I am convinced if you want to turn kids off from reading make them read most any of “the classics”
These books are for the most part are not something kids can relate to in the 21st century.
If you really want to discourage reading give them a book by Ernest Hemingway.
I hated his writing, in high school, college, and now in my 50’s.
Yes I know this book was released after he killed himself. It doesn’t matter. It has all of the pain of any Hemingway book.
Hemingway’s writing is great when it is describing scenery or situations. Where it is painfully awful is dialogue between characters.
Conversation usually involves one or more characters well on their way to being drunk. And like a drunk in a bar nothing they have to say is worth listening to.
In this book most of the section labeled Cuba is nearly unreadable.
Also women are always portrayed as emotional train wrecks. That is the case in this book as well.
In the section called Bimini the dialogue involving the main character Thomas Hudson and his children is so awful, no children speak like this.
The ultimate problem with Hemingway books is that the main character in every one of them is actually Ernest Hemingway himself. Then Hemingway writes the character as a combination of how Hemingway wants to believe he would speak, act,and behave, and the way he actually does.
No more Hemingway for me. ( )

I’ve long been a fan of Hemingway. I even got to visit the house on Key West last summer. Yet I found this to be a meandering mess. True enough, this was posthumously published, but I suspect there was a reason why Papa never got around to finishing this before he died. It reminded me of Harper Lee, and the relationship of Go Set a Watchman to To Kill a Mockingbird. Disappointing. ( )

As a woman, to read Islands in the Stream, is to enter a "man's world" as conceived by Hemingway. Tom Hudson,an American ex-pat who lived Paris and Italy during the jazz age period, has settled down, more or less, on the island of Bimini. At the outset of the book, Hudson combines a workman-like painting schedule at a studio in his home, with the social life in the bar of a nearby fishing village. In this "manly" world, Hudson, another ex-pat friend, and local men engage in a kind of society that involves trading insults, drinking and fighting, and various forms of danger at sea.

Islands in the Stream contains three distinct sections, setting out three periods in Tom Hudson's life. Read it to experience Hemingway's fine descriptive writing, and his skills in sharing both Hudson's contemporaneous thoughts as well as his personal reflections on the various chapters of his life, ( )

V prvej časti autor opisuje život maliara Thomasa Hudsona na ostrove Bimini ležiacom v Golfskom prúde, kde jeho osamelosť naruší návšteva synov. Druhá časť sa odohráva o niekoľko rokov neskôr na Kube počas vojny, kde sa Hudson zúčastňuje na tajných akciách v boji proti nemeckým ponorkám. Záverečná časť je situovaná na palubu prieskumného člna pátrajúceho po stroskotancoch potopenej nemeckej ponorky.

Written in Spanish.