Books You've Thrown Across The Room with Force

Nerdilydone said:

Oh man, all the Eragon books were so dull. There was only about a hundred pages of plot for every 400 pages of writing.

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Funny thing about the Eragon books: the hatedom is almost as large as the fandom. It's practically a cottage industry, snarking the books page by page. Kippurbird does a Damn good job with them.

If nothing else, thanks to Christopher Paolini and Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, I learned a valuable lesson: never read a book in which the main selling point is the age of the author. If someone says, "You have to read this book. The author's grasp on characterization is second to none!" Then it might be worth your time. If the main selling point is, "They wrote it when they were only fifteen!" Then stay away. There probably are exceptions to this rule but I can't think of any right now.

Cicak said:

No one makes anybody read a book. They choose to.

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70% of the books I have read were required reading. I never would have read I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Pearl, The Great Gatsby, or anything written by Shakespeare if I had had a choice. And on that note, I am adding to my list another book that was force fed to me just recently:

The Empowered Paralegal: Effective, Efficient, and Professional by Robert E. Mongue - A mere toss against the wall is too good for this book. This is supposed to be a book that helps paralegals manage their work (like a self-help book and equally annoying). It is painfully obvious that an editor never even looked at it. I dare anyone to try to read an entire paragraph without getting thrown off by the egregious spelling/grammatical errors. They are so bad that some of the sentences are rendered completely incoherent. Also, characters in the hypothetical scenarios change gender in mid-sentence. (Hey, I'm all for transgender characters, but no one transitions that fast.) The whole book reads as though it were dictated into an iPhone set on autocorrect and then sent straight to the printers without anyone having checked it first. You can make a drinking game out of this book. Every time you spot an error, take a shot of whiskey. Of course, you'd be dead by the end of the first chapter.

Emermouse said:

Funny thing about the Eragon books: the hatedom is almost as large as the fandom.

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Like Twilight? Man, I got many happy hours of entertainment out of ridiculing those books with like-minded people. As a result, I'm actually quite fond of the novels, without having ever managed to read them.

Emermouse said:

and Amelia Atwater-Rhodes,

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Oh man, her. Her Hawksong was one of my favourite books growing up. It has four sequels and I pretend they don't exist, because they're awful and shat all over the first book. "Oh my country is on the brink of a brutal civil war? Well f*ck it imma run off into the woods with my lover, ruling is too haaaard."
I pretend Hawksong is a nice little standalone.