Topic: Least Favorite Book

what is your least favorite book? I nominate this one. The main Character is some rich whiny spoiled brat who thinks he is qualifed to judge people if they are "phonies" or not. I don't relate to him, i just want to knock his teeth out just to shut his prentious mouth up.

Game of Thrones - bunch of nonsense with silly characters, really crappy been there done that "plot twists", inconsistent characters and stupid and disgusting (pedophilia! oh yeah!) descriptions and enormous plotholes. That's the series in the nutshell.

Dom Casmurro
Memórias Póstumas de Bras Cubas
Iracema
pretty much any other old book important to Brazilian literature(I mean it)

before someone reports me for using a langueage different from english in part of my post, I don't know the name of those books in english(if they actually have one) and thought something could be messed up by a literal translation of the second one(the only title that isn't entirely a "name" of sorts and can be translated)

The most recent disappointment was J.K. Rowling "The Casual Vacancy". Bought it last Christmas, read about halfway through it and can't stand it any more. I liked the Harry Potter saga, but this is just bad. Every character on the book is less likeable and more disgusting than the previous one, and Rowling's idea of adult literature is to cram it with sexual intercourse and innuendo, poopooloads of it. Overall, it's so immature.

That's kind of the point, though, You're not supposed to like or relate to the main character, at least not in a positive way. In fact,

You can have a good story without a good protagonist, so long as you make it clear he's not a good protagonist, which Catcher in the Rye definitely does by the end. There are other reasons to dislike it, mind you, since it's a very morbid and depressing book, IIRC, but it's best attribute is how it approaches its narration and main character.

Anyways, my least favorite that I can remember (I tend to blank out bad stories) is The Pearl, which was just morbid and depressing in a way that really didn't benefit, and arguably even muddles, its point. I also don't like Of Mice and Men for similar reasons, though I think I made that worse by misinterpreting the reference as implying a tragedy when it actually means "$#!+ happens", so I was expecting their problems to come down to character flaws rather than stuff coming out of left field that threw all their plans under the bus...

I'm a big Stephen King fan and have read almost all of his stuff (currently working on reading some of the newer stuff like Under the Dome, 11/22/63, Doctor Sleep, and Mr. Mercedes).........

The Tommyknockers. I wanted to like it. I really did. I know the premise of the story and it is intriguing!

The first 200 pages were pretty good but then the rest of the book was one big blur. It was a chore to read and I honestly have no clue what happened. I should have just stopped reading it but I kept going. Eventually, I was just reading the words on the paper without putting them into any context or story......every word read was one word less I had to go before it was over. I don't know if this is because the story truly lacked or I was just so disinterested.

Regardless, this book is the "Other M" of King novels, imo.

good point i guess, but really honestly i hate characters who are overly smug whiny and posse a "holier-than you* attitude, Like Holden here.

Text books.

why not expand to anything with more words than figures?

....you've lost me. XD

Jane Eyre.
So boring. So dry. Too wordy. I had to read it in high school. I read half of it and then read sparknotes for the rest.

I'm reading Jane Eyre right now! I love it, but then again I also watched The Autobiography of Jane Eyre, an awesome YouTube series. It's one of the books you'll automatically hate if you're forced to read it.

And speaking of forced reading, the absolute worst novel I've ever read, by far, was "The Tortilla Curtain". It's an atrocious excuse for literature about this obnoxiously privileged upper class white family in a gated community that's an obvious commentary on older millenials. They're so vain and unlikable and uninteresting. The secondary protagonists are two illegal Mexicans who are also horribly stereotyped. They go through every awful trial you can think of, and T.C. Boyle spends pages and pages describing them in all the most disgusting and repulsive ways possible--it really made me want to vomit. Over the course of the novel, the Mexicans continue to have unfortunate gross things happen to them while the whites remain aggressively stupidly ignorant.

To give an idea of just how bad The Tortilla Curtain is, the book opens with the white guy running over the Mexican guy and then puking on a scorching summer day, telling his wife, "But honey, he was Mexican!" Also all three of his pets get eaten throughout the novel and he carries their remains around with him.

Likable protagonists are not absolutely one hundred percent required for a good novel--though they sure frickin help--but if those unlikable protagonists aren't even interesting, and don't even live in an interesting world?

On high school, I was forced to study our Nobel laureate writer's novel, José Saramago, "Memorial do Convento" (in English: "Baltasar and Blimunda") whose writing style I absolutely despise. Saramago doesn't use the proper punctuation rules, instead he made rules of his own. Some sentences are almost a page long, dialogues are intertwined in between narration and there's no discernible way of seeing when character a is speaking and not character b. Reading out loud, I frequently get out of breath as I don't know when to make a pause on his mess. He is touted as a genius for the inventiveness of his punctuation system, I say he never understood the proper rules and improvised. In a nutshell, it's an all-out mindf***, it causes me physical pain to read his books, so I had to cope with a reading guide in order to pass the exam.

I love books (I hate most films as I prefer books to films) but here are my list of books I hate:

"Harry Potter" Series: I just don't see how a kid who's a wizard and fights a guy with no nose enjoyable.
"Game Of Thrones": Mainly what @Dave24 said, but also it's just killing, killing killing, I hate blood n gore in films, games. books. anything.
"The Help": I have to read that book in school and I hated it. The comedy's dry and the character's personalities are dumb. Film's no better.
"House On Mango Street": What a foot fetish book. This book can't go a page without mention the word "feet".

EDIT: And one more novel that @Gamecubed reminded me of "The Hunger Games". Yet it's another of forcing each other to kill one another.

Absolutely agree with you on that. I'm more interested in adventure stories, so when I was forced to read that, I wanted to cry. I was also forced to read Grapes of Wrath. That's another one that i found terribly dry. But I actually read that one cover to cover.
The only book that I was forced to read that i actually enjoyed was Lord of the Flies.

Another book series I hate is the Hunger Games. Just... don't understand why people like that. It's just the PG-13 version of Battle Royale.

Is "War & Peace "A good novel? And @Gamecubed I hate "Hunger Games" too. I for got to put that.

Hunger Games:. Borring characters you end up carrying nothing about because they all die anyway. And the author cannot write outside of the arena

Maze Runner: Terrible. I still don't know why I read them. Predictable, cliched, and boring characters that just aren't memorable. Never finished the last book due to the zombie-fest at the end.

Eragon: Didn't realize it at the time, but it's just star wars with dragons. The prose is bad, and the magic system is ripped out of "A Wizard of Earthsea" (Incredible, btw). In fact, there is not much original about this series at all,

Crossroads of Twilight and A Memory of Light (Bk 10, 14 of wheel of time saga) I want to like this series. I really do. It starts out sort of like a tolkien clone, but becomes so much more......and then so much less. The first 5-6 books are great, but it just slows down, until Crossroads of Twilight, a 700 page book, that only serves to set up for the next book. Nothing happens that couldn't be summarized in a 1 page summary. Bk 11 was good. Then Robert Jordan died. And Brian Sanderson killed what remained of my hopes for the ending. He had Jordan's notes, and wrote the last 3 books. The first felt like Jordan. The second, not so much. The 3rd, ugh. The entire 900 page book is battle after battle. While Jordan was great at writing stuff like that, Sanderson just falls short. Not to mention the plot holes. Throughout the entire book, a character is warned about the cost of doing something. He does it near the end..... and nothing happens to him. At all. And the epilogue where the main character switches bodies with one of the main villain is never explained, and never makes sense. I found out later that Jordan wrote it himself, but apparently Jordan couldn't make heads or tails out of it. /rant

I really can't think of any. I used to read a LOT in middle & high school, but I seemed to like everything I read.

Maybe if it's something I didn't like, it just wasn't memorable for me. In that case, I'll just say probably one of the things we were forced to read in school.

And again, he's practically the villain. I know that doesn't forgive it since the entire story is told from his perspective, I just think you should understand that as far as the writer is concerned, mission was accomplished.

Actually, as a general question to everyone, why do you need a protagonist to likeable and/or relateable? Personally, I don't mind if I hate a protagonist so long as the writer understands that said protagonist is not an admirable person. I see a writer as a teacher, and a character as a vector for his lessons. While oftentimes a protagonist is their way of projecting their own hopes and wishes of what they could be, maybe even how we should be, a ditestable character can be a way of showing how we shouldn't be, pointing out flaws in others - or in the case of a protagonist, perhaps it points out the flaws in ourselves. By making him the focus, we might get an in-depth analysis of this type of person: what he or she thinks, perhaps even what made them how they are, understanding why they do the things they do so we can stop ourselves from being like this person?

Ultimately, I feel that we dislike somebody because they exhibit traits that we can identify with, things we can see ourselves doing, but understand one way or another to reject that behavior. So when done well, I feel its important to me to take in stories with characters, even protagonists, that I don't like so I may learn from their mistakes and perhaps even grow as a person.

At least that's the way I think about it. I'd love to hear other perspectives, though.

The Catcher in the Rye is my favorite book. I read it dozens of times.
I totally relate to the hero. It speaks to me and I identity with what he's feeling 100% on some amazing spiritual level.