Friday 28 February 2014

Books I will never read

A blog post from Guardian has caused some discussion on Facebook, and I have challenged my young colleague to list – and justify – a hundred books we will never read.

To be fair, I must say that I never read chick lit, true crime and all kinds of stuff too numerous to mention. So this will be things I ought to read, for various reasons, but won't.

The easiest thing is sequels to books I disliked, such as

Twilight
Lightning Thief
Divergent
Uglies
Maze runner
Ender's game

To make sure I am not a snob, I will add:

The portrait of a lady, volume 2

Then sequels to books I like and therefore don't want to read a sequel, particularly if written by someone else

Oz sequels. I have read a couple, and they were all rubbish

Books by writers whose books I have read and didn't like. This, however, can be tricky. I didn't like the first two books by John Green, and then Julia made me read The Fault in Our Stars, and it is one of the best books ever. It made me read yet another book by John Green, and I put it aside after five pages. But, nothing by

Balzac
Zola
George Sand
Flaubert (hmm, I seem to have a bias against French literature)
Paulo Coelho
P. G. Woodhouse
Shel Silverstein
Dan Brown

Books that we were supposed to read in school

Theodor Dreiser (ironically, they are now banned in Russia as unsuitable for young readers)
Upton Sinclair

Books I don't want to read for no obvious reasons

Game of Thrones
Paradise Lost
The Bell Jar
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Atlas Shrugged
The Naked and the Dead
The Awakening
The Illiad
Quo Vadis
Color Purple
Beloved (started severla times and could not finish)
Stephen King
Thoreau
E.M. Foster (but I love his criticism)
Emerson
Marquis de Sade

Not sure whether I am up to a hundred yet, but could easily go on.

My list of books I want to read is much shorter.


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