Which authors/books do you hate?

I haven't posted here yet? Meh. Couldn't find any posts here by me.

Books to Stab:
-An American Childhood by Anne Dillard (SO utterly pointless and terrible)
-House on Mango Street by I don't remember who (Random. Really, really random with no real point)
-Anything by Maya Angelou (URGH! Die.)
-Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (I'm reading that in English. Total snoozefest. "I don't want to trouble you with my life story, but here it is anyway!" Stab.)
-That idiotic Eragon series by that unmentionable idiot. Grr. (Do I need to say it?)

Raye, I have great faith that there is at least one person on YWS better than Paolini. (I know, I know, it was picked up by a real publishing company, &c. - but not everyone has the time or money to go around promoting their work, and let's be honest, the company just wanted a fantasy novel and a prodigy. The only marketable thing about the book is that it was written by a fifteen year old.)

Also, sometimes, no matter how long someone works on something - it sucks. I could paint for years and the painting would, unfortunately, still suck. Effort does not always translate into skill.

We're reading "Beowulf" right now in English.

The Story:
Beowulf Brags
Beowulf defeats monster.

Repeat as many times as needed. Feel free to through in some ridiculously long speech in there while you're at it.

It's not horrible really, but it's got no depth, and really, no point.

There are no authors that I really hate, and it seems quite stupid to have a "personal vendetta" against an author if you don't personally know them. Sure, there are authors whose writing I don't like, or whose books that I consider horrible. But hating an author? I don't think I'd do that, not unless they had a habit of hitting small animals with hammers, or something along those lines.

So. Authors and books I don't like:

~ Marianne Curley, definitely. I read Old Magic and it was pretty bad... I really dislike her writing style and it was terribly boring.

~ Of course, I don't like Paolini/Eragon. Something about Eragon's tendency to black out at the end of every chapter really irked me.

~ When I was little, I really loathed the Babysitter's Club books.

~ I'm not the biggest fan of Mark Twain. I tried to read Huck Finn and it blew.

~ "Classic" horse books are annoying. They're all the same; they all feature the young country lad named something along the lines of Jim who gets a colt who does amazing things when it grows up. Gag me with a spoon.

~ Somethingsomething Hunter, who wrote the Warriors series. After awhile it ceased being like a series of books about cats and more like a really bad soap opera that just happens to have cats as the main characters.

~ Most classics. I find it amusing how a lot of people will go around saying, "I want classics! They're so gooooood!!!" and then proclaim how much they hate modern fiction. I never am sure if they're telling the truth or not... And I actually don't care that much. But still...

And probably others, but nothing else off the top of my head.

Peace, love, chocolate.

Muffin

Well now **cracks knuckles**

I just finished reading two of the most annoying books I have ever laid eyes on.

"Jeannie of White Peak Farm" By Berlie Doherty
and
"Falling from Grace" by Jane Godwin

The latter was a rather good book, and I enjoyed it a lot... then I came to the ending. It seemed to drag and drag til it could no longer. God that bugged me.

The Former, however, Jeannie, you had to drain each page by reading it over and over again to get all the facts...

Apparently the mums name is Madge... took me a while to figure that out...

also the way they talk... This book was written in the 80s. Tell me why their speech varies from the 1800s to modern day slang? Drove me insane too. Ugh.

about 3 times during Jeannie I thought to myself "I'm still READING THIS?"

But, you never know, it might have been a decent book 20 years ago?

Ani May, I'd have to agree with you about Beowulf, except that I think it gets let off the hook for being so ... old.

I enjoyed Beowulf, actually. Maybe because it was so repetitive after a while, lol (the only time you'll catch me saying something like that )

I didn't particularly care for The Color Purple. It just went so slowly, and then when it did go somewhere, it was in some insane direction. The contradiction of it, real, gritty, issues presented almost-dream like, plus the fact that it was written in an accent (I love accents, but to write a whole book in them is rather tiresome to read after a while) equals Amelia driven off the wall with frustration.

~ Somethingsomething Hunter, who wrote the Warriors series. After awhile it ceased being like a series of books about cats and more like a really bad soap opera that just happens to have cats as the main characters.

Erin Hunter, hon, and I think she's actually pretty good. ^_^ Then again, I haven't gotten that far in yet.


OK, I'll admit, the same old "tussle over food and territory" thing DID get kinda old by "Fire and Ice" (THE SECOND BOOK, lol), but hey, that's what humans do, right?

Let's see.

I'm feeling very anti-Stine at the moment. I think he's the dude who wrote the Goosebumps series? Yeah....

Erin Hunter, hon, and I think she's actually pretty good. ^_^ Then again, I haven't gotten that far in yet.

GAH! Erin Hunter! *runs off to stab little sister who's accululated large collection of said books and is scarily obsessed*

Someone also pursuaded her to try reading Lord of the Rings, *shudder* so I'm waiting for her to die a horrible slow death.

My current hate is House, by Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker.

It's really, really bad. Were it not for the fact it were a gift and I'm going to be asked about it, it'd already be in the charity shop >.>

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. Frequent use of the F word is disgusting and also it was written in the narrator's accent! I couldn't even understand most of it.

Let's see. The two summer reading books I was assigned are somewhere near the bottom for me: Atlas Shrugged and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The former was simply an essay expanded into a 1000+ page novel, and the latter was just repeatative and annoying. It also seemed like the author was trying too hard to be creative/inovative, and the 9-year-old narrator was just so darn irritating.

Also not a fan of Tolkein. I've tried reading LotR, really, but I just don't enjoy the reading equivilant of slogging through a thick, seemingly endless bog. Just too. Much. Description. I can see why other people would like it, though; the plot seems rewarding enough. And it does deserve props for being the first of its kind.

*drools over Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close*

I actually quite like it- it's not as good as his first book, but it's still very interesting. Some scenes are a little 'WTF?' [as in, all of the art store scenes], but I don't know. I have really strange emotions regarding 9/11, so it's more personal for me to read. I usually feel like crying, which I don't do very often- and if a book can make me do that, I automatically count it as pretty good. ^_~

Two new ones:

The Iliad- I don't quite understand why we have to read this. The Odyssey is pretty good, actually, and I enjoy reading it, but the Iliad is basically a laundry list of things we only read because other people were forced to as well. My English teacher described its symbolism in thirty minutes, and it was just like, "Why couldn't we just talk about the philosophy of ancient Greece in a a way that doesn't take three hundred pages...?"

Ready or Not- I actually kind of like Meg Cabot, because she has a sense of humor, and the main characters occaisionally fall in love with nerds. It's kind of a personal victory thing for me. But an entire angsty book about whether or not to have sex with your boyfriend? Gag me. Either do or don't, but don't whine at me for two hundred pages about it.

Myth wrote:Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. Frequent use of the F word is disgusting and also it was written in the narrator's accent! I couldn't even understand most of it.

Didn't that have a movie version, too?

I liked the film by the same name. *shrug*

Haha, I probably shouldn't say this, seeing as I am about to go listen to a talk by the author, but Monique and the Mango Rains didn't do it for me. It was very well written, and not at all preachy, but the college assigning it to us was, if that makes sense. God's truth is that the idea of giving birth squicks me, African culture doesn't interest me at all, and frankly, I don't want to read about either of those things. I had the hardest time reading this book; some of the descriptions of births gone wrong disgusted me in the worst way.

[spoiler]... and it's one of those books where the main character dies. I hate those.*[/spoiler]


---
*ironically, this also happens in my favorite book, but it is the exception that proves the rule