Tag: dislike

When I was in high school I used to not read the books that were assigned unless they caught my attention within the first 20 pages. I used to only give a book 20 pages to hook me. To be honest I give songs even less time, they only get 20 seconds. Art and other visuals get 30 seconds. But books got more time. Time for an author to tell me where we were going and why I might want to go there.

Because of this there were many books I did not read in high school because they did not speak to me . There were so many other books to read! I had discovered Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. I was falling in love with David Sedaris and of course I was being sucked into the world of Harry Potter. So I did not want to “waste” time on books that I did not think would enthrall me or characters I could not care about.

This is how I missed reading many American Classics.

They all seemed to be about a set of people who didn’t know how good they had it and could do nothing but complain. My very least favourite book was “The Great Gatsby”. This was the first time I was presented with a book where there were NO characters I could relate to or even liked. It was then I learned that to enjoy a book I had to have at least one of these things (besides a good plot, world building, or theme).

What is your least favorite book? I’m not talking about books that are just badly written, or books that are in bad taste (though those are good reasons to not like books) but what is a book that you just plain didn’t like an why?