Disappointing Bestsellers

[LittlleMy]

Hello everyone 🙂

I just wondered if anyone else has bought a ‘bestseller’ that otherwise wouldn’t have appealed without that status only to be hugely disappointed?

So I realise I’m slightly late to the party but I just finished ‘The Housemaid’ by Freida McFadden and it was such a struggle to get through! It felt more like it was written for the Young Adult market. Barely any descriptive text, always telling rather than showing, ridiculous coincidences, underdeveloped characters, juvenile writing especially sentences like ‘’there was something about that room that was very scary” “his expression sent a chill down my spine”. Highly predictable in parts, silly in others and just so very average!

Don’t come after me if you loved it, this is just my opinion of a recent book that really shocked me that it was able to reach the dizzying heights of becoming a bestseller.

I thought it might be fun to hear from any fellow disgruntled readers if they’ve had similar experiences! With Autumn just round the corner, and me needing a new list of books to read, this post may help some of us avoid similar disappointments!

50 Shades of Grey. I could not finish it.

@JHound oh snap! I couldn’t either - just horribly written I thought!

Yellow face. Tried twice to get into it and I just can’t.

I couldn’t finish The Thursday Murder Club.

Any of Rev Richard Coles' books

I did finish it, but this was one of my biggest disappointments tbh

I’m just going to watch the Netflix adaptation!

Yes. The Midnight Library, Matt Haigh.

So boring!

Lucy Foley’s The Midnight Feast’ reads like an amalgam of dozens of other books mashed together. Incredibly derivative with boring, two dimensional characters. I’ve abandoned it.

I agree Thursday Murder club and I’ll add Normal People. I gave up less than half way through.

Does sound like quite a heavy subject, thanks for letting us know!

Where The Crawdads Sing - the nature writing in it is exquisite but the story is just ridiculous and gets sillier and sillier. Such a shame as I loved the main character and the premise.

Lessons in Chemistry. Friends of mine loved it but I felt I was being told what to think and how to respond on every page. I haven't finished it but I will try again.

Orbital. Couldn't stand it. I read the first ten pages about three times and they felt like they went on forever. It was so repetitive and I just didn't believe a word of it. Has anyone finished it?

I did like Yellowface, though.

Weird, I loved that one, even though I didn't think it was very well written. I just adored the idea.

But being a bestseller is absolutely no guarantee of quality, just that other people bought this book in large numbers. It's just as likely to be a sign of effective marketing, some media tie-in, or positioning the book in places where people who don't read much or at all might pick one up (stations, airports etc).

It makes no sense to buy a book purely because it's a bestseller, unless you have other reasons to think it will be appealing to you. It would be like painting your house grey when you hate grey, because everyone else is doing it.

Look at the hugely best-selling The Salt Path -- for a lot of people a word of mouth 'feelgood', 'uplifting' purchase, and the story of a free-spirited, devoted middle-aged couple made suddenly homeless through not fault of their own in the same week one of them gets a terminal diagnosis, so they make the gutsy, eccentric decision to walk a LD trail and wild camp on £48 a week, rather than take the 'safe' route, accept emergency council housing and look for jobs.

Only it turns out that very little of it is true. His diagnosis is uncertain, and wasn't made till several years after the walk, and the reason they lost their home and livelihood was because she's embezzled £64k from her employer and defaulted on the loan she took out from a family member to repay the sum stolen.

Which might be the definition of a disappointing bestseller.

Oh I don’t like murder mysteries so will def avoid!

Anything I've tried to read so far by Colleen Hoover has been laughably awful but she has a huge following and movie adaptations being made so other people obviously see something I don't in her work.
Sally Rooney can write but I find her characters insufferable and haven't managed to finish any of her books other than Normal People.

I'm always amused by LF. Her first two novels appear to be essentially the same novel with different settings.

Very true. This time she’s just used every other similar book to write this one.

A Little Life by the end I just didn’t care anymore

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo it went on and on and on

Eat Pray Love I had to put it down the author so unbelievably smug and pretentious

I loved Yellowface

Where to begin?! 😁
Midnight Library
Beekeeper of Aleppo
Wolf Hall
Broken Country
Normal People
Yellowface
Remains of The Day
Any Jodi Picoult

Where the crawdads sing- utterly boresome. I tried 10 pages then gave up.

Yellowface- one dimensional characters but I did finish it.

50 shades of Grey- was given to me but tbh I didn't even open it because I knew I was going to loathe it. Silly misogynistic rubbish.

Normal People- found it a really tedious read so I gave up halfway in.

Normal People by Sally Rooney. It was hyped to the skies by all the papers but seemed to me like a very average young adult novel. Flat, easy-to-read uninspiring writing and the story was just 'will they or won't they', and it was hard to care either way. No atmosphere and no believable characters apart from the main couple.

I think for me though sometimes I like to try a completely different type of book or I’m after a quick and easy read and so I’ll rely on the ‘bestseller’ status as a guide though absolutely I’m very much finding out to my cost that other factors are at play that are so strong they sometimes eclipse the actual quality of the writing!

I also think that perhaps people are becoming less discerning about the quality of writing with the rise of social media platforms that champion fast paced easy to read often coming of age/scandalous subject matter. One only has to look at Colleen Hoover for an example of that I guess.

Ooh interesting! Not Jodi Picoult as well! 😱