Couldn’t get over the accent stuff in Huckleberry Finn. I gotta be able to flow state a book.
Agree, books written in dialect are just a pain in the ass. I’ve once tried to read something that was set in a Pacific island community, and the author had the brilliant idea to use some Creole-English-mashup. Completely unintelligible, droped it after 2 or 3 chapters.
I read a book about this kid stranded on a boat with a dude who had a Creole thing going on. That seemed fine.
It’s fine if they use it for the occasional dialogue, but this whole book was written like this. The entire narrative.
Yeah, that’s too jarring.
Mein Kampf - it’s borderline unreadable.
So you’re saying reading it is a struggle?
Haha, yes. And I gave up half way through. Early part about his past in Vienna was coherent, the rest was not
A bold statement…
Why?
I was joking. Because saying “ya know, I just didn’t care for that book that Adolf Hitler wrote” is just like, well yeah….
Saying Mein Kampf is borderline unreadable is bold?
Sarcasm doesn’t work well over the Internet, that’s my bad.
My point was that saying Mein Kampf is borderline unreadable, isn’t exactly stepping out on a limb or anything…
I’ll bet Satan’s Truth Social feed is pretty hard to read too.
But some fascists do manage to be pretty coherent. It’s just that clearly Hitler wasn’t one of them.
It’s such a terrible book, not just because of… you know, Nazis, but because it’s atrociously badly written. Rambling and fueled by completely blind hate, and it sets out a vision that’s completely detached from reality.
Really gave me similar vibes as listening to Trump talk, a sort of utter disbelief that people actually think he had something worthwhile to say
It’s such a terrible book, not just because of… you know, Nazis, but because it’s atrociously badly written
Exactly. No sane person would ever take it seriously. His logic is so broken that it’s painful to read
I tripped up some stairs reading ASOIAF
Always Sunny On It’s Always Filladelphia.
*flipadelphia
We got really sick
Worst book because of bad book was when I had to read and watch Tristan and Isolde for a school project. It was so bad with SO brain dead characters, but at least it was quick.
The worst book because of the experience however was the full version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. We know interrupt the story to spend 10 pages talking about the special meaning of a throw away line said by Frollo. 5 pages of story later, and we know interrupte the story to spend 20 pages detailing Parisian roof tops to the minutest of details.
Reading The Road as a new father. Fuck that. Made me cry.
Two separate and very distinct oof moments in that book.
I was reading a book at home at age 7, and then my dad slapped me in the bsck of the head.
I was harassed at one job for reading a book during lunch
I was expecting more answers along these lines. Slightly disappointed with the tangent that people’s answers have taken.
The red/blue/green mars trilogy. The first book was pretty great and the themes were good throughout but the main characters devolve into this weird privaliged manifest destiny hippy cult that doesn’t give a shit about the rest of humanity and acts like they got to mars all by themselves and not on the backs of the billions supporting the economies that made the journey possible.
Its the only serie series I’ve read where I ended up rooting for the oligarchic corporate overlords because even a mars owned by megacorps works out better for humanity than the mars envisioned by the protagonists at this point who are basically turning into a kind of proto-version of the spacers from asimov.
Perhaps a hot take, but East of Eden was an absolute trudge to get through. I think I made it almost halfway and gave up because I was not enjoying it at all. I wasn’t sure what the main points were and there were too many details unrelated to the plot.
A less hot take, The Fountainhead was also a pain to read. It was just boring as hell and I stopped about halfway as well. I only read it because I loved Anthem and became disappointed to find out it’s only related philosophically.
Jane Eyre: Every moment of this book was absolute torture. I could never get into this genre of book but this book took the cake. It was like the reading equivalent of trying to force down a terrible meal without gagging because it would be rude. I actually devoted my time to speed read it just so I could finish it faster.
Wicked: It was just a lot of, “Oh god, this isn’t like the musical at all 😰.”
A series, but The Wheel of Time becomes insufferable around book five. There’s like five chapters of lore/world building for every sentence that moves the plot forward. Also, the worst protagonist in the history of book writing. The side characters are the only reason I made it to book five.
I made it about this far as well. The thing that frustrated me the most was that early in the series they had to get from one place to another quickly, and they used that extra dimensional underground path or whatever, and they were like “oooooo, this is super dangerous, someone could definitely die!” and then later in the series it was just like, “yeah, we gotta take this route, nbd.” So the stakes just felt really low and overall things got repetitive.
Lol yeah that was a big issue with the books. He made this massive, detailed, multicultural world with all of this dimension, but then he wanted the same few characters to go everywhere and do everything in it. So getting them from place to place was super tedious. He started off trying to make them just walk, then take a boat, then the Ways, then alternate dimensions, then the dream world, then he straight up gave up and said “fuck it, they can teleport”.
I do like that the portal to alternate dimensions ended up being how the Seanchan acquired the weird monsters their army used. That was some quality world-building.
Don’t forget Skimming, which is plot relevant like twice after teleporting is introduced (and one of those times isn’t even for traveling, it’s to throw an invincible murder golem into the void between dimensions).
Is there even a protagonist? Yeah, I agree though.
It was seriously like 3 massive books of almost nothing happening.
Id would have to say Lolita. The way humbert humbert is super manipulative and gaslight-y about the worse things a human can do is why I had to drop the book halfway.
Almost every book I read back when I was a school student.
Each month we had to read a boring book chosen by the school, and at the end of each month we had a annoying test with questions like: “When the protagonist discovered the truth, what was the emotion he felt?” Or “How did the author felt when writing this?” So I had to read 300 pages of a boring book and pay attention to each detail each month.
I don’t dislike reading, actually I enjoy good books, but reading something against my will is sickening.
The goddamn Grapes of Wrath.
“What did the dust on the plain signify?”
Who the fuck caaaares, this book is boring and depressing.
I’ve always been a bookworm but fuck a lot of the shit they made us read in high school.
When I realized there are a lot of dumb people out there, 1984 by George Orwell.
Have you read Jack London’s The Iron Heel?
It is really the prequel to 1984, even Orwell said as much. 1984 stays with you but The Iron Heel will haunt you.
Never read it but I will thx for the info 👍👍
the main character has a couple speeches but I remember one in particular is so on spot for what capitalism is, that it was like OMFG THAT IS WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW!!! FUCK!!!
Like 1984, it does not have a happy ending.
1984, the go to citation by people misusing the word “fascism”.
… username checks out I guess? 1984 was also my first painful read. A true Mindfuck. It’s a good story though, but I felt like I needed a blanket and kitty therapy for like a month after finishing reading it. Maybe I was too young
We read Macbeth in high school, but they dragged it out over a whole year. It was so painful!
At my high school we had a teacher who had an advanced degree in Shakespeare studies, and she would teach a different play every quarter. They were great classes, but a single quarter was plenty of time for a very comprehensive look at each play. I can’t imagine stretching it out over an entire year and have it be anything but absolutely tedious.
Theatre should be seen instead of (or at least as well as) read IMO. I bet if you’d been taken to see a decent production first you’d have got a lot more out of reading it later.
Yeah absolutely.
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That sucks. Macbeth rules so hard. We did it over a couple weeks in school and it was awesome.
LOL. I had read it before we were taught it in school.
One of the three spirits is described as “An armed head” and the teacher was like “Yeah, nobody really knows what that description means, is a head in a helmet or what it’s supposed to be…”
So I raised my hand… “I hope I’m not giving away the ending or anything, but Macbeth is beheaded at the end… it’s an arm holding up a severed head. Each spirit is foreshadowing what’s going to happen. Armed head, bloody child, king holding a tree.”
The Scarlet Letter.
It’s like it’s designed to engender a lifelong hatred for the printed word.
Well, at least one letter
