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.

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

Top Ten Tuesday: Books With Food-Related Titles

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, our theme is food. We're supposed to be talking about books that make us hungry, but I honestly almost never take notice of food in books. So instead, I'm bringing you ten books that use food or food-ish words in their titles!

Then He Ate My Boy Entrancers: I love this whole series (the last couple books aren't the best, but most of them are very fun)

Chocolat: One of the few books that has genuinely made me want to eat the food described within!

Eat Pray Love: I know, this book is cliche at this point, but there is so much weirdness about being a woman and one's relationship to food that I think the idea of practicing indulgence deliberately hasn't lost its power.

Kitchen Confidential: This is Anthony Bourdain's first memoir, and it is what you would expect it to be...bursting with appreciation for food and life, irreverent, and rough around the edges.

The Hunger Games: I love this series, and the first one in particular is my favorite.

In Defense of Food: This one literally says food in the title. It basically boils down to an admonition to eat mostly whole/unprocessed foods.

Breakfast at Tiffany's: The movie is lovely, but if you've never read the book I'd really encourage it! It's quite short, more of a novella, but just wonderfully put together.

Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: You can't go wrong with Chuck Klosterman on pop culture.

The Grapes of Wrath: Grapes are food! Though this book is much more concerned with citrus groves in California (also, I hated this book).

The Cider House Rules: Cider is drink rather than food, but close enough, eh? I loved the movie in high school, which inspired me to pick up the book and I have loved it ever since.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books With Food-Related Titles

Top Ten Tuesday: Characters I Liked In Books I Didn't

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! Not every book is amazing, obviously, but sometimes the most frustrating books that don't really connect is that the characters in them feel like they deserve better. So here are ten characters that stole my heart, even if the rest of the book didn't.

Ma Joad (The Grapes of Wrath): I hated this book so so much after reading it in AP English in high school, but Ma Joad reminds me of Ma Ingalls...ladies who had to deal with a whole lot of bullshit and kept their families together as well as they could through it all. I found literally no one else in this book at all worth my time or attention.

Lucifer (Paradise Lost): I'm convinced that it's meant to be a joke that the devil is by far the most compelling character in this epic poem. But also proof that the villain is usually a better role than the hero.

Jakob (The Hangman's Daughter): The actual hangman's daughter, Magdalena, didn't particularly interest me, but the hangman himself, Jakob, was knowledgeable and thoughtful and enjoyable to read about in this otherwise completely unremarkable book.

Freida Mintz (Charity Girl): This book, about women who were held against their will because they contracted venereal disease, was very uneven, but I rooted for headstrong, independent Freida, who refused to just accept the circumstances that were handed to her.

Hannah Chase (The Sisters Chase): I found Mary, the older sister and the center of the narrative, boring and cliche, but Hannah, first as a sweet kid and then going through the regular rebellion of a teenage girl, was the only thing that got me through this legitimately bad book.

Florence (The Highest Tide): This book did absolutely nothing for me, but Florence, the old lady who takes an awkward, lonely preteen boy under her wing while stubbornly resisting her increasingly obvious need to leave her home, tugged at my heart strings.

Anna O'Donnell (The Wonder): I hated this book, but I loved the sweet, high-spirited girl at the center of a maybe-hoax miracle in rural Ireland in the early 20th century.

The Old Turk (Boys and Girls Together): Almost everyone in this book about five young people whose lives end up converging in New York is awful and the experience of reading it was unpleasant, but the relationship between young Rudy (who becomes such a martyr that he's boring) and his grandfather, the Old Turk, is the lone bright spot. He's so kind and warm-hearted that he seems to be from another universe entirely.

Bernadette Fox (Where'd You Go Bernadette): Bernadette was super smart and completely unwilling to go along with the bullshit in pretty much every aspect of her life. Too bad her garbage husband didn't bother to notice the way his centering of his own needs was slowly destroying her and the book made a joke out of her deterioration.

Venus Black (My Name Is Venus Black): I found Venus herself compelling, but the book as a whole fell very flat for me. Venus deserved a better book.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Characters I Liked In Books I Didn't

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.

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

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?

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