So, ok, you know the story about the ten books that influenced our lives and all that.
My friend Claire, being complicated*, made two lists – she rightly observed that if there’s some books that influenced our lives because we loved ’em, it’s also true there some books that pushed us in certain directions because we… well, because we loathed them.

So, can I put together a similar list?
Books that made me what I am because I did not like them?
I’m not sure I can make it to ten, so I’ll stop at five.

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery
This was read to us in school (what was I, eight years old?), and I found it boring beyond belief. Further exposure to the text at a later age also caused me to notice, and hate, a few of the ideological bits in there (like the link domestication/affection, which I find disquieting).
A consequence of my reaction to the book is, I tend to see with suspicion the very vocal, blue-eyed fans of the novel.

Dragon Seed, Pearl S. Buck
Now, this is Karavansara, right? And you know I love the Orient, and China, and history.
But can you imagine reading a 400-pages book about Chinese peasants at the age of ten? With the whole Rape of Nanking smack in the middle of it?
And yes – I still wonder how the heck that book made it to my school library (maybe they read “Dragon” in the title and decided it must be kids’ stuff).
Anyway, a classic example of the right book at the wrong time, this scared me off Buck’s work for two decades.

Siddharta, Herman Hesse
Required reading for high-schoolers.
Here the problems arose – I think – from the fact that I was already somewhat well-read in Eastern philosophy when I read Hesse’s novel, and I was not impressed.
I gave Hesse’s work a wide berth from that moment on, and went on reading books about Eastern philosophy.

Il terzo Mese dell’Inondazione, Alfredo Luvino

I don’t think this was ever released in English, but – a mystery set in the ancient Egypt? You know I’m a sucker for this sort of stuff.
And this was a hell of a best-seller, when it came out in 1991 – lots of coverage in the newspapers and so on. And everybody loved it.
The only problem – to me it was incredibly wooden. The sort of novel in which every character is introduced with his name, and then half a page of physical and psychological description, straight from the author’s notes.
The history and the archeology are excellent – the writing sucks.
This is one of the books that convinced me my money was better spent on foreign authors.

Japan Sinks, Sakyo Komatsu
This was the first science fiction book from a Japanese author I ever read, and Komatsu is a giant in the field – and yet this novel (coupled with the movie Virus, based on another of Komatsu’s books) caused me to extremely wary of Japanese science fiction for quite a while.
Great story, great ideas, but the pessimism, fatalism and bleak outlook of the author really really got to me – as far as catastrophe novels go, this one is really dark and, to me, off-putting.

And I think I’ll stop here.
I’ve read a lot of books far worse than those listed – in terms of story, characters, writing, what not.
But these really got to me at the time of writing – causing irritation,

There’s not many titles I disliked so much they left a big impression.

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*As in “charmingly complicated”