Might be. But I read somewhere that Kostova said (rather proudly) she hasn’t read vampire fiction or watched vampire movies. She presented the Dracula-Vlad Tepes stuff like it was something new, and she had no insight – just speculation.
If she was familiar with Vampires in pop culture, it didn’t show anywhere else in the book.
Not that I read it, thankfully but I know how it ends.
Hatchet
Oh Right, I can go back to the plane and find the GPS Beacon!! Ive been such a numb-nuts for the past (year?) of my life. I think I can end the torture now!
Deus Ex Machina if there ever was.
Not for nothing, but there’s some kind of mystic-magic bond between the magic horsie and the rider. It’s like losing your wife, or suchlike.
I know I mention it a lot, but L. Ron Hubbard’s Mission Earth series is still the steamiest pile of crap ever crapped out of a crap factory.
The Sword of Shannarra, for assuming I’m too stupid to figure out plot twists when they’re printed on the cover of the book. :rolleyes:
I picked up Phillip Pullman’s Golden Compass because it was so well-reviewed, award-winning etc. I could barely make it through, then wondered why I bothered. Really enjoyed throwing it at a tree. That book with its pretentiousness really really pisses me off.
The other book that pissed me off a lot (for different reasons) was Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara or whatever it was called. I had recently read Lord of the Rings & knew what a horrible rip-off this so-called book was. Can still make me angry.
Both of these piss me off so much I can begin to explain why intelligently.
You did better than I did, EC. I only got about 50 pages in before it hit the wall.
I finished and loathed The Corrections. What a whiny, self obsessed, greedy, soulless bunch of characters. And Mr. Franzen, in a calculated fuck you to his reader, made the only one of the lot with a shred of integrity demented by senility with hallucinations of dancing turds.
I enjoy hating it, though and even admit the book is useful. It works as a benchmark for all the over praised, vacuous junk that follows it.
Rising Sun was unrelentingly racist, alarmist, and poorly thought out. When it was published in the early 90’s, it raised hackles. Now people read about how the evil Japanese corporations were going to take over America by 2000 and get a good chuckle.
Michael Crichton’s last good novel was The Andromeda Strain. I read his later sci-fi, and I get the feeling that he’s saving money on his science advisor by hiring some 10th grade Ritalin case who managed to pull a D+ in biology for two quarters in a row.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Pretentious, unfocused and depressing.
Larry McMurtry’s Buffalo Girls. Like being forced to listen to a whining, self-pitying drunk go on and on for days.
Ethilrist and well he’s back, thanks for reminding me how much The Sword of Shannara annoyed me. Not only was it an obvious ripoff, the writing was clunky and lame to boot. I pitched it before I’d gotten through the first 30 pages or so.
And the circulation guy at the public library told me what a great book it was.
Anything by Brian Caswell pisses me off. Since he writes a fairly wide range of subject matters it’s not the stories that do it but the way he tells them. He is such a crap writer that I cannot believe he is “critically acclaimed” and loved by teenagers across Australia. He is also smitten with ellipses in a way that nobody over the age of 15 should be. To steal a quote from someone else on this board, if someone likes his books, that generally means we can’t be friends.
A Seperate Peace I hated it before the ending and then hated it more at the ending
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. I know most people either love or hate it. I loathed it and was happy when we moved on to other books.
I have to admit, I am also one of the few Canadians I know that doesn’t really like either Margaret Atwood or Carol Sheilds.
I just don’t.
I think they may throw me out of the country now.
…Hannibal. Grrrrrrrr. :mad:
Oh, I almost forgot the king of all piss-me-off books: Great Expectations.
There has never been written a more pointless, plotless, joyless book in the whole history of mankind. Put me off Dickens forever.
Jean Auel’s Shelters of Stone. We fans waited patiently for 12 years for this to come out, and it was boring, repetitive, and disappointing. I was expecting a huge catfight between Ayla and Marona, all that happens is a juvenile practical joke that backfires. The spelling of a character’s name is changed and Auel admits she did it because she felt like it. If and when the next book ever comes out, I’ll borrow it from the library, but damned if I’ll buy the hardcover again, unless she makes a HUGE improvement.
Me too. I haaaaate that book. I did, however, get an A on the paper I wrote about the myriad ways I hated it!
I was wondering if someone would mention this before I got here. God, did that suck. Actually, there was one good sentence in that book, along the lines of “The thing that destroys you is the impulse to agree with your critics, in order to gain their approval.” Other than that, pretty much a total loss.
Also, put me on the list for Jordan’s *Wheel of Time * and Auel’s books. Proof that successful authors need to be reined in before their work becomes bloated, repetitive, and boring.
Dean Koontz pisses me off royally now. Hubby and I loved the Chris Snow books, and *Watchers * is decent, but most of his other books are carbon copies of each other. Not to mention his increasingly overt hatred of atheists. It’s hard for me to like a book that basically tells me my philosophy of life is responsible for all the evil in the world. Thank goodness I just stopped reading and skipped to the end of The Taking. I would have been royally pissed to slog through a bunch of recycled Koontz crap just to find out that heaven and hell are really just alternate dimensions, Satan is an alien, he steals people’s faces (?!) and puts them on his evil spaceship, and he’s trying to hella-form Earth with demonic rain and fungus
Also, the man should be absolutely banned from ever again writing the word “bougainvillea.”
Someone recommended I read the “classic” apocolypse novel Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. The back of the book claimed it was about the rebuilding of civilization after a plague. Cool, the sociologist in me said.
It was awful.
The main character, Ish, spends the lion’s share of his time brooding on how smart he is in comparison to those around him, and lamenting the fact that no one else seems to have his intelligent spark, except for his weakling son, but gives up trying to teach school when the son dies. He bitches and moans about how the “tribe” is not becomming self-sustaining, but except for bitching, he doesn’t do anything about it. Then he gets old and dies. The end.
The Awakening, by Kate Chopin. Had to read it for English 102 in college. THe TA was enthralled by the author and the main character, and how progressive it was for the time it was written (early 20th century).
Sure, it’s so progressive to have a woman feel so damn sorry for herself all the time. I actually tolerated most of the book, but it was the ending which truly pissed me off.
For anyone who cares I’ll put it in a spoiler box:
The heroine drowns herself. This is after treating her own children like crap, leaving her husband (who she didn’t love), and taking a lover she found a bit disgusting. Because, you see, after witnessing a horrible childbirth, she realizes that she might just always get pregnant from sex. And rather than having that ever happen again, she decides she must die.
I initially, through some error, forgot to read the final chapter. I still wish I had.
And, I will always hate Tess of D’Ubervilles. Also for the ending.
I also agree with the OP about Odd Thomas.