The TBR List from Hell

Okay, somebody (MrAndrew, maybe?) somewhere in some GD thread at some point today (can you tell it's been a long long day for me?) mentioned the idea of a new topic about books read in Hell. So, how 'bout it?

If Hell meant spending eternity reading a never-ending pile of horrible books, which ones would be in your TBR pile?

Catcher in the Rye
The Poisonwood Bible
The Witches of Eastwick

The Great Gatsby
...because Hell aptly describes the ninth grade lit class I was in when I had to read it.

Mine would have to include Plato, and I really shouldn't be saying this as a Classicist, but I just can't make myself like him. I think probably the Bible, too, irony and all.

ET fix stupid typo.

Wild Animus
The Corrections
The Bonfire of the Vanities

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions I have never felt so dumb after reading a book.

Also, anything beginning with Harlequin presents...

Wuthering Heights
Little Women
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

Books from the far left or far right, politically and religiously.

Anything by Barbara Cartland

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Smollett

(I read one paragraph and sent it back to the library.)

fleela: good call with Wuthering Heights. ick.

I agree with Jthierer. Harlequin = Hell to me, not to mention anything involving algebra or accounting.

Anything dealing with current politics. I prefer to be blissfully ignorant.

Me too, Scaifea. I can't stand politics. Please no one post that it is my obligation, because I don't want to hear it.

Bodice-rippers. And seventh grade social studies textbooks.

*shudder*

Dickens.

La Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal - close to 700 pages of absolute boredom inflicted on us in French class when I was around 20 years old. The most trouble I ever had getting through a book. And I even had the German translation handy in case I had no clue what was going on. I fell asleep after every two pages. Imagine how long it took me to actually finish the book...

Twilight - if I had to read Bella's obsessive whining over and over again...*shudders*

stupid touchstones

* lights blue touchpaper, stands well back *

The collected works of Jane Austen and Henry James.

Maybe we should set up a hell book exchange. I'll take Grammath's Austen and James, if he'll take my romance novels, "sequels" to classic books, and self-help books.

Silas Marner - shudder
The collected works of Christine Feehan
In fact any romance books in quick succession or any academic theorist who likes jargon, repeating themselves and baffling their readers because they don't have any new ideas..

Well, if text books are fair game, then every text book I was forced to use in Catholic School should be in that pile.

You know I enjoyed about 2/3rds of the books on this list. LOL

Oh, and I've never even really tried to read Finnegan's Wake.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. I had to read it for school and it was torture.

The World According to Garp

and I almost finished it only because I was so desperate for anything to read. finally I couldn't take it anymore.

A big pile of self help books aimed at right-wing ignorant Christian-types written by authors who wouldn't know God if he smote them in person.

Anything by Brian Keene. The Rising was the worst piece of drivel I ever read.

A Separate Peace

geepers, I hated that.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. The first half of the title is absolutely dead-spot-on. The second half of the title is completely fraudulent.

This book literally became longer the more I read of it -- as measured by objective criteria. When I started it, it had 1,088 pages. After the first 50 pages, I checked and found it had 1,213 pages. After the next 100 pages, it had 1,569 pages.

So reading it is very much like being in Hell already.

All the books I've hated, I don't remember their titles. They are sent to obscurity where they belong, although I agree the genre of bodice rippers would be hellish to have to read.

Remembering Hypatia

;o)

Yay me! I started a thread without even trying! It's lazy person's heaven ;-D

Real hell would be no-book-at-all. Ever.

Even the worst book i've ever read would be better than none. Even if printed in a language i couldn't understand. Even with blank pages. Even if it smelled funky. Even if a pointy... well, you get the idea.

#33: ..then it will be Mao' s little red book for you... in traditional chinese

MUHAHAHAHAHA

Great point, J

>29 JPB: I can't tell you how good it makes me feel to know someone else hated A Separate Peace. I saw a play based on it that actually made me dislike it more.

Johnny Tremain

Great Expectations

I don't think Hell is a good enough punishment for a little rascal like me who doesn't even believe in Hell as the people who run School Chapel understand it. I won't go too much into my personal beliefs because that got me in hot water over in the Happy Heathens group, and would get me scorned by the GD Policy nerds.

Let's get Classical, shall we?

Hades. Doesn't get any worse or better than that to spend your afterlife in. Even if you're a Greek Hero you end up in a sucky next life. But what of the punishments?

For neat readers, they would be subjected to Harpies that rip and tear their books to shreds before they can read anything in mint condition.

For obsessive TBR pilers, I think what would happen would be this: you know the woman who's supposed to fill the jar with the hole in the bottom? Imagine an eternally refilling TBR pile like that. Filling with three times as many books for as many that you finish. Even if you didn't enjoy the books. (Hey, this is Hades, not Dante's Inferno, in Hades there's hope for small pleasures. There would be books you DO enjoy, just that you would have to finish the crappy ones front to cover before they appeared. Rereads would be allowed since Hades, as I recall, isn't as cruel as the people who run Dante's Inferno)

I'd put must of the books I was forced to read in school on that Hellish pile ;-)
I know, most of them aren't that bad, but I thoroughly hated reading them - I wanted to chose my own reading material!
It wasn't until later that I understood that I wasn't forced to read them because they were considered good lit but because they were part of what an educated person was supposed to know of.

So - The emigrants, People of Hemso and Therese Raquin; off you go!

On TA's theme
There is always the Tantalus punishment, the books you love just out of reach..
Or Sisyphus: you plough your way through a complicated and worthy mystery book only to have it snatched away before you find out whodunnit and because you missed all the clues you have to start again and repeat..

I loathe Silas Marner because of reading it in school - the style of prose combined with bored 13y-o's who don't understand & don't care to being forced to read it aloud - think of any book being forced on you like that and its pretty hellish

There are plenty of hellish scenarios which would prevent or hinder one's reading:

-Complete darkness, with no access to light

-Torrential downpour, and no shelter or clothes to cover the book

-Books so old that they disintegrate when you touch them

-Mis-bound pages (completely out of order)

-High winds, too high to fight, and no shelter

-Books printed in a dead, forgotten language, with no possible cipher

Why am I not surprised that Hell's bookclub got started by something MrAndrew said?

Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Flowers for Algernon are pretty high on the list of things I'd only read again if Hell froze over. And even then, I'd probably burn them for warmth.

For me it was:

1984
Siddhartha
The Metamorphosis
A Separate Peace
And unfortunately my current read for book club Snow by Orhan Pamuk. Hopefully this one will get better.

I'm right there with you Exvivre on the Romeo and Juliet - I like most Shakespeare but loathe that one in particular.

also a bit of drivel I was forced to read in a college class Thinker's Journey into How to think and solve problems by Hod Doering - complete trite bs nonsense this is the only book I've ever thrown at the wall - repeatedly.

Isn't it fascinating how many people have nominated something from school English class on this thread? I've often thought that the way Eng Lit was taught (at least when I was a lad) was the ideal way of (1) killing off any interest in the author and/or the story, and (2) instilling the idea that reading is B-O-R-I-N-G and a pain, definitely not something done for fun.

How many books are written to survive six solid months of teacher hammering away at every point until even the dimmest kid in class runs screaming from the agony of ANOTHER exposition of the same paragraph? And would anything meant to be read like that be readable in any normal sense?

I agree hfglen, so maybe, each person there should have an English Lit. professor there with them too? That's kind of hard on the teachers though. They are just doing their job. :)

Not a professor, MrsLee, just a 3rd-rate schoolteacher. I had an uncle who was an Eng Lit prof -- he could be very interesting to listen to, but then I didn't attend his classes. When my aunt died and we cleared up both-of-their belongings, I was amazed at the b-awful doggerel he'd been publishing in the retirement village newsletter. Even the rubbish I'd written for a program our Institute has for schoolkids had fewer hiccups (though I say it myself)!

We actually only read good books at school in English. Of course the level was lower than for you (apart from Macbeth), but that's also true for French and Italian where we only read boring books. Especially in French. Our French teacher had a thing for old classics that are just boring for the average 16-20 year old. I think we only read one book (over the course of seven years) that I really enjoyed.
German was a little better, we had a mix between very good literature and really bad and boring one. The worst for me was Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werther. I actually considered suicide after that, but not because the main person inspired me (like it did when the book first came out)... but because I wanted to escape his constant whining.

The books were:

Death & Dying by Katherine Kubler-Ross

The Death of Ivan Ilych by Tolstoy

Oedipus Rexby Sophocles

The Hell was:

My first quarter of college in my English 101 course.

The Devil was:

A bitter old maid instructor who did not like middle aged women in college. 8^(

I forgot to say: Things Fall Apart, assigned for two different English classes. Bleh! It didn't get any better the second time! I hate this book.

The Bible.

I second Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell. I started that book, got partway through, and have been unable to pick it up since. Its just draaaaaaaaaaaaaaags, and draaaaaaaaaaaags, and draaaaaaaaags.

In my hell of horrible books -

Anything by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Justina Robson, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Stephanie Meyer
Almost all holy books
Most 'new' science fiction (Richard K. Morgan, Charles Stross, gack gack gack)

That's enough thinking of being confined to those horrors... I need to go read something good to get the nasty taste out of my head.

*edit, *sigh* wonky authors....

Anything by DH Lawrence.

Hmmm, that settles it! The temperature in Hell can be no more than 450 degrees Faranheit.

Good to know.....

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, as I recall was particularly horrid.
I would also cringe if I had to read Vogon Poetry. I'm quite sure of that.

But that's only the THIRD worst poetry in the universe...

Audio-books read by someone in a monotone. Slowly. With many mispronunciations.

59 > worse would be randomly changing accents.

>#59: Good point. Actually, a book that was printed chock-a-block with spelling and syntax errors might just be conceivably worse than none at all. Also, one that is heavily highlighted throughout, in different colours.

>#60: I kind of like the idea of changing accents. Even if it was random.

#55 - kassetra, please don't spell her name "Stephanie Meyer". I can only come to terms with my name being associated with that drivel if the ridiculous spelling of "StephEnie" is maintained. Otherwise I may have to do something rash...

I think it's somewhere in the Thursday Next books that there is a woman who can't die until she's read the 10 most boring classics. Sounds a bit like hell to me.

#19

Sorry, dreamlikecheese, no deal.

I'll be Nth person to mention Wuthering Heights. Ugh.
Ulysses. I think I got to page 12 the third time I tried. Never trying again.

#53 - Agreed. The Bible would be on my hellish stack, too. As would the Koran and the Book of Mormon, etc etc and so forth.

Anything by L.A. Banks
Oliver Twist
The Diary of Anne Frank (yeah, yeah, I know I'm a terrible person. I feel for her and I dearly wish she hadn't gone through that, but I can't like her)
Hard Love by Ellen Wittlinger

Really, though, I think I could twist just about any book to my advantage, provided it was the only one available. True hell would be no stories of any kind. I've got a hardcore story addiction.

>65 clamairy: I find it sad and ironic that holy books are so uninspirational.

#65/#67 - well that works, since inspiration wouldn't allowed...and, of course, the FSM holy books (whatever those are) would be missing.

Horror

Bad romance novels (e.g. Nicholas Sparks)

Self-help/inspirational (esp. religious)

Math textbooks...

I'm with you on the math textbooks, particularly those laden with word problems.

Hey, I love math. Oh I guess for me there would be Math text books with problems that required paper and pencil to solve, but then there'd be no pencils and paper!

AHHHH! The horror!

#64 & others-Yeah, how could i have forgotten Wuthering Heights I just know that both Cathy & Heathcliff were totally 'certifiable' as well as insufferably self-absorbed. Had i met them i would have run the other way fast as my legs would carry me. And that is exactly how i feel about the 4 main characters in 'Seinfeld". Sorry, Seinfeld fans! 8^)

>69 bluesalamanders: bluesalamanders
Horror

Bad romance novels (e.g. Nicholas Sparks)

Self-help/inspirational (esp. religious)

Math textbooks...

*ditto*

Beowulf. Gilgamesh.

Robinson Crusoe - how can a whole (really long) paragraph be just one sentence? And why?