30 Days of Book Discussion: Day 11

A book you hated

This one is easy.  Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.  100%.  And the real cruelty is that I had to read it twice.  I read it my sophomore year in English, and then I moved to Utah and my junior English teacher wanted our class to read it.  Ugh.  Maybe I didn't read every page the second time, but I still had to go through all of the agonizing analysis in class.

This "classic" was written in 1891.  Let me break it down for you:

- Girl gets raped and is no longer "clean"
- Everyone shuns girl
- Girl moves away and falls madly in love
- Her love proposes and they marry, and she tells him about the rape
- He shuns her and they go separate ways
- The cad who raped her finds her and wants her to be his mistress
- After about a million years of him asking she finally accepts
- Her love comes back and wants to take her back
- She kills the guy who raped her
- She escapes with her love and they spend five days together before she's captured and executed.

And I had to read that twice.
Yup.  I hate Tess of the D'Urbervilles.  One day a lady came into the library, looking for "unfair" books. She was writing some sort of English paper.  "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" was out of my mouth before she finished her sentence.  Seriously, Tess can't catch a break.  If I never read that book again it will be too soon.

Do you have a "most hated" book?