Hate-reading?
I've been working through my read list and for a while everything was either phenomenal or good enough to entertain.
Then this one. My goodness. I don't like the author. I don't like the narrator. I don't like the other of two characters in the story (so far). I'm piqued by the central mystery, but I can just tell that this is one of those stories where the mystery is going to remain an abstract MacGuffin around which the characters and their flaws are explored. I can't imagine any of this will turn around, but I'm on chapter 3 and about a third of the way through.
So now I'm faced with the choice to finish or abandon. I've been trying to finish it because a friend of mine mentioned having a personal policy of finishing every book she starts, and I am inspired by that. But so far it's just lead to reader's block.
I'm going to get through it, because I'm stubborn, but I don't think I'll enjoy it. Has anyone else ever hate-read a story? What was it? I'm happy to share the one that spawned this thread but only if people want to hear about a book that I've judged in the first third.
(this is all light-hearted, I wouldn't read it if I really hated it that much)
Life is too short and there are way too many amazing novels/shows/movies that I haven't finished yet for me to waste my time powering through one that I'm not at least somewhat enjoying. The only exception to that is if, despite not necessarily being an enjoyable process getting through it, I know that finishing it will ultimately be an enriching/worthwhile/fulfilling/enlightening experience.
The only book I can think of that I legitimately "hate-read" was Atlas Shrugged. I dislike Ayn Rand, and view modern Libertarianism as a selfish, short-sighted, naive, and destructive political ideology. But I wanted to know where they got some of their core beliefs from, so I'm still somewhat glad I read it even though I hated everything about it.
I briefly dated an Objectivist in college, so I read it then, but I still had to skip the 80 page Jon Gault speech.
Pro tip: do not read Any Rand if you're doing group work in college and often carrying the team. It will make you both frustrated and insufferable.
Lol, I came to mention Atlas shrugged as well. I had some extra audible credits (I haven't had time for a while now) and decided to get Atlas Shrugged for similar reasons to you.
Its something like 50 or 60 hours though... so I don't know if I'll get through it if it sucks.
If you're anything like me, prepare to say "oh, for fucks sake!" and "really? give me a break!" out loud several dozen times throughout the experience. The world she constructed is basically a giant strawman argument against the idea of altruism, the main characters are all Mary Sue/Übermensch, self-made heroes/heroines, and all the villains are cartoonishly evil "parasites" with no in betweens. It's genuinely hard to believe that anyone took it seriously, even as an allegorical piece of fiction.
Shiiit. I honestly don't know if I'll be able to slog through that then.
The story itself is okay-ish, I guess, if you can look past the blatant moralizing, how absolutely unrealistic all the characters are, and the preachy monologues by several of those characters... like the notorious and absurdly long John Galt speech. But as my favorite quote about the book put it:
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
So YMMV. ;)
Hilarious. I, too, was about to add Atlas Shrugged. For me I tried reading it at a point in life when I finally broke the chain of shitty short-lived jobs and found a good job at a large company. So, the book initially appealed to me as it seemed to be praising hard-working people. But then it kept dragging out and it lost me. I abandoned it about a third of the way through. Many years later, on a day I was very bored, I ended up watching the movie to just find out how the story actually ends. And now that I think about it, I can’t even remember in much detail. Must have been a bad movie on top of everything!
My Atlas Shrugged story is that in high school while looking up scholarships, one required writing a book report on it. I got through something like three chapters before realizing that it wasn’t anywhere near worth the value of the scholarship to spend my time reading it, and completely dismissing Rand’s entire bullshit philosophy.
To be fair it taught me an important lesson: if a position cannot be directly argued for, it isn’t worth listening to. If objectivism actually made sense, Rand wouldn’t have needed to try to hide it behind theatrics.
This sparked a thought - I'm not sure I agree with this. At least, not as such a categorical statement. I remember reading in a biography of Lincoln, for example, that he was a master of anecdote and analogy, honed over long debates in roadside inns when he was a traveling lawyer.
Later in life, he was arguing for a policy of opposing the expansion of slavery but not immediately banning it in southern states. He crafted the famous analogy of coming up to your baby's crib and seeing a snake in it. Obviously, you don't want the snake in there. If you have another crib, you're not going to put a snake in there. But instead of trying to snatch the snake out, for fear that it will bite the baby, better to try to lure it out on its own.
He wasn't arguing directly for the abolition of slavery because it was an intensely heated topic and people stopped listening to each other immediately when it came up. Through an analogy, though, he could reach them.
I think it's very similar for a lot of philosophical topics. How many people can truly understand, say, the categorical imperative and how it stacks up against utilitarianism? But we can all immediately intuit the moral strength of someone like Gandhi and learn from his example.
My broader point I suppose is that things are complicated! I can't agree with a categorical statement that if something can't be argued for directly, it's not worth listening to.
The difference between these examples is that Lincoln could and did directly prove his point. Anecdote and metaphor were used to transmit those ideas to those who would not listen. Ayn Rand published those fiction books but never bothered to publish a nonfiction accounting of her philosophy. Why? To obscure the obvious shortcomings of her positions.
I can't speak to how she lived and talked because I was not witness to such things, but it strikes me as the same kind of strategy we hear Donald Trump doing all the time. He says a lot of things but he doesn't make any strong claims. It's plausable deniability. It feels like this so-called "original school of philosophy" is less of an actual invention of hers, and more so a collection of what she could get away with people believing after pushing her works for decades. This is what I feel is the heart of why reading her books is such a hollow experience; there's a distinct lack of substance behind it.
But then again, perhaps I'm not qualified to say these things about Rand. After all, I've never completed the entirety of any of her books.
She actually did publish a few nonfiction philosophy and essay books about Objectivism, but they were all really really late into her career. See: For the New Intellectual and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, for example. I never bothered reading any of her other books besides Atlas Shrugged though, for obvious reasons. ;)
TIL! Thanks for the info.
If only you had "pulled yourself up by your bootstraps", stopped being a "parasite" and became a "producer" instead, and written the essay to earn yourself that Rand Foundation scholarship, imagine how different your life would be!!! :P
That's kind of what my perspective is. I don't really "hate" the book, but I'm not enjoying it and am reasonably sure I won't. But I didn't enjoy The Good Earth when I had to read it in school, or right after I was done, but decades later it's stuck with me more than most books I read growing up. I'm glad I was forced to finish it.
My first novel I ever read when I was young, The Legend of Huma, took me three tries to finish. I knew I should enjoy it because it had a dragon on the cover, but the writing was completely new to me and it took me several unenjoyable attempts before it clicked. I remember that what clicked, specifically, was not obsessing over understanding every sentence but just moving through the story. I was a little inexperienced for what I was reading and just needed to get past that before the book came alive and I started reading Dragonlance novels back to back.
A more recent example was We Have Always Lived in the Castle, from a tildes recommendation thread I started a while back. I didn't enjoy it at all in the beginning, and there wasn't really a moment I can point to when I did, but by the end I liked it a lot. I don't think that'll be the case with the book I'm on now, but who knows.
I agree with you about walking away at the right time, but I'm both an inexperienced and insecure reader. I've not exposed myself or challenged myself with many genres beyond formulaic high fantasy with happy endings. So at this point in my journey I'm trying to challenge myself to read things I would've given up on before. If I truly truly hate it, I'd put it down, but in this case "hate-reading" is just a play on it's vulgar cousin. I don't really hate it. It's more like reading with a grudge.
Yeah, there are definitely loads of books I've read in my life that I didn't actually enjoy reading, per se, but that I persisted with because I knew they would likely still be worthwhile. And in retrospect, those are often the books that have impacted me the most, and stuck with me the longest too. E.g. Man's Search for Meaning, Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, Tao Te Ching, The Analects, Art of War, The Prince, The Road, Lord of the Flies, and TBH even LOTR and Dune (which can both be real slogs at stages).
So I would definitely recommend occasionally challenging yourself, even if you are an inexperienced reader. The trick is just to find the right balance between enjoyment, so you actually keep up the habit of reading, and challenging yourself so you get something more substantial out of reading than just entertaining yourself. Although the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive either, since plenty of enjoyable books can still have profound depth to them, IMO. E.g. Hitchhiker's Guide, anything by Vonnegut, PKD, Asimov, Heinlein, etc. ;)
I know this isn't quite what you were referring to when you coined hate-reading, but you reminded me of an unfortunate (and hilarious, at my expense) experience I had with a book a few years back.
I was reading Robert K Massie's biography of Peter the Great. it was an absolute tome at just shy of 1000 pages, but fortunately I had a major surgery coming up shortly after starting that would give me plenty of time to read it. Massie's prose is wonderful and I was fascinated the entire way through, so the painful recovery from my urinry tract procedure was dulled somewhat by the fact that I had this book to enjoy reading during my recovery.
... That was until I got to the last fifty or so pages and learned that Peter I of Russia died from a bladder infection, likely from surgery on his urinary tract. I distinctly remember laying in my bed in recovery reading about 18th century wooden catheters while painfully aware of my own and wanting to throw the damn book across the room. I had enjoyed hundreds of pages of history only for a cruel coincidence to ruin the last chapter or so. I powered through, but think I would have gladly DNF'd if I wasn't so close to the end.
Okay, this got a big laugh out of me. I'm so sorry it happened like that. Did you end up getting over it end enjoying the book in hindsight, or is it forever the book that predicted your death by UTI? Hopefully you're doing better these days.
Oh I can definitely look back on it now and laugh. I did end up having to go back a few weeks later with a nasty post-surgery infection and was almost certain Tsar Peter had cursed me.
I can honestly say it's the best biography I've ever read, and one of my favourite non-fiction books. It won a Pulitzer prize, and very much deserved to in my opinion. I've since purchsed Nicholas and Alexandra by the same author and hope to read that soon - I already know how that story will end and I'm fairly certain I won't suffer the same fate!
(And thank you for your well wishes. I won't go in to details for obvious reasons but the surgery fixed an ongoing issue for me that has greatly improved my quality of life. Thanks, modern medicine!)
Likewise, I slogged my way through most of the "uncut" version of Stephen King's The Stand while in bed with a bad case of the 'flu and pneumonia. Not only did it make me more anxious about the neverending cough, the book desperately needed the editing done with the original version. There was just too much gratuitous cruelty and gore left in, and the plot meanders were too hard for a feverish brain to follow. The religious metaphors were even more heavy-handed, and I was left wondering what personal traumas King was working through.
Now that you mention it, I DNF'd A Gentleman in Moscow a dozen or so pages in as we went in to lockdown during the pandemic shortly after I picked it up. This could probably become it's own thread at this point!
Out of curiosity, did you read both versions of The Stand? I haven't read it myself but I'm familiar with the history of the two versions and I'm curious. I usually reread at least one book per year, but the only time I've ever read a different version of the same book would be two different translations of The Count of Monte Cristo.
Though I'm certain I read both versions, it was many years ago and all I recall is that the "uncut" version was a much worse slog than the original release. I didn't think any of the included material contributed to the book as a story - the pacing and intelligibility of the plot suffered.
Spoiler warning
I thought Flagg was a more interesting villain in the original, when King didn't spend so much time on demonstrating that he was supernatural and demonic.There was more wallowing in the ghastly details of the "Captain Trips" superflu and what a pandemic apocalypse would look like. I think I'd read Richard Preston's The Hot Zone and Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague around that time, and had a really hard time with a pandemic as horror entertainment.
I only started free reading again as an adult after I gave myself permission for two things: I can read fun fiction, and I never have to finish a book I realize I'm not enjoying. That last one was a bigger deal coming from a mindset that felt like if I didn't finish a book, that was somehow a failure on my part. And in the end I just stopped reading.
So yeah, I'm pro team "put the book down, it may not be for you and you can always come back to it later." I think maybe some brains do well with the "I have to finish everything book I start," but for me it just made me hate reading. And I've finished substantially more books giving myself grace to put a few down along the way. That said I try to give a book 20-50% before I give up, and there were a couple I pushed through hoping in vein they were going to turn it around and catch my attention by the end. But there were also a few I got maybe 4 chapters into and knew pretty quickly it just wasn't a book for me.
So you say you're going to push through, but this internet stranger votes that you should table it for now because you could instead be reading something you really like. There's only so much time you'll get to spend reading in life after all. Why waste more than you need to "fun" reading stuff you don't like?
There are two books I have hate read in my lifetime.
The first was The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald may be a wonderful author, but I hated all of the characters so much. I would have stopped reading a few chapters in if it were not a school assignment.
The second was Maia by Richard Adams. It is the sequel to Shardik, which is my personal all time favorite. It is so incredibly long; it’s something like 800 pages to my memory. And most of it is just plodding along. There’s a political revolution in there somewhere but by the time it happens I had long stopped being interested in the society it happened in. The ideas in the book are also just plain bad. It’s about a young girl who gets sold into slavery by her parents, later becomes a sex slave, and there is a very unnecessary lesbian sex scene. I am a pretty masculine guy, but it was pretty obvious that the author didn’t know much about what it is like to be female, which is a problem because most of the book is from Maia’s perspective! The book basically killed any idea of how good a person I thought the author was.
I have pretty much arrived at the point where I will allow myself to DNF any book I am not enjoying. I even DNFed a three-book series halfway through the last book.
The most useful hate read I ever had was Digital Fortress by Dan Brown. The research is exceedingly bad, the plot is shallow, and his understanding of the tech is laughable.
Spoiler
A critical element of the plot turns on the fact that, in the inner sanctum of the government's most secret digital spy agency, people don't lock their workstations, they just turn down the brightness on the monitor. Not even just, you know, turn the monitor off. But actually dial the brightness down. Totally absurd.
But, I was on a very long drive when I was listening to it, and my annoyance helped keep me awake. So there was that.
I read Digital Fortress in high school and enjoyed it but I do remember it being a bit... out there lol. 2010 me had questions about the likelihood of all that stuff. Deception Point is even more fun.
I let myself DNF the final book in a trilogy somewhat recently. I'm still kind of upset about it but it was just the same plot as the previous two but with elements that were ickier. Not a fan of reusing single-book plots in a short series...
I did this with the Sword of Truth novels. The first bunch were pretty good. Standard fantasy stuff. Then the story started getting dumb and the author's politics became more and more tied into the plot.
At some point the protagonist is living undercover in the evil empire country. It's a communist state with crumbling infrastructure. He starts a revolution by showing how the free market and pursuit of profit makes everything better for everyone.
But I was like 5 books into the series and wanted to see how it ended, so I read 2 more books that I didn't really enjoy.
I powered through the last books of the series when I really shouldn't have. All the way through the original end of the series. I was young and dumb enough to enjoy Faith of the Fallen and I didn't realize it was just a ripoff of some Ayn Rand novel. (I'm not even sure I knew who she was at the time.) But even I wasn't dumb enough to think Naked Empire was anything but trash. Why I kept going after that is a bit of a mystery. When it required lots of skimming to finish a book, that should have been a sign that I shouldn't keep spending my money on such ranty garbage.
Thank you for posting this thread. As it happens, I've just quit reading The Castle by Franz Kafka, at around the half-way point.
Thematic spoilers:
This is an interesting one. The premise, theme, and atmosphere are well-presented, and the absurd character interactions are rather funny. Unfortunately, the story moves very slowly, and (as far as the point I've reached) makes no tantalising promises of picking up later.Metanarratively, this seems to be in keeping with the main theme. The Castle is a story about a man being sent in circles through a labyrinthine beureaucracy, while navigating arbitrary obstacles and petty squabbles. It becomes clear early on that the main character is making no progress towards his goals, and with his strategy probably never will. The 'prize' he's aiming for isn't particularly desirable in the first place, and certainly not worth the time and effort that he is expending.
The obvious question is: why doesn't the main character just leave and do something else with his life?
The next question is: why am I still reading this? The story is repeating itself. I'm not learning anything new. I don't hate it, but I'm not particularly enjoying it. I don't expect it to be much different later.
So I stopped. Was that the point? Did I 'win'?
I can extra relate to this. While not the book that inspired me to start this thread, I read another one recently that wasn't a hate read but I still felt very much like you.
Spoilers
I read House of Leaves. If you haven't (and don't plan to), the book is a multi-layered narrative. The inner story is about a photographer and his family who find an infinitely large, ever-resizing labyrinth in their home. The next layer is a video documentary made about the experience. The next layer is an book written about the that does on many meandering diatribes about only slightly related things. The next layer is the neighbor of the person who wrote the book, who collected his notes posthumously and compiled them for publishing. And then the final layer is the actual book I was reading about all of it.Every layer of the book, down to how the pages were formatted (with occasionally non-linear layouts), heavily referenced the Labyrinth (capital 'L') from mythology. I realized somewhat early in that the book itself was meant to be a labyrinth, complete with long-meandering dead ends and back-treading. It was clever for sure, but once I got past the cleverness I found myself asking the same question as you. It was like, okay, I figured out the thing -- I'm in a labyrinth when I read the book -- but should I finish?
In my case I did finish, and it might've been almost a hate read. I did enjoy it but only because once I understood what I was reading, I lowered my expectations for the type of story it was (not that it was a bad story by any means, but did not go deeper where I wanted it to go deeper, and frequently went deep where I didn't want it to).
The book frequently made me wonder if I wasn't smart enough for it, while at other times I was sure that the perplexed feeling I had was intended. I mention in another reply here that I'm an insecure reader, so I'm constantly trying to decide if I can learn something new from something, or if it's simply not for me. I am glad I finished House of Leaves, but would've enjoyed a book about just the inner layer (the family in the labyrinth house) or just the outer layer (the unreliable narrator with a backstory that moved me to tears several times, which is the only book to have done so).
I used to have the same rule where I would force myself to finish any book I had started, mostly just for my inner completionist (and a sense of snobby pride), although sometimes it does takes a little while for a story to rev up and I wanted to give it a chance. I did end up hate reading a few books that make my all time Worst List (exacerbated by my disgust at forcing myself to continue reading them), but there are also a few DNFs that even I couldn't stomach.
I typically read books for some kind of positive reason, either they were reviewed well or they're by an author I really respect. So I haven't read too many straight up bad-bad books (aside from Twilight and 50 Shades for the lulz...which ended up being more painful than anything, and I stopped after one book), which possibly makes my list look a bit different from lists of truly bad books. Mine are bad because typically I expected better of them and they betrayed me.
Worst (betrayal): The Amber Spyglass, Name of the Wind, PS I Love You, Mirror Mirror
Worst (just bad): Twilight, A Court of Thorns and Roses, 50 Shades of Gray, Angels and Demons
DNF: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Pillars of the Earth, Walden
Some of these are beloved and I am utterly baffled why people like them, aside from nostalgia. But I also like books that I know are on other people's worst lists (like the Silmarillion), so it all balances out.
Oh, no! It's true that the ending is... weaker than the first two books.
What did you think of the TV show?
I know...this is one of those series that is beloved by people who read it when they were small, but I read it first in my 20s and was incensed at Pullman for destroying his characters and plot for the sake of getting back at CS Lewis. I never watched the show, in part because my headcanon of what Lyra and Iorek Byrnison look and act like are way cooler than they could ever be in real life, and I don't want my visualization of them to be affected. How did you feel about the show?
Honestly, it was surprisingly good. It suffers from the usual TV-show-itis symptoms of unnecessary changes (gotta keep Lin-Manuel Miranda on screen!), sometimes odd pacing, lack of proper introspection leading to an excessive focus on action, etc. but it worked pretty well as a TV show. The main plot beats are there and the fantasy world scenes look pretty great. I remember enjoying the way they did some of the characters quite a bit, Marisa Coulter for example.
EDIT: I remember in one of the seasons fans were complaining because the daemons barely appeared at all. It's likely that they got a different budget each season and that got reflected on what they were able to produce.
Was this because he still hasn't finished the damn series? Or other reasons specific to the book itself?
Unfortunately, I found the protagonist to be a total Gary Stu jackass, and his constant humblebragging and tripping over attractive young women, for me, just left me rolling my eyes. Skimming a synopsis of the next book, I am not remotely surprised he somehow becomes a sex god, because of course he does. While I sympathize with everyone crying out for a third book, I am not one of them :)
Got it haha, that's totally fair! I was much younger when I read Name of the Wind so that might be why I didn't clock the Gary Stu-ishness. And I never actually read Wise Man's Fear (I was not allowed to at the time lol) and eventually took it off my TBR when I realized the third was never coming. Sounds like I didn't miss much!
It's so tough to judge the quality of art objectively, because so much of how we feel about it depends on who we are at the time. Like whether you read a book when you're 8 or 38 matters a lot to how you feel about it, and it's hard to disentangle those feelings! I was upset because I'd seen it listed so many times as a fantastic fantasy series, and when I was finally able to snag a copy from the library, I felt really disappointed and vastly underwhelmed, especially because the story is so dude-centric and I felt like we'd come a long way from those kinds of plots. Eight year old me may have loved it...39 year old me really did not.
Definitely. On a simple level, you absolutely cannot appreciate some things when you're young, even if you still enjoy experiencing them. But on a deeper level, it's not just a matter of childhood vs adulthood - you continue to change throughout your life, and so does everything you bring to the table when engaging with a work of art.
I've hate read a few books, but I do try to give myself permission to DNF books I don't like. I'm also stubborn and will trudge through books I think I should like, but don't love. My main issue has generally been books that need a bit more of an edit because they're too long for no reason, as if the author was trying to hit a word count.
I occasionally hate-read but I try not to make it a habit. It depends how invested I am. Usually, I'll put down a book if it's grating too much. But there have been a couple that I've hate-read!
Recently, I knew somewhere in the first couple of paragraphs that a book would be dubious. It was set in the very small part of the country in which I grew up. This region has a very specific mix of flora, fauna, culture, etc. The author is not from here. She absolutely butchered it. I hate-read it and listed to my friends all the reasons they shouldn't read it. We had a good laugh, but I kind of feel like I took one for the team. People who aren't from here generally enjoy it. I might have enjoyed it if I wasn't from here, but we'll never know.
Then there are other books I just keep reading despite stuff that is mildly annoying because it's about the experience instead of the glowing prose. Not really a hate-read but not the most amazing quality one, either.
That's an interesting case. I think I'd also be compelled to finished something that was really specific to my area and all wrong. Like the morbid curiosity of watching a universally panned movie.
This is might be a bit controversial but I ended up hate-listening to The Notebook Trilogy by Ágota Kristóf. If it wasn’t for my book club I would never had finished it. I just couldn’t get into the premise of no patos what so ever. It was like alternative jazz music to me. I know a lot of people really appreciate this and I want to like it…but just don’t. To no surprise I was the only one not loving it.
"Hate" might be a bit strong, but I'm hate-reading the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan.
I absolutely love the world and the story (at least, past the first book, which is just the Lord of the Rings). But I do not like his writing style at all. There's too much irrelevant detail, and it's quite repetitive at times.
I just finished book 11, and the rest is written by Brandon Sanderson (who I do like as an author). I'm hoping I enjoy the last few books more than the previous ones.
I enjoyed the first Sanderson WoT book a great deal. The second one I didn't have a strong opinion about but I didn't really like the last one. I can't really elaborate why without spoiling it so I'll just leave it at that.
Overall I thought Sanderson did a good job at filling in, probably the best that could be done realistically but I still liked Jordan's writing better. Yes, there is a lot of detail but personally I enjoyed that. It's cozy in a way and let's me get transported to the setting.
Wheel of Time is a great example of something I hate read as a kid (up to book 11, lots of arguing about the quality of the books with online friends). By the time Sanderson was doing the final books I'd learned about the sunk cost fallacy and was no longer invested into continuing, so I never read those books. It's not because I don't like Sanderson - I've read most of his oeuvre and beta read for him - but after six chonky books' worth of mostly nothing happening and mostly characters I dislike I was just so done with that world.
If it makes you feel any better, you've already made it past the almost universally agreed upon low point of the series (book 10). Personally, I liked Sanderson's books. I thought they breathed some much-needed life into the series. Plus he made some of the characters I wasn't a huge fan of less obnoxious, which was nice.
I think there's an interesting demarcation between hate-reading and stubborn-reading. I don't care to DNF a book, so I have plenty of books I only completed for sake of stubbornness. I can only think of a few times I've done proper hate-reading, which I'd consider more akin to watching a perilously close bus crash rather than running to safety. Haunting Adeline is one example, for reasons I think would be fairly obvious to anyone who has heard of that book; reading it did psychic harm to my existence. Johnny Angel by Danielle Steel I went into expecting to be a hate-read but, while I didn't like it, it wasn't as bad as I anticipated. One that probably was the most hate and the least stubborn (owing largely due to its short length and how obviously bad it is going in) is The Tao of Management, which is an attempt to apply (imitate) the Tao Te Ching to the banal, mid-century, Office Space-style middle management ethos.
I believe the last hate-read I did was A Game of Thrones just about the time the show was announced. I was given the book by a friend to borrow (who prefaced it with "every character you love will die or make you hate them) and had a rough time, so I tried the audio book. I actually dropped it about halfway through to read Oliver by Dickens... if that shows anything about how much I wasn't into anything by Martin I guess. But my favorite character did live through the first book, was pretty awesome, and ended up becoming even more awesome in the series from what I understand (Arya).
I've read that Martin used to have a pretty strict editor, which helped keep the pace and focus of the early books. By the time the series blew up, though, I think editors felt a lot less able to critique his writing, which is what led to the meandering and lack of plot progression in later books, as well as excessive descriptions of feasts and clothes. I remember going back to reread part of book 1 and was shocked by how focused it was compared to the last published book. It's a real shame, and I think that's reflective of the quality of writing, not of the reader!
That honestly sounds awful... I mean, that the pace and focus were lost on later books because I definitely felt the first was an ADHD fest. And honestly, I also likely have it, but half the time I was just so confused as to what the hell was going on that before halfway through I quit caring altogether (and thus, Oliver Twist).
I didn’t finish reading more than a handful of fiction novels between the ages of 10 and 20; I recall finishing only:
From 20 to circa 30, I finished no fiction novels. I probably started reading close to zero as well.
A few years ago, I started reading fiction again and have finished about a book a week for several years. The motivation was to improve my sleep hygiene and to better model valuing literacy for my children. I attribute the success to two changes in how I approach reading fiction.
I gave myself permission to skip paragraphs that seem to contain only physical descriptions of people and places. I can’t visualize them and I don’t care about them. Maybe I don’t care about them because I can’t visualize them, but either way, I gave myself permission to skip those sorts of paragraphs that don’t seem relevant to moving the plot forward.
I also set aside any shame I may have felt about not finishing books in the past. Now I view unfinished books as stories on pause. I might finish them eventually, I might not, but the story is still there if I feel like hitting play. Essentially shifting from thinking about those books as “did not finish” to “not yet finished.”
When I was younger and had less disposable income, and also access to way fewer books, I'd do this. But for many years now, books are plentiful (if I read in english), there are more people writing - sometimes much less educated authors, since it's easier to "self" publish now - and while my finances are not super liquid I can always afford more books. So I'm happy to drop that garbage like a hot potato, rant about how bad it was on the internet and move on to the next adventure!
It's rare that I'll finish a book that I actively don't like. When I was younger I would pick one book and read straight through it, and there were a few books I remember not enjoying as much but wanting to finish so I could "get on to the next book" that I wanted to read. Now that I read books based on my mood, I'll often stop reading a book where I'm not excited for it and come back (sometimes years later) to finish it.
I did have two books that I dropped in recent years because of characters I found I didn't enjoy after loving the first book. I wouldn't say I was hate reading, but I definitely went further in to the book because I really enjoyed the first one, hoping that it would get better or click for me.
The Wall of Storms book two in The Dandelion Dynasty series by Ken Liu. I think part of why I bounced off the book was reading it as an audiobook. One of the main characters of the series is a young girl who is essentially a genius, who also the type of character to poke holes/question everything. Having her come before the emperor and start giving a critique of the Confucian style monarchy, and then later poking at the character system of writing, felt annoying to me.
Honestly, I could be misremembering details since I dropped this book ~6 years ago. The reason I think this book just didn't land for me was probably that it was an audiobook. I read the first book in that way and loved it, but I think spending the extra time with a character who I didn't really enjoy by needing to listen to the narrator talk through their thoughts instead of just reading through it led me to stop. I've thought about picking it up again since I loved the first one, but I've got 1k+ books on my read list that I'd like to get to so I'm not if/when I ever will.
I listen to a ton of podcasts and would take breaks from listening to them to listen to an audiobook. After this book, I decided to only use my listening time for podcasts. There are tons of great performances I'll miss out on from not listening to audiobooks, but I have more podcasts that I want to listen to than time to listen to them (hundreds of them that I've found that I think are interesting that I bookmark in my podcast app).
Zomblog II by T.W. Brown. I'm a sucker for post apocalyptic stories, especially ones that involve zombies. I'm a fan of a slow zombies, the fast ones can be interesting, but the element of the unrelenting horde of slow zombies that hone in on your location and one wrong move can spell the end of you and potentially the group of survivors you're with is interesting to me. I dropped this book purely because I couldn't stand the main character. The first 3/4 of the original Zomblog followed a character I really enjoyed in the form of a blog/journal about his experience in a zombie apocalypse. It's not the best written work, but it scratched an itch for me, and it was by an independent author, so I'm happy to cut him some slack. The book also took place in the area I grew up and lived in the US (the Pacific Northwest which can be fun seeing characters go to places I've been to personally). I would encourage anyone interested to check out the first book, the last quarter will likely determine if you will enjoy the following books in the series.
I've included spoilers below as to why I dropped the second book here in case anyone doesn't want to get spoiled on the series and try it for themselves.
Spoilers below
Around 3/4 of the way through the original Zomblog the main character gets infected and dies. The narration is picked up by the woman he was romantically involved with, whom he had helped rescue from your generic apocalyptic band of "raider" bad guys. This leads to an abrupt narration shift, which was a bit jarring but makes sense as you have a new person recording their thoughts, and I was down to explore things further.
She was immediately more callous and cold-hearted, where the previous main character was a bit warmer and wanting to save people. I initially wrote it off as someone who had been through a lot, especially a lot of sexual violence at the hands of the "raider" group. As things progressed, I just couldn't find myself liking or even rooting for her as a character.
She led a group of women splintering off from the group they were a part of because she wanted to explore some of the US before fuel stopped working, and they would be forced to stay in one location. Seemed like they had a good thing going on in their group, and I tend to enjoy a rebuild narrative, but I could understand her wanting to do this, and it lets us explore more of the country. Where things started to go completely downhill was this group's decision to raid a town, not for general survival supplies, but specifically for batteries for their sex toys, as I remember it saying they "have needs". She even remarked on this being potentially dangerous, but those "needs" must be met. This decision led to a sizable portion of her splinter group being (I want to say 1/3-1/2 of the group) being killed. Just such a brain-dead decision, and there was absolutely no remorse about the loss of life from the new main character about this, or really any reflection on this being a terrible idea. I would totally of understood mentioning this in context of running low on supplies or just looking for batteries for that as part of their normal scavenging, but they were good to go on everything else and chose specifically to do just so they could get off.
She also finds out that she is pregnant, and her immediate plan is to go to the compound that the previous main character was previously at but left to go scouting and to see who else was out there (can't remember the specifics), and once she is there to have the baby and immediately leave so she can continue her exploration. I know being a parent isn't for everyone, but this ended up being something that she continually focuses on, as obviously pregnancy is a huge thing and this is a diary format book. As someone who is a parent who puts his kids first, this is a headspace I found myself not really connecting with, and all her previous actions and general callous nature made me realize that I wasn't enjoying the books anymore. I tried giving the book breaks and every time I came back I just couldn't stand the character. I read in the other synopsises for the books further in the series that she was the main character, so my hope that she would be swapped out for someone else was dashed.
I don't know if it was really hate reading, but I read the first book in the Expeditionary Force series a try and there were moments where the clunky writing and grammar and weird mismatched sentences sure felt like hate reading.
So many times I'd have to reread the same sentence over because I got to the end and thought I skipped a line and read the first half of one sentence and the last half of a different one... only to confirm that, nope, that's actually how it was written. And it happens a lot, too.
There was a period where I just started highlighting them of my Kindle because I knew I needed to show them to others.
Example sentences (copy-and-pasted, not transcribed)
I don't even know the correct way to describe these because they're not really run-on sentences—more like regularly using commas in place of semicolons, em-dashes, and periods—but these kinds of sentences appear fairly frequently throughout the book.
I pushed myself through the first book and started reading the second one, but when I realized things weren't any better, I lost the will to keep pushing through; it just kept distracting me and pulling me out of the actual story too much.
I was told that the person who does the audiobooks made those clunky lines sound natural, but I'm not a big audiobook person and, truthfully, the grammar wasn't the only thing holding me back from really enjoying it.
I looked into it, later, and saw that he self-published the first three books, so that would explain the lack of editing.
People hate-watch stuff because a movie is like 2 hours, and an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians is between 22 and 45 minutes. Reading generally takes more effort than watching. And reading a single book can take more than 40 hours, which is probably why "hate reading" is not really a thing.
That just means you have to be a more specific kind of masochist to enjoy hate-reading a full novel.