Top Ten Tuesday: Books I’d Gladly Throw Into the Ocean

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week's topic is books we would gladly throw into the ocean. I'm not big on the idea of book destruction, I'll admit. Even if the book isn't really my deal, I'm not usually ready to condemn it for all time. These ones, though...these ones tempt me.

American Psycho: Truly the most disturbing thing I've ever read. It's a razor-sharp satire and I appreciate Ellis's talent, but honestly I don't think anyone should read it.

The Circle: This book had the potential to say interesting things about social networking and the way it has changed the way people relate to each other...but instead it told a very simple story about people who are awful in deeply boring ways.

The Sisters Chase: I read this for my book club, and found it manipulative and profoundly unoriginal, but I DID enjoy the experience of ripping it apart in discussion.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: There are not words for how deeply and profoundly I loathed this book.

The Grapes of Wrath: If flat, two-dimensional characters, moralizing, and incredibly obvious metaphors are for you, you'll love this! I read it for AP English and it still makes me angry that I wasted my time on it to this day.

Atlas Shrugged: One of the few books I've ever given up on, during the like 100-page monologue by John Galt. I've actually read the rest of Rand's works and will argue that We The Living is actually pretty solid, but this book is just purely a piece of political propaganda.

Ask The Dust: That the author hated women was very obvious almost immediately, and I never really felt like there was a point to this story at all.

Crime and Punishment: Can you kill someone without feeling guilty? Spoiler alert: no. That's the book. 

The Sun Also Rises: Hemingway's writing just generally don't do it for me, but add in the relentless misogyny and it's a big "no thanks" from me.

Don Quixote: I don't love satire generally, but found this one in particular so very tiresome. It has like three jokes endlessly repeated over what felt like a billion pages.

Share:facebook - twitter - pinterest

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I’d Gladly Throw Into the Ocean

Top Ten Tuesday: Longest Books I’ve Ever Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about the longest books we've ever read. I know a lot of readers find gigantic books kind of unwieldy, but I actually quite like doorstops! Some of them have been amazing, some less so, but here are ten of the longest ones I've made it through (if one author has multiple entries, I'm going with the longest one for that author)!

A Suitable Boy: This will almost certainly be the longest book I ever read because it's looooong, y'all. I spent weeks reading it during a summer in college. It was really good and I want to read it again but that is a COMMITMENT.

Les Miserables: I know a lot of people complain about the extended digressions into things like the history of the sewer system in Paris, but I actually really liked the whole thing!

War and Peace: It's so long but it's soooo good! The size can be intimidating but once you get started it really draws you in.

A Storm of Swords: The longest of the A Song of Ice and Fire series! All of these books are super long, and this one is actually my favorite but it took me until my second try to actually get all the way through it.

Gone With The Wind: In the ultimate bookish heresy, the movie is better. The subplots that got cut were worth excising for a still-sprawling but more focused narrative.

The Executioner's Song: I still maintain that there's a very good 600 page book inside this 1000+ pager about the first person executed after the death penalty was re-instituted in the United States but as is it's just too bloated to really recommend

Don Quixote: I hated this book so much.

The Cider House Rules: The movie inspired me to pick this one up, and though I haven't read it again in ages I want to someday because it's really good.

The Memoirs of Cleopatra: I read this (and quite a bit of other Margaret George) in high school, and I feel like I liked it? My memories of it are vaguely positive anyways.

Shantaram: I read this fairly recently, and after about page 200 it was hate-reading. For the next 700+ pages.

Share:facebook - twitter - pinterest

Top Ten Tuesday: Longest Books I’ve Ever Read

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Didn't Like But Am Glad I Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about books we didn't actually enjoy but were nevertheless glad we've read. For me, this kind of reading generally means classics, because I do like bragging about getting through these (and honestly, many of them are better than you think before you actually crack them open). So here are ten that didn't do it for me but I appreciate having finished anyways.

Don Quixote: I know this is considered a delightful comedic classic, but I hate this kind of cringe comedy. For me, the "joke" played out quickly and then there were still hundreds of pages to struggle through and emphasis on the struggle.

Crime and Punishment: I thought I hated Russian literature until I read Tolstoy. It turned out I love Tolstoy, so I happily turned to Dostoevsky in the hopes that I would love him too. Nope. Just Tolstoy. I hated this book.

Hunger: I found this book on a list of under-rated classics, but the best thing about it was that it was short.

Gone With the Wind: The movie is an (admittedly problematic) fave, but the book? Scarlett O'Hara is a total grade-A asshole but Vivien Leigh makes it compelling on screen. I just rooted for the Scarlett in the book to get her comeuppance.

Of Mice and Men: This one is less on the braggy side and more on the pop-culture reference understanding side.

The Catcher in the Rye: This one even more on the pop-culture side. Why does popular culture think the world is so invested in the narratives of Sad Alienated Boys?

Heart of Darkness: Being able to drop a pretentious allusion to this Joseph Conrad classic is literally the only reward for reading it.

Into the Wild: I enjoy having read this so I can rant about how much I hate it to anyone who tries to tell me that Christopher McCandless was anything other than a dude who deserved exactly what he got.

The DaVinci Code: This was not a good book, for me, but it was a cultural phenomenon and I'm glad I read it at the same time everyone else was.

Butterfly Boy: This was a book club pick and while I really appreciated getting the perspective of a man who is both gay and Latino, because it's not a kind of voice I experience very often, I didn't actually like reading it.

Share:facebook - twitter - pinterest

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Didn't Like But Am Glad I Read

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Surprised Me

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're going through books that surprised us. I'm going to split mine up, and highlight first five books that surprised me by how good they were, and then five that I was surprised to find I did not enjoy.

Happy Surprised

Anna Karenina: Never having really read Russian lit, I thought I didn't like it because it was too long and boring. And then I read this book and discovered that I really did love Tolstoy. Both this and War & Peace are a million pages long and amazing.

Moby-Dick: Again, a book with a reputation of over-long snoozer, this time about some dude obsessed with a whale that ends up killing him, the end. But this book is actually delightful and has a ton of information about whales and whaling, religion, seafaring life, and so much more, as well as creating some truly unforgettable characters.

Jane Eyre: I thought this was just a gothic romance, which has never held that much appeal for me, because all you ever hear about is Mr. Rochester and his crazy wife in the attic and the looooove story. I was happy to find out that this is much more a book about a young woman discovering herself and making her own place in the world and very much liked it.

The Rosie Project: I usually shy away from romances (no offense to those of you who love them, they're just generally not for me), but I'd read such good things about this one and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I really did enjoy reading it! It's just incredibly charming and a breezy, pleasant book.

So Big: I never would have picked this up but for its Pulitzer Prize (I'd never even heard of it before), because a story about a young woman being widowed with a baby son and scraping out an existence in midwestern farm country doesn't sound like something I'd really like. But Selina DeJong is an incredible character and I got totally sucked in and this book is really really good, y'all.

Not Happy Surprised

Don Quixote: I've gone on a classics kick over the past several years, and found that I actually liked a lot more of them than I thought I would. And then I got to Don Quixote and words cannot adequately describe how much I hated it and it was so long and reading it was like torture.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette: Everyone I knew who'd read this book described it as super funny and really good. And then I read it, and found its cavalier treatment of mental instability horrifying. I know they're making a movie of it and I think it might work onscreen, but it fell so very flat on the page for me.

Crazy Rich Asians: This is kind of along the same lines...rave reviews for a frothy fun romp and I mostly wondered if Kevin Kwan had ever been in a relationship before, because the one at the center of the book was deeply unrealistic and not in a good way.

Fahrenheit 451: I loved many of the dystopian classics I read in high school, and I wanted to love this one (it's about book burning! how could I not love it?) and I found it so boring I honestly can barely remember it.

Yes Please: This pains me, because I love Amy Poehler so much and wanted to just love every second of her book but it did absolutely nothing for me at all. It was neither interesting nor funny nor insightful. It was just kind of there.

Share:facebook - twitter - pinterest

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Surprised Me

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Took Me A Long Time To Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! Today's given topic is books that took a long time to read, and to be honest, this is a list I struggled to put together because I generally read really fast. Even for books I don't like, because I try to burn through them as quick as I can so I can move on to something better. That being said, there are definitely some books that I had to chip away at bit by bit, mostly because of length but sometimes because they were genuinely difficult.

War and Peace: This book took me about three weeks to read, because it is very very long. But there's a reason it's virtually always at the top of lists of best books: it's really incredible. Natasha might be one of my favorite characters in literature. Very much worth the time investment.

Les Miserables: Another super-long epic. I've actually never seen the show, but I did see the (very hit and miss) movie before I read it, and honestly I think it helped to have some sort of idea of the general plotline because there are so many characters and so much story that without an idea of generally what was going on I'd have been discouraged. It's also very good and worth the time.

Creative Mythology: This was the end of a four-book series that I'd found tiresome even after the first one but I'm both a completist and very stubborn. By the time I got around to this one, I was deeply and profoundly ready for the series to be over but they were really hard to slog through so it took weeeeeks.

A Suitable Boy: I read this the summer after my freshman year in college because my mom had a copy hanging around and it had always intrigued me. Another super super long one, this book actually taught me most of what I know about The Partition. I'd like to revisit this story one day when I have a LOT of spare time.

The Grapes of Wrath: This was the bane of my senior year of high school. I'm not much for Steinbeck and this is a lot of pages of Steinbeck. We had to keep these reading logs for each chapter, so I actually had to do a close read of every part of it and by the time I finished it I was so angry about reading it.

Vanity Fair: I'd made a stab at this in high school for fun and never was able to get into it, but a couple years ago I picked it up again and made it through. I usually have a hard time with books with unlikable protagonists, but once I decided that Becky's scrapiness was actually kind of admirable I got around to enjoying it if not loving it.

A Storm of Swords: All of the A Song of Ice and Fire books are long, but the third volume was the only one that stymied me on my initial read-through. I got bored and actually had to start it over again after getting about 1/4 of the way through because I put it down for so long that I couldn't remember what was going on. Once I made a second stab at it, it went really fast, but that first try was rough.

Don Quixote: I loathed this book so hard. It was all I could do to make myself spend just 20-30 minutes a day with it, so it went by slooooooowly.

The Divine Comedy: This is kind of cheating, because I read this three-part epic poem over the course of an entire semester in college. I loved it, don't get me wrong, especially since taking the whole class gave me so much of the context behind it...well, most of it anyway. Paradiso was kind of weak, but the other two parts were great.

Wolf Hall: Once I got into it, I really liked it (and its sequel even more), but I had a hard time getting grounded in the way Hillary Mantel was telling her story. It's one of those things that I'm glad I was able to push through until I got my head around, though, because it's a great book.

Share:facebook - twitter - pinterest

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Took Me A Long Time To Read

Top Ten Tuesday: Five Characters Everyone Loves But I Just Don't Get and Five Characters I LOVE But Others Seem To Dislike

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic: characters you either love that everyone else hates or you hate that everyone else loves. I feel a little like this prompt is tilted towards reading that’s fandom-oriented (i.e. YA), which isn’t most of my reading. Since I can't come up with ten either way, I’m going to split this as 5 Characters Everyone Loves But I Just Don’t Get and 5 Characters I LOVE But Others Seem To Dislike.

Not For Me

Luna Lovegood (Harry Potter): Honestly, she was the first character that came to my mind when I read the prompt. People ADORE Luna, and I just...don't. I re-read the series a few years ago and my first impression was confirmed. She's not an awful character or anything, she's just not my cup of tea...I find her quirkiness irritating rather than endearing, which leaves me feeling all aloney on my owney.

Lizzie Bennett (Pride & Prejudice): Everyone falls all over themselves about what an amazing heroine she is, but she's my least favorite of the Austen novel leads. I get that the whole thing with the book is her and Darcy learning to get over their pride (hers) and prejudice (his), but she's kind of a jerk enough along the way that I'd have been just as happy to see her not get the happy ending (I think Darcy's pretty yuck himself, though, so they totally deserve each other anyways).

Tris Pryor (Divergent): I tried and failed to get into the Divergent books (I thought the first was decent, but the second annoyed me so much I didn't even pick up the third. I will at some point, probably, but I'm in no hurry at all. Tris completely failed to grab me...she just immediately felt like a poor man's Katniss Everdeen, except with all the real interest sucked out of her. Pass.

Scarlett O’Hara (Gone With The Wind): The only reason anyone can stand her, I think, is Vivian Leigh’s incredible performance in the movie adaptation. In the book, I found her selfish and spiteful and petty and just a terrible mother. I enjoyed the book much less than the movie and the character of Scarlett was the main reason why.

Don Quixote (Don Quixote): The power of my hate for this book a year after I've read it is unabated. If the guy were just being weird by himself and not getting anyone else involved in his nutty take on the world, I have no beef. But like old dudes everywhere, he goes ahead and decides that his view of the world is the only correct one, dammit. Ugh. Ugh. Hated him, hated Sancho, hated the book. 

But I DO like...

Daisy Buchanan (The Great Gatsby): She's selfish and shallow, but I've always seen her as a sad and ultimately sympathetic character. To me, she's trapped inside the world she's chosen and swallowed up by it. She's a pretty little bird, raised in a cage, that lives in a cage, and ultimately will die there without ever knowing true happiness. 

Cho Chang (Harry Potter): This is maybe cheating a little because I'm not a hardcore Cho fangirl, but I think she gets an unreasonable amount of pushback. Harry gets a crush on her, waits forever to make a move, and then gets all butthurt when she's had the audacity to start going out with someone else who likes her. And after that guy dies, she tries to move on with her life and give going out with Harry a shot and figures out she's not ready to date again yet. What's to hate on here? I genuinely don't get it. 

Frodo Baggins (The Lord of the Rings): He's not anyone's favorite character in The Lord of the Rings trilogy...not even mine. But I feel like he gets brushed off as whiny or boring, when he's actually incredibly brave and dedicated. Guy has never left his hometown and then VOLUNTEERS to take the most powerful evil object that exists to the worst place in the world to destroy it, and stays true to his mission even though he's given plenty of chances to ditch it. He only falters at the very end, when the Ring's malevolent influence that has been working on him the entire time finally overcomes him. Frodo is a badass, yo. 

Humbert Humbert (Lolita): I know. He's reprehensible. He's a child rapist. If he were an actual human, my legs couldn't carry me away from him fast enough. But as a character in a book, he's fascinating: witty, erudite, and completely undone by his infatuation with Lolita. It's a testament to the power of Nabokov's talent that he can write this absolute monster of a man with such pathos that he's not nearly as loathsome as he should be. 

Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair): I totally did hate Becky for the first portion of the novel as she schemed away without any apparent thought for the consequences for other people, up to and including her only real friend Amelia. But as the plot pushed forward, I found myself rooting for her. She's totally a sociopath, but girl is a SURVIVOR. She does what she needs to do to. Now that I'm thinking about it, she's a lot like Scarlett O'Hara, but for some reason I find her struggles to work her way up the ladder from the bottom more compelling than Scarlett's quest to retain a top-level perch. 

Share:facebook - twitter - pinterest

Top Ten Tuesday: Five Characters Everyone Loves But I Just Don't Get and Five Characters I LOVE But Others Seem To Dislike

I Don't Get It: 7 Classics That Leave Me Cold

When you think of yourself as a Reader, you want to read all the "important" works of literature. Or maybe that's just me being pretentious. Some of my effort to read the classics has gone well...Moby-Dick is better than you think it'll be and surprisingly modern in structure, I loved Anna Karenina with my whole heart, and getting into Jane Austen has been a joy. Some of it has gone...less well. Here (in no particular order) are seven classics that I have read and completely failed to understand why I'm supposed to care

• The Catcher In The Rye: I think I read this at entirely the wrong time in my life. I read this when I was 23, during my second year of law school. This is really a book that should be read around 16, or whatever age you are when you start deriding everyone who isn't exactly what they appear to be on the surface as "fake". Because that's basically what it's about: the disillusionment of realizing that the world isn't always what it seems to be, and a longing to go back to a time when it was. If you've emotionally progressed past this stage, this is probably going to be more irritating than anything else, but if you're right in the middle of it, you probably will love it for the rest of your life. I'm in the former camp.
• Don Quixote: I feel like this is probably a weird comparison, but Don Quixote reminds me of what I liked least about "The Office" on TV. Don Quixote is basically Michael Scott, all cripplingly awkward delusion. Which makes Sancho Panza the Dwight figure, which works surprisingly well, but I digress. What I'm trying to say is that this is a book that consists essentially entirely of awkward humor, which is my least favorite kind of humor. It was really long and I just wanted it to be over
• The Grapes of Wrath: Either this or Of Mice and Men could have gone here, honestly, but I hated Grapes more. Just heavy-handed metaphors about misery and despair, and then long passages about misery and despair. I will rewrite the book in one sentence: the Dust Bowl and Great Depression super sucked for everyone, but especially Great Plains farmers. The end. 
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: I read this in either 11th or 12th grade English in high school and I can remember very little about it except an overwhelming feeling of "do not want" whenever I opened the book. I remember that Huck and Jim go down the river together, but I can't recall a single other thing that happens. The fact that I don't have the slightest recall of the plot tells you I just completely didn't connect with it, because that's really unusual. I don't remember this being bad, per se, just that I found the exercise of reading it to be, well, exercise rather than enjoyment.
• Love In The Time of Cholera: A sprawling epic about the power of true love to last a lifetime...or a five alarm snorefest? I'm in the latter camp. Dude falls in love with lady, lady ultimately rejects him, and he bangs everything in sight while thinking about how much he loves the lady that rejected him. Meanwhile, lady marries someone else and they stay married, more or less happily, until he dies. Dude comes back in the picture (this is when everyone is old) and he and the lady finally rekindle their romance. I found the plot ridiculous and the language excessively flowery. I'd heard great things about it and was really disappointed a
• The Sun Also Rises: This could have been any Hemingway that I've read (besides the short story The Snows of Kilamanjaro, which I actually rather like), but this one was my least favorite of his. Bullfighting and humans fighting and drinking and thwarted, doomed love affairs and precious few adjectives. Reading Hemingway, to me, feels like watching Scorcese. Stories about men and violence and the women in their lives who aren't people, really, but objects and symbols. While I can appreciate Scorcese movies (even though I usually don't like them), I can't get there with Hemingway. He's just the worst. 
• Crime and Punishment: I'm normally not one to pitch a fit about books where nothing happens. The Virgin Suicides is my favorite book of all time and not much happens in that one. But this one? White dude thinks he's better than everyone else and could get away with murder without feeling guilty. He commits murder. He feels guilty. That is essentially the entire plot, and it goes on for eons. 

Tell me, blog friends...what classics didn't do it for you?

Share:facebook - twitter - pinterest

I Don't Get It: 7 Classics That Leave Me Cold