Top Ten Tuesday #258

Hi all! I hope you’ve had a good week since I last did one of these and you’re not getting too bored, if like me, you are currently on lockdown!

It’s week 3 of lockdown here and honestly, it’s starting to feel like first semester of Uni again, where I was bored and kind of lonely, except at least then I could go to trampolining and horse riding, and run whenever I felt the need to be out of my flat. Still, silver linings, we had lovely weather over the weekend and I was able to sit outside and read on our balcony at home which was nice and really made me feel better, so I’m looking forward to some more good weather like that this week.

Anyway, as it’s Tuesday, I have another Top Ten Tuesday for you guys, courtesy of Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. I actually have no idea what this week’s topic was meant to be as I wrote this post in January, the week that I left for Cape Town and the topics for April weren’t up yet (and obviously I didn’t know I would be returning home early) so I’ve kind of just made things up as I went along for the next few weeks of posts!.

Thanks to Jana for having the topics scheduled so far in advance, it really helped me out in prepping everything before I left!

This week, I’ve decided to talk about my Top Ten Least Favourite Books, as we did a Favourite Books post way back when I first started doing Top Ten Tuesdays and I thought it would be fun to do a ranty equivalent. This is no shame on you if you did like the books on my list, they just did not work for me! (Also, I’m only including books I finished on this list, since obviously I didn’t like ones that I didn’t finish).

1. Lord of The Flies-William Golding

Ugh, this is possibly my least favourite book that I was ever assigned at school. It’s so boring, it’s not even written that well, and who really needs another book about how awful men can be? Like we get it.

2. The Fault In Our Stars-John Green

Yes, I know millions of people loved this book and it’s a famous bestseller or whatever, but it just wasn’t for me. I found it really boring, I thought the characters were really pretentious and did not read like believable teenagers (and I was the same age as Hazel and Gus when I read it, that’s not me at 23 saying that) and I just thought the plot was super predictable.

3. One Day-David Nicholls

Again, I just found this one really dull. Dexter was a massive ass, I didn’t really like the repetitive nature of the book, and honestly, it didn’t feel like either of them really changed all that much until right at the end. I also really hate the movie for this one, Anne Hathaway’s Yorkshire accent is atrocious!

4. We Are Blood and Thunder-Kesia Lupo

This is one I read more recently, last year in fact and there was a ridiculous amount of hype over it, but I genuinely just couldn’t see it. I found it really, really dull, barely anything happens till the end, both narrators are super flat and I wasn’t a massive fan of the writing either.

5. The Invisible Library-Genevieve Cogman

This one had a promising concept but poor delivery. It really kills me because I should have LOVED THIS, librarian spies anyone? But the author just threw too much into it, it was like it was trying to be all kinds of fantasy at once, with the dragons and the spies and the time travel and werewolves and vampire and Fae…..you get it, it was all just too much. I was too confused to really get into it, and then on top of that, the characters were really flat as well!

6. The Curious Incident of The Dog In The Nighttime-Mark Haddon

This one has received quite a bit of pushback from members of the autistic community as not great representation and honestly, I can see why, Haddon’s characterisation of Christopher is incredibly stereotypical and not massively nuanced, the author has admitted that he did basically no research into autism before writing the book and honestly I’d rather support autistic authors telling their own stories than allistic ones who can’t even be bothered to do research.

7. Glass Sword-Victoria Aveyard

I mean I probably should have known this book wouldn’t work well for me, given that I didn’t exactly love Red Queen, but I REALLY HATED this book. It was so slow, it wasn’t all that well written, the plot was dull, the characters were underdeveloped….I could go on, but basically me and this book did not get on, and I did not finish the rest of the series.

8. Sea Witch-Sarah Henning

Again, this should have been so good! An origin story for Ursula/The Sea Witch, it should have been amazing. But instead of being all dark and twisted and fun, it was a boring trudge through a 17th century Danish inspired world, where basically nothing happened, the characters were flat and the focus was all over the place.

9. Not If I Save You First-Ally Carter

I loved Ally Carter’s Heist Society books, but this book was just bad. It was so boring, the plot was basically just the two main characters trudging through Alaska and though Maddie did grow on me, Logan was completely flat as a character. The writing wasn’t great, the villains’ motivations were flat, honestly, there was very little I liked about this book.

10. Graceling-Kristin Cashore

Ugh I know this was like a big book in YA Fantasy, but I could not stand it. I hated Katsa, I didn’t like the way that she looked down on other women, that she completely shut down her emotions because she thought the only way to be strong was to be strong physically and despised all feminine things. Thankfully, we’re past seeing that kind of character as the ideal, and this book was published ten years ago, when that was more of a thing, but still, I didn’t enjoy reading it. I also didn’t like Katsa and Po’s relationship, and generally, I just thought it was a really slow, boring book, that lacked in world and character development.

So there we go, those are my Top Ten Least Favourite Books. Do we share any? What did you think of these books? Let me know in the comments!

I will be back next week with another Top Ten Tuesday, which again will be a different topic to the scheduled one. I’m going to be talking about Top Ten Sequels I Want To Read, otherwise known as my Sequel List of Shame, those second/third/fourth books in a series that I have left languishing on my shelves, even though I read the first books ages ago!