Books you hate but everyone else likes?

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I'm pretty sure everyone has at least one of these: a book they absolutely despise, but the rest of earth's population is in love with. What are yours, and why do you hate them? I'll share a few of mine.

Let's get the obvious one out of the way: Twilight. I'm an author, so I have to hate it by default. Enough people have talked about these books, though, so I won't repeat what's already been said a thousand times.

To Kill a Mockingbird. The one that everyone claims is the greatest book ever written. I had to read it at least three times during high school because my teachers couldn't shut up about it. And you know what? I hated it every single time. Maybe it's because I'm a fantasy reader and writer, and I like epic battles between good and evil that decide the fate of the world, and things like that, but TKaM was just so... freaking... boring. It's about normal kids doing normal things in a normal town on normal earth. If I wanted that, I'd look through my mom's scrapbooks, because I, too, was a normal kid doing normal things in a normal town on normal earth. The only time anything actually happens was when the kids got attacked by the redneck guy at the end of the book, but that's the kind of thing that should have been happening all throughout the book. Well, if you wanted to make it fun to read, or even remotely interesting, I guess. Which this book isn't. It was boring.

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas. This freaking book. I hate every molecule of its existence. It sounded awesome (Game of Thrones meets The Hunger Games), and I was so excited to read it that I put it on my Christmas list. I got it, started reading it, and slowly grew more disappointed with every page. I love the young adult genre when it's done right, which it never is, and I've been thinking for a very long time that it needs more high fantasy books instead of just urban fantasy. With it's setting and awesome premise, Throne of Glass should have been my absolute favorite book. What could have screwed it up? The main character: Selaena Sardothian. I probably spelled that wrong, but I don't care. She is, literally, the most unlikable, badly written Mary-Sue character I have ever read. The book claims over and over again that she's the most fearsome assassin in the world, but 1. she doesn't act like one, and 2. she never actually does anything to prove it. Oh, she'll tell you she's awesome. She won't freaking shut up about herself. "I could kill this guard, steal his sword, kill that guard with it, and then undo these chains and kill the third guard while balancing on the tip of a needle, solving world hunger, and playing the trombone with my butt." Great, show us. No? You're just gonna tell us you can, and then not do it? ... 'kay. ToG is a textbook example of why you should show, not tell. This goes on through he whole book, and then when she actually does do something, she fails. Like when she gets into a spar with her mentor, and he promptly trips her. She complains about how unfair that was, as if being an assassin was the most honorable of professions in the first place. Girl, do you even assassinate?! And the worst part is, everyone just goes along with it. Prince McHottyPants and the knight Sir SwoonWorthy instantly fall for her because she's bee-yoo-tee-fool, mysterious, and generally everything she really isn't but the author desperately wants your to think she is. She's vain too. If I read a book about the world's greatest assassin, I want to read about her assassinating crap, not prancing about in pretty dresses, giving an inner monologue about how she's just, like, soooo much prettier than those other girls and they just can't even. This isn't a real assassin! This is Stylin' Assassin Barbie! I hate this book so much. I could go on (and trust me, I'd love to), but this is already long enough. Best advice I can give you is to read Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson instead. Vin is everything that Saelena pretends to be.

So, what are some of yours? And why?

Stephen King's It.

I genuinely like almost everything Stephen King has written, with the notable exception of It. I tried to like it, honest! I had tried to read it twice, and both times, I just couldn't get through it, because it was just so damn boring! The damn thing would put me to sleep! I attribute a great deal of this book's fatal flaw to it's mammoth size... which gave it all the more opportunity to be slow and tedious. That, and I just didn't think the writing was up to snuff. Then again, Stephen King could write, "The king died. Then the queen died of grief. The end," and it would be a bestseller, because it was written by Stephen "freaking" King!
It seems, everyone else that who read this tome of tedium very much disagrees with me, calling it their favorite King novel. But I stand with my criticism.

I read that in middle school, and I honestly enjoyed it. Could never watch the movie afterwards, because the book was so much better. But that was nearly ten years ago and my taste in literature has changed a lot since then, so I don't know if I'd still like it. I do agree with you on the length, though. The reason I don't read much King is because his books are 90% filler. If he cut out everything that didn't have an immediate impact on the main plot, his stuff would be, like, 200 pages.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman....I found it a miserable plodding trek through a vulgar dark cloud of growling depression. The characters felt so ugly and unlikable. It proved to me that positive reviews do not guarantee a pleasant read. I tend to get a synesthesia-like effect from books and American Gods made me feel like I was surrounded by a thick grayish-brown smog.

1984

Don't get me wrong, I love reading books set in dystopian worlds, but the amount of slang that is featured in Orwell's novel made the book very confusing and its themes hard to understand.

Brave New World

Everyone in the world has to be a drug addict in order to comply with the law? Like 1984, the themes in Brave New World were hard to understand which in turn, was confusing.

Knut Hamsun: Victoria (boring story, boringly written). I had to read it for school, and somehow I managed to get through it, but boy it was boring!

John Donner: Døde menn skyt ikkje (zzzz)

Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and "Romeo and Juliet". They were both terribly boring and the old fashioned language was nearly impossible for me to read.

In high school we had to read "Of mice and men" for English. It was so boring I couldn't get through more than a few pages. I started skimming it, then skipped pages looking for some excitement. None was to be found. I never read more than the first couple of pages, it was so dull I kept rereading sentences and I still didn't know what they said (a problem I had with many textbooks as well as they were dry and boring). The teacher allowed us to watch the movie a bit later, it was so boring I actually fell asleep.

Frank Herbert: "Dune"
I wanted to like this one so much, because I liked the idea of the Arrakian sand worms. But I couldn't get into the story.

Stephen King: "Needful things". Gad what a bore. Even worse since I expect so much more from King. I wasn't impressed by Cujo either. It should have been a short story if he had to write it at all.

Anne Rice: "Interview with the vampire". Snore. I wasn't able to read it through, so I watched the movie instead when it was aired, yawning my jaws off.

Without a doubt, it would have to be the Harry Potter books. I have never embraced this trend, even though I normally like books written in series. I like to know what happens next. However, everything and everyone connected with this particular book series is loathsome to me. I tried to read the first book, but found it so boring and dumb that I couldn't get past the first chapter.

One book series I'll never read is Fifty Shades of Grey. How can anyone even consider this entertainment? Anyone involved in an abusive relationship should find the idea horrible. Plus, the writing is so bad that most people throw the books into the trash where they belong.

Pretty much anything by Ayn Rand and Ernest Hemingway. Probably an unpopular opinion, but there it is... lol

Here's another one I can mention: The Magicians, by Lev Grossman. I mentioned in one of my other threads that it bugs me when authors try too hard to be different. That's just as bad as straight up copying another author's work, sometimes even more so. Grossman is, strangely enough, guilty of both those sins with this book. The premise is ripped straight from Harry Potter: young man discovers school of magic, and then goes there and learns magic. Grossman even admits it. However, his is supposed to be Harry Potter for grownups. That might have been cool, except that his idea of "grownup" is that everyone curses like sailors, has sex with anything that moves, and is never, ever happy, not ever. That sentence sums up the whole store right there. The book lacks a coherent plot, it's just a string of events that occur over the years that keep getting progressively more depressing. And it really is freaking depressing. I read books for escapism, but the whole point of The Magicians seems to be, "Life sucks, the world sucks, you suck, and magic can't f***ing help you." Why would anyone want to read something like that? Well, checking the positive reviews on Goodreads, I see a lot of people praising it because of how different it is. It's a book written for hipsters by a hipster. It doesn't matter that the characters are terrible to read about, the plot goes absolutely nowhere, and the entire point of the book is to remind how terrible your life is, it's DIIIIIIIFFFFFEEEEEERRRRREEEEEEENNNNNNNT!! !!1! What else could possibly matter, right?

I'll steer far clear of that book! I'm not a fan of fiction involving magicians as it is and this book sounds particularly disgusting. It seems as though virtually every work of fiction is like this lately, full of sex and profanity and devoid of any imagination whatsoever.

And the worst part is, it was apparently popular enough to warrant it's own tv series on the Scifi channel! What is wrong with people these days?

Sci-fi is another genre I could never get into. Most of the modern sci-fi books are creepy and weird. I read "Reserved for the Cat" by Mercedes Lackey, because I love cats. I found it weird and disgusting, with talk of vampires and other creepy stuff. The ending was sort of cute, but the rest was garbage.

Zodiac. It has high ratings on Goodreads but I found it to be really dull. The worldbuilding was decent, with each zodiac system having its own architecture and culture, but every zodiac was a craphole compared to Cancer, which just so happens to be the main character's (and probably the author's) sign. And the characters have zero personality. They just do whatever is required of them by the plot. And they get into stupid love triangle crap when there's a galaxy to save.

Actually, I would agree with that. Rand appeals to narcissists and psychopaths and Hemingway was a racist sexist ghoul with no style to his writing--or maybe you could say his particular style was a notable lack of style. I would add 50 Shades of Grey, though. I've never read the book itself, but I've read enough excerpts from it to know that it is truly, truly awful writing. Like, I don't think you could write something worse than 50SoG if you were TRYING YOUR HARDEST to write the worst book ever.

The most recent book I read that I absolutely hated was "Federer and Me," by William Sidelsky. It turned out to be more about the author than about Federer. He devoted entire chapters to the stringing of racquets, how he hated Rafael Nadal and told stories about his private life he would have done better to leave out. That book was a huge disappointment.

The 50 Shades trilogy. Fanfic is good for practice but this is just a mediocre one rewritten only to remove the copyrighted characters. Unfortunately, most readers didn't see past the sex (if it can even be called sex to begin with- SSC is broken several times throughout), and because SEX SELLS it flew off the shelves.