One of the best parts of working in a library is the opportunity to constantly talk about books – to recommend my favorites and to gather recommendations from both patrons and staff. We’ve featured various displays and blog posts with staff favorites, but August’s main card catalog book display is a little different from the typical “staff picks” post; these are all books that we staff members hated (or at least really, really disliked).

As much fun as it is to talk about books we love, sometimes it feels even better to vent about a book that we can’t stand. Seriously, we all love to complain, don’t we? I think it’s just human nature. And moreover, it’s important to recognize that we don’t all have to like the same things. Some classic favorites will appear on this list, and some recent best-sellers. Just because we work in a library doesn’t mean we like everything on our shelves, after all.

Here are the books that various staff members shared their distaste for, organized by department:

Archives:

One book that I hate with a passion is Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. I took a class on historical-fiction while in grad school at Mount Saint Mary’s College in LA and it was one of the assigned books. The long and short of it, it is dull, unoriginal, uninspiring, and boring. The characters are unrelatable and at times one sided. The most you learn about them is through the letters that were written. The book may be based upon Mary Hallock Foote life, but a biography would be more interesting. It would be much more interesting to read What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, a Novel by Dave Eggers or Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier.

Another is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. I’ll admit the book is one of the great works of American nature writers, and I like some of her other works, but this one is a dull read. The main plot, if you can call it that, is her explorations near her home and views on nature and life much of the books comes from her personal journals as inspiration. Although I enjoy nonlinear books or different ways of storytelling, this books jumps off the deep end. The book reads like short vignettes with no real plot. It wanders around and goes nowhere. Much of the book is her fluid thoughts. It would be much better to read Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich or Desert Sojourn: A Woman’s Forty Days and Nights Alone by Debi Holmes-Binney, which are both incredible reads.

Adult Services:

The first books to come to mind right away are Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. My reason for Portnoy’s Complaint is that there is one particularly (in my opinion) disgusting scene that I wish I could un-read, but remains one of my only clear memories of the book. As to Great Expectations, I read it years ago as a high school student and as I recall the main character drove me crazy.

Circulation:

A Farewell to Arms:  Hemingway’s writing style just never grew on me, but his misogyny is what consistently turns me off.  This book features a 2-dimensional female character for the big ol’ strapping hero, and perpetuates everything I hate about how we talk about the First World War (that only men did things, and women’s actions are always peripheral).  I remember that the French Mutiny of 1917 happens about 3/4 of the way through this book, and there is a fear that the narrator would get killed.  And I’m sitting there thrilled, only to realize that he’s narrating, so he can’t die.  It was a very sad moment for me…

Murder on the Orient Express: Basically, Agatha Christie breaks all the rules about mysteries, the first of which being that the reader should, technically at least, be able to figure out what happened, if they are talented enough.  She seems so concerned with deliberately obscuring the truth from the reader in order to make an elegant mystery that it’s impossible (for me, at least) to get any satisfaction out of the book.  This was my first Agatha Christie, because all I ever wanted to do with my life was to go on the Orient Express….and even though the character studies are vaguely interesting, the big reveal is so utterly stupid, implausible, and feels like such a colossal cop-out that I was furious.  I’ve read a few more of hers since, and it’s never gotten any better.

Tracker: I get that it’s a book about survival and coming of age and all that, but it’s also about a kid wounding, terrifying, and killing a deer.  In a very graphic manner. That’s the whole plot.  

A Day No Pigs Would Die: Clearly, I was scarred by summer reading lists…this is another that uses cruelty to animals as a metaphor for growing up.  In this case, it’s a pig that this boy, who lives what I remember as an incredibly boring life with a family who really doesn’t seem to like each other in the slightest, loves.  And then his father tries to mate the pig with a neighbor’s’ boar, and then kills the pig because it won’t mate (pig feminism?) and then the dad dies at the end, and the kid really doesn’t seem to care at all.  Utterly boring, except for the animal torture.

Children’s Room:

I really HATED The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men.  I felt like they were miserable and horrible and boring and the only redeeming quality of Of Mice and Men was it was a shorter miserable book than The Grapes of Wrath.

Anything by Paulo Coelho, and The Secret by Rhonda Byrne.

South Branch:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: I have a sneaking suspicion that many of the people who claim the life-altering powers of this book haven’t actually read it. This author had an insufferable tone of voice and talked very little of the Zen that came from maintaining his bike. It actually had very little mention of his bike maintenance on his road trip at all. I think what bothered me most, is that the author came across as a bad father in this book, while trying to make it seem like he was a good father because he took his boy out on the road with him. This was a book full of contradictions, but not in a good way.

At Home in Mitford: I’m not one for evangelizing prose, but what bothered me most about this book was the one-dimensionality of the characters. It seemed that they were there only to serve as a lesson; a sort of throwback to the bildungsroman, even though the main character was firmly in middle-age. The dog that only responded to scriptures instead of commands was a little too on-the-nose and the heavy-handed simplicity of the plot lines made this a very uncompelling read.

Catcher in the Rye: (I’m not going to be very popular at the library after this, am I?) I guess I just wasn’t the angsty, unhappy teenager that this book often appeals to. I know this was life-changing for so many people, but for me, this book was nothing more than someone’s excuse to whine. I didn’t think that Holden Caulfield had enough challenges in his life or gave life’s experiences enough of a chance to be as unhappy as he was which made this an incredibly frustrating read.

Reference:

Gone Girl: I don’t even know if I hated the book and the storyline so much as I just hated the two main characters. The novel switches back and forth from a husband’s and his missing wife’s points of view, and each character painted himself or herself in a worse light each time they narrated. Just when I thought Nick couldn’t be worse than Amy, he’d surprise me with just how awful a person he was – and vice versa. I think that reading from their points of view is supposed to show the inner workings of psychosis – a type of perspective I usually enjoy – but I just found myself annoyed. Then it was almost over, and I thought, “It can’t get worse. I’m almost done,” but the ending was the worst part. Overall the story was suspenseful and has an okay, semi-predictable plot twist, but it was almost hard to care what happened to these two.

Red Queen: This teen dystopian novel takes place in a world divided by blood colors – the weak red-blooded workers who live in slums, and the powerful silver-blooded nobles with superhuman abilities. The main character, Mare, has red blood, but discovers she has the same type of superhuman abilities as silvers after she lands herself in the silvers’ royal palace as a servant. A love triangle between Mare and the two silver princes emerges, and a political rebellion develops throughout the novel. Red Queen had some potential, but ultimately the characters were poorly developed and the action scenes were somehow rather dull. I do give it credit for the fact that even though I was frustrated by it, I still found myself not wanting to put this book down.

 

And there you have it: a list of books that members of the Peabody Library staff just can’t stand.

Join the conversation! Let it out, vent to us: What books have you read and hated?