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Books you want to throw across the room

236 replies

tobee · 19/08/2016 11:49

Over 20 years ago, on holiday I took The Chamber by John Grisham. I'd heard it had (at the time) the biggest amount for film rights ever paid. When I finished I literally threw it across the room in disgust. (Actually poolside area). It was such a load of hogwash! Now I look back and wonder I bothered to get that far.

Any books that have provoked a similar reaction in you?

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SpecialAgentFreyPie · 19/08/2016 12:00

I usually love Laura Lippman, but the ending of The Most Dangerous Thing was so unbelievably offensive (not to mention unrealistic to the point of WTAF) that I actually went off her books for a few years.

Basically, the end excused and pitied the child molester/psychotic pimp because she was a woman Not in a literary'makes you think' sense, but in a 'I didn't know how to finish the book/little boys aren't harmed by molestation if it's a teenage girl' sense.

One of the few books I've genuinely been disgusted by.

The Crow Girl was very interesting, but a certain reveal was just so OTT it spoiled the psychological analysis for me.

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FoxesOnSocks · 19/08/2016 12:07

Last one I actually lobbed across the room was 'a girl is a half formed thing'

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ComedyWing · 19/08/2016 12:08

I think I did actually throw Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life across the room. I thought it was a morally- and aesthetically-indefensible load of misery porn that seemed to take an endless, deeply unpleasant dislike in saving up the horrifying details of a child's sexual abuse as a sort of narrative titillation for the reader, and almost glorying in what further horrors (continual agonising pain, extreme domestic violence, rape, progressive disability, self-harm, betrayal, bereavement etc etc) it could pile on the hapless character in adulthood.

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ComedyWing · 19/08/2016 12:09

deeply unpleasant liking, not dislike! Duh.

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janeelliott · 19/08/2016 12:12

Twilight and Fifty Shades of grey. Infuriating drivel.

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AndYourBirdCanSing · 19/08/2016 12:13

50 shades was chucked across the room, as was American Psycho

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tobee · 19/08/2016 12:21

Ha! Love these intense reactions.

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sazerashez · 19/08/2016 12:22

Comedy wing: you've described little life perfectly. I felt exactly like you. It made me both angry and bored.

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SpecialAgentFreyPie · 19/08/2016 12:22

Ugh. American Psycho.

The constant use of the term 'hardbody' was justification enough to hate it.

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YvaineStormhold · 19/08/2016 12:25

Under The Dome by Stephen King, because of the truly fucking awful ending even by his standards

The Bunker Diary by Kevin Brooks, because I didn't want the bloody thing anywhere near me after I read the truly harrowing ending.

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AnneLovesGilbert · 19/08/2016 13:06

How did it end Yvaine? I bought it when I started watching the TV series, but that turned quickly into a pile of utter shite and now I don't know whether or not to start the book? It's a hell of a tome, so not worth it?.

I did American Psycho on my degree course and while I never threw it anywhere I had to put it outside my bedroom every night as I thought it would give me nightmares if it was too close to me. Hated. Every. Single. Word.

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Ohlalala · 19/08/2016 14:14

50 shades was thrown in the bin. Had never done that before!

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mumhum · 19/08/2016 14:16

Gosh yes I agree, A Little Life wad too much and lost all its message somewhere along the way.

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AlmaMartyr · 19/08/2016 14:32

Outlander.

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TheCountessofFitzdotterel · 19/08/2016 14:33

Totally agree about The Bunker Diary. I should have known better than to read it in the first place - an earlier one of his, The Road of the Dead, is also horrible, not as shocking but just constant unredeemed violence.

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dietborebingo · 19/08/2016 14:35

Da Vinci Code. Written like a self congratulatory wank. It's awful.

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TheTartOfAsgard · 19/08/2016 14:38

The simarillion. I love lotr and Tolkien but I just can't get to grips with it! I've started it 3000 times but it's been lobbed at the wall each time

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dalek · 19/08/2016 14:41

One Day - what a waste of time! I actually persuaded a woman in a shop from buying it as she was umming and ahhring between it and The Help.


Also Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. Put it in the bin on holiday

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fruityb · 19/08/2016 14:48

We are all completely beside ourselves - utter bilge.

Zoo by James Patterson. I love a Patterson but this one bored me rigid!

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Sooverthis · 19/08/2016 14:51

The Minaturist every reviewer must have either been sniffing glue or paid to say it was 'gripping'

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ItsNiceItsDifferentItsUnusual · 19/08/2016 14:52

Oh no! I'm about to start reading A Little Life.

I hated Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White'. The way he described women made me want to scream.

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TheSolitaryBoojum · 19/08/2016 15:02

I'm a book addict. A serious one, over decades.
There are books I hated and didn't finish, but others called them classics and amazing and fabulous, so I let them live on in a charity shop somewhere.
Every few years I read a book so appalling that I can't let it pollute anyone else, so I tear it into bits and stuff it in the bin. Or use it as a firestarter.
Then I delete it from my memory so it's dead to me as well.
So I can't give you titles, but yes. There are books I eliminate.
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SlinkyVagabond · 19/08/2016 15:08

Yy to Da Vinci Code. So badly written I threw it across the room, got out of bed and threw it again.

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Tatlerer · 19/08/2016 15:14

This reminds me of quite a well- to-do friend's mum who bought 50 Shades as she thought it was a thriller ( of the crime, not the knicker variety). A chapter or so in, when she got the gist of it, she had to go outside and put it in the wheelie bin (not any bin inside the house!).

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TaraCarter · 19/08/2016 19:05

I couldn't throw it, but I returned Betrayal by Fiona Mackintosh to the library unread. I had never, ever, ever done that before in ten years of owning a library card.

To this day, that book (and another whose name I don't recall) define my rock bottom for printed fiction.

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