Crap series you wish you hadn't started reading

Cafe Society
1

Because hey, once you’re started on a story, you’re pretty much stuck with it eh?
Top of my list these days is the utterly execrable, entirely pointless, boring as paint webcomic called Questionable Content. It’s like a bad soap opera, only it moves a lot slower and doesn’t have any scantily clad pretty people. (This is based on mostly theoretical knowledge of course, since I haven’t ever actually seen any soap operas, but I know they used to ‘update’ five days a week with hour long episodes, and all the ads had lots of hot people making out)

Game of thrones comes a close second. In fact, I found it so bad that I’ve actually managed to stop reading it after the third book (or was it just the second? I forget). I’ve thankfully managed to dodge the Wheel of Time bullet, but I imagine it’s probably up there for many people. So, dopers, what other series would you advise unwary readers to steer clear of?

2

It’s weird. I have kind of a love/hate thing going on with QC. It does move slower than molasses in January, and sometimes I wonder why I continue to read it. Just tradition, I guess, probably the same reason why most people have read most comics throughout history. I started reading QC when there was already a few years worth built up, and it wasn’t so painfully slow reading it that way. I’ve grown to like the characters though, so while it has it’s faults, it’s not as though it takes a lot of effort on my part. A click of the mouse and about 30 seconds of my time 5 times a week- not a big time sink.

Someone should introduce Jeph to the concept of drawing up a few comics in advance, so that every time he has a sniffle he doesn’t miss a deadline. Really, if he got his shit together, he could take vacations and not have to worry about the strip.

I generally avoid any series of books that need to be read in order. I used to have trouble getting them all at 2nd-hand stores and libraries. Nero Wolfe, Spenser, etc, were fine, but many others would be very disjointed if I skipped books. Butcher’s *Dresden Files *and Codex Alera were very rare exceptions. No regrets there.

3

Because it had a pretty cover, I picked up* The Copper Crown* by Patricia Kennealy Morrison. (She claims Jim Morrison went through a handfasting ceremony with her; he must have been really drunk that day.)

Kelts In Space! Wretched abuse of “ancient lore” that would get you laughed out of a RenFest in rural Iowa. Every character a Mary Sue. Yet I read 3 books in the series. I read fast! I thought it would get better! The covers really were pretty!

At least I was able to stop before reading any other books in the “universe.”

4

The Wheel of Time series. Drek.

5

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The middle was interesting, but I don’t give a rat’s ass about the investigation of some fraudulent financial scheme that occupied the beginning and end of the book. I’ve successfully resisted reading the other two books in the series.

6

I’m going to go with the Sookie Stackhouse True Blood series by Charlaine Harris. The first one wasn’t too bad, modulo the whole “where have I seen the gifted beautiful human who’s irresistible to all the vampires and werewolves” deja vu. But like most of these series, it seemed to veer immediately into relationship angst and soft porn. I don’t care if Sookie’s milkshake brings all the vampires to the yard. I struggled through the next two and couldn’t go on.

Same thing for the Anita Blake series by Laurell K. Hamilton. Which features, gosh, a gifted beautiful human who’s irresistible to all the vampires and werewolves and that veered almost immediately into relationship angst and soft porn. It’s kind of a shame, because the first Anita Blake book I read was pretty good – a police procedural set in a supernatural setting.

7

For web comics, I’ll go with Erfworld and Darths & Droids. I think it’s too strong to say they’re crap and I wish I hadn’t started reading them, but I’d say that I’m on the cusp of giving up.

Erfworld is too slow for my taste (partially due to circumstances beyond their control, granted) and Darths & Droids has drifted too much in its genre (from RPG humour to generic Star Wars fumetti, although it recovered a bit recently).

8

I regret nothing. Seriously, I’m a reading slut. Of course, if book one is drek, I’m unlikely . . . well, less likely . . . to pick up the second.

I mean, if there was really nothing else to read, I’d even check out Sluggy Freelance again. I probably still have the bookmark.

9

The Brian Herbert/Kevin J. Anderson Dune prequel/sequel abominations. I finally stopped myself somewhere in one of the Butlerian Jihad books. It was like going back to a 5 star restaurant you loved many years ago, only to find they’d closed the kitchen and just got your food from Applebees takeout.

10

I got seriously bored and finished the Game of Thrones series. I have no major argument with the writer, he does a craftsmanlike job, what I dislike is how every fucking chapter jumps around, I prefer to concentrate on one aspect of the series at a time for at least 4 or 5 chapters.

I read the first Thomas Covenant novel and got halfway through it and gave it away. Abbhorrant nasty man, nothing about him interested me enough to draw me into the book

I got through the first 3 or maybe 4 Anita Blake. Started out a bit Mary Sue, but tolerable. Then the do I screw the monster or not, which monster do I screw, Ill just screw them all seriously got annoying. Fuck them or not, make up your damned mind and get over it.:dubious:

Most series have some annoying parts, and if the characters engage enough I can deal with minor annoyances, though the Ring of Fire series makes me want to whack Eric Flint and David Weber with a brick. I am currently rereading the second one [1633] and they are whinging about not being able to make enough of some antibiotic, they need lots and lots of thick heavy stainless steel to make some sort of retort vessels and it needs to be able to withstand pressure. The quick and dirty answer is make a heavy pressure vessel, and line it with what stainless steel they can scrounge. The long answer is Gustav is already having chromium shiped in from somewhere in the north, and they can bash together a freaking bessemer converter and a heavy engineering shop - for the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s sake, they have 3 freaking machine shops, assorted machinists and engineering types, and the contents of everybody’s libraries and the high schools library. I could freaking bootstrap myself up to a heavy shop with what they have there and I am no great engineer but I do know how to research and organize and use what they have there.

11

Dead on. My reaction was almost exactly the same. The first one was vaguely tolerable journeyman hack work despite the rampant Mary Sueism - I had much the same reaction to the first Dresden Files book, really. But while the Dresden Files books got steadily better ( well no worse or slightly better through the first three, then picking up steam thereafter ), the Stackhouse books quickly got worse. Like you I called it a day after number three.

Tried the TV series and couldn’t really make it past the first season, despite Anna Paquin’s objective cuteness.

12

Harry Potter. It’s pretty easy for me to stop reading web comics. Pigborn for example. Now that moved slow.

13

Most of them. At 50 I am a lot more likely to drop a series early on than when I was younger and had my whole life ahead of me. In fact, about the only two series I am still engaged in are the Discworld books and the Thursday Next books, although the last was less interesting to me than the previous four. Still Jasper Fforde is so enormously creative i’m not worried about him running out of fresh ideas soon.

Series recently dropped include Dresden books (got through most of the first two), Harry Potter (made it through “Goblet” before giving up), Patrick Rothfuss’ series (was hoping they’d lose the world’s most irritating love interest, but alas. That character made book two unreadable).

14

I quit reading Wheel of Time quite a long time ago. My daughter loved the series, and kept buying the books as they came out. So I had BOOKS IN MY HOUSE THAT I DIDN’T WANT TO READ. Books that would have cost me nothing to read. That’s how bad I thought they were. I bought and read and enjoyed the first three Song of Fire and Ice, and borrowed #4 from the library, read it, and decided that IF old Rail Road ever finishes the series, I’ll try to hunt down the volumes that I don’t have, and start reading the books in order. Right now, though, it’s hard for me to keep all the cast straight when the books take so long to appear. I have to go back and re-read the books in order to keep everything straight. I wouldn’t say that the series itself is crap, but I’m not going to try to read the new books as they are slowly squeezed out. I quit reading Janet Evanovich’s Numbers series, and whatsherface’s Alphabet series (A is for Alibi), even though I enjoyed the first few books in each series, both series just went over the top. I also gave up on Harry Potter. I’m sure that the series was very exciting for people who have never read much juvenile fantasy before, but I’ve been reading Diana Wynne Jones since 1979 (I can pinpoint it because I remember finding Dogsbody at the Spanish base library on my first visit there).

15

Oh, Isobelle Carmody’s Obernewtyn series. I started reading them in high school, where our library had a dearth of fantasy, especially with female protagonists, especially by Australian authors. Funnily enough, the author started writing them in high school, too. They just go on and on, there’s still (I think) two more books yet to be published, and they get bigger and more bloated every time.

It’s also apparently holding up her slightly better series, which started with Darkfall and Darkbane. Shouldn’t start a new series til you finish the old one, eh?

16

Somewhere in the past decade, Something Positive went off the rails and changed from being an irreverent comic about hipsters and turned into a schmalzy family drama that makes For Better or Worse readable in comparison. It was such a gradual change that I couldn’t quite pinpoint where it happened - but once I realized it had happened, I completely lost interest.

Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar and Timeline-191 series. I eventually got sick of his refusal to ever give the stories any meaningful closure and his continued habit of dropping bridges on the only characters who were truly sympathetic while giving the unlikable dickish characters more and more influence and page time.

I dropped out of Game of Thrones (the TV series) pretty early - I watched a few episodes and decided I didn’t care about any of these people.

17

If I’d stopped reading Patricia Cornwall’s Scarpetta series one book earlier, I’d merely think it had declined in quality. As it stands, I read Blow Fly and it was so bad it retroactively spoiled all the earlier books for me. Not sure I could ever read them again now.

18

I enjoyed the first 6 or so of the Sookie Stackhouse books but then got bored. however, I absolutely loved the 4 books started by Grave Sight by the same author.

Carolyn Hart’s Death On Demand series got dull a long time ago - the heroine married a man who is SO perfect he doesn’t begin to seem real - but she does a series about Henrie O which I am crazy about. wish she would write more of them!

19

Eh. Those Thomas Covenant books, and the Dune series. I guess I was eight or nine or so and my pops’s paperbacks drew me in. I was into Dickens then but didn’t even know the Pickwick existed then – time wasted, as far as I’m concerned. Click a button and Brahms, Beethoven, and Bach (not a joke – those were the guys, and nobody pushed it on me) sort of became my “books” until I was about 18 and actually found out people like Goethe and Ingeborg Bachmann existed. Did I know German? No, but fuck it, you learn it.

20

Oh lord, what a slog that was. I think I made it through four of the six books. What really drove me crazy wasn’t the fact that Covenant was such a jerk, but the fact that he still wouldn’t believe that he had been transported to a fantastic world (“I’m not really here, this place is an illusion, and I’m dreaming”) all the way into the third book or so.

Duuude… this is Book 3, and the third time that you’ve been brought to this magical kingdom. You’ve just got to learn to accept what life gives you.

Speaking of fantasy, I also gave up on Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Death Gate Cycle. (I wrote about this in another book thread.) Yes, it’s my own fault for reading something from the creators of “Dragonlance”. I started the series in high school, and recently tried to pick it up again. It was lousy, I remember why I stopped reading it in the first place, and I really shouldn’t have expected it to be a mature, well-written fantasy series.

The absolute worst, crappiest, soul-crushingly horrible series I ever had the misfortune to start was this science fiction series about dead souls coming back to possess the living. It was set in the far future, with space colonies etc. but there was a supernatural element too. I don’t remember the author’s name, the name of the books, or the name of the series, and it was all so bad that I’m happy to have forgotten it.

++SPOILER ALERT++

This ultimate entity of ultimate evil summons forth the spirits of the dead something something who possess living people somehow somehow and the possessed and the living get into this space war whatever whatever. Sounds awesome right?

++SPOILER ALERT++

At one point the spirit of Al Capone shows up and becomes the general of the possessed-people army. Ha ha ha. There was a whole mix of famous historical people being resurrected and fighting in this intergalactic battle for the souls of mankind.

What made me stop reading this piece-of-crap series wasn’t the sheer silliness of the plot, but the omnipresent and gratuitous TORTURE scenes. It was like SciFi Torture Porn. An innocent family of space colonists gets horribly tortured, a loyal dog gets horribly tortured, evil people torture each other etc. etc. ad nauseam. I seriously think the author wanted to torture people in reality, but since that’s illegal, decided to write a book about his fantasies and tack a science fiction plot onto it so it would sell.

I stopped reading at the start of the second novel and physically threw these books into the trash Fahrenheit 451-style. Hurray! There’s one less set of this series in existence.