I read Neil Gaiman's book of short stories, Smoke and Mirrors, and while it wasn't bad it seems that he's a little too fond of describing people fucking in detail. I'm not a prude, and that kind of thing isn't bad in small doses but it seemed like every other story had something of the sort. Basically the amount of coulation made the book seem crude.
On that, I was told to read
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor by John Barth (by my grandparents, no less!), and definitely ran into a lot of trouble with that. It's a reasonable story, but there is entirely too much sex in it.
On school books, I found that the most annoying ones were the ones that could be summarized as "Things were bad, then they got worse. Then it looked like they might get better, but they got worse. Then you thought that it couldn't get any worse, but it did anyway." A broader category of Strife26's "America in <time period> was not nice to <group>", I think. I know I can add "The Good Earth" to that list, at least: China in then 1930's was not nice to peasants.
I was also extremely annoyed by "Brave New World", in that the entire thing was Huxley ranting about how bad the Brave New World was, but if you looked at it from the inside it was really a much better place to live than the modern world, in terms of solving hunger/poverty/war/etc. The insistence on the need for retarded elevator boys bothered me too, I think.