28 May 2009

Booking Through Thursday: Unread


"Booking Through Thursday" is hosted by Deb. In the perfect follow-up to last week’s question, as suggested by C in DC:

Is there a book that you wish you could “unread”? One that you disliked so thoroughly you wish you could just forget that you ever read it?
My immediate thought was, nope, I've not hated anything or wished it back enough to want the memory of reading a particular book gone from my mind. Then I started thinking back to things I perhaps had to read or forced myself to finish.
So, I admit, my number one, absolutely-wish-I-never-read-this-in-the-first-place is....The Grapes of Wrath. Surprised, right? Well, we had to read it in American Lit in high school(and since I was in the advanced program I was a sophomore and everyone else was a senior) and since the entire class was packed with senior slackers the teacher assigned a quiz per chapter. On every. Single. Chapter. It's enough to put one off reading permanently. I've read other Steinbeck's since then and liked them and I'm going to be braving The Grapes of Wrath for Connie's BNBC Classics group in July. I'd really like to "unread" that high school experience so I can start fresh.
Runners-up for the "wish I could unread this one" award are:
- Breaking Dawn (I was enjoying the series up to the last book - it seriously wasted my time - and I pretty much had to finish because of the "can my 10 yr old read these books" questions)
- Mr. Darcy's Daughters (bleck)
- some romance novel I found lying around my parents' house that I read because I was bored one day and the poorly written/badly imagined sex scenes are now burned into my memory (it doesn't get the big prize because I've managed to actually forget the title - it was a red mass market, not unusual for the romance genre)
What about you? Got a reading experience you'd rather remove from your brain with an ice pick?

3 comments:

  1. Aaaannnndd, for some reason Blogger is refusing to recognize only one paragraph break out of like 5. I've edited three times and it's not going to work. *sigh*

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  2. yeah, definitely a few i could do without. "sonata for miriam," anyone? oy. :-)

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  3. I've re-read some of the hated books of high school and had a different reaction. I made it through Mr. Darcy's Daughters, but have totally forgotten it.

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