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!

All fours and The Safekeep.

I find this reassuring. I have a history degree and I'm actually embarrassed that I cannot finish Wolf Hall 🙈

I loved the TV series.

I found Wolf Hall a good read, but couldn't get through Bring up the Bodies. Luckily the second TV series televises it.

Same experience with Orbital. Waited for weeks and weeks for it to become available on the library app because I am trying not to buy anymore books. Had heard great things about it.

Read a couple of pages, skimmed a few more and immediately returned it. Something really offputting about it and I just couldn't be bothered to persevere with it, which isn't really like me at all.

I’ve just finished The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. I thought it was entirely unoriginal, and not very well written. People raved about it to me!

Anything by Zadie Smith
Conversations with Friends - dialogue was so weird and stilted
The Goldfinch - ok but I don’t understand the hype really

Don’t know why I quoted! Sorry!

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Wtf? Just no.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. I couldn't get into it at all and plodded to the end, whereas friends rave about it. And I'm delighted to see someone else citing I Am Pilgrim, which was just terrible (another friend's recommendation).

I really enjoyed early Robert Harris books but nearly threw The Second Sleep across the room. Awful lazy ending. He may as well have written 'and then they woke up and it was all a dream'. He's not really written a good one for years.

I also loved the Wolf Hall trilogy but was pretty familiar with the period, which possibly made a difference. I then tried A Place of Greater Safety, about the French Revolution, which is a beast of a tome, and got utterly and totally lost. Not a scooby what was happening or who was speaking.

Oh that’s interesting. How so? I’m struggling with Babel atm, on paper it seemed I was gonna love it, but it actually feels like a chore. Haven’t read anything else by her, but was planning to try Yellow face next.

I have a fave waterstones person too!

I pushed myself through Caledonian road and whilst it was very clever and intellectual, I didn't get anything satisfying from it. I took it into hospital with me in hardback. Idiot that I am!

But then I LOVED Mayflies.

Midnight library - I listened on Audible. Utter fecking dirge. Can anyone tell me the ending?

Orbital - very clever. Beautiful prose. Dull for the reader.

Wolf Hall. Tried over and over. Couldn't do it.

Butter - glad others didn't like it, saves me picking it up and considering it every time in Foyles!

Loved Crawdads. Loved Captain Corelli. Loved Life of Pi.

I literally thought the name Freida McFadden when I read the title of this thread!
She’s a terrible writer, no idea how she’s got such a a following

On Chesil Beach. I did finish it, as it was very short. And terribly boring.
Agree with The Thursday Murder Club - I couldn’t finish it!

I listened to ttmc and I can’t remember whodunnit so I will watch the film but it was incredibly formulaic. I didn’t finish The Midnight Library as it was terrible and so trite. I just read the dirty bits of 50 shades back when it was a phenomenon, I seem to remember chapters of emails about law documents and I doubt anyone was reading those 😁

I’m really wary of bestsellers as everything seems to need to have a twist rather than a logical ending which makes a lot of books very unsatisfying to read imho.

The Housemaid was one of my book club books. It was ok but the ending was so disappointing and felt completely out of nowhere. We read other books around and there was so much to talk about but that one just felt like - this is the story and there wasn't really any depth.

I read Normal People and just didn't really enjoy it that much

I was just going to say Yellowface.

Thought it was awful. It was sooo self-indulgent and the ending was like a teen creative writing competition.

It had a massive marketing campaign is all, and these things sometimes become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That Eleanor Olyphant POS

Daisy Jones and the Six
The Twyford Code
Normal people
Anything Emily Henry

Twilight, the Hunger Games, The Alchemist, Cloud Atlas and most Ian McEwan books are the top of the heap for my list of Disappointing Bestsellers. Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Jane Eyre were put down for rests many years ago, and I'm yet to pick them up again.

I read a paragraph of 50 Shades over a friend's shoulder. As it mentioned anal fisting and the Bible in the same sentence (on our way to a place of religious pilgrimage, of all things 😂), I thought that might be one to swerve!

Ones like All the Light We Cannot See and The Midnight Library were read in fits and starts, usually before bed...

As a result, I tend to give 'bestseller' lists, displays and supermarket books a wide berth. Mind you, I apparently read some random and obscure books, but at least there's variety!

I loved it!

Seconded!

Finished Thursday Murder Club but underwhelmed and won't read another.
Thought Normal People and Conversations with Friends both massively overhyped.
Couldn't finish Eleanor Oliphant .Those are the recent ones that come to mind.

I've just got back from holiday where I read the Housemaid (on bookshelf at Air BnB) and The Secret History (donated by DD).

The Housemaid was a nice easy read, entertaining enough but definite Colleen Hoover vibes. I was gobsmacked to discover there are more in the series.

The Secret History I'm still processing. DD adores it, but I'm not sure how I feel. I usually read crime fiction and have only broadened out into more literary stuff this year and although I enjoyed it, I found it pretentious and in need of some editing. I thoroughly enjoyed mentally casting the characters from 80s Brat Pack actors though! Also I was planning to read way more books and I think I'm a bit disgruntled that it took me so long.

I enjoyed the Ministry of Time recently, really didn't get on with Shuggie Bain - just relentlessly depressing and misogynistic.

Thursday Murder Club series I've always had on audiobook - I'm not sure I'd get through reading them. I love the way Osman writes characters and relationships but the plot lines are ludicrous.

I find the same issue with all McEwan’s books. There are superb passages in them all but they don’t hang together as a whole. It’s as if he wrote them in chunks, having good days and bad days, and then joined the bits together, not very successfully.

I actually cried at the bit in Chesil Beach where the aged hero retraces the journey over the Chilterns that he made to visit his sweetheart as a young man. Also, the bit where Bryony Tallis goes off for a sulk after the cousins fail to take her play seriously is the best account of a teenage flounce I’ve ever read.

Agree that the following were awful:
Midnight Library
Da vinci code (quite fun but sent my DM into proper Qanon online rabbit hole territory which i cannot forgive)
Sally rooney
Eat pray love
Adie LaRue
A little life (depressing and unrealistic portrait)

Disagree, and enjoyed:
Wolf hall and sequels (amazing)
Crawdads and Life of Pi
Thursday murder club (quick and amusing, a bit formulaic)
Like the Strike series though some of the middle ones needed a more ruthless editor

Additional recent disappointments:
Black cake
In memoriam
Braiding sweetgrass (dnf)

I do enjoy Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. And Amir Towles. And loved Niall Wiliams This is Happiness. Also liked American Dirt. Brilliant non-fiction I am re-listening to: Empire of Pain. And Mick Herton's Slough House series- just wonderful.

Otherwise, I am mostly sticking with classics: Trollope, tolstoy, Mitford, Waugh, even Proust. At least they use quotation marks. Don't buy new books new - they turn up in charity shops or get gifted!!