Everyone has a classic book, one that's adored by English teachers and hipsters the world over, that they can't stand. I don't think you should feel guilty about it. I don't think you should be forced year after year to sit in silence while other people rhapsodize about a classic book you secretly despised. Here are three such books I never want to see again.

THE GREAT GATSBY
Not only did this book cause people to think that rich people are interesting (they aren't), it essentially created the entire modern "white people problems" class of novel that still persists to this day. OOOOH, LOOGIT ME! I'M JAY GATSBY AND I'M FILTHY RICH AND I THROW HUGE PARTIES BUT MY HEART STILL ACHES FOR THE ONE GIRL I CAN'T BANG! Way to go, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Way to cause every rich Ivy League douchebag out there to throw white parties and drive while shit-faced. I hate you. Did you know that Baz Luhrmann is making a movie out of this, and that it's going to be in 3D? And that it's going to be fucking horrible? There is nothing good about a book that inspires the Moulin Rouge! guy to make a movie no one wanted in a format no one likes. I bet it features a six-minute musical number, because Baz Luhrmann is a shithead.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
There are paragraphs in this book that go on for DAYS. In fact, that seems like a staple or any and all Russian literature: NO PARAGRAPH BREAKS. Just an endless march through a literary gulag, with no stops for water or peepeeing. God forbid Dostoyevsky ever bother to hit the carriage return. No, no. Wouldn't want to let the reader off easy like that. No, best to write paragraphs that are 10,000 words long, so that your eyes aren't allowed to blink and re-moisten for 20 minutes at a time, until you just wanna find an old woman and bury an ax into her head. Let my eyes BREATHE, dick. When I was in school, everyone referred to books like this as "eating cement." These are books that you have to sit there and just will yourself to digest, taking in page after goddamn page without remembering one single thing that you had just read. Oh, I tried absorbing the book. I really did. And when my teacher asked me a question about it and I gave him a blank stare because all that shit went over my head, it wasn't because I had failed to read the book. I read it. Honest to God. But I took in NONE of it. They may as well have left it in the original Russian for me to read. And you know what? I just looked at an excerpt of it today for this piece and I still begin glazing over the words after two sentences.

THE HOBBIT
Why wasn't Bilbo the one who killed the dragon? I spent hundreds of pages waiting for Bilbo to get to kill the dragon, and then what happens? Some random-ass Bard does the deed. From out of nowhere! What the fuck? Then everyone fights over the dragon's estate, like it's a goddamn episode of "Dallas" or something. Total bullshit. This is why we have Peter Jackson: To make these stories better. I don't give a shit about the bureaucratic difficulties of an imaginary realm. THAT ISN'T THE FANTASY I HAD IN MIND.

Drew Magary writes for Deadspin, NBC, Maxim and Kissing Suzy Kolber—a humor site dedicated to the NFL. The Postmortal, now out from Penguin, is his first novel. You can follow Drew on Twitter.

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Here are the words, in order, from the trailer.

"Jacob. What are you doing."

"I'm here to warn you."

"Just leave now."

"She has the right to know."

"What."

"We've been tracking the situation in Seattle for a while. Unexplained disappearances. Killings."

"Someone's creating an army."

"An army of vampires?"

"They're coming here."

"This means an ugly fight, with lives lost."

"We're in."

"As long as we get to kill some vampires."

"It's time."

"Yes it is."

Average number of characters per word: 4.32.
Average number of syllables per word : 1.38.
Average number of words per sentence: 4.

On the Gunning-Fogg index, which evaluates the number of years of education needed for comprehesion, it scores a 3.95, just slightly higher than the text of "Rock-a-bye Baby." Four other different tests give it a reading level appropriate for grades 0, 2, 2 and 6.

Also Jacob is only briefly shirtless once. IT'S TIME! YES IT IS!

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The newspaper division's annual loss was actually 15% less than last year-even while 2009's revenues were down 15% from last year. So this year, they had an operating loss of only $163 million-while for 2008 that loss was almost $193 million. (Last year: terrible. This year: bad.)

The company's magazine arm, however, had a significant downturn. That division "had an operating loss in 2009 of $29.3 million, compared to an operating loss of $16.1 million in 2008." So revenues for magazines there were down 27% over last year.

There was a similar decrease in their profitable television division, even! Revenue for that department was down 16% in 2009 from 2008, though it had an operating profit.

So let's look at some recent history!

The operating income of the newspaper division in 2005: $125,359,000
The operating income of the newspaper division in 2006 $63,389,000.

That's a decline of almost 50% between 2005 and 2006.

In 2007, however, they held pretty much steady with operating income of $66,434,000.

So you can imagine that their operating loss in 2008 of $193 million was stunning.

Let's look back at the trending of the newspaper division's yearly pure revenue, setting aside the final income numbers:

2003: $872,754,000
2004: $938,066,000
2005: $957,082,000
2006: 961,905,000
2007: $889,827,000
2008: $801,265,000
2009: $679,282,000

So revenue began trending down from a 2006 high and then, in 2009, massively sagged. I don't really need to graph that for you, do I?

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While creative differences caused a divide in Matt Groening and Sam Simon's relationship, the division of The Simpsons' spoils created a chasm. After the first season, when the show was blowing up and the money started rolling in, Sam felt that he was not being appropriately compensated. Today, Simon has made more than $200 million from the show, but at the time, issues over money only added fodder to his war with Groening. "Once, Sam got an envelope from Fox, and opened it up, and looked at it, and angrily threw it down on the ground," says one witness from the early Simpsons days. "We knew it was a check, but we didn't know what it was for. Later, Sam stormed out of the room. We crept over to see what it was, and it was a check for $34,000, which Sam had felt was not enough for whatever his part of this payment was-it was merchandise-and that check sat there for a couple days on the floor. We all just looked at it longingly, cause to us it was still a lot of money."

Daria Paris, assistant to Sam Simon (1989-94): I think a big issue came up when the merchandising started rolling in. And Sam was seeing a smaller portion of it than others, which wasn't really fair.

Jay Kogen, writer/producer (1989-92): I think Sam did okay. [Laughs] Part of it may have been money, but I think it was a combination of stuff.

Gavin Polone, former agent for Conan O'Brien, Simpsons writers; executive producer, Curb Your Enthusiasm: Back then, you used to make different deals than today. People got what was known as "adjusted gross." I think Sam may still be getting $50,000, $60,000, whatever, per episode.

Brian Roberts, editor (1989-92): Matt used to be the king of merchandising. He would just sit in his office and sign posters and create more ways of doing merchandising. And meanwhile, Sam and the writing staff were churning out brilliant episodes. (And just as a side note, Fox is so cheap we never got any animation cels or anything. I couldn't even get one cel from the episode I wrote. But there was no shortage of Butterfingers. You could always go up to Matt's office and grab yourself a big handful of Butterfingers, because those were free, because Matt signed that Butterfinger deal. No shortage of those. To this day, I can't eat a Butterfinger.)

The hatred between the two of them just became deeper and deeper for I don't know what reason. I think Jim sided with Matt. I don't understand it. I think Jim fell in love with the myth and the legend and said, "Hey, let's ride this deal." That was the beginning of the end, I think, for Sam.

[...]

Conan O'Brien, writer/producer (1991-93): Friends of Matt's would be traveling and they would find bootlegged Simpson merchandise. Sometimes they were funny and sometimes they were disturbing. Like a Marge made out of a lizard's skull, or T-shirts that were from some country-recently liberated from the Iron Curtain-that had Bart saying weird phrases that were mildly threatening or racist. I remember Matt cracking up once. "Did you see what they just found? Ceausescu had this in his basement."

Also not amused by the knockoffs was one James L. Brooks. One story, which circulated throughout the Gracie Films building, involved Jim in New York City soon after the show had hit it big. Brooks spotted an African-American street vendor hocking counterfeit Bart Simpson T-shirts. Jim accosted him: "You're taking food out of the mouths of my children!"

[...]

Ken Estin, writer/producer, Taxi, The Tracey Ullman Show: Whatever Matt got, [Fox] stopped giving [to others] instantly, because in the first season of The Simpsons they were already making phenomenal money-money that nobody ever dreamed of. When I first met Matt, I don't even think he had a house. Once he started working [on Ullman], he got a house in Venice that I think he was renting. Then he bought it. Then when The Simpsons came out, he bought the house next door and turned it into a game house where he just had Simpsons things in it. He put in pinball machines and toys and toothbrushes and light fixtures, just everything you could possibly imagine-I was amazed. You'd be in one house and then you'd walk next door to the other house and there it was. It was The Simpsons house-his game house-but he made money so fast that then he sold both those properties and bought a huge house somewhere else.

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