Oh Prime yes! If anyone wrote a book about a man leaving his wife as she wanted to have kids, then went out on a eating and fucking binge around the world, feminists would be burning it in piles.
I know I’ll be heartily disagreed with, but: Infinite Jest. I’m only halfway through, I’ll admit.
There’s some very clever writing, some interesting ideas, and some very capable use of pastiche. But. The characters are flat and exceedingly affected, the story barely exists, and the tone is frustratingly inconsistent. It reminds me of what Kurt Vonnegut would have been like, if somebody opened up his head, removed the self-effacing lobe of his brain and replaced it with an extra self-important lobe and then told him to write books at least 300% the length that they should be.
the Agatha Raisinbooks by Marion Chesney
the thing about her books - and I’ve read too many of them - is they are sometimes aaaalllllmost readable. so you start getting into them and then, suddenly, you read a sentence that just goes
CLANK
much more annoying than if they were completely unreadable! :mad:
I tried to read a couple of those, but Agatha’s mooning over her neighbor James got on my nerves. I much prefer the quieter, more off-scene Qwilleran-Polly relationship in Lillian Jackson Braun’s Cat Who…series.
I’ll confess that I’ve never read any book of either of these two series, and never wish or intend to. Utterly put off by the chief characters’ names: I feel totally certain that any book with a heroine called Agatha Raisin or a hero called Merlin James Qwilleran, will be for me, so cosy-cloying as to trigger off nausea. And I admit that this is borderline-insane prejudice on my part…
I absolutely hated Life of Pie. Everyone told me to keep going, you need to read the ending. I hated the ending. But I think I would have hated it with a different ending too. Hate hate hate.
. . . . he wrote for all us acid freaks instead.
The Cat Who… mysteries aren’t bad if you can stand “cozy” type mysteries and don’t mind precocious cats. Qwill is a pretty good character, and I recall the stories being fun if somewhat simplistic (I didn’t read them, I listened on audiobooks during long commutes). After not too long they all start running together, though.
I agree about Joyce, but I’ve always liked Eliot. Ezra Pound’s the baffingly pretentiously over-referenced Joyce of poets, IMHO.
I’ll add to the counter-chorus that nothing happens in Jonathan Strange & Dr. Norrell. Tons happens in the book, not even counting footnotes, and I’m not just saying it because it happens to be my favorite novel (I like Austin’s writing style as well, what can I say).
However, in further support for my contention that stuff happens in J.S. & D.N is that if it didn’t what in the world is the BBC going to fill for 7 hours:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/bbc-to-adapt-jonathan-strange-mr-norrell-as-miniseries/
Oh there’s lots that happens in JS&MN (including an entire war), but it’s written in such passive-voice Austeninan language that it seems that nothing happens. Like that short story of Clarke’s I mentioned upthread ages ago. There’s a pretty good scene where the heroine goes into the Fairy Realm and beats hell out of the army, then wakes up in a cabbage patch swatting moths. I was three pages past that before I realized something just happened! in that slog of a story.
To my mind, the understatement implied by the language adds to the humour and charm.
As an example, at one point:
[spoiler]One of the magicians, experimenting on his own sanity in order to perceive a fairy who is making life difficult for him, makes a breakthrough - and is cursed by that fairy (who is powerful and malevolent) by being imprisioned in a column of permanent darkness that is centred on him. Now he wanders over the city of Venice, quite insane (and able to magically alter reality) and surrounded by a towering column of night.
A character, remarking on this sight, states something like “say what you like dear fellow, a tower of impenitrable darkness simply does not bode well”.
I had to laugh. 
[/spoiler]
I just re-read Cryptonomicon, and I rather like it. But I take your point, it’s not the tour de force that Snow Crash was. I enjoyed it more for the characters, but the story is a bit of a anti-climax. Felt the same way about The Diamond Age. I’m two-thirds of the way through Quicksilver, though, and it’s much more enjoyable, if you haven’t totally given up on Stephenson.
Ah, so I’m not the only one…
Oh don’t get me wrong, I love the dry humor. I was raised on the original Dr. Who and Hercule Poirot and Agatha Christie Mysteries and whatever other British shows PBS had on in the 80’s. But JS&MN, for me, didn’t really get going until the third book so it wasn’t worth taking up shelf space for books that kept my interest for all 800 pages.
The Bear and the Dragon by Tom Clancy.
Wikipedia link with spoilers
Clancy’s books started to go downhill quickly after Debt of Honor, but there was usually enough in each of his books to enjoy.
The Bear and the Dragon is the only Clancy I’ve never reread. The racism and heavy handed politics along with a ridiculous plot and bloated page count make this one easy to skip. I think Clancy was really pissed off after 8 years of Clinton
The Teeth of the Tiger is also horrible, but at least it isn’t 1000 pages of crap.
I haven’t read any subsequent Clancy books because these two were so bad.
I also finished with him after “The Teeth of the Tiger”. What got me, was not the preposterous events in the books; nor his general world-view (with which I don’t sympathise); but his use-of-the-language mannerisms, often very repetitious. I came to feel that if I had to read one more time, “pshrink”, or “he lit up his computer”, I’d rip the book in half and throw the pieces at the opposite wall, with maximum force.
Over all, I liked Debt of Honor and Exe. Orders. Some things were left undone or incomplete in character development esp in EO. ex: Pat O’Day and Andrea Price never courted, but they got engaged at the end of the book announced by the President during a press conference. It was like I decided to run for reelection and Pat and Andrea are getting married. Lame? I guess their private life was really private. I guess it just got all edited out. ex: Ryan said he was going to give Clark his old identity back John Kelly. But he’s still John Clark for the rest of his days as far as I can tell. Lame? A lot of mistakes. The school that JC went to as a kid in reality wasn’t formed until 1969, but what the hey it’s a work of fiction. I mean I know that Clancy is writing fiction and a lot of stuff he writes just has to sound right enough to not break the immersion. But sometimes he does that by just being a formula writer rather than writing around his characters.Clark and Ryan,Ding Chavez etc
Along these lines, Hannibal. It’s pretty much a novelization of a Saw movie, without the clever plot twists. About halfway thru, I realized that Thomas Harris really loves Hannibal Lecter and wants you to be rooting for him. Many people thought the ending was stupid, but given what I’m pretty sure the author’s mindset was, it (unfortunately) makes perfect sense.
Take it your an atheist? If that’s the case, you aren’t her intended audience.
A “dis-recommendation” which I feel moved to make – perhaps more informed by prejudices of my own, than it should be: Eric Flint’s “1632” series. Premise: the mining town of Grantville, West Virginia, and its inhabitants, are suddenly transported in toto from the end of the 20th century, to Germany in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War: the Grantville-ites promptly set about promoting civilisation and progress.
The author writes very well; it’s the content and the attitudes behind it, that I hate. The whole thing is permeated with smug self-righteousness of a left-wing kind, on the part of the time-travellers and, plainly, on the part of the author on their behalf. It’s not the left-wing bit that I have a problem with – I’d find an equivalent work with that degree of sanctimonious self-congratulation re any socio-political position, equally infuriating. The whole thing is so exasperatingly two-dimensional and black / white: the time-travellers, and those seventeenth-century folk who “get a clue” and realise how right and noble they are and throw in their lot with them, are GOOD; all other seventeenth-century types are thoroughly barbarous, benighted, loathsome and BAD.
I read “1632”, the first in the series; there’s no way I’d read any more of the series. Getting toward the end of “1632”, I was longing for the bad guys to kill every one of the Grantville-ites and their seventeenth-century allies – horribly – and to burn bloody Grantville to the ground, seed the site of it with salt, and plough the stuff in. The series has many devotees – many of them, people whom I respect – so perhaps I’m weird for hating it; but “thus it is”.