Books Is there a book you hate?

You are, of course, aware that Forgotten Realms is a D&D campaign setting?

Anyway, books I hate ... let me recall high school ...
The Pearl - John Steinbeck
Julius Caesar - William Shakespeare
A Separate Peace - don't remember
Shirley Valentine - Willie Russel
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne (liked his style, but hated the book)
The Odyssey - Homer (but only as translated by W.H.D. Rouse)
Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams (such a bad end to such a great series)
The First Crusaders 1095-1132 - Jonathon Riley-Smith
And then there's text books, but I'm not getting into them.

 

Romeo and Juliet is one.

And i also didn't like To Kill A Mocking Bird. I don't think some people will agree with me on that but i was forced to read this in 3rd year. I just did't like the story, but i thought it was honurable of Argus Finch to stand up to the mob when the man he defending (can't remember his name) was in jail.

 

Yes, naturally, since I used to play D&D. XD However, there are plenty of novels based in that setting (I'm not talking about, say, the actual handbooks for the game), and they stink. The fact that they're based on an RPG is no excuse for the characters to be flat and stereotypical.

I just... I can't appreciate fantasy that feels like a badly-designed D&D campaign. ^^; I stopped reading books based on game settings after that, I just haven't found many that were good. Nine times out of ten, you know exactly how the characters will act and exactly what the mysterious item will do, and you can figure out who's evil just based on their species because of D&D alignments... and so on...

Actually, a lot of my dislike of the series had to do with the character Drizzt... e_e; Talk about a walking cliché, and a bit of a Mary Sue type at that. But enough of that.

 

Yeah, a bad main character can really destroy a series. And, yeah, the D&D novels are generally pretty terrible. Still, you should expect the old RPG stereotypes from a D&D novel, since that's what the target audience is used to.
Of course, that doesn't make them any better.

By the way, I just remembered how much I hate the collective works of Hickman and Weis.

 

Ack, I have a few. Oddly enough, they were all my high school english summer reading books:
Of Mice and Men,
Leaves of Grass,
and the oh so notorious Oliver Twist. Ever since I read this while battling sleep, I cannot read anything laying down.

 

Really? I recall actually liking some of their stuff - I hated most of the characters (too many typical stereotypes - ugh, Tanis XP), but the Legends trilogy... I was pretty fond of that for a while. Of course, I was also about 14 when I read those books, so chances are I'd find them a lot less engaging now.

But y'know, if you thought the stuff they wrote was bad - you should compare it to the spin-offs written by others in the Dragonlance setting. *shudder* Those were horrible. Not only did they have every cliché that was in the original stuff and then some, most of the time the authors didn't do a very good job of keeping the feel of the characters. Blech. That bugs me more than anything else - it's why I don't read a lot of fanfiction, too many people don't keep the characters accurate.

 

The Lord Of The Rings books, To Kill A Mockingbird, Animal Farm, Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, and a myriad of others that I had to read for school. I'm not saying they're BAD books, of course. I'm just saying I didn't like them, personally.

 

James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I had to read it my senior year of high school, and I have never hated anything with as much passion as I did that book. Some people should not be allowed to write using stream-of-consciousness. It was bad. I also dislike Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe, but that may have been because I had to write a 10-page research paper on it. It's a well-written, interesting book and all, but it's too dense and wordy for me.

 

There are several I hate that I had to read in high school: 'Jane Eyre' (and anything else from the Brontes, too), then 'The Pearl', 'Ethan Frome', 'The Awakening', and anything else with realism or naturalism in them. With the books I read as a kid: 'On My Honor', 'From the Mixed-up Files of Basil E. Frankweiler', 'The Sign of the Beaver', 'Dear Mr. Henshaw'... Man they were irritating and boring. :anger2:

I didn't read this story, but my third grade teacher read it to us. It was called, 'Who Needs a Bratty Brother.' I couldn't stand the girl's little brother. I wanted him to be punished so badly. Heh, those were the days. :catgirl:

There are a lot of books I like, but I sure hated the ones from school...

 

Sadly, I didn't get past the Hobbit, let alone LoTR books, so I second your distaste on that...uh...hmmm....trying to think about others that I don't like...Swiss Family Robinson, and my 5th grade teacher read it to my class...it was boring...Death Gate Cycle...I read only one or two chapters of it, and couldn't read the rest, 'cause I couldn't figure out what the flying flip was going on!

 

Anyone read Wolf by Gillian Cross? If you haven't, don't bother. I found it soo rubbish and boring, and then my english teacher decided it would be great to study in class! :anger2:
It goes so over the top, and the main characters irritating and pathetic (for me)

there.
i feel much better now.