Top Ten Tuesday – September 5: Ten Books That Were A Chore To Get Through

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish.

September 5: Ten Books I Struggled to Get Into But Ended Up Loving or Ten Books That Were A Chore To Get Through or Ten Books I’ve Most Recently Put Down (the theme is…books you had a hard time with…tweak it how ever you need)

1. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

This was required reading in high school. It was a chore to get through because it’s written in the vernacular of the time period. If it were not for the Cliff’s Notes and discussion in class I would have failed the quizzes and tests.

2. Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige

Basically I lost patience with the pacing. Should have been a stand-alone YA novel.

3. Enchantress: A Novel of Rav Hisda’s Daughter by Maggie Anton

Where was the magic? Where was the villain?

4. Beheld by Alex Flinn

Not at all how it is described on the book jacket. The main character is barely present. During some chapters I was skimming.

5. The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi

I was expecting something more eerie and supernatural and I ended up bored. Also, I would get so annoyed at some of the characters’ behaviors.

6. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

It took me a while to get used to the style of writing. She gets very wordy. It was close to the last quarter of the book that I didn’t have to reread sentences to understand the scene. It takes a lot of brain power to read and I was tired after 2 chapters.
The book is told through the perspective of the tenant, Mr. Lockwood, and the story itself is from the perspective of the housekeeper, Ellen Dean (Nelly). And the story she tells happened in the past. So because it is told this way we get a lot of telling and not much showing.

7. Hustling Hitler: The Jewish Vaudevillian Who Fooled the Führer by Walter Shapiro

The title is false advertising. I get that the author was trying to set up a background of Freeman’s life and how he became the man he was but I just wanted it to be about him hustling Hitler. I was not interested in the little details of his many cons and vaudeville days. Just concentrate on that one detail of his life, conning Hitler.

8. The Drafter by Kim Harrison

Everything moves so slow and not much of the plot develops. It is very repetitive and the action is not very enticing. I didn’t even finish.

9. Dodgers by Bill Beverly

I was so bored by the story. I expected an action packed road trip adventure. What I got was a story as mundane as watching the trees and flat plains outside your backseat window.

Just when something exciting would happen, it was short lived. Then it was back to the boring road trip. Blah, blah, blah. I was not much of a fan of they style of writing either.

10. Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities
by Flora Rheta Schreiber

I read this as a young teenager, so long before I had a computer. I got about a quarter through and gave up. Too long, too boring, too disturbing. And I read somewhere that it was all fabricated.