The Book Sacrifice Tag

Disclaimer: These are my opinions, and I intend no offense to people who love these books- each unto their own. This is all in good fun!

This is a shameless rip-off of a tag I saw the lovely Ariel Bissett do on YouTube. In case you hadn’t realised, I’ve got a lot of pent-up rancour. I love books, but of course there are some books that I…. don’t. Nobody tagged me in this, but I DO WHAT I WANT OKAY.

The tag is easy- there are four scenarios, each one requires you to sacrifice a different kind of book. And without further ado:

THE BOOK SACRIFICE TAG

1) An Over-Hyped book: Let’s start this off with a Zombie Apocalypse! Let’s say you’re in a book store, just browsing, when BAM! ZOMBIE ATTACK. An announcement comes over the PA System saying that the military has discovered that the zombies’ only weakness is over-hyped books. What book that everyone else says is amazing but you really hated do you start chucking at the zombies knowing that it will count as an over-hyped book and successfully wipe them out?!

Okay, the book I’m picking for this is one that I found personally insulting.

Yes, it’s “Anna and the French Kiss” by Stephanie Perkins. YA Romance isn’t a genre I’d normally go for, but this one was hugely popular on booktube, and it had a million five star ratings on goodreads. I decided to give it a shot, but oh. my. god. Every single character in this was awful, offensive, and repugnant, the worst being the two leads: Étienne-the walking stereotype- St. Clair, who was a stupid, vapid, irritating cheater, with a British accent, French physique, and American heart (I would honestly rather shack-up with Heathcliff than spend a moment more reading about this moron); and Anna Oliphant, the idiotic, myopic, thoroughly detestable seventeen-year-old who represents everything people hate about America, tourists, and other people. She is a self-professed “film-buff” who doesn’t know that there are cinemas in Paris. Paris, France. She doesn’t know that there are cinemas in the country that invented film. What’s more, when she does make this startling discovery, she proceeds to watch American films. That she’s already seen. Disgusting. I hated literally every aspect of this book, from the godawful characters to the contrived and saccharine plot to the blatant ignorance of anything outside suburban upper-middle class American culture.

The zombies can eat it for all I care.

2) A Sequel: Let’s say you’ve just left the salon with a SMASHING new haircut and BOOM: Torrential downpour. What sequel are you willing to use as an umbrella to protect yourself?

The book I’m choosing here isn’t really a sequel so much as it is a spin-off but it’s…

“Heroes of Olympus: The Lost Hero” by Rick Riordan. I didn’t hate this, but I LOVED the “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” series, and I actually loved the rest of the “Heroes of Olympus” series, but this book was a bit…. meh. We didn’t get to spend enough time with the characters and settings we loved from “Percy Jackson,” and instead had to acclimate ourselves to the new trio- I loved Leo Valdez instantly, but unfortunately his POV only comprised 1/3 of the book. The other 2/3 belonged to Jason Grace, who was dull, vanilla, and inane, and Piper McLean, who was whiny, annoying, codependent, insufferable, and caught in satanic meld of Mary-Sue and Manic Pixie Dream-Girl.

3) A Classic: Let’s say you’re in a lecture and your English teacher is going on and on about how this classic changed the world, how it revolutionized literature and you get so sick of it that you chuck the classic right at his face because you know what? This classic is stupid and it’s worth detention just to show everyone how you feel! What Classic did you chuck?

It’s got to be…

“Of Mice and Men,” by John Steinbeck.

In all fairness, this book had the misfortune of being one I was forced to read in school. Now I’m not one of those people that by default hates any book taught in school- on the contrary, I love most of them. But this one….

Firstly- the way we studied this book made it repugnant. We had to treat every. single. aspect. as a metaphor for something else, and it drained the life out of the book faster than you can say “Jack Robinson.” We had someone else’s interpretation forced upon us, and that is literary suicide when it comes to enjoying a book. I get that this had a lot of social commentary and whatnot, but I was honestly just bored by this book. It felt a hundred times as long as it was, it was endlessly and tiresomely depressing, and the only character I cared about was Curly’s dog. Also, who decided to make a bunch of fifteen-year-olds spend nearly an entire semester on a book roughly the length of one of those Delia Smith recipe packets they hand out at Waitrose?
4) Your least favourite book of life!: Let’s say that you’re hanging out at the library when BAM global warming explodes and the world outside becomes a frozen wasteland. You’re trapped and your only chance for survival is to burn a book. What is the book you first run to, your least favourite book of all life, what book do you not fully regret lighting?

Oh. My. God.

Ah, yes, it’s my old foe, “before i fall” by Lauren Oliver. This is probably the worst book I have ever had the misfortune to read. This made the catastrophe that is the “Twilight” series look like Don bloody Quixote. This is probably the worst novel ever penned. Every single character was a whiny, demented, obnoxious moron. The protagonist had probably the most irritating voice ever, a constantly condescending tone that was probably supposed to make her sound edgy and worldly-wise but just made her look bitchy and vapid. I would have been pleased if every single character in this book was trussed up in a ball and sent to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. It was awful. The protagonist needed to die seven times before she was hit over her thick skull by the epiphany that abusing a classmate to the point of suicide is a shitty thing to do. The fact that this piece of garbage got published…