readers advisory for all discussion

I know this may be a big back and forth. Self explanatory. I regret reading Maximum Ride, Pretty Little Liars, Confessions of A Shopaholic, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Hoot, and Hatchet to name just a few.

I probably hate the last three the most.
Pretty Little Liars is more of an anger issue as they rebooted the book series when the original series ended stupidly and yet I still read two of the reboot! Plus the show that is in my opinion, more horrendous than the big reveal for the original finale in the books.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is just an insult to history. Trying to get away with it by writing "a fable" in tiny letters on the front cover doesn't justify it.
Hoot and Hatchet were book assignments and I felt Hoot was insulting my intelligence and finding out about the sequel to Hatchet, which is like Hatchet remixed, made me feel even stupider for nearly having to write notes for things so obscure that they could be mentioned in one sentence in the entire book.

Thanks for tolerating mini rant. :) please let me know your thoughts on this subject if you'd like to share.

What was historically inaccurate about Striped Pajamas? I haven't read it, I'm just curious.

I haven't read it, but I do remember the film premise feeling implausible. People were allowed out of concentration camps to do specific jobs, but the set up was so inaccurate and implausible as to be legitimately unfair to the historical horrors of the holocaust. If anything, the film's climax was so viscerally horrible it got away with this better than a book would do.

I won't call it a regret read, but The Stranger by Albert Camus was such a disappointment, the ending made me actually toss the book across the room. Essentially, a man mopes around a summer beach resort, theorizing and postulating on his life and meaning of existence, and then abruptly, and for no clear reason...

(view spoiler)[murders a complete stranger (hence the title) and postulates that he had a right to do it because he could do it. (hide spoiler)]

If you have read the book, maybe your thoughts are different, but for me, it was most unsatisfactory.

Maybe I just wasn't mature/ready enough to read Let the Right One In but the pedophilia stuff really bothered me and I regret reading as far as I did (which wasn't very far).

You, by Caroline Kepnes. Gross :/

The Man Book by George P. Saunders
I’m not even sure what made me read it. Maybe to get an insight of a way men think??? Anyways I came away from that book wanting to find this author and punch him in the throat! What an ass!!

Living dead girl 🤦‍♀️ that book Still haunts me in a bad way

Moby Dick. I love long 19th century books but this was just bad. Half the book (every second chapter) is totally inaccurate scientific information (and dull at that) the books premise is idiotic, of course, but more than that the whole structure of the book was ponderous and pompous. For all the talk of Melville’s great language I found it a plodding narrative with none of the humour or sparkle of Thackeray, Poe, Dickens or Austin.

I would say Jonathan Livingston seagull.no idea why it has so may plaudits. Honorable mention to Portnoys complaint

I don't regret reading anything, because if I really hate it, I stop. Besides, being able to trash talk, with authority, a book that is universally respected, is one of the joys of my life.

I have to agree with Robert about reading Camus’s The Stranger. I read it because so many people talking be about it but I found nothing in it-nothing,
Another highly praised one I felt to be worthless was Catcher in the Rye.
Generally I read about 50 pages of books and if they don’t rope me in by then, I quit wasting my time. I read those two in their entirety because of all the hoopla about them and learned that hoopla is no test of a good book.

If one does not get the Stranger or the Catcher in the Rye, the problem is with oneself.

Anything I score with two stars or less, since I figure that's the whole point of two stars or less.

The sole exception being Kurt B. Anderson's "Fantasyland" since it gives me an excuse to self-publish a rebuttal to that whole thing.

Wow

Paul wrote: "I have to agree with Robert about reading Camus’s The Stranger. I read it because so many people talking be about it but I found nothing in it-nothing,
Another highly praised one I felt to be worth..."

I really struggled with Catcher in the Rye too.

I think that some of the 'classics' are so hyped that they can be a let-down.

I read A Bell Jar and A Female Eunuch with great difficulty but struggled through to the end because I felt I should do.

Our last Book Club read was The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and again I read it to the end with difficulty. However, I was not alone, it was universally disliked by all at the group!

I will never understand the attraction to either the movie or the book: Gone with the Wind.

As someone who at least purports to want to be a writer it's hard for me to say I regret reading anything necessarily because I do think even a terrible book or a book that's just for a very different audience than yourself can teach you something, even if it's just what not to do.

For instance, my hatred of Something Wicked This Way Comes taught me that I neither want to read nor write a book that is 80% metaphor and uses very little concrete language.

Probably the only thing I truly regret reading is something that's not on my shelves here. Elliot Rodger's manifesto. I only read like two thirds of it, but that was two thirds too much.

American Pyscho- Brett Easton Ellis
Mysterious Skin- I cannot think of this author but it was made into a movie by JLG
Haunted- chuck palahniuk

these just scarred me in various ways

Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter is a recent regret

Defending Jacob. For a book that I was so excited to read. Had it in my TBR for 10 years and read it in my cruise but it was so bad.

Sarah wrote: "American Pyscho- Brett Easton Ellis
Mysterious Skin- I cannot think of this author but it was made into a movie by JLG
Haunted- chuck palahniuk

these just scarred me in various ways"

I don't blame you at all for that Sarah. I detest serial killer genre books and avoid them. There is nothing interesting about crazed lunatics with a compulsion to kill. (That is one reason why I hated The Stranger so much)