As promised, here’s The Bad list of 2014! If Brian and I hadn’t started that Hate Book Club, this list would be depressingly short, which I guess means I’m getting better at picking out books for myself. As always, these were the ones I rated 1 star on GoodReads (you can’t rate 0 stars, unfortunately).
Every Day
This book was the one I hated most this year. I think others on this list might be objectively worse, but I knew going in that they would suck. This book’s premise sounded interesting, but then it just pissed me off. I think I did a pretty good job summarizing why in my original post:
the main character is a new person everyday, wearing their body and accessing their memories until midnight when he moves on to some other random body. This premise raises a lot of interesting issues, almost none of which are explored. The bulk of the plot is about his creepy relationship with the girlfriend of one of the people he possesses. Maybe it’s just because I really hate the love at first sight trope, but their relationship struck me as superficial bullshit. “He looks at her and only he can see her secret sadness” uggggggggh no. You can’t use that as a shortcut to establishing a believable connection between two characters. Plus, the ethical implications of dragging your host body around, wrecking its life because it’s your vehicle for the day are only kind of acknowledged. We’re supposed to realize that his stalker-Nice Guy(TM) love trumps all those concerns, I guess. Also, he hops into a lot of different teen-problem-novel-esque situations that we’re supposed to Learn A Very Important Lesson about, even though these people are portrayed as strange cardboard cut-out minorities with almost no humanity of their own. Except the one fat guy he possesses, who is described as “the societal equivalent of a burp.” The protagonist makes a big show of how non-judgmental he is, except of the fat guy, because since you did this to yourself, you deserve society’s scorn. A GIANT NOPE TO BOTH THOSE ASSUMPTIONS, David Levithan. Ew.
It by Stephen King
I was enjoying this book until the end, when the group of eleven-year-olds decide to pause in their escape to have sex in a sewer tunnel.
Grinding in Greenville by Victoria Andrews et al
A poorly-written romance novel with damaging portrayals of rape victims! Heyeah.
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus by John Gray
Obvious advice you might find useful if you are a 1950s stereotype.
Real Marriage by Mark Driscoll
A thinly-veiled cry for help.
Enchanted by Alethea Kontis
Some kind of re-imagined fairy tale bullshit?? I literally remember nothing about this book.
Six 1 stars out of 82 total books isn’t bad!
Next: The Ugly
Previously: The Good
2013 The Bad
Haha wow Ii would not have guessed that the scariest thing about It was an underaged sewer orgy how the hell even