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readingatwork posted:I just put down Tinker by Wen Spencer. I tried but God drat is this some of the worst writing I've ever experienced in a legitimately published format. Twilight was less insufferable to sit through than this. Wait, that poo poo was legit published? By who? 
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Oct 10, 2013 23:03
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I suspect Baen.
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Oct 11, 2013 00:28
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General Battuta posted:I suspect Baen. Correct.
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Oct 11, 2013 00:55
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fatpat268 posted:Haha, wow, I didn't even make it that far in the game. This is from a while back in the thread, but that book was a real let down. I know it's not fair to criticise a book for not being what you expected, but I really thought the book was going to have something to say about how hollow and unproductive nerd-culture can be. But no, just a bunch of pandering and self-congratulation. I recently had to give up on Heller's [bold] Something Happened [/bold]. It was a good book, but it mirrored my unhealthy mental state at the time far too closely and I had to stop. It took me so long to try to press through in this state that I just had to quit and read something else that wouldn't put me in a depressive state every two pages. I intended to go back when I felt better, but it sat in my attic during a house move and I've left it too long now.
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Oct 12, 2013 22:06
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I picked up a cheap copy The Seventh Seal by noted occultist Dennis Wheatley, and got to page 5. Those pages described the protagonist Coolguy von Posh who, with the blasé confidence of true good breeding and mesmeric eyes flashing under "devil" brows worms his way into a masked ball. An accomplished horseman who speaks five languages and can appraise jewelry on the wrist, he knows that the way to excite a woman (besides being him (he's very handsome)) is to do the unexpected - he wins the heart of an equally aristocratic but not nearly so cool French princess by bragging about the women he has beaten. Dude can gently caress right off as far as I care.
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Oct 20, 2013 19:23
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Tried to read The White Queen by Philippa Gregory, and just couldn't get into it. There wasn't a single person I cared about after 75 pages, and the first person present tense just didn't do it for me, even if it might be stylistically interesting to do a historical novel like that.
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Oct 22, 2013 00:39
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Currently my unfinished book is the first one of the Malazan series. I've heard it's really similar to Glen Cook's Black Company series but I just can't finish the first book, it's not interesting to me. Usually after about 6 months I re-start a book I had trouble reading before and I finish it, so it's only a matter of time. Two books I started and just never finished were Gerald's Game and Lisey's Story by King, guy can write a ton of books I love and then just make some that are complete garbage.
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Oct 22, 2013 01:51
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Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy. Because I'm too dumb to understand it.
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Oct 22, 2013 12:25
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GreyPowerVan posted:Two books I started and just never finished were Gerald's Game... by King, guy can write a ton of books I love and then just make some that are complete garbage. You didn't miss much, don't worry. I'm always bothered by the skeevy parts of King's writing. That book made me creeped out, but not in the way he intended.
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Oct 22, 2013 20:12
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The Night Circus. I got two thirds of the way through before I got bored and gave it back to the friend who recommended it to me. The pacing and time jumps came off as kind of awkward and weirdly placed to me. The biggest issue I had though was that Celia and Marco bored me as main characters and the secondary characters weren't interesting enough to keep me into the book. I'll probably try finishing it another time but I'm kind of disappointed.
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Oct 22, 2013 20:25
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Tulalip Tulips posted:The Night Circus. I got two thirds of the way through before I got bored and gave it back to the friend who recommended it to me. The pacing and time jumps came off as kind of awkward and weirdly placed to me. The biggest issue I had though was that Celia and Marco bored me as main characters and the secondary characters weren't interesting enough to keep me into the book. I'll probably try finishing it another time but I'm kind of disappointed. Oh, man, are you happy you didn't read the end, then- I agree about the characters/love story being lame, but the "magic" systems and the circus itself were pretty cool... until the end made me retroactively hate everything about the book. The business card with the loving email address, jesus loving christ.
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Oct 22, 2013 23:17
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I started and stopped A Confederacy of Dunces twice. I've never wanted to physically harm a character in a book so much. I could hear his mouth breathing and sense a neck beard of terrible power. One day I'll pick it up and finish that aggravating bastard's story, but not any time soon. I'd have to read it as a voyeur if at all.
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Oct 24, 2013 14:53
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BrownJenkin posted:I started and stopped A Confederacy of Dunces twice. I've never wanted to physically harm a character in a book so much. I could hear his mouth breathing and sense a neck beard of terrible power. One day I'll pick it up and finish that aggravating bastard's story, but not any time soon. I'd have to read it as a voyeur if at all. Filth! My God! He deserves rape!
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Oct 24, 2013 23:02
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I am about ready to quit The Passage by Justin Cronin. I heard it was basically like The Stand for better or for worse, so I can't say I'm surprised but I was willing to give it a chance. I like the broad scenario, everything with the government plot was interesting, but man is this loving thing bloated. Every time a character has a scene we have to be told their backstory more or less in full again and again and again... I've just got to where the nuke goes off, Wolgast apparently dies and now we're with a completely new character narrating their loving backstory. Does it tighten up and focus on the plot at all now the vampires are loose, or does it just continue to be so meandering? I can deal with the apparent divine intervention (or turtle intervention, if we're going with the stand), and the magic wonder kid who everyone loves, I just don't want to read another paedophile/nun's monologue only for him/her to get killed without consequence.
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Oct 28, 2013 16:07
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Eau de MacGowan posted:I am about ready to quit The Passage by Justin Cronin. It is bloated, period. I think fans of the book (and I am most definitely not one) would admit as much.
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Oct 28, 2013 17:00
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funkybottoms posted:It is bloated, period. I think fans of the book (and I am most definitely not one) would admit as much. I genuinely enjoyed the book and the sequel, and yes, the book is a huge, bloated mess.
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Oct 28, 2013 19:27
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funkybottoms posted:Oh, man, are you happy you didn't read the end, then- I agree about the characters/love story being lame, but the "magic" systems and the circus itself were pretty cool... until the end made me retroactively hate everything about the book. The business card with the loving email address, jesus loving christ. I liked the magic system and concepts behind it a lot and that's really what disappointed me the most. I really liked that the magic sort of seeps out and affects everyone involved in circus, not just Celia and Marco. Everyone's aging process being slowed down was kind of interesting. I would have assumed that it only lasted for the duration of the game but Tsukiko would have been about a hundred when she joined up if I remember correctly and she's repeatedly described as being a youngish woman, not old. The magical ginger twins who could talk to animals were loving annoying though. I've heard mixed things on the ending and so I want to try again to experience "the most romantic/dumbest ending ever".
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Oct 28, 2013 19:57
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The Game of Thrones, the first book :/ Attempted 3 times, I always start to fall asleep after about 12 chapters of jumping from character to character. Something about the format just doesn't do it for me. I love the TV show and gave it another try after finishing the season... Nope. Please don't kill me. It's weird because I've gotten through much drier stuff (the history of chocolate for instance), but just can't be bothered to get through it. I even read the Wheel of Time which is way, way worse. edit: Oh, going through the thread, I'm not quite alone in this. Excellent, I thought everybody loved these books. There's dozens of us, George! Dozens! Comfy Fleece Sweater fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Oct 29, 2013 |
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Oct 29, 2013 18:40
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I guess it's a kind of format where you either love it or hate it. Personally I like the way you jump from POV to POV. After just started the 5th book, I can't possibly imagine how GRRM could have written the books any other way.
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Oct 29, 2013 19:41
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Not sure if I've posted in this thread before but here we go. Dune bored me. I made at least two attempts to read it, but disliked it a lot and ended up reading it in a sort of haze of confusion. The early parts were fun with the intrigue and the Atredies trying to get used to the strange culture of the Fremen, and hey, even the chosen one stuff was done in a different and kinda cool way. The book fell apart after the Harkonnens attacked - from what little I care to remember, the kid and his mom fled to the desert, met with the Fremen, and the kid promptly proceeded to get everything he wanted and orchestrated a rebellion without lifting a finger or anything? And then he got high a lot and had a wife, and then he walked up to the bad guys and won in one sword fight against one guy. And everyone spent a lot of time telling him he was the chosen one and he spent a lot of time thinking about how he was the chosen one and then I lost track. Don't read the Stark's War series. It's sci-fi military fiction by some navy dude and it is dreck. America rules the world despite somehow having a military structure that encourages WW1 style callousness in its commanding officers, bolstered by lots of intergrated tech that forces soldiers to adhere to schedules on the battlefield. Not-The-Author Ethan Stark is sent to the moon with his female just-a-friend-I-swear to help America subjugate the last free people on the moon, which apparently means having like all of three or four battles in the entire loving novel and a lot of Stark going around, interacting with people I couldn't care about and pondering on being a soldier. The book ends when Stark leads a rebellion, soldiers are brothers, blah blah blah. They don't even loving describe the spacesuits, weapons, vehicles, or anything like that, which I'm pretty sure a military fiction needs to do. Should have got one of the Culture novels instead. Also, never properly read Stephen King's It. I just skipped to the parts where the clown does something. The rest is boring and/or weird and I never felt invested in any of the kids.
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Oct 30, 2013 16:45
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Don Tacorleone posted:The Game of Thrones, the first book :/ Me too. GRRM's writing just doesn't work for me. The show is a good adaptation though.
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Oct 30, 2013 17:05
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Deleter, I've often remarked that Dune is the most interesting boring book I've ever read. I'm always amazed by the worldbuilding and the ideas, while simultaneously skimming pages and falling asleep.
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Oct 31, 2013 05:29
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ulvir posted:I guess it's a kind of format where you either love it or hate it. Personally I like the way you jump from POV to POV. After just started the 5th book, I can't possibly imagine how GRRM could have written the books any other way. And when he does do it, everyone bitches I WAITED FIVE YEARS AND THERE IS NO JON SNOW GURM IS TEH WORST. I agree ; the intertwining stories approach is a big part of why I like his books.
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Oct 31, 2013 05:36
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Speaking of A Dance With Dragons! I just could not stand how whiny, self-pitying and directionless the whole drat first half of the book was. I was already pretty tired of all the non-Jaime parts in A Feast for Crows, and then Dance turned out to be almost nothing but that stuff. Weird incompetents sometimes getting tortured or just feeling sorry for themselves. I assume the second half of Dance kept on like that, but I'll never know! I was really sad, too, because I loved the first three and loved even more the Jaime story in Feast. The first book I ever didn't finish was Sojourn, the third and final book in the origin trilogy of famed D&D weirdo character Drizzt Do'Urden. I had been okay enough with the first book, struggled through the second, and then with the finish line in sight I rolled my eyes and took the books back to the library. These were pretty short little novels and there were only 20 or 30 pages left to the end, but I just gave no shits. I also gave up on Wheel of Time in book 8, The Path of Daggers. Pretty far into the series, but I got to yet another "boy women sure are whiny bitches" chapter and just couldn't take it anymore. I don't know if I'd have the patience for Dune nowadays. I tore through it ~15 years ago and loved it, even more than Lord of the Rings. On the other hand most of what I read these days is incredibly short by fantasy doorstopper standards.
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Oct 31, 2013 05:56
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Plague of Hats posted:Speaking of A Dance With Dragons! I just could not stand how whiny, self-pitying and directionless the whole drat first half of the book was. I was already pretty tired of all the non-Jaime parts in A Feast for Crows, and then Dance turned out to be almost nothing but that stuff. Weird incompetents sometimes getting tortured or just feeling sorry for themselves. I assume the second half of Dance kept on like that, but I'll never know! I was really sad, too, because I loved the first three and loved even more the Jaime story in Feast. I stopped listening to the audiobook (and series) due to how annoyed I was over how badly the book started. I didn't mind a retread of past events since I liked AFFC but the way it was paced was boring to me. The backbreaker for me however was undoing 4 books of intrigue by introducing Rhaegar. It rang absolutely hollow and felt like a utter cop-out.
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Oct 31, 2013 12:34
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Jude The Obscure - this was picked for me to read by a well-meaning English teacher. I managed to get through the early part with Jude as a child, but once he turns into an adult the story becomes so crushingly uneventful that I found it impossible to get any further. I took it back and swapped it for The Owl Service instead. Moll Flanders - I chucked this in after wading through page after page devoted to the lead up to Moll marrying her first husband, who is subsequently written out of the story in a paragraph. Yes, very amusing DeFoe, you wig-wearing 18th Century tosser. Gravity's Rainbow, on the other hand is a book I've always found absolutely fascinating but have never been able to finish. It's just so insanely dense that I always seem to lose track of where I am and then have to start over. I must've done this at least four or five times. I fully intend to finish it one day.
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Oct 31, 2013 14:36
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My other book is Godel, Escher, Bach. It just blows my brain about halfway through, and I think I'm either too old or not in high school anymore to get it. I'll attempt it again in a few weeks.
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Oct 31, 2013 17:21
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Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. Just... drat this book was boring. It's supposed to be super progressive with only using the "she" or female based pronouns or something to that effect, and that's great and all but I got about a quarter of the way through the book and poo poo all happened. It's supposed to be some kind of revenge story from an AI that's stuck in a single body instead of the hundreds of bodies it's normally in, and yet weirdly enough, no revenge. No nothing. Just boring rear end page after page of more boring things.
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Nov 1, 2013 09:30
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. I found the narrator's point of view fairly unique and well-done, really dug the narrator himself, and found the civilization to be very interesting, as well (the "she" thing is explained, by the way). The book is a little deliberate at first, but things ramp up significantly after a bit. Honestly, I would gladly have read a whole book of the "boring" stuff, and since I hadn't read the back of the advance copy I have (sci-fi from Orbit generally pleases), I went into it completely cold. funkybottoms fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Nov 1, 2013 |
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Nov 1, 2013 09:43
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Yea, it's one of those where you are either gonna love it, or hate it. I don't think there are many "in the middle" reviews. Kinda polarizing, like Rothfuss. Either it's the greatest thing since sliced bread or it's the story of how a creepy guy mooning over a girl became a sex ninja.
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Nov 1, 2013 17:41
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New book I couldn't finish, The Life of Pi. I don't even know why I started it, one of my friends with terrible book taste recommended it. Never listening to them again.
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Nov 1, 2013 18:34
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The Iron Council by China Meiville. I found it difficult to enjoy, mostly because it lacked the smooth narrative flow of Perdido Street Station and The Scar, both by the same author. The spartan writing style was simply not engaging, though, as usual, Meiville presented some very interesting ideas. I almost hesitate to begin the Kraken for fear that it will be more life the Iron Council and less like The Scar.
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Nov 1, 2013 19:00
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Anything by Tom Clancy, who should be commended for managing to convince the world to overlook his horribly horribly lovely and impenetrable, stuttering writing in favor of whatever is supposed to be good about his books. For non-fiction, The Punic Wars by Adrian Goldworthy. Many historians are capable of presenting a large amount of information in a concise or at least fairly digestible manner. Goldsworthy is not among them. After a full chapter expounding in as many words as possible exactly what and what not the focus of the book was I deleted the PDF and spent an hour eating oatmeal so that my mouth could properly empathize with my brain.
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Nov 1, 2013 19:14
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I could never get through any book longer than maybe 50 pages. That kind of focus is just too much for me, so now I just watch readings of different books e.g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HQaBWziYvY
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Nov 1, 2013 20:09
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lol (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 1, 2013 23:53
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I'm going to throw in The Casual Vacancy. I got eight chapters in, and didn't care what happened to any of the characters. Though the one that really sticks out for me is Wuthering Heights which is the only schoolwork book I've been unable to finish. Shakespeare was easy, I was several chapters ahead of the class in Death of a Salesman, I even managed to read both endings to A Handful of Dust and parts of The Canterbury tales we weren't even studying. But Wuthering Heights is the book I just couldn't force myself to finish. I ended up reading a guide and referencing the actual book for essays when needed, just so I didn't have to put up with that thing. All through, I felt like I was reading a different novel to everyone else, this wasn't some passionate tale of brooding romance, it was Stockholm Syndrome.
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Nov 5, 2013 13:03
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Elfface posted:I'm going to throw in The Casual Vacancy. I got eight chapters in, and didn't care what happened to any of the characters. Casual Vacancy is really interesting in that way. I wrote a review about it and I pretty much dragged myself to the end for exactly that reason - I hated all the characters and didn't give a poo poo. The only reason I finished it was because I wanted to finish the review. And then the ending completely turned everything around and really redeemed it, suddenly making it make sense that the whole first part of the book was so unpalatable. I think she actually intended it to be that way, and I commend her for trying the experiment, but I'm not sure she anticipated people not wanting to even get to the ending to see what she was trying to do... [edit] Oh what the hell, I will elaborate: The book is about people being judgmental and prejudiced toward each other based on superficial evidence. As the book goes on it reveals more and more about the characters until the reader realizes they were making the same sort of superficial judgements against the characters at the beginning, treating them the same way the other characters in the book were, for pretty much the same reasons. Unfortunately she also gives you absolutely no one to root for from the start, so there's no reason to keep reading... Tagra fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Nov 5, 2013 |
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Nov 5, 2013 23:15
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Pretty much any of the big brick length epic fantasy novels that are drifting around. A Song of Ice and Fire, Malazan: Book of the Fallen, and Wheel of Time all bored me to tears. Talk about outgrowing a genre.
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Nov 6, 2013 06:08
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Zevin_Mars posted:Pretty much any of the big brick length epic fantasy novels that are drifting around. A Song of Ice and Fire, Malazan: Book of the Fallen, and Wheel of Time all bored me to tears. Talk about outgrowing a genre. Yeah me too. Magician I picked up a while ago and for a few hundred pages yeah.. but then no. Read Song of Ice and Fire literally a decade ago or more.. when I was in my teens holy poo poo it was amazing. Now it's just.. juvenile. I still read sci-fi and get right into that though, so I haven't totally grown out of my imagination.. but so much of fantasy really does seem to be a ridiculous place where men are still all powerful, women are objects and do little more than look pretty (until you get a Brienne of Tarth and then her whole thing is she's not pathetic, which is different because the rest are) and complex conflicts are resolved in simplistic and ridiculous ways. I guess as I grew older it just seems all so irrelevant and silly to me, while when I was younger I guess I pined for a world more like what was written in these novels? I don't mean to belittle those who still read the genre, but I find good sci-fi can wrestle with some really interesting ideas and questions while fantasy seemed to fall into a rut. But as an old-time ally of the genre, some proper swords and sorcery can still get my hair to stand on end  Just not engage me for hundreds (thousands often, Jesus) pages.Oh and Magician was a good book and a good fantasy book, I recognized the quality straight away. I just wasn't up for it anymore 
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Nov 6, 2013 18:21
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Tony Montana posted:fantasy stuff There's an Ursula K. LeGuin thread going at the moment; might want to check out her fantasy. Her SF is top tier; but she brings the same insightfulness to whatever she writes. Her Earthsea series is regarded as some of the top fantasy written. The books are also rather brief; so you don't have to worry about 10 book doorstopper series. If you're tired of books where men are all powerful and women are objects and do little more than look pretty, give her stuff a try. As far as books I couldn't get through, haven't had too much trouble lately. Just finished The Master and Margarita, currently working on One Hundred Years of Solitudes. In both cases I'm reading some trashy-er books in between finishing, but I'll see it through. Taking a break from 100 years right now because I can't take any more Jose Arcadios and Aurelianos at the moment
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Nov 7, 2013 08:36
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