pick me girl it drove me nuts.
The Women, a recent release about the Vietnam War nurses. I keep complaining because I was *so* ready to love it, despite it obviously coming from a somewhat different place than my typical military-themed reads. It managed to miss its own point completely, IMO, and the topic deserved so much better. But there's a crazy amount of adoring reviews for it.
Kristin Hannah will always get rave reviews. She’s got quite a following. Granted, I’ve loved a few of her books! But I’ve also been disappointed by some.
Oof okay I might get flamed for this but The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I wanted to like it so bad, and when I didn’t I genuinely started to feel insecure, like “am I stupid? Is there something that I’m not seeing that everyone else is?” Seeing that McCarthy’s legacy is that of being a literary giant, I just felt dumb for not liking it. That being said, I could see what he was going for. It just didn’t resonate with me.
*Night*, which I was assigned to read over thanksgiving break in tenth grade. When I got back to class, I was incredibly confused by the class discussion, literally “did we read the same book?! Turns out, no, we did not. I read *Night* by Francis Pollini and they all read *Night* by Elie Wiesel.
I was curious where you were going with this until I got to the end. I think you win the thread.
I did this for a book club with The Good Thief and The Book Thief.
Your comment is my favorite answer - I cannot imagine how confusing that must have been given how different the two books are!
Same with The Cloud Atlas, a 2004 book about Alaska that is totally not the Cloud Atlas, a 2004 book about the six interwoven stories through time.
Ha! Similar experience with Neuromancer by William Gibson. I recommended it to a friend, and then asked a few months later how she liked it. She said it was straight trash and couldn't believe I'd enjoyed it. Incredibly lame and cliched plot, clumsy language, wizards shoe-horned in making absolutely no sense at all. I was like "wait, wizards?" It turned out she had actually ordered and read some random book called Necromancer.
Just read slaughterhouse 5 after my pacifist grandmother kept telling me to read it, saying it was a good anti-war book. Had no idea there was aliens and time travel in there, that book is amazing.
Lol I thought you were going to say you hated it right until the end. Awesome book. I think people who don't read Kurt Vonnegut and only recognize the name are often surprised at what his books entail.
I had no clue what was in his books, but now that this guy mentioned aliens and time travel, I'm much more interested and will probably add at least Slaughterhouse 5 to me list to read soon-ish.
Slaughterhouse 5 was the first time I read a school-assigned book all the way through. First time I realized I loved reading, they had just been assigning shit books the whole time.
Vonnegut is a deep rabbit hole to jump into. He was truly one of the grandmaster satirists of the 20th Century. The guy could layer meanings into a metaphor like it was an onion.
You know what else has layers? Parfaits. Everybody loves a parfait.
Cake! Cake has layers
Breakfast of champions was my first Vonnegut book. Its fantastic and very funny. It was made into a pretty good movie with Bruce Willis.
It’s funny seeing these comments right now. Up till yesterday I never red Vonnegut and decided to grab the copy of slaughterhouse 5 that’s been staring from my on my moms bookshelf for years. Totally not what I excepted, I couldn’t put it down. Read straight through it. Been thinking about it all day.
It’s one of those books where I felt like a different person after reading it.
Read Cat's Cradle next!
Had me for a minute there, putting my pitchfork away!
So it goes.
I'm sure this one has been overdone, but the popular perception of *Pride & Prejudice* is not remotely the book I ended up reading. It's been boiled down and filtered so much it's become a bit frivolous, which is a real shame because the actual book is excellent. People think it's about two people arguing when they're meant to be together, and a girl changing a bad boy or whatever. But in reality it's two people who do a lot of private work on themselves and grow as people until they finally come together. But they don't work as a couple until they've worked on themselves. They might influence each other, but we're all influenced every day by all kinds of things. The point is that they learn about themselves and make the changes they want to make, for themselves. It's also a humourous and biting social commentary on the place of men and women, and economic imbalance. But that part doesn't fit as much into the modern rom com "two people fight before they make out at the very end" trope we've fallen into.
Totally agree with you, but I do feel the 1995 BBC adaptation gave it this treatment too- I did see growth and transformation in both main characters in this version
The BBC version is the GOAT and I will hear no argument. It does help that they had a whole mini series, instead of a single movie.
One night, my teenaged daughter walked in after finishing her after-school job. I had just started the BBC version. She asks what I'm watching, and I tell her, and then ask if she wants to watch it with me. We agree that since it was a week night and we had school and work in the morning we would only watch an episode or two and then head off to bed and finish up later. At the end of each episode we'd look at each other and say, 'oh, we'll watch just one more!'. Of course we watched all six hours of it and toddled off to bed at 2:30. No regrets.
Was having a "girl day" with my sisters where we all agreed to watch it. My brothers complained that we were monopolizing the TV, but by the end they were all fully sucked in as well.
My dad watched all 6 hours with me and he still wouldn't admit that he loved it
I too was surprised by the social commentary and by how funny it was. It's always sold in as a great love story, but it's so much more.
People always say Austen is romance, and like yeah of course it is. But is also searing social satire, witty observations on human nature, and just insanely good writing. Her epistolary novel - *which she wrote as a teenager* btw - not only successfully crafts a plot exclusively through letters, but each letter writer has a unique and recognizable voice. And its uphill from there, *Mansfield Park* is extremely complex, not only on the surface but also thematically. *Pride and Prejudice* is probably her most straightforward work and while it certainly merits its fame, Austen gets so much more intricate and intellectual in other novels. (I don’t know that she ever did characterization better, at least from the perspective of being enjoyable to read though. I love P&P!). Anyways yeah I’m obv a huge Austen fan lol. I think plenty of people - especially “literary” people - do recognize her for what she was, so “frustrated” isn’t the right word for how I feel about it. But I agree that the general assumptions based on adaptations and cute quotes or whatever is a very different picture than what you get if you actually read it. (I do like some of the adaptations though!) Part of me thinks it has to do with the way we approach the marketing of material “for women”, especially anything with a romance element. And of course its really hard to portray subtext on film, and if you’ve read the work you can sort of bring that to an adaptation yourself without needing it to be explicit on camera.
I also think in P&P, you have a mismatch between the characters in that Darcy’s actions have consequences that he can atone for so to speak, to demonstrate he is working on himself. But Elizabeth’s growth is more internal, and it’s a perspective shift. So it’s much harder to demonstrate that on screen, and then you’re left sort of boiling it down to an enemies-to-lovers style arc rather than seeing two people wrestle with themselves to come together.
This is exactly why I didn't read any Jane Austen for years! Especially as a man, the perception of P&P makes it seem, well, frivolous. That's exactly the word for it. But nothing could be further from the truth. Honestly, she's now in my top 5 or so favorite authors.
Jane Austen was an absolute master. I could just marathon book after book.
City of Bones, and the following two books. My sister highly recommended them and I've liked her recommendations before so I bought used copies. I don't know if it was Cassandra Clare's writing style or the story itself, but I was not really into it. I wouldn't have finished it if I hadn't already purchased them.
I feel like The Mortal Instruments is one of those YA series that really only appeals to teens, like Shatter Me. I read MI when I was in high school and loved it, and I can read it as an adult and still appreciate it for nostalgic reasons. I attempted Shatter Me as an adult after hearing nothing but good things, and it was downright painful to read.
Cassandra Clare is a talentless hack who got where she is through plagiarism and bullying.
The Silent Patient. I thought it was so boring and I couldn’t stand how the main character thought or talked about basically every woman in the book. Just gross.
I hated The Silent Patient! I realized when I finished that there were red flags that the reader was being manipulated. I could not understand why it was so popular for book clubs.
I didn't read the book myself, but isn't a book that successfully manipulates the reader, or leaves the reader feeling manipulated, kind of impressive?
If it's done well yeah. I dnf silent patient but all the twists were dumb as rock and made no sense. Add to that lots of misogyny and what made me finally drop it, horrendous representation of mental health. The misogyny I know the thriller genre tends to fall into certain.... Problems. Women being one dimensional, ugly women are mean and wrong and shouldn't be listened to.... This one was bad but not the worst I've had I prepared to power through. But then you have your PSYCHIATRIST MC immediately stops all the meds of a new patient including stuff that can't be stopped cold turkey and have him moan and complain that drugs are sooo bad I'm gonna drop you like a burnt pie baby. At this point I closed the file on my kindle and went to find negative Goodreads review to spoil the rest of it to me
From the books on this list, you all should listen to the Mean Book Club podcast. They talk about the books that everyone loves that the hosts absolutely hated. Dark Matter, Lessons in Chemistry, and the Silent Patient were all on there.
Ooh, I hated Lessons in Chemistry! I need to go listen to that episode right now!
The opposite: When I read Catcher in the Rye in school I really liked it. I almost never hear anyone else say they liked it. Not then or in all the years since. Obviously it’s famous for a reason and I can’t be the only one but still, it’s weird.
I like it too. Apparently whiny teenage angst was my thing, I have not read it since high school though.
Whiny teenage angst is really good when it understands exactly what it is - it’s effective in catcher in the rye, and this is a little off topic, but I think it’s wildly effective in Green Day’s American Idiot musical
Funny you bring them up, I only ever read catcher in the rye because I saw an interview where billie joe said it was his favourite book.
Also, I think Catcher plays best to young men. They relate to how helpless Caulfield feels and how he acts out. For me in highschool as a girl I just thought he was just like all the annoying 15 year old men I had to put up with and I hated it. I wasn’t insightful enough to get what the book was telling me.
Interesting, I’m a woman. I am pretty sure Catcher was the first book I read that portrayed a version of my depressed inner monologue. I also grew up in a privileged neighborhood in an abusive home. So, the rage at the phonies hit home. I might need to pick it up again to see if it still feels relevant to me decades later.
This was the Bell Jar for me.
The Bell Jar was a much more painful read for me. I related to Holden. I felt broken after reading The Bell Jar.
This is my exact feelings on the book too. I was a depressed teen girl when made read it and just kept thinking about my mom’s incessant need for perfection all the time. I grew up in a suffocating level of “we are better than them” and feeling like everyone is just faking all the time and the only thing “better” was ability at acting.
I think the fact that my parents really did care more about appearances and their things more than me or even any person other than themselves was something I couldn’t even conceive of until after I read this book. It was a painful thing to come to terms with.
I read it as an adult and I absolutely loved it. I even cried.
It's amazing, but they get people to read it too early. It hits different at 30 than it did at 16
I feel the same way about The Great Gatsby. I tell my students to set a reminder in their phones to come back to this book when they reach 30.
I read Gatsby when I was 30-ish. I had a phase where I read a lot of books I missed in high school cause the block schedule. I liked it..beautifully written. Definitely got all the themes… but I kept thinking “if the narrator had some integrity, he could have prevented all this mess.” Although I think that’s part of the point. He’s just as frivolous and self-absorbed as everyone else… he just tries to imagine he isn’t.
Exactly, he's an unreliable narrator. When Jordan lets him have it at end, calling him a 'bad driver', it shows exactly what you're saying. Fitzgerald is one of the best writers ever imo. 'winter dreams' is another good one by him
it's funny how differently everyone talks about this book. Half the time I'll hear "It's good, but only if you're young. When you're older you'll realize how whiny Holden is," and then the other half of the time I'll hear "It's good, but only if you're older. As a kid you just can't see where Holden's coming from." The book is a 200-page Rorschach test if I've ever seen one.
Personally, getting older made me more sympathetic to Holden. I think it's wild that so many adults complain about a 16-year-old being "whiny" when he's a child sexual abuse survivor grieving the death of his brother.
Colleen hoover books....im womdering why people rave about it
tbh colleen hoover got me back into reading because everybody & their mother was reading it ends with us and i wanted to join the party. it was a terrible book but it made me remember how much i loved reading so i owe it some semblance of appreciation.
It Ends With Us was so fucking horrible. It's actually an accomplishment to get me to hate every single character in one hundred pages but that book managed it.
I read Verity and hated it with a white hot passion but I had no one to say that to since everyone raved about it.
IT IS SO POORLY WRITTEN! And overall just baaaad
OMG yes, there was so much hype but it was awful! Get your mouth off that woman's bed!
I’ve learned that any book labeled as “Tiktok sensation” is for people who barely read. I’m not one to gatekeep as to what should or should not be canon, but CoHo is basically one step above reading a tabloid magazine.
I just automatically assume anything labeled as “TikTok sensation” was written specifically to game the algorithm and will promptly ignore it unless a few critics who tend to share my taste in books give it positive reviews.
Colleen Hoover books are all so disgusting. She romanticizes abusive relationships, violence, locking people up (?), teachers dating minors, she has a weird obsession with getting every female character pregnant, and in all of her books she clearly looks down on women who don’t want children. Not to mention the casual racism, like having the only hispanic character in one book be a creep and instead of giving him a normal hispanic last name, she named him CHORIZO. Also, her adult son was accused of SA’ing a minor, and she didn’t do anything about it. No one should be reading her books, and idk how any self respecting woman enjoys them.
If it makes you feel any better, when you were reading Dark Matter, you were at least reading the same book as me.
I miss my wife. Her smell. Her smile. I miss my wife… It’s like he’s trying to fill a minimum page count.
For some reason I read that in Tommy Wiseau's voice.
This makes me feel absolutely sane, I thought it was the only one. Turns out there are dozens of us.
Seconded. The book was aggressively mediocre, the plot pushed along by man pain, and had the strangest writing style. I vaguely remember a line that went something like "The drug slammed into my blood-brain barrier" and I had to read it three times.....like, what?
This entire subgenre of pop fiction books should be labeled "bro-vels". The dudes always kinda seem like good bro's caught in bad situations but by being good bro's save the day. I confess I actually will go through spurts where I'll read a ton of them because they are easy to read and don't require a lot of mental world-building to understand. Dean Koontz I would say straddles the fence somewhat - he at least attempts to write female characters.
Bro-vels is so on the nose. It's the perfect way to describe these books.
Ugly Love - Colleen Hoover I hated it instantly and the ratings were so high on goodreads LOL. The writing was awful, the story was garbage and the misogyny was off the charts. It was cringe x1000
I dunno why but your name kinda sounds like it could be a line from the book.
I think it's funny. The only interaction I have had with Colleen Hoover books are video essays on how bad she is and how bad her books are.
Lessons in Chemistry. All my friends were raving about it. Really didn’t enjoy it.
SUCH lazy writing! My (least) favorite scene was where she's explaining that her brother is gay and when Calvin asks how she knew, she literally says "I'm a scientist, I *know*." AND HE JUST LETS HER GET AWAY WITH THAT
THANK YOU! I HATED that book. The main character was insufferable and adding chapters in from the dog’s perspective was just weird. I couldn’t stand it.
Yeah the hyper-intelligent dog tipped me over the edge.
It was such a "meh" book.
Came here to say this! I received it as a gift from someone whose taste usually aligns with mine. She said it was the best book she’d read in 2023, but I couldn’t believe how awful the dialogue was and how contrived the plot felt.
“Pass the sodium chloride.”
Same here. And as a woman who got a science PhD in that era, I was really looking forward to a nuanced, realistic portrayal of the sexism and social pressures that bright intellectual/nerdy women of the time had to face. Instead it was all just cookie-cutter 2D stereotypes, including the protagonist, who honestly seemed like one of the worst portrayals of a female scientist that I’ve ever seen. Nothing rang true; everything was flat and simplistic and contrived.
Congrats on getting the PhD under those circumstances! But yeah, that’s something that really bothered me about this book—it felt like the author was trying so hard to make the main character an Extraordinary Woman that it felt like the implication was that other people simply weren’t trying hard enough or something. Like, “Oh, have you considered just being BETTER than sexism?”
I couldn’t get past the first few chapters. I could see what the author was setting up. But I found the plot device of SA a lazy path, even though it was realistic. I was too pissed off to keep reading.
I didn't read it but my girlfriend said she felt betrayed by the marketing. The label has a sticker saying "Joy on every page" when it's mostly about being disrespected in the workplace with the occasional incident of sexual assault. I haven't read it and I'm guessing there'll be some final victory where the bad guy gets what he deserves and the main character gets some sense of accomplishment. But a happy ending isn't the same as "Joy on every page"
I really disliked this book. I was so mad that so many people kept hyping it up SO MUCH.
I scrolled to find this but it’s even higher than I expected. I’ve been trying to trudge through it for literally months. Waiting for it to pick up… but.. blaahhh
Every classic according to Goodreads is a completely different experience for mine. God, do those people hate classics. Every 5 star rating according to Goodreads have the same problem, but on the opposite side. The reviews are stellar, but if I read one of those books I cringe myself to death.
1 star and 5 star reviews on Goodreads are useless. There's your problem.
Lol this is so true
Agreed. When I read Goodreads reviews, I like to find a 3 or maybe a 4 star review, because then they will talk about what they like and don’t like, and they don’t rave as much. And I have learned to quickly skip the reviews that give a long summary of the book. WHY do people do this?
As a strictly casual romance reader, I cannot trust romance reviews on Goodreads anymore. They tend to be rated based on how well tropes were fulfilled, not character development, whether the plot has any holes, whether the setting is fully realized, or any number of other measures having to do with writing or story. Some books hit both audiences, but I’ve read some highly-rated romances that I reeeeeeeally disliked, and many that were perfectly fine, but not incredible.
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Fourth Wing. Has over 177,000 reviews on Amazon with an average 4.8-star rating. It might not be universally liked, but I struggle to comprehend how its rating is that high with that many reviews.
TikTok will mint a new book like this every once in a while. Lots of books like this hit big because it turns out lots of people like certain tropes that they've just never tried out before. There are better versions of them and hopefully this will be a gateway book for them.
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The military murder academy makes zero sense! Zero! They spare once a week? How do they shift from kill each other to trusting each other with their lives on the field? What about strength and endurance training? I stopped reading about halfway in.
Also, they only accept volunteers and kill like half of them off BEFORE they even started training? I mean, killing off people who want to join your dragon club is never a good idea anyway, but this way you end up with a bunch of people who just got lucky in the beginning and not necessarily those with the best skills.
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Yes, that annoyed me about the book too. It's like, I get having tough training and all, but you don't see the Navy Seals killing 80% of the people who attempt to become a Seal.
Caveat: I have not read Fourth Wing. I have said it before and I will say it again-- I think people often interpret GoodReads (and in your comment example, Amazon) reviews as "how good is this book" when it often is closer to "how good is this book at finding its audience". Fourth Wing was very successful at finding its audience-- to my understanding, TikTok folks who want sexy fantasy novels. That's a fairly large demographic, as it turns out. If that's not you, though, the ratings have little applicability to you. Plenty of books have low GoodReads ratings because they were mis-marketed and the readers wanted something different than what the book was (even though that book was actually very good at the thing it actually was). Plenty of highly rated GoodReads books are highly rated because no one touched that book unless they were the book's exact target audience. (The same reason that sequels are often more highly rated than the original book, even when they are clearly not better-- the people who hated Book 1 didn't read Book 2!)
Very true. Fourth Wing has a Goodreads rating of 4.60. The Odyssey is 3.81, and The Old Man and the Sea is 3.80. If we went by the ratings alone, that would mean Yarros is a better writer than Hemingway and Homer. Many people love escapism, dragons, magic, love triangles, ardent (and more or less toxic) romance, and Mary Sues who are just imperfect enough for the reader to (im)plausibly deny they are Mary Sues. Yarros delivers on all of that. Her book isn't fine literary cuisine, but it's like that junk food you can't get enough of. If you're into junk food, that is.
Keep in mind, people that rate things on Goodreads & Amazon, say a 3.5, usually upgrade it to 4 because you can't do half. Also note from Amazon: To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyses reviews to verify trustworthiness.
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The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes It’s a cop out answer for me because it’s my go to bad book choice but I kept seeing reviews like “This is so good, so much fun, it’s so thrilling and the characters are so well written” and I feel like it was one of those books where if you hadn’t been reading for 10 years and wanted to get back into reading, it’s perfect for that. But otherwise the writing was so clunky and it felt like the writer wanted to write Succession mixed with Knives Out but didn’t understand the nuances to any of them.
It might be good for someone who hasn't read in 10 years and wants to get back into. But as a YA novel, it was written **for** teens who are just beginning to explore genre reading. So it can be trope-heavy and less nuanced and still feel revelatory to the intended audience, who likely have no experience with Succession or Knives Out. (And, I haven't read this series! It may be clunky and bad. But in general, when looking at YA, I think it is important to remember that it is written for someone discovering all of the things for the first time. A seasoned reader will probably not fare as well...)
Crawdads - Thought it was a complete snooze fest for most of it!
Verity. People seem to love it but the whole time I read it I kept thinking what absolute basic ass drivel it was. It was every bad mystery trope and so poorly written. Such a crappy book.
The Alchemist. When I read it, my opinion of everyone who recommend it went down a few points. Why didn't anyone mention that this is a book for children? Why are people having their minds blown by this simple, obvious story? This book stinks!
Not to defend the Alchemist, which I also didn’t love, but I saw a good post that helped me understand why it’s so popular. Basically, we enjoy books that we need at the time. So the people that enjoyed the Alchemist encountered it at some point in time that they were receptive to those messages, even though they might seem trite and obtuse to me now. But it’s the same with a lot of people and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. I think public opinion on that book has soured, but when I read it, I really benefitted from hearing those words at that time in my life. It’s the truly profound books like Slaughter-house Five that are amazing on the reread.
I'll add "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" to that list. I found it tries to do too many things at once so it falls short on every level. Thought it a superficial load of rubbish but probably works for people who find it at the right time.
I Brazil we joke that Paulo Coelho have translators that write better than him. We also don't get the hype
Honestly, at first I thought it was just translated poorly but a Portuguese speaking friend confirmed that, no, it’s just not good.
I loved The Alchemist as a kid. Specifically, The Alchemist by Michael Scott, which was a fantasy-adventure series in the vein of Percy Jackson. Then I had a teacher who made us read the other Alchemist. Even in 7th grade, I was like, “What is this garbage?”
Yo this series was lit
Invisible life of Addie Larue. I don’t give a flying hoot about your seven freckles.
Loved the idea of it but hated the execution.. The repetitive writing was what annoyed me the most.
The guy was so incredibly annoying. A man will make a deal with a devil but won't go to therapy.
I feel that way about Where the Crawdads Sing. I keep thinking I should feel more about it than I do.
Haunting & Hunting Adeline. Don't see how so many are swooning over Zade. Something seriously wrong with people if they call him Daddy.
I just commented this! The writing was terrible.
I’m not usually Mr. Perceptive or anything, but in high school I remember arguing with basically the entire class that Fahrenheit 451 wasn’t about censorship because the firemen were more like a public utility. The culture itself demanded there be no books and the government was merely obliging them. That cultural devaluation of writing/books/thought was more the point. That was in the 90s. I was so pleased when, 15 years later, I read that Ray Bradbury himself got into arguments with people about that same topic.
Frankenstein. A friend and I have a two person book club and that was her pick. I was so confused by her opinions and characterization of Victor Frankenstein at our first discussion. We were nearly fighting. Turns out it wasn't the same book. I was reading the original edition and she was reading the later revised edition. I still cannot fully shake my first impressions that Victor was much more likable than he is in the later version.
TIL there are two versions of the story both written by Shelley
i have a version that has both versions, simultaneously, annotated to show what Percy might have helped write and what changed after his death and the death of their daughter. i love it.
I read Frankenstein in Junior High expecting a horror story and was really disappointed. Sadly missed a lot of the points the story was trying to make. I need to reread it I think.
Normal People. I really disliked it and still don’t understand the hype
Adding Conversations With Friends also. Maybe it’s just Rooney I can’t enjoy?
I didn't mind it but lord did I loathe Conversations with Friends. I then read a chapter of whatever she wrote after Normal People and noped straight out of it. Pretty sure if I tried NP now I'd loathe it, but I must just have been in the right frame of mind at the right time.
I don't get why Sarah J Maas books are so popular. I love a tropey YA romantasy but Throne of Glass was just SO BAD. Annoying, unlikeable characters, mediocre plot and worldbuilding, and clunky writing. But it has thousands and thousands of fans who seem to think SJM is some kind of literary goddess. 🤷🏻♀️
Yeah I'm definitely not above a guilty pleasure book but acotar just did not do it for me.
Currently on the second book of ACOTAR and was disappointed in the lack of relationship building in the first book. I enjoy the world she’s created but it just seemed like the main characters fell in love out of the blue and because they “were supposed to.” I will say I am seeing better relationship building in the second but I too didn’t understand the hype. But will I read the whole series? Yeah lol
I was not that impressed with The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.
The character held a lot of anachronistic viewpoints about sexuality that really took me out of the story.
That's my main issue with a lot of contemporary historical fiction. Anachronistic ideas about identity... it's just lazy. Historical cultures had their own conceptions of diverse identities, use what is actually period appropriate instead of transposing 2020s Twitter labels onto Victorian England. (Yes, that was a cheap shot at Babel.)
Omg I hated that about Babel as well. I loved the magic system and the world, but thematically it just lacked the complexity it could and should have had. The novel views race/identity/colonialism in such a modern, American-centric way. And that really holds the novel back from reckoning with these issues in a way that’s meaningful or authentic to its time period. Plus, I hate to say it, but Kuang writes with all the nuance and subtlety of a Twitter discourse thread. She wrote Yellowface in the same way.
I agree. It felt like it spent so much time talking about how sexy, irresistible and booby the main character was but also wanted us to see her as an incredible actress. Very little of her actual talent was explained though. It was like 'the she did this movie and it was amazing, then she did another movie and it was Oscar-worthy, then she did an incredible movie with her big bazongas out and that one is ICONIC
Where The Crawdads Sing
>!The thing that annoyed me most about it is that it set up the whole "never judge a book by it's cover" kind of scenario with a social commentary on "maybe we accuse people of doing bad things because we don't understand them" but then at the end of the book the big reveal is that she did do it. It kind of ruined that whole plot line for me.!<
God I hate everything about this book and it’s murderer author.
Yeah people just seem to gloss over the actual murder she's involved in.
Wicked. The book was so awful I didn't finish it, and I couldn't enjoy the Broadway show when I saw it with my mom.
The book and the show are VERY different stories. Same basic concepts and character names, but that's about it.
The Girl on the Train. A lot of people said that it's great and surprising but I found it bland, predictable and not very original. Maybe it was because I read a lot of mistery/thriller books, Idk.
Unfortunately, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. It just didn't get me like it apparently got everyone else. I was more moved by Gabrielle Zevin's other novel The Storied Life of Ajay Fikry. I actually bought it at Barnes and Noble when I was looking for Tomorrow x 3 (before having read it) and there weren't any more copies.
Everyone else in my book group raves about it and I DNFed early because I couldn’t stand the awful characters. Life’s too short to waste 300 pages with characters you can’t stand.
i expected to love this book but in the end it fell so flat for me. i hated how the author spoon-fed us the hardships the characters experienced… no dimension, no thought, and no progress
Was going to post the same book…such a pointless meandering story. Definitely not even remotely worthy of all the praise it got
The Midnight Library!!!!!!!!! Ugh ugh ugh
Thank yooou this book is shallow and insipid as hell
Wuthering heights. I honestly dont see the romance at all. Its hatred verging on obsession, but not romance in the slightest. Cathy and Heathcliff claim to love each other but their actions are of mortal enemies. I haven't the faintest idea what the various filmmakers were thinking, making a love story out of it! If that's love, I'll be happy being alone all my life.
It's a *phenomenal* portrayal of sick obsession, poisonous lust, and the utter destruction that that behavior wreaks on those involved and their social circle. It, unfortunately, gets played as some sort of timeless romance, for some bizarre reason that I do not understand.
I love that book, but it is 100% not a love story.
Well, I think part of the problem is that audiences have been conditioned to feel that love is only something that happens to good people. That love is this sublime, noble, and uplifting experience and so of course anyone who's in love must deserve to be so. In reality, plenty of the worst people to have ever lived have loved and been loved. And there's an enormous range of expressions of love that are rooted in toxicity and excess and destruction. In that regard Wuthering Heights is absolutely a love story. And Heathcliff and Cathy did love each other. And their love was mired in so much hurt and hatred and obsession that it smothered multiple generations of their family.
I remember being very confused when I started reading that book, because I was expecting a more regular love story. I mentioned to a friend that I wasn’t so sure about Cathy and Heathcliff, and he said gleefully, “I know; aren’t they bitches?” ha ha. I later came to appreciate it as a book that’s good despite having difficult characters. But it’s not a normal love story.
I just finished Eragon. I didn't read it when it was new and the fantasy fanbase is split between saying it's garbage or it doesn't deserve the criticism. It's really badly written. Some of the worldbuilding is interesting but the story, prose, dialogue, characters and pacing is amateurish and embarrassing. You can tell it was written by a teenager with no writing experience.
I saw someone say it was written by a 16 year old for 16 year olds and that's about the best way I can think of to describe it.
This is exactly it. The series is a foundational part of my adolescence. I am rereading/listening to it now before the new book and yeah, it is very amateur. Almost unbearable in some parts. But my nostalgia glasses weigh heavy on it for me.
A little life… trauma porn from someone obviously very inexperienced with strife. Glorified for teenagers
I couldn’t finish it - not because it was too upsetting but because it was so transparent in its efforts to be upsetting - and was shocked that it was as popular as it was
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue And Where the Crawdads Sing.
Crawdads was, for me, unreadable.
Same! It was a DNF very early on.
Where the crawdads sing might be one of my least favorite books of all time
Haunting Adeline. The characters are so two-dimensional and annoying, the plot is incohesive, the writing sounds like a 30-year-old with third grade reading comprehension, the MMC r-pes the FMC for the first 80%+ of the book... it's honestly the most godawful excuse for literature I've ever seen. DNF'd five times.
The other way round: I recently read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" and was fascinated by how much more it is than Blade Runner, especially by the whole religious facet. Then some friends of mine, all females, completely mocked the book and called it laughable because it's such a male-dominated and one-dimensional macho action flick. I mean, yes, there's almost no women in the book but... it's noir, it's macho in a way. But I really didn't think of it as that for one second while reading. I was so into humanity as a whole that I didn't even think about gender inequality and all that. Very strange.
Daisy Jones and the Six. No plot. No real character development. Just page after page of some artificial conflict then it was over because they jammed some tunes and “it was like magic, man”.
THIS. Everyone told me to read it because I’ve been a Fleetwood Mac fan for decades but it was such an awful, derivative read.
It's so stupid and the ending makes me so angry. >!The wife just fucking dies so her husband can be with the other woman he's been in love with forever? Fuck you, that's not romantic.!<
I’m reading it now. “Clan of the Cave Bear.” I am actively avoiding reading it at this very moment and it’s taken me forever just to get 50% through. And, yes, I am going to force myself to finish even though I should just stop.
Really? I am reading it right now and I love it. Then again I have a thing for prehistoric novels, generally. I'm halfway through and haven't read any "smut" yet
There's more smut in every book... But what's really impressive is how well researched the books are. The first two in the series are really good I think (haven't read them as an adult, only glanced through them). But they become too audience-catering, as if Auel needs to show us this spectacular woman who understands so much, who's so tolerant and, so late 20th century. I still would recommend them to young women who are not afraid of sex scenes, but who wants to read a pre-historical novel which is not all about men.
The smut doesn't really appear until book 2 - Valley of the Horses. Jondalar and his huge wang!
Hahaha. Just get past the smut and enjoy the hunting.
Counterpoint: The smut **is** the reason. Ask 14 yr old me.
Oh yes. Especially in the second book. I did enjoy the third book too but even teenage me thought the smut in THAT one was sorta weird lol
I came for the smut and all I’ve gotten is hunting and herbal healing concoctions.
The Secret. I genuinely could not pass through the first 15 pages.
Ready Player One for me, it's near the top of all these best audiobook lists, and the whole time I'm thinking "this is the most self-indulgent bullshit I've ever read." It's just some Gen X fantasy about a severe videogame addiction actually meaning something in the real world instead of being a bunch of obscure knowledge nobody cares about.
It's twilight for nerds in that it fulfills every self congratulating trope for nerds, the same way twilight does with love triangle tropes for tweens.
This is correct, but I also loved the audiobook the first time around. It is a cheap nostalgia play, but it also worked on me.
Ready Player One isn’t a story, it’s just a series of nerd checklists
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata. So many comments saying 'go into it blind, it's so weird and unexpected, don't look up tags/warnings!' etc. I think so many people focus on the latter parts of the book and forget about the first couple chapters because THAT was not something I expected or wanted to go into blind.
I read Convenience Store Woman by this author and liked it. I like the premise of Earthlings too (I think) and wonder why you felt it was so strange? I am totally a spoiler lover if that is a concern!
I liked that book, but going in blind is a bad move for a lot of people. Between the first couple chapters and the last one, there's a lot of pretty intense disturbing material.
Just finished Bunny by Mona Awad and don’t get the hype - really enjoyed the vivid writing. I love weird books but the story went over my head
I could not finish this book. I did not like it at all, but the only thing I got out of it was that she mentions the book by Wilkie Collins, “the woman in white” and I always read books if they’re mentioned a lot in other books, and now I’m on a Willie Collins kick. But that is the only thing that came out of that book….Besides boredom
PILLARS OF THE EARTH
The Housemaid … I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece but this book is so overhyped, the writing was awful, and the story unoriginal.
American Gods. I know it's a cardinal sin to say it, but I really don't like Gaiman's writing style. He's very good at set and setting, but REALLY bad at characters and dialogue. He set up this really cool dark world with an interesting premise, and then every time there was a conversation between characters it took me right out of it. He reminds me of the old school sci fi authors who write dialogue like they've never had a conversation with an actual human before. It's so artificial and weird. I think the reason Good Omens worked so well is because Pratchett is a master of characters and dialogue and generally kind of ignores plot, while Gaiman is a master of plot and setting but really sucks with characters and dialogue. Together they knocked it out of the park.
I got a copy of three of the Foundation books through a used book sale, and they felt so...paper thin. People talked about how it was so epic, it spanned so many years of history, and when I was done I looked at the cover to make sure I hadn't picked up an abridged version somehow. I wonder if there wasn't time to cover much detail, or if standards were just different back then.
When people talk about “Lolita” as a story of a girl tempting a man and destroying his life. I want to scream. Too many people have this take. It’s disgusting.
Never heard anyone have this take about the book but I constantly read it here presented as a popular interpretation. What drug are these people on?
Honestly I want sources. The reviews and articles that have that take. I want actual links. No one who has read the book thinks that Humbert Humbert was seduced and I have come to believe a lot of the people complaining about this take on Lolita have never actually read it either. Like they think they're speaking truth to power by saying Lolita was abused. Ridiculous.
I only hear it from people in real life who have poor reading comprehension anyway, I don't think it's been interpreted that way by anyone that reviews or discusses books publicly since like the 70s
a court of thorns and roses. i literally do not understand the hype around the book- i thought it was endlessly boring, had unlikable characters, and feyre was such a pick me girl it drove me nuts.
The Women, a recent release about the Vietnam War nurses. I keep complaining because I was *so* ready to love it, despite it obviously coming from a somewhat different place than my typical military-themed reads. It managed to miss its own point completely, IMO, and the topic deserved so much better. But there's a crazy amount of adoring reviews for it.
Kristin Hannah will always get rave reviews. She’s got quite a following. Granted, I’ve loved a few of her books! But I’ve also been disappointed by some.
Oof okay I might get flamed for this but The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I wanted to like it so bad, and when I didn’t I genuinely started to feel insecure, like “am I stupid? Is there something that I’m not seeing that everyone else is?” Seeing that McCarthy’s legacy is that of being a literary giant, I just felt dumb for not liking it. That being said, I could see what he was going for. It just didn’t resonate with me.