Top Ten Tuesday: Books I’d Gladly Throw Into the Ocean

This week’s topic–books I’d gladly throw in the ocean has me thinking of the worst books I’ve tried to read. I think I’d prefer to bury them in a toxic landfill thought. No reason to harm coral and aquatic species by dumping them, right?

In first place! Wild by Cheryl Strayed! A book so irritatingly smug and self-aggrandizing that I refuse to even link to it. You are completely free to love it, I loathe it.

The other books in this list are not ranked and do not leave me anywhere near as rankled as the book above.

Novels

 

Nonfiction

Astronauts Wives Club is my best-rated review on Goodreads. The book stank. It was written in a juvenile-snarky tone and the only research done, apparently, was watching the movie The Right Stuff. This book should never have been published–it was that bad.

Churchill and the King is awful, too. Why? Well for starters the genius editor who approved buying this manuscript and turning it into a book failed to do any research. You, see the relationship between the Prime Minister and the Sovereign is confidential. It is not that nothing gets said about the audiences–some things do get said, of course,. But, other than knowing that at the start of the war George VI preferred Lord Halifax to Winston, not a lot else is known about their true personal feelings. For starters, it hasn’t been long enough yet for everything to be declassified, although most now is out there. For another, the current sovereign, Queen Elizabeth, controls who may see her father’s diaries. There is just tons of speculation in this book. It’s one of those annoying “we can just imagine them putting their heads together” kind of books where they make up possible expressions or speculate on voice tones. I hate this kind of “history” book.

Why not join the fun next week? You can read the rules here.