So I’m about halfway through Wilkie Collins’ “The Woman in White,” and I’m officially throwing in the towel. My God, this guy hates Italians so much it’s alarming! I didn’t expect it to bother me so much (not that anti-Italian racism was ever okay, just that Western racial politics have shifted to where that 19th century prejudice usually comes off as goofy to modern readers). I’m not even Italian myself, but as a Romani reader I’m used to gritting my teeth through insulting Victorian depictions of “the other.” This one got me, though. It was so constant I just couldn’t stomach it.
Has something like this ever happened to you? Picked up a book and went, “Well, I didn’t think that was a deal-breaker for me, but I guess it super is?” What book and what made you toss it?
by yeweebeasties
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i picked up a book about saying in different languages/cultures. thought it would be fun. after the intro where the author explained where he got the idea for the book he went into a lengthy monologue about gender and biological determinism.
it was so out of the left field i wondered if another book got mixed into my copy. did not actually make it to any interesting sayings, just dropped the book right there.
I’m one of those “I have to finish a book when I start it” people, but the middle section of 2666 was ROUGH. I have a strong stomach, but you can only read so many rape/murder police reports before it starts to break your spirit. I’m glad I stuck with it, though. The rest of the book is incredible.
The four agreements. The whole thing was overly verbose for no reason at all.
If any book throws an unexpected pregnancy or miscommunication trope at me, It’s getting slammed shut.
This was like 15 years ago, but I was reading The City of Bones when it came out and hit that plot point where the two love interests found out they were siblings. Immediately set the book down and stopped because I couldn’t get past that. Turns out at some point down the line they were revealed to not actually be siblings but I couldn’t bring myself to pick the series back up.
I was reading “Voyage au bout de la nuit” by Celine (who is a French author, not a very good guy) and I was actually enjoying it but for some reason he kept talking about women in a horrible way.
There was a scene where he was talking about a girl he didn’t like anymore, but still “had the possibility of rape on her”. The first time I was like, okay this is disgusting but I moved on. The second time he said the same thing but about another woman, I was done. Shut the book and will probably never finish it.
Edit : also I will add the passage in « On the road » from Kerouac where he really want to fuck a 12 years old « prostitute » but kinda feel bad but also really want to f her so he romanticised her, says she a « goddess » that can’t be defiled or something. So freacking gross
I finished it and there was a whole laundry list of reasons I hated it by the end, but the >!sexual assault!< in the first few pages of Lessons in Chemistry really put me off the rest of the book.
I finally decided to read The Godfather and while it’s a great book and adds alot to the movies there’s a whole section I have elected to call “the vagina monologues” because it’s an entire chapter or two talking about an old fling of Sonny’s and how she gets her loose vagina fixed.
Some pulpy easy read like Grisham but lesser known had a line where the guy is taking a leak and drinking a glass of water at the same time.
He comments to himself how this could be an endless loop if he just had more water.
It was near the beginning and so dumb I remember thinking to myself, if the rest of the book is like this I’m going to kill myself.
I guess it seems silly, but I remember it over 20 years later. I closed the book immediately.
I picked up Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt for a book club. I read a few reviews before I started and thought what would bother me the most would be the gore or the apparently disappointing ending. Nope! Every male character in that book, including the teens (who sound the same as everyone else), is horribly, violently misogynistic. Female characters are introduced only for some guy to make gross comments about their bodies, age, intelligence, and how they would still fuck them. I can handle that if it’s important to how a particular character thinks, but it was disgusting and ubiquitous.
In the first chapter, the main character (male, middle-aged doctor) describes his teen son’s teen girlfriend as a “pert little cutie.” 🤮I lasted 100 pages and that’s only out of duty.
Blindness by Jose Saramago. I was really into the book and the premise, but there is a sexual assault about midway through that just put me off completely. I don’t even remember what it was that I found so upsetting, but I just stopped at that scene and never went back to it.
A lot of books of that era of The Woman in White and later had “anarchists” as the boogeyman. And they were often Italian. I recall Sherlock Holmes had a few plus I’ve read of them in other books. The authors clearly wanted an “other” to blame and they were an easy option back then.
I had picked up what I thought was a cheesy romance novel about the Titanic from a used book store. I was pretty stoked to read it and was struggling through the first few chapters which were POV of a young boy. Suddenly the kid starts imagining his mom and sister naked. It was so gross and off-putting that I ended up throwing the book in the trash.
The author who wrote The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCollough?) wrote a Pride and Prejudice sequel that sounded interesting until a few pages in when the story established that Elizabeth and Darcy’s marriage wasn’t a happy one. I was PISSED and stopped reading it immediately.
I was reading the Grace of Kings by Ken Liu.
I thought the beginning was bad because every time I thought we were past the false starts and getting a POV character, another one would die. I found myself wondering when we were getting past the “prologue” phase and should actually care about the character. Then it got to that point and was boring.
When I was over 100 pages in, I started to wonder when the author would discover the existence of women in Asia.
When the author did discover women and wrote them as stereotypes I was pretty much done. This was in spite of the constant “brother” “brother” “my brother” dialogue that was supposed to pass for establishing true friendship.
It was like an alien who had never meant a human before was attempting to write human interactions. No emotion whatsoever, just a cold rendition of events that should feel impactful but don’t.
I’ve recently been on an american literature kick and I could really have done with a warning about how racist Jack London was.
Call of the wild was of its time, I gritted my teeth and got through. White fang was….. worse. His short stories….. I literally couldn’t go on anymore.
Was very bad luck that I was reading aloud to my dyslexic husband and came upon a depiction so outrageously racist that he was audibly gasping.
This was written in the 20th century! Children read his shit! Wtf?!
I started reading The White Maasai and I threw the book across the room when the white protagonist sees her future Maasai husband for the first time. Insta-lust, and it felt so cringe and awfully exoticizing. I couldn’t continue reading it.
I take ages to read books so I hate DNFing them at a point as it feels like I’ve wasted my efforts, but I sacked off Babel around 300+ pages in. YMMV though, a lot of people love this book so could be more for you than me.
While the plot and writing were okay, the author simply beats the shit out of you with the themes over and over. It’s like.. I get it, I agree with you, but oh my god stop.
I can read a scene where a character faces racism, sees their culture disrespected or stolen from, faces classism, etc; I can read it, understand, and agree with the message. I don’t need the following 2-3 pages of ruminations over each and every situation, often repeated, absolutely laying out everything just in case you didn’t get it for some reason.
The world was interesting, but after a point it just felt like the author assumed all her readers are incredibly dense it felt like being talked down to. So, I guess my answer is feeling like the author thinks I’m an idiot.
I was reading Watchers, which was my first Dean Koontz book (might be my only.)
I was able to put so much stuff aside / suspend my disbelief, but when what’s-his-name started explaining how strippers work to the OH SO INNOCENT Nora I just had to put it down. The way he writes women / Nora in particular is just so bad
The Midnight Library used chess as a really key recurring metaphor throughout the book, and it was painfully obvious the author had absolutely no clue how chess works, and didn’t bother to ask anyone who did. ‘If one side is down to a pawn and a king, and the other side has every player, there is still a game.’ Yeah no, you’re not winning that game through gritty resilience. I was unreasonably infuriated and it made me hate the book and distrust the author.
Stephen R Donaldon’s *The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever: Lord Foul’s Bane*. Opens with violent rape of the man’s rescuer. 😑
The love stitch section of the godfather, didn’t put me off the book but it was just a bit too detailed and congratulatory to me. Felt like it was the opinions of the author far more than the motivations of the character.
When a sexually violent act is written too descriptively and is overly lengthy… it almost never adds to a story and takes me out of the story to start questioning why the author is so obsessed. Looking straight into your cold blue eyes, Stephen King.
Outlander. A great concept and some cool historical stuff, but some very dodgy themes and there was a scene quite close to the end that made me put it down straight away and not finish, despite there being very little of the book left. Weird. And not in a good way. And also Gormenghast, which I tried to read twice, because that’s weird in a good way, but it’s so deeply miserable that it was making me blue.
I recently tried to start Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon. I’m already about 50/50 on him, I loved Kavalier and Clay and the Yiddish Policeman’s Union, but have tried a few others that really didnt hit for me.
On page two of the book a record store employee (who loves *deep* music like jazz and knows the *true secrets* of crating a vinyl record) is having a sexual encounter (which is fine, I’m not a prude) but Chabon describes a woman running her tongue “along the E line of his dick.”
I have a vinyl collection and I love jazz but.. cmon man. Closed the book forever.
I don’t remember the title of the book but it was by Dean Koontz. It was about subliminal messages in commercials and I got the to this part in the book where the antagonist was controlling this family by using words, and was forcing the young son to do sexual things to his mother while everyone watched. I didn’t far into that scene, it grossed me out too much. I never picked it back up and have been wary of Koontz afterwards.
Of all things, the reason I only made it about 20 pages into Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go was because I couldn’t stand the typeface.
The paperback version at the time had this typeface that was almost like your typical Caslon or Garamond. But it had some weird decorative flourishes that just distracted the hell out of me for some damn reason. Couldn’t do it.
I should probably see if they’ve changed it, since. Or get the e-book.
Edit: Found a [scan of it](https://fontsinuse.com/uses/18826/never-let-me-go-by-kazuo-ishiguro-vintage-boo)! It’s called Bembo Infant of all things.
In Dan Simmons’ Hyperion he repeatedly describes female characters’ nipples to the point you just knew when some glass cutting talk was coming. Cringed me out a bit. It’s really not essential for sci-fi/fantasy authors to update me in detail on nipple status. It didn’t make me toss the book but it got tiresome and after finishing it I read some reviews of the follow up books and decided to call it at just Hyperion for now.
I picked up The Secret because I think the concept of the law of attraction can be useful as long as you don’t go overboard and have common sense. Like: if you’re in a good mood and treat everyone in a nice and friendly manner, you are much more likely to be treated nicely in return. If you’re in a bad mood and you take it out on other people, chances are you’re going to deal with someone fighting back or being disliked by most people you deal with.
But there are definitely people that take the shit way too far and they really believe there’s a mystical force that will “mirror back” your energy to you. Any bad thing that happens is your fault. The author fully went off the deep end when she said people who have died in tragedies like 9/11 or war, and people who get terminal diseases all somehow attracted their fates by putting out negativity or having negative thoughts too frequently. At that point I knew she was fucking crazy and I was out.
Tried to go back and read Ender’s Game, a book I loved as a (female) child… didn’t get 20 pages in before an official told the main character that girls almost never went to the special school for geniuses because “thousands of years of evolution are working against them”.
Like no wonder I had to work through so much internalized sexism and imposter syndrome as a teenager.
I tried to read “The Crossing Places” by Elly Griffiths during lockdown. An archeologist who helps solve murders?? Right up my alley! I didn’t make it 30 pages before I threw that book down the hall.
From the first 30 pages, here’s what I know. We have two main characters.
Ruth, an archeologist- “Fat” (she weighs like 150 lbs) and never stops talking about it. She has two cats, which apparently makes her weird and sad. If it weren’t for the occasional archeological insight, our girl Ruth wouldn’t even pass the Bechdel test when talking to herself. All other women are the enemy, especially her mother. She’s an atheist, and so am I, but she is written as the kind who makes it her entire personality. I think this was an effort to make her highly logical, but it misses the mark.
Harry, a detective- Abuses his power to be a bad driver and likes Ruth because she doesn’t feel the need to “dress like a slut.” But she’s too “fat” to be a cop. Did I mention that he also liked her because she was pretty smart for a girl and could “look him in the eye like an equal”??? Super skeevy, hates his wife and three daughters, and from what I understand, ends up in an affair with Ruth. And we’re supposed to root for this guy?
This came out in 2009 but reads like it was written in the 50s.
Dialogue attribution. Obviously I don’t need it to all be the same, but if you’re so insecure that you can’t mostly use “said” or “asked,” but instead have to fill the page with “erupted,” “complained,” “inquired,” or so many others, often accompanied with adverbs, I don’t think I need to read the book, because it starts to become all I can think about.
My “favorite” recent one: “I’m sorry,” he apologized quietly.
I mostly read non-fiction. A couple of days ago I got a chance to borrow The Creative Act by Rick Rubin from the library. I was expecting an insight into the mind of a uniquely creative person. A couple of pages in, Rubin suggests that a creative person should constantly search for clues sent by the universe for making decisions – as an example he mentions that when he had acute appendicitis and a doctor suggested surgery, he did some soul seeking by picking up a random book, which happened to advice against invasive procedures. Celebrating his intact appendix (and obviously leaving out details of treatment), he presents this as proof of the creative mind’s abilities. I couldn’t bare the quackery and returned the book early.
In Shogun by James Clavell there’s a part where the protagonist is getting a bath or something and all the Japanese people are oggling at how huge his dick is.. I think I struggled forward a bit more but that was just so fucking stupid
First the author used the phrase “Harder said than done.”
Ummmm. What? How can it be harder to *say* something than to actually do it?? The phrase is **easier said than done.** It’s easy to say it, hard to do it.
Then the author described a “wall to ceiling bookcase.”
What the what?? It’s either wall to **wall** or it’s **floor** to ceiling. Wall to ceiling doesn’t even make any sense.
Then the author used harder said than done *again* (!!!!) and I had to peace out.
The Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson
First one is good, the second one falls off rather and by #3 we are in a mystifying morass of too many indistinguishable characters, with the author describing their desperately humdrum doings in huge detail.
Ericsson is eating a croissant at 25°C while Bengtsson recharges his mobile phone to 81%. Meanwhile Carlsson is doggedly driving to Stockholm through thick snowdrifts, Olafsson is adjusting the water pressure on his morning shower and Nilsson is sorting in a leisurely way through his sock drawer…
It’s sort of a case of literary heat death