Top Ten Tuesday

It’s time for my first top ten-list on this blog. So continuing with an awesome tradition started by the girls of The Broke and the Bookish, I give my own contribution to Top Ten Tuesday. This week is all about Ten Bookish Things I Want to Quit or Have Quit.

 
So, here are Top 10 Authors I Quit Reading (and why)

10. Nikolaj Gogol - just want to get one thing straight: I love Gogol. The guy was a genius with words. Back when I was a nerdy teenager, I used to read Gogol all the time. But times changed, and so did I, and, frankly, I just don’t feel the urge to read him again. Still, everyone should read Gogol at least once in their life.

Nikolaj Gogol

 

 9. Anton Chekhov - same as with Gogol. Still a fan of this M.D. turned author, but I just don't feel like reading him anymore.

 8. Alexander Dumas – what would my childhood be without The Three Musketeers and its sequels? However, when I tried to re-read some of these classics as an adult, they just didn’t live up to the nostalgia. Some things are better left in the past.

 7. Mikhail Lermontov - because they force fed us his poetry in school.

 6. J.K. Rowling - when the first Harry Potter book came out, I was right there with all the other muggles who wished they were wizards. But by the time I finished The Order of the Pheonix the magic was gone and, to be honest, the whole thing became too repetitive.

The last Harry Potter book I read

 

5. Dan Brown - OK, I admit I've only read The Da Vinci Code, but it was more than enough to swear off any other works by Mr. Brown. Maybe I'm wrong to judge the author by just one book, maybe not. One thing is sure - I'm never going back.

 4. Ernest Hemingway - I have a great amount of respect for the classics, but the hype surrounding Hemingway will forever baffle me. Perhaps, it’s a matter of taste. Who knows?

3. Herman Melville - again, I've only read Moby Dick, but I really, truly hated it with all my heart. I don't know what was worse - the messy, incoherent narrative or the pseudo-scientific passages about whales.

 2. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - so we've come to the top two. My love for science fiction started with Clifford D. Simak and the Strugatsky Brothers. I was thirteen back then. Sixteen years later, I still re-read Simak at least twice a year. Strugatskys, not so much. It's not that their books are bad, I just got fed up with the soulless characters devoid of any human emotion, and the pseudo-intellectual questions that the authors tried to raise. Not to mention their inability to write strong and likable female characters.

 

No more roadside picnics for me

1. Stanislaw Lem – I used to be a fan of Mr. Lem. I still like Solaris and the very funny adventures of Ijon Tichy. My problem with Lem, though, has always the arrogance and the pretentiousness with which his books were written. But that’s not why I quit reading Lem. No, the reason why he holds the number one spot on my list, is his crime novel The Investigation. When I finally finished it, I only had one question: did Lem even know how to write a crime story?

 

 

Well, that's about it. Thank you for making it to the end of the list :) and don't forget to subscribe. Also, I will be writing my review for Margaret Atwood's In Other Worlds very soon.