Agreed. I actually sat through the film in its entirety. Perhaps I’ll give the book another shot someday, if I am desperate for something to read.
Oh jeez, until now my brain had succeeded in erasing that book from its memory. I read it because someone I respected had owned a copy of it. All I remember is that the second half of the book had a stench more vile than the first. I still own that book, only out of sympathy for any trash collector who may inadvertently touch it.
“Mad raving”? Yes, like a rabid cur.
Joel Rosenberg and the Minneapolis crowd used to call it Sword of Shinola, for all the proto-Tolkeinites who didn’t know their shit.
I’ll fifth or fiftieth or five hundredth Dan Brown’s brown dans. Jeebus, I hate(d) Da Vinci Code and all the pretentious ignorance it represents and spawned.
Probably an unpopular choice, but I recommend a pass on Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell… I read 400 pages waiting for something, anything to happen, and was told by a trusted friend that nothing happens in the remaining 400 pages either. I brusted* it, far too late. It stands as the perfect example of extreme overhype for first novels by English majors who work in the publishing industry, something the world has far too many of.
My sister long ago gave me a copy of Helprin’s A Winter’s Tale, which she was insane about and gave copies to everyone she knew. It bored me to tears repeatedly but I had not yet learned to brust.*
- After (Steve) Brust’s Law: “Life is too short for bad books.”
Creole Belle, the latest Dave Robicheaux novel by James Lee Burke. This is a bloated crapfest by an author who has written a lot of good, solid novels with this lead character. This one would have us believe that a couple of senior citizens (these novels’ main characters are former Vietnam vets who are now cops/detectives in a real timeline) who still manage to engage in fistfights, get shot, stabbed, beaten etc. and bounce right back. Not to mention that one of them, an obese alcoholic, is still attracting young women at 60+ years old. Add to this some bullshit mystical apparitions and you have a novel that should have died in the borning, rather than ruin these characters for all the fans.
The Berrybender Narratives, Larry McMurtry: Historically inaccurate, way too long, and I hated all the characters.
I just finished reading “Gulliver of Mars” by Edwin Arnold. I was rather disappointed, I suppose I was expecting something like H.G. Wells or Jules Verne were writing at about the same time, and it starts out like the John Carter stories, but it just didn’t seem very good. Like someone said above, I just kept waiting for it to get better and it never did.
There’s a UK television series from the 90’s called The Book Group in which that book was soundly trashed.
It’s on my Kindle. Guess I’ll remove it.
Ditto on The Berrybender Narratives. I love McMurtry but that was just plain silly.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, apparently well received by critics and wildly popular, it was the worst book I’ve read in our book club after years of some poor choices. Forget that he doesn’t use punctuation for dialogue, it felt the writer didn’t have anything for them to say anyway so filled the rest by bludgeoning the reader with ever greater amounts of visceral trauma. Of course the Indian babies are impaled on spikes. Of course the grandmothers were raped. Of course the puppies stuffed in a sack and thrown in the river were shot at with a pistol. It actually became funny. I would have wished a worse fate on every character in the book had any atrocity not been already thought of and fully explored by the writer. This was a historical western account written by a 12 year old with a penchant for slasher flicks and torture porn.
The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian. It has the biggest “Ha ha! I fooled you!” ending ever – a complete cop-out.
I recently read The Da Vinci Code for the first time because it was free to download for Kindle from Amazon. As a free download, it cost too much.
Going classical here, Great Expectations by Dickens. I had to read it in High School and I got a D on the test rather than re-read it to study, it was that bad. I wanted everyone in it to die a painful and horrible death.
I will back you up on this. I tried to read it, got about halfway through and wondered why I had slogged that far. I got it from the library, and was about to renew it so I could finish and decided I didn’t really care.
I’ll also second Voyager’s mention of Gentry Lee. I can’t re-read Rendezvous with Rama after what was done to the rest of the series. 
Both of those books were bad enough that I wrote reviews on Amazon.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Amateur Barbarian View Post
<snipped> Probably an unpopular choice, but I recommend a pass on Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell… I read 400 pages waiting for something, anything to happen, and was told by a trusted friend that nothing happens in the remaining 400 pages either. I brusted* it, far too late. It stands as the perfect example of extreme overhype for first novels by English majors who work in the publishing industry, something the world has far too many of.
I started Strange/Norrell 'cause it was recommended by one of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman. My daughter enjoyed it, but uhhh… yeah, nothing happens ever at all ever.
I’ve mentioned it before in threads like this, but after seeing the movie version of “Last of the Mohicans” I decided to read the book. The cashier at Borders tried to convince me not to buy it, which should have been my first clue, but I bought it anyway. Jeez what an unreadable incoherent mess.
Every couple of months I have lunch with a guy I used to work for about ten or so years ago. Back when I worked for him, he seemed to pride himself on the fact that he only read non-fiction. So I find it amusing when I have lunch with him now and he raves about the Dan Brown books (the subject of which seems to come up somehow every two or three times we get together). I guess reading all of that non-fiction for so long has dulled his perception of what good fiction is. 
I’m surprised to see people saying that “nothing happens” in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Okay, you don’t like the style of the book, that’s fine. But there’s undeniably a plot in it. There’s the struggle between Norrell and Strange over who is the better magician and the struggle between the mortal characters and John Uskglass.
When I was in high school a close friend gave me her copy when she was done. I may have read 3 chapters when I told her, “This is The Lord of the Rings. It’s not even pretending not to be LoTR. It’s almost like the author joking on LoTR.” And she said, “Yeah, I loved Lord of the Rings, I don’t mind reading it again.”
Yes. But it takes 1000 pages to recount what most authors would put in 100. Mind you, if you like the atmosphere and style, that’s fine, I still enjoyed it, but it was a slow moving book.
I nominate The Celestine Prophesy. I know it’s sold about a gazillion copies but man what a steaming pile. It’s supposedly a novel but it reads as a heavy-handed woo woo polemic. Sacred insights and then you vibrate into another plane of existence? The only way to read this is to channel MST3K.
See, I thought I would adore it. I fucking love footnotes. I read all the plot lines in The House of Leaves concurrently. Still couldn’t plow through Strange & Norrell.
Sure and you can reduce the plot of Crime and Punishment to “a guy commits a murder and then he turns himself in.”
I like you.
Have you read Pale Fire?