You Might Hate This Book

Will Stephanie want to die reading this book? Will Faulkner be the death of this friendship? The puns are just too numerous and easy this week as Stephanie reads William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying .  Addie Bundren’s dying wish is to be buried in her hometown, but her poor, rural family finds this to be no easy task after her passing. While her husband, Anse, leads the family on this odyssey wi...

Spring is here, and love is in the air! But will Hannah hate The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood, a book that Stephanie and so many others love?  Olive Smith “accidentally” kisses the most hateful and hated professor in her Stanford lab: Dr. Adam Carlsen. This meet-cute that she wishes had never occurred leads to a fake-dating situation in which Olive slowly falls in love with a man she thou...

For this month’s bonus topical episode, Stephanie and Hannah discuss children’s books in honor of their friends, Brad and Kristi Montague, and the launch of their new book The Fantastic Bureau of Imagination . But…who really hates children’s books? Hannah and Stephanie don’t, but it turns out a lot of other people do. Join the two friends as Hannah shares and Stephanie reacts to a list of some com...

This week Stephanie assigned Hannah Leaving Time by popular novelist Jodi Picoult. Hannah is skeptical about the often touchy-feely nature of Picoult’s writing. Will she hate it as much as she and Stephanie both think she will? Jenna Metcalf is thirteen and doesn’t know if her mother Alice is alive or dead. She hasn’t seen Alice since was three, on the day of a tragic accident at her parents’ elep...

This week Hannah and Stephanie return to an author they mentioned in the episode on O Caledonia : Maggie O’Farrell and her historical fiction novel, Hamnet . Will Stephanie appreciate her Shakespeare-loving friend’s assignment this week?  Everyone knows about Shakespeare, the man behind Macbeth , Romeo & Juliet, and, perhaps most famously, The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark . But wh...

This week Stephanie chose Verity by Colleen Hoover for her thriller-hating friend Hannah to read. Will Hannah hate it as much as the previous thrillers she’s been assigned, or will Stephanie finally succeed in bringing her friend into this genre?  Lowen, a struggling New York writer who’s facing imminent eviction, is offered the deal of a lifetime: the chance to ghostwrite the last three nove...

This week Hannah assigns Stephanie a book by an author she knows her friend historically has hated: Stephen King. As she embarks on the journey of the Dark Tower with The Gunslinger, will Stephanie find “long days and pleasant nights” or…just some long days?  Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger in a world that has “moved on,” tracks the elusive man in black, a sorcerer that has answers Rolan...

This week Stephanie assigns Hannah the show’s first YA novel: Heroine by Mindy McGinnis. Will Hannah hate it or find it…addicting?  Mickey Catalan’s world is shaken when she suffers a severe hip injury in a car crash months before the start of her senior softball season. Defined by the sport that she loves and the comfort she derives from the field, she does everything she can to heal her bod...

This week Hannah takes Stephanie into the Scottish highland’s with Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia . Will Steph come willingly, or be dragged kicking and screaming?  Janet lies dead on the floor of her family’s crumbling castle. But as Maggie O’Farrell writes in the introduction, this is “not a whodunit,” but an “account of Janet’s life, from birth to early death, taking in sibling bonds and bet...

The world is in peril! Well, not really. But Hannah and Stephanie’s friendship might be if Hannah hates Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir as much as Stephanie fears she will.  In the not so distant future, Earth is threatened by an alien life form that is stealing energy from the sun. Ryland Grace, disgraced scientist and devoted middle school teacher, awakes aboard the Hail Mary, Earth’s last d...

Elves! Spiders! Matriarchy! Oh my! This week, Hannah assigns Stephanie a classic fantasy novel, Homeland by R.A. Salvatore. Will Stephanie hate her first foray into the Forgotten Realms? Deep in the Underdark, a murderous matriarchal society of drow serve Lolth, the Spider Queen. Then one day, a lowly, third-born male, Drizzt Do’Urden, decides to challenge the status quo and question the very cult...

This week, Stephanie makes a second attempt to present Hannah with a revenge thriller. Will Hannah hate it as much as she did Razorblade Tears ?  On the campus of Gorman University, English professor Scarlett and English student Carly couldn’t be more different. Carly is a shy, anxious freshman whose roommate, the vivacious theater major Allison, attempts to break her out of her shell. Scarle...

This week, Hannah assigns Stephanie Hannah Webster Foster’s 1797 epistolary novel The Coquette. Will Stephanie be an unwilling and resentful student of this early American seduction novel?  Eliza Wharton suddenly finds herself free of an advantageous but undesired engagement. Writing of her joy to her female friends, she expresses a desire to remain “free.” As she encounters further proposals...

This week, Stephanie assigns Hannah a book whose title alone would turn many (Hannah included) away from reading: Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows . But is there more to this book than the title suggests? Nikki is 22, single, and living above a pub in London when she takes on a job teaching Punjabi widows how to read and write. However, the widows defy Nikki’s expectations and end up teaching her...

This week, Hannah tries to atone for the lack of resolution in her previous assignment by making Stephanie read The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. But will Hannah be able to convince Stephanie that this book deserves its many accolades?  Tony Webster receives a puzzling bequest from the mother of his high school girlfriend, Veronica. Now in his sixties, he tries to make sense of the pas...

Surprise! After all this talk of books they hate, Stephanie and Hannah want to end the year on a positive note. In this bonus episode, they each present three books they read in 2022 that they not only loved, but think the other would love too! They are friends for a reason, after all. Support this show by subscribing and leaving a review!  You can support us on Patreon at https://www.patreon...

Stephanie and Hannah tackle true crime this week with Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark . Will Hannah find her introduction to true crime as enlightening as Stephanie hopes, or would she have rather stayed in the dark?  Written by popular true-crime blogger Michelle McNamara, and published posthumously by her husband Patton Oswalt, this book take a deep dive into one woman’s obsess...

This week, Hannah sends Stephanie into the dream-like surrealism of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore . Will it be sweet dreams for Stephanie, or will she just want to wake up?  Kafka Tamura is a fifteen-year-old boy running from both his past and his future with nowhere to hide. Nakata is a sixty-year-old man who can’t read or write, but he can find your lost house cat by conversing with...

This week, Stephanie assigned Hannah a book from a genre that she knows Hannah hates: romance. However, there’s a reason this romance novel holds particular interest for Stephanie.  April Whittier and Marcus Caster-Rupp embark on a whirlwind romance after he comes to her aid–much like the Greek hero he portrays on television–when internet trolls leave nasty Twitter comments on her recent cosp...

This week, Hannah takes Stephanie back in time with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Although she loves this book, Hannah is confident Stephanie will hate it.  On the eve of the Industrial Revolution, the inhabitants of Winesburg, Ohio feel isolated from both the broader world and from their neighbors. As they tentatively reach out to each other and to George Willard, the town’s lone jour...

This week, Hannah and Stephanie discuss a book that Stephanie loves, Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby. Will Hannah hate it as much as Stephanie fears? Two grief-stricken fathers from different worlds–a low-income white man and a black ex-con–seek revenge for their sons’ murders. In their quest for revenge, they also seek their own redemption, having never accepted their sons’ marriage while they wer...

This week, Hannah and Stephanie discuss Never Let Me Go by Kazou Ishiguro, a book Hannah loves. Will Stephanie hate it?  Ishiguro’s novel follows the friendship and heartaches of Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy. They grow up together at Hailsham, a seemingly idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. However, their futures are not entirely in their hands, and they must come to terms with thei...

Hi! We're Hannah and Stephanie, and we're so excited to introduce our new podcast You Might Hate This Book, a podcast about best friends with VERY different tastes in books. Follow us at HateThisBookPod on Instagram and Twitter, and hit subscribe so that you never miss an episode! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.