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Captain Corelli's Mandolin...I love the book and was really disappointed by the film.

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I too loved the book and hated the movie. This book contains one of my favourite quotes: "History is the propaganda of the victors". So true!

As for books I loathed, the ones that spring to mind are the ones we were forced to read in school: "Moby Dick" and "Lord of the Flies".

I don't read romance novels and I'm not into science fiction or fantasy either. Personally, I can't stand books where the characters have weird, hard-to-pronounce names that look like the author took a bunch of random letters and then threw an apostrophe into the middle of them for good measure! Names like Qo'olun'hga. Fantasy authors are generally guilty of this.

"Song of Solomon" by Toni Morrison. I actually finished the whole thing because it was assigned, but the second it was done I grabbed up another on the summer reading list - Catch-22, because I knew I needed a good laugh! Man, I hated that book (Song of Solomon, that is)...

Oh! Sorry for the double post, but I just remembered more - I also hated everything I had to read by John Steinbeck. I know he's one of the "greats," and I actually found the premises of both The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men interesting, but I just couldn't get past that writing style, which bored me to tears.

I also struggled to read "Death in Venice." Even though I didn't hate it, I had to start it over about 10 times becuase I always fell asleep reading it!

For english this year we had to read 'Of Mice and Men'
I'm a historical fiction and fantasy fan, so I'm used to books with plenty of plot, and heaps of character development. This book, though not badly written, just didn't do it for me at all. The characters were simple, the whole plot lasted a grand total of 4 or 5 days, and noone went anywhere!
In addition to that, the book was written just like a play. There was barely any description, apart from at the start of each 'scene', and the majority of the book was dialogue.

Also we are being made to over-analyse it, which ruins it as well.

And don't get me started on the last line...the ending was great, last line just ruined the entire ending for me.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. I had to read that for AP Literature my senior year in high school. I'm fairly certain that if I had a time machine I would go burn the manuscript of that book to save the world the horror of having to read about industrialization changing the landscape of England.
Great Expectations is another. It's probably my least favorite of Dickens' books and that's saying something for me. I've never really been able to enjoy a book of his. It might be that I tried to read them when I was too young because I liked to get big books when I was little... but I'm thinking the blame really goes to the author on that one. I'll have to look at them again and see if my theory is right.

It's interesting to see how people's tastes differ. I love all of Thomas Hardy and most of John Steinbeck, though I haven't read either for a while. On the other hand (and I know this is heresy) I was bored rigid by Lord of the Rings. I had to read the Hobbit at school and hated it. Then, because I was a trendy child of the seventies, I tried to read Lord of the Rings. I seem to recall giving up on about page 4 of a description of a forest with trees that talked...

I like talking trees.

One man's trash.. (-8

Hard to say if there is a specific book I've hated but I've learned there are some authors who have a writing rhythm I just can't catch. No matter how I try I cannot read Ann Rice. Her genre should be right up my alley but I just find myself constantly having to re-read passages because suddenly I'm clueless as to where the story line is.

The other author I can't read because of sheer annoyance at the clumsy and transparent suspense manipulations, or attempts at suspense, is James Patterson. I know he's enormously popular but his books are so predictably silly to me.

"Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens was a horrible book. Also Pip, the book's "protagonist" was hardly one.

And also "The Optimist's Daughter" by Eudora Welty.

Clarrisa by Samuel Richardson.

I had to read this 1500+ page book for a high school English class. At the time it was out of print and not even available from the public library.

I managed to special order a copy and read it in the one week alloted (crazy!). I was the only student in whole class who bothered to do so.

It was the most tedious book I have ever read. To add insult to injury the teacher failed me (only F I ever got in high school) because he didn't like how I dressed (I sometimes wore black t-shirts for bands I liked) and thought I was satanist or something.

He actually admitted this to me later when he saw me feeding the hungry and homeless at a church sponsored event.

Anyone who thinks "The Doors" or "The Beatles" are a satanic bands needs their head examined.

I've got two authors that I hate--William Faulkner and Mark Twain.

Faulkner couldn't write his way out of a wet paper bag--I promptly threw my copies of "Intruder in the Dust" and "A Light in August" out after I had to read them for my college English classes. Faulkner's sin is that he used stream of consciousness--long, long, long blocks of text without punctuation. I like punctuation. Punctuation is my friend. William Faulkner wrote at least three blocks of six pages each without punctuation. William Faulkner is not my friend.

Mark Twain, on the other hand, is guilty of writing in dialect. That, to me, is a no-no. I don't want to spend time trying to decipher what the character is saying. Books with dialect in them get stopped immediately at the first interest and thrown across the room with stunning force.

Nathaniel Hawthorne is simply boring. "The Scarlet Letter" was excruciating to get through because it was just dense. I hate that book.

And the team of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle inspired me to be a writer. After reading "Lucifer's Hammer", I was convinced that some books are better used as doorstops.

20 000 leagues under the sea by jules verne.
i know its supposed to be a classic and that everyoe should love classics but i found it very boring...

to me it seemed that too much time was wasted describing the marine life and their groups, sub groups and who knows what else! am i the only one who thinks this? or is just the fact that the book is not meant for today's kids?

Hm... I don't paticularly like "Breaking Dawn" by Stephenie Meyer. It's a tad dull and I the plot sucked. :P

I don`t like Frankenstein by Dean Koontz

Even with books you didn't like ( I STILL do not want to use the word 'hate') , we encourage people to tell us why. If not, it just turns into a list of books. As you will see, in the thread entitled 'What are you reading at the moment?', people are asked to give a resume or a reason for liking a certain book and the same applies here. Thanks.

The only one that comes to mind at the moment is "From a Buick 8" by Stephen King. Don't get me wrong he is my favorite author of all time. The book is just my least favorite. I had a very hard time finishing it. It was drawn out and really not very interesting at all. I will probably never pick it up again.

I am generally adept at picking books that I, based on description, will probably like but I throughly disliked Paradise Lost by John Milton. I know the book is from another time period, but I thought it dull and tedious, almost unreadable, I could not even will myself to finish it, I eventually gave it to my best friend who is a religious studies major. Not to mention this awful little book started the whole ludicrous Lucifer as a fallen angel story that people in modern times take as fact, a note my dears, Lucifer is only mentioned once in The Bible and that is as The Morning Star, not as a fallen angel. K, thanks.

I must say I have difficulty in finding a book I hated, of course some I didn't enjoy but I don't thing "hate" would fit the description of how I felt with those I found bad in some aspect. For example, I have mixed feelings about Bill Bryson's "Mother Tongue". On the one hand I found it really interesting and entertaining in a very original, clever way, very craftly written, but then it also left me with a bitter taste, the taste of ethnocentricity and prejudice, of narrow-mindedness, take for example: "Not only were the Anglo-Saxons relatively uncultured, they were also pagan..."
Can't western scholars understand that cultures are not to be measured taking for granted that the status they "should" achieve in order to be considered a culture is that of the western white culture?? I just can't stand this kind of writing!!

Something called "The Blue Flower" by Penelope Fitzgerald. It opens with a scene of a eighteenth century German family doing their annual wash and goes downhill from there.

I read many books that I haven't liked and that were considered classic or best-sellers but none that I've picked up and sat down. I guess I just push myself and try and find the good in the work that someone smarter than me says exists. But a few thousand books later I've come to the realization that smarts doesn't always have much to do with it!

I really disliked Bret-Easton-Ellis' "American Psycho". I managed to read around half of it, but then it made me feel physically sick so I just gave it away. Also, I really disliked Iain Banks' "The Wasp Factory" for pretty much the same reason.

I've borrowed a couple from the library that I stopped reading soon after I started.
One I can't even remember the name of or the author, but I'd just finished re-reading the Dan Brown novels and upon browsing the library shelves, found another mystery series set around the Vatican that looked promising. Sadly, The style of writing was incredibly amateurish in such a way that it was distracting me from the story itself. Like an attempt at creative writing in highschool.

I also didn't like the first book I read by Robert Walker for much the same reason.
They were both very hard to get into.

TIME MACHINE
H.G.Wells.
I tried reading it in my vacations but just couldn't get through. All because of his obscure language. Very tough to understand.