We Need to Talk About Kevin Seemed to have been written by two or three different authors. Just awful.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Eat, Pray, Love
I wanted to burn it. What an awful, boring book. Just effing travel and be happy. I cannot stand people who wallow.

Anna Karenina
I am going to go try and read this now. I put it down and never really felt like picking it up again, but I can read Bronte sisters on repeat...

Eat Pray Love was terrible. I read 20 pages and was gagging. Never picked it up again.

Agree. A dear friend gave me that book and I just could not finish it. The author was so incredibly self-centered and determined to achieve her own happiness no matter that cost that I could not stomach it.

Anonymous wrote:Fifty Shades of Grey. Really, so dumb, so poorly written and I was even at the beach when reading it. Skimmed through and put it down.

+1000% What a piece of crap. Although this book (or the half that I read) gave me incredible hope. I think that if such a terribly written book could be such a success, I might still be able to strike it rich before my children are college age, after all. I'd just have to write about sex.

Ulysses.

Anonymous wrote:Eat, Pray, Love
I wanted to burn it. What an awful, boring book. Just effing travel and be happy. I cannot stand people who wallow.

Anna Karenina
I am going to go try and read this now. I put it down and never really felt like picking it up again, but I can read Bronte sisters on repeat...

Eat Pray Love was terrible. I read 20 pages and was gagging. Never picked it up again.

We Need to Talk About Kevin - hated the way the book was written - with a series of letters/diary entries. So slow and boring. I skimmed the last 1/2 of the book.

Similarly -

Defending Jacob - long and slow. I read half, skipped entire chapters and still understood the whole storyline. Both were great for falling asleep.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:"Precious"--just reading the first few pages made me sick.

Along those lines…something like 'writing down the bones" about some girl killed in a cellar omg.

Tangent based on some PPs posts: I also did read The Goldfinch and at first, after the plot change, I was very excited to be reading it, but after a while when the protagonist was in las vegas i started to dislike the book. I did finish it but never regained my like of it.

The Lovely Bones was very hard to read.

precious i never read or heard about and saw at the movies. god i wish i could unsee it.

the lovely bone i could not get thru. also disturbing

eat, pray, love did nothing for me. i made it to pray...

It Takes a Village by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Fifty Shades of Grey. Really, so dumb, so poorly written and I was even at the beach when reading it. Skimmed through and put it down.

This, 1000 times. SO glad I didn't buy all three of them. I understand it was for entertainment purposes, but like you said, it was SO poorly written that I couldn't take it anymore. I can read better Mommy porn almost anywhere

Ditto and I did buy all three of them. I ended up giving them to my 80 year old grandmother. She is really enjoying her "sex".

The Happiness Project. I found it trite and wanted to smack that Gretchen person for her smarny, self-satisfied, overacheiving, overprivileged point of view.

Middlemarch. I tried to read this in high school, again in college, and could never get past the first 100 pages.

I have been trying to read The Night Circus for months and just can't get into it. It feels like I have been reading forever and I'm not even halfway through. Does it get better? I feel like nothing is happening and I just keep waiting for it to improve.....

Anonymous wrote:Life After Life - everyone loved it, but I couldn't digest it in the few minutes I have to read each night - maybe if I ever had hours to sit and read...

I agree. Very overrated. It felt so random.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Infinite Jest.

It's excellent, but it's just so long and dense that life gets in the way.

Agreed - plus it was so darn heavy that I just couldn't stand having it in my lap in bed! Not even kidding. Someday I may try again since I can now get it on kindle.

It's worth it! And honestly I am planning to read it a second time one of these days. I feel like getting through it once to get the overview and sort of understand where it is all going will make it much easier and more satisfying the second time. Some people didn't like the ending but I actually think it explained enough.

I should have known better, but I tried reading a nonfiction book, "the battles of World War I: everything you need to know." I ended up reading this when I was trying to find the recent history of Israel and the Middle East. England essentially controlled the land that became Israel, so I was trying to find out how England got that land.

I ended up getting this book from the library. I learned that WWI was basically a bar fight, and everyone was just fighting each other to fight each other. I made it about 2/3 of the way through before I just couldn't read one more battle. "The next battle was in such-and-such town. 17,000 soldiers died from such-and-such country, and the other country gained 2 miles."

I skimmed as much as I could, and I think England captured Jerusalem simply by physically advancing their military.

Eat, Pray, Love
I wanted to burn it. What an awful, boring book. Just effing travel and be happy. I cannot stand people who wallow.

Anna Karenina
I am going to go try and read this now. I put it down and never really felt like picking it up again, but I can read Bronte sisters on repeat...