What Diane's Reading

Don’t Bother

I hate to label any book as “bad” but I have read some that I wish I had never wasted my time with. To that end, here are some books that I DON’T recommend, even if you’re on a desert island and it’s the only book you have (if that were the case, I suggest you work diligently to wash the words of text from the book and write your own, in blood if necessary, to have something WORTH reading).

  1. “She’s Come Undone”, Wally Lamb - I know that many of you LOVED this book. I thought it was lame. I had no sympathy for the main character and I wanted her to shut up.
  2. “Four Blondes”, Candace Bushnell - I say Candace Bushnell came up with a brilliant idea for Sex in the City and I am forever grateful that she didn’t do the writing on the episodes. She’s an idea person and that’s okay, we need good idea people. I don’t think she’s a writer and I wonder why no one has told her that yet. Her characters are one dimensional idiots, there’s rarely a story line that has any actual meaning and the writing is poor.
  3. “Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination”, Helen Fielding - How is it possible that the woman who brought us “Bridget Jones’ Diary” a fabulously fun read could then bring us Olivia-stupid-Joules. Olivia lacks all of the charm and endearments of Bridget and leaves you wondering when you’ll ever finish the book.
  4. “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”, J K Rowling - I feel bad about listing this because I really do like the Harry Potter books (and I liked them long before the movies and the immense popularity). But this is essentially a book based around a prophesy about Harry Potter. And that is the lamest prophesy ever, that of Harry Potter and his arch-nemisis Lord Voldemort, only one can survive in the end. Duh! Of course one of them will have to die in the end, isn’t that just good fiction? Darth Vader and Luke, Frodo and Sauron, Snow White and the Witch, etc. all prove this rule. You don’t let both evil and good prosper and expect it to be a good story. One must be vanquished, destroyed, dimished to enhance the other.
  5. “Ethan Frome”, Edith Wharton - Who cares about some dude and his sledding accident? I read it in high school and to be honest, I don’t remember much about the story, nor do I want to. I thought it was terrible then and I intend to avoid ever reading it again.
  6. “Cold Mountain”, Charles Frazier - I tried to read this book, truly I did. I almost never abandon a book, but I did eventually abandon this one. I just didn’t care. I liked Ruby, but I got quickly weary of Ada who I wished would just shut up, buck up and deal. I skipped to the end, read the ending and was satisfied that I’d had all I needed of this story to last a lifetime. I also thought the movie sucked.
  7. “The Guardian”, Nicholas Sparks - I loved “The Notebook”. This is not on the same level. It’s like someone gave him a license to write increasingly sappy books and we (the general public) just kept buying them without questioning how dumb they were getting. ”The Guardian” (like all Sparks’ books) did make me cry, but mostly I felt sick that I was crying over a dumb book about a woman and her dog.
  8. “A Wedding in December”, Anita Shreve - I was disappointed. I didn’t find the characters all that likeable and the story didn’t hold my attention.
  9. “Motor Mouth”, Janet Evanovich - Don’t get me wrong, I love the early Stephanie Plum novels and I actually enjoyed “Metro Girl” (especially the gross spider scene). But “Motor Mouth” leads me to believe the Evanovich is just cranking out books to make her mortgage payment, not because she has the same passion and fun with her books that she had early on. What a disappointment!