The end of the year is here! I am SO ready for 2018 and some positive vibes for the New Year! But first, before we get to my favorite reads of 2017 (you’ll get that post tomorrow), here are my 2017 Disappointments! (Note: these books were not necessarily published in 2017, I just happened to read them in 2017.)
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The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
Uggh. The characters here were just so unlikeable! This was the first book I read in 2017, and it tops my list of disappointing reads for the year. I was not impressed and don’t understand why this book has been so popular.
Links: Amazon | Goodreads | my review
The Best of Adam Sharp by Graeme Simsion 
This one almost took away the title of Most Disappointing Read from The Nest. It sure was close! The Best of Adam Sharp is unfortunately being made into a movie, and I’m hoping they change the horrific ending!
Links: Amazon | Goodreads | my review
A Million Worlds with You by Claudia Gray
What happened here? I loved the first book of the Firebird Trilogy, A Thousand Pieces of You, and thought the second was okay, but the last book just fell totally apart and traveled through every cliché. This truly was disappointing, I had high hopes that the trilogy would end well.
Links: Amazon | Goodreads | my review
Valley of the Moon by Melanie Gideon 
No. No. No! I think I need to stay away from time travel books. I rarely enjoy them, and this one just did not make one bit of sense if you thought about it for too long. Plus, there was that cringe-worthy ending.
Links: Amazon | Goodreads | my review
And here’s the one I think most of you will be up in arms over! But I’m sorry (not really sorry…). I just couldn’t with this book.
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
I just don’t get it. I found this far too long and boring. Perhaps it was that I read this over a very, very long period of time (it took me over a year!) and so I kept getting pulled out of the book, but there was SO much that could’ve been edited out. There were a few sections that I did enjoy, but as a whole I just thought, blah.
Links: Amazon | Goodreads | my review
Well, I was in fine form today. I’m sure there are people who love these books that I just blasted, and that’s wonderful! That’s the great thing about reading: we each get to form our own opinions of what we read, and we bring our own life and experiences to every book we read.
Stay tuned tomorrow for my Favorite Reads of 2017!
Have you read and hated any of these books? Loved these books? Please tell me why! REALLY – I would really love to know!
luvtoread 
I did give War and Peace 5 stars, but I’m pretty sure in retrospect it was just because I was so happy I’d finally finished it! The truly sad thing is that after struggling for months to get through it I can now remember almost nothing about it… bah! 😉
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Yep! I totally understand! I was so relieved to finally finish that book. I’ve heard that the recent miniseries was a good adaptation. I wonder if I’d get more out of the adaptation than I did out of the book…
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I haven’t had the strength of mind to try it… 😉
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Yeah 🙂
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At my undergrad institution, you had to take classes in certain time periods to major in English. Usually, the categories to check off had lots of options. But one category only had TWO options. You could either take Ancient Greek lit, taught by a man everyone hated, or you could take this class in which you were required to read War & Peace, which was taught by a woman everyone hated. I took the Ancient Greek lit because my friends ahead of me in the program warned of how awful War & Peace was for them. One young woman tried to listen to the audio book over spring break while she drove home. There are so many characters in those door-stoppers that I don’t know how she kept it all straight!
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Eek! I can’t imagine listening to the book! I had to keep writing everyone’s name down, and their connections to each other in order to keep them all straight. At least the good thing about an audiobook would be to know how to pronounce the names. I know there are a lot of people who rave over War and Peace, but I’m definitely not one of them!
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In the future: if you’re going to read a big huge classic, print out the character list on Wikipedia first. They all have them, and it’s really, really helpful.
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Yeah… thanks for the reminder! I think I’d definitely do that if I ever were to try War and Peace again.
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For some stupid pride reason, I didn’t print out those sheets when I took a class called Victorian Universe. I made my own charts for Middlemarch, Vanity Fair, and Bleak House. Wikipedia was new when I was in school, and we were always warned strong against how inaccurate it was, so I felt I had to do it myself. Apparently, I need a Mr. Darcy to point out how stubborn I am.
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hee hee 🙂 I bet you retained more of the information by making your own chart though, right? I still hear warnings about the accuracy of Wikipedia, but I think for stuff like characters in books and publishing dates it does pretty good. I use it all the time for tracking series, or if I need a reminder on what happened in a certain TV show or a book, etc.
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