 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to Top 5 Friday. Today is the first of my best and worst of the year. We are going to start with the biggest disappointments. So today is Top 5 Disappointments. These are not necessarily the worst books I read this year. They were just books that I was looking forward to that did not reach the level of my expectations. I tried to lower my expectations with a lot of books this year. I'm trying to be a better reader in the way of not having expectations going into things. But two of these, I mean I had such high hopes for because of the authors that wrote them. And one of them I waited five years for. So it was a huge disappointment. If you know what I'm talking about, go ahead and make your guesses down in the doobly-doo. So next week will be the Top 5 worst books of the year. The week after that will be my Top 5 picks for the year. And then I will probably take a week off right at the end of the year for Christmas and New Years. I'm not sure. You might get some content. I don't know. But I think I'm going to go out on the third week of December will be my last Top 5 Friday of the year. Another thing is, if you would like to see any topics, leave them down like a Top 5 whatever. Leave them down there in the doobly-doo and I'll try to get to them next year. I have a lot of plans for next year. Hopefully we can get the ball rolling on some new content and get back into the swing of things with Thursday theorists. Hopefully I can get these videos done. But without further ado, my Number 5 biggest disappointment this year. Many of you probably think it's Number 1, but it's Number 5 only because I wasn't through the roof with expectations. It's Elevation. I thought it would at least be good. It ended up being terrible. It's the only book I've ever given by Stephen King I've ever given one star to. I never thought it would happen, but it did. So this is Number 5 mainly because we got the Outsider this year also and that book was amazing. If you didn't like it, I don't really care. But anyways, Elevation. Terrific book. No, sorry. Terrible book. The Outsider. Terrific book. Elevation did everything wrong. I mean, from page one it was awful. I don't really want to talk about it too much. If you've watched my Thursday theorist about it and my review of it, my spoiler-free review, I go more into depth. So if you want to, check out those videos. Next up is Frankenstein in Baghdad. I had heard so much about this book, but the expectations isn't what killed me. It was the actual content that disappointed me. I was expecting, on the back, it tells you right off the bat from the rubble strewn streets of US-occupied Baghdad. Haiti, a hatty, sorry if I'm pronouncing that wrong, a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local cafe. You don't really get that feeling from that character. Collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. That's not all. They lie. The book opens up with him stitching one last piece on the corpse and then the rest of it is just really, really bland and boring content. So yeah, this is a pretty big disappointment. That's my number four. My number... I'm actually going to switch these out because I just realized how much of a disappointment this other book was. My number three pick is Frederick Bachman's Us Against You. I love Beartown. I gave it a startling five-star review. I normally don't care too much for Bachman, Bachman, however you pronounce it, probably Bachman. Anyways, you know how I mess up names all the time. This book was like a really, really bad rehash of the first book. I knew everything that was coming and he had this horrible... The main thing I remember about this was he was constantly reminding you that you're reading a book by saying things like, this isn't that kind of story. This is this kind of story. And he said it a lot. It must have been, you know, well over half a dozen times that he takes you out of the story to remind you that you're reading a story. There was also a lot of bad, you know, like fake foreshadowing. Like he would make you think that one person was going to die and then he'd kill someone else. And it got so bad that it became predictable. Like I knew by the end that, okay, nothing's really bad going to happen. Nothing bad is really going to happen to this person. It's going to be someone else and I was right. That was a huge disappointment. My second biggest disappointment because her novel The Grip of It was one of my best books of last year. My Only Wife by Jack Jemps. Yeah, I really don't remember a single thing about this book. I read it over the course of like five days. Nothing drew me in. It's only 167 pages, so I might reread it at some point in time. I could have very well missed everything she was going for. I don't think so, though. I read very closely because I did read The Grip of It and that's another book that you have to read very closely to catch all the stuff. And I get a kick out of people complaining on my review. There were no answers. Oh yes, yes, they were. There were definitely answers. But anyways, this one, I didn't understand the point of it. This is more like what people are saying The Grip of It was, which there's no explanation or anything. So I think I just missed everything. But my main point is I didn't enjoy it. I love The Grip of It, the whole thing. Maybe it was the horror elements of The Grip of It. I don't think this one is anywhere near as dark. I honestly can't remember a word of it. I feel like I didn't even read it. But I'm going to try and go back to it next year. But yeah, I'm super disappointed coming off The Grip of It. This, I think is her first novel. I will, I keep saying this. I want to revisit it. But then again, I don't because I don't want to have the same, the same crappy experience I had the first time. It's not like I'm dealing with, you know, a Stephen King thing here where even when he's bad, he's good. I think the book might just be bad. I don't know. And I hate to go back through. You know what I'm talking about. All right. So my number one biggest disappointment this year was Marisha Pessil's Never World Wake. God, what a terrible book this was. Of course, disappointing. I waited five years after night film for this book, and it was just God awful. I remember every single bit of this book and not in a positive way. My main thing was is I kept waiting for the book to start. That's like the main thing that I remember. I'm reading along. I'm like, okay, any minute now, here comes the the Pessil content that I've signed up for and just kept on going. And I'm like, I am reading a really, really poorly thought out YA murder mystery. And I like, I don't care about any of these characters. I don't care about any of the stuff. And then there's a thing that is like the house. I'm trying to I got artwork up here. I can't get up and get it because my legs wonky, but the dark house at elsewhere bend. I think it's I think it's called. But yeah, that I kept waiting for that something to happen with that storyline. Nothing, nothing good happened. And I'm just left with this feeling that I wasted five years of my life. I know that sounds a little dramatic. But I was and another thing is it makes me want to go back and read night film and consider the fact that it might not have been as good as I thought it was. And I hate it when that happens. That's one of the the biggest disappointments you can have is to read an author's later work and have to wonder if those earlier books really were as good as I as you thought they were. Because a special topic in Calamity Physics was great, loved it. But I read that after night film. And night film, that's in my top five books of all time, which I need to do also. But this one, man, it's just it's like it's like somebody else wrote this. And I keep going back to maybe it's something she had lying around. And she knew she wouldn't have another book out for a while, another adult book out for a while. So she may be fixed this one up and threw it out there. I don't know. But yeah, biggest disappointment of the year, Neverworld Wake. If you want to give your own list of your disappointments, not necessarily like I said, not necessarily the worst books of the year that you read, but the biggest disappointments, leave them down there in the doobly-doo. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U. This has been the top five Friday. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye bye.