Books you regret reading

[veti]

Spin-off to avoid derailing another thread...

What are the books that you really regret reading? Maybe they were recommended by someone you trusted. Maybe you were promised a twist ending that would make it all worthwhile. Or maybe you just read on with the awful fascination of one watching a train wreck. But whatever the reason, you put part of your life into this work and when you were done, all you could think was "I'm never getting those hours back".

I have a couple of contributions to get the thread rolling. Note that spoilers may follow.

Dan Brown, 'The Lost Symbol'. Summary: a mysterious, mystically-superpowered villain believes that 'ancient wisdom' guarded by the Freemasons would enable him to become a god, and sets out to force our hero to uncover the Masons' deepest secret.

Spoiler: it's a bible. Yes, that's right - the unspeakable secret that billionaire Freemasons are prepared to lay down their own, their families', and each others' lives to protect - is the most readily-available book in the Western world. If only our villain had thought to check in his hotel drawer, we could all have been spared 700 of the most tedious pages it's ever been my misfortune to read.

And if you think that's silly, just wait until you find out why the CIA is involved.

D J Watry, 'The Tainted Sword'. It almost feels like cheating to include this. After all, the cover didn't exactly promise a deep and meditative read. But it did suggest an entertaining sword-and-sorcery romp in a vaguely D&D-themed setting, and boy did it fail to deliver that.

What it does deliver is like "swords and sorcery without adults". There's not one character in the entire book who has more maturity, wisdom or responsibility than a thoroughly spoiled 13-year-old. They all deserve what's coming to them, except for the "heroes" who quite inexplicably get a "happy" ending. Me, I'd been rooting for "rocks fall, everyone dies" since about the midpoint.

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There's my starters. What's your Most Regrettable Literary Experience?

[Lethologica]

I regret reading Brisingr. Eragon and Eldest weren't terrible despite being terribly derivative, but the more elves got involved, the stupider it got.

Thankfully I quit Inheritance at the first speed bump. I don't know how it ends and I don't care.

[Adderbane]

Firewing by Kenneth Oppel

The thing I hate most in books is when authors retcon the character's happily ever after in the sequel.

[Olinser]

I regret reading Brisingr. Eragon and Eldest weren't terrible despite being terribly derivative, but the more elves got involved, the stupider it got.

Thankfully I quit Inheritance at the first speed bump. I don't know how it ends and I don't care.

Concur.

The fist book wasn't bad (if a huge cliché storm), but the follow on books got progressively worse and worse. Probably the worst problem I saw was that the main characters were quite frankly TERRIBLE people, and yet were treated as unambiguously right and moral in everything they did, regardless of how crazy it was.



I also deeply regret reading Star Wars New Jedi Order books. They weren't BAD, per se, but the quality was incredibly schizophrenic due to multiple authors trying to write effectively 1 storyline, the main villains were ludicrous, and they just completely gutted multiple long-standing characters so they weren't even recognizable. I kept hoping they were going to get their **** together but finally quit about 10 or so books in.

[Giggling Ghast]

I kind of wish I hadn't read any of the Voyage of the Jerle Shannara books. Those were what soured me on the Shannara series.

[-D-]

Anything starting with Anita Blake.

[Knaight]

I'm not sure I'd break out the term "regret", but I've gotten through some real garbage. Dan Brown deserves some mention here - The Davinci Code was staggeringly inane - but he's got nothing on the rest of these books. More than a few would have been abandoned had they not been required reading for school.
Anthem by Ayn Rand: It's basically Atlas Shrugged but worse.
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho: Note that there are two books called the Alchemist - one of them is an excellent fantasy novel, the other one a hundred and fifty pages of insipid garbage where a protagonists utterly incapable of being a protagonist by virtue of their inability to make any decisions is guided through a journey by a bunch of mystical forces pushing this flat non-character prop through a procession in tedium that purports to be an adventure.
Conan by Robert Howard: I'm glad that I read these and gained literary perspective through doing so. It was still a miserable experience.

[Razade]

The Sundering Duology by Jacqueline Carey. The story starts interesting with the concept of "Written from Sauron's perspective" essentially. Not even a "Sauron was right" story, just a character study into the evil/maligned enemy. Then it slowly descends into some...pretty boring crap with a love angle and I decided to skip to the end and it ends with a "And now the real story starts!" and...that just killed it for me. Nothing gets accomplished by the end, no one learns anything, there isn't even a tragedy. Just shlock.

[Red Fel]

I regret reading Brisingr. Eragon and Eldest weren't terrible despite being terribly derivative, but the more elves got involved, the stupider it got.

Thankfully I quit Inheritance at the first speed bump. I don't know how it ends and I don't care.

Actually, I'll throw Eragon in there. I read it as an adult, on a recommendation. The recommender was someone I met on a program, a teacher in her spare time. She assured me that, even though it was YA genre fluff written by a literal child, it demonstrated a uniqueness and quality.

She was dead wrong. Even setting aside how derivative and pretentious it was, it lacked complexity or dynamism. I asked her point blank if the reason for her recommendation was that she was impressed that a child wrote a best-seller that became a film; she said no. She lied to me.

Another I'll throw in is Wicked, by Gregory Maguire. You know, the one about the Wicked Witch of the West? The one that inspired a Stephen Schwartz musical? Mild spoiler, it's nothing like the musical.

I don't need my stories to be sweetness and light. I read Dune in elementary school, for badness' sake. I can appreciate a tragedy in the classical Greek sense, where a character is brought to ruin by their own tragic flaws. But I don't react well to the sensation of true futility. Not a fan. And this book did to me what the movie Unforgiven did - it left me an emotional wreck for several days.

Unlike Eragon, it's not a bad book. It's quite good. It would have to be, to evoke such a profound cathartic reaction. (ProTip: Red Fel experiences catharsis the way most people experience a violent stomach illness. Nothing left inside and a queasy, weak, sore feeling for days.) But that said, I don't like having that done to me emotionally. I don't enjoy it. And given the chance for a do-over, I would set the book aside and just enjoy a campy, cheesy musical.

[Cikomyr]

The Gunfighter

Because I really hated the experience. And i feel I should hand over my nerdcard.

[Hagashager]

Soul of the Fire by Terry Goodkind. It's the fifth book in the Sword of Truth series and the point where I stopped reading it. The fifth book is absolutely awful. Grotesquely violent for its own sake, self-indulgent, barely focuses on the series' protagonists, and is the apex of Goodkind's affection for "Rape as plot contrivance" a form of contrivance I find very offensive and immature when not handled with tact, tact Goodkind lacks.

The Watchmen a graphic novel by Alan Moore that is just so precious it makes me gag. I'm not a big fan of books/comics/graphic novels that tell their stories with such heavy-handed pretentiousness.

Thankfully, those are the only two that stand out currently. The vast majority of books I've read, even if there were parts I did not enjoy, I generally find worth reading for the sake of different writing styles, views and general pleasure (if I'm reading for that purpose)

There were also a plenty of books I did not like as a child, but as I got older I appreciated them more. The most apparent being the works of Mark Twain. As a child I never liked him, as an adult I now consider him one of the greatest authors I've ever read.

[BWR]

"Elminster in Hell" by Ed Greenwood.
Greenwood isn't the greatest author around but his other books have been at least somewhat readable even if they aren't particularly good. This wasn't. This was a tortuous affair. Our titular Old Perv is caught in Hell by some monster who wants the Silver Fire. why is it he wants the Silver Fire? We are never told but we assume it must be because this one ability tied to this one god on this one miserable little planet must be the awesomest thing ever because....Greenwood, I guess. So he tortures El and rifles through his memories. We are treated to pointless scenes of El dealing with things and ending up having sex with someone so much younger than him that even if he were her ancestor they would not be considered relatives.
"Foolish mortal, none of this nonsense! show me the Silver Fire!" our supposedly intelligent and powerful antagonist proclaims. Rinse repeat. The entire book is just chopped up scenes like this, some of them stolen from other Greenwood stories. the entire thing is capped off by Mystra wanting to save her Previous so she makes Halaster into a Chosen, and he proceeds to beat up Hell and save El.

I have literally had fever dreams that were more enjoyable than this piece of ****. At least then the passage of time was pretty diffuse and unclear. With El in Hell I was painfully aware of every excruciating minute. I keep it on my shelf as a reminder that no, I don't need to finish reading everything I start. If it is bad enough, I am allowed to drop it.

[Telonius]

There are exactly two books I regret reading: Johnny Tremain, and Catcher in the Rye. I read Johnny Tremain back in grade school, and even then I felt like I was being sold a false bill of goods.

Catcher in the Rye ... partly because of how its proponents push it up to be the greatest book ever written about teen life, and it really fell short of the hype for me; but mostly because through the entire thing I could never bring myself to care what happened to Holden, at all. (I get the feeling that The Chocolate War occupies the same place for me that Catcher does for the people who enjoy it).

Crossroads of Twilight is probably the book I hated most, all-time. Single worst reading experience in my life. But I'm glad I read it, anyway. I am going to finish my own book series (one of these days). I keep that hardcover copy to remind me how it felt when I read it; and how I never want to inflict that on any of my readers.

[WhenLilacs]

I've regrettably read all the books in the Stephanie Meyer Twilight Series. It was a dark time for myself and for all of humanity (namely middle school girls). At one point, a friend proposed writing a Jacob fanfiction.

Perhaps 50 Shades of Gray is in a similar vein of appeal (but I haven't read that, phew).

[talking about true regret here. I don't think works that have literary merit are exact wastes of time and even if I don't like them, I wouldn't say I regret reading them.]

[Metahuman1]

Regards the Eragon series. I, was, granted, like 14 when I read the first book, but I do recall enjoying it. I kept working through the second and third books, and while I noticed a SHARP drop in quality (Or possibly my tastes just getting better.), they kept teasing me with moments were it looked like things were going to improve.



And THEN we got to book 4, and I wound up just quitting in frustration about half way through.





Regard's the Anita Blake series. I would argue that while mistakes are made through out the early installments, none of them are unforgiveable. (Even to me, something of a firearms and martial arts enthusiast, who cringes several times when fights or reasoning for certain guns/ammo in use are discussed. Or sometimes the presence of certain guns and ammo in the books at all. ). Were I though it really, really started to go full on off the rails was Narcissus in chains. And even then, it would, once in awhile, throw a bright spot at you to trick you into thinking maybe, just, just maybe, they were going to get there crap in gear again.

And that's what sucked about it so much after while. It was objectively increasingly awful, but it obscured this with little bright spots or the occasional good/interesting idea to make it harder to peg down.

I think the point were I lost it was well past were I should have been reading (Ok, I KNOW it was well past were I should have been reading.) There's a guy whom the main character helped put in charge of the local Were-Lions, whom she knew at the time was a thug mob enforcerer. And surprise surprise, this is working out poorly, so she and a couple of the other lions, are challenging him for dominance. And backing her up is this body guard that's been assigned too her for a number of books and was frequently a character I found myself really liking and wanting to see more of and learn more about and see have her moment.

For context, both thug and bodyguard are roughly comparable in terms of power form being part of the super natural scene.

Said thug is described as 6ft tall or so and densely build, and having the kind of experience a fairly trusted mob enforcer and higher level Lycan would.

Said bodyguard also has that Lycan experience. But, she's described as being one of the most serious weightlifters the main character has ever seen, 6'6ft tall, and oh, yeah, she's an ex black ops spook.


She's noticeably stronger and larger then he is, she's got a significant natural reach advantage, she's at minimum as experienced a fighter as he is, and she's far and away vastly better trained.

This fight should have been over in under 3 minutes, probably under 1, with said bodyguard utterly destroying the guy and only not killing him if she had made a choice to spare him, or someone in a position to do so ordered his life sparred.


Instead, he cheats and starts winging, just so the main can save the day, except the person they were all stepping up to protect get's killed in the process.


But yeah, it started ok, and then it just fell the hell apart.



Edit: I thought I'd clarified the early installments, realized I'd missed that, and added a bit of clarification.

[Rynjin]

Concur.

The fist book wasn't bad (if a huge cliché storm), but the follow on books got progressively worse and worse. Probably the worst problem I saw was that the main characters were quite frankly TERRIBLE people, and yet were treated as unambiguously right and moral in everything they did, regardless of how crazy it was.

Honestly, I thought the 4th book was the best of the bunch. It ended in a way that seems to acknowledge the flaws of the preceding books, and a lot of Eragon's self-righteous smugness gets wiped away by the end.

As for my end...the last book of any K.A. Applegate series, Animorphs and Everworld specifically to me, though I hear all are similar.

She likes to end great series' on downer, out of nowhere endings. Animorphs in particular still makes me a terrible mix of sad and angry to this day. There was already plenty of legitimate, well-earned pathos in Rachel's death and Tobias' coming to grips with the fact that, as a hawk...his lifespan from here wasn't going to be very long. Seemed set to be a good, if bittersweet ending...then that cliffhanger bull**** where we learn Ax just got killed, basically, and his body was about to be used to kill all the other surviving main characters. Cut to black. Series over. Never elaborated on.

**** offffff with that.

[Zalabim]

There is one book. I do not remember it's name or author. I won't make more than a cursory effort to find it, for reasons that should become obvious. I checked it out at my local library for some unremembered reason. I can't imagine why a book like this was even in a library.

So to skip to the regrettable part: It's a fantasy story and part of the background setup is thus: There's several noble houses that rule the land with attributes vaguely associated with animals, like a bear's endurance, owl's wisdom, wolf's loyalty, or whatever. Typical D&D magic stuff. The bloodlines have become diluted and their gifts weak over time and now the land is in trouble.

In the story's climax, the hero is tasked with reviving the animal powers in the bloodlines in a rather direct, sordid, and thoroughly detailed manner starting with a wolf and a large dose of magic. The sex is not even slightly handwaved. How anything good could come of this is thoroughly handwaved.

[digiman619]

The Malloreon series by David Eddings. I liked the Belgariad, but the Malloreon seemed like bad fanfiction. Remember the Ultimate Choice that determined the fate of all reality? Well, now there's a NEW Ultimate Choice that will determine the fate of all reality for real this time! Also, I'm introducing love interests for all the single heroes including bringing one back from the dead! Also, the villain is a woman with stars as her skin tone. ORIGINAL CHARACTER, DO NOT STEAL!

I blame his wife for getting involved in his work. This was the start of him writing his female characters (especially ones in positions of power) less like Polgara (strong, respectable women who engendered trust) and more like Ce'Nedra (flighty creatures of whim that the hapless male leads have no choice but to go along with). This is very apparent during the Elenium & Tamuli trilogies. which I so regret reading. I can't prove it, but I'd wager we were seeing a bit of the author's personal life in that.

As for the Eragon debate, I read the first book and basically thought "Well, that was meh" but didn't hate it. Then I read the second one. Good god, the elves were total bastards. and the dwarves not much better. I actually decided only to read the chapter following our main hero, not the other half of the book about his cousin. I thought I'll read one and then the other so I'll get more coherent stories. I never got around to reading the other half.

[Kalmageddon]

Let the right one in, I've never seen a more mean spirited, unplesant and disturbing book, where the only characters we can root for are killed off horribly or are forever traumatized by the designated heroes and protagonists. There is only ugliness and cynicism and I have no idea of how anyone could have read this and thought it would have been a great book to adapt for the big screen. Twice.
Haven't seen either of the movies and I'm not going to.

The Roots of Heaven, a Metro 2033 spin-off novel written by Tullio Avoledo. I dislike it much for the same reasons I dislike Let the right one in, only worst. Let's be clear, both Metro 2033 and Metro 2034 are not uplifting tales. But all the characters are interesting and reletable to some extent, even when they make horrible mistakes. Not so in The Roots of Heaven. From beginning to end it feels like watching a transcript from an exploitation movie and the whole thing, not a short book, mind you, is a shaggy dog story that goes nowhere. Oh and thank you Tullio for reinforcing the provincialism that plagues our (Italian) media. You write a spin-off for Metro 2033 and you set it in Italy with no connections to the source material. Bravo.

The Bitterbynde trilogy. I've read this books on advice from a female friend of mine. That turned out to be a mistake. While the first book wasn't bad (though massively spoiled by the title for the Italian edition), the other books read like fanfiction filled to the brim with wish fulfilment, where an unlucky girl finds love in the arms of a supernaturally perfect man with no flaws whatsoever and where all the other male characters are turned into caricatures to empahsize how perfect the love interest character is. And the big "plot twist" the whole trilogy builds up to can be deduced halfway through the first book. And to add insult to injury, the last book wraps everything up in a hurry in the last 3 pages.

The Pillars of the Earth, **** Ken Follett.

[Cheesegear]

Anything starting with Anita Blake.

Did we just become best friends?

[factotum]

These days I don't usually bother finishing books that I'm not enjoying. The last one I can remember that I struggled through to the end of despite not liking it much was "The Coming of the King" by Nikolai Tolstoy, which I'm sure was very literary but was simultaneously boring and hard to read.

[Tvtyrant]

I kind of wish I hadn't read any of the Voyage of the Jerle Shannara books. Those were what soured me on the Shannara series.

Huh. Those were the only.ones in the series I actually liked.m.

[Fri]

There's just one book I ever regret buying or reading.

Celestine Propechy.

I bought that because from the description I thought it's a pulp-fiction action adventure book. I didn't know. I didn't know! I never heard it before!

[Eldan]

There's been some schlock, but very little I actually hated among books I read for fun.

For school, however, wow, did we ever read crap. (Most of this is in German, some probably mercifully doesn't have English translations. I'll just translate titles).

It started in middle school when we read "Escalator downwards" (Rolltreppe abwärts). I've managed to suppress most of my memories of it, but basically, it combined two things: our teacher thinking that it would be hip and cool of him to read a book about "the youths of today" or something, filled with painfully bad slang and what read like a bad drug PSA. You know "Yo, yo, kids, if you skip school, you will shoplift, and then become a homeless heroin addict and die". It didn't help that we were out in the country a bit, in Switzerland, and I don't think even one of us had ever seen drugs. Or a mall. Or heard any of this "totally hip slang".

Then there was "The Sorrows of Young Werther", which came up in High School when we read German classics. It's a 100+ page teenage emo blog on myscape. For some reason, it's a classic. It's insipid, stupid, pointless and whiny. Our hero is some kind of independently wealthy minor noble teenager. He falls in love with a woman he met once. She is nice to him, but doesn't love him. So he decides that now his life is forever over, that he shall only know sadness and sorrow, deeper than anyone has ever experienced. He whines on for ages, then kills himself. The end. Of course, there are such gems as his diatribe about how the lepers begging in the street still have it better than him, because he is so much more educated and intelligent and emotional than they are, and therefore able to experiene deeper sadness. While lounging around in gardens all day. Never have I more wanted to murder a fictional character to stop his whining.

I can probably think of more later.

[-D-]

Did we just become best friends?

(ITEHTTS Rogal Dorn voice) YES.

Regard's the Anita Blake series. I would argue that while mistakes are made through out the early installments, none of them are unforgiveable. [snip] Were I though it really, really started to go full on off the rails was Narcissus in chains. And even then, it would, once in awhile, throw a bright spot at you to trick you into thinking maybe, just, just maybe, they were going to get there crap in gear again.

And that's what sucked about it so much after while. It was objectively increasingly awful, but it obscured this with little bright spots or the occasional good/interesting idea to make it harder to peg down.

I heard first installments were ok, but after reading about Were-Svan (Were-Svan?! Were-Svan?! What is this ****ing world then? Will she find a Were-Hamster and recreate an episode of South Park?) and the furry-****-fest that are latter books, I retroactively started hating it. Especially, since the main character is a Author Avatar of epic proportions. Basically it's a porn, for people into succubus, vampires and/or furries.

[Metahuman1]

(ITEHTTS Rogal Dorn voice) YES.


I heard first installments were ok, but after reading about Were-Svan (Were-Svan?! Were-Svan?! What is this ****ing world then? Will she find a Were-Hamster and recreate an episode of South Park?) and the furry-****-fest that are latter books, I retroactively started hating it. Especially, since the main character is a Author Avatar of epic proportions. Basically it's a porn, for people into succubus, vampires and/or furries.

Pretty much.


Though, in the interests of fairness, Were-Svan is an aberration in universe. It only really happens one of two ways. Your either born into it as part of a curse on your family line placed by a notable magic user, or your the original victim said notable magic user is cursing. It's there to be a punishment. Cast out by humanity, but nothing but prey to everything else supernatural running about.

But yes, the Porn with a Plot + Author Avatar escalating dangerously close to Mary Sue levels does nothing but get worse, and does throughly derail and ruin the lot of it.


Now, if you gave me a spin off series about her body guard setting up shop in another city and removed it form all the other goings on in that series except the universes more basic rules as a back drop, that could have potential.

[Cikomyr]

Catcher in the Rye ... partly because of how its proponents push it up to be the greatest book ever written about teen life, and it really fell short of the hype for me; but mostly because through the entire thing I could never bring myself to care what happened to Holden, at all. (I get the feeling that The Chocolate War occupies the same place for me that Catcher does for the people who enjoy it).

Oh god this. It was a mandatory reading in my High School "English as a Second Language" class. Man, was the experience thoroughly unpleasant, and absolutely nothing that came out of it.


I have read some really unpleasant books. The most unpleasant i can remember was 1984, but the ordeal made it just more precious and worthwhile. Catcher in the Rye is the pointless thoughts of a self absorbed teenage emo.

[2D8HP]

Since I seldom finish books that don't interest me, I remember less of these than movies (which my wife usually gets).
But I'll cite a few:

The Worldwar series by Harry Turtledove.of which I read two and a half books.

Basically, outer space aliens invade just before the Second World War.

Lot's of trite, repeated phrases, really seemed hurried and "phoned in".

---

The Silo series by Hugh Howey, which I also read two and a half books.

Left too many unanswered questions, and also seemed too long.

---

The Great Gatsby. It was assigned reading in high school (so over two decades ago), but I still remember my intense loathing of the characters.
I did get a good grade for the essay I wrote about how much I hated the characters.

---

The Natural History of Dragons, which I actually liked, but it led me to read one and a half of the sequels, which didn't interest me as much.

---

The Grapes of Wrath, I don't actually regret reading it, but man did it make me cry, which is true of most non-fiction histories of the 1930"s and '40's.

---

Utopia for Realists, since it's about politics I can't say much about it, beyond that some of what the author (a European) describes as the "problems of modern civilization", don't fit the USA, and actually sound pretty good to me!

[-D-]

The most unpleasant i can remember was 1984, but the ordeal made it just more precious and worthwhile. Catcher in the Rye is the pointless thoughts of a self absorbed teenage emo.

I read 1984 after a fever. I dreamt I was inside Room 101. My worse fear was that O'Brien was right - that such society isn't just inevitable, but eternal.

[Sprütche]

Some time ago I read The Three Musketeers and I have absolute no clue how that material could become so famous. I don't outright hate it but I was very disappointed by the heroes most of the time. I don't remember a movie that was close to the book but I have seen only few of them.
I guess the book is a product of its time (and somewhat based on a true story?). The musketeers are drunken mercenaries who like to brawl all the time. D'Artagnan is a total idiot. Okay, he is very young, but messing with the enemy's deadliest agent just for petty revenge is beyond inexperience. And his irresponsibility is staggering. Sorry Ketty, he extorted you for his scheme but he cannot really protect you from Richelieu's men. But hey, there is this free place in a cloister. And poor Madame Bonacieux. D'Artagnan is supposed to be in love with her. He did not do anything at all to find her for a year, then she gets poisoned by de Winter and dies when the musketeers find her by pure chance.
Milady de Winter is also quite stupid some of the time. She can easily brainwash Britain's most fanatic soldier while being his prisoner in record time, but she falls for D'Artagnans' silly trick.
Athos, Portos and Aramis are poorly characterized. Portos was the strong guy, I think. Athos and Aramis are religious and clever but I cannot tell who is which.
The king of France is an idiot. The queen is clearly working against the king, but the musketeers keep on doing favours for her. Of course, it's an arranged marriage and the musketeers need the money.
Richelieu is the only one doing his job of serving France, even though arranging the murder of another head of government is wrong. In many movies Richelieu is supposed to court the queen. It is mentioned by the author in one sentence but Richelieu did nothing that made me think it's true.
D'Artagnan never fights the guy from Meung within the story. We are told in the epilogue that they became friends who like to hurt each other in duels.
And the trial and execution of de Winter was shocking. I know those were other times but why even bother to put up this show trial. They could have just as well killed her. The musketeers are the attorneys for the prosecution, the witnesses and the judges before paying some village executioner to do the dirty work for them out of sight.

I also deeply regret reading Star Wars New Jedi Order books. They weren't BAD, per se, but the quality was incredibly schizophrenic due to multiple authors trying to write effectively 1 storyline, the main villains were ludicrous, and they just completely gutted multiple long-standing characters so they weren't even recognizable. I kept hoping they were going to get their **** together but finally quit about 10 or so books in.

I hated The New Jedi Order for killing Chewbacca right at the beginning, other important guys later on, making Han Solo a mental wreck and laying waste to the whole galaxy. But that seems popular these days. At least it got better somewhen after book 10. And finally the Yuuzhan Vong war never happened. Instead they kill other heroes in the movie. Aargh. Another problem was that they reused almost every character who ever appeared in a book or comic.
The different authors were always a problem when they borrowed other characters from the EU. Even the main trio had quite different portrayals.

For school, however, wow, did we ever read crap. (Most of this is in German, some probably mercifully doesn't have English translations. I'll just translate titles).

Then there was "The Sorrows of Young Werther", which came up in High School when we read German classics. It's a 100+ page teenage emo blog on myscape. For some reason, it's a classic.

I can probably think of more later.

You are totally right in every single point. Young Werther was bad. What made it worse for me: My teacher went on a total killing spree with that genre. Irrungen, Wirrungen by Fontane (different English titles), Intrigue and Love by Schiller, Emilia Galotti by Lessing, The Reader by Schlink. So much complicated tragedies, unrequited love, lovers not befitting each others' social ranks. I never had any interest in that genre and we did not read all of it. One in excerpts, one as a movie. But now that field is forever lost to me.