A Song of Ice and Fire. All of them. Total collapse of what used to be a good writer.
Why did you keep reading after the first book?
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
Clones baaing their way to their horrible deaths, like helpless sheep. No one really tries to escape. No PETA group tries to save them. Possibly the differences between my American sensibilities (you are a unique and special individual!) and the author’s Japanese sensibilities (community above all), but no book has ever made me more angry!
“The Female Man” by Joanna Russ is one of the very few books I’ve ever actually thrown across the room infrustration. Stream-of-consciousness style writing at its absolute worst. Unpenetrable. Bleah. Do not want.
I liked it. Not the best style I’ve run across, but far from the worst. The author, Irving Yalom, is a combination of Proust, Tom Stoppard and Shakespeare next to Ayn Rand, for example.
Dan Simmons. Once bitten and all that. (Lots of other examples in that thread).
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. I know a lot of people love it, but I just don’t get it. She could have cut out about 50 of her 800+ pages by removing the footnotes (that, by the way, add nothing to the actual story). And as for that story, well, it’s quite boring. Her emulation of Dickens’s writing is cute for about 50 pages, then you realize she’s not very good at it. She applies an absurd comedy of manners to every single character. I finished it because I’m sick and have to finish what I start.
Oh god I’d forgotten all about that one. Thanks a lot. What makes it worse is the sort of cult-like following it has of people who think it Really Means Something Important.
I was on summer vacation in high school and looking for a book to occupy a fair amount of time. Not being familiar with Scientology, I picked up Battlefield Earth. This was the book that taught me it was acceptable to set down a bad book and walk away. I thought the method of destruction of the Psychlo homeworld was laughable even then, and I was reading a fair amount of hack science fiction at the time. But then to realize the story is only half over, and now turns to economics instead of military? No thanks.
Pillars of the Earth, what a revolting display of presentism. Ugh. I don’t understand what anybody saw in that one.
Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony. Look at the pictures, read the bibliography, but don’t read the text. Cosman’s interpretation of what and how food was eaten in the middle ages is … unlike anything else.
Agree and disagree:
Djibouti: every few years I pick up an Elmore Leonard book, because they’re really easy to read, and I think maybe THIS time I’ll appreciate him. Every time he leaves me cold: he’s like an 86-year-old hipster who’s so freakin’ satisfied with his coolness that I want to slip a frog down his pants.
Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell: I loved it. The footnotes are part of its greatness; I love books with obnoxious narrators. It’s one of my favorite fantasies, and given the amount of fantasy I read, that’s saying a lot.
Now for the one I disrecommend: Thraxas. It won the World Fantasy Award, so I recommended it, unread, for our book club. Its putrid stupid sense of humor killed the club and made half its members never trust a recommendation from me again. The book thinks its Terry Pratchett, thinks it’s engaging in sly satire, but once you realize that you’ve read the same quasifeminist joke about the same chainmail bikini for the dozenth time, the humor, such as it is, wears paper-thin. Stay away!
Wuthering Heights. We had to read this crap in my senior year of high school. I got so bored I couldn’t help but skim through the last three quarters of the book. If it weren’t for Cliffs Notes, I surely would have flunked the test.
As a result, I’ve vowed never to read anything else by any of the Bronte sisters, and I’ve also thrown in Jane Austen for good measure.
I liked it, but I don’t recommend it to people because it was unbelievably long and slow moving, which isn’t something most people would tolerate.
I lobbied my bookclub to abandon Catch-22, only one out of 5 of us actually managed to finish it. I didn’t care what happened to any of the characters and got sick of being hit over the head with the repetitive message.
Oh yes. I actually have that one on my bookshelf, because I can’t quite bring myself to throw a book into the garbage, but I also don’t want to inflict it on the unwary by donating it to a charity shop. My recycling bin will be here in a few days, and that should solve my moral quandary.
Like I said, I know I’m in the minority with Strange and Norrell.
Ooh, yes, **Catch 22 **is another one that I didn’t like. I guess it’s supposed to be funny, but like Strange and Norrell, it recycles the same “humor” throughout. It just gets old fast. And it’s another one that most people like.
Remember, kids, if your teacher ever asks you to read anything by Herman Melville, tell her “I would prefer not to.”
I remember being frustrated with Strange and Norrell, but not whether or not I liked it. How odd. It’s been a number of years now. I’d probably have to reread it to decide. Not sure it’s worth the effort.
I’ve told those who asked me that I did not like books 2 and 3 in Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy. Out of some sense of duty, I am trying to finish number three but it just drags on forever, and if I have to read another paragraph detailing the specs of whatever mac computer someone has in their possession, I might just toss the book out of the window.
I actually started a whole thread about how much I hated When Nietzsche Wept.
[QUOTE=When Nietzsche Wept]
How much of life have I missed, he wondered, simply by failing to look? Or by looking and not seeing? …He had seen nothing, registered nothing. No images had transfered from his retina to his cortex. All of his attention had been consumed with thoughts of Bertha: her beguiling smile, her adoring eyes, the feel of her warm, trusting body as he examined or massaged her. …Is this to be my lot forever? he wondered. Am I destined to be merely a stage on which memories of Bertha eternally play out their drama?
There were times–today, ensconced in the fortress of his consulting room–when he felt strong and safe. At such times, he saw women as they really were: struggling, aspiring creatures dealing with the endless pressing problems of every day life; and he saw the reality of their breasts: clusters of mammary cells floating in lipoid pools.
[/QUOTE]
I rest my case.