Top Ten Tuesday – 20th February

I’m doing the Top Ten Tuesday meme, which is now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, and the theme for 20th February is…Books I’ve decided I’m no longer interested in reading. I probably should have looked at this before I did last week’s post and knocked a bunch of things off my TBR! Oh well, here goes:

1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov – this was the first book on my TBR before I had a bit of a clear out the other day. I obviously added it when I was going through a phase of ‘these are ‘good’ books that I should read’. These days, regardless of how much of a classic it may be, I’m just not interested in reading this at all.
2. Anything else by Charles Dickens – as mentioned the other week, I read Great Expectations at school, and it put me off Dickens for life. As with the above, his books may be classics, but I’m no longer interested in reading those just for the sake of it.
3. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen – this one comes under the heading of ‘I don’t particularly like what I’ve read about the author, so I’m not interested in reading their work’. I know that can be a controversial opinion, but I’m okay with it.
4. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline – this one’s is a mixture of the Jonathan Franzen reason, and the fact that I’ve read reviews which make me pretty certain that the representation of female characters within the book and how they’re treated would really frustrate me.
5. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon – I think Outlander is probably a very good book, but I decided when I was cleaning out my TBR that it’s probably not for me. There is a definite possibility that I’ll change my mind about this in the future.
6. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden – this is another book that I cleaned off my TBR. There’s so much I want to read that gives insight into other experiences and cultures, and reading a book by a white guy about a culture that he is not part of and, from what I’ve read, hasn’t treated with any particular nuance, doesn’t further that aim.
7. The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye by David Lagercrantz – I really enjoyed the original millennium trilogy, but was so disappointed by The Girl in the Spider’s Web that I don’t feel the need to pick up any more of the series with Lagercrantz at the helm.
8. The First Bad Man by Miranda July – this is apparently still on my TBR, but I tried No-One Belongs Here More Than You a couple of years ago and I just could not get on with it. And with so many books to read, I don’t feel like revisiting authors whose work I haven’t previously enjoyed. Again, I reserve the right to change my mind on this one.
9. The End of the World Running Club by Adrian J Walker – I picked this up in a Kindle sale last year, but after a few chapters, I already disliked the main character and the book’s bland, unchallenging approach to gender roles that I gave up.
10. Anything else by JK Rowling – I have a lot of respect for a lot of what JK Rowling has done, and the amounts she’s donated to charity and her refusal to back down from Twitter trolls. However, the Johnny Depp thing last year, and the ‘Dumbledore’s gay but wait, we don’t want to actually show you that’ has sadly left me with the impression that her feminism is not nearly as intersectional as she would have us believe, and that’s something that’s important to me these days.

This is definitely a mixture of ‘books I’m no longer interested in’ and ‘authors whose beliefs don’t seem to mesh all that well with mine’. I find myself a little nervous about putting this out into the ether, as I’ve found that often saying what you don’t like can be more controversial than what you do!

But anyway, what books are you no longer interested in reading? I’d love to hear!

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