My Most Irritating Read Ever — Let’s Rage Together!

[hiteshp]

�� The Book That Made Me Want to Throw It Across the Room (and Maybe at the Author)

Ever met a book that didn’t just waste your time, but seemed personally committed to ruining your mood?
The kind where every page feels like the author is winking at you… not in a charming way, but in a “Ha! You thought this was going somewhere?” kind of way?

Maybe it had characters so infuriating you wanted to reach into the pages and give them a stern talking-to (or a flying kick). Maybe the plot looped around like a drunk GPS. Or maybe it was the writing style — dripping with pretension, overstuffed with words that belong in an academic paper, not in a supposedly “fun” read.

This thread is for those books. The ones you finished only out of spite… or hurled across the room with enough force to alarm the cat.
Tell me your “most irritating book” and why it still haunts your memory. Bonus points if you can describe it without naming it — we’ll guess. ����

This thread is inspired from Dr. Drib's "The Most Boring Book" I read or tried to read.


The one that inspired me to start this thread is :

The Exchange - by John Grisham! More Like The Gourmet — My Top Pick for ‘Most Irritating Book’

[Quoth]

Almost anything by James Joyce. All I tried were DNF.

[Loosheesh]

Penhallow (by Georgette Heyer) might be the one. I have only a vague memory of why I detested it so much (according to Calibre, I read it at the beginning of 2013 ... and gave it one star!) but I definitely remember wanting to toss my Kindle after completing the book, I was that furious at the ending. (I'm almost tempted now to pick it up again to see what really all the fuss was about )

[nana77]

"Tereza Batista: Home from the Wars" by Jorge Amado (1975) was thought enought. Readed like 20 years ago, but still recalling it harsh (not as boring, not not-well written: strain).

Ps: a book that countered it a bit: Tortilla Flat, by John Steinbeck (1935).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tereza..._from_the_Wars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortilla_Flat

[seanyyz]

“A Little Life” by Hanya somebody. Do not read. You have been warned.

Most of the 700 page book is taken up with the author physically torturing what seems to be the lead character. I got about 600 pages through before I gave up. So many people had liked it that I thought it must have some redeeming features. Nope. And a big chunk of the book is the author’s appropriation of gay men’s experience. As a member of that community that bothers me after a while.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by seanyyz

“A Little Life” by Hanya somebody. Do not read. You have been warned.

Most of the 700 page book is taken up with the author physically torturing what seems to be the lead character. I got about 600 pages through before I gave up. So many people had liked it that I thought it must have some redeeming features. Nope. And a big chunk of the book is the author’s appropriation of gay men’s experience. As a member of that community that bothers me after a while.

Holy crap! This novel by Hanya Yanagihara has gotten an INCREDIBLE amount of praise, press, recognition, etc.

Thank you for mentioning this book, (even though you didn't care for it).

After reading the complete sample on Amazon, and going through a LOT of reviews there, and then seeing that there have been 83,524 people who have rated it, I went ahead and BOUGHT THE DAMN THING!

[Luffy]

The Lonesome Dove. I did not throw my book at the wall, instead I made paper planes from its 10 first pages and flew them across my room.

[issybird]

There are many candidates, but for now I’ll go with The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

How did I hate it? Let me count the ways. The general ickiness, tweeness overload. The anachronisms. The ridiculous plotting, absurd characterizations and sheer unbelievability. The Mary-Sueness of the protagonist. Yuck, yuck, and did I say yuck? And people loved it! This last is what made is so irritating. There are a lot of bad books out there but I manage to get along without giving them a passing thought. But this was recommended to me! By a friend! Who should have known better!

This is an extremely bad book.

[DNSB]

One reading recommendation from a friend that I detested was How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler. Not sure why I disliked the book because so many parts of it grated on me from it seeming to be a novelized isekai anime to the author's writing style. Add in that while the main character Davi may be the horniest female character of all time, reminding us of that every second page was getting boring by the end of the first 20 pages.

[Courant]

The Blademaster's Call, It is about a bad author who gets transported to his own world. It is full of meta commentary that is supposed to be humorous. The main character is more annoying than funny and it contains a lot of references to older songs and movies, but not to fantasy. If you took that out, it would be a boring underdeveloped story.

[Karellen]

My nomination is And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer which is the 6th book of the The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy trilogy.

I absolutely hated this book.
From around chapter 6 I just started skipping through the text. The constant quotes from the Guide were useless, out of context and not comical in any way.
Each event, each conversation, each description was uselessly dragged out. 20 page turns to get to some trivial point which was probably funny in the authors head, but not out here in the real world.

[Gormagon]

I hated every book I had to read in school. Back then all were boring and totally meaningless to me. And on top of that I had to interpret this shit. How was I supposed to know what the writer had in mind (if anything at all) when he or she wrote this trash? Maybe he or she just wrote it to make a living or to fulfill a contract?
These books I've finished and the premise "The ones you finished only out of spite" is more or less fulfilled.

Nowadays with ebooks I just stop reading when I find a book boring after a few pages. One novel I stopped reading recently because the author used "them" as a pronoun for one of the protagonists. I really have no interest in people who deny biology and construct anything other than men and women.

Another novel I stopped lately after a few pages because the language used was absolutely turgidly. The cover on the other hand looked very nice. I'm always a sucker for an attractive cover. One of my favourite novels I bought because I liked the cartoon cover by Daniel Torres.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by Luffy

The Lonesome Dove. I did not throw my book at the wall, instead I made paper planes from its 10 first pages and flew them across my room.

I loved this book. But, hey!, we all differ in what we like/dislike.

If you like paper planes, may I suggest that you not stop at a mere 10 pages. You have MONTHS of play to look forward to.

[rowe]

Open by Andre Agassi.

As a keen tennis player growing up, Agassi was my hero. That made this read all the more painful. The whole book is him whingeing about how much he hates the sport that gave him everything.

It feels incredibly ungrateful. He is consistently insulting towards the organisations and people that supported him, yet spends pages bigging up his own charity work, which came across as entirely self-serving.

By the end of the book I deeply disliked him and wished I'd never read it.

[hildea]

Originally Posted by Gormagon

One novel I stopped reading recently because the author used "them" as a pronoun for one of the protagonists.

Which book was it? From what you wrote it seems we have very different tastes, so the odds are good that I’ll like a book you hated.

On that note: You might like The Gilded Chain by Dave Duncan, it annoyed me so much that I actually wrote a review about it, back when I still used Goodreads:

OK plot, well written, good worldbuilding, BUT: The female characters were handled so badly that it was noticable and annoying. I've read lots of books describing societies where women have less power than men, so that's not the problem. But the women were mostly invisible, or when they appeared they were described so briefly that you could practically hear the author muttering "Let's get boring this female stuff out of the way so I can return to important things". Minor spoiler:

Spoiler:

Durendal's love is described as deep and important, but only in passing -- two sentences about how much he and Kate loves each other, and then it's back to the important stuff with the king. No hint of conflict of interest between family life and service to the king, no use of the obvious plot possibilities related to Kate's occupation as a sniffer (someone who can detect magic).

I expect this kind of treatment of women from Dickens, but not from someone living today.