I love Barbara Hambly’s fantasy works, and I thoroughly enjoyed Bride of the Rat God, which was set in 1920s Hollywood, in this world. So I thought that her Benjamin January series would be great. Set in our world, with some magic mixed in.
I tried. I tried to love those books, but I gave up after a couple of them. I don’t know what it was, but I just couldn’t get into them.
Sense and Sensibility and Zombies. I tried, but even the hack-n-slash was just so dull.
I wonder when did you read the book, as you "already agreed with the basic premise, " “knew how it ended” etc.? For me, reading the book in 1997, having grabbed it on a whim from a local bookstore, was a revelation. No-one had explained this stuff with such broad insight and applicability, AFAIKnew. Diamond changed the way I viewed world history, and I know many people who felt the same way then. Sure, the book was somewhat repetitive towards the end, but the brilliant points he made along the way more than compensated. Had I known about Diamond’s theories before, or had I read about the various criticisms (environmental determinism etc.) directed at it later, the impact would have been much smaller. Still, it’s a monumental work of huge importance, IMHO.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters? I’ve read the first, and found it somewhat amusing.
The Lord of the Rings isn’t an adventure story.
Anyway, I’ve also been disappointed by Banks’ Culture books. I mostly enjoyed Consider Phlebas and a couple of the earlier ones, but the more recent ones… eurgh! And they pretty much all end in the same way!!
Also, when I was a kid/teenager I used to enjoy Stephen King’s books. But then it got to be that each new one would be noticeably longer than the last, for no obvious reason other than that his editor gave up actually editing. I struggled along manfully until It, which just killed him as an author for me.
Douglas Adams’ Mostly Harmless. He later admitted to having written it when in a bad mood, and boy does it show. It’s just awful: the characterisation is mildly horrible, and he makes all his characters’ lives miserable. The book is just not fun to read at all, but doesn’t offer anything in place of the missing humour. Consciously or unconsciously, Adams just stuck two fingers up at his established characters and his existing readership.
And finally: The Three Musketeers. I gave up on it after a hundred or so pages. It’s odd in that I wasn’t finding it boring, and it avoids the usual nineteenth-century problem of forcing the reader to wade through page upon page upon page of narrative. But I became aware that I lacked any enthusiasm for picking it up and reading another chapter; it was a chore, and not a pleasure. Once I realised this (which took a while), I took it back to the library. One day I’ll maybe have another bash at it.
A Song of Ice and Fire
Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
His Dark Materials (and I’m an atheist, I should’ve loved this)
It wasn’t the pacing that was the problem, although I did find the first half of the book pretty dull, and then there was a pointlessly gross bit in the middle, and only towards the end did the plot start to get interesting. There’s just something about Banks’s writing style that I disliked. I can’t put my finger on it, but I kept being pulled out of the story because of what I perceived to be bland and awkward writing.
Other Banks fans with more familiarity with the Culture series chime in—I haven’t read Matter, Excession or Look to Windward—but I don’t think his style/tone changes that much between Phlebas and Weapons. In which case, it doesn’t sound like he’s the writer for you. De gustibus again.
I’m still trying to get into Foucault’s Pendulum, which everyone says I should just love, and I just can’t do it. This, despite really liking The Name of the Rose. Go figure.
I thought I would love the novel The Postman, because I loved the movie so much. (I’ve seen it at least a dozen times.) I had high hopes for it. I’ve enjoyed many other novels after watching the movies based on them (American Psycho, Vision Quest, others) but I was very much let down by David Brin’s novel. The characterization and narrative was very thin and abstract compared to the very realistic world that is brought to life in the film. Also, General Bethlehem, the character played by Will Patton, wasn’t even part of the novel. Maybe Brin has some other good books, and I have read some essays by him as well which I liked very much, but that novel was not too good.
Probably because I had seen the movies first and I read them in high school I would say Pierre Boulle’s “Planet of the Apes” and “Bridge on the River Kwai”. I suppose looking back, the ape story was pretty good but at the time I was disappointed it “wasn’t like the movie”.
After reading and liking several of Jules Verne’s books, I picked up “Michael Strogoff” because the jacket blurb said it was exciting and breath taking. I didn’t find it that way. I don’t remember thinking it would be a science fiction story so I wasn’t disappointed when it wasn’t.
Seconded (or thirded or fourthded or whatever) on Dune. I finally made it all the way through by sheer will-power, but it SO wasn’t worth the time or effort…
Also Ender’s Game. I spent years hearing about how great the book was, but somehow never got to it until I was maybe 39-40… No one mentioned how stupid it was or how horribly telegraphed the ending of the book was. Big disappointment.
Apparently not. I think a lot of the posts in this thread say more about the readers and a lot less about the books in question. I always thought of Dune as being targeted at a younger audience, and I’m flabbergasted when adults find it difficult to read. It’s short enough to read in an afternoon and the language isn’t particularly cumbersome.
I dislike books that are juvenile, poorly written, lacking in character development, or just simply cliche ripoffs. Sometimes people will hype these books to me. I’ll get excited and jump in, only to be disappointed. Some recent examples are The Black Company, The Summer Tree, half of Neal Stephenson’s works (*Cryptonomicon *and the Baroque Cycle were great; Snowcrash, Zodiac, and The Diamond Age might have been fun when I was a kid, but not so much now), the Thomas Covenant books, and anything by Piers Anthony (I liked him when I was 12, but I picked up a book recently that my nephew was reading and it was tripe.)
That was my experience as well the first time I tried to read it.
Give it another try. It takes a while to find POB’s rhythm, but when you eventually do it is well worth it.
Most of Verne’s work isn’t science fiction (as it’s usually understood – i don’t want to get into another pointless argmrnt defining Science Fiction), but is often filled with odd geographic or scientific facts. Michael Strogoff is one of these.
It was immensely popular as a stage play (Verne’s income from stage adaptations of his works probably exceeded his book royalties), and has been filmed at least twice.
One of the attractions is a science-based “twist” in the story, much as Around the World in Eighty Days has. Did you get to the twist?
A friend of mine loves the Aubrey & Maturin books. Whenever there’s too much verbiage about sails and ropes and obscure nautical terms, he just thinks, “OK, now they’re handling the ship skillfully,” and skips ahead. 
I’m with you guys. That book was on the bedside table for over two years and I must have started it six different times. Never got more than fifty pages without throwing it down. Locations I knew, historical characters I liked, early forensics, well-recommended by friends-- what’s not to like? But somehow a real dud.
The nautical stuff sounds great in the audio books, read unhesitatingly by somebody who knows how to pronounce everything.
I saw the movie first, too, and went looking for the books. After I finished reading M&C I barely had enough interest to continue on to the second book. By the time I was halfway through the third book, I went ahead and ordered the entire set.
Seconding KSR’s Red Mars series. It was built on wonderful hard science concepts that should have produced an infallibly interesting story, but it was devoid of any sympathetic characters and was written in a very plodding dry style. I finished the series out of bullheadedness and wish I’d never wasted the time.
Umberto Eco’s Foucalt’s Pendulum. I normally gobble up historical conspiracy fiction, but this whole book seemed to be long narcissistic literary wankery, like getting trapped in a conversation with an art gallery critic. Again, the lack of any interesting characters made it even more of a chore to read.
All right, I know I said I wouldn’t argue with posts in this thread, but I’m ignoring myself. Learning nautical terminology is part of the fun of reading O’Brian or Hornblower. There’s a pretty good glossary in the back of most of the books, and what with the newfangled internets and all, it shouldn’t be that big of an obstacle these days. You don’t need to know every little detail of every little line or sail, but I was able to get the gist of what was going on just from the context, and if I can do it, anyone can.
Actually, I found that reading such books with The Oxford Dictionary of the Sea at hand helps a lot. No more do I think someone casting the lead from the chains is in danger of being pulled overboard if they drop anchor.