Books you hate but everyone else likes?

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Wuthering Heights: A wordy, discombobulated melodrama with screaming couples set against the windy moors.

Ugh. Twilight is AWFUL. I do write fanfiction about its characters, but I change a LOT about it. My favorite characters are Jasper and Caius, and its fun to manipulate the universe. I'm a writer, though, and I can do that with just about any cartoon/book/movie/whatever. And to top it off, the movies are worse! They picked TERRIBLE actors for the two main characters (Jacob isn't too bad, but the other two...Ugh...)

And if I might add a movie...Avatar. The one with the blue aliens. Never watched it. Never will. Don't want to. Everybody I meet is like "Ooh, you HAVE to watch it." I don't want to. I don't know why, but I don't. I would rather watch Twilight, and I have told you my sentiments on that.

I loved the "Sandman" comics, so was really looking forwards to "American Gods." I didn't hate as much as you did, but I find a lot of Gaiman's prose writing underwhelming. Feels like he's pulling his punches, and his ideas are often more "silly without being funny" than "madly inventive genius."

Not so much a beloved book as a Revered Author. I tried to like Henry James, I really did. "The Bostonians" was OK, though the most interesting bit was the Penguin Classics introduction to it. I ploughed though "Portrait of a Lady", so slowly and painfully I forgot who the main characters were a couple of times. (Normally, I read /fast/. "War and Peace" took me two weeks.)

Then I tried to read "The Golden Bowl." A couple of chapters in, I ground to a halt and thought about what I'd just read. To whit, a scene, spread over three pages but containing only nine sentences, in which a character walked into an empty room, said, did and saw absolutely nothing, and walked out again, during the course of which the author ruminated vaguely, obscurely and otiosely, with many gratuitous subordinate clauses such as this one, about the character's profoundly boring yet somehow not especially plausible inner life.

I gave up on James, and learned that a revered work of literature can still be just a bit s**t. The other thing I learned from him is how to parody tedious writing.

- The Fault in Our Stars
- Percy Jackson
- Divergent
- Lord of the Rings
- The Hobbit
- Narnia
- Vampire Diaries books

I thought The Hunger Games was okay, but I would not have finished reading it if it was not assigned school reading.

When I was in the Peace Corps, just to have a funny thing to talk about, I read the first few chapters of 50 Shades of Gray, and the first few pages of Twilight. I couldn't get past the first few pages. I've heard that 50 Shades was originally conceived as a Twilight fanfic or something like that, but it's obvious that Stephanie Meyer is a significantly worse writer than E.L. James. Reading 50 Shades was like watching a movie that's so bad it's good - just totally ridiculous and campy. Twilight, on the other hand, is so poorly written, even in its basic sentence structure, that I just found getting through it deeply unpleasant. So yeah, Twilight's terrible.

I don't hate them by any means, but two writers I've been disappointed by, at least in my reaction to them, are Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson. I find both of them very appealing as people, and I love the idea of them. And they are great writers. But the issue is, I guess they just aren't my style - I just don't enjoy them. I love some of their contemporaries, like Orwell and Lester Bangs, respectively. With Hemingway, it's so stripped down that there isn't enough to dig into for me. And with Thompson, I just have trouble getting into it.

I read The Hobbit. That was reasonably easy. But I couldn't get through the first Lord of the Rings book. I mean, a whole page to describe a hillside. Too tedious for me.

Sorry to those that love it.

Twilight I can definitely relate to. I couldn't even get through the first chapter. And I did throw the book.

Fifty Shades of Gray I haven't read and never will. It started as Twilight fanfiction so there you go. I did read about what happened in the books and I was horrified. Not from a moral standpoint, but from an author's.

The Hunger Games Anyone who read these books with an unbiased opinion will see that the main character, Kadniss, was a horrible person. And the books were poorly written imo.

Fablehaven I think this book actually angered me. This is a children's fantasy series. Someone at the library recommended it to me because I love the Artemis Fowl series. Doesn't compare. It was like saying 'hey I see you love grapes. Why don't you eat this lemon? It's just like that.' After reading the first five chapters of the book, I wanted to go back and throw the book at the librarian for recommending it (and I hoped the spine would hit him in the forehead). My problem with it was that there were no consequences to the characters' actions, when it was stated that there should have been. I ragequit.

Harry Potter I found unnecessarily wordy. But at least there was character development. It just took forever to explain.

Mark Twain's novels.

A while back, I tried reading some of Edgar Allen Poe, but I found the characterization to be nil, and the writing to be of such an archaic style that I could barely stand to finish any of it.
I know, to say this about the man who is considered to be The Master of horror fiction is blasphemy.

the popular examples--
twilight and 50 shades. for very similar reasons.
fun(?) fact, there is a brand of red wine called 50 shades of gray now.

the perks of being a wallflower and catcher in the rye, also for similar reasons.

madame bovary and anna karenina, again, similar reasons.

and dickens can suck my dick.

There's a lot of them, but most recently, I completed "Shopaholic" by Sophie Kinsella. It was terrible. I really don't understand what anybody sees in that book.

I completely agree. I've seen quotes, I've heard summaries, and I've even picked it up to glance at the contents while in thrift stores looking for books/cd's/dvd's. It really is quite disgusting/horrifying- the (lack of) quality of the writing, the messages it sends to readers, the complete and utter lack of knowledge about sex/healthy human relationships, just...ugh...I can't even...ugh...it's all so very bad in every possible way. It really scares me that there are people out there that read it as a romance or guide. I'm not sure which is worse.