What is the most overrated book you’ve read?

Question

Danguole · Accepted Answer

When it first came out, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. All I heard was that it was a new Harry Potter book, and as a big Potter fan, I picked it up. My god, was it horrible. Maybe it was because it was a script for the play, but the biggest part was how little sense it made. I mean, it broke the already-set rules of time travel, how you can't change things in the past because it's already been done. And that whole plot line with Voldemort having a child with Beletrix??? It was a mess EDIT: I posted this because before it was released, there was a massive hype train, and I bought it the first day it came out, and I hadn't looked on Reddit or anywhere else because I didn't want spoilers

Josef · Answer

any Dan Brown books. I've read three of them and they are all basically the same boring plot.

Salomo · Answer

Infinite Jest was highly recommended to me but after about 100pgs I couldn't care about the characters or keep track of the plot. Felt like when I tried to read Gravity's Rainbow.

Oznur · Answer

House of Leaves. Don't get me wrong I loved the parts with the family in the house, but the main character investigating the whole thing was the most boring character I've ever read. I really don't get the reddit hype over that book.

Debbie · Answer

Anthem by Ayn Rand. Yuck.

SHEMIKA · Answer

Eleanor and Park. It was actually pretty problematic, but even without the problematic parts it was just... very boring? It was being talked up like it did something new and fresh with the YA romance genre but I just didn't see it. That and she literally named her Korean character Park. Park Sheridan. Park is a Korean surname. And his younger brother's name is fucking JOSH.

smilla · Answer

Lovely Bones

Silke Eiffel · Answer

A Wrinkle In Time. I felt it was boring, and the movie was worse

Birit · Answer

Gone Girl. I hated that book so hard. What a load of overblown crap.

Karin Fischer · Answer

Insert high school required reading here

hind · Answer

Celestine Prophecy

Mandy Baer · Answer

Gonna get a lot of hate here but, Into the Wild. The author is just so fucking dull and monotone that there was nothing aside from the actual plot that was actually interesting in that book

Tiia-Maria · Answer

The amount of people who don't like Catcher in the Rye here is bothering me. I know it's not for everyone, but I think they missed the point of the story

chenette · Answer

Wuthering Heights.

Dawn · Answer

Eat, Pray and Love.

Amie · Answer

12 Rules for Life by J. Peterson. I discovered his lecture series on personality, loved it, discovered the craze around him after that, wanted to read his book for comparison & bc it was a huge bestseller when it first appeared. It's ok - it is literally not bad - but neither the writing style nor the content managed to fascinate me. I enjoyed listening to the lectures way more.  And anything by Thomas Mann. He is considered intellectual literature and I read him when I was a teenager who read a lot, and huge books with ease. His were the first I never finished. They describe mundane happenings, leading nowhere. And while that might be intentional, it is horribly lame to read.

Betsey · Answer

I never actually finished Game of Thrones. It was an incredibly tedious book featuring a whole cast of unlikeable characters doing very boring things. I managed to get about three hundred odd pages into it before I just couldn't force myself to keep going.

Merve · Answer

Twilight.

Benjie · Answer

The Great Gatsby. It's soooo fucking boring. It's a bunch of rich people complaining about other rich people. What do I get out of that?

EVELIA · Answer

Eat pray love

Calida · Answer

The Fountainhead

Nataline · Answer

Moby Dick. Great for falling asleep. Don't read it for entertainment.

Knarik · Answer

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is pretty overrated.

Blayne · Answer

To kill a Mockingbird is fine. Just fine. That's it. It's not a masterpiece. It's not amazing. It's okay. I like it. I don't love it. It's somehow the only book where the film is better.

Cyrene · Answer

Ready Player One

Reea · Answer

The Great Gatsby. It's just pretty dull reading personally.

Mandy Farber · Answer

American Gods.

Heidi-Maarit · Answer

Surprisingly, Sapiens. Really enjoyed reading parts of it, but was deeply disappointed when I realised a fair few chunks of the book are just simplified speculations and generalisation. I'm referring here to when he talks about religion and social systems in history especially, the writer paints his speculations as if they're scientific facts even though to anyone who's read about this stuff more in depth it'd be clear he's just finding an explanation that fits the conclusions he wants to reach. Again there are large parts of the book that are interesting and educational, but it requires a few big grains of salt let's say..

Brigitte Adler · Answer

Diary of a Wimpy Kid  5 years back me would curse the present me for saying it but as more and more books came out I realized that Greg is just an entitled brat and Rowley is an angel for putting up with him.

Acacia · Answer

Atlas Shrugged  Its the same point driven into the dirt for 90% of the book. The other 10% is a 2 hour radio address that takes 12 hours to read.

Yvonne Meyer · Answer

Anthem Ayan Rand, 2112 is a better version

Mirigli · Answer

All of the Hunger Games except the first one

milla · Answer

Wicked

Deloris · Answer

"The Game of thrones series. Couldn't stand the way the man writes. I fought my way through the books, but I just couldn't enjoy them. I found them repetitive and dull. My God if I ever saw the phrase "breaking the fast" again I might lose my mind. "

Serja · Answer

Doesn't Ender kill (or close that) his bullies? I liked the part in the book because it fits his character and shows what kind of character he is but for a children's book that's a bit harsh. Nothing wrong with teaching children to stand up against their bullies but some children might get some wrong ideas from that. Just some food for thought.i would totally give the book to my children.

Teodoor · Answer

It bothers me so much that Orson Scott card is a massive homophobe because I honestly really like the enders game series and want to reread them but I don't feel right buying any of the books because I don't want to give j any money.

REFUGIO · Answer

I know Reddit loves them but Ready Player One and Ender's Game are horribly written kids books and nothing more.

Edithe · Answer

1Q84. Motherfucker, why the FUCK are you writing about children having sex? Are you okay, dude?

enna · Answer

Naked Lunch. Writing while you're high off your tits on LSD does not make the book groundbreaking or cerebral.

CHANTELLE · Answer

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck Awful

Nicoletta · Answer

Wicked. I couldn't even finish it.

Anna-Gretha · Answer

Ready Player One. I had multiple people recommend it. There was also a big movie made of it. But the book was, in my opinion, poorly written, and the dialogue felt like I was reading some socially awkward person's best guess at what a conversation would be like. I was very unimpressed.

naila · Answer

50 shades. Go read anything by Zane or The sleeping beauty series by Anne Rice instead.

Simge · Answer

The Sleep Book by Dr Seuss. Not interesting enough to hold my attention. My kids and I never managed to make it through the book in one sitting. Always fell asleep about halfway through.

CAROLL · Answer

I can think of several, but #1 is probably that noted boomer fetish object On the Road. Basically the maunderings of a guy so far up his own @$$ that he needs Plexiglas installed in his belly so he can see out.

Anna · Answer

The Alchemist. It was good but not that good. Especially since the author talked about the true ending

Casandra · Answer

The fault in our stars

Otes · Answer

Fifty Shades of Grey. Not a big fan of the book.

Jordanna · Answer

The outlander series is quite possibly some of the best plot ever but it just...it's BORING. Like literally, it all makes sense, there's no major plot holes for a casual reader like me, but Jesus it's boring. It's the perfect TV show book series

Nagina · Answer

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

SHELA · Answer

Frantically scrolling to see if my favorite book series is mentioned.

Keiju · Answer

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children The book had me very confused, the movie was awful. Idk why people like it

Deega · Answer

Eat pray love lol

Jillane · Answer

Divergent. It was just a shitty hunger games clone. And the movie was worse

Aleecia · Answer

"Pretty much any "bestselling" YA book that we force the kids to read. My coteachers and I have watched kids fall asleep reading books that they are supposedly going to fall in love with. (It does always allow me to rant about how the NYT best seller list is basically an op-ed paid for by publishers. The kids just look at me but I enjoy my ranting.) "

Ada-Maria · Answer

Eragon. I thought I would love a fantasy epic since my friends said it was great and I liked LotR but it was terrible. The characters and their choices felt so shallow and stupid.

Jillie · Answer

"Maze Runner. What little sense that it made, the entire series could have been a whole book, and should have been, because by itself, the first book known as "Maze Runner" made absolutely no sense at all. It was just a prologue. And that's not how humans would behave in that type of scenario, resorting to petty drama rather than survival. The director of the movie had to fix so many things like "1000 ft walls" they instead made 50 ft walls to be believable. A gymnasium ceiling is usually 25' high. The timeline also didn't make sense, compared to how many people were there, which was fixed in the movie. "

Dorsaf · Answer

HP Lovecraft as an author (his complete collection). His worlds may be interesting but I find his prose almost unreadable.

VIRGINIA · Answer

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, I got it for my bar mitzvah a few years back and was told it would change my life. It's one of only three books I've started but never finished. It's the most tediously preachy thing I've ever read, and I've read Immanuel Kant.

Antje Peters · Answer

The alchemist. Fuck that piece of garbage

Jeri · Answer

May not be a popular opinion but Girl, Wash Your Face. On the other hand, what I read of her husbands book was pretty decent

Tilma · Answer

The Art of War. Read it when i was school and then later on in life found out dude lost almost all of his battles.

sofie-amalie · Answer

Crucify me for this but The Great Gatsby. Wasn't a bad book, just took forever to get to the point.

BRANDA · Answer

The Little Prince. I can't deal with adults who glorify it. Don't get me wrong it's a great book for children. And for adults to discuss with children. It's a great book to learn what a metaphor is when you're young. And how lovely it can be used in literature. It has good messages. But grown ups with real lives saying how it's the most meaningful book they ever read, how it taught them everything they know about life and how it's the most precious piece of literature is such bullshit. What type of Disneyland on cocaine life do you have when Le Petit Prince teaches you everything you know about life and opens your eyes in your late 30s.

Purcell · Answer

Atlas Shrugged.

marijana · Answer

Without a doubt, Eat, Pray, Love. It was so hard to feel bad for someone who had the time and money to spend months traveling to cool places!

Karolin Fisher · Answer

Dead poets society. Read it for school which may be the problem

CHANTELLE · Answer

ITT: People complaining about crappy grocery store novels and YA

Katharina Hertz · Answer

The Magicians.  What a shitty fucking book. I don't even know why some people rate this book so highly. The writing was horrible, the characters flat and boring, a stupid Harry Potter uninspiried story, and the main character, Quentin, was a whiny little bitch from start to finish.

nazife · Answer

The Notebook, what a steaming pile of predictable shit. Also anything by Paulo Cuehlo, that absolutely unbearable fucking hack.

Anji · Answer

The Alchemist

DARNELL · Answer

Jekyll and Hyde. It's an cool concept, but instead of being told from Jekyll's perspective (apart from the last chapter, the only interesting bit) it's told from the perspective of his friend, Utterson, who is literally the most boring character I've ever encountered in a book.

ROSEMARIE · Answer

"The Da Vinci Code. The way people were talking about it when it was released, you'd think it was the best thing ever committed to paper. But it's just a mediocre mystery novel with overblown religious themes and a bog-standard "twist" ending (the supposed good guy was bad and the supposed bad guy was good, shocker!). "

NGAN · Answer

The chicken soup books did nothing for my teenage soul at all, yet everyone raved about them for a good year or so.

What is the most overrated book you’ve read?

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