# The moment you realized that a book sucks.
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [July 25, 2006, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917 "2006-07-25T03:01:53Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Diceman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diceman)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/1 "2006-07-25T03:01:53Z")
The recent thread [Books you’ve thrown across the room in rage (open spoilers likely)](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=381028) got me thinking. I’ve never actually thrown a book in rage or disgust, but there have been a few where I’ve reached a certain point in the book, and I realized that there was really no point in reading any more.
Two such books stand out in my mind. The first was _Jaws_. It was the book that the famous shark movie was based on, and when I found it in a local library years ago, I checked it out right away. It turns out that there were several sub-plots that Steven Spielberg cut out when he made the movie. This was a good decision. For example, it turns out that Mayor Vaughn is mixed up with the Mob, and Chief Brody’s attempts to investigate this cause him to be threatened by mafioso. Their first act of intimidation was to kill the Brody family’s cat, while their young son was watching :eek: :mad: . But what caused me to put the book down was when Hooper, the marine biologist, arrives to help with the shark. One of the very first things he does after arriving in town is to start having an affair with Brody’s wife! At this point, I decided that this book was a horrible, mean-spirted story that I really didn’t care to finish reading. I did flip to the end, however, to find out how the ending compaired to the movie. I’ll put it in a spoiler box in case anyone out there still wants to read this turd. Hooper gets eaten by the shark, but given what he’d done before, this is hardly a great tragedy. The biggest surprise was that they don’t kill the shark. After eating Hooper, the shark just kinda decides not to eat Brody and then leaves. Like it felt sorry for him or something. It’s a really lame and unsatisfying ending. I don’t know what happened with the Mob or Vaughn.
The other book was _The DaVinci Code_. I borrowed it from my mother around the time the movie came out. I got as far as Chapter 2 before I gave the book back to mom. The reason I stopped reading can be summed up in one sentence. “He looked like Harrison Ford in a tweed suit.” This sentence jarred me on at least two levels. First of all, it’s lame and lazy writing. Doesn’t the main character deserve a better description than this? Put some effort into your work, man. You’re not in freshman Lit class. Second, I suspect that the author was thinking ahead to the movie, and dropping a not-so-subtle hint about who he wanted to see cast in the lead role. I didn’t even bother to flip to the end of this book. I knew from hearing about the book what its premise was, and frankly I just didn’t care enough about the guy who got killed at the beginning to want to find out more.
A short time later, some local radio personalities were discussing a news story about how albinos were upset with the character Silas. The radio guys read a passage from _The DaVinci Code_ which was apparently supposed to establish that Silas is a religous fanatic and a masochist. Sweet Jesus was it bad! The radio guys were using dramatic voices to describe how Silas glorified God by whipping himself (or however that went), and they were cracking up laughing at the poor writing and the sheer absurdity of the scene. I felt vindicated.
Has anyone else had experiences like these? Where you reached a certain point in a book which made you decide to stop reading it?
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### Author:  [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 3:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/2 "2006-07-25T03:51:56Z")
Let’s see…
staying with Dan Brown, in his execrable book about anti-matter whose title I am blocking in subconscious self-defense, the prologue discusses antimatter as if it were discovered in the last few years, instead of being predicted by Dirac over 70 years ago, and claims that the mutual annihiliation of particles & antiparticles is the ideal energy source because it does not create any radiation. Reading through that in the bookstore, I gingerly put the book back on the shelf, went the bathroom to wash my hands, then left the bookstore still closing, when I returned with a flamethrower.
Okay, I didn’t actually burn the place down. I just thought about it.
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### Author:  [@Cardinal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cardinal)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 4:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/3 "2006-07-25T04:12:03Z")
There was a series of books that were “allegories”, about a guy named Joshua who I think pulled into town and got all kinds of smack about his lovie-nicie-nice-deep-wisdom ways. I think I found out it had sold pretty well, and I bought the first one.
As best I remember, in the first chapter, there was:
“The car screeched around the corner. Such sounds had meant bad things in the past.”
I returned the book the next day. “This has all the subtlety of a bulldozer.”
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### Author:  [@Arien](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arien)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 4:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/4 "2006-07-25T04:15:22Z")
I was bored one day so I read a chick lit book of my sister’s, Jemima J by Jane Green, and my god, it was so horrible! I can’t believe this woman got a book deal. I thought Bridget Jones was entertaining enough, so I (wrongly as it turned out) hoped it might be good light reading.
It’s about a woman who has no life because she is fat. I guess the author has never really struggled with her weight, because she kept mentioning just how much Jemima ate. Early on it mentions how she eats four bacon sandwiches on the way to work every day or something ridiculous like that. That’s probably when I realized this book sucked ass but I kept reading because I hate myself, I guess. Anyway, at work her friend convinces some guy to photoshop her face onto someone else’s body and she realizes she could be beautiful if she lost weight. She strikes up an internet romance with some American guy (she’s English) and gives herself six months to lose all the weight before she jumps on a plane to meet him. Everything goes well for a while until she finds his porn collection and realizes he has a fetish for morbidly obese women and she’s kind of like his beard. I think she actually reaches into a cupboard for something and a big stack of porn falls out and hits her on the head. At the end she gets together with the guy she had a crush on at her old job who didn’t know she was alive before the weight loss, and the author tacks on a note about how she went back up to a size eight, which sounds like it’s only there so readers won’t accuse her of encouraging eating disorders.
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### Author:  [@sturmhauke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sturmhauke)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 9:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/5 "2006-07-25T09:06:54Z")
\*The Magic of Recluse[\i]by L. E. Modesitt was a good fantasy book, which kicked off a pretty good series. When the 6th book, _Fall of Angels_, came out, I ran out and bought it. 20 pages later I set it down for good. Modesitt decided to shoehorn a crappy sci-fi origin story into his perfectly good fantasy world. I slogged through page after page of ridiculous technobabble so thick that I could barely tell what was supposed to be happening. As a fan of both classic hard SF and modern space opera stuff, this offended me on multiple levels. More books were since published in that series, but I haven’t bothered with them.
I was also into the Wheel of Time series. They started sucking around the middle of book 4, but I kept vainly hoping they would get better until I finished book 8 (_Path of Daggers_). That one had about a short story’s worth of plot stretched thin across several hundred pages, and padded with artless descriptions of women’s dresses and what colors they were “slashed” with. When I finished that one, I kicked myself in the head, and then decided that any future WoT books would suck even more. Looking at some plot synopses, it now seems that Jordan has stretched a couple of story fragments across several volumes. I believe what we are witnessing is the formation of a literary black hole. As the WoT collapses under its own gravity, the plot dilates and slows to an infinitesimal velocity. Jordan will continue to publish volumes until the end of the universe, but the plot will never actually reach a conclusion.
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### Author:  [@sturmhauke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sturmhauke)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 9:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/6 "2006-07-25T09:08:53Z")
Stupid coding. Jordan confused me with his talk of slashes, and I put the wrong sort of slash in there.
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### Author:  [@Staggerlee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Staggerlee)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 10:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/7 "2006-07-25T10:11:50Z")
Two books which left me bad-tempered and disappointed (and the wasted opportunity of the author only reminded me of my own, infuriating me more…) were (The Book of) **Whim** , follow-up to Luke Rhinehart’s **The Diceman** , and **Something Happened** , Joseph Heller’s second attempt after **Catch 22**. Both eroded at my initial liking of each author to the point where I should have put the books down, but didn’t, on the off-chance that it was a new narrative structure with the first 75% dreary followed by the remainder justifying it in a clever literary manner. Maybe **Something Happened** is named ironically; I don’t care. Nothing Happens in it. Just don’t bother.
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### Author:  [@stationary\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/stationary_bandit)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 1:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/8 "2006-07-25T13:07:48Z")
> [@Staggerlee](#):
>
> Maybe **Something Happened** is named ironically; I don’t care. Nothing Happens in it. Just don’t bother.
**Staggerlee** , I recall really enjoying the opening chapter or two, where the narrator is describing his office neuroses. This felt like classic \*Catch-22 \* caliber stuff. But then, yeah- the color of the writing, the overall scenario, everything took a nose dive for me, too.
I’d have to nominate my favorite pre-Dan Brown hack (only my opinion-- I know a lot of people like him): Thomas Patterson. \*Along Came a Spider \* was The Thriller To Read back in the early '90s and I could. Not. Get past the first page.
_He buried the baby. Buried it alive_ (italics definitely not mine). One-line paragraphs, amateurish emphasis. . . it just felt like writing that screamed for attention without actually earning it.
Of course, I must be all wet- from that book on, Patterson only went on to sell about a kajillion copies of his books.
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### Author:  [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 1:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/9 "2006-07-25T13:23:22Z")
> [@Cardinal](#):
>
> There was a series of books that were “allegories”, about a guy named Joshua who I think pulled into town and got all kinds of smack about his lovie-nicie-nice-deep-wisdom ways. I think I found out it had sold pretty well, and I bought the first one.
>
> As best I remember, in the first chapter, there was:
>
> “The car screeched around the corner. Such sounds had meant bad things in the past.”
>
> I returned the book the next day. “This has all the subtlety of a bulldozer.”
Ah, now there’s a book that has been sitting on one of my shelves somewhere for over ten years, wondering if I was ever going to finish it. Is there any lamer device than basing a book around a character who’s obviously supposed to be a Jesus figure (which I put in spoiler boxes because it looked like the author was revving up for a big revelation that that’s who it really was, even though I didn’t stick around to find out) and using him to klunkily deliver your Messages?
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### Author:  [@shizaru](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/shizaru)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 2:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/10 "2006-07-25T14:47:15Z")
I knew it would probably be cheesey and corny, but I tried to read a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel once. I don’t normally read those things, but I was bored and at the time a geographical bachelor (meaning my wife and were both in the military at that time, but stationed in different places). The USO had a bunch of books you could take for free. I don’t even remember the particular name of this book, but about ten pages in the author went into a description of basically how big Lt. Dax’s boobs were and how they looked in a dress. I felt icky just for reading it, because it made me think of how many trek fanboys probably got off on it. I tossed the book in the garbage and found a copy of I, Robot by Aasimov in the post library.
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### Author:  [@Lord\_Ashtar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lord_Ashtar)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 2:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/11 "2006-07-25T14:54:55Z")
For a while I was on a Dean Koontz kick. I had read _The Bad Place_, _Watchers_, and _Whispers_ and picked up another one called _The Mask_ because I was going to go sit and wait to testify in court later that day and figured a new book would help make the time go more quickly. I don’t remember anything about it, just that a little less than half way through I realized I’d rather sit and stare at the wall like Puddy than read any more of that tripe.
I later learned that Koontz is a real hit-or-miss author. Seems he’ll write a good book and then write three or four real pieces of crap. I guess I had just gotten lucky with the first books of his I had read.
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### Author:  [@Shirley\_Ujest](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shirley_Ujest)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/12 "2006-07-25T15:00:33Z")
The point in **Dan Brown steaming pile of fetid crap** _The Davinci Code_ when the professor is described in the book…it is worse than any of the 10,000 romance novels that I’ve read.
Dan Brown is clearly projecting himself into this character and has writing skills that are below Harlequin’s standards in every sense of the word. And that is saying something.
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### Author:  [@Eureka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eureka)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/13 "2006-07-25T15:06:31Z")
> [@stationary bandit](#):
>
> I’d have to nominate my favorite pre-Dan Brown hack (only my opinion-- I know a lot of people like him): Thomas Patterson. Along Came a Spider was The Thriller To Read back in the early '90s and I could. Not. Get past the first page.
> He buried the baby. Buried it alive (italics definitely not mine). One-line paragraphs, amateurish emphasis. . . it just felt like writing that screamed for attention without actually earning it.
>
> Of course, I must be all wet- from that book on, Patterson only went on to sell about a kajillion copies of his books.
I think you mean JAMES Patterson. I read an article about him in Time magazine a couple months ago. He started writing a book writing the way he does (and that you object to) intending to go back and flesh it out, and then read his “outline” and decided that he like it the way it was. And so he began a career of short paragraphs, and short chapters.
That said, he has made something of a choice to be prolific and popular, but not get respect.
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### Author:  [@Missy2U](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Missy2U)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/14 "2006-07-25T15:51:53Z")
> [@Skald the Rhymer](#):
>
> Let’s see…
>
> staying with Dan Brown, in his execrable book about anti-matter whose title I am blocking in subconscious self-defense, the prologue discusses antimatter as if it were discovered in the last few years, instead of being predicted by Dirac over 70 years ago, and claims that the mutual annihiliation of particles & antiparticles is the ideal energy source because it does not create any radiation. Reading through that in the bookstore, I gingerly put the book back on the shelf, went the bathroom to wash my hands, then left the bookstore still closing, when I returned with a flamethrower.
Angels and Demons.
I read it. You were right.
---
### Author:  [@stationary\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/stationary_bandit)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 7:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/15 "2006-07-25T19:04:50Z")
> [@Eureka](#):
>
> I think you mean JAMES Patterson. I read an article about him in Time magazine a couple months ago. He started writing a book writing the way he does (and that you object to) intending to go back and flesh it out, and then read his “outline” and decided that he like it the way it was. And so he began a career of short paragraphs, and short chapters.
>
> That said, he has made something of a choice to be prolific and popular, but not get respect.
Doh. Yes, thank you- James. The thing is, as you say, he does seem to have made a conscious decision to write sh\*ttier, if more commercially. His first novel, _The Thomas Berryman Number,_ won an Edgar award, for Og’s sake. But I guess quality writing and the respect of one’s peers don’t get you a new speedboat.
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### Author:  [@Rubystreak](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rubystreak)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 7:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/16 "2006-07-25T19:10:27Z")
I picked up a book at the library a few weeks ago called _The Memoirs of Helen of Troy_ because, hey, good premise for a book. The first chapter is all this very obvious, cheesy exposition about the suppression of godess religion. There is no art to it whatsoever; it’s obvious, tired, and lame. Couldn’t bother to read past that.
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### Author:  [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/17 "2006-07-25T19:16:34Z")
A couple years ago we had a short-lived book club. I nominated _Thraxas_ for it, based solely on the fact that it had won a World Fantasy Award, and I’d loved every other book I’d read that had even been nominated for that.
Good grief, it sucked. I think the second or third time the author explained why the heroine’s chainmail bikini was hilariously ironic was when I decided it was hopeless.
Daniel
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### Author:  [@Edward\_The\_Head](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Edward_The_Head)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/18 "2006-07-25T19:28:53Z")
Diceman:
I’ll leave it in the spoiler since you did but:
I’m pretty sure they do kill the shark. I thought the last thing of the book we see is the shark floating because of the barrels.
I actually liked the book Jaws, I might be the only one though.
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### Author:  [@Sarahfeena](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sarahfeena)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/19 "2006-07-25T19:29:59Z")
> [@Rubystreak](#):
>
> I picked up a book at the library a few weeks ago called _The Memoirs of Helen of Troy_ because, hey, good premise for a book. The first chapter is all this very obvious, cheesy exposition about the suppression of godess religion. There is no art to it whatsoever; it’s obvious, tired, and lame. Couldn’t bother to read past that.
That is the worst…when a book has an agenda, and it just hammers the point in the most inelegant way.
I was going to read that. Glad you warned me.
---
### Author:  [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)
#### Post date: [July 25, 2006, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-moment-you-realized-that-a-book-sucks/365917/20 "2006-07-25T19:44:23Z")
> [@Left Hand of Dorkness](#):
>
> A couple years ago we had a short-lived book club. I nominated _Thraxas_ for it
Dare I admit I enjoyed the Thraxas books? Apart from the last one, that is. The humour is very British.
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