Have you ever thrown a book in the bin?

[HopSpringsEternal]

I did yesterday for I think the 3rd time in my life.
The first was that book by Gina Ford when DS1 was about 2 weeks old. It was all the rage at the time but DS definitely didn't want to follow the rules. In fact it was DH that threw it out and I was definitely a lot more.content.
The second was when I got out my old Doctor Dolittle books to read the kids and I realised they were littered with the N word. In a sort patronising racist way "the nice n man". Didn't want that word seen or normalised by any other kids so in the recycling it went.
The last was yesterday. Lying in bed realised their was a Neil Gaiman book on my book shelf. Didn't not want a book of that vile bastard staring at me so into the bin he went.
Foot all other books if I don't want them anymore.I just take them to the charity shop. But I didn't want to inflict the above three on anybody else.
Has anyone else?

That book haunted me.

The film still lives rent free in my head [shudder]

Another book I absolutely loved.

I have only ever thrown one book away. It was a cookery book - when the third recipe I tried from it failed spectacularly. I’m a reasonable cook and it was clear None of the recipes had been tested. I then went online and gave it a terrible review and mentioned that I had binned it. Quite cathartic tbh…

I have threw one across the room, Normal People. Absolute pile of shite.

Lance Armstrong’s book on cycling. Threw that one in the bin with some force when it was confirmed that he’d been doping for years.

Twilight. I was reading it before my dd did- didn’t want it in my house. 50 Shades of Grey. Ditto.

I'm happy that I haven't seen it then. Likewise Adolescence.

Adolescence is fraught. I watched it because I love Stephen Graham but it was upsetting.

That was the one we had. I don't know if we still do; it might have had to go to a charity shop due to reasons of space. What happened to yours is far worse - I'm not sure I could forgive a let-down like that.

That's piqued my curiosity...

According to Yes, Dawn French.

I was going through a horrible time with lots of time to kill in hospital waiting rooms and thought it would be a nice distraction with a positive message. Nope. The main character provides the life affirming message by shagging three generations of men from the same family.
gross and not the empowering message promised.

Binned.

When I was 4-5, we had the Ladybird Book of Nursery Rhymes. It was a nice little book with beautiful illustrations, but it had to be passed onto a cousin because I couldn't stand the illustration of The Man in the Moon. Looking at him now with his old-style aviator's cap and his cup of tea, he looks like a cross between one of the Wright Brothers and Miss Marple, but little me could only see his angry red face and I'd cry bitterly at the sight of him.

That's interesting. I had Wuthering Heights as one of my set texts for A Level and hated it for similar reasons - horrible book full of horrible people and I thought that the whole thing was ridiculously overwrought.

I read Charlotte Bronte and Anne Bronte at around the same age and enjoyed their books far more.

That was 40 years ago so maybe I should give Wuthering Heights another try.

My 3 children once got 2 copies, in a library lucky dip, of a picture book about a child (well technically anthropomorphised hippopotamus) with a particular illness which has a support charity based in my town.
It was clearly a book written to help parents of kids with the illness explain what was happening to them, or explain to their friends why they couldn’t play any more, and for that purpose would have been perfectly good.
The charity had clearly donated a whole pile of them to the library and some bright spark thought it would be appropriate to wrap them up for a lucky dip.
But it terrified my kids and went straight in the bin….

The 7 Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is on my to read pile. I bought it on a whim when I was in a bookshop a couple of years ago and still haven't got round to reading it.

It seems to be pretty universally despised on this thread. Could anyone (ideally without spoilers) say why they hated it so much?

.

Yes, it seems to have been a bit Marmite-y for reviewers. A Pulitzer Prize on the one hand and some accusations of being callow and indulgent on the other. I can sympathise with the objections to an extent (I also think that Hilary Mantel needed a good editor to give her permission to use fewer words and scenes than the Cromwell-on-her-shoulder was bullying her into!), but, yes, a healthy and enjoyable disagreement.

I do see that it is the kind of writing that comes close to what, in less experienced hands, we would readily castigate for being too caught up in insufficiently processed autobiographical unhappiness. That is also what is so challenging about the Bell Jar -- which I confessed upthread to binning then unbinning. If ANY other writer than Plath had written such rawly suicidal stuff, it would have been embarrassing emotional exhibitionism, the stuff best kept to private diaries

I'd have done the same with the Gina Ford book...utter insanity it was!

I really liked this book when I read it, just shows we're all different

Couldn’t actually bin it, since it was a library book, but chucked it right across the room. Turned out right at the end that the whole story of the character’s life - as you thought - was only what should have been, that had flashed through her head in the seconds before she was killed in a road accident.
How that ever got past an editor I will never understand.

The Imaginary by AF Harrold. I hid this one until DC old enough as the blurb made it sound frightening at their age then. Some years later I read it and threw it away because it was actually disturbing and I didn’t want to traumatise some child beneficiary of it in second hand circulation.

Which reminds me, I find it fascinating that despite how well this sold, even inexplicably winning a debut novel award, the author's second novel has STILL not turned up. She said she was working on it in January 2018. A publication date of September 2024 came and went. A publication date of February 2025 came and went.

The film was optioned in 2017 and was talked about being made in 2018 but never happened. Suggests it all went off the boil quite quickly.

Completely agree about Eleanor Oliphant. It read like a self-published novel by an overly optimistic wannabe.

If it hadn't been hyped I would have just shrugged and said "Not much good, but well done the author for finishing it and getting it accepted for publication" but I was really annoyed to have been duped by the (presumably heavily curated) buzz around it.

That seems to happen more these days - barely publishable books getting rave attention. Publishing seems to be a marketing exercise first and foremost, to a greater extent than of yore.

I must confess, unless this is hyperbole, it does really bewilder me. (Although I think surely it must be hyperbole!)

If a book infuriates or disgusts me, at most I'll make a sound of disgust and slam it shut, then lay it aside. Not literally hurl it across a room. I can't imagine doing that. For starters, it might hit something!