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27submissions
Finished
Hey Pandas, What Is A Book You Would Never Recommend Reading?
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#1
The Bible.
Final score:
7points
UKGrandad 1 week ago
I don't know about that. On the one hand, it is a long and for the most part tedious read, but on the other hand, it's only by reading it that one can get a real understanding of how nonsensical it is. It has been said that the one sure way to become an atheist is to read the Bible
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#2
My pick would be the zodiac academy series. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be some sort of satire but it has poor grammar, distasteful a*****t and “romance” scenes and is overall rather awful. I still cannot believe there are about 10 entire books in the series.
Final score:
4points
#3
'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'. Nothing but a couple of hundred pages of self-indulgent, self-pitying, remorselessly dull whining.
Final score:
4points
#4
Atlas Shrugged. The main characters are self-important sociopaths. The writing is wooden; you can’t relate to anybody in this book. And Ayn Rand’s ideas contributed to the anti-human extreme capitalism that has eaten the U.S.
Final score:
4points
#5
Any of the 19 books Donald Trump claims to have written. Most were done by Ghost riders, and there's very little likelihood of learning anything factual from any of them.
Final score:
4points
Lotekguy (Submission author) 6 days ago
I apologize for the typo in "ghost writers". The print was very faint on my phone, and I haven't figured out how to edit it.
#6
I gave up on "Pattern Recognition" (William Gibson) because of the amount of purple prose - padding shouldn't feel like padding.
Final score:
3points
#7
"The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. Oh Em Gee. Nothing but one horrid episode followed by another horrid episode. Grim. Weepingly sad.
Final score:
3points
#8
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Had to grind through it for a book club and I don't think I've ever hated a book so viscerally. I had literally zero emotional connection with the protagonist and absolutely no interest in her life. I wouldn't say it's a bad book, just one about someone who irritates me profoundly. The Catcher in the Rye comes as close second.
Final score:
3points
#9
A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara. Most self-indulgent load of t*****e-p**n trash I've read. It's a shame, because the first... third to half? I don't remember exactly now, is extremely well-written; there's *something* about the main character you don't know, and you want to figure it out.
Once you find it out, the book smacks you around the face with it, along with any other awful thing that could happen to a person -- trust me, it probably happens to the protagonist (who, by the way, is not a particularly interesting or loveable character). The end was a relief to me, and to people that know the ending, that probably sounds like an awful thing to say.
I'm still annoyed by this book even years after I read it because I feel cheated. I really enjoyed the first part. I've rarely had a book where I enjoy the first part but want my money back by the end.
Final score:
3points
#11
The Shack by William Paul Young. Absolute first-year cod-philosophy, Christian apologetics style, which is one thing - but couched in a prose style so ham-fisted it makes Dan Brown seem like John Steinbeck.
Also I never finished The Silmarillion, which reads like a DM manual
Final score:
2points
#12
Had to read "Of Mice And Men" at school. I get that it's a classic and all, but bleak bleak bleak bleak, good grief.
Final score:
1point
Vix Spiderthrust 1 week ago
Steinbeck in general. He's a really good prose writer, but he really is unremittingy grim.
#13
Rosario is Dead by Majgull Axelsson. If you know you know. There are a lot of truly horrific scenes involving children in that book I wish I'd never read.
Final score:
1point
#14
Madame Bovary. I remember little of it except it was the most depressing book I've ever read.
Final score:
1point
#15
Anything by Charles Dickens. Don't get me wrong, the meat of the stories themselves is amazing, but the writing, ugh. He wrote serials for periodicals, he was paid by the word, and OMG is shows. His plots are great, but the writing is wordy and tedious. Take the opening of A Tale of Two Cities. The famous quote that begins It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... That single sentence goes on for over 100 words. Tedious. Boggy. Mind-numbing. Seriously, rent a movie or go see the play.
Tolstoy is difficult, if better written. It's the names. There's just so many of them. Each person will have one name and a couple nicknames, then there's names for horses, dogs, even swords. And the sentences don't usually have those clues that let you know what the names are referring to. So, you can find yourself thinking which chap is this now? and eventually figure out it's this other dude's sword. Worth reading, but keep a list so you know which name goes to what.
Final score:
1point
#16
Dickens definetly: overly worded narrative cos PBTW
War of the worlds: its just a very boring long walk narrated by some guy who doesnt do anything.
D H Lawrence . . . . .
The Great Gatsby . . . .stunningly dull book about narcissistic bright young things who do nothing of interest
Sherlock Holmes . . . not because they are bad, they arent, but because Holmes needs to be PORTRAYED and not read about. Basil Rathbone is THE best film Holmes, Jeremy Brett is THE best tv Holmes ( Benedict, whilst a fine actor, butchers Holmes).
Anything by Clive Cussler
Anything by Matthew Reilly
Avoid everything Wilbur Smith wrote after Hungry as the Sea
Wuthering Heights. A turgid dreary book written about awful people being awful to each other.
Final score:
1point
#17
The Last Man, Mary Shelley. Never mind Dickens being paid by the word, was she being paid by the ton? I waded through the first third of the most turgid pointless verbosity I've ever encountered, then I gave up.
Final score:
1point
#18
Mein Kampf. Ridiculous tedious unreadable drivel written by a complete nutter.
Final score:
1point
#19
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche.
I couldn't get through it. The main character was such a self-righteous a*s that I got annoyed every time I picked it up. The copy I had also included a few pages about Nietzsche himself. He also sounded like a self-righteous a*s. I guess it makes sense to write about what you know.
Final score:
0points
Vix Spiderthrust 4 days ago (edited)
Friedrixh Nietzsche is the only enormously famous philosopher who has anything like an enjoyable prose style, so this seems odd, though YMMV and whatever
#20
"A Marker to Measure Drift" by Alexander Maksik. It was just...kinda gross
Final score:
0points
#21
Atonement. Utterly unconvincing as narrated by a female. Boring, long-winded, overly-complicated.
Final score:
0points
#22
I would recommend, 'Earthlings,'' by Sayaka Murata (sorry) but with the biggest proviso ever. If you have trigger issues with a***e you might want to stay well clear
Final score:
0points
#23
Any thriller where the narrator straight up lies to you. An unreliable narrator is good, but there has to be an actual reason why they are not being entirely truthful.
I read a book where the majority of it, the narrator is being d*****d without his knowledge, so he's unsure of whether he's actually seeing things or not, but the whole thing started with a blatant lie that pissed me off. "I'm petting my dog while on the phone with my wife who may be getting m******d" becomes "oh actually I was hiding in the bushes nowhere near my dog, attempting to m****r my wife, while on the phone with her".
Not saying the name for obvious spoiler reasons, but not the first book I read last year where the crime was just a complete lie up until the end where, oh silly me, I actually did it.
Final score:
0points
London Paris 1 day ago
getting what,d? "getting d******d without his knowledge?" what on earth is that referring to?
#24
“House of Leaves”. Supposedly a genre-defying cult classic. I love horror and especially unpredictable and unusual horror but I found this almost unreadable. A potentially interesting story buried under a lot of pretentious, boring nonsense that added nothing to the narrative. I struggled to the end but was not rewarded by anything of interest.
Final score:
0points
#25
Mud bound. Had to read it for a book club, ended up really mad at the dude that suggested it for making me read something so unrelentingly miserable and horrifying.
Final score:
0points
#26
Forrest Gump. How they made such a good movie out of such a terrible book is beyond me.
Final score:
0points
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