Books you want to throw across the room

[tobee]

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?

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.

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

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.

deeply unpleasant liking, not dislike! Duh.

Twilight and Fifty Shades of grey. Infuriating drivel.

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

Ha! Love these intense reactions.

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

Ugh. American Psycho.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Outlander.

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.

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

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

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

We are all completely beside ourselves - utter bilge.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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!).

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.