22 Worst Books of 2022

lapetitepritt

Jan 5

Hello, bookworms!

Happy Wedsnesday, what are you currently reading? I am almost done with A Quiet Life in the Country by T.E. Kinsey and I plan on starting Infamous by Lex Croucher next. I am very excited about all the books on my TBR for this month, and all the reviews to come.

Anyways, today I am here with the list of the worst books I've read in 2022. As with the Best Books list, this will be in chronological order, aside from the top three that will be ranked. I have read a lot of bad books, and it was hard to pick just these 22. I won't be doing any dishonourable mentions, but know that there would be a lot of them if I did.

☽ The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
I'll try to be quick with each book. Aside from being one of the most boring mysteries I've ever read, this book thought itself so smart, but it only came out as annoying. What's more, it's one of the books with the worst fatphobia I've ever read. And it came out in 2018.

☽ Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby
Same as the previous book, this was boring. Also, it read a lot like a dudebro book trying hard not to be. I know that the author probably wanted that to underline how wrong the dads were, but I honestly didn't like that it seemed that we were supposed to understand them.

☽ People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry
I am sorry, romance lovers and TikTok girlies, this book was so fucking bad. It was boring, the characters were flat and useless, and I wish I didn't waste my time reading it. And this is coming from someone who usually enjoys the friends to lovers trope very much.

☽ The Silence of Bones by June Hur
Another boring mystery. You'll notice it's a common theme here, and that's because I have been reading mysteries for too long to accept boring ones. The historical setting was interesting, but it wasn't a well balanced book, as far as I am concerned.

☽ The Maid by Nita Prose
This one was kinda problematic, to me, and I have read reviews from autistic persons that agree with me. The main character was coded has seemingly autistic, but this was never stated and the author used her as a token for her plot, which was extremely annoying.

☽ Sense and Second-Degree Murder by Tirzah Price
My God, did I hate this book. I really loved the first instalment in this companion series of Jane Austen's retellings, but this was a flop. Granted, I am not the biggest fan of Sense and Sensibility to begin with, so it was a hard job, but she somehow managed to make it worse.

☽ The Caretakers by Amanda Bestor-Siegal
I had to look up my own review, because I didn't remember what it was that made me hate this book. I only remember the hatred, and that's not a good sign, eh? Apparently, I felt that the whole book was pointless, and it kinda tracks, as I indeed don't remember it.

☽ Even If We Break by Mariek Nijkamp
This is one of the lowest rated books I've ever read, and I can see why now. I needed a book with a title beginning with E for a challenge and one with a disabled MC who used a mobility aid, and that it the sole reason why I picked up this one. I better had not.

☽ Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
This was in the run to be one of the top three worst books I've read this year, but it saved itself by only a little and just because it's been so long since I've finished it, my anger and hatred has tampered down. But it was awful nonetheless, and I would not recommend it.

☽ Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li
My biggest disappointment of the year, I am still so sad and mad over this. It is sold as a heist story, but it is not. It's a literary fiction book about being Asian American. Which would have been interesting, had it not been sold as a fucking heist story. Damn it.

☽ The Violent Season by Sara Walters
I don't honestly remember anything about this, other than I found it problematic for the ways it portrayed certain dynamics between characters and mental illness in general. I read it for the Alphabetical Challenge, but literally anything else would have been better.

☽ Double Booked by Lily Lindon
Possibily worse than People We Meet on Vacation and up there in my top three worst romances I've ever read — not that I have read all that many, yet. I hated it so much I didn't even get a bookplate signed by the author at YALC. That's how much I despised it.

☽ Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney
Can you believe I was going to give this at least 4 stars, if not 5, until the stupidest plot twist on planet Earth happened? Because it's true. I had even predicted the twist, but I was hoping that it was a red herring and that the author would shock me. She did not, unfortunately.

☽ Sea of Tranquillity by Emily St. John Mandel
This one is entirely my fault, because I didn't read the synopsis. I could have avoided a horrible read, had I bothered to learn this was a pandemic story with time travel, two of my most hated tropes. Sadly, I am stupid and these are the results. I've learned from it.

☽ The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
This saddens me, only because it was a gift from a dear friend. I would never have bought it, but I was hoping to love it, since she is such a huge fan of this book. To me, it was one of the cringiest reads of the year, and I couldn't care less about the plot, to be honest.

☽ The Maidens by Alex Michaelides
As I said in my Goodreads very brief review: "Can men stop writing female main characters?". This is especially true in the thriller genre (The House Across the Lake is another prime example), and Alex Michaelides has never met a woman in his life, probably.

☽ We Do What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart
This was honestly bad, but I could not tell you what it was that made me despise it this much. Probably the wasted potential, because it had it in itself to be an interesting exploration of a toxic relationship between a student and her female teacher. But no, it wasn't.

☽ Witcha Gonna Do? by Avery Flynn
I had almost forgotten about this, another awful romance. Maybe this is the worst I've ever read. It had the worst writing style of the year, that's for sure, and it also read like someone wanted to write smut but had ideas for a YA novel, and just aged the characters up.

☽ The Ones We Burn by Rebecca Mix
This book has been the center of a controversy, which I encourage you to look up (I did talk about it in my review). Aside from being problematic and triggering for many people, it was also badly written, and probably this is the reason why everyone understood it differently.

And now, onto the three books that made me waste my time the most!

Miss Aldridge Regrets by Louise Hare
If you ever stumble upon a book challenge that has "read a book with a dumb MC" as a prompt, look no further. The main character of this one is so stupid that I wanted to throw my Kindle out of the window at every page. It was a bad, boring and predictable mystery.

Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen
I can feel all the intellectualoids screaming at me that I don't understand Real Literature©, and maybe I don't. I had to read this for a class, I was paired with it by chance, and I honestly would have preferred anything else over this book clearly written by a cishet white man.

House of Leavs by Mark Z. Danielewski
And the award for worst read of the year goes to House of Leaves, without a shred of a doubt. I honestly thought it was going to be a favourite, instead I hate this with every fiber of my being. Post-Modernist shit at its finest, and I hate post modernism as a whole.