Least Favorite Books of 2017

After going through all the books I read this year, these five stood out as the ones I had the least fun with. Luckily, I had a very good year of reading so I didn’t have to slog through loads of low ratings to pinpoint these. As much as I love talking about books I love, talking about books I don’t like is worth it in a different, rather cathartic, way.

Please keep in mind that these are my opinions and I’m not trying to slander the good names of these books, insult anyone’s opinions, or hurt any feelings- what it comes down to is that they’re just not for me!

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Passenger by Alexandra Bracken

Passenger wins the award for being the book to put me to sleep more than anything else I read this year. Maybe I was just particularly tired over the two weeks I read this, but I could not make it through a good chunk of this book without my eyes getting heavy. So many naps happened. I just found this book incredibly long and incredibly boring. The plot was alright but nothing I was truly engaged in, and I did like the characters, but everything just took so long to happen. I always found my attention waning (to the point of slumber).  This book was a MAJOR snooze fest.

Front Lines by Michael Grant

Front Lines is an alternative history book set during a World War II in which females are allowed to enlist as soldier, and it was extremely disappointing. It was long and slow and just didn’t introduce anything new to me that I would have liked to see in a book about girls fighting in World War II. The descriptions of war bored me to tears. I found nothing very shocking, or inventive, about it, and I felt like the romance was an obligatory “girlish element” to include. This was, perhaps, the driest books I read this year.

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas

I know this series is widely beloved, which is exactly why I wanted to get into it so much, but unfortunately it complete missed the mark with me. The characters felt shallow, the plot inconsistent, the action kept being told and not shown to me, and the love triangle appeared to take precedence over all the deadliness and “mystery” of the plot.  I am told that Celaena is a deadly assassin, but I do not believe I saw her kill one person. And really, the love triangle seemed to consist of Chaol and Dorian walking into Celaena’s room without knocking whenever they pleased, over and over and over.  However, I read it with the help of this read along, which enhanced my experience exponentially. I did read the second book in the series, which I found to be better, unfortunately I was not destined to be part of this fandom.

The Bone Season by Samatha Shannon

I did not enjoy this book one bit, and I 100% should have DNF’d it, but, like with Throne of Glass, I really wanted to get a full picture of what all the hype was about. Unfortunately, I really, really ended up disliking it. It was long and dense, full of a lot of info-dumping and complicated jargon, and yet I still feel fuzzy about exactly how the world of this book works. And even though this book is so long, I don’t feel like a whole lot happened. Worst of all, I really could not stand the characters. I found them flat and undeveloped, and the master/slave romance between Paige and the Warden was…rather baseless, simple, and not my thing. I found this book downright boring. If I could go back and use the time I used to read this book to read something else, I would.

Kasper Mützenmacher’s Cursed Hat by Keith Fenonmiller

I think of this book as the beginning of the end of my brief stint with ARCs. “But how can you swear off ARCs by reading just one bad one??” you ask. I swear to you, if you read this book and you would understand the wariness it cursed upon me for requesting all future ARCs. It was just…horribly, terribly, offensively bad historical fiction. The characters were unlikable, the plot was tangled and disjointed, and the historical inaccuracy of it killed a part of my soul (if I ever make a horcrux and you need to destroy it, read it this book). It was set during the 30s-60s, but characters would use modern 21st century phrases and slang (after saying something awful about Jewish people, Hitler’s right hand man Joseph Goebbles proceeded to add “no offense,” rendering everything he’d said inoffensive, of course), and apply modern values to things. Mostly, this book just attempted too many things and played with too many concepts and ended up being an extremely chaotic, messy story. It was painful to get through and the worst book I read this year. Also, please, if you ever feel the need to give your main character a long name like Mützenmacher, AT LEAST do not put it in your book’s title.

Do you agree with me on these books? Disagree? What are some of your least favorite books of 2017??