Bottom Books of 2020

Hello! Today’s post will be about my least favorite books of the year. Luckily, I don’t have many of them – most of the books I read this year were three stars are higher.

These are in no particular order and they all rated between 1 and 2.5 stars:

Hitorijime My Hero by Memeko Arii – This one, like all the other manga on this list, share a unique trait in that I couldn’t really get past volume 1. Usually when picking up a new manga I give it two or three volumes before really deciding if I wanna read the whole thing or not, but this series (and the rest below) I knew after one volume that no, no I really didn’t.

This particular manga series is a romance between the two on the cover, but hey, turns out it’s a student-teacher romance and the student is seventeen. That was about it for me, didn’t wanna continue.

Also, this series apparently picks up after another one, one that was never actually translated into English. So it was hard to follow at first, on top of all the other things I disliked, augh.

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime by Fuse – This is the first volume of the light novel series the anime is based off of. Honestly I didn’t care much for the anime, so I don’t know why I thought I’d like this more.

Turns out everything I disliked in the anime was amplified in this. The main character objectified women’s bodies upon meeting them and played it off as a joke like ‘hah hah look how edgy I am’. So yeah no, not for me, and I won’t be continuing the anime either.

Armada by Ernest Cline – I couldn’t even finish this one, man. I feel like Cline’s books just aren’t for me as a whole. This book was pretty cringey, and basically the main character the whole time is going ‘haha look how cool and I am and look how much pop culture I know’.

I get that some people like that, but it was not for me.

I. O. N. by Arina Tanemura – This one-shot manga was so, so bad. Part of me thought that maybe I would have liked it more if I was a teenager when I read it? But honestly I don’t think I would have. The plot is really all over the place and disjointed and weird and it just really felt like I was reading a mess.

Strawberry Panic by Sakurako Kimino – So this manga was riddled with issues. It’s a female-female romance which I was looking forward to, but the dynamics of it are terrible. One of the girls is basically predatory and the other has no idea what’s going on the whole time. The plot was super convoluted and made no sense, and the giant cast of side characters were all just the same person over and over.

Also, this manga is marked ‘the complete collection’ but hah, no, it’s not. The series is three volumes long, but this bind up contains only two of them. They never translated volume three to English. So guess who never got an ending in this ‘complete collection’. It’s poop.

Pestilence by Laura Thalassa – This book was not for me. Honestly I didn’t mind the first half of it or so and was rather invested, but the plot kinda fell apart towards the end, as did the conclusion to the romance. The two main characters had a large issue (understandable, considering one of them was like killing civilization) but the way they got past it was so dumb, and didn’t make sense, and honestly felt way out of character for the principles that the main character had established she had earlier in the book.

It was messy, and I didn’t care for it.

The Rose & The Dagger by Renee Ahdieh – This one I DNFd, and pretty recently, too. It was disappointing. The first book I read and thought was decent, but this one just felt really tropey and melodramatic in the worst way. The main character had no idea what she was doing, and kept saying one thing applying herself to one principle and then doing another. And then they brought up a really clunky love triangle. So yeah I quit about a hundred pages in. Sigh.

And that’s it! Seven books that were down in the dumps for me this year. Considering I read over 170 books, having only 7 that I didn’t like was pretty good I think.

If you’ve read any of the above, lemme know what you think!