Books I Wish I Hadn't Read

   It's been too long since I wrote a blog post. It's not been a great year and I'm not in a great mood (probably because pollen is stupidly high again #ihatespring), so why not write about all the books I loathe?

The Insider by Ridley Pearson

   I read the entire series, even fighting the dragging plot at times, waiting for the conclusion, and when I get to it, I'm confronted with this. First of all, who the heck crowd-writes a book? Crowd-funding I get, but crowd-writing? The author literally published his outline on the internet and had other people write it for him. In the places where he just copied and pasted the internet peoples' writing into the book (and it happened quite a bit), he credited them by putting their name down at the bottom of the page (which was incredibly distracting). It didn't help that the sentences were choppy and didn't fit together very well. He also randomly switched to present tense for this book, when all the rest of the books in this seven-book series were written in past tense. The plot was awkward, contrived, and unrealistic. There was a random maybe-betrayal by a very important character that was never explained at all. The characters were cardboard and, though the series spanned five or more years, they never changed. At the beginning of the series, the main character started a will-they-won't-they relationship, and after five years, he's still acting like a boy in the middle of puberty trying to ask his first crush out on a date. And he's been in a steady relationship with the same girl for FIVE STINKING YEARS. The all-anticipated event of the story was the appearance of Mickey Mouse, and even though literally every other Disney character the kids have encountered so far can talk, Mickey can't. Some all-powerful king-of-the-characters he was. What a humongous letdown. And at the end of this stupid book, I was whacked over the head with the "hint" that there was going to be another series, which I personally would rather shoot myself than read.

A Whole New World by Liz Braswell

   If the light-hearted fun adventure is what you love about Disney's Aladdin most, then this book is your worst nightmare. The first fourth of the book rehashes the movie while constantly changing little details for no good reason. Then, when it finally gets to the twist, it quickly takes a dive into the ridiculously dark. Right off the bat, Jafar murders the sultan, then cuts up the magic carpet, creates a zombie army, destroys Agrabah, tortures the genie and countless random citizens, and strips the genie of all his magical powers turning him human so none of this can be put right again. And at the end Jafar turns out to be crazy and talking to an imaginary Iago because he apparently murdered the real one so he could have a tiny glimpse into the future that didn't seem to affect the story any. The other characters aren't anything like they were in the movie, either. I'm not sure if Aladdin lies even once, and in this version of the story, he directly causes the death of a cop friend (he's a street rat, he shouldn't have a cop friend) by knocking a pillar onto him, which crushes him. #lightheartedfamilyfun Jafar is a psychotic murderer, Jasmine is a revolutionary (???), and, apparently, Aladdin's dad ran off and left him. This is an adaptation of a Disney movie for crying out loud. He's supposed to be dead! They're always dead! Ugh. Some of the Twisted Tales are good, but not this one.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

   I bet you didn't know that sunlight reflects off water. Henry David Thoreau did, which is why he's better than you.
   Thoreau is ridiculously contradictory ("People should never cut down trees!" Borrowed an ax from his neighbor so he could cut down trees around his pond. "Trains are awful and noisy and loud and I hate them!" Can't be bothered to move further into the wilderness to where he won't be able to hear the trains anymore. "People should do whatever I want, you shouldn't just emulate what I'm doing, but if you're not doing what I am, you're stupid."). He's also weird. Who loves wasps? They are not a thing to be invited into bed with you! Also, he never locks his door so people can come in and stay whenever, and condemns any who do, defending his decision with "I only got stolen from once!" You may like to get stolen from, but I, good sir, do not. When there were several feet of snow on the ground and impending snowstorms, Thoreau tramped ten miles through the woods on snowshoes to visit his favorite trees. He's also incredibly boring. Nobody cares that he spent 8.74 on groceries for eight months. Or how much he spent on bricks. He certainly doesn't need to defend his spending a bunch on watermelons. He doesn't need to tell everyone that sunlight reflects off water like it's new information to us, or describe in detail his lengthy day hoeing beans. Frankly, no one really cares. And he's arrogant. He assumes that unless the reader is told, we're going to think that the Cicero that built a fence near Walden Pond is the same Cicero as the Roman philosopher that lived before Christ. And he assumes that anyone who is poor has committed crimes. This is a stupid, boring, pointless book that I hope never to read again.

Eldest by Christopher Paolini

   I had heard the name Eragon for a while, so I finally decided to read the series. MISTAKE. I wasted countless hours of my life reading this stupid series. Unfortunately, I rarely drop series, so I didn't drop this one. I wish I had. Eragon was like a Lord-of-the-Rings version of Star Wars, and this was like The Empire Strikes Back, except without all the excitement, and with an addition of a fun murderer as a side character. This book drags on and on and on. The whole point of the book is for Eragon to train with the elves so he can defeat the not-actually-evil government, but it takes hundreds of agonizingly slow pages for him to actually get there! And once he does, the training is agonizingly long and boring too. Also peppered with philosophical musings on any subject under the sun, like how all enlightened people (read: elves) are atheists, and how evil it is for Eragon to eat meat because he's *gasp* telepathic! There is one long section devoted to Eragon watching ants (smacks of Walden, methinks). The only kind of exciting parts are the parts with Eragon's cousin Roran, who almost gets his entire town murdered because he won't tell the police any information about his criminal cousin who stole a dragon egg (like, he's a legitimate thief). Then Roran decides to go on a murderous rampage (I wish I was exaggerating), slaughtering anybody who come in his way. He even counts his kills. Eragon spends the entire book whining about his random on-and-off agonizing back pain (which implausibly came from a sword wound to his back) and Arwen-I mean Arya's rejection of him. Yeah, cry me a river, Eragon. She made it clear from the moment she met you she wasn't interested. Finally, Eragon gets magically transformed into an elf, which gets rid of all his scars and also his chronic back pain. How does this happen, you may ask? Two identical twin elf girls strip and stand naked back to back and jiggle so the tattoo on their back can come to life and release the spirit of the dragon. I want to die right now. I actually own this book and I seriously want to burn it.

Brisinger by Christopher Paolini

   I was stupid enough to keep reading this series. As I said, I rarely drop series. Thankfully, there are no more naked elves in this book. Unfortunately, there's plenty of other awful things to make up for it. For instance, Eragon kills an animal to eat and feels so sorry for it because he's telepathic, so he decides to become vegetarian (although that could have happened in the last book; after all this time they blend together). Also, Eragon turns out to be super violent and even lets himself be possessed by a demon at one point so he can use more magic. He spends waaaaay too long making a magic sword, and every inch of the way is described in excruciating detail. Also, Paolini decided he was tired of being accused of writing Star Wars and decided that Luke Skywalker (I mean Eragon) wasn't actually the son of Darth Vader (I honestly can't remember the guy's name at this point). Instead, Obi-Wan was his father. Which makes no sense and is full of plot holes, but anyway. Roran, the violent cousin of Eragon, has apparently been sleeping with his girlfriend this entire time because "he might as well take liberties with her" since she's afraid of him doing that anyway and now she's pregnant. So Eragon performs a rushed marriage for Roran and his stupid girlfriend and Eragon is just wildly excited about the whole thing. Then the fun zombie army shows up. The metaphors and dialogue are ridiculous (the book actually has the dialogue "Die, puny humans!"), the exposition is everywhere, the book is super bloated, and the magic system is stupid at best. There's apparently this Ancient Language (which the elves speak in all the time) that is magic and shapes the world and if you say fire in it you get fire, and if you get pronunciations wrong, you might accidentally curse a baby to grow up fast and have powers instead of blessing it. Yeah. Also, it was ridiculously gory (partially because of the zombie army) and this might have been the one in which there was a bizarre cult in which the people constantly hacked off their limbs to show their devotion for their god. Are you grossed out? Because I'm grossed out. Also, Eragon is a self-righteous jerk. Just sayin'.

Inheritance by Christopher Paolini

   And enter the infamous fingernails. What am I talking about, you may ask? I am talking about the three LOOOOONG pages of description of a man's fingernails in excruciating detail. And the worst part of it? You don't even find out the character's name. This is in the completely irrelevant side plot of a minor character being tortured. Why she was fascinated with the man's fingernails is beyond me. But the fingernails come back. Every time the man is in her torture chamber, the stupid fingernails take center stage. How could they not when they've been described so thoroughly?
   If you can't tell, this book is just as bloated as the others. Eragon learns to manipulate reality with his magic Ancient Language (and still can't win the granite cliff of a girl he still hasn't stopped pining over), manipulates the emotions of a little girl, kills the bad guy with sadness, and finds some dragon eggs. There are also copious amounts of pages describing a former dragon's struggle coming to terms with his new life as an inanimate object. But as a plus, this book meant the end of the series (I hope).

Unwind by Neal Shusterman

   This book makes me want to puke. It was so so horrible. It was freaky and creepy and horrifying and it probably scarred me for life. It's not even remotely plausible, and yet... I'm getting shivers down my spine just thinking about it. The premise is that after a huge civil war in America over abortion, the two sides settled on a "compromise" in which abortion is illegal but 13- to 18-year-olds can be "unwound" (read: murdered), and then everything in their body is used as organ donation for somebody else. And apparently this appeased everybody. The guy wrote this book to make everyone think abortion is awful (which it is), but there's no way this book accomplishes that. Abortion is illegal in the world of this book, and no one even thinks about having one. Issues actually addressed in this book are: organ donation, suicide bombers, caffeine addiction, and (apparently) Frankenstein. He creates a straw man to destroy in this book in hopes it will make pro-choice people feel guilty. Nobody would ever agree to the "compromise" at the end of this war he talks about! Pro-life people like me see all life as sacred and would never agree to killing teenagers as an alternative to killing unborn babies. Pro-choice people would never agree to this as an alternative to abortions (what exactly is the point of killing the child after you've spent thirteen years raising them?). That doesn't fit with the beliefs of anyone on either side and therefore can't be a compromise. Also, the science is so false you couldn't sneeze at it. You expect me to believe you can just put a piece of someone's brain in someone else's brain and expect it to work? That there won't be compatibility issues? That psychologists and psychiatrists and brain surgeons didn't go, "This could be catastrophic for the mental health of patients with brain damage"? And the religious parts are even more disturbing. A debate throughout the entire book is whether "unwinding" (killing a kid and harvesting their entire body for parts) is death. Apparently, the consensus the author came to is "No," because at the end of the book, there's a whole collection of people who got a body part from this one kid in a room, and every single one of them is talking so that it's one monologue like the dead kid is talking and they actually remember memories of the dead kid's life. As if you get a kidney or a lung from a man and you suddenly share his soul. The entire book is just sick and wrong, and seems to be simultaneously scaring people away from organ donation and making them feel guilty for not being organ donors because "if more people had been organ donors, this never would have happened." There are other weird bits as well, like the fact that caffeine is considered a drug on the level of cocaine and is banned (say bye bye to chocolate). And "clapping", where people get their bodies filled with an explosive substance, go to a random place, clap their hands, and blow up. It's a weird form of suicide bombing that's apparently pretty popular, even though it's not religiously or politically motivated, so it's hard to know why anybody actually does it. And storking. Not explaining it because it's just too weird. Also, it's not even well-written. The characters are flat, the emotions are shallow, and the character arc of one kid is kind of unbelievable, probably only because it wasn't shown at all, so he just turns off-screen from a sweet little kid into a suicide bomber. I hate this book so much and it will haunt me forever. Apparently the next book is a ridiculously creepy-sounding Frankenstein retelling. I'd stay far away from this book.

   That was very therapeutic. I feel much better now. What are some books you intensely loath and why? Tell me in the comments!