Clarke’s Rama series. I mean, I can totally get into weird spaceships, cities that make no sense, octopus-aliens, cool. But the ending?
God did it? Seriously?
What Rama series? Clarke only wrote Rendevous with Rama.
There may have been some hack-work books using his name, but I won’t blame Clarke for abominations perpetrated behind his back.
Hatchet
What a idiot I am, I can just go back to the plane and use the emergency beacon. It kinda makes me wish I thought of this at SOME POINT IN THE PAST YEAR
Or at least, thats how I recall the ending.
I popped in here just to look for this, and I’m thrilled to find it. All I’ve ever heard is absolute and unqualified praise for Cryptonomicon–which I never quite understood. I slogged my way through every last page of that ponderous tome, waiting for The Really Cool Shit to start happening, based on my experience with Snow Crash. And then I got to the last page and… this. All that work, all that self-indulgent crypto/computer geek twaddle I waded through–and this was my payoff? 
I hate the ending of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. I just hate it. The third part of that book is just a complete letdown. The entire first two parts are creepy, creepy, flesh-crawling, jumping-at-loud-noises, delicious scary, and the ending is so far over the top that it actually doubles back and eliminates anything frightening about the entire book. Resulting in epic scary-book fail.
I found this ending disappointing as well, but it’s not as if it stops where it does for no reason.
I’m pretty sure we’re meant to understand that the protagonist dies at that moment.
I’m not boxing the ending because nobody should read this book anyway. At the end of The Historian, we learn that all the missives, murders, and machinations were because Dracula was looking for a historian to catalog his library. Apparently he never heard of Craig’s List.
The ending of North Dallas Forty pissed me off no end.
That’s the book, not the movie (which I haven’t seen. It might be the same and also piss me off).
Well, I’ll be damned. I read those when I was pretty young, and I never even noticed that Gentry Lee wrote them (although, wiki says Clarke ‘read and made suggestions’, so he’s not totally off the hook). They were under Clarke at the library… Here I’ve been thinking Clarke wrote 'em for probably a decade, and it’s that damn Gentry Lee I can blame!
Well geez now that two people have mentioned this book I have to point out that the 2nd to last mention of this book on this messageboard was from me with a totally different take on the ending.
My answers for this thread have all been taken already…
As you request I’m flaming you, but not for the reason you think: that is not the book’s ending! Gaaah!
I seem to remember that…
He had tried to get the backpack with the beacon earlier, and had almost died. That backpack that contained it was not accesible until a thunderstorm or something caused the plane to move around and made it easier for the kid to dive and get the stuff he needed.
At least, that’s how I remember it.
By “totally different take” do you mean that you didn’t find it disappointing, or that you didn’t think that the narrator dies? Because if you have a different take on what actually happened at the end, I’m curious to know what it is.
No, the ending made me cry (the thread was about books that you cry)…I realized that the main character died at the end. And since it was announced as Eco’s last novel it seemed especially poignant to me to end the book in such a way.
Foucault’s Pendulum. Yeah, I get the spoof factor. But the climax that all the conspiracies are aiming towards is
a giant power generator?
WTF?
These people have invented immortality and magic as “mere” research by-products along the road to
power generation?
Just ripped me out of the whole thing, spoof factor or no. I am sure everyone can conjure endless metaphorical “justifications” for it (as can I), it just didn’t work for me as storytelling.
Red Mars.
Every good character died. I couldn’t bear to read the other two books, just too sad.
Not that, that ending is all-together that much better. 
I mean, it’s still deserving of this thread, no?
Saberhagen’s Swords Series- Just an awful. awful. lame ass ending. You could tell he didn’t know how to finish it, and just decided to take a dump on what had been (overall) a pretty good series.
Peter Benchley’s Jaws.
The shark is coming towards Brody after destroying the Orca. It’s coming closer, closer, and then… it dies. Then sinks. The End.I literally threw the book across the room.
Don’t know why I read his book The Island after that. But I did. The protagonist has just managed to get his son back from the pirates and is about to face off against the Dastardly Head Pirate[sup]TM[/sup]. After a little needless exposition, the pirate kills himself. The End.
Dante: as I recall Jaws, the shark didn’t die, it just went away in that random, miondless killing machine way.