Foundations by Isaac Asimov. It's a great story but it's a tough read. Way better as an audiobook.

Catcher In The Rye

What a miserable experience reading the whiney thoughts of that little shithead.

Maybe it would have been more relatable if I read it at 15, but I read it at like 28 and it was insufferable.

A close second is The Great Gatsby. I kept waiting for something interesting to happen and then just like that it was over.

"Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer. I read it in high school so maybe I wouldn't hate it as much as I do if I wasn't forced to read it, but the plot is basically about a booksmart kid who decides to leave his rich parents and society behind to live in remote Alaska. The book follows Chris McCandless along his journey from the Eastern part of the country, through the South, and finally up the West coast and to Alaska (hitchhiking mostly). When he gets to Alaska, instead of actually being prepared and realizing the risk, he goes into "Into the Wild" incredibly unprepared - he ends up having to stay at his remote camp well into the spring because he didn't consider all the snow melting would render the river blocking his path back to society completely uncrossable. He ends up dying because he ruins most of a moose by failing to properly smoke the meat, and eats a poisionous plant out of desperation. Obviously this could have been avoided by just doing the proper research or bringing extra food (he only brought a few pounds of rice, and the guy who drove him to his final stop literally told him it was a bad idea to do this with so few supplies and only a .22 rifle). Basically his horrible death could have been easily avoided if he wasn't such an idiot.

The author clearly had a ton of respect for the guy, because he spent a year or two peicing all this together. He spoke about Chris (the unprepared trancendentalist wannabe) with a great deal of reverence, acting like he was a martyr for a cause unclear to me. Why you would want to spend years of your life in an attempt to immortalize an idiot, I am not sure. The author also decided to randomly interrupt the main story with a few chapters about his own moronic adventures, which made an already bad book worse.

The fucking bible, ugh

the scarlet letter. I found it extremely unrelatable, and generally boring. I think The Crucible play by the same author arthur miller* conveys the same overarching principles about religious hypocrisy and herd mentality in a much more interesting way.

Harry Potter. I tried to read first book but couldn't, the cringyness was high and the naming convention was straight up from 90's bad fantasy book parody. It's like one of the few books i not finished after i started, and i read a lot. And while the others are just forgettable experiences, HP is constantly in my face in media, reminding me of it.

Equus. Was forced to read it for highschool English literature class. Never again.

A tossup between books 7-10 of the Wheel of Time series. I gave up half way through book 10 and resent the time that I wasted on the series. 20 years later I still recall the desperate hope that the next chapter/book would advance the storyline, only to be greeted with more subplots, stupid things happening because of characters inability/unwillingness to communicate, and overly verbose descriptions of every little thing.

I hear the final books, written by a different author, were much better.

I've read some utter wank in my day, but the one that first springs to mind is Fault in their Stars by John Green.

of mice and men. its only 100 pages with large lettering and i still couldnt get through it because it was so boring

Any author of the french mouvement réalisme.

I thought Their Eyes Were Watching God was really rough to read through because Hurston was trying to phonetically write out how her characters spoke and it was painful to read through.

And I like how it is somewhat discussed in American Fiction through the different writers and their approaches to black literature.

The Executioners Song