 Oh, I get it. When he says, as you wish, he's really saying, I love you. Oh, we're opening on this joke again. Hey James, we need to talk. Yeah, yeah, I'll bet we need to talk. Well, yeah, people have been getting on my case about... I thought we were the same person. Okay, fine, they've been getting on our case about doing another top 10 list. They want us to do another top 10 list about our most hated books. Or they want me to do... whatever. They want me to update it for 2020. So that's what we're gonna do today. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. So at this point, it's been several years since I did my top 10 most hated books video. And the list has shifted around a lot in that time. And just out of curiosity, I did a YouTube poll a while ago. And it seems that a couple of you wanted me to do an updated version. Just a couple of you. And so, here we are. Now, keep in mind as I go through this list that there are some entries I took off of this because other books were worse and they just got bumped off. And there are some where looking back on them, my tastes have changed a little bit. And I feel like I should give them more credit than before. So most of them are still bad. But I don't think they're bad enough to warrant being on the list. And others, I just... didn't feel like putting on there this time. What are you gonna do? The rage fades away after a while. Because remember, this isn't the 10 worst books I've ever read. This is the 10 most hated books or my 10 most hated books. Like if the rage and annoyance aren't there, then it's not really a hated book. Anyways, here we go. Let's get started. I should also point out that spoilers are major and inevitable for every book I talk about here because I can't really talk about the worst parts without doing that. First up at number 10, we have The Fifth Wave. Now, I already did a whole long review of this series from back to front. And keep in mind this is the entire series that I'm talking about here. It's not just one book because, well, they're all really bad and they all feed into each other. But the thing about the series is that if I could describe it in two words, it would be unfulfilled promise. I think that the first book starts off really strong and I think it sets up what could be a phenomenal story. The issue is basically everything after that. The plot is essentially just aliens come to Earth, they destroy most of civilization, most of the humans are wiped out, and then enter a teenage girl named Cassie and she is just trying to survive in this world and then she gets separated from her brother and she goes to rescue him. And if that sounds like something that would be kind of focused, don't worry, it isn't. The story, it's not good in the first book, but it is at least somewhat focused because Cassie is going to get her brother. But it's also switching between several different characters and it's switching between third and first person as well. So it's just kind of jumping all over the place and it's about multiple different things. And then once you get to the second book, there's like no plot at all other than we're trying to stay away from the aliens because they're going to kill us, which maybe you could do something with that, but you really do need to make your stories more focused if you want your audience to care about it because if it's not focused then it can't escalate and if it can't escalate then there's no sense of tension and you really need a sense of tension for a story that's supposed to be this action-adventure sort of thing. And then once you get to the third book, again, they're still just running away from aliens for the most part, but then at the end it doesn't completely come out of nowhere but they just sort of destroy the alien ship and then everything's good. Like the series was never about saving the world. At least it didn't feel like that because they barely ever talked about that. And so when they do save the world, it just comes out of nowhere and as I said, there's no escalation to it. You know, the story goes all over the place and the characters for that matter are not strong enough to carry it. Like sometimes a weak story can be carried by really strong characters, but these guys, while I'll admit I've seen worse, they're not good. Cassie has like two personality traits, maybe, to her. The main villain, Vosh, has maybe one, but he's also just the least intimidating villain of all time because pretty much all he does is monologue. And his monologues aren't even good. I don't hate villain monologues. It's just that he doesn't actually have a point to saying anything that he's saying. It's just, yes, I'm talking and talking and talking and it doesn't actually mean anything. And even though he is the representative of the aliens that are attacking, we never really find out why the aliens are doing what they do. Like, we know they're coming to Earth and we know that they don't actually want to wipe out humanity. They want to, quote, destroy humanity's humanity and make us stop trusting each other so we become less social so then we'll be isolated in tiny little bands that wander the countryside so we never build up civilization again. And I think that's what it's saying, at least. Like, it is extremely complex, but at least, um... Yeah, okay, and they never say why they want to do that. Do they want to protect the environment? I don't know, but the simple fact is that we never directly interact with the aliens and we never find out what they're doing here in the first place, so they're some of the weakest villains I've ever come across. Like, they aren't especially annoying or anything, but it is really, really disheartening to see them fall that far, especially after they had such a great opening because they did destroy the vast majority of the human population. And in addition to just really not making any sense, the series is not written well. Like, at one point, Cassie spends a page and a half describing the contents of her backpack and at another point, she uses an entire paragraph-long sentence to describe how she shot a guy and it goes into, oh man, I was screaming and he was screaming, it's really obnoxious and everything goes on way longer than it needs to. And I think maybe you could have put this whole book into one, or combined this whole series into one book, it might have been salvageable, but as it stands, it just feels incredibly half-baked. Like, I've never read any other work from the author, so I can't say if he's good or not. I've heard other people praise him, but I've never read any of his work, so I can't say for certain. All I know is that this feels like he had a couple of half-ideas, like not even full ideas, just a couple of half-way ideas, and never got the chance to properly flesh them out before he actually started writing. And I can't say for certain, but that's what it feels like. And that's also why these books don't really have any sort of themes whatsoever. Like, they keep talking around the idea of like God and morality and stuff like that, but they never actually come to any sort of conclusion on it. It's just like, hey, man, do you believe in God? I don't think so. Oh, well, I'm not sure what I believe. Like, that's all they do. And so there's just nothing here to carry it, nothing at all. Number nine, the Twilight saga, New Moon. So this one is not only still on the list, it's in the exact same place on the list, because while I'll admit there are worse books out there, that's the whole point of this video, this one, I mean, it's Twilight. You have to put one on there. And even if I will defend the first, third, and fourth books as being just sort of mediocre, you know, they're not good, New Moon is a million times worse than they are. So we've all heard the many, many, many jokes about how Twilight is just sparkly vampires and kissing and, oh, I love you, but I also love the werewolf and that's about it. But the thing is, three of the four books have an actual story outside of that. And it's not the greatest, but like it's there. You know, it adds some tension. There are actual villains out to do stuff. The heroes are actually at risk in those situations. New Moon is just Edward leaves Bella and then she's sad. And that's kind of the whole, that's just, that's everything. So it's extremely boring. That's the big thing throughout most of the book. It's just boring. And even when they try to bring in some tension near the end, it just doesn't really make any sense. So it becomes equally boring. And Bella, while she's a blank slate for the most part, in this book, she is just pathetic because her boyfriend that she had been with for a couple of months leaves her. And so she's just gonna sit in a room and cry for like six months or something. And it's, it's not only stupid and generally not how mental health works, but it's just boring to read. It's super, super obnoxious. And it just makes me hate Bella so much more because I do think that if this series had been like a trilogy, then Bella at least would have been more tolerable because you know, like I said, she's a blank slate throughout most of the series. But in this one in particular, I just, it's like someone just poking the side of my head over and over and over again and not like pokes either, like enough to hurt a little bit after a while. Like that's what reading New Moon feels like. But at the same time, I don't think you could have skipped it because this is the book where you introduce werewolves and those become important in the last two. But there was really no way to organically introduce them in the first book, at least not without radically changing everything. So this book kind of needed to have the werewolves, even if Jacob Black is the human personification of the phrase, I'm such a nice guy. Why doesn't she like me? So at the end of the day, I think the Twilight saga New Moon is the literary equivalent of an abortion. It had to happen, but it's sad that it had to happen. Number eight, the Divergent series, Allegiant. So my most watched video of all time is still on the world building of Divergent and how awful it is. And most of the content from that video comes just from the third book because Divergent is all about, well, it was the first really big Hunger Games knockoff because there were tons of those. And Divergent is basically all about the world has been destroyed and some survivors live in the remnants of Chicago and they don't think anyone outside their city is still alive, but they might be, who knows. And also in order to keep order, people are divided into five factions and each of those factions is just based on a single personality trait. Like they have one for smart people, brave people, honest people, etc. And the main character Triss just decides to join up with Dauntless, which is the Brave faction. And then, you know, some stuff happens, you know, bad guys try to take over, there's a war. And it's not a great series, I don't think, but I will defend the first two books. They're all right. However, once we get to the third one, all of that goodwill was completely pissed away because they, they didn't just drop the ball. They dropped every ball they had as hard as they possibly could. So essentially, they venture outside Chicago and they learn that, oh, there are still plenty of people out here. They learn that half of the United States population has been destroyed, which don't get me wrong, that is a massive, massive thing, but it's not like full apocalypse the way we were thinking, so that already takes away from some of the tension in some of the world building. But in addition to that, so reading the first two books, you might be thinking it doesn't really make sense for people to only have one personality trait, even if that personality trait is extremely dominant. It's just kind of weird. But I at least was willing to suspend my disbelief and just roll with it because it seemed like maybe the series was trying to make a point about how, you know, each of these traits is something we strive for, but if you have one without the others, then it's completely useless. And honestly, I'm probably giving the books too much credit, but you know, that's what I was thinking. But then it turns out that the government actually genetically modified people so that they only had one personality trait, and the main character Tris, who is what's known as a divergent, by the way, which is someone who has more than one personality trait, and so they don't fit into the system, and so the system's it's showing off how broken it is, really. But it turns out that divergence are literally just normal people. So yeah, the main character is special because she's normal. There's actually nothing special about her. She's just the government blocked all these people into the city, and they were all, quote, genetically damaged, which are the people who only have one personality trait, and they just set them to breeding in hopes that they would produce genetically pure people, which is not how genetics work. So that alone is just a really, really dumb plot twist, and you're probably going to be hearing that a lot throughout the rest of the list. But even beyond that, the story of this last one just isn't very good. You know, they sort of change villains around and they change what the conflict is about because before it was, you know, who's going to rule Chicago and how, and well, without that, we're just trying to build a new one from scratch, and it's not particularly good. The villain is completely unmemorable. I don't even remember his name. I just remember that when they made the movie, he was played by Jeff Daniels. And even then, they're never going to make a final movie because they blew their load too quick and tried to split the third book into two. And then it goes to this really weird climax where Triss has to sacrifice herself in order to save the day, and I guess it's super sad and stuff, even though she really didn't need to die. As a matter of fact, when I was first reading this, I was thinking like her brother could have done it himself because her brother has spent the last two books being cowardly and betraying people, and this would be like his redemption of sorts. Like, you know what? I finally decided I want to be a good person, but like, we don't get that. We're lost with that. And then Triss's boyfriend is super sad, and then it cuts to years later and he's like, well, I'm sad she's gone, but you know what? I'm going to keep living and that's just about it. So, man, whatever subtext there was in the series, gone. Whatever investment I had in the plot, gone. The world building completely falls apart. The characters weren't great before, but in this last one they don't have much to do or they just do stupid stuff, so yeah, as I said, it dropped every ball it had and it dropped them hard. Number 7, Maximum Ride Forever. I want to preface this by saying I hate James Patterson books. I just hate all of them so much. The way they're written is obnoxious. They're super repetitive. Most of them especially the crime thriller ones are totally interchangeable. Like, occasionally he'll branch out and do stuff like Maximum Ride, which is a little different, but if there's no science fiction or fantasy elements, then it's just trash. Maximum Ride is a series all about kids who were grown in a lab and they were fused with bird DNA so they have wings on their back and they can fly and stuff, and several years before the series starts they escaped from that lab and they're in hiding and then the lab people come to try and take them back again and that's what kicks off the bulk of the plot. Now, I will say that the first three books in this series are a really solid trilogy. In fact, they were supposed to end after the third book. I have a whole long video about this whole subject if you're curious about it, but essentially yeah, it's kind of dumb but it does have heart to it. It feels like James Patterson was telling this because, yeah, he really felt this story needed to be told. And there are a few funny bits and fun stuff. Like, it's an alright series, which I have a real soft spot for because of nostalgia. And then they just decided to keep going and so books 4, 5 and 6 are all pretty episodic and they all just kind of revolve around the characters trying to save the environment or something, even though all the old bad guys are dead they just keep bringing up new ones and then never really developing them in any way, so they're just haha, I'm bad guy, why am I bad because bad guy and sometimes the environmental message winds up shooting itself in the foot because the villains are saying, hey, we need to protect the environment so I'm gonna kill all the humans to do it and like I mean, trying to frame it that way does not make the environmentalist side look good. You know, if you're trying to frame it between things will stay as they are or you'll all die, most people are gonna choose to stay as they are rather than oh, okay, let's drive a little bit less and switch to green energy. And then book 7 was supposed to be the last one and it ends with like Paris getting destroyed and it was kind of an unsatisfying ending I guess so then they started writing Book H, which is Maximum Ride Nevermore and that one it also ends with the whole world getting destroyed this time, it's not really explaining what happened but then it's like, okay, kind of an unsatisfying ending and then a year later for the last time, for real, we promise they released Book 9, Maximum Ride Forever and I know that they're making a 10th one but it's been off than it is a sequel so you know, just work with me here. I know I had to build up a lot before I even got to this point but that's really the main reason that I hate this one so much is that I was getting fatigued is not a strong enough word but I can't think of a better one I was getting fatigued by Maximum Ride and I was only pushing forward at this point because I really wanted to get that scripted video out, Rise and Fall of Maximum Ride. I didn't read this when I was a kid when I was in the target audience because I was just so done with it. So this book starts off with the world getting destroyed in an unspecified manner which is super obnoxious thanks James Patterson, we appreciate that but it's also bad because all the suffering and hell that the characters went through for the past eight books is suddenly it's pointless, it turns out it was all for nothing and the one thing I will say in this book's favor is that it did show the heroes fail to save the world and then they have to deal with the consequences of that failure which is a little interesting and I wish they had expanded on that more but after that it just kind of becomes a standard hey the bad guy is doing bad things he's trying to kill some more of the mutants and people that are left let's go fight him and kill him and then while this is going on the heroes split up for really no reason and then it gets to oh no this person's dead actually she's alive oh no this person's dead actually he's kind of alive he's in a coma and then the third leg of the love triangle has to come in and sacrifice himself to resurrect him because he like electrocutes him with his own body electricity yeah it doesn't make any sense and then max fights a villain who is really bland and then just kills him you know like he never has a real reason for being evil he's just evil but that may have been saved because one of his lieutenants is a guy named Jeb who is kind of the flocks adopted father and while while he's not a very consistent character he does switch back and forth between being good and evil a couple of times and it doesn't really make sense for him to be evil in the last book they could have worked that angle to make the conflict between him and max seem more emotional but instead he is about to kill max and then another character who was introduced just in this book comes in and kills him and then that's it and then it cuts to years later max has had a baby and they're teaching her to fly and just there's not there's not any sort of climax it doesn't go out with a bang it just sort of fizzles and then it's over and max I know has been forced to grow up really quick but she's still a 15 year old girl and it makes me a little uncomfortable that she's pregnant and having kids at that age and obviously it's written by james paterson so there's basically no description at all chapter 1 the world is destroyed chapter 2 the bad guy destroyed the world chapter 3 I am sad that the world is destroyed and now my friends are splitting up chapter 4 one of my friends is dead chapter 5 oh no she's actually alive chapter 6 we're gonna go fight the bad guy chapter 8 we found the base where the bad guy is chapter 9 we're fighting the bad guy chapter 10 we're still fighting the bad guy chapter 11 the bad guy's dead chapter 12 I have a baby and everything's great that's what this book feels like number 6 true allegiance so this is another one that doesn't sound that bad on paper because it's basically just an old school tom clancy esc thriller where there's like terrorists going out to destroy america and the good guys have got to stop the terrorists and you know that's fine that sounds okay you could maybe do a story about that but it was written by ben Shapiro professional opinion haver and look before you get on me about saying you need to put your politics aside when you're reading this book you only hate ben because he disagrees with you well I can't set my politics aside when reading this book because ben obviously didn't bother to set his politics aside when he was writing it every other paragraph is filled with some sort of screed about how he's right and people who agree with him are the smartest folks ever and anyone who disagrees is not only wrong but they're selfish and evil and disgusting and it's just really really greating to read after about three pages and that's not even counting how a lot of the ideas he tries to push are just straight up disgusting like how he thinks it's okay for americans to kill civilians in more time but at the same time if terrorists from other countries kill any american civilians it's because they're irredeemably evil or how he thinks that the black community is faking police shootings in order to get sympathy and how black community leaders who come out and denounce things like that are actually secretly crack dealers or how terrorists who agree with ben are still the good guys you know there's literally a character in this who basically she lost her farm because of government's environmental regulations so she built a giant truck bomb and blew it up outside the EPA headquarters and the thing is you could maybe do something with a character like that you could maybe use it to show how someone could be pushed to the limit and finally become a terrorist who's willing to kill innocent people in order to affect change and then you could just come right out and say yeah that's not okay but instead he just says yeah it's okay when you do it but it's bad when they do it and even if you set all of that aside which again you fucking can't it's just a dumb story it's really really dumb it's kind of a fascinating window into Shapiro's mind but it does not make any sense like the main crux of the plot is how iraq actually did have nuclear weapons and the us was right to invade them but they actually hid those nuclear weapons in iran so the US never found them you know because iraq and iran really get along so well you know it's not like they fought the deadliest war since World War 2 against each other no no that never happened all the muslim countries they're just one blob then they don't have their own internal divisions you're so smart the characters are two dimensional at best like the most I can say about one or two of them is that they are consistent and they aren't too hypocritical but other than that the characters just sort of do whatever they want based on what the plot demands it's written terribly like how it describes cars falling into a river as bath toys of an angry god and just a lot of dumb shit like that and well I think this one is kind of a shame because as I said if you changed let's be honest everything about it you could probably do an okay story with this setup but Shapiro just did not bother setting his own politics aside and he just decided to use it as a propaganda mouthpiece he wanted to show how his worldview was the correct one because he invented a fake story where his worldview is the correct one I guess and well it is kind of sad because if he hadn't done that then this book might have been okay number five throne of glass okay I'm gonna be up front right now this book or this whole series rather is not the worst thing I've ever read like I said and it's not the most hated thing I've ever read which is why it's at number five on the list but it is the most miserable experience I've had relating to running this channel because as awful as most of these other entries on this list are they eventually end throne of glass just does not end the story starts off like a typical young adult fantasy there is an assassin named Selena who's like the most badass badass in the history of badassery who is forced to compete in a tournament for the king so that she can gain her freedom from prison but actually the king is evil and so that sucks and then rebellion rebellion starts etc more stuff don't forget the love triangle but then when it starts it's not only a clumsy rendition of all these terrible young adult tropes it is just unpleasant at every opportunity it can be now I said when I reviewed it way back when that the series feels like it was originally structured as a trilogy and that's because it was it was originally supposed to be a trilogy and they expanded it to seven books by the end like the first book kind of feels like a prologue and it's very easy to see that two three and four were all developed as a trilogy and if it had ended there I think this would have been tolerable like it still would have been bad but I don't think it would have made it on this list because it would have been tolerable it would have ended but the fact just at the end of the fourth book they finally defeat the evil king but like a fucking 90s JRPG villain says oh no I was actually possessed by a demon the whole time and the demon is the one that's doing all the evil things so now you have to spend another three books fighting that guy and I think the moment I saw that I knew that there was no way this series was going to be redeemable like unless you completely changed everything about it and did like a page one rewrite there is no salvaging this in addition the main character name part way through the series and like I know that she's a secret princess so she was hiding her identity and then so she finally starts going by the name Eileen but it's still really obnoxious to have to do that half way through and she's also just never challenged in any way she's not the most insufferable Mary Sue ever we'll get to that in a minute but she is up there you know like I said she's just the most badass fighter of all time even without her magic she can go in and fight 20 dudes at once and still come out on top and then when she does get her magic she can just shoot out fire and destroy entire armies because she's literally chosen by the gods and then when it comes around that she has to sacrifice herself to save the big bad guy one of her friends comes in and oh it turns out actually neither of us has to sacrifice anything yeah like you'll give up some of your power but you know that's not a big deal you're alive now and so just she never has to give anything up and most of the other main cast members don't have to sacrifice anything like there's no major deaths in this entire series other than one in the second book and even then we didn't spend enough time with that character to really care about them so it doesn't mean that much and then there's the fact that Eileen slash Selena gets into like multiple love triangles and it's all really annoying and it treats it like the way a lot of young adult series treat romance which is really obnoxious in that you can look at your partner and just know what they're thinking like at one point she and her partner have an entire like over a page long conversation where it's like his eyes seem to say this and then it's like they have telepathy except they don't have telepathy and it's really stupid and then it just straight up turns into porn in the middle of the fifth book I'm not exaggerating when I say that it is straight up porn they spend multiple pages describing characters having sex and in pretty graphic detail like Sarah Jamoss I don't know if you just really wanted to write erotica but if that's the case just go write erotica don't try and cram it into this thing that's meant for teenagers it's really obnoxious and a little gross if I'm being honest and as I said this may have been tolerable if it hadn't gone on for so long it's 7 books none of which are short I think the shortest of them is still over 400 pages and the longest is pushing 700 it's never it's never ending it's just a deluge of more and more shit that you don't care about because I think that Sarah Jamoss just thinks that making something long makes it epic because there are huge tracks of multiple books that are just taken up by tertiary characters traveling like the fifth book in particular at least 40% of it is just a side character and another side character traveling to bring something important to Eileen and you could cut out pretty much the entirety of that like you just say oh she was traveling and then she ran into this dude like you could maybe do it all in three chapters because it's not like anything interesting is even happening they aren't fighting the bad guys or anything hiding out and then they join a circus and oh my god it's hmm no like I like I keep saying it's so long it just never ends it keeps going forever and you'll never escape it that's why I hate throwing a glass so much number four the fifth sorceress through some weird coincidence this is the second entry on the list that has the word fifth in the title but I mean that's just a coincidence like I said so this one was on the list last time it's still on the list this time because there is nothing good here okay it's like the author Robert Newcomb actually admitted at one point that he'd never read epic fantasy before and he just decided he wanted to write one and so the fifth sorceress comes across as Lord of the Rings if it was written to be femme-dom porn I'm not joking about that last bit by the way we'll get more to it in a minute but like okay so this starts off as just kind of generic and cheesy but you think maybe it'll be fun it's basically many hundreds of years before the story begins there was this thing called the sorceress war and I guess women having powers is bad because women are evil and just want to take over when they have power whereas men just want to we're not even touching on that because that's a whole other box of worms but basically there are five more sorceresses left or actually four sorceresses left that they send across to another continent and spoiler alert there is a fifth sorceress who's still staying behind and causing trouble then we enter Tristan the main character who is actually a prince not rather than a farm boy so that's nice I guess and he's really stupid he describes multiple women as the most beautiful women he'd ever seen he constantly gets himself and others into danger he's extremely slow in the uptake and needs everything explained to him in many page long monologues and okay maybe that could work if he was or at least be less annoying if he was like 16 or 17 the way a lot of these protagonists are he's third there is no excuse for it like this dude is the most obnoxious man child that I've ever had to read about and I've had to read about several remember Ben Shapiro is on this list and the thing is that most of the story would not have happened if other characters hadn't been idiots either because the thing is the wizards when they're coordinating Tristan they have to basically take off this necklace and dip it in water in order to give it power and then they give it to Tristan and then suddenly he'll be the powerful king but there's a brief moment while they're doing that where none of the wizards have power and so they're all in grave danger and a character specifically brings up hey something bad might happen I think what we should do is we should do the ceremony down in the basement where no one's there and then just do a public ceremony which is all for show for the public and then they say no no we have to because tradition I guess and then lo and behold the bad guys come in and attack them and kill most everybody except Tristan and his friend Wig and then they kidnap Tristan's sister and bring her off so then Tristan and Wig just travel to the other continent it's super easy but it takes them a long time and then by the time they get there Tristan's sister has been brainwashed and now she's going to be a part of the five sorceress circle and then Tristan is captured and he gets raped by one of the sorceresses which is actually the second time in the book he gets raped but I guess the first one doesn't count because he didn't climax definitely not how rape works Robert Newcomb and then it turns out that the bad guys evil plan was to kill everybody on earth except for the five sorceresses and Tristan and then repopulate with their magically gifted inbred babies points for originality I suppose but it's really dumb and then obviously Tristan escapes and overthrows him and then the lady who raped him is pregnant but because of magic she's about ready to give birth after like three days and then she lost her power she doesn't want to live anymore so she jumps off a building and kills herself and then Tristan cuts her open and buries her and his baby next to each other and then the epilogue is like some sort of god or other being picking the baby up bringing it back to life and it's it's kind of gross so as I said there is multiple scenes of non-men rape in this and there's a lot of parts where women are shown to be like sexual deviants with unsatiable appetites and they like hurt men, they whip them and stuff it genuinely feels like the whole thing was typed with one hand like Newcomb I get it you're into some stuff I'm seriously not judging you for that I am judging you for putting it in this book though and just broadcasting your baggage so loudly for the entire world to see because the fifth sorceress is a miserable experience it starts off as maybe just a traditional cheesy epic fantasy story and then it just through a series of extremely dumb decisions each of which is worse than the last it becomes borderline unreadable the only reason that this and others like it are more fun than throwing a glass is because I can at least laugh at this one whereas I couldn't at that and this one it's just nothing but monologues where people explain exposition but also never really explain how magic works I still don't know much about this world or about magic at one point the author clearly changed what he wanted to call coins and started spelling it differently and I guess the editor just didn't pick up on that because this book was clearly not properly edited and it failed for a reason it's only really known among fantasy fans because it's so terrible and that reputation is well deserved number three elixir I can summarize a lot of what's wrong with this book in a single sentence it was written by Hilary Duff yep, Lizzie McGuire herself that's the only reason I even found out about these and why I decided oh those sound terrible let's read them and yeah they were terrible at its core it's basically just a highlight knockoff where it's normal girl runs into supernatural boy they fall in love and then there's some other sort of supernatural conflict which that's not inherently bad but this fails to even follow the formula properly so essentially the plot is this girl named Clea Raymond or Clea Raymond is famous because she's the daughter of a senator okay and she's also like super beautiful but also super plain and yada yada yada and her father went missing before the story began because he was looking for the elixir of life or the elixir of youth I forget which one it is I think the book actually switches back and forth between them so that's again not properly edited but he went missing and then she looks at some of her pictures and she notices that there's this one guy just sort of in the background of all of them from the time she was a baby and it's kind of unsettling and then she runs into that guy in real life and it turns out that he's 500 years old he drank the elixir of life that time not long ago and Clea was his girlfriend back then and every hundred years she gets reincarnated and then dies before she really gets a chance to be with him but not only that the third leg of their love triangle which in this life is her friend Ben is also connected to them and is reborn every hundred years and he actually his whole thing is to get cuckolded by the other guy and then do something which accidentally leads to his girl's death and I guess that's tragic and cyclical or something so they go off looking for Clea's father and they kind of give up on that actually yeah the ending of the first book is them looking for information and then they find some information and then Sage gets kidnapped Sage is the immortal bad boy and I'm rescuing Sage and then the third book at the very beginning she's visiting her dad's grave and Clea's like I miss you dad weren't you looking for him? last you saw he was still alive and that's what I mean this story isn't really about anything it doesn't follow the Twilight formula properly because even books that are bad that follow that formula are at least about something and this one isn't it's about saving my dad and then it's about oh my boyfriend is immortal and I don't know how I'm gonna deal with that and then it's about oh I need to stop the curse on me and then it's about oh this family of psychics who just gain psychic powers by thinking about it really hard are now trying to kill my boyfriend so they can get more elixir of life and then it's oh my boyfriend's dead but it's okay his soul went into another guy's body and then in the third book it turns Clea's best friend gets angry at them because she thinks that they faked her boyfriend's death because Clea and her boyfriend were cheating on her and it doesn't make sense in context either and then at the end of the third book they're finally gonna fix everything but then the bad guy literally just writes down his evil plan in a notebook and someone else sees it so they're able to stop him happily ever after I guess in addition to just not being about anything none of the characters even stand out even in terms of like stupidity or anything they're just complete blank slates there's no personality anywhere here none at all and well I think that speaks for itself really and then the story as I said goes all over the place and it's just awfully written there's lines like oh god I don't even want to say it out loud but the worst line in the series is obviously when Clea is talking to her friend about whether or not she likes this dude and Clea says no he's like my brother and then her friend says hey I read flowers in the attic it was kind of hot anyone who's read flowers in the attic knows that just nope nope I hated that I don't have any lines so much that I think this might have been placed at like five on the list if it weren't for that one single line and there's others that are not quite that bad but also sprinkled throughout and well I don't know how much I can talk about this that I haven't already said before it's just horrible in every way but at least it's pretty funny number two the house of night series again I have a long review of it and even in that hour 49 minutes I could not bring up everything that I hated about this series because there just was not enough time like I could sit here for probably four or five hours no exaggeration and describe all the bad things in that book series because it is the worst thing ever it's so horrendous in every way so it starts off assuming like maybe it's a twilight knockoff because it's young adults about vampires and there's a lot of romance in it really it's more of a Harry Potter ripoff because the main character is this girl named Zoe and one day she gets marked as oh she's going to become a vampire because in this world vampires are just sort of born at random among humans like they don't you don't have to be bitten or anything like that you just one day someone will say hey you're going to turn into a vampire and then you do so it's really good as vampires either because they don't have to drink blood to survive they don't have to stay out of the sun they don't have to be invited before they can enter your home and also they have some magic powers which are really weak but you know it makes them essentially wizards more than they are vampires and then there's an evil villain who wants to take stuff over because her cat died I'm not joking when I say that like that was the main motivation for the villains actions throughout the whole series her cat died when she was younger and that made her sad and I'm constantly amazed that despite this book going to crazy places all over the time throughout the series it always manages to revert to the status quote very quickly like in fact every book ends with them setting the villains back further like every single one no joke like the villains never gain a leg up on the heroes so any tension that might have been there is just completely gone and for that matter they also defeat the villains the exact same way every time they just form a magic circle together and then they can just do whatever they want it seems there's really no explanation for anything in the series but over the course of it they meet a fallen angel type dude who is also the father of a bunch of demons because he raped a bunch of Cherokee women and then later they try to redeem him and he becomes a good guy which okay look maybe you can do that with murder because well you might be put into a position where you have to kill someone someday and there are times where we hear about someone killing somebody else and we're like you shouldn't do that but I kinda get it there's some circumstances where we understand you might have to kill somebody you're never gonna have to rape anyone so that character bit not only fell completely flat for me but it was just kinda gross and then there's another time where they like go to Italy and Zoe is apparently going to become the vampire queen one day cause I don't know but we'll get back to that in a little bit and then her soul is taken to another world but then it comes back and then status quo is returned they go back to the house at night they continue living their school life at one point Zoe's boyfriend is killed and the main villain brings his soul back into the body of Zoe's dead mother and that's kinda crazy and stupid and fun but it just winds up reverting back to okay they're in school learning magic now like this series has some potential I will admit that like they're not really ideas but like seeds of ideas that could be interesting if they were utilized properly to do absolutely nothing with any of them it just gets it gets worse and worse as time goes on because well like a lot kinda like thrown of glass it's way longer than it needs to be it's 12 books long and it's more repetitive than even thrown of glass because it just it always defaults back to okay we're at school and the villains are still out there but we're gonna get them one day like the entire pretty big character cast there was one that I sort of liked that was Aphrodite who starts off as just sort of like a classic generic mean girl archetype but then you realize okay her parents are kind of manipulating her into it and so you feel a little bit for her and then she becomes a better person later but she's still kind of a bitch and she's like hey this is who I am take it or leave it okay it's not a great character but I can work with it I can work with her in my life hated a more obnoxious Mary Sue than Zoe Redbird because everything about her well everything is about her actually the story isn't about anything else it's about how awesome she is like as soon as she becomes a vampire she gets visited from Nix the goddess of vampires and she tells her hey you're super special and you're gonna accomplish great things okay and then she goes to school and she learns her magic is super powerful and she has skill in all five elements which no one else has ever had because you know she didn't have to work for it but she's just that special and then she runs into the vampire queen and the vampire queen is like I'm gonna make you the queen when I die because she's just that special and then she gets into a love septagon at some point in the series she is involved with six or seven other dudes and okay that's bad enough because it's oh all these dudes are into me but it's really creepy in a couple of ways because one of the dudes is you know that rapist fallen angel like I said before and one of them is one of her teachers who's in his 20s and he actually does take her virginity and I guess it's kind of framed as a bad thing but it's framed as a bad thing because he was manipulating her not because he was too old for her and there's a off-color power dynamic there but to make it even worse Zoe cheats on her boyfriend with him and then the book has the gall to make us think that her boyfriend is the asshole or to try and make us think that her boyfriend is the asshole because he's angry at her and breaks up with her and then later it has him apologize to her because Zoe is just that cool and just that special like the entire world just revolves around her like all the other people all the villains and their plans everything revolves around Zoe Redbird and that more than anything is what kept this from being kind of enjoyable because there are a lot of really dumb moments in this which are really funny like at one point in order to avoid getting in trouble at school the main heroes calling a bomb threat on a bridge yeah like that happens and it's really stupid and funny but I could not get into this series just for the sheer entertainment of laughing at it because Zoe is the most obnoxious Mary Sue I have ever ever come across I hate her so much the whole everything is just about her everything connects to her in some way and not only does it connect to her in some way but she's at the center of it and well there's only so many different ways I can say that but Zoe Redbird deserves to die and finally number one the lovely bones yeah like anyone who's surprised has not been watching my channel for that long what else even is there to say about this okay I was forced to read it for school when I was 15 and it's all about a 14 year old girl who was raped and murdered and then she's like watching her family from the afterlife which that sounds kind of interesting but they never actually do anything with it because the guy who murdered her her family is kind of looking at investigating him for a while trying to find evidence of what he did and maybe stop him from hurting other people but then they just give up on that plot thread pretty early on because you know there's no value in trying to save the lives of other people because he continues his serial murdering after that and the only time he dies is in a total accident like in the movie I think I haven't actually seen it and I never will but I think it's implied that like Suzy actually kills him and it just looks like an accident but in the book nope it's 100% an accident and there's really no point to it like it's not even a character study where we see him on his journey to become a serial killing rapist because we don't get any real time with that you know we see him as a kid and he's kind of unhappy and then we see his mother got thrown out of their family by his father and he never saw her again but we never see what was between that and serial murdering like he just he just is one um yeah yeah yeah no no no no it's uh there's nothing there and then all the characters are just the most selfish hateable people ever and some people have defended this book saying oh well you know real people would act that way in that situation like how her Suzy's mom abandons the family afterwards because she just can't deal with uh being reminded that her daughter's dead like you know she can't be in the same house and everything and like yeah I get it there's no real going back to normal after that but I that doesn't change the fact that it makes her mother super hateable okay realistic and likable are very different things and well much like a lot of other entries on this list this story isn't really about anything you know it's about her family investigating the serial killer and then it's about her family trying to cope with it and then it cuts to years later and her family is just moved on and it's them living their lives and then it's about Suzy in the afterlife just kind of doing stuff and then at the end oh my god I hate even bringing this up but at the end came a scene that's so bad that when I read it it gave me a headache meaning that this caused me physical pain and I'm not exaggerating when I say this uh basically Suzy decides to sort of visit the guy that she liked when she was alive and the way she does that is she inhabits the body of one of her old classmates and then has sex with the other dude so um she essentially just like raped her friend that's that's bad on its own but when you consider that she was raped and murdered before she oh dear look guys rape just sets me off ok I don't really like reading or hearing about it it makes me really angry and I feel justified in that because as I said earlier you might have to kill but you'll never have to rape and the fact that the author is like so up her own ass and this book is so up its own ass about how no I'm teaching you things look this is saying something like the entire book just feels like it's pressing in your face this means something this is deep I'm doing a character study this is how people are weird and it's ok to rape someone sometimes and even shit like flowers in the attic and other exploitative things they're at least honest about how their exploitative trash you know they aren't trying to send a real message or anything they're just like here's some suffering porn but the fact that the lovely bones is that combined with this holier than now attitude just sets me off in ways that I I can't even really describe them like a big part of the reason why I waited so long to do this 2020 update to this is because well I didn't want to retread the same ground like the I highly doubt there will ever be a book I read that is worse than the lovely bones and if it is I just I don't want to ever run into one because it's unpleasant in every way I hate this I hate the author if you like the book I kind of hate you too like I'm never one to get on people about their preferences but in this case I feel justified in doing so are the best as well as all the other names here and if you want to get stuff like early access to my videos and you can suggest new content you want to get your name on here then consider donating to my patreon and if you either can't do that or you just hate me and don't want to do that then well liking this video commenting on it and sharing it around really helps to get the word out and even if you dislike it that also boosts it in the algorithm so really no matter what I win here anyways see you guys later bye