30 Day Book Challenge – day 2: What is your least favourite book?
Another more or less unanswerable challenge. There are a several books I’ve not been able to finish for various reasons, and there are several that I’ve read and not liked. So I should have a choice of what to write about. Trouble is that books I don’t like also prove forgettable.
Of books I’ve read recently, The Whole Day Through by Patrick Gale was one I had to work hard to finish. I didn’t particularly dislike it – just couldn’t see the point of it.
The two main characters attempt to rekindle something they had for each other years ago, but whatever didn’t work the first time round, doesn’t this time either. Unfortunately, I felt that instead of being tragic or even sad, the outcome was ‘so what’.
A book that I didn’t like and didn’t finish was It by Stephen King. I read less than a quarter and gave up – too much 
dodging about in time with too many important characters and none of them particularly empathetic. Plus it was not at all scary. A creature living under a town and attacking the children ought to be terrifying, but this one wasn’t – or not to me anyway. Maybe if I’d stuck with it, I’d have come to appreciate it, but life’s too short to try the almost impossible.
My memory says there are plenty of others I gave up on, but it refuses to produce their titles. Is this a well-trained memory dropping stuff it doesn’t need, or intimations of old age?
Cover art from Goodreads.
e a m harris 
I just browse through books that I don’t find interesting, read the mid-section, then jump to the concluding part to see if it has merit. If I want to really not be disappointed, getting a good book review is useful for me.
LikeLike
Thank you for stopping by and commenting. I love reading book reviews, but I often find that they are too variable to be a guide as to whether I’ll like a book. Amazon is particularly variable, with some people saying a book is wonderful and others saying it’s awful. Like you I tend to skip to the end where I can’t be bothered to read the whole thing, and on one or two occasions that’s made me go back and read the rest of the book.
LikeLike
You forget because there’s a reason you stopped them. You didn’t like them. So why waste time remembering them?
It was one I read and thought was decent. There were some weird sexual things that occurred later on in the novel. I’m a big Stephen King fan, and It was a good book, but not one of my personal favorites.
LikeLike
Thank you for your comment. I think I made a bad choice in my first Stephen King to read. I shall try him again another time. One of my present problems is that I have a lot going on and can only read for short periods. This makes complex books difficult to follow – one of the reasons I’m reading poetry and short stories more than usual, they can be fitted into a few minutes.
LikeLike
Stephen King has a collection of short stories, with one of them being a short novella, called The Long Walk. It’s one of my favorite Stephen King novels, and it’s a quick one, too!
LikeLike
Hi Rebecca, thank you for this information. I’ll look out for the novella and give it a try. I often like a short read and I think some authors do their best in a shorter work.
LikeLike
I like short novels or longer books more than I enjoy short stories. But I do find that sometimes when I read a long book, I end up with a list in my head of all the things they could have cut out to make the book 300 pages shorter! 🙂
LikeLike
That must be your inner editor at work; a very valuable ‘inner’ for anyone who blogs or writes other things. The reviews on your blog are to the point and informative as a result. Keep up the good editing work.
LikeLike
Thanks! 🙂 I like that, “inner editor”!
LikeLike
I thought It was a good book. I was a Stephen King fan when I was a teenager. Yes there were a lot of character’s in most of his books. But some how when he starts to bring the story to a close you know exactly who is who. But then as I mentioned I was a teenager and could retain more. 🙂
LikeLike
Thank you for stopping by and commenting. I think I may have liked it more if I’d read it at a different time of life. I’ll probably try another of his books one day (when I don’t have so much going on perhaps) as I know he has a great reputation and is very popular so it must be me not him who created the ‘not liking’.
LikeLike