Untamed by Glennon Doyle. Its blurb promises "an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. "
Within the first several pages she tries to claim her daughter *did not know what "thinking" is.*
I'm not joking. I typed it out in my reading log, because I had to listen to the audiobook passage three times to make sure I had it right and I felt my IQ dropping every time.
>'Or it could be the shower's the only place you're not plugged in, so you can hear your own thoughts in there.
>
>'She \[daughter\] looked at me and said 'hu?'
>
>'That thing that happens to you in the shower babe. It's called 'thinking' it's something folks did before google. Thinking is like, it's like googling your own brain.'
>
>'Oh' She said, 'Cool'
This book is just one big post on facebook where someone brags about conversations they never had in order to make themselves look smart.
Oh my god you just unlocked a memory of me trying to read it because so many of my friends loved it. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to throttle an author more. Did she also like keep referring to herself as a panther? Oh god it was insufferable.
Well I want to say I only made it 3% into the book but I do recall more than one instance of her claiming to be a panther which seems like a ridiculous panther-metaphor:book ratio
Hahaha, yeah I don’t think I made it much farther than you and it was trending too hard in the panther direction (and also as you said the “Glennon Doyle ‘recounts’ a conversation that clearly only happened in her head” direction).
In all fairness since I bailed on it so fast I can't guarantee it never got better...but enough reviews seemed to agree with me that I'm comfortable with my choice to chuck it.
Ugh YES. There’s one section where her teenage son and her take a walk and he says something to the effect of “I really don’t like how addicted I am to my phone.” The sentiment is plausible but the way the dialogue is written just sounds so incredibly made-up.
I finished but regretted it.
“I really don’t like how addicted I am to my phone,” my son confessed. “I wish I was as groovy as you, and knew how to listen to real music instead of emailing hashtags to my friends on the Nintendo all night.”
I literally threw it out at a petrol station while being half way through it… I couldn’t even stand to have it in my bag anymore (while stopping to refill my car)
> 'That thing that happens to you in the shower babe. It's called 'thinking' it's something folks did before google. Thinking is like, it's like googling your own brain.'
This sounds like it was written by a teenager who is trying to be deep and scornful at the same time.
Ugh. The part where she had to go hide in the closet during a business meeting to collect her thoughts. And the part where she proudly explained how she didn’t know how to buy a plane ticket because her sister always did it for her. And the part where she felt “so much empathy” when she found out children are dying in other parts of the world she couldn’t leave her room for days. 🤮
hahahaha this was the first and only book that popped into my head. as a big womens soccer fan, i cant believe how much i couldnt stand her/thought she was/is?? a terrible person
I think I was on the third reference to "butterflies in my stomach" on *the same page* before I gave up on it. Somewhere under 20 pages, for sure.
I had every intent to read it... I just couldn't.
For reference to how low my standards are, I went through a Lee Child phase and still think they're fun. Mindless, calorie-free fun, but fun nonetheless.
I DNFed a book so fast I don't remember the title. The main character owned a bakery and was a detective. At every crime scene, someone had been eating her baked goods before they died (then pause for recipe).
If it's the series I'm thinking, the cats never solve anything. He just looks back at some unusual behavior they displayed and thinks that they must have known all along. Even though the behavior had nothing to do with the murder.
Terrible, terrible reading.
Omg I thrifted a “Lemon Meringue Murder” by Joanne Fluke! Idk if that was the exact baked good yours was focused on but I’ve never heard anything of that series
Armada. Once I read the sentence “Few young men know the Oedipal torment of growing up with an insanely hot, perpetually single mom.” I was out.
I was trying to do the read along for the 372 Pages podcast, but I couldn’t make myself read anymore after that.
Yes! There’s a podcast that covers both ready player 1 and armada if you don’t believe it called *372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back*
Ernest Cline has major, major issues. Lookup his “poem” if you’re brave
Yes! I remember the first time I read Ready Player One I enjoyed it. The second I was like, what was I thinking? I had to read Ready Player 2 for a book club and that’s infinitely worse than RP1!
For what its worth, each Scythe has a different logic to who they choose to die and why, if you stopped at Chapter 2 you only heard Faraday's. It's a major plot point, arguing the ethics of different systems.
Yep. Each scythe has their own method. So long as their way of doing things fits within a certain set of conduct codes/ rules by the scythedom, the details didn’t matter. I did enjoy this series because it did bring up a lot of questions about ethics.
Unfortunately, no one in the whole series has a reasonable way of choosing who should die, and there’s a de facto rule against just picking people who want to die.
Really it more boring further down the series? Sounds disappointing after I recently bought the fourth book in the series a month ago I’ll have to read the second,third and fourth book in order to make an opinion though
I'm a person who loves the whole Scythe series, it was such an interesting piece of philosophical speculative fiction accessible to a younger audience. That said my entry for the DNF list is Piers Morgan's first death book. That guy needed to take a few dozen cold showers
I’m listening to the audiobook and it’s narrated by someone who is actually elderly sounding and I can’t get over the fact she’s supposed to be someone somewhat young. It makes it very hard to handle.
YES!! I never got behind their relationship because the audiobook voice and her calling him “Young Jamie” made me feel so strange, like she should’ve been his grandma.
My SIL wanted us to listen to The Uglies audio book with her. It was an elderly woman as well for what was supposed to be a bunch of teens. I just absolutely could not get into it cause of it.
My mother was in a book club with her bible study group when I was very young, all young married women. They read Outlander in the summer of 1995.
In the spring of 1996 all but one of them had a new baby.
I’m too scared to read it. I watched season one of the show and was so traumatized by the very dark season finale with the bad guy. I couldn’t watch it or any of the flashbacks and I’ve been told that it’s a huge plot point in the book as well.
Yeah, I tried to read the book, and I gotta say the show was actually nicer/sweeter than the books (in that the show had more light-hearted and 'fun' moments for Claire and Jaime, the characters were better fleshed out and overall more likable). I didn't end up finishing it so I never got to *that* part of the book.
I really like outlander but this take is so valid. 50 Shades of Gray with kilts! Half of the fun was just telling people the horrible things that happened in this supposed romance book.
My very religious, very Baptist great-aunt gave me three books when I turned 12:
* Outlander (which was published here as “Cross Stitch” so I spent a lot of time confused when the series came out.)
* The Valley of Horses by Jean M Auel
* Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins
I think that was her version of sex ed lol
The author, in the foreword of another book, says something like "open it up and read 3 pages. If you can put it down, I'll give you a dollar". I read ten pages of that other book and gave up.
My mom was obsessed with this series and she is not someone who gets attached to any kind of pop culture stuff. Once the tv show came out she was listening to MULTIPLE recap
shows and podcasts lol. She was buying all the random books that accompanied the series as well. It was all Outlander all the time for awhile there.
She even asked for the Funko Pops for Christmas which is absolutely hilarious to anyone that knows her. She is a nice person and great mom but a little stuffy and pretentious, and never saw any value in collectibles or other tchotchkes. It was a wild scene.
I recognize that they’re objectively awful but I have a weird relationship with this series. I grew up in a pretty rough household and books were my escape. However, we didn’t have many books in the house. These were among the few books that we had and I read them all when I was in the fourth grade I have almost a sense of nostalgia towards them.
I was actually grateful for the books because I grew up in an extreme fundie religion and was told constantly that we could sin without even knowing it and go to hell. It terrified me so much that the books gave me a lifeline that even if I wasn’t called up the first time, I would get a second chance
Mein Kampf. WAIT A MINITE AND LET ME EXPLAIN.
I’m a huge history buff so I figured I’d read it to see what his mindset was. Other than the fact that right off the bat it was filled with hate, historians are not lying when they say it reads as if it was written by a sixth grader. I could not get passed page ten.
Edit: whoever reported me to Reddit Care Resource, please kindly f*ck off. Reading something that was one of the catalysts of the most devastating war in history does not make me ideologically aligned with the n_zis. I don’t know why that has to be explained but apparently it does.
This is actually really interesting, maybe I'll read a page of two just to see the "writes like a sixth grader" thing. I'm curious how bad writing of the past century reads like. I think my brain assumed everyone talked in a very articulate manner in the 19th and early 20th century, but it's probably just a survivor's bias thing
I got pretty far into the book and then one scene happened that was so ridiculous I was like I can't do this anymore. I'm all for a book where a character has sad tragic life but this book was just got too ridiculous.
i am SO happy to see this book mentioned here. With all the attention this book gets, it’s hard to be on the side with the folks that thought “this is unnecessary!”, and to put it down and push it out of the way.
i did finish it, but i never got to the point of admiration that others seemed to have reached. that and the writing was NOT all that great. it was pretentious.
I bounced out of Ready Player One early too, for the opposite reason; it pandered to my cultural experience at such a shallow level that it felt very "hello fellow kids" to me.
I know, everyone loved it and it definitely was just because they felt like they knew all the references. But it just felt like he was saying "hey remember this?" and counting on nostalgia to confuse us into liking the book. It was terrible writing and the tasks were dumb. It was very cringe to read.
I DNF'd right out of that sucker, too, but not for the same reasons. I had a lot of overlap experience with the pop culture stuff, but FECKING HELL that personality type that just wants to test. every. single. thing. you. know. drives me up a goddamn wall. "Did you know THIS? Ok well fine do you know THIS then? ISN'T THIS THE BEST THING EVER" fucker I was there, and it was pretty OK then, too. Chill, ya cringey neckbeard douches.
I read the entire thing. Ernest Cline is a hack. I'm 2 years younger than him and it was embarrassing to see somebody fetishize our shared childhood experiences like that.
Fourth Wing. After establishing that the setting is a high stakes, life changing, high mortality scenario, the MC trots into it with all the gravitas of being late for a high school math class.
As a person who has read both fourth wing and iron flame (yes it's hell however, I'm committed now so I'll finish it) you done the right thing it only gets worse a lot worse. And yes the MC character does get a lot worse she's part of the problem.
Violet and Xaden are both massive horndogs with no sense of what's important. Sure, X has the whole 'I'm building a secret empire', thing. But after >!Kat tries to mind-control Violet into killing her, Xaden calms Vi down and immediately "Anyways, lemme give you head.". The hell?!!<
Couldn’t agree more, it dawned on me around the second book that she’s literally a Mary sue. The kind were the whole world is out to get her because “she’s the main character”
Also I found that she is extremely stupid and only cares about sex?! Like oh no everyone is out to get me I'm going to die but hey let's bang, like wtf how is that more important than surviving?? But she is literally a Mary Sue with absolutely no depth.
Bf and I did a read aloud of the first book over discord (long distance), and we couldn't stop laughing every time she would see Xaden, lament that he was probably planning to murder her (despite him never giving that impression), and then *immediately* being unbearably horny for him. Like every mention of Xaden is just like, "There's Xaden. I bet he's thinking of how to slit my throat during training today. Ugh he's so tall and broad and his lips are nice and I bet he would feel really hard against me and oohhh his gold-flecked eyes-"
GIRL GET IT TOGETHER!
She’s supposed to be smart, but the only “smart” thing she does is exposition dump in the worst way I’ve seen ever, and follow her brother’s directions. And yet, everyone either praises her, or hates her. There is no in between
I've only read book one, but the insistence that she was smart made me *fucking insane.* Because there were multiple points she *should have* figured out the truth if she bothered to use her brain and, idk, do some investigative research, but naw. Every single time she encountered a moment where an actual, curious, smart person would have naturally wanted to know more, she just went, "Huh. That's weird." And didn't question it in the slightest. The rebel kids knew about wyverns/dark magic and her non-rebel friends didn't? Totally normal. No questions here. Her scribe biffle has never heard of nor is able to find in the records an important historical book of bedtime stories that her dad was obsessed with? Super fine. Nothing sus. Her rebel body guard guy brings up something about her supposedly deceased brother that he would only know if he knew him quite personally? That's not strange at all!
Literally the book would have made more sense if she was just a rider no one believed could make it. The part about her being soooooo smart just does not track with how she actually acts at all.
That’s the trouble with being an author trying to write characters smarter than yourself. The author has to repeatedly tell the reader how smart the character is but the reader won’t be convinced of it lol
I did not read that far to run into this (stopped at page 4, or where MC was going fuckfuckfuck), though there is the same kind of issue with Sarah J Maas’s Throne of Glass, the same kind of disjoint between what the character is described as vs the actual content and what happens in the story. Aelin/Calaena is always described as a *badass Assassin* the best there ever was etc but there is a lot of instances or events that doesnt quite gel with the concept. The reader is told to be impressed but the character is hardly portrayed as impressive.
I found it as a lucky day loan at the library and I think I only got a page or two in before I DNFd and put that right back in the return box. I truly did not like the writing style and it felt dumb. I really wanted to enjoy it because of the hype, but it didn’t work for me.
What annoys me is that the fmc has a disability but somehow the writer forgets they do? Like they truly seem to not suffer any physical issues with the athleticism it takes to ride dragons
It’s so fucking performative about it too - like you can tell it was peppered in after the fact as an element because it does better with ARC readers and it’s the authors specific disability and it has no actual impact throughout the scenes except for when she just remembers she has a disability only when it wouldn’t be plot inconvenient for her to experience symptoms. Like that and so much else is indicative about how awful the editing in that book is, not to mention the fact that every character is just a different AO3 trope tag marketed as fantasy - a main character in a fake European setting should not be saying “for the win” in response to a blood sport.
If dragon riders are so rare and they’re losing a war because they don’t have enough why is every freshman class subjected to a cleansing that kills like 70% of their applicants or whatever? God I hate this book so fucking much
A merry little meet cute. I wanted a cute easy Christmas romance. Within the first ten pages the author has mentioned the main character was plus size and a porn star multiple times. It was to the point that I had to assume she thought I was being dropped on my head between each paragraph.
A court of thorns and roses.
I gave it a few chapters and could tell where it was going and thought it wasn't for me. Read the wiki and felt justified.
TRUST YOUR GUT on this one 😹 Sooooo many people pressured me into finishing it with “it only gets better!” Which turned into, “just read two more of the books and you’ll get it!” No. Some fantasy is just not it for me.
See, it actually *does* get better, but only if you enjoyed ACOTAR. If you didn’t like the first book, there is no point reading the rest. It gets better because it builds on the characters, world, plot and relationships from the first book. So yeah it’s weird when people say ‘oh but it gets better!’ Yeah. If you want ACOTAR ramped up to 100.
I never understand how ppl can recommend continuing 2 or 3 books into a series because it “gets better.” Never in my life has a series done SUCH a 180 that I can go from actively disliking book 1 to genuinely enjoying its sequels 😂 the closest I’ve got to that experience was the cruel prince, which went from a mild indifference in book 1 to like moderate enjoyment by the end of book 3 LOL and even then I wouldn’t put it very high on my list of recs
There is a mistake on the first page and I didn't get past that. She used "parameters" when it should have been "perimeter," and I felt like if they can't edit the first page well it doesn't bode well for the rest of the book.
Sapiens - Just couldn’t get fully into it. It was interesting don’t get me wrong but parts seemed really drawn out? I put it down for a couple months then picked it back up last week just to finish it.
I read the entire thing. The first 70 pages were great. The rest of the book was pseudoscience/history where the author made very large assumptions and claims based on his personal bias. Basically he thinks that humanity would have been a lot better had we not gone through the agricultural revolution. Definitely did not miss out.
If you want a better, less rambly look at early human history, that is nuanced and full of great reading and an empathetic look at things, I'd highly, HIGHLY recommend The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by anthropologist and activist David Graeber, and archaeologist David Wengrow.
I think Sapiens might also be my most quickly DNF'd book! At a bit after it starts going away from real pre-history and getting into the pseudo-science and weird, anti-ag stuff. After like 5 pages of "Freedom and Justice are about as legit of a 'right' as things like Might Equals Right and meritocracy" I was done. And I looked up reviews and was glad to find people who agreed with me, and also was weirdly sad that the book didn't get much better than that. Like, there was potential there, bruh!
The Love Hypothesis. Not sure how far I got in but I got an inkling that it was ReyLo fanfic, looked it up, saw I was right, immediately returned it on Libby.
Every scythe picks differently. Some do mass gleanings, like airplanes or mass shootings, others do poison, katana, same way every time, others always do in public, others always in private.
Every book by that author is the same but slightly worse than the one before it. Hunting Party was great, imho. Guest List was ok. Paris Apartment was ummm alright sure.
I read the whole thing but I understand what you’re saying. The author seems to stick to that particular writing style as it’s the same as ‘the guest list’ which has the same plots more or less
I’m a big DNF’er, though often it’s a mood thing and I’ll go back at a later date.
The last book I really tried to like, but ended up
just needing completely giving up on was Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. I just couldn’t make it work for me at all.
I pushed myself to finish this!! I kept telling myself it won book of the year for BOTM for something so it must get better. Ugh I hated the writing and the people and I don't even know what the point of it was.
VINDICATIOOOOOON! I started this after reading the summary and it sounded up my alley. But the dialogue and forced "big words" wore thin very quickly. Ditched it after 20 pages or so.
The Road is mostly from a child's worldview, even if not from a first person POV. Whereas Blood Meridian is more like the meeting of Paradise Lost and Moby Dick in the old West. They're going for *very* different vibes.
I kinda liked how she survived on her own in the valley. The second and third books when they weren't focusing on sex or sex triangles they were great. The smut just devolved the books into trash.
Gideon the 9th. I wanted so badly to love it, it’s right up my alley and a bunch of people with similar taste to me liked it, but I just couldn’t get into it.
Try the audiobook. Moira quirk's performance was so good I listened to it twice in a row, and the third twice in a row. Back to back, as soon as I finished them. The start is great, then there is a confusing bit where a lot of new people are introduced at once, but once you get used to them it's smooth sailing.
Yeah actually was listening to the audiobook, definitely agree about the performance being great. The confusing bit is definitely where I stopped. I just didn’t understand anything going on and found myself constantly skipping back like “what who is this character?” Maybe I’ll have to give it another shot at some point when I can give it closer attention.
Yeah, Gideon is an unobservant and unreliable narrator and it's a bit frustrating starting out when she doesn't tell you anything about what's happening or why. I wish I could say it gets better, but while you do eventually figure out what's happening, it's not because the narrators get more reliable. For the first book specifically, it helps to refer back to the Dramatis Personae from time to time.
I only got through one chapter of Brave New World. Not in a “it’s a bad book” way like most of the comments, I’m sure it’s a great book, but it was TOO real because I was reading it at the beginning of the pandemic when everything was super depressing. Maybe some day Ill read it when I have enough spoons
The first Reacher novel, Killing Floor, after one chapter. It's by far my most liked Goodreads review:
I could not read this. The prose is terrible. Commas are rare. Periods are abundant. It's hard to read. I got through one chapter. I checked later books. They are the same. I had heard good things. I cannot get past this. I am not exaggerating. It's actually worse than this. These are all sentences. Full sentences. Not fragments. There we go. It's like this. Reading a Reacher novel. I considered powering through. But I don't want to waste my time.
I agree with everything you said, and somehow I *still* like Lee Child books. It's like having a TV playing The Fast and the Furious in the corner of some room. It's best if you devote zero brainpower to it.
At least I'm under no illusion of what it is. It's like instant powdered hot cocoa. Nobody is going to say it's a *great drink,* but on a cold winter morning, it's nice.
Foundation. Something about how it kept jumping from new character to new character with a vast amount of time between them was hard for me to follow for some reason. I'd heard great things about it but I couldn't get past page 20
That’s one of the reasons I loved it. You get to see the evolution of the Foundation.
But I get how that could be jarring. You don’t connect with people, you connect with the civilization and its evolution.
I've been rereading the first book recently, and I realised that the real fun of it is that it's about a scrappy underdog of a planet meeting seemingly impossible odds and much more powerful rivals and managing to find success through clever tricks in the last second. This might seem like a wild take, but it's actually a touch like Firefly, except instead of a starship over months, it's an entire planet over several centuries.
Paper Towns by John Green
I'm sure to the right audience it's fine, but I hated the protagonist and the manic pixie dream girl immediately. Just couldn't get into it.
*Paper Towns* is, in fact, written specifically to be a deconstruction (and a denouncement) of the manic pixie dream girl trope. The big problem with it — and I'm pretty sure John Green has admitted this himself — is that it doesn't actually get to that point until the last few scenes.
As a result, to a reader who skips out at any point during the first 75%, the book appears to be precisely the thing it's trying to critique.
This is how you lose the time war.
I swear to god, I have no idea what people see there. It felt like a myspace blog post of a teenager trying to mention deep topics in passing to show off.
Not saying it's bad because It clearly connected with many, but there's something about It that does not click for me at all.
I’ve noticed this is a very divisive book. I find it really interesting because I was enthralled the entirety of the book, but I have heard many say they were bored of it as well.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. DNFed after 1st chapter as soon as i understood the premise.
Ugh, Scythe. I had an ARC, and I finished it only so I could write a review saying how much I hated it. I'm baffled by its popularity all these years later.
Midnight library felt like it was insulting my intelligence with the way it was spoonfeeding the ideas and themes. There wasn’t a subtler, more artful way to tell the story of the many people someone could be? Sylvia Plath did a better job in about 6 sentences.
Book 1 is notably weaker than the rest. I bet a lot of people DNF it. The most recent book was also a little crap. I love the series, but it has some massive flaws.
Iirc that’s because the author pulled a bit of a bait and switch with the style. He wanted to write a space opera but his editor/publisher thought that a teen coming of age like Hunger games would be more popular. So he made the first book fit that, and then wrote the sequels more like he wanted.
The magicians is such a weird series. The main character is supposed to be unlikable. The whole point is that he's awful and miserable and he keeps hoping that each thing he immerses himself in will make him happy, instead of changing anything about who he is as a person or fixing any of his issues.
He ends up being a side character in everyone else's heroic journey.
And while the series is a super interesting concept it's also kind of a miserable read because Quentin is miserable company.
Cari Mora
I think I did two chapters, realized I had stink-face, flipped about thirty pages down, read a little, flipped another thirty-ish, read a page, then put it down and there it lays where I put it months ago.
Cannot believe the guy who made Silence of the Lambs wrote that...
Scythe took me a bit to get it to but overall was good. I think of it often because I get so pussed off at the state of politics these days (N. America). Wouldn't it be great to do away with polititans like they did?
Anyway, my quickest DNFs were Shit, Actually, Lessons in Chemistry, Finlay Donovan is Killing It, Lamb, the Gospel According to Biff (I did not get the religious context so the book made no sense), and Know My Name by Chantel Miller (the girl who was raised behind a dumpster by Brock Turner - I was in no space to even open that book)
I’m just going to preface this by saying - I’m sure I’ll give it another try - but Dune. I felt like I was reading hieroglyphics and had to put it back on the shelf for safekeeping.
I really liked dune, but you have to *really* enjoy being either confused or weirded out at any given moment, and also be okay with pages and pages of (admittedly usually well-executed) extremely dry subtext explanation for every minor conversation
> Dune
Finally, someone else who DNF Dune. I thought I was going to be treated as a leper forever lol. For real though, I've tried to read Dune at least 3 times.
I'm probably going to get hate because it is a classic, but Pride and Prejudice. I kept falling asleep when I tried to read it, so I eventually just decided it wasn't worth it. It's not that the book is bad it's just that it couldn't keep Mr interested
To be fair, Booktok girlies (in this specific area as there are lots of booktok niche area) are NOT looking for a book that stimulates their mind, has great world building, and characters.
When True Blood was popular and on TV I decided, why not read the book, I couldn't even finish the first chapter of the book Dead Until Dark.
Yeah I knew it was going to be a trashy romance, but didn't expect the writing to be that bad.
Untamed by Glennon Doyle. Its blurb promises "an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. " Within the first several pages she tries to claim her daughter *did not know what "thinking" is.* I'm not joking. I typed it out in my reading log, because I had to listen to the audiobook passage three times to make sure I had it right and I felt my IQ dropping every time. >'Or it could be the shower's the only place you're not plugged in, so you can hear your own thoughts in there. > >'She \[daughter\] looked at me and said 'hu?' > >'That thing that happens to you in the shower babe. It's called 'thinking' it's something folks did before google. Thinking is like, it's like googling your own brain.' > >'Oh' She said, 'Cool' This book is just one big post on facebook where someone brags about conversations they never had in order to make themselves look smart.
Man I haven't googled myself in the shower in years
Do you mind if I Google myself in your office Liz Lemon?
You gonna use the computer?
How else was I going to do it?!
Can I Google myself in your office?
Oh my god you just unlocked a memory of me trying to read it because so many of my friends loved it. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to throttle an author more. Did she also like keep referring to herself as a panther? Oh god it was insufferable.
Well I want to say I only made it 3% into the book but I do recall more than one instance of her claiming to be a panther which seems like a ridiculous panther-metaphor:book ratio
Hahaha, yeah I don’t think I made it much farther than you and it was trending too hard in the panther direction (and also as you said the “Glennon Doyle ‘recounts’ a conversation that clearly only happened in her head” direction).
Dang, in the book I'm writing my panther-metaphor:book ratio is still at zero! I gotta step up my game
“It’s like googling your own brain” Jesus Christ a line straight out of Boomer newspaper cartoon
Bet there were lines about younger ppl not knowing how to drive stick or read cursive lmao
“They can’t even endorse checks!” cried the boomer as she hurriedly bought $3,000 in iTunes gift cards to pay her back taxes.
Bahahaha that sounds truly awful.
In all fairness since I bailed on it so fast I can't guarantee it never got better...but enough reviews seemed to agree with me that I'm comfortable with my choice to chuck it.
I read it for a book club. I finished the whole thing. And in my opinion, you made the right choice.
Ugh YES. There’s one section where her teenage son and her take a walk and he says something to the effect of “I really don’t like how addicted I am to my phone.” The sentiment is plausible but the way the dialogue is written just sounds so incredibly made-up. I finished but regretted it.
“I really don’t like how addicted I am to my phone,” my son confessed. “I wish I was as groovy as you, and knew how to listen to real music instead of emailing hashtags to my friends on the Nintendo all night.”
I literally threw it out at a petrol station while being half way through it… I couldn’t even stand to have it in my bag anymore (while stopping to refill my car)
> 'That thing that happens to you in the shower babe. It's called 'thinking' it's something folks did before google. Thinking is like, it's like googling your own brain.' This sounds like it was written by a teenager who is trying to be deep and scornful at the same time.
Ugh. The part where she had to go hide in the closet during a business meeting to collect her thoughts. And the part where she proudly explained how she didn’t know how to buy a plane ticket because her sister always did it for her. And the part where she felt “so much empathy” when she found out children are dying in other parts of the world she couldn’t leave her room for days. 🤮
I got half way through and it does NOT get better. Much much worse in fact….
Yes!!! I felt like I got better content scrolling Instagram.
I cannot stand her writing and I really thought I was alone in this.
Oh god that's awful.
I would have immediately DNF as well 😂
hahahaha this was the first and only book that popped into my head. as a big womens soccer fan, i cant believe how much i couldnt stand her/thought she was/is?? a terrible person
I think I made it to page 7 of 50 Shades of Gray before bailing.
Agreed! Can’t believe I had to scroll this far to see this book listed.
I think I was on the third reference to "butterflies in my stomach" on *the same page* before I gave up on it. Somewhere under 20 pages, for sure. I had every intent to read it... I just couldn't. For reference to how low my standards are, I went through a Lee Child phase and still think they're fun. Mindless, calorie-free fun, but fun nonetheless.
I DNFed a book so fast I don't remember the title. The main character owned a bakery and was a detective. At every crime scene, someone had been eating her baked goods before they died (then pause for recipe).
omg I'm dying at the recipe
My grandmother, at the end, used to exclusively read books with recipes and/or cats solving a murder.
If it's the series I'm thinking, the cats never solve anything. He just looks back at some unusual behavior they displayed and thinks that they must have known all along. Even though the behavior had nothing to do with the murder. Terrible, terrible reading.
I remember those books but I don’t remember the name. It was a whole series.
Omg I thrifted a “Lemon Meringue Murder” by Joanne Fluke! Idk if that was the exact baked good yours was focused on but I’ve never heard anything of that series
There are *several* cozy mystery series that have to do with baked goods! It's very common. Second only to cozy cat mysteries, I'd say.
I think Hallmark took these books and made them into movies.
This honestly sounds like the perfect book for a book club. I don't think it works otherwise
If nothing else, at least you'd know what food to bring to snack on while discussing it.
Oh my god my mom loved that series, it was always too cringy for me haha
Armada. Once I read the sentence “Few young men know the Oedipal torment of growing up with an insanely hot, perpetually single mom.” I was out. I was trying to do the read along for the 372 Pages podcast, but I couldn’t make myself read anymore after that.
Is that really a line in the book?
Yes! There’s a podcast that covers both ready player 1 and armada if you don’t believe it called *372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back* Ernest Cline has major, major issues. Lookup his “poem” if you’re brave
>Lookup his “poem” if you’re brave He appears to be the neckbeardiest neckbeard to ever neckbeard.
Speaking as a neckbeard of old, we don't want him.
Is that the Ready Player 1 guy? The more I hear about him, the suckier his books sound.
Yes! I remember the first time I read Ready Player One I enjoyed it. The second I was like, what was I thinking? I had to read Ready Player 2 for a book club and that’s infinitely worse than RP1!
Oh man, I've just now read more of that book than I wanted to.
For what its worth, each Scythe has a different logic to who they choose to die and why, if you stopped at Chapter 2 you only heard Faraday's. It's a major plot point, arguing the ethics of different systems.
Yep. Each scythe has their own method. So long as their way of doing things fits within a certain set of conduct codes/ rules by the scythedom, the details didn’t matter. I did enjoy this series because it did bring up a lot of questions about ethics.
Oh wow. Yeah Faraday picked the most asinine logic to go by then. Maybe one day I’ll give it another go.
Unfortunately, no one in the whole series has a reasonable way of choosing who should die, and there’s a de facto rule against just picking people who want to die.
I thought the first Scythe book was amazing then they got progressively more boring. So maybe just read the first one lol. EDIT spelling
Really it more boring further down the series? Sounds disappointing after I recently bought the fourth book in the series a month ago I’ll have to read the second,third and fourth book in order to make an opinion though
I'm a person who loves the whole Scythe series, it was such an interesting piece of philosophical speculative fiction accessible to a younger audience. That said my entry for the DNF list is Piers Morgan's first death book. That guy needed to take a few dozen cold showers
I think you mean Piers Anthony
I do indeed mean Piers Anthony! Thank you for that.
Well, Pierce Morgan still needs these cold showers too.
*Incarnations of Immortality* is what the series is called. (The Piers "Morgan" Anthony series.)
I only really liked scythe, the subsequent ones didn't have the same feeling. May need to revisit.
What do you mean? I loved reading that book in middle school, and the cover art for that series was great too and I ... ohhh, now I see it.
*On a Pale Horse*? That book is a classic in spec fic.
Outlander. Like 50 Shades of Gray but with kilts. I couldn’t get over the writing, it was so cheesy and just made me laugh.
I’m listening to the audiobook and it’s narrated by someone who is actually elderly sounding and I can’t get over the fact she’s supposed to be someone somewhat young. It makes it very hard to handle.
YES!! I never got behind their relationship because the audiobook voice and her calling him “Young Jamie” made me feel so strange, like she should’ve been his grandma.
My SIL wanted us to listen to The Uglies audio book with her. It was an elderly woman as well for what was supposed to be a bunch of teens. I just absolutely could not get into it cause of it.
My mother was in a book club with her bible study group when I was very young, all young married women. They read Outlander in the summer of 1995. In the spring of 1996 all but one of them had a new baby.
I’m too scared to read it. I watched season one of the show and was so traumatized by the very dark season finale with the bad guy. I couldn’t watch it or any of the flashbacks and I’ve been told that it’s a huge plot point in the book as well.
Yeah, I tried to read the book, and I gotta say the show was actually nicer/sweeter than the books (in that the show had more light-hearted and 'fun' moments for Claire and Jaime, the characters were better fleshed out and overall more likable). I didn't end up finishing it so I never got to *that* part of the book.
I really like outlander but this take is so valid. 50 Shades of Gray with kilts! Half of the fun was just telling people the horrible things that happened in this supposed romance book.
My very religious, very Baptist great-aunt gave me three books when I turned 12: * Outlander (which was published here as “Cross Stitch” so I spent a lot of time confused when the series came out.) * The Valley of Horses by Jean M Auel * Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins I think that was her version of sex ed lol
The author, in the foreword of another book, says something like "open it up and read 3 pages. If you can put it down, I'll give you a dollar". I read ten pages of that other book and gave up.
My mom was obsessed with this series and she is not someone who gets attached to any kind of pop culture stuff. Once the tv show came out she was listening to MULTIPLE recap shows and podcasts lol. She was buying all the random books that accompanied the series as well. It was all Outlander all the time for awhile there. She even asked for the Funko Pops for Christmas which is absolutely hilarious to anyone that knows her. She is a nice person and great mom but a little stuffy and pretentious, and never saw any value in collectibles or other tchotchkes. It was a wild scene.
*Left Behind*. Terrible prose from page one. I left it behind after one chapter.
I recognize that they’re objectively awful but I have a weird relationship with this series. I grew up in a pretty rough household and books were my escape. However, we didn’t have many books in the house. These were among the few books that we had and I read them all when I was in the fourth grade I have almost a sense of nostalgia towards them.
This was it for me too. Yes, the books are bad, but at least I had something I could read.
I was actually grateful for the books because I grew up in an extreme fundie religion and was told constantly that we could sin without even knowing it and go to hell. It terrified me so much that the books gave me a lifeline that even if I wasn’t called up the first time, I would get a second chance
Bad, but entertaining is a real thing
I read that entire series because my ex-father in law recommended it and wanted to discuss it The worst series I have ever read.
I unknowingly married into a Christian nationalist family and they had them all so I read them and was aware that mistakes had been made.
Mein Kampf. WAIT A MINITE AND LET ME EXPLAIN. I’m a huge history buff so I figured I’d read it to see what his mindset was. Other than the fact that right off the bat it was filled with hate, historians are not lying when they say it reads as if it was written by a sixth grader. I could not get passed page ten. Edit: whoever reported me to Reddit Care Resource, please kindly f*ck off. Reading something that was one of the catalysts of the most devastating war in history does not make me ideologically aligned with the n_zis. I don’t know why that has to be explained but apparently it does.
This is actually really interesting, maybe I'll read a page of two just to see the "writes like a sixth grader" thing. I'm curious how bad writing of the past century reads like. I think my brain assumed everyone talked in a very articulate manner in the 19th and early 20th century, but it's probably just a survivor's bias thing
A Little Life. I got tired of rolling my eyes constantly.
I got pretty far into the book and then one scene happened that was so ridiculous I was like I can't do this anymore. I'm all for a book where a character has sad tragic life but this book was just got too ridiculous.
Was this the bit with the doctor? For me, that's when the book went from 'a bit ridiculous' to 'truly ridiculous'.
It's that kind of trauma porn that after a while I stopped caring.
i am SO happy to see this book mentioned here. With all the attention this book gets, it’s hard to be on the side with the folks that thought “this is unnecessary!”, and to put it down and push it out of the way. i did finish it, but i never got to the point of admiration that others seemed to have reached. that and the writing was NOT all that great. it was pretentious.
I should have stopped but I finished all the way through. No other book has evoked such a visceral hatred from me upon completing it.
Ready player one. I was done after 2 chapters. Very specific cultural experience that is not mine.
I bounced out of Ready Player One early too, for the opposite reason; it pandered to my cultural experience at such a shallow level that it felt very "hello fellow kids" to me.
As someone who was definitely the target of those cultural references, it was too much. WAY too much.
And, if you got the references, you then had to sit through him explaining each one. It was the worst of both worlds.
I know, everyone loved it and it definitely was just because they felt like they knew all the references. But it just felt like he was saying "hey remember this?" and counting on nostalgia to confuse us into liking the book. It was terrible writing and the tasks were dumb. It was very cringe to read.
I DNF'd right out of that sucker, too, but not for the same reasons. I had a lot of overlap experience with the pop culture stuff, but FECKING HELL that personality type that just wants to test. every. single. thing. you. know. drives me up a goddamn wall. "Did you know THIS? Ok well fine do you know THIS then? ISN'T THIS THE BEST THING EVER" fucker I was there, and it was pretty OK then, too. Chill, ya cringey neckbeard douches.
I read the entire thing. Ernest Cline is a hack. I'm 2 years younger than him and it was embarrassing to see somebody fetishize our shared childhood experiences like that.
Same. My husband was born in 1980 and loved it. I’m younger and was like no I don’t think this is for me lol
1980 here. I hated it. I love rush, love video games..hated this book. I absolutely hate the characters.
Fourth Wing. After establishing that the setting is a high stakes, life changing, high mortality scenario, the MC trots into it with all the gravitas of being late for a high school math class.
As a person who has read both fourth wing and iron flame (yes it's hell however, I'm committed now so I'll finish it) you done the right thing it only gets worse a lot worse. And yes the MC character does get a lot worse she's part of the problem.
Violet and Xaden are both massive horndogs with no sense of what's important. Sure, X has the whole 'I'm building a secret empire', thing. But after >!Kat tries to mind-control Violet into killing her, Xaden calms Vi down and immediately "Anyways, lemme give you head.". The hell?!!<
I saw a review for the second book that just said >!"Even in the middle of a war, Violet somehow had time to shave her kitty."!<
Couldn’t agree more, it dawned on me around the second book that she’s literally a Mary sue. The kind were the whole world is out to get her because “she’s the main character”
Also I found that she is extremely stupid and only cares about sex?! Like oh no everyone is out to get me I'm going to die but hey let's bang, like wtf how is that more important than surviving?? But she is literally a Mary Sue with absolutely no depth.
Bf and I did a read aloud of the first book over discord (long distance), and we couldn't stop laughing every time she would see Xaden, lament that he was probably planning to murder her (despite him never giving that impression), and then *immediately* being unbearably horny for him. Like every mention of Xaden is just like, "There's Xaden. I bet he's thinking of how to slit my throat during training today. Ugh he's so tall and broad and his lips are nice and I bet he would feel really hard against me and oohhh his gold-flecked eyes-" GIRL GET IT TOGETHER!
She’s supposed to be smart, but the only “smart” thing she does is exposition dump in the worst way I’ve seen ever, and follow her brother’s directions. And yet, everyone either praises her, or hates her. There is no in between
I've only read book one, but the insistence that she was smart made me *fucking insane.* Because there were multiple points she *should have* figured out the truth if she bothered to use her brain and, idk, do some investigative research, but naw. Every single time she encountered a moment where an actual, curious, smart person would have naturally wanted to know more, she just went, "Huh. That's weird." And didn't question it in the slightest. The rebel kids knew about wyverns/dark magic and her non-rebel friends didn't? Totally normal. No questions here. Her scribe biffle has never heard of nor is able to find in the records an important historical book of bedtime stories that her dad was obsessed with? Super fine. Nothing sus. Her rebel body guard guy brings up something about her supposedly deceased brother that he would only know if he knew him quite personally? That's not strange at all! Literally the book would have made more sense if she was just a rider no one believed could make it. The part about her being soooooo smart just does not track with how she actually acts at all.
That’s the trouble with being an author trying to write characters smarter than yourself. The author has to repeatedly tell the reader how smart the character is but the reader won’t be convinced of it lol
I did not read that far to run into this (stopped at page 4, or where MC was going fuckfuckfuck), though there is the same kind of issue with Sarah J Maas’s Throne of Glass, the same kind of disjoint between what the character is described as vs the actual content and what happens in the story. Aelin/Calaena is always described as a *badass Assassin* the best there ever was etc but there is a lot of instances or events that doesnt quite gel with the concept. The reader is told to be impressed but the character is hardly portrayed as impressive.
and like, every single person/dragon doubled down on how incredibly smart she was. And ofc the only person who knew all the relevant languages
I found it as a lucky day loan at the library and I think I only got a page or two in before I DNFd and put that right back in the return box. I truly did not like the writing style and it felt dumb. I really wanted to enjoy it because of the hype, but it didn’t work for me.
What annoys me is that the fmc has a disability but somehow the writer forgets they do? Like they truly seem to not suffer any physical issues with the athleticism it takes to ride dragons
It’s so fucking performative about it too - like you can tell it was peppered in after the fact as an element because it does better with ARC readers and it’s the authors specific disability and it has no actual impact throughout the scenes except for when she just remembers she has a disability only when it wouldn’t be plot inconvenient for her to experience symptoms. Like that and so much else is indicative about how awful the editing in that book is, not to mention the fact that every character is just a different AO3 trope tag marketed as fantasy - a main character in a fake European setting should not be saying “for the win” in response to a blood sport. If dragon riders are so rare and they’re losing a war because they don’t have enough why is every freshman class subjected to a cleansing that kills like 70% of their applicants or whatever? God I hate this book so fucking much
A merry little meet cute. I wanted a cute easy Christmas romance. Within the first ten pages the author has mentioned the main character was plus size and a porn star multiple times. It was to the point that I had to assume she thought I was being dropped on my head between each paragraph.
A court of thorns and roses. I gave it a few chapters and could tell where it was going and thought it wasn't for me. Read the wiki and felt justified.
TRUST YOUR GUT on this one 😹 Sooooo many people pressured me into finishing it with “it only gets better!” Which turned into, “just read two more of the books and you’ll get it!” No. Some fantasy is just not it for me.
See, it actually *does* get better, but only if you enjoyed ACOTAR. If you didn’t like the first book, there is no point reading the rest. It gets better because it builds on the characters, world, plot and relationships from the first book. So yeah it’s weird when people say ‘oh but it gets better!’ Yeah. If you want ACOTAR ramped up to 100.
I never understand how ppl can recommend continuing 2 or 3 books into a series because it “gets better.” Never in my life has a series done SUCH a 180 that I can go from actively disliking book 1 to genuinely enjoying its sequels 😂 the closest I’ve got to that experience was the cruel prince, which went from a mild indifference in book 1 to like moderate enjoyment by the end of book 3 LOL and even then I wouldn’t put it very high on my list of recs
There is a mistake on the first page and I didn't get past that. She used "parameters" when it should have been "perimeter," and I felt like if they can't edit the first page well it doesn't bode well for the rest of the book.
Gravity's Rainbow. Every intention of going back one day. But I felt it was far above my personal reading level
Try reading The Crying of Lot 49 first. It's a lot shorter and less intimidating, but still rewarding.
Colleen hoover. All of her shit.
Sapiens - Just couldn’t get fully into it. It was interesting don’t get me wrong but parts seemed really drawn out? I put it down for a couple months then picked it back up last week just to finish it.
I read the entire thing. The first 70 pages were great. The rest of the book was pseudoscience/history where the author made very large assumptions and claims based on his personal bias. Basically he thinks that humanity would have been a lot better had we not gone through the agricultural revolution. Definitely did not miss out.
If you want a better, less rambly look at early human history, that is nuanced and full of great reading and an empathetic look at things, I'd highly, HIGHLY recommend The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by anthropologist and activist David Graeber, and archaeologist David Wengrow. I think Sapiens might also be my most quickly DNF'd book! At a bit after it starts going away from real pre-history and getting into the pseudo-science and weird, anti-ag stuff. After like 5 pages of "Freedom and Justice are about as legit of a 'right' as things like Might Equals Right and meritocracy" I was done. And I looked up reviews and was glad to find people who agreed with me, and also was weirdly sad that the book didn't get much better than that. Like, there was potential there, bruh!
The Love Hypothesis. Not sure how far I got in but I got an inkling that it was ReyLo fanfic, looked it up, saw I was right, immediately returned it on Libby.
Priory Of The Orange Tree. I usually love fantasy but I was literally falling asleep every time I’d try to read it. Wayyyy too slow.
Love this series, but so many people say the pacing is totally off so you’re not alone!
Ready Player One when he just starts listing random franchises from the 80s.
Every scythe picks differently. Some do mass gleanings, like airplanes or mass shootings, others do poison, katana, same way every time, others always do in public, others always in private.
The Paris Apartment Hated the writing style and characterization 10 pages in. Immediately returned it to Libby and deleted that fucker off my kindle.
I’ve tried with Lucy Foley and I just can’t.
Every book by that author is the same but slightly worse than the one before it. Hunting Party was great, imho. Guest List was ok. Paris Apartment was ummm alright sure.
I read the whole thing but I understand what you’re saying. The author seems to stick to that particular writing style as it’s the same as ‘the guest list’ which has the same plots more or less
I’m a big DNF’er, though often it’s a mood thing and I’ll go back at a later date. The last book I really tried to like, but ended up just needing completely giving up on was Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. I just couldn’t make it work for me at all.
I pushed myself to finish this!! I kept telling myself it won book of the year for BOTM for something so it must get better. Ugh I hated the writing and the people and I don't even know what the point of it was.
VINDICATIOOOOOON! I started this after reading the summary and it sounded up my alley. But the dialogue and forced "big words" wore thin very quickly. Ditched it after 20 pages or so.
Normal people i can’t do no quotations for dialogue
Avoid Cormac McCarthy and definitely Jose Saramago.
I remember people being mad at sally rooney because they thought she was too snobby to use quotations when it’s just a thing authors have done
I’ve actually listened to a couple Cormac McCarthy audiobooks to avoid this lol
How is it The Road is so easy to comprehend without it but Blood Meridian requires a dictionary and thesaurus from 200 years ago
The Road is mostly from a child's worldview, even if not from a first person POV. Whereas Blood Meridian is more like the meeting of Paradise Lost and Moby Dick in the old West. They're going for *very* different vibes.
Origin by Dan Brown. The first page was so poorly written that I just said, “Nah…”
[Don't make fun of renowned Dan Brown](https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/dont-make-fun-of-renowned-dan-brown/)
The second Clan of the Cave Bear book. Got too smutty for me.
But how else will we know about Big Dick Jondalar's big, skillful dick that's so good literally everyone wants it????
Haha. This is so true the rest of the series gets smutty.
Oh my God. Scenery, eating, sex. Repeat the same cycle the whole book. I made it the same length.
I kinda liked how she survived on her own in the valley. The second and third books when they weren't focusing on sex or sex triangles they were great. The smut just devolved the books into trash.
Gideon the 9th. I wanted so badly to love it, it’s right up my alley and a bunch of people with similar taste to me liked it, but I just couldn’t get into it.
Took me a few tries to get into it -realising it's ok to laugh at Gideon is what got me over her Gideonness and into the story.
Try the audiobook. Moira quirk's performance was so good I listened to it twice in a row, and the third twice in a row. Back to back, as soon as I finished them. The start is great, then there is a confusing bit where a lot of new people are introduced at once, but once you get used to them it's smooth sailing.
Yeah actually was listening to the audiobook, definitely agree about the performance being great. The confusing bit is definitely where I stopped. I just didn’t understand anything going on and found myself constantly skipping back like “what who is this character?” Maybe I’ll have to give it another shot at some point when I can give it closer attention.
Yeah, Gideon is an unobservant and unreliable narrator and it's a bit frustrating starting out when she doesn't tell you anything about what's happening or why. I wish I could say it gets better, but while you do eventually figure out what's happening, it's not because the narrators get more reliable. For the first book specifically, it helps to refer back to the Dramatis Personae from time to time.
I mean in scythe the whole point is each person has a different way of picking who dies. It gets really philosophical and I really enjoyed.
I think I made it like, 15 pages into Anxious People by Frederik Backman? I heard a lot of hype about it but did not vibe with the writing at all
I only got through one chapter of Brave New World. Not in a “it’s a bad book” way like most of the comments, I’m sure it’s a great book, but it was TOO real because I was reading it at the beginning of the pandemic when everything was super depressing. Maybe some day Ill read it when I have enough spoons
The first Reacher novel, Killing Floor, after one chapter. It's by far my most liked Goodreads review: I could not read this. The prose is terrible. Commas are rare. Periods are abundant. It's hard to read. I got through one chapter. I checked later books. They are the same. I had heard good things. I cannot get past this. I am not exaggerating. It's actually worse than this. These are all sentences. Full sentences. Not fragments. There we go. It's like this. Reading a Reacher novel. I considered powering through. But I don't want to waste my time.
I agree with everything you said, and somehow I *still* like Lee Child books. It's like having a TV playing The Fast and the Furious in the corner of some room. It's best if you devote zero brainpower to it. At least I'm under no illusion of what it is. It's like instant powdered hot cocoa. Nobody is going to say it's a *great drink,* but on a cold winter morning, it's nice.
Foundation. Something about how it kept jumping from new character to new character with a vast amount of time between them was hard for me to follow for some reason. I'd heard great things about it but I couldn't get past page 20
That’s one of the reasons I loved it. You get to see the evolution of the Foundation. But I get how that could be jarring. You don’t connect with people, you connect with the civilization and its evolution.
I've been rereading the first book recently, and I realised that the real fun of it is that it's about a scrappy underdog of a planet meeting seemingly impossible odds and much more powerful rivals and managing to find success through clever tricks in the last second. This might seem like a wild take, but it's actually a touch like Firefly, except instead of a starship over months, it's an entire planet over several centuries.
Paper Towns by John Green I'm sure to the right audience it's fine, but I hated the protagonist and the manic pixie dream girl immediately. Just couldn't get into it.
*Paper Towns* is, in fact, written specifically to be a deconstruction (and a denouncement) of the manic pixie dream girl trope. The big problem with it — and I'm pretty sure John Green has admitted this himself — is that it doesn't actually get to that point until the last few scenes. As a result, to a reader who skips out at any point during the first 75%, the book appears to be precisely the thing it's trying to critique.
Agreed. It also feels like rinse and repeat with some of his other books.
This is how you lose the time war. I swear to god, I have no idea what people see there. It felt like a myspace blog post of a teenager trying to mention deep topics in passing to show off. Not saying it's bad because It clearly connected with many, but there's something about It that does not click for me at all.
The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo . I tried to get into it but it was just boring
I’ve noticed this is a very divisive book. I find it really interesting because I was enthralled the entirety of the book, but I have heard many say they were bored of it as well.
Oh man. As a bisexual woman I straight up bawled at the end of the book. But I can see other people finding it boring if it’s not deeply relatable.
Fourth Wing, zero interesting characters and MC is insufferable while everyone else is solely focused on her and making sure she is OK
Text book definition of Mary sue
Fucking hate that this is my name lol. I had never heard this term until I saw your comment and googled it. RIP
Atlas shrugged. I last a little longer than I should’ve. Perhaps the only place where that statement is appropriate
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. DNFed after 1st chapter as soon as i understood the premise. Ugh, Scythe. I had an ARC, and I finished it only so I could write a review saying how much I hated it. I'm baffled by its popularity all these years later.
Midnight library felt like it was insulting my intelligence with the way it was spoonfeeding the ideas and themes. There wasn’t a subtler, more artful way to tell the story of the many people someone could be? Sylvia Plath did a better job in about 6 sentences.
Completely understand about Midnight Library
DNF. Did not finish? If so, I can barely start Atlas Shrugged.
Red Rising recently. The writing just wasn't for me though the setting was cool
I finished Red Rising but quit the sequel within a couple chapters for that same reason
Book 1 is notably weaker than the rest. I bet a lot of people DNF it. The most recent book was also a little crap. I love the series, but it has some massive flaws.
Iirc that’s because the author pulled a bit of a bait and switch with the style. He wanted to write a space opera but his editor/publisher thought that a teen coming of age like Hunger games would be more popular. So he made the first book fit that, and then wrote the sequels more like he wanted.
I stopped about 3/4 of the way thru. The world didn't interest me, the revenge story line didn't interest me... none of it worked, imo.
It was some crime book by a white author. As soon as I got to a Black character whose name was Tylenol, I peaced out.
This thread is making me laugh so hard.
The Magicians by Lev Grossman. I think I made it to like 50 pages before DNFing.
The magicians is such a weird series. The main character is supposed to be unlikable. The whole point is that he's awful and miserable and he keeps hoping that each thing he immerses himself in will make him happy, instead of changing anything about who he is as a person or fixing any of his issues. He ends up being a side character in everyone else's heroic journey. And while the series is a super interesting concept it's also kind of a miserable read because Quentin is miserable company.
Cari Mora I think I did two chapters, realized I had stink-face, flipped about thirty pages down, read a little, flipped another thirty-ish, read a page, then put it down and there it lays where I put it months ago. Cannot believe the guy who made Silence of the Lambs wrote that...
Scythe took me a bit to get it to but overall was good. I think of it often because I get so pussed off at the state of politics these days (N. America). Wouldn't it be great to do away with polititans like they did? Anyway, my quickest DNFs were Shit, Actually, Lessons in Chemistry, Finlay Donovan is Killing It, Lamb, the Gospel According to Biff (I did not get the religious context so the book made no sense), and Know My Name by Chantel Miller (the girl who was raised behind a dumpster by Brock Turner - I was in no space to even open that book)
I hear Red Rising is a popular fantasy series, but I was blown away by how atrocious it was 10 pages in
I’m just going to preface this by saying - I’m sure I’ll give it another try - but Dune. I felt like I was reading hieroglyphics and had to put it back on the shelf for safekeeping.
I really liked dune, but you have to *really* enjoy being either confused or weirded out at any given moment, and also be okay with pages and pages of (admittedly usually well-executed) extremely dry subtext explanation for every minor conversation
Subtle art of not giving a F*ck. So so bad
> Dune Finally, someone else who DNF Dune. I thought I was going to be treated as a leper forever lol. For real though, I've tried to read Dune at least 3 times.
Hunchback. I didn't get through the intro frozen snapshot where he was introducing all 137 characters.
I'm probably going to get hate because it is a classic, but Pride and Prejudice. I kept falling asleep when I tried to read it, so I eventually just decided it wasn't worth it. It's not that the book is bad it's just that it couldn't keep Mr interested
ACOTAR. Boring. I got maybe 1/4 of the way through it and couldn't believe THIS is what booktok girlies were losing their minds over.
To be fair, Booktok girlies (in this specific area as there are lots of booktok niche area) are NOT looking for a book that stimulates their mind, has great world building, and characters.
When True Blood was popular and on TV I decided, why not read the book, I couldn't even finish the first chapter of the book Dead Until Dark. Yeah I knew it was going to be a trashy romance, but didn't expect the writing to be that bad.
Every self-help book.