September 2019 Group Challenge

Are you brave enough to read someone’s least favorite book?

Share a book from the list that you really hated and let everyone know why. The writing style? Unlikeable characters? No plot? Predictable plot? Then choose someone else's most disliked book and read it to see if you might actually like it. It will be interesting to see if there is a consensus and if it is for the same reasons.

Happy reading (maybe!)!

Of the 830 list books I’ve read, only three have been ranked as one star. They qualified on the grounds of being equally tedious and distasteful:

The Wild Boys - William Burroughs
Crash - JG Ballard
Blood and Guts in High School - Kathy Acker

If you just want tedious and incomprehensible I recommend Hyperion by Friedrich Holderlin, or The Lusiads by Luis Vaz de Cameos.

For straight tedious try Walden by Henry David Thoreau.

Good luck!

I looked back over the last year or so of reading and picked a few. I was interested to see that several books that I rated low and reviewed pretty scathingly, I actually forgot that I disliked and thought of sort of positively (like The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead). So I chose less on the star rating I gave and more on negative impressions that I still have.

Shirley by Charlotte Brontë: despite Jane Eyre being one of my favorite books ever, I really couldn't stand this book. I found it boring and pretentious and the message to be too obvious. I wrote, "I'm not sure how a book can be overdramatic and boring at the same time."

Wild Harbour by Ian MacPherson: I found this book conceptually interesting, but highly annoying to read. The format is as a diary. The dialogue is atrocious and hyperbolic. Not really for me, but I was interested to know the book exists and at least it was short.

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride: This is a highly experimental novel in terms of language. It's written in the thoughts of a young woman from age 2 through her late teens. The language is very fragmented all the way through - incomplete sentences, odd word choice (even made up words), and lots of disjointed thoughts. Combine that with an excessively dark plot and I just didn't want to read this. The girl's brother has brain cancer, her father has run out on them, her uncle sexually abuses her which leads to a string of sexually abusive encounters and then her own promiscuity. It was just all so dark.

Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth: This book is important historically because the English ate it up and took it as a real insight into the rise of the middle class in Ireland and the bad habits of the Irish landed gentry. But the writing, plot development, and character development are basically non-existent. Thady's voice gives some character and there are a few funny moments, but this is basically a long run-on sentence in 90 pages.

I like this challenge and will definitely read a book somebody else hated. It turns out that I have hated quite a lot of books! I tried to choose a few that I REALLY hated but could honestly imagine somebody else liking. There were some others that I felt nobody could ever enjoy.

Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible * (anti-colonialist sermon)

Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles * (horrible people have sex. Or don’t.)

J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace * (everybody rapes, everybody kills dogs)

Salman Rushdie, Fury * (awful tragifarce on angst of an aging academic)

DBC Pierre, Vernon God Little * (cheap mockery of America centered on a school massacre)

Zadie Smith, On Beauty * (absolutely awful. Hated every word.)

This is an interesting idea. I already have a list of books from the above that I would like to read and will narrow my choice down later. Following is a list of books that didn't work for me:

The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor - brutal and very dark, couldn't understand what point the author was trying to make
The First Garden by Anne Hebert - Weird, difficult to relate to or understand
The Day of the Dolphin by Robert Merle - dated, boring and the writing was so mundane that I couldn't understand why this was included on the list
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis - as much as I enjoyed his The Green Man this one left me cold. Didn't find it humorous, thought it was mean-spirited and overly misanthropic.

LOL do I have a few? The winners of the most boring/absurd are:

Babbit by Sinclair Lewis

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by {Haruki Murakami

Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth

Vathek by William Beckford

The winner: a tie between Castle Rackrent and The Wind Up Bird Chronicle!

Only two come to my mind right away, but I'll keep thinking...

Walden was sanctimonious, preachy, arrogant and I couldn't get past page 50. I never will.

A Passage to India took me two months to read and I hated every second of it. Incidentally, other Forster novels haven't been nearly as difficult.

>8 amaryann21: A Passage to India was a set book in high school for me. I managed to ace the year without ever getting past the first third or so.

I have decided to read Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee.

The list of 1001 books I've scored with 1 star is as follows:
Oscar & Lucinda (I gave up caring about them once the story took an odd twist)
American Psycho (bizarre)
Madame Bovary (I just wanted to slap Emma Bovary)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (just too too long to finish, turned into a slog)
Confessions (Whinger)
Fingersmith (too little voice differentiation and too glib)

The only one I have a temptation ot revisit is the Hugo, as I did enjoy Les Mis. I just think it took too long to get through, making it into a chore.

My low scoring reads are:

Crash
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Mysteries of Udolpho
The Passion of New Eve
Optimists Daughter
The Autumn of the Patriarch - have enjoyed other Marquez books, but this one was painful.
Surfacing - usually love Margaret Atwood, but not this one.
Fear of Flying

I loved the two books I've read by Murakmai so far, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche and 1Q84, so I'll give The Wind-up Bird Chronicle a try.

This is so interesting! Some people hate the same books I hated, like Wild Harbour and Walden. But there are also books on these lists that I absolutely loved, including at least one that was a 5-star read for me. So clearly it is already true that one person's dud is another's beloved. I am planning to read The Lusiads, not that I expect to love it but it looks like a good challenge.

I like this theme! There are a number above I also hated, it is reassuring that others also didn't rate them.
I have read two of the Michel Houellebecq books on the list, I only read the second because I had bought the two cheaply in a charity shop. Both books enraged me.
While I can see why American Psycho is on the list, I think both Less than zero and Glamorama are utterly blah.
Neuromancer lost me completely, I read the pages, but not sure I got anything out of it.
Not a fan of William Burroughs, I would say that Naked Lunch was my least favourite.

There are a few I could read here- off to see what I can get hold of.
ETA - ordered The Optimist's Daughter and Fury
I will probably only read one as September is a pretty busy month at school.

I dove into The Hunchback of Notre Dame yesterday and finished all but 100 pages. I can understand why you thought it was a slog, Helenliz, and I think the fact that I've been to Paris and to Notre Dame is making it a little bit easier. I don't know that I'm enjoying it, but it doesn't feel as much like work as so many list books have.

There are many on these lists that I agree were really awful! But there are also a few I really liked.

I recently bought Lucky Jim so I will probably read that. And I've always wanted to read Fingersmith and have liked other books by Sarah Waters, so I might try to get to that as well.

>15 amaryann21: I think it took me 3 months to read it, every time I picked it up, I had to get back into the swing of it. Had I had the time to read it quicker, I feel sure it would have been less painful.

>16 japaul22: I think Waters is just too unpredictable. I've rated the two books I've read by her a 4* and a 1*. The 1* being enough to put me off trying many more.

>17 Helenliz: I can definitely see that. I finished it in two days, and I think I needed to to stay with it. Hugo is difficult that way.

I'm really glad I finally read this. It's given me some great food for thought. Hugo proposes that the printing press killed architecture because architecture was the written history of mankind previous to the ability to mass produce books. Makes a lot of sense in the book when he spells it out, and nothing I'd ever considered before. I also appreciated the history of the cathedral's architecture, the evolution of the physical building, because it's another thing I hadn't really thought about.

Since it's early in the month and I just got my hands on a copy of Blood and Guts in High School, I'm going to take that one on as well.

>2 puckers: I agree about Blood and Guts in High School. At least it didn't take long. And now it's over.

>5 annamorphic: I ended up reading Disgrace. I can see why many find this an unlikeable book. The main character is insensitive and unlikeable, women are subservient tools in power struggles, and there is no glimmer of hope in the conclusion. Having said that I found it a deeply affecting (even if depressing) book and as the middle-aged father of two girls I was often asking how I might react in (God forbid) similar circumstances.

I read The Optimist's Daughter - not a long book by any stretch, but not much really going on. There were times when I could see potential in the plot and writing, but I wasn't much grabbed by the kitchen sink drama. I wonder if this is because I am a Brit, so I didn't connect with the setting.

>22 soffitta1: I didn't connect with the setting much either, and I live in the US - but maybe because I live in the north?

I have finished my read of Disgrace and although it is very bleak and depressing, I ended up getting a lot out of this read. I was shocked but also deeply affected and I am now eager to try more books by this author.

>23 LisaMorr: I am curious if her other books are the same.

Fury -hmm I put this down a couple of times and if it weren't a 1001 book, I'd have given up. This book has also ages particularly badly.

>6 DeltaQueen50: I read Lucky Jim and I'm a little embarrassed to say I really liked it! Normally I don't like this type of male-centered book, but I thought Jim Dixon was funny and he wasn't successful enough to engender my hatred or even annoyance. I'm looking forward to reading some more Kingsley Amis.

>26 japaul22: I was just at your thread at the Category Challenge saying I was glad that you enjoyed Lucky Jim. This month's challenge is a great illustration of how some books click with us and others don't. This is a challenge that I hope we repeat at some time.

I like this category as well - just as interesting as the favourite read we did before. Best and worst always bring out good discussions!

I finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle last week and I really liked it. Murakami really drew me in and I found it amazing how he was able to connect everything together. I'm also very interested now in reading more about the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and the puppet state of Manchukuo.