I’ll refrain from commenting on 75% of the posts in the thread so far, and just add a few of my own:
Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavir Tapestry - I’ve loved everything else of his I’ve read. This sucked.
Larry Niven - I used to be a big sci-fi fan. Couldn’t ever get into his stuff.
The Third Chimpanzee, by Jared Diamond - I liked GG&S, though not as much as many other people here, but this one sucked. His arguments were lame and his points were unimpressive.
Luckily, I have a lot more entries in the complementary thread - books you liked that you didn’t expect to. Glaring at that “Moby Dick” comment above.
I’ve got two that immediately spring to mind. Tim Powers threw in a picturesque Gypsy camp four pages into The Anubis Gates, and all my interest evaporated. And the more shameful one, Italo Calvino in If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. Normally I’m crazy about Calvino, but second-person, first-tense narration rubs me in all the wrong ways.
I wasn’t too crazy about Arturo Perez Duarte’s The Dumas Club or Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, but I at least got as far as the conclusion before I threw them aside with a profound, “Who cares?”
Must confess that I am one of those Philistines that cannot ever get through a Patrick O’Brian book. Lord, I’ve tried, but to no avail.
I had two goes at “Master and Commander” because it was a great movie, but the book was just too boring. A few chapters in, O’Brian goes into pages and pages and pages about the religious beliefs of the first mate on the ship. Who the F____ cares?
For me, it’s Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars series. I actually read all three books because I thought I saw a thread of potential to the idea of showing a more or less realistic depiction of terraforming Mars over multiple generations. But the multiple generation thing is submarined almost immediately when immortality is discovered. Most of the characters are idealistic idiots. The one interesting character gets brain damaged and becomes just as dumb as the rest of them. The struggle between Mars & Earth boils down to Mars is really far away so Earth can’t do much, and the resulting Martian government is pretty much designed to be unable to accomplish anything. Also, there’s a Martian environmental movement that is supposed to parallel the present day Green movement, but completely ignores the fact the environment on Mars is completely inhospitable to life, and that it really would be better for everyone if humans didn’t have to live in failure prone domes.
The Red Badge of Courage, read it in high school in the middle of an American Civil War obsession, I was around the same age as the protagonist, I was into first hand accounts and realism in literature (we had just gotten done with a Romanticism poetry unit…<shudder>).
Besides just being referred to as ‘the youth’ which always bothered me, I never felt like I was there. I pushed though it for the test but it didn’t stick and I can hardly recall anything about it now.
Not one I expected to LOVE, per se, but one of my guilty pleasures is Piers Anthony’s Xanth series (Dragon On A Pedestal was my gateway drug to fantasy fiction). But this latest one I got out of the library had me putting it back down within 30 minutes. He has a character who’s a woodwife (a fairy creature that appears human from the front but is hollow from behind), and she speaks in wood puns. “Yew” for “you”, “wood” for “would”, etc. It’s incredibly distracting and difficult to read…and she’s one of the major characters! Her dialogue is going to be on almost every page! I’m still hoping that Anthony just deems the conceit understood within the first 25 pages and stops that. I’m going to try again when I’ve read the rest of this library haul.
Preach it, brother. I had the book practically thrust into my hands by someone who thought I’d love it, and I expected I would, too, but… meh. Felt forced and precious in its writing style, and just never clicked for me.
Er - the book was published in 1992, won the Nebula, and got a Hugo nomination. Complaining about spoilers here is a bit like griping if I tell you that Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze.
I like the TV series Bones, so I was looking forward to reading one of the novels by Kathy Reichs that the series is loosely based on. I kept expecting it to get better, but it never did. It wasn’t horrible, but it was barely worth finishing.
I loved the movie Doctor Zhivago but the novel was pretty bad. I finished it, but it was a slog.
I tried several times to read Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever. It seemed like the sort of series I’d enjoy but I just couldn’t get into it.
It took me five tries over a three-year period to finally plod through The Gunslinger. I still can’t figure out how it’s looked at with such passion – unbelievably boring book.
David Ebershoff’s The Nineteenth Wife- I like anything having to do with modern day polygamy and I’m fascinated by the life of Mormon prophet Brigham Young and this is about both- one plotline about his wife Ann Eliza Webb who sued him in federal courts for divorce (she was a real person) and another plotline about a modern day son of a polygamous cult who returns home to solve another. Easily the most boring book I’ve read in years combining all of the excessive wordiness of Thomas Wolfe with the complete inanity of Danielle Steele.
I thought I’d love the book it was based on: Wife No. 19, by Ann Eliza Webb Young. But it was terrible. Many of her anti-LDS claims are completely false. No sources are cited. It is all from her memory, and from her biased perspective.