Most Infuriating Book(s) You've Ever Read?

[soren7550]

While reading the most boring book you've read thread [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.828022-Whats-the-most-boring-book-youve-ever-read], while trying to think of what the most boring book I've read was, books that infuriated me came to mind more often than books that bored me. And it seemed that several people on the thread were infuriated by their picks. So I figured, why not make a thread about infuriating books?

One such novel for me is Prospect Park West by Amy Sohn. I figured I'd give it a go since it took place where I live (no, not Prospect Park West, that's the street that runs along the west side of the park, and that's where the rich people live. But, it's a part of my neighborhood), and the price was right (free). Boy, what a waste of time that book was. All the characters are various kind of awful and insane (and no, not the fun kind), the book's reasoning is stupid, it displays Park Slope's residents as all super racists yuppies, has chapters that have about nothing to do with the main characters or the 'plot' (for example, there was a chapter about a kid who hates his homosexual father, and the only reference it has later on is that one of the main characters very briefly mentions that there's a gay couple that live in her building).

Above all else, the book make out marriage and children to be the bane of all existence, and how your life will be forever ruined should you pursue such a heinous lifestyle.

The only thing that kept me going was the occasional mention of local businesses.

So, what about you?

 

[Queen Michael]

West of the Moon by Barbara Bickmore. It's about this Mary Sue nurse who Has Not Allowed Herself To Love for ten years, but then she meets this guy whose "eyes were incredibly blue" and fals in love with him. Just like that. And of course he's already married, but his wife's a ***** so that apparently makes it okay for him to be unfaithful. And one of the things he dislikes about his wife is her Christianity, because she just uses it as an excuse to look down on people and "doesn't stay true to the spirit of the religion." Because actually criticizing a religion isn't okay, of course.

And then she goes to Africa to work as a nurse, all the while still having no flaws whatsoever, and leaving her beloved man ebhind. Will Their Love Survive? But since she can't just spend a romance novel without a man to be with, she meets a man there. And of course he conveniently dies in the end so that when she comes back she can be with guy #1 without having to choose. And in the final pages of the book, he just waltzes in and goes "Hi! I'm divorced now! We can be a couple!" after no contact with her for a while (and he obviously refrained from contacting her in Africa so that it wouldn't ruin the author's plans for the heroine to have a romance with that other guy) and he's clearly doing what the plot requires rather than what would be natural for him to do.

A character who's supposed to be a jerkass comes off as unintentionally sympathetic. For instance, there's this time where they go to a medicine man to get help to cure a sick man. Once the sick man is cured, the "jerkass" remarks "Maybe he just decided to stop pretending." And this is supposed to be a strawman, but it's actually a very valid point.

A side character who's supposed to be an urbane reporter just comes off as naïve.

All in all, an awful, awful book for people with awful, awful tastes.

 

[Queen Michael]

anything wrote by germaine greer. but in particular her book that details her rabid hatred of transgender people.

People, this poster deserves a huge hand.

 

[Little Woodsman]

Last year one of my closest friends sent me a book that he claimed had changed his whole perspective on life, death and the afterlife. The book is called Journey of Souls by Michael Newton, PHD. Though in his case I'm fairly sure that stands for Pretty Hardcore Dip-shit.
You see Mr. Newton is a counseling psychologist and hypnotherapist who claims that he has through past-life regression sessions with his clients found out not only how people progress from one life to another, but also what happens to/with people's souls between lives. Most of the book consists of transcripts of his sessions with clients.
Now you may believe in this sort of thing or you may not....but here's the thing. I've had some counseling training, and this man should be thrown out of the profession. Early on in the book he states that while his clients were in the hypnotized state he was careful to keep his statements neutral so that his clients' responses would not be attempts to please him or 'get the right answer'. But if you read the actual transcripts he violates that constantly . He constantly leads his clients, giving them hints of what they should be seeing next, occasionally gives detailed descriptions and then asks if what the client sees matches his description (amazingly it always does) and at one point when a client starts to describe something to him he tells the client "That's not what we're looking for." and the client immediately switches his description to be exactly what they were looking for.
What mostly boggles my mind is that this dip-shit actually left these things in his transcriptions so anyone reading the book with even a slight bit of skepticism would see right through it. The only thing I can speculate is that he is fooling himself along with a lot of other people.

 

[MysticSlayer]

Monster by Frank E. Peretti. It has absolutely no redeeming quality. The basis is that a man and his wife are out camping, the wife gets kidnapped by a race of Sasquatch people (I am not making this up!), and the rest of the book is her trying to survive while her friends attempt to find her. The whole plot is ridiculous beyond words. And of course Peretti, being the Fundamentalist Christian that he is, has the main villain as a professor of evolutionary biology who ultimately fails in an attempt to prove evolution, has a monologue about how evolution has been disproven, and his creation was the evil sasquatch that was really killing people (not the one the wife was kidnapped by). And then, to add to it all, he decides to try to kill everyone who discovered his failure because he doesn't want to be proven wrong. I'm pretty sure most people can catch the implications made with that part of the story.

Of course, the level of infuriation I have is partly due to the fact that a friend of mine said it was the best book he'd ever read, so I had high expectations for it. My mistake.

 

[PFCboom]

The Scarlet Letter. I couldn't get over how the characters seemed to outright revel in their self-loathing. Speaking as a guy who used to have a problem with hating myself (well over a decade ago) I just can't stand the very concept of it, even in a book.

Jumper Cable, book 33 in the Xanth series. I hated how the females are portrayed as weak-willed in the face of a few kisses from guys, then near the end every character simply accepted what seemed to be the end of Xanth itself. Imagine if you were slated to be gruesomely executed, and you just went along with it with little more than "welp, that's just how it goes, I guess." God *&^%ing damn, I hated every one of those characters.
And then there's how the book begins. It's a narrative hook. A literal, physical hook drags the main character (a flippin' spider) into the narrative.
For that matter... The most recent Xanth books have been, well, less than stellar. I've read every book from the 1st to the 33rd, and I can't help thinking the writing has... taken a turn for the lazier. More and, frankly, stupider puns, useless pun characters with useless pun talents, that flippin' narrative hook... come to think of it, most of what I personally don't like about the newest Xanth books probably comes from reader suggestions, like the puns and pun characters. The writing isn't terrible, it's just... painful, especially since the first dozen and some books were insanely good.
Ah... I made myself sad with nostalgia.

 

[soren7550]

Here's another one: The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus. Now, the blurb made it seem enjoyably enough, making it out to be this true story of the author's experience as a nanny. That's all thrown out the window come the first page, which states that the book is a work of fiction. However, that doesn't stop them from refusing to give the main characters names. The protagonist is just her job title (and little else), she works for Mr. and Mrs. X, Mr. X's mistress is Miss Chicago (and not in the pageant sense), the guy the sentient job thinks is cute is Harvard Hottie, and so forth.

The sentient job has 'friends' and 'family', but are given about zero personality, she 'loves' the brat that she has to nanny, even though he's a horrid child, and decides she doesn't like his name so she gives him a new one, the borough Queens is written off as imminent death, and the ending is really dumb (in short, instead of telling her employers off after they fire her, for forcing her to work a lot of extra work and never paying her for it, she leaves them a speech about love and shit, and the brat hates a puppy he had for no determinable reason [what four year old hates puppies?!]).

 

[TakerFoxx]

A good chunk of the Sword of Truth books after they jumped the shark, but Naked Empire and a good deal of the Chainfire trilogy stand out. By that point, the endless preaching had gotten so bad that it swallowed up the story, and the once-likeable main characters had gotten so reprehensible that the already evil bad guys were taken to insanely comical levels of evil to make the main characters look good by comparison. Plus, the narration constantly went over the plot in case we had forgotten the books we had just read, making the very act of reading a boring slough.

 

[SckizoBoy]

Hmmm... probably anything by Ross Leckie... the guy professes to be a Classics scholar, but fuck his fiction is a blithering pile of shit... once he dies, I reckon he'll spend his entire afterlife being *****-slapped by Livy.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

Slaughter House 5. I was recommended the book by one of my college teachers and I couldn't stand it. My teacher knew I liked interesting or weird ideas and the story certainly has one with it not going from point A to point B to point C but jumping from point A to E to L to D, ect. However, the story itself is really poorly written, it is not high level stuff by a long shot and most of the characters are either uninteresting or despicable. I'm given no reason to care for the main character and the story itself seems to be giving the message that nothing matters anyway. I like interesting ideas but an interesting idea does not inherently make a book good.

Another book I found infuriating was The Amber Spyglass. Such a convoluted, contrived, and aggravating ending to what started off as a great book series. Read the Golden Compass and then stop there and imagine your own ending.

 

[dfphetteplace]

There was a recent book written by a neurosurgeon called Proof of Heaven. Anyone who understands hypoxia on the brain, and what happens during cerebral vascular accidents and/or transient ischemic attacks understands why people can sometimes feel like they are outside the body, or have intense feelings of euphoria or impending doom. The book served no merit to prove his point, except to those that do not understand the pathophysiology of the human brain. You would think that a neurosurgeon wouldn't write something like this, but after his own "first hand experience with the after life", he thought this was a good idea. The book does not prove anything, and just seemed to make him some quick money.

 

[Pseudonym2]

The Dream and the Nightmare. Racist, stupid, and highly influential.

 

[Ima Lemming]

The Dangerous Days of Daniel X. On top of the writing style being aggressively juvenile and condescending, I'm pretty sure the moral of that book is that if you have any talent, skill, or ability, you're not human.

 

[lacktheknack]

All the books I've read that I dislike are highly religious in content and only serve to solidify schisms and fissures between Christians. However, this is not R&P and I don't feel like discussing them, so I'm not naming names.

Beyond that, I got nothing. I wasn't a big fan of "Things Fall Apart", I suppose.

 

[rcs619]

"Micro" by... well, mostly by, Michael Crichton. It was another one of the novels that were unfinished at the time of his death and then finished out by some other author.

I wanted to like Micro, it was basically Honey I Shrunk the Kids, but with corporate intrigue and killer nanomachines. And Crichton's stuff, while not all nearly as good as Jurassic Park, is usually at least good for a fun adventure story.

Micro was terrible. Literally, the only reason the second half of the novel exists is because the main antagonist is cartoonishly, unbelievably terrible at being a villain. Basically, he's an evil CEO who was going to use shrinking technology to be rich, or something. He winds up murdering one of the main character's brother, who then decides the best time to confront the bad guy about his brother's murder is INSIDE of the badguy's headquarters IN FRONT OF EVERYONE while they were invited there on a tour. The badguy then proceeds to fake an industrial accident, and tricks the main characters into stepping into a big, obviously ominous machine by telling them it's a safe-room where they can be safe. He then shrinks them all to half an inch tall.

So the main character has not only doomed himself, but the rest of the tour group who had nothing to do with him or his brother, because now they totally know the CEO guy murdered him. They're half and inch tall now, totally helpless as they stand on the floor while the badguy talks about how he's going to kill them all to destroy any evidence. His master plan is to feed them to a snake. They're half an inch tall, he could literally step on them. Or, like, drop a clipboard on them and be done with it, but he decides to feed them to a snake while going on like a Bond villain. Then the cops turn up to investigate the alarm he set off, and he LEAVES THEM ALONE IN THE ROOM while he goes to talk to the police. They all escape, and through a series of preposterous events and yet another idiotically botched murder attempt, wind up lost in a nearby nature preserve.

They're are like, eight people. Half an inch tall, hopelessly lost in this nature preserve, and due to plot, they've only got a few days before the shrinking process kills them unless they grow back. They have no supplies beyond the clothes on their backs. Just leave them for the ants and beetles and call it a day, right? Nope, the badguy decides the best idea is to send in a group of mercenaries, shrink them down along with MILITARY GRADE WEAPONS and tiny FLYING MACHINES (to help them cover more ground than the people on foot), and send them to hunt down the tour group. It's at about that point that I just stopped reading. The only highlight was the crazy tomboy outdoorsy girl who basically turned out to be Rambo, but even that couldn't carry the book.

Beyond the idiotic plot contrivances, it just reeked of being filled in by another author. Descriptions were minimal at best, and there were literally whole portions where people are having a conversations where it's just described as "He talked to her" and "he yelled at her and she got offended" instead of actually having the conversations on the page. It just seemed like they only did the minimal amount to fill in the gaps that Crichton left, and nothing else.

 

[Mr.Mattress]

"The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho is super annoying: Trying to spread some sort of philosophy that's basically saying "Do Stuff and you'll achieve greatness", but in a very snooty way. It's boring most of the time. The Alchemist isn't even the main character, and he only appears in like 4 chapters, so naming the story after him is stupid. And the twist at the end makes me angry (I am not gonna spoil it). Just stay away from this book. It's lame.

 

[OneCatch]

anything wrote by germaine greer. but in particular her book that details her rabid hatred of transgender people

Oh god, seconding this. That woman is such a hypocrite in basically every respect (and I'm speaking as someone who's vehemently feminist).

My contribution is The Dice Man. An intriguing premise, but with increasingly stupid leaps of logic and downright inconsistencies to justify the narrative.

Also, I find most of Philip K Dick's stuff pretty frustrating, purely because it's usually an absolutely fantastic premise, but written in such a drugged up, hallucinogenic style that they're borderline incomprehensible. I'm not one to moan about unusual writing styles, but I find his stuff incredibly difficult to parse.

 

[Keiichi Morisato]

ichigo 100%, because the main character was so flaky. he end up dating each of the love interests more than once, i was like JUST CHOOSE ONE ALREADY AND DEVELOP THE RELATIONSHIP!!!!! though it ended pretty well, it wasn't enough to save the series for me.