This reminds me of a handy tip. If you are planning to take some books away with you on vacation, read the first chapter of each one before you set off. This way you won’t be stuck with a load of unreadable books.
Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams are great–but none of us who read the book could stand it, and I was a little worried I’d be barred from any future book-club suggestions. I don’t think it’s just the Britishosity of the book that made me hate it. But maybe it’s more British than Pratchett.
Daniel
Thank you so much for hating that book. You are my new best friend. I was <i> horrified </i> by it.
Let’s review the main themes (most of which you pointed out):
-overweight women eat more than the green bay packers
-size sixteen (if I remember correctly, that is the size she is when the novel begins) is MORBIDLY obese
-the correct way to lose weight is to starve yourself and work out compulsively
-a man must be insane if he likes voluptuous women
-you can only ever be happy if you are really, really thin
I was reading a book called The Third Twin by the maddeningly inconsistent Ken Follet. In this book, the male lead was discovered to have various “twins” (ie, clones) floating around, who looked precisely like him.
So, obviously, he and his girlfriend should come up with some questions-only-he-knows-the-answer to, so that she can verify that he is really him, right?
Well, they don’t, and they don’t, and they don’t, and they don’t, and then FINALLY they do. And then the very next chapter, one of the evil twins shows up, she lets him in, she thinks he’s the good guy, and when he starts treating her badly, she thinks it’s the good guy treating her badly, totally forgetting the entire premise of the book! What happened to the ID-checking scheme they FINALLY came up with? Who knows?
It was at that point that I finally and utterly decided that the book was awful.
I’ll nominate She’s Come Undone, by Wally Lamb.
I realized it sucked at the part where the narrator has her first lesbian experience (with a woman who talked her into it by saying, “Nobody cares about us fatties.”) Apparently, she decided to regret it immediately afterward, and while the other woman is still asleep, the narrator trashes her apartment, kills her fishes by pouring bleach into the tank, and leaves. WTF? If you don’t want to be a lesbian, fine, but what did this lady ever do to deserve that? I knew I couldn’t be sympathetic to the main character any longer, and sure enough, I hated her til the end.
:eek: Holy Christ! She’s supposed to be a sympathetic character? I mean, that’s not go-to-prison quality assholery, but I cannot imagine writing such a character to be sympathetic.
Daniel
Do people who actually use the word “sucks” read books?
Several times now Stephen King has written a book that was great until he introduced an entirely unnecessary supernatural element:
- Rose Madder
Great, scary book until the picture suddenly becomes a magical neverland starring one of King’s stock characters, a Mystical Negro. From that point on, dreadful.
- Cell
Fantastic book until the phone-zombies suddenly became psychic.
- Dreamcatcher
Okay, not so great, but not too bad until the introduction of yet another King stock character, the Magical Retard.
Yes. Lots of books actually suck.
Wild Animus. They were giving promotional copies of this book away at my train station one night, and I really wanted to like it, but when the protagonist was so much more ‘in tune’ with nature and the various women in the book were all enamored with him, I knew we had an unrecoverable problem.
It sucked.
Think about the origin of the slang word “sucks.”
Yes. We also use “rock” as a verb. But if you prefer we can write “the precise instant you became cognizant that the narrative in question, presented in the form of a codex, electronic file, or auditory record, was so vehemently repulsive as to call to mind a forced act of fellatio.”
How’s it not go-to-prison quality? There’s definite malicious mischief going on in that spoiler box; it’s at least go to JAIL.
Wicked. I quit when I got to the weird sado-masochistic sex club, and realized that there was not one single character in the book to that point with whom I would voluntarily spend five minutes.
Hey, if Shakespeare can make a pun on the word “cunt,” I think we can label the occasional book with “sucks” without fear of being seen as philistines.
I’ve read the first 50 pages of most of the paperbacks you find at the airport stores. I got to about page 100 of Interview with the Vampire though.
It was a political thriller. It’s been so long, I can’t even remember the title or the author (but I remember he was supposed to be pretty good in the genre.) A bunch of renegade generals from various countries had decided their leaders were a bunch of wusses, and were going to stage simultaneous coups and end up controlling every nuclear weapon on earth.
So far, so good. But then the hero managed to get captured. And all the renegade generals – the most brilliantly evil military minds on earth – decided to have a couple of henchmen take the hero away and lock him up in a dungenon somewhere.
I found myself yelling (to the book!) Why don’t you just kill him now!!!
I have never read another political thriller.
Normally I’d say this is excellent advice- but there are exceptions.
I’ve started reading The Seven Pillars Of Wisdom (T.E. Lawrence’s book on his adventures in Arabia 1914-1918), and the first two chapters are unreadable, flowery shit.
But then it suddenly gets good, with the cast of thousands and the trains blowing up and the shooting and the war, glaven! 
Seriously though, if I’d given up after the first chapter I’d be missing out in a big way… but yeah, Rayne Man’s method is pretty sound for the vast majority of books.
I would like to agree, except my deal-breaker was Tick-Tock. I guess I had read all of his “good” ones first.
I don’t know what I was supposed to think about it. Those poor little fish… 
Da Vinci Code: the first two words.
“Renowned curator…”
Honestly, I thought it was some kind of joke.
And some detective novel whose name eludes me that said something like “dust moved in the air like particles in Brownian Motion”.
Dust moving in the air is particles in Brownian Motion, you idiot. What a shite simile. It would be meaningless unless you remembered your high school science, but if you did get it, you’d know it’s not a proper simile.