omg how many numbers did you — this is going to be long. college dissertation long.
2. Your 5 least favourite books of all time.
1. The Day No Pigs Would Die. Read it in 8th Grade, thought it was horrible, horrible fan fiction-quality writing. A pig was raped for insemination and the boy sees blood trickling down its leg—so graphic and so unnecessary. AND ALSO. THE PIG DIED. SO. IT’S ALL A LIE. But god, yeah, I thought that book was poorly written, overwrought horse manure.
2. Actually, we read Across Five Aprils that year too and it was a SLOG, utterly forgettable, just a whole lot of nope. (The teacher tried to make us read it in fifth grade and the whole class was SO BORED she gave up halfway through. She passed around a tub that we all threw our books into and CHEERED.) It was one of those historical fiction books where, everyone’s just plodding along … on this farm … occasionally someone listens to the radio and we get a page of ~updates from the war~. Literally all I remember is that a character’s name was Shad.
3. That My Dear Uncle Oswald book by Roahl Dahl that I read a while back. Just … a lot of rape going on. Rape, sexism, a weird little homophobic part … nagl. It was about … something to do with this guy inventing this pill from an ~insect in Africa~ that causes uncontainable, uncontrollable lust. And they were going to celebrities, drugging them, getting them to have sex with this girl, STEALING THEIR SEMEN, and then accusing them of rape afterwards. I could not really process why in the world I was reading it.
4. The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness doesn’t really deserve to be on this list because it wasn’t offensively terrible, but it was SO MIND NUMBINGLY BORING.
5. I hate to do it, but maaaaybe the number 5 slot goes to A Casual Vacancy? Like The Crane Wife, it isn’t that CA is offensively horrible, it didn’t murder my family or anything, but I think we were all SO EXCITED for JKR’s new book, the idea that she was going to keep writing, that maybe she would start on a project just as exciting and captivating as Harry Potter and … instead … we got … that. Lots of unnecessary words like “vulva” and “masturbation” being thrown around for what felt like shock value … I found the book so dry, and normally I wouldn’t take offense to that, but … It’s JKR. We were all hoping for something more.
FOR THE THREE PEOPLE STILL READING THIS POST … I SALUTE YOU. ONTO THE NEXT QUESTION.
4. Characters you hate.
Half the characters I read. No, um. There’s hating a character because they’re a bad, vile person, and then there’s hating a character because they’re such a waste of paper. I think I’ll say I disliked Heathcliff and Cathy from Wuthering Heights immensely, primarily because I was told to expect a wonderful love story??? and that heathcliff was such a romantic figure??? and then he throws a baby off a staircase????
okay I really need to cut this post. more madness beneath the read more.
Other characters I hate… I have no great affection for Draco Malfoy. I think he’s pretty two-dimensional and I wish he’d had some actual redemption in Deathly Hallows. Instead, he never evolved, never really changed, just … stayed a pointy-chinned little shit. I also greatly dislike the bully of children that was Severus Snape, but I still enjoy him as a character for being well written and vividly fleshed out. So there is the difference between the two forms of hating a character: Snape I’m not fond of in the sense that he was a bad guy; Draco, I don’t particularly like, because he was just so flatly written.
10. Name five absolutely great film adaptations of books.
HAS THERE BEEN FIVE? Okay, no joke, Clueless was a GREAT adaptation of Emma—captured the spirit of the book perfectly and adapted it to a modern setting. The Pride & Prejudice Keira Knightley movie I thought did something similar—it wasn’t a page-by-page faithful adaptation, but I felt like it got the book. The Emma miniseries with Jonny Lee Miller I feel similarly fond of—maybe not a faithful adaptation, but it was fun and I loved living in the world of the characters for a few hours.
Hunger Games and Catching Fire would be my other two picks. I’m not head-over-heels for the quality of the writing in the HG books, but the movies nailed the stories, nailed the emotions, just—did a really, really good job.
16. A book you haven’t read and have no intention of ever reading. (If you want, tell us why you don’t want to read it.)
I’ll probably go with the, I’m guessing, stereotypical answer of Fifty Shades of Gray. I tried reading the first few chapters ~for fun~ but it wasn’t even good enough to mock. It was just nonsensical, depressingly bad writing.
21. The most disturbing book you’ve ever read.
Easily, Escape from Camp 14. For a split second, I considered a couple of horror novels, but nothing an author could create comes CLOSE to actual human sufferings. Escape from Camp 14 was my first exposure to North Korea and its prison camps, and I basically spent the entire book ugly sobbing. A harrowing, affecting, disturbing read if ever there was one.
WELL I GOT MORE OR LESS COHERENT THERE AT THE END. TOO BAD I SPENT THE BEGINNING OF THIS POST RAMBLING ON. Anyway, if you want to request any more book questions, the post is here and my ask box is over here.