I’ve read some utter wank in my day, but the one that first springs to mind is Fault in their Stars by John Green.

David Weber, Out of the Dark.

The book has an excellent premise: an alien invasion by technologically superior forces where not even asymmetrical warfare (guerrilla warfare) works. Humanity was getting it’s arrogant arse kicked all over the planet.

I guess David realized he bit off more than he could chew, because the premise was working itself into a multi-book series. So about halfway through that book he employed a Deus ex Machina by pulling the most perfect opponent to the alien invasion out of his arse: vampires.

Yes, vampires. a force that so perfectly neutralized all of the alien’s advantages that the second half of the book amounts to teenage revenge wish fulfilment as the vampires steamroll the aliens back into orbit - and then eliminate them in orbit - by riding on the outside of their escaping shuttles. Because vampires don’t need to breathe.

I got so disgusted at the lame-arse way of avoiding a truly great story that I nearly threw the book across the room. I forced myself to finish the book to see if it got any better. Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

And now, a decade-plus later, he’s released two sequel books.

smh facepalm bridgepinch sigh

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A tossup between books 7-10 of the Wheel of Time series. I gave up half way through book 10 and resent the time that I wasted on the series. 20 years later I still recall the desperate hope that the next chapter/book would advance the storyline, only to be greeted with more subplots, stupid things happening because of characters inability/unwillingness to communicate, and overly verbose descriptions of every little thing.

I hear the final books, written by a different author, were much better.

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yaos. I was expecting a nice fantasy story with dragons and shit. But the romance part of it was just so annoying. “Oh look that dude is so hot…” at every. single. occasion. I could’ve known beforehand that this book is more targeted towards female readers, but sometimes I just like to go to the book store and buy a book based on the blurb. Since then I made the new rule to keep my distance to books that mention TikTok or #BookTok on the cover.

“Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer. I read it in high school so maybe I wouldn’t hate it as much as I do if I wasn’t forced to read it, but the plot is basically about a booksmart kid who decides to leave his rich parents and society behind to live in remote Alaska. The book follows Chris McCandless along his journey from the Eastern part of the country, through the South, and finally up the West coast and to Alaska (hitchhiking mostly). When he gets to Alaska, instead of actually being prepared and realizing the risk, he goes into “Into the Wild” incredibly unprepared - he ends up having to stay at his remote camp well into the spring because he didn’t consider all the snow melting would render the river blocking his path back to society completely uncrossable. He ends up dying because he ruins most of a moose by failing to properly smoke the meat, and eats a poisionous plant out of desperation. Obviously this could have been avoided by just doing the proper research or bringing extra food (he only brought a few pounds of rice, and the guy who drove him to his final stop literally told him it was a bad idea to do this with so few supplies and only a .22 rifle). Basically his horrible death could have been easily avoided if he wasn’t such an idiot.

The author clearly had a ton of respect for the guy, because he spent a year or two peicing all this together. He spoke about Chris (the unprepared trancendentalist wannabe) with a great deal of reverence, acting like he was a martyr for a cause unclear to me. Why you would want to spend years of your life in an attempt to immortalize an idiot, I am not sure. The author also decided to randomly interrupt the main story with a few chapters about his own moronic adventures, which made an already bad book worse.

Bible.

Catcher In The Rye

What a miserable experience reading the whiney thoughts of that little shithead.

Maybe it would have been more relatable if I read it at 15, but I read it at like 28 and it was insufferable.

A close second is The Great Gatsby. I kept waiting for something interesting to happen and then just like that it was over.

Foundations by Isaac Asimov. It’s a great story but it’s a tough read. Way better as an audiobook.

Rich dad poor dad. Rich dad never existed. It’s all made up grift and, consequentially, people fall for it and make expensive life investment decisions after it.

of mice and men. its only 100 pages with large lettering and i still couldnt get through it because it was so boring

Of the ones I tried to read, Atlas Shrugged, and it’s not even close.

Of books I’ve completed, Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. Read it at school, hated it (as well as Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the D’Urbervilles) - full of ridiculous coincidences. And also utterly miserable to boot.

I started reading The Da Vinci Code, but gave up after the very first page.

The Bible!

the scarlet letter. I found it extremely unrelatable, and generally boring. I think The Crucible play by the same author arthur miller* conveys the same overarching principles about religious hypocrisy and herd mentality in a much more interesting way.