I'm going to get hate for this, but I did not enjoy The Handmaid's Tale at all. I didn't care for the style of writing or the narrator. It's been over 10 years since I read it, so I can't say much else, but I do not understand the hype.

I wouldn't advise reading Dune. Got through two amd a half books before finally wondering what the hell I was doing to myself.

Torment Saint by William Todd Schultz

Ravelstein. I get it's partially autobiographical, but Bellow seems to have no clear understanding of what the book was supposed to do. In some sense my final thought was 'what a couple of quirky academics', way too superficial a takeaway for a Bellow book.

The Illuminatus Trilogy.

Forest Gump

No, I've read Dune since. I liked it

Battle Ground by Jim Butcher was terrible. I knew it would be, because the first half of the book was terrible, but I enjoyed so many other Dresden Files books. Part of it was having gotten older, but it's still bad and my last Dresden Files book.

Swords and Deviltry By Fritz Leiber is also pretty bad. It's a different kind of bad, and I understand why it is less good to a modern reader such as myself, but Leiber wrote better stories twenty years before he published this one.

Doctor Faustus

i read the first 3, before i realized i could just drop it.

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After I finished Where the Crawdads Sing, I felt like I wasted my time trying to like a book that apparently a lot of people really enjoyed. The story immediately fell off at the end with a quick resolve time skip. I felt like I was still left with a lot of questions and nothing seemed believable for a book that was supposed to be considered realism.

the books will never go away. if you ever run out of books to read, you can pick it up again.

The movie is unending and torturous, I can only imagine how tedious the book is.

I read stranger in a strange land by robert heimlin. Stopped near the end when the plot went off the rails. I wasn't enjoying the preverse family swap elitist nonsense, but kept reading because it was the only book in the house. Had to stop when it became clear he was just making it up as he went along, just an excuse to write about fucking your kids I guess.

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Two thirds of the Ender/Bean books

Too many to list but 2 I recently read Don Delilo's White Noise (it's a movie out soon) and Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children. I hated them both. I didn't like the writing style of either and thought they were poorly written and over hyped.

I didn't get that one either. I'm assuming the TV show is a lot different.

The Devil Wears Prada. The screenwriter did the author a huge favor. Horrid book. Hated every character.

Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. Too many words about fishing that gave me a headache. This the first book that made me remember English is my 2nd language lol. I felt like I was just learning how to read and translate.

Lydia Millet’s “A Children’s Bible”. I’d give the first 80% of the book a solid B-, which was why I got to the end. It was just barely good enough to keep going. But the end was just wretched on so many levels. It was sloppily plotted for one thing; she literally falls back on a deus ex machina to get out of the corner she wrote herself into. But what’s worse the allegory and moralizing just punch you in the face. It’s the kind of ham fisted garbage you’d expect from a freshman taking his first creative writing class. It honestly makes a Chick tract look subtle and nuanced.

Right. I stopped reading this book about 1/4 of the way in. Life is too short.

I agree. It's an interesting concept, but doesn't go far enough to write beyond the obvious plot points.

The Midnight Library

Didn't like it as well, for the exact same reason. I like the idea of the book, but that's it.

Definitely Hidden Bodies lol

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Feels like Clarke is trying really hard to imitate Dickens, but falls wildly short. And the footnotes, ugh.