I hate getting books for Christmas in general because I’m such a mood reader, and I’ve plastered a fake smile on my face many a time and repeated internally ‘Its the thought that counts.’ as I unwrap a book I will not read.
But the worst one by far, given to me by my own Mother , who I know loves me, when I was fourteen years old! was >!Men are from Mars Women are from Venus.!< I am sitting there horrified thinking what is she trying to tell me? As my sisters are flat on the floor laughing to the point of puking. We eventually came to the conclusion she just saw an attractive cover on a bestseller table and grabbed it. Love to know your terrible gift stories.
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Mother in law gave me Jesus Christ - Our Promised Seed one year. I’m an atheist, and she knows that.
Some rubbish self-help book that was advertised on Dr. Phil.
A bible
I can see the self-satisfied smile on their face as they did it to, the monsters.
I was raised Catholic and on Confirmation day, at 15, the gift I got from my godfather was a Bible. I thought to myself: my good sir, I wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t studied that exact book for the past decade of my life. So yeah, as a voracious reader, I was expecting something a bit different. And the fact that the priest himself told us beforehand that for his Confirmation he got a wristwatch didn’t help either. Anyway, the Bible at least came in handy when we were analyzing some excerpts in high school. From then on, everyone who’s considering buying me a book receives a carefully curated list.
Was it at least a study Bible with some decent notes?
I don’t mind having multiple Bibles, because I like studying theology and crossreferencing different translations against the original text, or reading the study notes and learning materials. But then, if someone bought me, say, a generic NIV or KJV or whatever, I’d not be too thrilled, since I have those.
For the record though, I wouldn’t say no to a Douay-Rheims one day. That’s one I’ve not got.
It was indeed a generic copy.
That being said, in all honestly, studying the Bible isn’t something I’m that much interested in. I respect it and try to incorporate its wisdom into my thoughts and actions, but for me organized religion was always more of a chore than a free choice.
However, I’m glad that you are passionate about studying theology. My grandma also likes to fill out her free time with such musings, and sometimes she’ll share her thoughts with me, which I always appreciate.
I hope you manage to get a copy of Douay-Rheims!
I don’t remember who gifted it to me, but I got a book on Buddhist wisdom for my (Lutheran) confirmation day.
I’d like to know the thought process that was going on in that person’s brain!
My MIL loved giving me right wing propaganda books. 🤢 no thank you. If your blurb is from Rush Limbaugh, I’m not reading it.
My local library is bursting at the seams with donations rn. They had LGBT books and conservative books like one from Rudy Giuliani for sale to help make room. They also had different books available for free. One of the many free books was from Pat Robertson.
When I was leaving the library I laughed in my head thinking 'I wonder if Rudy ever though his book would be priced the same as an LGBT book (or even near one), or if Pat Robertson ever thought that a library would view his book as material to give away for free, while they put a price tag on LGBT books because they were seen as more valuable.'😂
The books only costed 25 cents, but I found the fact that they were giving away Pat’s books for free, unlike the LGBT books, and Rudy being given the same price as hilarious.
I do worry about them selling some of the LGBT books, fortunately they still have a lot in circulation. They were selling two completely good copies of ‘Lawn Boy,’ and I looked into their catalog for it, it’s no longer in circulation. However, they do have the very libertarian ‘Tuttle Twins’ books still in circulation.
That makes me want to reread The Miseducation of Cameron Post.
The only time I read a work by him was that one time I found the first three instalments of his Rush Revere series in a thriftstore. Well, I didn’t know anything about this dude when I bought it, considering that he’s not that popular in Germany compared to the US, but well…
I should’ve guessed that somethings odd with him when the foreword of the first book openly talks about that it will show kids how great american exceptionalism is. IIRC, it also had a weirdly naive outlook on US history, always stressed that the country is the land of the free but kept looking over all the bigotry. Oh, I think the last one I read was also weirdly pro-war/pro-army, because one of the main characters had to come to terms with the fact that is father is a soldier or something?
Whatever, I probably wouldn’t have bought the set if I knew more about him before.
My abuelita used to get me the new Bill O’Reilly book of the year. She really didn’t mean any harm, she’s just a very old school catholic Mexican lady who just accepted whatever she’s told (by the church usually) to accept. She knew I was interested in “politics” and thought I might find them interesting. Unfortunately, the politics I was/am interested in are leftist literature like Marx, Engels, Bakunin, etc among myriad others. Eventually, she started watching Colbert and thought he was so funny and silly (I’m still not sure if she realized it was satire) she started getting me his books. I had a lot of fun reading those. But ultimately, my abuelita is the best and she could get me a pile of shit for Christmas and I wouldn’t love her any less.
Oh, and onetime my fascist uncle got me Atlas Shrugged unironically…that one was pretty bad too.
I had an ex-girlfriend that keep giving me Ayn Rand to read. She said how they changed the way she looked at the world. In retrospect I’m glad that relationship ended.
Was one of those books a short little sucker called Anthem? I had to read that in high school and I guess you could say it changed how I looked at the world. I was imaginating triplets joined at the head before I finally figured out everybody was using the royal we (as in Queen Victoria’s classic statement “We are not amused”). Had to work WAY too hard to get that little piece of information and I’ve never read Ayn Rand again. (In fact, when somebody asked me about that book years after graduation, I had to look on the fiction shelves at the library and go through all the Ayn Rand books they had because I’d blocked the damn title out of my brain.)
As far as I’m concerned, the only good thing to come out of “Anthem” is that it inspired the story on Side 1 of Rush’s ‘2112’ album.
What a sweet lady. I’d forgive her, but not my MIL. She hates that I’m progressive. 😂
what’s abuelita? And I don’t want to know.
On the plus side it does make good fire wood!
Those books I won’t even donate. Straight to the trash. I don’t want them out circulating in the world. My MIL gives me “biblical roles for women”type books which also go straight in the trash.
Ha, this year you should give her “A Year of Biblical Womanhood” by Rachel Held Evans and “The Making of Biblical Womanhood” by Beth Allison Barr.
I had a stint in eating disorder treatment right before Christmas one year as a teenager. A couple in my extended family, who I have little in common with and don’t know very well, got me an ENORMOUS book of “positive thinking” platitudes. Genuinely it was ~500 pages of the kind of corny quotes you see MLM types post on Instagram ripped from their original context. I tried to comb through it to find something of value but not a single quote meant anything to me. A lot of them were religious too, and I am not religious- the atheism of my immediate family is actually a huge source of drama in the extended family so that was awkward.
I ended up giving it away to a book donation drive shortly after. They really did mean well and I appreciated the thought, but it also showcased the ignorance that my family had around the situation in an uncomfortable way…
At 13 I received The Ultimate Weight Solution for Teens by Jay McGraw (son of Dr. Phil) from a family friend. When I opened it they said “because you’re a teen now.” Apparently it was the best way to celebrate that. This was 2003ish so a toxic time for body talk but I remember thinking why tf should I have to thank them for this obviously rude gift? No one in my family acknowledged how weird it was and it sat on a shelf for years.
I would’ve thrown hands. I’m so sorry!!!
Side story: one friend’s father was recovering from Big C surgery and being grumpy. Someone gifted him “Deep Thoughts” by Jack Handly. He laughed so hard he almost hurt himself.
“It’s a shame how a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of wild dogs.”
Jack Handy’s Deep Thoughts books were the best. He recently released a couple of novels, which are basically just deep thought jokes strung together in a loose narrative.
He’s still got an active website that was updated last time I checked. His stuff never fails to make me laugh.
My favourite Jack Handy was ‘People think clowns are funny but I don’t. In fact, I think they’re kind of scary. I think it’s because when I was a child, a clown killed my dad.’
Probably not remembering it exactly right but I laughed so much.
“ If you drop your keys in molten lava, let them go, cause man, they’re gone.”
That’s my favorite one of his deep thoughts!!! I joke to my children that it’s a metaphor (I think a metaphor is what I mean) for letting go of things that aren’t meant to be anymore
I had a similar experience when I was in hospital as a teenager. A teacher gave me one of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books. I read it because I was beyond bored, and there was one story in there that particularly incensed me - a teacher gets her students to write down all the things they’re unable to do, makes them bury the lists in the playground, and holds a funeral for ‘I Can’t’. They create a tombstone for I Can’t and hang it on the classroom wall. After that, whenever a child said they couldn’t do something, the teacher would point at the wall and remind them that I Can’t was dead.
One of the biggest lessons I had to learn as a disabled kid (and just a human generally) was that everyone has limits and it’s more than OK to respect those. If I insist that my car is really a convertible submarine and insist on driving it into the Irish Sea, the car will not be inspired to develop these new capabilities. People are no different. Of course there will be times when self-doubt and low self-confidence keep you from things you could do, and of course it’s a good thing to overcome the feelings that hold you back, but there will be plenty of other times when saying ‘no’ is liberating rather than restricting.
In my old job I used to deliver teacher training from time to time, and I’d always tell participants to make sure they never tried to encourage any child with, “There’s no such word as can’t”…unless they could tell me, hand on heart, that they believed themselves capable of landing a principal role in the Bolshoi Ballet by next Wednesday. There was always laughter at that, but you could almost see the realisation dawning for some attendees.
i read that one. it was shit.
r/wowthanksimcured
God I hate that shit. I’ve had my own mental health issues and getting angry on my own behalf has dragged me out of more depressive holes that positivity ever did. I might do a self help book of my own. How to get angry and set boundaries by I Jackdaw.
Very glad you survived your dangerous illness.
I’d read that!
I’d read that one, too. Positivity has its place, but that’s not the be all/end all.
I never got books as gifts, not on Christmas or anytime of the year but during Christmas I like to buy Christmas themed books.
So last year I had got the book “In a Holidaze” by Christina Lauren because I thought the book would be about time travelling which it was to some extent but it was more about romance and relationships and family and I really didn’t like the book at the end.
I don’t remember the titles but they were like 3 bodice-rippers. I was a teen then and I live in a predominantly Catholic country (with lots of other Christian denominations) so like…it was odd lol. But it’s not like I wasn’t reading worse things. But who wants to get such books from their uncle’s girlfriend lol. I’ll just assume they thought the covers were pretty.
I never got to read them and after I moved, I now don’t know where they are. I just thought it was nice that they thought to get me books because everyone knew back then that I loved reading.
Not me, but my friend’s terrible father bought her a book about STD’s and a book about how to be a Proper Lady one year when she was like 10. Gag.
Ugh, yes, I got an etiquette book when I was 16, already too polite a teenager, while my three brothers burped and farted and cursed their way to adulthood
I always get suspicious when people describe themselves as polite.
Ok
Girl what
Makes sense. He likely wants grandkids, and knows that he’s more likely to get them if his daughter is a proper lady.
Not this absent divorcee of a father with several daughters by different women.
And regardless, it was a super inappropriate gift for her age.
Jesus fucking tap dancing Christ in the hell is wrong with this “father” …!?
THINGS I ASK MYSELF EVERY TIME HE COMES UP
My BIL bought my niece a Bill O’Reilly book when she was about twelve. She’s now 31 and a raging liberal, lol.
You’re having me flash back to the Glenn Beck book someone got me as a kid. Same outcome lol.
You mean the GOP is turning our kids into left-wing radicals? They should ban their own fucking books./s
I was not gifted it but told I could read his copy of Sarah Palin’s book. I opened it, read a couple random trash pages, and declined.
How many brain cells did you lose during that time?
I could literally feel my neurons cry out in agony and had to slam the book shut and throw it across the room.
Could you see Russia?
M
Who’s Bill O’Reilly?
Don’t ask, he appears when you say his name!
You have to say it three times. Shhh…nobody say it again.
Mine’s not all that terrible, but I started dating a very nice (and somewhat wealthy) man a few weeks before Christmas. Since we were brand new, I’m sure I got him some thoughtful but inexpensive thing, and he gave me a book. A brand new, hardcover mystery book by Patricia Cornwell that he obviously had laying around and just grabbed. A book would have been a great gift but I don’t read mysteries (but felt obligated to read this one) and once we’d have been dating a little longer he would have been able to accurately gauge my reading tastes.
We went out for years and he ended up being a stellar gift giver!
I’ve read a lot of her stuff and you either really like her or you don’t. There’s no middle ground.
She was a good writer; it was just the genre. The book was The Body Farm. Yikes!
OMG! That’s one of the worst ones, as far as being gore filled. I learned about the body farm and that it’s a real place from that book.
That is definitely NOT the book you’d normally give if your were trying to impress. 🤣
Right? Put me off Cornwell, although I read her Jack the Ripper stuff.
I know! By the time she came out with her Ripper stuff, I wasn’t into her anymore. I watched the show she made about it though.
Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue”
Yuck!
I know🤢
Not saying I wouldn’t have taken the opportunity to be Vice-President if it was offered (or at least considered it), but she went out and made a damn fool of herself–she reads ALL the newspapers and magazines that come out every day?–and after the campaign was over, kept saying she wanted to run for President, although one of the first things she did after returning to Alaska was resign as governor (,granted, she’d been away from it for a long time, but if you can’t run one state, should you announce you want to be in charge of all fifty?).
No book at all. :( (Seriously, when I was a kid, they wouldn’t buy me books because “That’s not a present!”. Now that I’m an adult with grown kids, it’s “You work in a library, you don’t need it!” :stomps foot in temper:)
I did get an inappropriate book for Christmas when I was 14 - my Dad bought me a Robert Heinlein box set (great!), which included “Stranger in a Strange Land” (awesome), and a book which included some of his more sexually-charged works. One featured incest! My dad eventually read them all, and I got a cryptic “If you read something you don’t understand, you come ask me, ok?” When I got to that book, I was horrified, paralyzed by the knowledge that my DAD knew exactly what I was reading. :laughing:
That’s hilarious. A Dadfail, but he did try, bless his heart. lmao.
Not for Christmas, but when I was 13, my dad suggested I read Friday by RAH and then offered the rest of his collection. It was eye opening indeed. 👀
Robert Heinlein […] book which included some of his more sexually-charged works.
That… doesn’t really narrow it down.
One featured incest!
Neither does this.
Haha okay that tracks. I haven’t read much Heinlein but I remember being very confused at the end of Time for the Stars when his brother’s granddaughter was like “Hi uncle time-dilation with pop-pop’s DNA. Welcome back to Earth. We’re getting married now.”
“Sorry, what?”
“I grew up trading your thoughts. It’s not incest if you’re psychic.”
It’s either Robert Heinlein or VC Andrews
I think there’s several of his books that feature incest. They’re great books, though. But, yeah.
Yeah, at 14, that was a bit much. Especially once I knew my Dad had read it. :laughing:
A Higher Loyalty by James Comey 😂.
Not me, but one year my parents bought my brother The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson. It didn’t go over well at all.
The author probably should read his own book, he gave enough fucks to censor the swear
Barack Obama’s autobiography. I have nothing against the guy but I just don’t read autobiographies, let alone 1000 page autobiographies.
Herman Melville Biography. Snooooorrrreeee