I picked off Throne of Glass on a recommendation and started it this morning. I’m four chapters in and don’t want to keep going. A lot of the book feels like padding, and the main character is just too mercurial. It’s disappointing, because the person who suggested the book is usually right. Ah well, I gave it a shot.
Seems like, most of them. I keep trying.
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf and The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse were both recommended to me by someone whose judgement I respected. So I really wanted to like them but I couldn’t finish either - it felt like I let a friend down.
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My wife loved the entire Harry Potter series, so I thought I’d give it a try. I read the first book all the way through, then three weeks later, I reminded myself that I was going to read the first Harry Potter book. I had forgotten every thing about it.
After listening to folks carry on about what a great and funny author Terry Pratchett was, I felt obligated to start his Discworld series and purchased The Colour of Magic. I got maybe 50-60 pages into it and couldn’t bring myself to continue reading it. I left it on the bookshelf and picked it up a year later, figuring maybe I was in a bad place a year earlier and perhaps judged his writing too harshly as a result. Second try I got maybe 70 pages into it before giving up. Guess he’s just not my cup of tea.
Before anyone else gets a chance, let me be the first to advise you that most folks don’t recommend reading The Colour of Magic, instead you should start with Guards, Guards or Equal Rites, which is where Pratchett really got his legs underneath him.
Meanwhile, I tried reading The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton on the strong recommendation of an old friend of mine. There’s a lot of interesting concepts in the story, but after one plot point I chucked it across the room. One of the main characters, a preternaturally lucky starship captain, seduced and knocked up the underaged daughter of one of his trading contacts. Then he immediately took his cargo and abandoned her. From what I can tell this event has consequences down the road, certainly for her and maybe for him, but I was already getting frustrated with the story and had no more patience for spending time with characters like that.
I was hoping that I would appreciate the novels of Henry James, but I found them tough to read and not particularly interesting. Washington Square was not too bad, though.
I tried “A Game of Thrones,” because several friends recommended it, and because I do enjoy fantasy fiction. I got about halfway through it, when I determined that most of the characters were horrible people, and those who were actually not horrible people invariably had absolutely terrible things happen to them.
I realized that I had no interest in reading that kind of story.
I started with Guards! Guards! and it just didn’t take. For whatever reason I’m another for whom Pratchett mostly hasn’t clicked and I really expected him to. Which is funny, because I do like Good Omens, which many folks have told me is much more Pratchett than Gaiman. Which I believe having read a fair bit of Gaiman (who I’m fine with, but not quite a huge fan).
I think it’s the “wanted to like” that’s throwing me. I have plenty of books that I “expected to like” that just didn’t work, one of them mentioned already, Game of Thrones. I got through the first book, and 2-3 chapters into the second (this is prior to it becoming a TV series) and just thought “I hate all these people, even the ‘good’ ones, and hope they die in a fire.” If I can’t get behind any of the characters, it just fails for me, although there are series (Wheel of Time, I’m looking at you) that I almost hate finished, because I had so much invested in it despite going off the rails far earlier.
[ as I type this, I see @kenobi_65 has just posted a similar opinion on GoT but meh ]
I think the most common reason you want to like a book (including the OP and most other posters), is that it’s a recommendation from a friend, and you want to be able to talk about it with said friend, share the experience. So my most recent experience was a friend wanting me to read The Silmarillion. Now I had tried, honest to god tried this before, once in my teens, once in my 20s, and again in my 30s. So I figured I’d try it again in my now late 40s, and see if I could plow through it.
After all, I’d read and more or less enjoyed much of the Return of the King appendix…
But I just can’t. It has all the elements that weary me in JRRT other works, but little if any of the fun or charm. And I myself have been on the other side of the equation: I wanted my wife to read the Hobbit and main trilogy of Lord of the Rings, and she tried hard but stalled out on The Two Towers. She loves the movies (well, the OT, is meh on the Hobbit Movies of course), but finds the effort of reading Tolkien and all the side bits tedious. In her words, the movies function like the novel Princess Bride, and she wants a version with just the good bits.
I got halfway through Stephen King’s, Under the Dome and realized it wasn’t wrapping it up any time soon and it had been an unpleasant read anyway. It was much better as The Simpson Movie.
A lot of people, including on this board, have recommended the Lord of the Rings. First I read The Hobbit, as people have said it’s a gentler introduction. Finished it. Hated it. But I resolved to carry on.
Started The Fellowship of the Ring. Got about 2/3 through it, hating every page. Finally I got to the part where there’s a meeting and they’re talking about all kinds of people I never heard of. That’s when I realized I was totally lost and gave up.
This is #2 for me - I did manage to slog through the first two but halfway through the 3rd I just was like, I don’t even care anymore. And I definitely didn’t need to them burst into song or poems or whatever kept happening (its been a long time but I just remember being annoyed a lot by those bits).
#1 for me is Little Women and I don’t even just not like it, I loathe it. Based on my usual reads, I really should love that book, but I find it way too sentimental and every single character bores me to tears.
If you do decide to give Pratchett another chance, Small Gods might be a good one to try. It’s a standalone, and written when he was in his prime.
Most books I read, I wouldn’t have read if I hadn’t wanted to like them, so there could be a long list. But in particular, I love a good fantasy. I love Lord of the Rings, really like Discworld, and when I finally got around to reading Game of Thrones, I did like it, though I didn’t love it for much the reason @kenobi_65 gave. On the other hand, there have been some fantasy authors that really disappointed me because if I enjoyed them as much as so many other people seem to, I’d have a lot of reading enjoyment ahead of me. So I’ve started, but not continued with, series by Robert Jordan, Joe Abercrombie, Michael J. Sullivan, and Guy Gavriel Kay.
Oh, and Tim Powers’ Last Call had some interesting ingredients and I was intrigued by what he was trying to do, but for some reason it just didn’t work for me. I had to force myself to finish it in hopes that I’d appreciate the way he pulled it all together at the end, but I didn’t, really, and I was just glad it was over.
That was me, slogging through ALL of Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I expected to love it… I loved sci-fi, loved fantasy, loved Tolkein, and loved Donaldson’s setup of the main character having leprosy.
But the characters were selfish, one-dimensional, and utterly unlikeable*. And the fantasy world was pretty generic.
I tossed those books in the early '80s… and haven’t read any “epic fantasy” since. I’ve never done such a 180 on an entire genre.
God, I fell like I need to take a shower after even thinking of Thomas Covenant…
*He gets whisked (don’t ask how, it’s just “Magic”) to another land (don’t ask where, it’s just “Low-Rent Middle Earth”), and immediately meets a young damsel… and rapes her.
The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson was a big one for me. I’ve read his Mars trilogy, and Aurora a few times each and obviously really enjoy much of his writing.
This book, according to Wikipedia “…explores how world history might have been different if the Black Death plague had killed 99 percent of Europe’s population, instead of a third as it did in reality.” I was really looking forward to it but I just couldn’t get past the first chapter or two. It seemed to me that he was trying to be too unconventional or typical or something.
Pratchett was early in his writing career with that novel. I’d suggest starting with one of his later works, like “Small Gods” or “Mort” and you may find you change your mind about him.
Same here, but only one try, and I don’t think I got as far into it as you did. When I find myself wondering “Why am I reading this?” I have to think it’s time to move on.
And now I find out, reading this thread, that that’s not recommended as a good starter book.
I read the first Covenant trilogy when I was in high school, 40 years ago. I loved the world-building aspect of it, even if I found the Covenant character to be terrible.
I tried to re-read the first book, maybe ten years ago. I think I made it through about 100 pages, before setting it aside in disgust — not only disgust in the main character and his actions and attitude, but disgust in my younger self for not really seeing all of that, way back when.
I’m going lighter here. Every woman I knew was reading or talking about Fifty Shades of Grey
Could not do it.
Even threw it in the burn barrel.
Awful.