I don’t really regret starting the Dresden Files, because I do enjoy the universe, and the stories are acceptable popcorn fare, and I like Murph and Bob, and most of the other supporting character.
But then there’s Harry Goddamn Dresden himself, and the fact we’re stuck in his head the whole damn time…
I didn’t used to regret it…until the last two books. I won’t be reading the next one and now I regret getting invested in these characters.
A lot of mine have already been mentioned (Clan of the Cave Bear, Thomas Covenant, Sluggy “Get the hell on with it!” Freelance). As for some others…
Anything K. Sandra Furh’s done since Friendly Hostility. I am massively annoyed at how she just gave up in the middle of the next comic, Other People’s Business, right when it was getting interesting. She posted the unused scripts for the remainder of the series on the comic’s Livejournal but they were mostly raw notes. I’m still mad enough not to read any of her future comics over this.
Anne McCaffrey’s Tower and Hive series. I read the whole thing when I was in high school. A more irritating bunch of spoiled brats I have never encountered either on the page or off. By the end I was praying for either the bugs to win or for the ordinary untalented people to rise up and eliminate the fucking smug Gwyn-Raven-Lyon clan. If ever anyone deserved to be up against the wall when the revolution comes…
Anything Jacqueline Carey’s written after the first three Kushiel books. I loved those. The next three I couldn’t stand because it was over a thousand pages of Imriel de la Courcel whining about nothing. Wah wah wah, my birth mother was a traitor. Wah wah wah, I married the wrong chick. Wah wah wah, my wife got killed. Wah wah wah, I had all the sex with my cousin but no one realizes how true and real our love is. Shut. Thefuck. Up. I won’t even touch the Naamah series.
Other series I won’t touch are the Wheel of Time (I’ve been amply warned) and George R.R. Martin. Those two are the reason why I’m leery of starting any series that hasn’t been finished yet. The only ones I have are Greg Keye’s Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone (which is finished now) and J.V. Jones’ Sword of Shadows (even though I can’t find anything past the first book. It’s time to resort to the internet shopping).
I read one of the Sookie Shithouse novels. I shan’t read a second. If I thought I could get away with it, I would sue Charlaine Harris for the brain cells I wasted.
Martha Grimes’ series about Richard Jury and Melrose started out wonderfully, but turned into a crap series. The Man With a Load of Mischief, The Old Fox Deceiv’d, and* The Anodyne Necklace * are all great novels. The series’ quality became a bit uneven after that, but she still came up with books like *Help The Poor Struggler *and The Old Silent.
Then with The Old Contemptibles, the series drived into the toilet. Too many plots were more unbelievable than a bad Doc Savage novel. Melrose Plant, who in the beginning was so intelligent that Jury feared he might be a murderer, turned into the biggest twit in the UK.
Game of Thrones. I watched the show for three seasons, then decided to follow up reading from where that left off, halfway through book three. The books are just awful. I’m still going, but my pattern is to read the first few pages of a chapter, then flip to the end of it to read the last few pages of the chapter. In the middle, I will have missed a detailed seating chart for whatever meeting or feast, along with a complete rundown of who ate what in what order, and some pointless moping by a handful of people. If anything actually happens in a chapter, it happens in the last two pages.
And worse than the writing is the behavior of the author. Martin is accused of hating his characters, but I say he hates his audience. He writes the first couple books, then waits like four years for the third, which turns out to omit (the good) half of the story and characters, and includes an epilogue stating his reasoning for the split and “more coming next year!” Then he waits five more years for the other half. And still has two books to go!? Jackass. What TV producer looked at that record and decided to start a show before 2025!? Dude won’t live to the end of the last book. Fine by me, as his successor will do a better job. The re-working of the story for TV makes a lot of sense to me now. The audience would walk right out on Martin’s version.
Reminds me of Lost. With Lost, I thought they were good at creating entertaining episodes, but utter crap at telling a story. Martin is good at the big story, but utter crap at the finer details and execution.
I’m still OK with Dresden, though they’re certainly not masterpieces, but I am regretting having started his Codex Alera. It’s a silly world populated with nothing but cliches, and there’s a strong undercurrent - almost Anne MacCaffrey-strength - of a frustrated romance novelist running through the whole thing.
This sounds exactly like my friend’s rant about Wheel of Time. Yes, I’m so going to give this series a miss.
I like the most recent Dresden books a lot. I can’t believe it’s been a year and nobody’s mentioned Krondor.
No Yelling Bird and Sugartits comics? No way.
I wish I never started reading the Amtrak Wars and the Wheel of Time (and I only read two of each of those)
Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. I actually tried this twice. I hope I forget about lobstrosities again.
Drek? That’s high praise for Wheel of Time.
And ranking right down there with it is Thomas Covenant. I wish I had the hours I wasted reading those two series back again. I kept reading the next novels, thinking “This has got to get better”. No, it didn’t.