What books have made you want to throw them against a wall in anger/frustration?

For me, it’s gotta be War and Peace.

Why?

1. Andrei dying, only to be not dead, only to die anyway!

2. I ship Sonya/Nikolai. That is all. Stupid, stupid Nikolai going to marry that stupid other chick. :(

The Man Who Laughs was worse, Spanman, because it was set up to be a happy ending, and then Hugo killed every off for no reason

1. Andrei dying, only to be not dead, only to die anyway!

I will ditto that to the infinite power.

I wanted to throw the book at the wall. GAAAAAAAARGH. DAMMIT, YOU.

aww, now I know that he dies. =|

A Tale of Two Cities, because that was a godawful book.

Como agua para chocolate (or, in english, Like Water for Chocolate). It’s supposed to be a classic piece of latin american literature, but I just couldn’t get over the main character. Tita: a stunningly beautiful teenage girl, whose cooking causes miracles (magical realism) and two men fall passionately in love with. The book asks me to believe that Tita is oppressed and miserable. Granted, she did grow up with a borderline abusive mother who forbid her from marrying, but that doesn’t change the fact that 1) she’s stunningly beautiful and 2) that every magical element in the story seems to be working on her behalf. The focus of the story is always on her suffering, even though there are people around her who have it way worse than she does (often because of the magic).

I quite liked the early parts of Like Water For Chocolate. Around the chapter where the recipe was matches I got a bit bored, and Tita wasn’t the most interesting character ever, but still…

For me, it was the blatant unfairness of the magic. Like, when Rosaura couldn’t feed her newborn child and the family couldn’t find a wet nurse, what happened? Tita’s magical breasts began to magically flow with milk, and the child end up loving Tita more than his own mother. That nearly made me throw the book against the wall. And, for some reason, Rosaura was always blamed for marrying Tita’s love interest, while the love interest himself is blameless (even though he agreed to marry Rosaura specifically so that he could be closer to Tita). No me gusta las Mary Sues.

Yep. And her meals trigger orgies on occasion.

And sexing her makes a man die of pleasure.

Brisingr met my wall on several occasions. At some points, once per page.

Wasn’t the god supposed to be Doctor Who? I facebooked when I read that bit.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. The writing is superb. The story is a let-down, and that’s putting it lightly.

Ah, that explains it.

The Odyssey. Seriously. I even skipped most of it, and I still got bored. Why? Well, there are 24 books in it, and all the interresting stuff (i.e. everything between Troy and Ithica) is in books 9-12. And even then it gets boring. Why do I need to know the geneology of all the dead women Odysseus meets in the Underworld?

The story is fun, though, if you cut out all the boring stuff.

In the seventh grade, we watched a seriously weird movie of it…I wonder how it got past the school. o.O

We got to watch the old school R&J movie in my 9th grade English, complete with about 1.5 seconds of underage Juliet boobs. Of course, that was preceded by what I swear must have been an hour of Romeo walking around the room bare-assed.

We watched the new one in 7th grade IIRC. I just don’t know where they got a hold of the sheer volume of drugs they must have smoked to make it.

A Tale of Two Cities, because that was a godawful book.

Aw, I had PSL for Charles Darnay. Every other girl in the room thought I was insane for not liking Sydney.

The Franco Z version is my favorite, even though Leonard Whiting looks like Zac Efron. But Romeo high on drugs…? Huh…?

Also: any romance novel that spends more time on plot than on romance. All the plots are the same anyway, so why do they bother?

even though Leonard Whiting looks like Zac Efron.

JUST AS PLANNED

My mother has entirely too many. Seriously. I used to steal them to read as a kid. This is probably why I’m so crazy.

Oh yeah, the Zac Efron lookalike. I remember him. (Luckily for us, when we watched bits and pieces of the Zefferelli version, she skipped that part.)

And that bare ass scene went on way too long. The whole time I was sitting there thinking about how much I don’t want to stare at his butt.

Then you do not want to look, er…

Oh yeah, the Zac Efron lookalike. I remember him.

What does it say about my class that they all thought it was Zac Efron?

Tailchaser’s Song by Tad Wiliams.
1. The main character goes through ALL OF THIS FREAKIN’ DANGER to find his girlfriend, and the ingrate said “I like it here. I’d rather eat 3 times a day, lay in the sun, and always be warm than live in the forest.”
2. The cat is young, yet he speaks like he’s graduated from Oxford. I mean, he would be our equivalent of a street urchin, yet he talks like he owns the place.
3. An epic fight between immortal cat brothers, spanning countless years through time.
4. The main bad guy is an obese cat who can hardly move, yet he fixes all who gaze upon him in terror.
Other than those very frustrating points, the book was pretty enjoyable.

@Un-Dante’d

>3. An epic fight between immortal cat brothers, spanning countless years through time.

THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE!!!

Wait, I forgot to mention one of mine. I couldn’t finish The Tin Princess by Philip Pullman.

It was just… hangs head The “romance” irked the frick out of me. I mean, the male character kept going “Ah, she is so perfect and awesome and affectionate and generous and wonderful” ad nauseam.

Granted, it was months since I read it, but still.

Wait, I forgot to mention one of mine. I couldn’t finish The Tin Princess by Philip Pullman.

Yeah, that was the worst one imo. =|

It gets better.

(I think. I only read an abridged version.)

I dunno. Frankenstein kinda pissed me off. First aforemented endless letter on sailing, and then Frankenstein is a total idiot. If you ask me, the whole monster situation is entirely his fault and what does he do about it? Whine. Unconstructively. I am restraining myself, I already spammed about this when I read the dumb thing (I also probably spammed Elanor, so it’s no use repeating the process)

How about post-Three Musketeers Dumas? a) he didn’t write most of it himself, and b) Twenty Years After. Argh. Okay, I read it when I was eleven so I may have been biased, but seriously? 100 pages of telling us what happened in the last book, 500 of running around France talking to people and 100 of actual plot.

b) Twenty Years After. Argh.

X
Aww, but…but, I like that one!

I honestly despised all of them. Really, I did. I really love Cornelia Funke (she gave the world The Thief Lord, and for that I am eternally grateful), but Inkheart and Inkspell and Inkdeath… urgh. The only thing I remember of distinction in the book is that “Band-Aid” was given a specially page to tell people that it was copyright and the name was used with permission, and Capricorn’s death scene, where he “fell down on his face and his black heart stopped beating.”

Yeah.

I read Inkheart fairly quickly (mostly because I liked the idea: stuff coming out of books you read is awesome to a nerd like me) but I had Inkspell for ages. I didn’t even bother with Inkdeath because it was even longer and I had lost faith in the series quite a bit.

I don’t know; am I the only one who has a faint dislike for Cornelia Funke’s style? Granted, I read the translated editions, but something still seemed… not so good.

I’ve read all of the “Ink Series” except for Inkdeath. I have also read The Thief Lord.

I read Inkheart. It was really a lot of meh for me. It did not blow my mind, but it was not too bad. Although that may be probably because Dustfinger reminded me too much of my ex. (lol I used to date a guy like that:P Never again)

I confess I avoided the Thief Lord movie after the disaster that was the Inkheart movie (and after I had a friend who developed a ginormous crush on Scipio’s actor).

I mean, the concept of the first Ink book was good, and I loved it mostly for that and Dustfinger. I will admit that I’m a sucker for fantasy worlds and mushy romance, which is why I liked Inkblood, although the length issue irritated me..

Cornelia Funke’s kinda like Eva Ibbotson though. She used to write ghost-and-dragon stories for little people, and then she started on the YA market…I mean, admittedly, I have the entire collection of both, but I definitely appreciated Funke more when I was younger, and the more recent Ibbotson Formulaic Romances, TM, have been more formulaic than usual…

Eva Ibbotson manages somehow to pull over her Formulaic Romances™ with me. I don’t know how the hell she does it. I know what’s coming every time, and yet I keep on reading instead of throwing the book across the room.

Polaris Rhapsody. You think that you have a nice, satisfying, somewhat bittersweet ending, when Lee just decides to kill off almost everyone off-screen on a single page.

FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUU

@ Elanor: I dunno, Magic Flutes didn’t impress me.

Well, okay. Yeah, that one underwhelmed me.

But the others—Rom, Qun, I knew pretty much what was going to happen. But I read anyway, and squee’d.

Yeah, Sues galore. Somehow, though, I don’t hate her Sues, it is very odd.

But yeah. I can’t remember any of the heroes besides Rom and Quin, and that’s telling all on its own.

Though—Journey to the River Sea! Finn!

Yeah…“flaws”. Ohh, forgot about Rupert. I always picture a vague sort of Ron in my head. Sort of.

Sergei, though, I loved Sergei.

I like her kid books, like The Secret of Platform 13 and The Star of Kazan. Zed is one of the many people on my PSL list. I’d write fanfic about Kazan if there was a larger fanbase for Annika/Zed.

This is Propsero as I remember him “Ah! Dethroned! The horror! The traitors shall pay! My lovely daughter Miranda was almost raped by my servant slave but aaaanyway, fall in love with Ferdinand! Yayy! Things are going according to plan! Mwuahaha!”

Boy, I think, but Ariel is such a nice girl’s name…cough cough Little Mermaid cough cough

...

Which Victorian era piece of literature is Kelso from? (And who is Hyde in Scrubs?)

Which Victorian era piece of literature is Kelso from? (And who is Hyde in Scrubs?)

Kelso is Harry Wotton’s grandfather, uncle, or something of the sort in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Hyde is from “That 70’s Show.”

This is Shakespeare. Everyone is a Mary Sue. Well, except for Hamlet, but he dies at the end.

I have two words for you: Oedipus. Complex.

Shakespeare’s tragedies are just boring. It’s a sad fact of life. I actually like Marlowe’s plays better than Shakespeares OMGSERIOUS stuff.

Don’t get me started on Oedipus. He was an idiot too. Who the hell walks around Greece randomly killing old kings?

My Sophocles tells me he did it because he was in a bad mood and Laius was mean to him. and then he killed the rest of the company for the heck of it.

Pride and Prejudice. x_x I don’t see how this book is supposed to be entertaining. Watching paint dry is more interesting.