(mostly pre-2016)
Books I Detested and Abandoned
- Adams, Richard – Watership Down
- Atwood, Margaret – The Year of the Flood
- de Botton, Alain – How Proust Can Change Your Life (also made me never want to read Proust)
- Cohen, Leonard – Beautiful Losers
- Colombani, Laetitia – La Tresse
- Ferrante, Elena – The Days of Abandonment
- García Márquez, Gabriel – One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Kerouac, Jack – On the Road
- Ng, Celeste – Little Fires Everywhere*
- Waller, Robert James – The Bridges of Madison County
- Zusak, Markus – The Book Thief
Disagreeable Works I Read Anyway
- Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi – Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
- Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
- Chekhov, Anton – A Life in Letters*
- Dahl, Roald – Esio Trot
- Foer, Jonathan Safran – Everything Is Illuminated
- Haddon, Mark – The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
- Hesse, Hermann – Siddhartha
- Hollingshead, Greg – The Roaring Girl (I couldn’t give this away; I tried)
- Kundera, Milan – The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- McFadden, Bernice L. – Keeper of Keys*
- Murakami, Haruki – A Wild Sheep Chase
- O’Malley, Bryan Lee – Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life
- Pynchon, Thomas – The Crying of Lot 49
- Theroux, Paul – Kowloon Tong
*My own doing. The rest were loaned, gifted, praised, when I naively take arbitrary recommendations.