I’ll admit that sometimes I get caught up in the publisher’s hype of new releases and immediately buy or request them.  Or, I’m browsing through some of the blogs I read on a regular basis and I notice that everyone is giving five stars to this one new book.  Either way, I do end up getting swept up into the hype of a book on occasion.

For me personally, most of the time I find that an overhyped book is good, but that it’s not the greatest novel ever written like some people say it is.  It’s very rare that a book lives up to its hype.  Perhaps I’m just overly critical, though.  There are certainly hyped books that were worth the hype for me, like Graceling or Mira Grant’s Feed.

By contrast, there are books like If I Stay by Gayle Forman (which I read before the movie came out).  That’s probably one of the most overhyped, overrated books I’ve ever read, not counting some ridiculous ‘classics’ like The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton.  The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory was certainly disappointing as well.  It was supposed to be an entirely new take on a rather forgotten woman, Mary Boleyn, but it just ended up being the TMZ of the Tudor period.  Gregory took the most scandalous accusations of the time and didn’t bother researching much to slap together a novel purely designed for shock value instead of realism.

Those were some of the most overhyped books I’ve ever read.  What are some of yours?  Were there any books that have absolutely lived up to the ridiculous hype for you?