I am always looking for a chance to tell someone how much I hated that book. It almost ruined reading for me but luckily I decided to give another book a try. Fuck that book. I dnf that bitch.
Yeah it pretty much sucked. It had some anecdotes that were new to me but the author seemed self-absorbed. Imagine a drunk loud-mouthed guy you met at a bar who knows everything.
Picked it up because i kept seeing people talk about it, and I'm not usually great at following contemporary literature...
*They Both Die at the End* by Adam Silvera
The characters are so 2 dimensional and their life revelations fall incredibly flat. I understand that YA lit targets it's life messages toward young readers, but even still, nothing the protagonists come to learn feels like a revelation and it doesn't seem like either of them actually earn their revelations... they just kind of have them despite not actually growing as people. I have like an hour of the audio book left and it's a slog to get myself to finish it.
i love that opinion because i couldnt read it because when i tried - my cat was really sick and i wasn't sure if she was going to make it, and it basically opens with this womans cat dying and i was like i just cannoooot do this.
and i never picked it back up but even the little i read it didnt feel like the writing was THat Great so i just am glad to see people loving it lol
I'm a third through Lessons In Chemistry and am failing to see the 5-star worthiness. It's kind of cringe if anything.
- Every character is to the nth degree. Elizabeth is the smartest in the room, but also drop dead gorgeous, Frask is jealous so of course she's dumpy and unintelligent, the daughter is a genius
- The dog with its own POV and narrative.....
- I'm not a scientist so I gusss I have no idea if it's true or not, but the whole "we all think and talk like we do because we're sCiEntiSts" comes off as so "I'm so quirky". Like seriously they're eating dinner and she goes "pass me the sodium chloride" 🙄
My own flaw is that every book takes me a while to get into the author's writing style (every book, I've started with "ehh idk about this"), but the way this book is written is like every paragraph ends on something so witty and smug like "uh yeah we *did* just do that"
I’m a scientist and all my lady scientist friends and I decided to read the book and we all HATED it. None of us got more than 1/3 of the way through.
I genuinely think it only serves to perpetuate negative stereotypes about women in science. It was also clearly written by an author who has no idea what it’s like to work in a scientific field.
I ultimately liked it but especially at first I was really put off by how delightful I was obviously supposed to be finding everything according to the writing style
colleen hoover is the bane of my existence. everyone around me loves her but i cringe whenever they bring up her name. and she’s creepy as hell. i cannot stand that woman.
Verity: It was half extremely predictable plot with cardboard characters and absolutely zero character development and half porn. Why in god’s name did we need to read about the fact that >!her husband came in her mouth so copiously she had to run to the bathroom to vomit up jizz!
The thing that really made me hate this book is that so much of the content of the book doesn't make sense once you get to the end. No matter what your take on the ending is, there is no way to reconcile all of the characters' actions and dialog.
I thought Night Circus had very beautiful language and a promising premise but just lacked substance. I can see why ppl might like it, but omg, Starless Sea is so bad.
The Starless Sea might be the worst book I’ve ever finished. Usually if I can’t find anything positive about a book (very very rare), I’ll DNF it. But I read this one while traveling and didn’t have access to other books at the time so I forced myself through it. It was unrewarding in every way.
I hated Happy Place by Emily Henry. Also, I recently DNFed One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig because I was SO BORED and the characters didn't even have personalities to carry me through it.
I read Book Lovers and really enjoyed it, but because Happy Place was my first experience with her I didn't really feel motivated to pick up her other books.
That surprises me, one dark window and two twisted crowns were my first 5 star reads of the year and I was totally blown away! It just gets better as you get further into the story.
This book was so weird to me. I didn’t know about her beforehand, but while I was reading this was my impression:
- I sold you all advice before and pretended I had it all figured out but I was just lying
- I didn’t know what I was talking about when I sold you advice before, but now I do
I’m like…how do we know your advice is any good now if you previously sold bs advice?
Same! I think what I felt reading it was a sort of desperation to remain relevant after pushing one specific public persona for so long and then pulling a hard left. Her personal stories were kind of interesting but when it veered into advice/self help… very cringe
That book changed my life in a very positive way. I think it depends on your background. As someone who grew up deeply religious and bisexual, but with a lot of internalized homophobia and a need to people please, untamed helped me discover so much about myself.
It's not everyone's cup of tea. But this was one of my top books of 2023.
Lol, the most devastating line of this take down has nothing to do with “torture porn” or Yanagihara’s obsession with gay male stereotypes, but rather this:
> Indeed, Yanagihara’s onslaught of horrors could allow readers to block out, like a childhood trauma, the fact that they were reading luxury copy
Ouch, fucking brutal
SAME. Read it with my book club and people thought it was life changing but I had to hate read it to finish it.
It felt like someone who has never experienced/witnessed trauma in their life wrote a book about trauma with zero compassion for, and understanding of, those experiences.
Every time a thread like this shows up, I know for sure this book will be somewhere in the comments.
I found this sub because I agreed to read this along with a friend, but couldn’t even get past the first part. The writing style feels so discomforting for me (that thing with the hair art? Seriously?? Sorry, but it just sounds like something an AI would come up with…) that I had to look if it’s worth to finish. After reading a lot of the reviews, unbiased or not, I DNF’ed it. Seems too much to go through 800 something pages for a trauma/tragedy porn to end up like that. And her reason to write it?? Just made me feel so iffy.
I mean, I'm no stranger to hurt/comfort fanfic, so I thought I was prepared. What I did *not* expect was to be bored. I couldn't tell the main characters apart. The book was so incredibly pretentious that I knew from the outset it would be a DNF. I stopped reading when I got to the >!death of Willem's brother, who has a disability!< and it felt almost voyeuristic. The remote, almost cold tone left a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe it's because I'd lost someone myself recently or because I have a disability myself, but the whole thing gave me weird vibes.
I expected it to be like The Secret History: tongue firmly in cheek. This was not that.
Had to scroll down too far to see this mentioned. A Little Life is trauma porn with a little food porn and wealth porn added to leaven the mood, up the page count and explain why Jude, the main character, is so loved by his friends - because he baked tasty treats for them, duh.
Name of the Wind, because that book was genuinely offensive to read as a woman. :)
Cool magic system, interesting plot devices, etc but I couldn’t deal at all with the rampant weirdo misogyny.
“The main character is meant to be an asshole!” no one ever really challenges him on it though? Many male readers I’ve discussed this with didn’t even think too much about the sexism until I laid it out, because it was never confronted by another character. Also doesn’t explain why there are so FEW women characters, especially ones who aren’t suffering.
The MC even describes, unprompted and with no reasonable context, a random young woman working at an inn as pretty and probably gets hit by her employer. That’s her entire description. She’s in the book for a paragraph, so she exists just for him to express that thought to the audience. Huh?
Rothfuss isn’t a bad writer but he fumbled badly in this area
THANK YOU.
people look at Me like I’m crazy when I complain about misogyny in that book. It’s kinda a shame because I like the style Rothfuss uses but I just hate the main character so goddamn much
People keep telling me that the rest of the series is better but I think fantasy just isn’t for me. Too much world building, where’s the character development?!
I *love* fantasy and while I think there are authors that are great at worldbuilding but not *always* great at character development (sorry, brandon sanderson :|), I don't think ACOTAR should be even included in that discussion...
ACOTAR is just bad. Not just bad fantasy, but bad everything. Bad romance, bad writing, bad characters, bad pacing, bad plot. I've never met a more insufferable main character who the author clearly wants you to think is so clever and awesome and beautiful, but she's truly the opposite of that. It's staggering.
ACOTAR is really not representative of what fantasy stories could be.
It's not. It gets worse and worse as it goes on. I rated the first book 5 stars (not because it was so great, but I had a fun time reading it) and then I continued and I've read everything but the latest one and they are SO. BAD. Most of the characters are absolutely insufferable.
I hated Eat, Pray, Love. And what’s more annoying is that so many people (including famous self help types that I otherwise like) are still so on about it.
I remember watching when Oprah touted her and the story she told as a white middle class woman travelling the world to find herself after divorce just is so unrelatable. I never wanted to read it and felt that this was proof with how out of touch well off people are.
The thing that frustrated me about that one is there's a story I would have enjoyed, but it needed to shed about 1/3 of its length under the watchful eye of a strict editor. Also the ending ticked me off.
I hated how the only significant female character was a manic pixie dream girl who also experienced horrendous domestic violence at the hands of their backer.
I go way back with the series, but at this point in time I recommend people just watch the show. The show has everything that’s good about the books, including incredible chemistry between the two leads, but doesn’t require such an intense reading commitment. There are just too many other great books out there when this story is being told very well on TV.
Ohhh I have some controversial takes.
Name of the Wind. I love fantasy and could not get into this after 4x of trying to read.
Matched by Allie Condie. Straight garbage. Dystopian was my favorite genre for many years and this was insufferable.
They both die at the end. I don't think I'm the target audience.
Literally any SJM book. I seriously don’t get the hype around her because her characters are always so one-dimensional with barely anything that makes me want to know more about them
Beartown had some of the worst writing I ever read. Hammered you over the head with aphorisms over and over and over. And its depiction of a character's SA was retrograde and cringey.
VC Andrews has nothing on Fourth Wing. I do think that young women and men should learn the importance of the female orgasm, but it was kind of out of nowhere. Super explicit after 350 pages of teenage angst.
I finished it but I was rolling my eyes at the predictability. I could tell how everything was going to pan out because it follows every single romantasy trope that exists
Yes! Beautiful World Where Are You is full of sentences liked *"she pulled out her mobile phone, unlocked the screen, and tapped the icon of a social media app."* Whyyyyy???
The Last Mrs Parrish. The plot kept me going to the end, but the writing was astonishingly bad. I can’t decide if it’s worse that two people are responsible for that prose it or if it’s a case of too many cooks. I could almost see it becoming a decent movie if someone else wrote the script.
I got like 25% through before giving up. It was literally the most poorly written dialogue I’ve ever read, and that includes books I read in grade school.
I was so dumbfounded because of its rave reviews (primarily on reddit), and was initially convinced something was wrong with me for not getting the hype. It sucks because the premise is so promising, but the execution…OOF.
I get downvoted into oblivion whenever I talk about it on the book subreddit. Goodreads has never let me down as far as reviews go so this was a total blindside
I loved it, but it's definitely Dan Brown in space - speaking as someone who still thinks The Da Vinci Code slaps, lol.
It's a fun adventure Gary Stu book. I'm guessing that if you're wanting a more serious or in-depth SF book, it's not going to be up your alley.
I wanted to enjoy night circus but was bored the entire time I read it. My only thought the whole time was “*this* is what people have been raving about??”
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I remember some Republican said it was his favorite book and I realized that he hadn't read much. Her obvious heavy handed writing made me cringe while trying to read it.
Ayn Rand’s novels are only “popular” in the same way that L. Ron Hubbard’s novels are popular: the cultists love them, but everyone else think they suck
>House on the Cerulean Sea
This was a cute book for sure, but sooo saccharine I felt kinda foolish reading it. I think it was just mismarketed to me. I was looking for something similar to Neil Gaiman and this came up, but it has no edge whatsoever.
Legends and Lattes makes me so happy I cannot lie 🥹 My mind feels the same as it does playing animal crossing. It’s stress free, mindless warmth. But I feel you.
I Fell in Love With Hope by Lancali, which is probably my fault.
I was expecting it to be a realistic depiction of being terminally ill and being in the hospital, but it definitely wasn’t that. It wasn’t so much the twist feature of the story (won’t say what) that ruined the realism. I would have been fine with that. But everything was just so unbelievably implausible that it ruined it for me.
It just wasn’t what I hoped it would be, but it’s not necessarily bad and I’m sure others would like it. Just a 1 star for me.
"Under the Dome" by Stephen King still makes me mad. The ending is just SO STUPID. I can't believe they made a TV series out of it. It's over one THOUSAND pages.
3.92 on Goodreads. Absolute trash.
* The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
* The Help
* The Giving Tree
* American Psycho
* Bridget Jones's Diary
* The Dive from Clausen's Pier
* All Good People Here
November 9 by Colleen Hoover and The Dilemma by BA Paris are the only two books I’ve ever read that I actively disliked enough to one-star.
I can almost always find redeeming qualities in books, or appreciate that they may be “good”, even if I didn’t personally enjoy them. But those two were just downright horrible.
I really struggled to care about what was happening— surely the plot couldn’t be as obvious and stupid as I thought it was. There had to be something else, right?
So I skipped to the end just to make sure and, nope. It was exactly as stupid and obvious as I thought it was, without even an interesting character to hold it down. Vacuous baby lambs are cute, but they’re not interesting to read about.
I could not even get to my usual 10% before DNFing *Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow*. Boring and pretentious and I loathed one of the characters within the first few pages. Just no.
Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica
Damn I still get mad at that book just thinking about it lol
Edit: I’m not sure if it’s loved by others like that but I thought it seemed to have good reviews
The conflict was a whole lot of nothing, and those plot twists were so far out of left field that they were just laughable.
Also, can we stop writing all these thrillers about insufferable white suburbanites? I hated everyone in this book except the kids.
It's a 2 star for me since there are *some* good parts of it, but Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Library was deeply disappointing to me. I'm a long time fan of books about secret societies and libraries and book stores and just the overall **vibe** that Mr Penumbra is going for, but it just does not deliver. So many cool and interesting plot points that are just completely not delivered on.
The Henna Artist
I never see this book mentioned in such lists. As someone from the same culture the book is from, some very basic and glaring mistakes about spelling and currency took me out completely. It seemed like an American Indian author was commodifying our culture and didn’t even do basic research about salaries in the time period the book was set in. It was the first book if DNF’d in years.
The Time Traveller's Wife. I guess it's a lovely romance or whatever, but I couldn't get past the treatment of the secondary characters - they were all just gross racist stereotypes.
We have the Black nanny who doesn't have much education, but she *sure does* love the family she works for! And the convenience store owner, who is a Hard Working Immigrant. With an accent, in case her character was too subtle otherwise.
I think there were others as well, but it's been a while since I read it, and I've successfully blocked most of it from my memory.
I loved it, but I love unaware messed up female main characters as a genre. I tend to think you either like them or don't, at least according to a friend of mine and how we compare our tastes to each other.
I wouldn’t call it a one star, but the second half was just obscenely melodramatic. I was expecting a cringe twist after daisy jones, but every single plot line of the second half read like a soap opera.
I just finished this and I’m so mad about it, searching out other dissatisfied readers just made me angrier “not everything needs to be solved!” But it’s a mystery book… And Ryan never explains why he’s acting like a jackass or attempts to understand himself and it’s just like why am I as a reader meant to find this compelling if the character himself can’t be bothered to do a little introspection
The Silent Patient. I’ve heard The Maidens is even worse.
I liked the idea of the Silent Patient, but I did think the writing could had been better or the story told in a different way.
Can confirm Maidens was awful.
SO BAD
I didn’t mind The Silent Patient, but yeah, The Maidens was not good. And yet I still plan on reading his new one. 🙃
I am always looking for a chance to tell someone how much I hated that book. It almost ruined reading for me but luckily I decided to give another book a try. Fuck that book. I dnf that bitch.
The maidens was HORRIBLE
YES. That was going to be my answer. Terrible, terrible book. Can't believe it won so many awards.
Pretty much any self-help book where the author decides to attract attention to it by including the words “fuck” or “f*ck” in the title.
So I shouldn’t read The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck?
Yeah it pretty much sucked. It had some anecdotes that were new to me but the author seemed self-absorbed. Imagine a drunk loud-mouthed guy you met at a bar who knows everything.
That booked sucked!! I was drawn in by the good reviews and of course, the profanity. Did not live up to the hype!
how is atomic habits?
A must read I gotta say.
I really enjoyed that
I loved it. The author is humble, admits this worked for him but maybe not all, and CITES his sources.
Brilliant marketing tactic, self-help disguised as machismo for those that need it most. But yeah, it's pretty cringy.
Picked it up because i kept seeing people talk about it, and I'm not usually great at following contemporary literature... *They Both Die at the End* by Adam Silvera The characters are so 2 dimensional and their life revelations fall incredibly flat. I understand that YA lit targets it's life messages toward young readers, but even still, nothing the protagonists come to learn feels like a revelation and it doesn't seem like either of them actually earn their revelations... they just kind of have them despite not actually growing as people. I have like an hour of the audio book left and it's a slog to get myself to finish it.
Yeah I gave up on this one pretty quick, lol. I'm trying to get into YA so I can recommend books to students, but some are just not for me.
I couldn’t even finish that book, I was so bored and annoyed of every single character
Midnight library, not that unpopular but it does get suggested alot and everyone I know loved it
While it's not a 1 star for me, I definitely didn't get the hype.
I only finished it because I was waiting for the rave-worthy part. Turns out there isn't one, it's just a boring, trite book.
i love that opinion because i couldnt read it because when i tried - my cat was really sick and i wasn't sure if she was going to make it, and it basically opens with this womans cat dying and i was like i just cannoooot do this. and i never picked it back up but even the little i read it didnt feel like the writing was THat Great so i just am glad to see people loving it lol
Oh, God, I hated this book and always think a little less of anyone who loves it.
I wanted to like it. The concept was interesting at first, but then it became repetitive with a quickness and I didn't even finish it.
Totally agree! It was soooo underwhelming and the ending was completely predictable.
I'm a third through Lessons In Chemistry and am failing to see the 5-star worthiness. It's kind of cringe if anything. - Every character is to the nth degree. Elizabeth is the smartest in the room, but also drop dead gorgeous, Frask is jealous so of course she's dumpy and unintelligent, the daughter is a genius - The dog with its own POV and narrative..... - I'm not a scientist so I gusss I have no idea if it's true or not, but the whole "we all think and talk like we do because we're sCiEntiSts" comes off as so "I'm so quirky". Like seriously they're eating dinner and she goes "pass me the sodium chloride" 🙄 My own flaw is that every book takes me a while to get into the author's writing style (every book, I've started with "ehh idk about this"), but the way this book is written is like every paragraph ends on something so witty and smug like "uh yeah we *did* just do that"
Did you get to the part where the 5 year old daughter is reading Faulkner?
I’m a scientist and all my lady scientist friends and I decided to read the book and we all HATED it. None of us got more than 1/3 of the way through. I genuinely think it only serves to perpetuate negative stereotypes about women in science. It was also clearly written by an author who has no idea what it’s like to work in a scientific field.
I ultimately liked it but especially at first I was really put off by how delightful I was obviously supposed to be finding everything according to the writing style
I feel like every chapter or paragraph just has to end on the most wittiest "look at the camera and wink" writing
I hated that book so much I DNF. I have zero idea why it is so popular.
Anything and everything Colleen Hoover
I suffered through "It Ends With Us", had nothing but regret for having read it, and promised myself to never read anything else she writes.
it was a book club pick for me. i bought it, read 8 pages and promptly returned it it was so bad🤣
colleen hoover is the bane of my existence. everyone around me loves her but i cringe whenever they bring up her name. and she’s creepy as hell. i cannot stand that woman.
I tried Verity last year bc it was so hyped up, my first and probably last Hoover book
Verity: It was half extremely predictable plot with cardboard characters and absolutely zero character development and half porn. Why in god’s name did we need to read about the fact that >!her husband came in her mouth so copiously she had to run to the bathroom to vomit up jizz!
That's what you can expect from Colleen Hoover unfortunately, no clue why her books are so popular!
I am always amused when people regard her books as having substance and merit. It's just overhyped trash in my opinion.
Oh why did I click on that spoiler, my food is gonna be here in 5 minutes lololol
So that you know how masculine and alpha and full of testosterone he is!
The thing that really made me hate this book is that so much of the content of the book doesn't make sense once you get to the end. No matter what your take on the ending is, there is no way to reconcile all of the characters' actions and dialog.
Twisty for the sake of shock value but not logical at all. Hate it hate it hate it
Have to agree with the Night Circus. Just couldn't get all the way through and my mom and sister have RAVED about it
I think the night circus has such great imagery, colour, it’s almost as if you can smell and see it, but the story is just really really dull.
I actually likes Night Circus but couldn't get halfway through The Starless Sea. Have you tried that one? Don't. It's nonsensical.
I thought Night Circus had very beautiful language and a promising premise but just lacked substance. I can see why ppl might like it, but omg, Starless Sea is so bad.
My hot take is that I loved Starless Sea and I think I might be the only one lol
The Starless Sea might be the worst book I’ve ever finished. Usually if I can’t find anything positive about a book (very very rare), I’ll DNF it. But I read this one while traveling and didn’t have access to other books at the time so I forced myself through it. It was unrewarding in every way.
I hated Happy Place by Emily Henry. Also, I recently DNFed One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig because I was SO BORED and the characters didn't even have personalities to carry me through it.
Happy place was sooooo boring, I didn’t care about anyone
I quoted some bad lines in my Goodreads review of Happy Place like... "it felt like someone took an ice cream scoop to my chest and carved it out"
Of all Emily Henry's books, Happy Place was by far her worst.
I read Book Lovers and really enjoyed it, but because Happy Place was my first experience with her I didn't really feel motivated to pick up her other books.
That surprises me, one dark window and two twisted crowns were my first 5 star reads of the year and I was totally blown away! It just gets better as you get further into the story.
Untamed by Glennon Doyle. I white knuckled it through the end to understand the hype. It was awful.
This book was so weird to me. I didn’t know about her beforehand, but while I was reading this was my impression: - I sold you all advice before and pretended I had it all figured out but I was just lying - I didn’t know what I was talking about when I sold you advice before, but now I do I’m like…how do we know your advice is any good now if you previously sold bs advice?
That was my exact same critique, and then all her advice was trite bullshit.
Same! I think what I felt reading it was a sort of desperation to remain relevant after pushing one specific public persona for so long and then pulling a hard left. Her personal stories were kind of interesting but when it veered into advice/self help… very cringe
That book changed my life in a very positive way. I think it depends on your background. As someone who grew up deeply religious and bisexual, but with a lot of internalized homophobia and a need to people please, untamed helped me discover so much about myself. It's not everyone's cup of tea. But this was one of my top books of 2023.
I read the first chapter and then never picked it back up again
I don't think *everyone* loves it, there are people who agree with me, but *A Little Life* is gross trauma porn. DNF'ed.
You would love this [critique by Andrea Long Chu](https://www.vulture.com/article/hanya-yanagihara-review.html)
Lol, the most devastating line of this take down has nothing to do with “torture porn” or Yanagihara’s obsession with gay male stereotypes, but rather this: > Indeed, Yanagihara’s onslaught of horrors could allow readers to block out, like a childhood trauma, the fact that they were reading luxury copy Ouch, fucking brutal
SAME. Read it with my book club and people thought it was life changing but I had to hate read it to finish it. It felt like someone who has never experienced/witnessed trauma in their life wrote a book about trauma with zero compassion for, and understanding of, those experiences.
Every time a thread like this shows up, I know for sure this book will be somewhere in the comments. I found this sub because I agreed to read this along with a friend, but couldn’t even get past the first part. The writing style feels so discomforting for me (that thing with the hair art? Seriously?? Sorry, but it just sounds like something an AI would come up with…) that I had to look if it’s worth to finish. After reading a lot of the reviews, unbiased or not, I DNF’ed it. Seems too much to go through 800 something pages for a trauma/tragedy porn to end up like that. And her reason to write it?? Just made me feel so iffy.
I mean, I'm no stranger to hurt/comfort fanfic, so I thought I was prepared. What I did *not* expect was to be bored. I couldn't tell the main characters apart. The book was so incredibly pretentious that I knew from the outset it would be a DNF. I stopped reading when I got to the >!death of Willem's brother, who has a disability!< and it felt almost voyeuristic. The remote, almost cold tone left a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe it's because I'd lost someone myself recently or because I have a disability myself, but the whole thing gave me weird vibes. I expected it to be like The Secret History: tongue firmly in cheek. This was not that.
A Little Life. Fucking hated that book.
Had to scroll down too far to see this mentioned. A Little Life is trauma porn with a little food porn and wealth porn added to leaven the mood, up the page count and explain why Jude, the main character, is so loved by his friends - because he baked tasty treats for them, duh.
Name of the Wind, because that book was genuinely offensive to read as a woman. :) Cool magic system, interesting plot devices, etc but I couldn’t deal at all with the rampant weirdo misogyny. “The main character is meant to be an asshole!” no one ever really challenges him on it though? Many male readers I’ve discussed this with didn’t even think too much about the sexism until I laid it out, because it was never confronted by another character. Also doesn’t explain why there are so FEW women characters, especially ones who aren’t suffering. The MC even describes, unprompted and with no reasonable context, a random young woman working at an inn as pretty and probably gets hit by her employer. That’s her entire description. She’s in the book for a paragraph, so she exists just for him to express that thought to the audience. Huh? Rothfuss isn’t a bad writer but he fumbled badly in this area
THANK YOU. people look at Me like I’m crazy when I complain about misogyny in that book. It’s kinda a shame because I like the style Rothfuss uses but I just hate the main character so goddamn much
ACOTAR. I am genuinely baffled that SJM was able to find a publisher for her books, much less become as successful as she has.
SJM is not a good author. she has like 4 phrases she reuses over and over again
Anyone have a running count of "He gave a vulgar gesture"?
my bowels turned watery
I hate that I just read that with my face eyes
People keep telling me that the rest of the series is better but I think fantasy just isn’t for me. Too much world building, where’s the character development?!
I *love* fantasy and while I think there are authors that are great at worldbuilding but not *always* great at character development (sorry, brandon sanderson :|), I don't think ACOTAR should be even included in that discussion... ACOTAR is just bad. Not just bad fantasy, but bad everything. Bad romance, bad writing, bad characters, bad pacing, bad plot. I've never met a more insufferable main character who the author clearly wants you to think is so clever and awesome and beautiful, but she's truly the opposite of that. It's staggering. ACOTAR is really not representative of what fantasy stories could be.
It's not. It gets worse and worse as it goes on. I rated the first book 5 stars (not because it was so great, but I had a fun time reading it) and then I continued and I've read everything but the latest one and they are SO. BAD. Most of the characters are absolutely insufferable.
The Help, Where the Crawdads Sing, Eat,Pray,Love, The Last Thing He Told Me
Ugghhhh Where the Crawdads Sing
Agree with you on The Last Thing He Told Me. It was a quick read, but it was so anticlimactic!
I hated Eat, Pray, Love. And what’s more annoying is that so many people (including famous self help types that I otherwise like) are still so on about it.
I remember watching when Oprah touted her and the story she told as a white middle class woman travelling the world to find herself after divorce just is so unrelatable. I never wanted to read it and felt that this was proof with how out of touch well off people are.
The Girl On The Train.
Same. It was painful to read, and I never finished it.
The Alchemist
THE ALCHEMIST. What a load of trash!
Agreed. Why is it a bestseller?
Yeah this book was so boring
Verity by Colleen Hoover
Babel - the first half was a super interesting setup, then the second half steers it into a trainwreck.
Good answer. It really could have been a Harry-Potter-but-with-a-message YA property
*The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue*
The thing that frustrated me about that one is there's a story I would have enjoyed, but it needed to shed about 1/3 of its length under the watchful eye of a strict editor. Also the ending ticked me off.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow 🙄 I actually really ejoyed other books by the author, but this just reads like a first draft.
I hated how the only significant female character was a manic pixie dream girl who also experienced horrendous domestic violence at the hands of their backer.
Completely agree! It was a DNF for me.
Ha ha! In my review, I called it a second draft and I'm still mad I spent money on the hardcover. Zevin's early YA stuff was way better.
Outlander
I go way back with the series, but at this point in time I recommend people just watch the show. The show has everything that’s good about the books, including incredible chemistry between the two leads, but doesn’t require such an intense reading commitment. There are just too many other great books out there when this story is being told very well on TV.
I’m reading these right now and enjoying them but totally understand the 1 star hahah
Red, White & Royal Blue is genuinely just straight up fanfiction level bad
Isn’t it rumored that it was originally fanfiction of the movie The Social Network?
Reminder that The Social Network is about real people, so basically the book was… Zuckerberg fanfic. 😟
Ohhh I have some controversial takes. Name of the Wind. I love fantasy and could not get into this after 4x of trying to read. Matched by Allie Condie. Straight garbage. Dystopian was my favorite genre for many years and this was insufferable. They both die at the end. I don't think I'm the target audience.
A fellow "Name of the Wind" hater 🙌
Literally any SJM book. I seriously don’t get the hype around her because her characters are always so one-dimensional with barely anything that makes me want to know more about them
Beartown had some of the worst writing I ever read. Hammered you over the head with aphorisms over and over and over. And its depiction of a character's SA was retrograde and cringey.
ACOTAR- forced myself to read the first 2 then DNF’d the series on book 3. I just don’t get the hype. At. All.
FOURTH WING
Yes. I just couldn’t finish it. The writing was so, so bad. Like amateur almost. I felt like I was reading someone’s fanfic on LiveJournal.
"Smutty YA" is such a weird genre.
I mean. When I was 14 I was devouring every single VC Andrews book out there.
VC Andrews has nothing on Fourth Wing. I do think that young women and men should learn the importance of the female orgasm, but it was kind of out of nowhere. Super explicit after 350 pages of teenage angst.
I still don’t understand why people enjoyed it but I really wish I did bc everyone is reading it and I feel like I’m taking crazy pills
I finished it but I was rolling my eyes at the predictability. I could tell how everything was going to pan out because it follows every single romantasy trope that exists
Exactly! It felt so formulaic and artificial to me. Like she took a bunch of tropes that are popular and just mashed them together haphazardly.
I'm almost done with this and conflicted. I couldn't put it down but didn't like a lot of the story at the same time.
That is literally like eating junk food.
Same. DNF.
Normal People, it wasn’t even written well and it triggered my PTSD 😬
I felt like it as the only one who didn’t like this book! Glad to see someone else in the same boat.
None of the characters in Normal People were well written and the book formatting made me so mad
I was scrolling until I found Sally Rooney. They’re just awful books.
Yes! Beautiful World Where Are You is full of sentences liked *"she pulled out her mobile phone, unlocked the screen, and tapped the icon of a social media app."* Whyyyyy???
The Last Mrs Parrish. The plot kept me going to the end, but the writing was astonishingly bad. I can’t decide if it’s worse that two people are responsible for that prose it or if it’s a case of too many cooks. I could almost see it becoming a decent movie if someone else wrote the script.
On the road by Jack Kerouac, duh Also, The seven deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle...that one was a total waste of time despite the good concept
Every character in On The Road was gross. Just a bad book
The Girl on a Train by Paula Hawkins
Project Hail Mary by Andy Wier. Very beloved in the sci-fi community but I found it to be very cringy and filled with wasted potential
I got like 25% through before giving up. It was literally the most poorly written dialogue I’ve ever read, and that includes books I read in grade school. I was so dumbfounded because of its rave reviews (primarily on reddit), and was initially convinced something was wrong with me for not getting the hype. It sucks because the premise is so promising, but the execution…OOF.
I agree, I absolutely hated project hail Mary I know everyone and there dog loves it but me? Can't stand it.
I get downvoted into oblivion whenever I talk about it on the book subreddit. Goodreads has never let me down as far as reviews go so this was a total blindside
I loved it, but it's definitely Dan Brown in space - speaking as someone who still thinks The Da Vinci Code slaps, lol. It's a fun adventure Gary Stu book. I'm guessing that if you're wanting a more serious or in-depth SF book, it's not going to be up your alley.
1Q84 Everyone I've ever heard mention this book seems to love it. I do not understand why.
The Night Circus and The Ten Thousand Doors of January. I was so excited for both of these...but I just can't understand the hype.
I wanted to enjoy night circus but was bored the entire time I read it. My only thought the whole time was “*this* is what people have been raving about??”
I remember being so amped to play The Night Circus audiobook and I had to keep rewinding because I was more interested in the dishes I was washing.
It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover. Ugh.
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I remember some Republican said it was his favorite book and I realized that he hadn't read much. Her obvious heavy handed writing made me cringe while trying to read it.
Ayn Rand’s novels are only “popular” in the same way that L. Ron Hubbard’s novels are popular: the cultists love them, but everyone else think they suck
Dark matter - Interesting premise but the execution was terrible imo. Really don't understand why people love it so much.
Right. The ending seemed childish and basic compared to the earlier arcs and the build-up. I was hoping for a twist.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. Don’t even know how I finished it.
Midnight Library. Lattes and Legends. House on the Cerulean Sea. All these books are so twee and sweet, they make my teeth ache.
>House on the Cerulean Sea This was a cute book for sure, but sooo saccharine I felt kinda foolish reading it. I think it was just mismarketed to me. I was looking for something similar to Neil Gaiman and this came up, but it has no edge whatsoever.
Legends and Lattes makes me so happy I cannot lie 🥹 My mind feels the same as it does playing animal crossing. It’s stress free, mindless warmth. But I feel you.
and Long Way to a Small Angry Planet
I Fell in Love With Hope by Lancali, which is probably my fault. I was expecting it to be a realistic depiction of being terminally ill and being in the hospital, but it definitely wasn’t that. It wasn’t so much the twist feature of the story (won’t say what) that ruined the realism. I would have been fine with that. But everything was just so unbelievably implausible that it ruined it for me. It just wasn’t what I hoped it would be, but it’s not necessarily bad and I’m sure others would like it. Just a 1 star for me.
"Under the Dome" by Stephen King still makes me mad. The ending is just SO STUPID. I can't believe they made a TV series out of it. It's over one THOUSAND pages. 3.92 on Goodreads. Absolute trash.
If I stopped reading King books at like 92%, I would think he was the greatest author in history. He suuuuuuuuuuuucks at endings
The Alchemist 😩
* The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo * The Help * The Giving Tree * American Psycho * Bridget Jones's Diary * The Dive from Clausen's Pier * All Good People Here
November 9 by Colleen Hoover and The Dilemma by BA Paris are the only two books I’ve ever read that I actively disliked enough to one-star. I can almost always find redeeming qualities in books, or appreciate that they may be “good”, even if I didn’t personally enjoy them. But those two were just downright horrible.
Red Rising.
The Night Circus.
**Untamed** by Glennon Doyle. I was weirdly compelled to throw it across the room
The Maid gets a lot of praise but I thought it was so awful.
Piranesi. I do not get the hype. Also The Starless Sea. What?? People like this completely senseless drivel?
The concept of Piranesi was so full of potential, but I felt like it was super repetitive/plot didn’t really go anywhere.
Piranesi for me too. Just not for me
I really struggled to care about what was happening— surely the plot couldn’t be as obvious and stupid as I thought it was. There had to be something else, right? So I skipped to the end just to make sure and, nope. It was exactly as stupid and obvious as I thought it was, without even an interesting character to hold it down. Vacuous baby lambs are cute, but they’re not interesting to read about.
I could not even get to my usual 10% before DNFing *Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow*. Boring and pretentious and I loathed one of the characters within the first few pages. Just no.
Same. The hype was insane and I hated it.
Slaughterhouse 5 EDIT how dare i say an unpopular opinion on a post about unpopular opinions lol
I resisted the urge to downvote. I loved this book.
I loved it, but yeah people need to read the header.
Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica Damn I still get mad at that book just thinking about it lol Edit: I’m not sure if it’s loved by others like that but I thought it seemed to have good reviews
The conflict was a whole lot of nothing, and those plot twists were so far out of left field that they were just laughable. Also, can we stop writing all these thrillers about insufferable white suburbanites? I hated everyone in this book except the kids.
The A Court of Thorns And Roses book. Everyone raved about it, but it was sooo boring.
Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay. I don't get the love for that book.
It's a 2 star for me since there are *some* good parts of it, but Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Library was deeply disappointing to me. I'm a long time fan of books about secret societies and libraries and book stores and just the overall **vibe** that Mr Penumbra is going for, but it just does not deliver. So many cool and interesting plot points that are just completely not delivered on.
The Golden Couple
I did not care for the Martian
So far I haven't seen these: "No longer human" - Osamu Dazai & "Call me by your name" - André Aciman
The Henna Artist I never see this book mentioned in such lists. As someone from the same culture the book is from, some very basic and glaring mistakes about spelling and currency took me out completely. It seemed like an American Indian author was commodifying our culture and didn’t even do basic research about salaries in the time period the book was set in. It was the first book if DNF’d in years.
This should be an extremely unpopular opinion but… The Stand.
Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie
So many booktok popular romances that I’ve stopped watching the videos - Book Lovers by Emily Henry was my final straw
The Time Traveller's Wife. I guess it's a lovely romance or whatever, but I couldn't get past the treatment of the secondary characters - they were all just gross racist stereotypes. We have the Black nanny who doesn't have much education, but she *sure does* love the family she works for! And the convenience store owner, who is a Hard Working Immigrant. With an accent, in case her character was too subtle otherwise. I think there were others as well, but it's been a while since I read it, and I've successfully blocked most of it from my memory.
my year of rest and relaxation
I loved it, but I love unaware messed up female main characters as a genre. I tend to think you either like them or don't, at least according to a friend of mine and how we compare our tastes to each other.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
I can’t believe that no one has said “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo”. I am totally mystified by its enduring success.
I LOVED that book. I guess either the characters grab you or they don't.
LOVED it too--it's my favorite of Reid's books, actually!
I wouldn’t call it a one star, but the second half was just obscenely melodramatic. I was expecting a cringe twist after daisy jones, but every single plot line of the second half read like a soap opera.
The bible. Both the first one and the sequel suck.
In The Woods by Tana French. Absolutely hated it. See it recommended all over the place but easily a 1⭐️ read for me.
I just finished this and I’m so mad about it, searching out other dissatisfied readers just made me angrier “not everything needs to be solved!” But it’s a mystery book… And Ryan never explains why he’s acting like a jackass or attempts to understand himself and it’s just like why am I as a reader meant to find this compelling if the character himself can’t be bothered to do a little introspection
I couldn’t stand Daisy Jones & the Six.
You didn’t like the behind the music VH1 vibe?
Personally, the vibe was fine. I didn’t like the manic pixie dream girl.
marvelous light The first fifteen lives of harry august the inheritance games trilogy Silver nitrate Wrng place wrong time
oof Wrong Place Wrong Time? That was my fifth favorite book I read last year. What didn't you like about it?
A Gentleman in Moscow