I’ve been on a tear lately…the bad kind. It’s the kind of thing where you read so many bad books that you start thinking that you just don’t like reading anymore. Here are a few that have had me avoiding books altogether lately:

BOOK REVIEW: When it takes you three months to get through a thriller, you know it can’t be very thrilling at all. Such is the case with The Fifth Gospel by Ian Caldwell. You may recall that Caldwell, along with Dustin Thomason, was responsible for giving us The Rule of Four back in 2004. This book deals with the murder of a priest in Rome. While reading the book, you’ll learn an awful lot about the Shroud of Turin, Greek Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and a host of other things you didn’t really want to know about. And at some point–if you’re like me–you’ll put the book down and ask yourself, “When, exactly, do I start feeling thrilled?” The answer? Never. Two Stars.

BOOK REVIEW: The Mirror World of Melody Black is the second book by Gavin Extence, who wrote The Universe Versus Alex Woods, one of my favorite books of 2013. So imagine my disappointment when I read this book and realized it was the biggest of sophomore slumps: a protagonist who is spiralling into insanity chapter by chapter. Problem is that she’s bland, boring, and pretty annoying if the truth be told, so you keep wishing somebody would just lock her away in a padded room so she could just shut up already. What a disappointment–and I think the publisher knows it, too, because it went straight to paperback here in the States. One Star.

BOOK REVIEW: The premise for Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes must have seemed like a great idea. Have Adolf Hitler wake up in 2011 in Berlin, and have him deal with a world that turned out distinctly different than the one he envisioned. Sounded great to me, too, and I laughed at the opening slapstick scene with Adolf and a newspaper vendor. But that was it. For a book that was supposed to be a satire, it was long on Hitler spouting off about his disappointment with the world on Facebook and YouTube, and very short on laughs. If I was interested in reading the rantings of a racist megalomaniac, I would have just picked up a copy of Mein Kampf. Two Stars.

BOOK REVIEW: The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides has been out for a while, but it’s my biggest disappointment of the year. His second book, Middlesex, is one of my top ten books of all time. Reading this book was like being invited to the dorm room of two pretentious college kids, who then spent the next six hours discussing all the awesome stuff they learned in class. If that isn’t bad enough, they frequently use words you’ve probably never used, or never heard anybody else use for that matter. If I heard people talk like this around me, I’d probably want to give them a solid beating. Luckily, it was just a book, so I was able to give up about halfway through. Pure, unadulterated torture. Oh…did I forget to mention the plot? That’s because I couldn’t figure out what it was, or if there was one at all. One Star…but that’s just a carry-over star from the six-star Middlesex.