About a year ago, a friend/ex-roommate of mine had a book that dealt with time travel. I forget the author’s name, but would remember it if I came across his other works.
I’ve always been interested in time travel, because I think that it would really be cool, and I like to hear people’s opinions on things that can and cannot be done.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part talks about anomalies (sp?) and various incongruencies in our space/time continuum. Really neat stuff to read. It also explains why silver balls in the pyramids couldn’t have happened and other interesting phenomena. (Well, I don’t remember where the silver balls were…)
The second part explains different aspects of science and time travel. This part is a little tough to get through, for me anyway, because it reminded me a bit of my Career Development Courses in the Air Force. It tended to be a bit dry and sometimes over my head, especially the part about photons. But, it was good to read and gave me new ideas about time travel.
Then there is part three. If I had bought this book, I would have been more upset than what I was. Part three totally throws out all the ‘cool’ things that were talked about in the previous pages. The author begins telling us that every thing has a ‘history’ and that we can ‘travel’ back in time to find out exactly what has happened to a particular object. He goes on to explain how to have a party and have everyone do these ‘exercises’ to help ‘clear’ their minds. Then pass around some ‘antique’ objects and everyone then relates a piece of history from the object’s past.
Boy, talk about a bad ending. I was all into reading about incongruencies in our space/time continuum, about how travelling the speed of light would make time travel easy. About having a massively dense cylinder just past Pluto that would permit time travel. Then bam!! I’m reading about having a party with some friends and making up civil war stories about an object made in taiwan.
Talk about a let down. Have any of you come across a big let down in a book? Boy, that had to be my biggest. I’d rather watch a bad movie with Travolta and Psyclos.
Yeah… Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews. Talk about a sucky let-down book. It was basically about some mistreated children, but it had no memorable plot; just a lot of implied incestuous temptations, and NO MYSTERY. Why this book is shelved in the mystery/thriller section is beyond me.
…it’s bad enough the books were torried while Andrews was alive; her books are now ghost-written by her remaining relatives (not by her, from beyond the grave), I believe.
I have found, generally while reading books by Philip K Dick, that I get to within a few pages of the end and just stop. I didn’t like or dislike any of the characters; I didn’t care what happened to any of them. They could all be run over by a truck. Or a lorry, if the story were set in England. So why force myself to finish it?
During my unguided youth I was an English major and forced to read Madame Bovary in several classes. It was put up as Great Literature, but it sucks donkey dongs! Flaubert obviously hated and feared women and the whole book stunk of his bile. Each charcter was more hateful than the last! And it isn’t written well, translated well, nor even printed well!
After college I decided that I never needed to read a book about unpleasant people again. Or one without pictures. I’d paid my dues.
I agree about bad movies. They only last two hours.
The Firm
After all I heard about this book when it came out, by the time I got around to reading it, I was ready for some really good stuff. I mean, I was waiting to read about how the evil law firm was harvesting human organs for use by alien scientists in anal-probe experiments. I mean, SOMETHING! But no. The Big Scary Evil Firm was up to, oooooh, laundering money for the mob. Scaaaary. And what do they do to the good guy? They chase him. For a while! C’mon. I really don’t see what people see in Grisham, although I did like A Time to Kill. It’s one of the funniest books I’ve read. I only wish I was sure that it was intentional…
I can’t even recall all the touted books I read and thought, “Huh?”. ::shudders:: Name of the Rose, Bridges of Madison County, And Ladies Of The Club, Dune, etc.
This will outrage English majors everywhere, but after years of trying, I still loathe Charles Dickens. Everything he wrote, and that includes Tiny Tim and his cane.
So he was the Victorian Stephen King. He was an unself-conscious chronicler of his time, a vivid word-meister who brought characters to life, blah blah blah. Not even Miss Haversham, her moldy wedding dress and roach-infested wedding cake could overcome the pure tedium.
Not to say those (and other) works aren’t as fully great as widely known. But the messy synapeses of my brain just don’t capture the salient parts.
I’ve hated every book I’ve ever read by Peter Straub. I have forced myself to read two or three of his books. I’ve been told how great they are,so I keep waiting for them to get better. I find them terribly disjointed and boring.
I usually banish memories of disappointing books. Most of the ones that have really let me down are sequels or follow-ups (Speaker for the Dead is a good example). But there I guess part of the blame has to lie with my expectations.
Started reading “Lucifer’s Hammer” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, two well-known sci-fi authors. It was recommended by my husband, and supposedly the story that “Deep Impact” was based on. After laboring (really) through a monstrous 80 pages, I picked up “Lost Moon” by Jim Lovell and a ghost writer. This is the story of the failed Apollo 13 mission, written by the commander of the mission and on which the movie Apollo 13 was based. In 3 pages I was hooked. Disappointing that 2 people who write for a living and have all the devices of fiction on their side couldn’t hold a weak, soggy candle to a freakin’ astronaut.
I thought the first half set up an intriguing premise (instantaneous travel with six dimensions, i.e., to other parallel universes). But into the later part of the book, I expected Graham Chapman’s Colonel to come and say, “Stop reading, it’s getting too silly!”
There were trips to books read in childhood by the travelers (e.g., Wizard of Oz), references to other Heinlein books which completely lost me (NotB was the first [and last] book of his I read), and a weird sexual creed amongst the principal characters.
Their dimension-traveling machine was installed in a car with an on-board computer named Gay. It was given code-named commands to do complex actions. To travel instantly 10 miles “up” (relative to the car), they gave it the command “bounce”. And to prevent the computer from doing things based on casual conversation, it would only act on command words said immediately after its name. So, if the pilot wanted to move 30 miles out of the way of some perceived danger, the pilot would exclaim, “Gay bounce! Gay bounce! Gay bounce!” Every time they used this command, I thought of the Gil Chesterson character on “Frasier”. :D:D
I, also, have tried several times to “get into” Peter Straub. Tedious is a nice word for it. Same for Clive Barker. What’s so great about a guy who writes himself into corners and then just makes up ridiculous stuff out of the blue (and outside of the logical framework of the plot) to rescue his story? A number of times my reaction was “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Ditto on Flowers in the attic. What a nasty, wretched little book.
Dissapointing? After reading Thomas Tryon’s The Other, which I thought was one of the most effective and horrifying novels I’ve come across, I read his Night of the Moonbow. BORING! I kept waiting and waiting for something interesting to happen.
As a Stephen King fan, there are several of his that I felt crapped out somewhere in the middle. Insomnia became a chore after about the first 150 pages. Maybe the title indicates a cure. Sure put me to sleep. Also, The Talisman (see Straub opinion above). There were interesting parts to it; my guess is those were written by King.
Other King books that started off with grabbing me and then letting me down were the Dark Half and Needful things. Both had a really good and interesting premise, and were even developed well. But the resolutions sucked. The Tommyknockers sucked pretty much from the beginning.
I love fantasy novels and used to pick them up if an author I knew I liked had contributed a positive blurb to the cover… in this way, I was lured into buying the first of a looong series by Janny Wurtz, can’t even remember the title but it’s about brothers, who are princes, who don’t get along so well. Urgh, about half way through I realized that was a few days of my life I’d never get back.
Shardik, by Richard Adams… loved his Maia, and this one was supposed to be in the same setting… can’t stand it.
Most of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time Books, somewhere around the middle of the series. I loved the first few and would like to read the whole series, but they started to bog down in a big way. I’ll muddle through 'em eventually, but not for a while yet.
Hannibal, the sequel to Silence of the Lambs. Totally lame.
Also, I heard so much about ‘Catcher in the rye’, expecting something controversial and meaningful. What a bore!
I can see why so many psychos identify with it…I can’t remember the main character’s name, but the goof is terrified of confrontation…and does nothing but have fantasies about pushing people out of windows. That red deer hunting cap…was a people hunting cap…
I guess I got something out of it.
I’m glad you happened by. One of my oldest and closest friends, now an editor for a university press, whose literary opinions I always respect, has been on a Gore Vidal kick of late, and I’ve been feeling guilty for never having read much beyond magazine articles. I browsed through Duluth, among other things, in a bookstore the other day and wasn’t at all taken with it. So what should I read?
It’s been getting harder and harder for me to slog through most of Dean Koontz’s stuff - I suppose at this advanced age it’s harder for me to follow for forty frickin pages while he tries to finish a train of thought.
Grisham’s “Runaway Jury” is another one I have a problem with - I just skipped page after page after page - talk about tedious.
OTOH, I loved Stephen King’s Insomnia. Eh, what the heck do I know anyway? I just read one of my son’s Hardy Boy books last night. WHAT??? I HATE “Norm” and was waiting for Drew Carey to come on!