Worst book I finished: Upgrade by Blake Crouch. It’s like it was written by bad AI that was given a writing prompt then fed a bunch of Tom Clancy, Jack Reacher, and My Pillow/ testosterone ads. Who’s to say it wasn’t.

Worst book I DNF’d: One Hundred Years of Solitude. Yeah, whatev, it’s me, so everyone says. Still, 3/4’s of the way through and I just couldn’t take the soulless recounting of names, battles, inappropriate relationships, and deaths. I felt nothing for these people because there was zero character development, limited dialogue, and the book didn’t spend enough time with any of them for me to get invested. I’ve heard every list calls this a classic, but I didn’t like one thing about it.

This was a 1 star hate read for me. I do not understand any of the hype. The characters were all so wooden and unbelievable. The whole thing was insubstantial and unrealistic. They may as well have given her superpowers.

This is one of my favorite books, although most of that is due to Nabokov’s incredible writing. Still, I’ve always seen this as more of a morality play about obsession. About how it can take over your life, turn you into a monster, drive you to do all kinds of obviously insane and harmful things, and even when you get what you’re after, it’s still hollow and not enough because obsession is it’s own hungry illness that’s separate from what you think you’re attaching it to. Not to erase the true horrors of pedophilia, I just never got the sense that’s what Nabokov was actually writing about. Also never thought we were supposed to sympathize with HH so much as watch what happens when someone is consumed by an obsession and bear witness to the unhappiness and destruction that ultimately follows.