My Nine Least Favourite Books (Of All Time)

Top Ten Tuesday is weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.


Of all the books that I have read, there have been some stinkers. Some pretty bad books. But I don't regret reading any of them. Even a bad book can still turn out to be valuable reading experience. 

And if there's anything I can learn from reading a terrible piece of fiction is that sometimes a promising idea can be ruined by sloppy execution, and that most authors of bad books still have a passion for what they do.

So to honour those overrated dookies and those unfortunate misfires, I'm listing nine of my least favourite books of all time. 


1. Hurricane Moon

by Alexis Glynn Latner

Here, an interesting premise is ruined by stale writing, boring science and the most wooden, generic and uncharismatic characters that graced the pages of any book. You really shouldn't judge a book by its cover, especially if the cover is pretty.

You can read my full rant on Hurricane Moon here.

 

 

 

2.  Anything by the Strugatsky Brothers

 
Pretty much anything these guys wrote was pretentious, dry and sexist (and I don't throw this word around very often). While reading their books I got the impression that Arkady and Boris were more interested in rubbing their "superior intellect" in their readers' faces, than in writing a good story. Not to mention, they stole from other SF authors. And Star Trek.

 

3. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

by Seth Grahame-Smith

I hated every minute of reading this glorified crossover fanfiction. Here's why.  

 

 

4. Moby Dick

by Herman Melville

No, no, no, no, no! Just because a book is considered a classic, it doesn't automatically make it good. It doesnt' get a pass for its terrible writing just because it's old.  

 

5. The Old Man and The Sea

by Ernest Hemingway

 
Yeah, the same goes for this snooze-fest. Maybe I'm not just a big fan books about fishermen and whalers?

 

6. The Investigation

by Stanislaw Lem

 
The unwritten rule of every mystery - especially a murder mystery - is that you have to reveal the bad guy in the end. If there's no payoff, you're cheating your audience. Lem must have been unfamiliar with that rule.

 
 

7. The DaVinci Code

by Dan Brown

I actually enjoyed this book. The same way I enjoy popcorn and M&M's. It's cheap, it's tasty and you don't remember it five minutes after you finished it. 

 

 

Finally, is listing a book that you had to read in college cheating? Cuz in that case, I'm cheating twice. These last two books are considered classics in the sociology world. I hated them. And it wasn't just me. Our entire class hated them. Feared them. Wanted to burn them.

What were they about? Something about identity being a social construct and whatnot. 


8. Jaget och Maskerna (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life)

by Erving Goffman.

 

9. The Social Construction of Reality

Peter, L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann

These were my top - or should I say - my bottom ten books of all time.