So this blog and my goal of reading two books a week was supposed to help me actually finish two books a week and break me of my habit of starting 5 different books at once. This was working for a while, but I have started 6 books in the last two weeks and haven't finished any of them yet! Must stop doing that.
So since I haven't actually finished a book to write about, I decided to steal an idea from Brianne's blog and write about a few books I really hate. I know there are more than this, but here are the first three that came to mind.
1. She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb. This is by far the worst book I've ever read. I hated every second of it and cannot explain why I made myself finish it. I think it was because I had heard some good things about it so I kept convincing myself that it must get better, but it didn't. I hated the main character. Like in a kept vividly imagining her death kind of way. The story was, well, just non-existent. I have no idea why he wrote this book. Or why anyone published it. Or read it. Well, they read it because of Oprah, but I don't know why she read it. Terrible.
2.Beloved by Toni Morrison. No, I don't just dislike this because of Morrison's politics. I love Anna Quindlan and Barbara Kingsolver and well, pretty much any modern writer is at least somewhat liberal so I just accept that. Beloved was just awful though. Again, the main character was awful. And the sex against a tombstone scene was just disgusting. I get that it was supposed to be a metaphor, but it was poorly written and was just gross. You could tell Morrison was trying to make you feel sorry for blacks as a group, but it just made me mad at the main character because she was an idiot.
3. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Okay, this one I would probably like if I read it again. But I had to read it my sophomore year of high school when I had Mrs. Satan as a teacher. Her goal in life seemed to be to make everyone absolutely hate reading, a rather odd goal for an English teacher. She was so overly focused on symbolism that she never talked about enjoying a story or character or anything else. EVERYTHING was about symbolism. Which is why Melanie and I started calling her Mrs. Satan. We figured her red hair symbolized her relationship with the devil. We made up a whole story about how she had a portal to Hell under her desk. Anyway, when we read Fahrenheit 451, she made us go through and find every single allusion we could find. We also had a write something about our favorite character, and I purposefully picked her least favorite character just to annoy her. Well, I ended up getting an F on that because that character wouldn't have been able to find as many allusions as I did - I had found like 300 or something. Anyway, so when I read this I mainly spent my time finding those stupid allusions rather than enjoying it. She sucked.
This is hilarious, primarily because I felt the complete opposite about her. I would say that she was one of the major influences in my life, the one that helped me realize that it was good to really Think, and that I could. In fact, you might even say she's the reason I was an English major. Crazy.
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