I’m with you there. Back in college I knew a bunch of people into him, the internet is crawling with fans and I had a girlfriend who finally gave me some book of his. I don’t think I made it more than a third of the way in when I just gave up out of boredom.
I did meet him once. Said girlfriend took me to a book signing of his. We were like 3rd and 4th in line and he asked me if I was a fan. I said not especially, I was just there to get an extra book signed for the girl next to me.
I think you’re projecting a little bit and seeing pretension/falseness where it doesn’t exist. Enthusiastic people are sometimes just enthusiastic.
The Dresden Files are like the Discworld books, it helps if you skip the first four or so books and pick up on them later. Start at about Summer Knight, and you pick up the backstory pretty fast. Jim Butcher improves vastly as an author as he writes, it’s one of the things I like about the series.
Everybody told me how great Sue Grafton’s mysteries were. So I tried to read one.
You could not get me to finish it with a gun. Whoever told her she could write was demented.
The Game of Thrones would be worlds better if instead of flipping perspective between groups/story lines he would just stick to one or perhaps 2 story lines per book.
Hm, lets flip between story a, b, c, d, e, and f randomly and throw in some spicy sex scenes for the fuck of it. I refuse to read a book that is so damned randomized because he is trying to do a whole world simultaneously …
Forty-five posts, and no one has mentioned Ernest Hemingway?!? :eek:
Tired of pointing out what an egotesticular wanker he was. Figured I would mention Game of Thrones this time out.
Herman Hesse, a Nobel Prize winner. I tried three times to read Steppenwolf. Never made it past page 27.
I think *Catcher in the Rye *is a tremendously overrated novel. I never could understand why they wanted to ban the thing. From all the outrage you would think it is a pornographic masterpiece, but it was barely readable, IMO.
I read one Pratchett novel and was not impressed.
I tried to read two of Rowlings’ novels, but never made it past page 40. The scenes with the Muggles were just too over the top. I understand a lot of novels for young people use the theme of “not being able to get along with the elders,” but a whole slew of authors from Andre Norton to S.E. Hinton were much more interesting. I may try to read them again, though.
This is almost exactly what I was about to post. 
I read (and re-read) and enjoyed his short story collection Dreams Underfoot when I was about 13, but when I got around to reading some of his other short story collections I was pretty disappointed in them. I never bothered with any of his novels because they didn’t look very good. Then I re-read Dreams Underfoot again and was pretty disappointed with that.
A friend of mine in college who was underwhelmed by de Lint pointed out that most of his significant female characters are really just the same character, and speculated that he couldn’t stand to write for long about anyone but his fantasy woman. I suppose they might all be based on his wife, which would be kind of sweet, but still it got old.
This same friend also shared my experience with Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin. It had been enthusiastically recommended to us by other friends…but we were not impressed. It turned out later that my sister had the same experience, and I suggested we should form a club. 
I like the idea of a 20th century retelling of the ballad “Tam Lin”, and the book started off doing a pretty good job of introducing the fantasy elements into the real world setting…before turning into an excruciatingly dull account of the mundane day-to-day life of a college student. There’s no plot in this book except for the “Tam Lin” storyline, but it went for IIRC a hundred pages or more without developing this at all. Instead the heroine did things like meet with her adviser and plan her course schedule. She also meets Tom Lane (who by his name is obviously a variant on Tam Lin) early in the book but doesn’t get together with him until a lengthy romance with another character who will prove to be IIRC totally unimportant later. I kept thinking “I know you’re going to end up with Tom, his name is the title of this book, so just get on with it already.”
Years later I happened to see Dean’s Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary at the library and decided to give her another chance, hoping she’d been able to cut down on the boring stuff a bit. Turned out it was even worse. She sets up an intriguing situation early on, then goes almost the entire book – hundreds of pages – without developing this at all until the last chapter or so. It was like she’d written a short story and then padded it into a novel by giving what seemed like a minute-by-minute account of the teen heroine’s homework, what she had to eat, etc.
I gave The Dresden Files what I feel was a fair chance – I read the first 4-5 books – but the things about them I found irritating (e.g. the main character, and how pleased the author seemed with him) did not improve.
I really expected to like Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next books, but I felt about them the way I think the people here who don’t like the Discworld books (which I love) must feel about them. The first couple had enough promise that I kept going in hopes they’d get better, but a chapter or so into the fourth book I thought “There are a lot of things I could be reading that I wouldn’t have to force myself through. Things that are actually funny, and don’t just have characters with stupid puns (Jack Schitt) or out-of-context common phrases (Harris Tweed) for names.”
“Farenheit 451” sucked
I wasted enough time on Butcher. There are plenty of other writers out there.
Add me to the 'tried to like Charles de Lint but he was just too dull" crowd. I love his ideas, his execution is just boring.
Patrick Rothfuss. I read his books and was impressed the first go 'round, but was TOTALLY underwhelmed the second time. Too many instances of purposely misleading/heavy handed foreshadowing and using “…don’t look a gift horse in the mouth…” in a fictional universe that did not include the Trojans.
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” means that you shouldn’t examine the teeth of a (real live) horse that you’ve been given…at least not in front of the giver. Checking a horse’s teeth is a pretty reliable way to tell how old the horse is. It implies that you think that the giver is giving you an old, nearly worthless horse. It has nothing to do with Trojans.
The saying that you might be thinking of is “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts”. THAT refers to the Trojan Horse.
I couldn’t handle Grafton’s books either. In my case, it wasn’t that I found her literary skills non-existent; I just detested her character Kinsey Milhone. KM is so utterly, smugly pleased with herself about absolutely everything – I struggled through one of the novels, got part-way through a second, then said “no more”.
My libertarian friends kept telling me I needed to read ScFi books by Robert Heinlein. “Start with The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. You’ll love it!”
So I bought The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and started reading it. God, how awful. The author spends *way *too much time explaining technical crap and ignores the story. I made it half way through the book and gave up on it.
Hey, this is exactly what happened! Your post made me remember reading a collection of supernatural stories when I was a kid that included a story called “Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary,” and it was definitely short-story length. So I just checked her wiki page and sure enough, the short story version was published in 1989, and the novel came out in 1998.
I didn’t like Dean’s Tam Lin, either. Appropriate for this thread: I read it in high school when I heard it was similar to (the greatly superior) The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope, also loosely based on the ballad of Tam Lin, and I had hoped Dean’s book would be equally as engrossing as Pope’s. Ugh, it was not. It was like 500 pages of a totally separate story that had nothing to do with the fairy tale besides the characters’ names, until the final ten pages. And that story was painfully dull, about dull and pretentious people, told in dull and pretentious prose. What a let-down.
Iain Banks. Based on recommendations I thought he’d be sort of a god-poet, but he was just another author-insertionist with a sort of okay multi-book conceit.
Really that’s my problem with sci-fi in general. Usually the authors put all their work in the central conceit. If it fails, there’s no plot or characters to support it. If it succeeds, well, same thing. They create an interesting world or concept and then flog it to death with detail, never really bothering to put any real characters or stories in it.
I love romance books and I love Carl Hiaasen’s madcap Florida detective stories and I am not opposed to chick lit so I thought I’d love Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series. Alas, Stephanie is too stupid to be allowed to live even in book form. I flung Two For The Dough against the wall about 3 chapters in and never picked up another.
Far and away his WORST book. If I’d read it first, I’d have never ever picked up another Heinlein book. I honestly don’t know why people like that steaming pile of piles. Read some of his juveniles (Between Planets, or Red Planet, or the Rolling Stones.) They beat The moon is a harsh mistress by miles. His short stories are good. I love “All you Zombies” and “By His Bootstraps.” Just keep that moon revolt thing the fuck away from me.
Your libertarian friends would do themselves a favor by not recommending it. Maybe some of the Lazarus Long stories - plenty of libertarianism, far less “sucks ass.”
See, that’s why I like his books. I’m fascinated with how seeing the same events through different eyes can be totally different experiences. And it also makes the books infinitely re-readable; the first time through I identify with one character and see things from his/her point of view, the next time through I might be more into another character and suddenly it’s like a whole different book.
But yeah, I can totally see how if you find that annoying, his books would be unreadable.