Least favorite assigned book

[David Zebarah]

This may be here somewhere, but I went through the last few pages and didn't see anything.

I love reading more than most people (well, maybe not here, but in general), but I feel like there's still some books that I didn't like, or even hated.  So I'm wondering what book makes you cringe a little bit every time you think about it, and why do you feel that way?

For me, it was The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.  It jumped around and was really confusing and there was way too much randomness for what a lot of people consider to be a great example of classic literature.  And it took me forever to read.  I was reading at a rate of like a page every 3 minutes, because I just couldn't concentrate on it.

Anyway, feel free to rant about The Scarlet Letter or Heart of Darkness, or whatever you were forced to read in school.  Because sometimes, it's as much fun complaining about crappy books as it is reading moderately good ones.

[Aoife hayes]

I was only assigned 2 books in school and the one I disliked most out of those 2 is also one of my least favourite books...ever: Lies of Silence by Brian Moore. The pace is terrible, and it's meant to be a thriller. The characters make stupid decisions so much that you just don't care about them or what happens to them. I'm glad it was a short book because even at that I found it hard to read until the end!

[Julia]

Oh, boy. To me it totally was "Shriek: An Afterword" by Jeff VanderMeer. It started so promising! Very much like Indiana Jones with an enigmatic event in the long gone past and a historian trying to unravel the mystery.

And then it just goes coo-coo.

The narrator gets more untrustworthy with every page you turn. In the middle of the book the story has long forgotten its original goal and just throws one unexplainable event after another at you. In the end nothing is solved.

Never before have I been this disappointed. And angry! I usually treat my books very carefully, but this one was smashed against the wall every other page I read.

[Lisa Ann]

In seventh grade we red this awful book where everyone over the age of twelve died of some virus and the whole world was just a mess of eight year olds poisoning guard dogs and six year olds shooting each other for food and water. There was absolutely no redeeming quality of this book.

[Lisa Ann]

Also shiloh. I still hate shiloh.

[Grace]

That was A Girl Who owned a City! I personally liked it, in hindsight it sort of reminds me of the Hunger Games, or the Lord of the Flies

[Jeanette]

A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age by William Manchester

I was assigned this book going into Sophomore year for AP European History and it was awful.

[Mollie HDubbs]

I have to read that in the next few weeks. People say it's pretty good. Why do you think it's awful?

[Carrie]

Catcher in the Rye and Death of a Salesman. Apparently I was the only teen in my high school not able to relate to Holden Caulfeild. Don't get me wrong, I understood that it was a classic, well written, and needed to be taught; however, I just couldn't connect with it on any more than an academic level. The emotional level just never clicked with me.  Although, in retrospect, if it hadn't been for Catcher in the Rye, I would have never found my love for writing or my natural ability to speak in public. So, I guess it wasn't as bad as I thought at the time. As for Death of a Salesman, well, that book just bore me to bits. I get it. He doesn't like being a salesman and he's a terrible husband. Yippee. Although, my dislike from this book might also stem from my teacher trying to tie it in at the end of our senior year saying that this book represented the "transition from high school to college". Somehow that theme just didn't pop out to me. 

[Scott]

I didn't like Catcher when I first read it, but it's grown on me since then. I can agree that Death of a Salesman is a tad overrated. I much prefer O'Neill to Miller. 

[Ruth Bernando Fernando]

Oh that's interesting, most of the people in my class disliked Catcher in the Rye whereas I didn't. I'm curious, how did reading it help you discover your natural ability to speak in public?

[Anna Sakach]

I couldn't stand Catcher in the Rye.  The entire time I spent reading it I was waiting for something resembling a plot to show up, but instead he just kept wandering around the city disliking himself for no reason other than that he occasionally had things better than some other people.  Maybe there's something wrong with me for being so annoyed by him, but it seems to me that if you feel bad for other people, you should help them instead of doing nothing and hating yourself.  Sorry to rant, but I have never really disliked a book other than this one.

[Ellen M.]

In high school, I hated Willa Cather's O Pioneer.  I've never really enjoyed reading about pioneers and this book just seemed to drag on and on.

In college, I didn't like reading Trilby. Although the story was interesting, long chunks of dialog were in French so I had to stop what I was reading and go to the back of the book for a translation.  It really took me out of the story.  Plus, I was reading Dracula at the same time, and between the 2 I never wanted to pick up Trilby.