The Life of Pi. I think “meh” sums it up, even though it was clearly supposed to be deep and meaningful. I’ll also second One Hundred Years of Solitude - magical realism is all very well but after the big ending I thought “Wow, that was pointless”.
But I like Confederacy of Dunces and The Man Who Was Thursday (although I prefer The Napoleon of Notting Hill to Thursday).
I too didn’t get A Confederacy of Dunces and didn’t manage to finish it. About 10 people recommended it to me as my kind of book too.
Dan Brown goes without saying. What a hack.
For me the worst offenders are people who do the same schtick over and over again. I’m looking at you, Tom Sharpe, Carl Hiaasen, and Christopher Brookmyre. All three of these have pretty much the same schtick too - series of minor characters in slightly absurd situations all combining via convoluted plot devices into a grotesque/violent farcical climax. Enjoyed the first three books I read from each of these authors, then never wanted to read any of them ever again.
And I’ll add Terry Pratchett to the above list too for the same reason, though there’s a different kind of schtick involved.
At least you could finish it, I got a bit more then half way and just stopped reading it.
I also have not been able to understand the love for Pratchett, I’ve read 4-5 of his books and I liked one, the one about death, and that was it. The others were boring and not worth the time.
I’ll also second The Road, I found it really boring.
People recommended Dan Brown to you? You poor thing.
Agreed. Read “Porterhouse Blue” and “Grantchester Grind” and then never read Sharpe again.
Also agreed, although the problem with Pratchett is that when he’s good, he’s very very good so you can’t assume that the new book will be more of the same. That said, I haven’t read his new one but my reaction to hearing about it was “Oh God, not another Vimes book.” People who want another Vimes book or Witches book or Rincewind book are like the people still yearning for another series of Blackadder or a Monty Python reunion. Let’s move on, shall we?
I agree entirely and hence get very amused when people defend it on here whilst slamming the film. The difference being that the film was good.
Someone suggested “Everything is Illuminated” for my book group, saying it was her favourite book of all time. I got about halfway through and that took far too much energy. It was a turgid mess filled with “hilarious” mock-foreign English.
Yes, several, in the form of “I know you like literature, well wait until you read this thing!!! OMG!” And as I have said before on the SDMB, at the first two words (“Renowned curator”) I was thinking “aha, it’s a satire on bad writing”, but after the first chapter I realised to my chagrin that it wasn’t.
Also, I had read The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail when I was a teenager, so contrary to my recommenders, there wasn’t anything particularly revelatory about the subject matter either.
I think that is where I went wrong. I was tempted by it as a youngster on holiday, that comparison to “Hitch-Hiker’s” on the cover was all it needed. Jesus it was crap. Really badly crap. I haven’t had the desire to read a single thing by him since.
For those mentioning “Let the Right One In”, it could be worse. As part of my continuing efforts to get my skills up to scratch, I am reading it in Swedish. I have been at it for months. The thing is never-ending and it goes so much slower when you only make a few pages per sitting.
I liked Pillars of the Earth OK, but was let down by Follet’s second one, World Without End. It was the exact same story! Sure, there were two plucky heroines instead of one, but otherwise it was a cut and paste job. He did change the characters’ names, so I’ll give him props for that. But it sucked.
House of Leaves: I thought this book was going to be good. A story within a story and lots of psychological twists and turns? Sign me up. Instead, it’s just a chore. I’m not interested in typographical gimmicks; the book totally didn’t work for me.
Agree with The Road. Again, it just didn’t do it for me. I get the conceit, I really do. But sometimes conventions like quotation marks serve as invisible signposts - readers don’t even see them, honest! But when you go against convention, it stands out like a sore thumb, and not in a good way.
I’ve heard a lot of people recommend Steve Erickson’s Gardens of the Moon, particularly on message boards devoted to fantasy. Good gravy, what a mess it is. There are far too many characters, dull dialogue, no humor, imaginative concepts that appear but are never explained, and absolutely no underlying logic to anything that happens. The basic idea is that we’ve got this empire that has any number of wizards and weapons and allies who are all powerful enough to blow up whole countries in a few seconds, yet for some reason the Empire never uses any of these powerful wizards and weapons and allies, and instead goes through ridiculous byzantine plots. They hire some members of the Assassins Guild to kill the leaders of a certain faction in a certain city, but then someone tries to stop them by hiring other members of the Assassins Guild to kill those members of the Assassins Guild, so they’ve got to hire some more assassins to kill the assassins who were sent to kill the first assassins…
Why not just send a wizard to blow everyone up?
The Hunger Games trilogy. I must have heard a dozen different people tell me how they tore right through those books. I read the first one and was somewhat underwhelmed. I read the second one and was disappointed because it was exactly, and I mean the same as the first, same plot and everything. So, of course I read the third book, completely expecting it to be less than stellar. I was right. I don’t make a recommendation on them one way or the other because I know a lot of people love them. Yes, the action is nonstop, but the writing is sloppy and the plot gets a bit too outrageous.
I tried to read The Master and Margarita when Andrew Lloyd Webber announced his plans to compose a musical based on it. I was SO glad when he dropped it and picked up Wilke Collins’s The Women in White.
Oh and I managed to get halfway through “Return of the King” before I gave up on “Lord of the Rings”. Horribly, horribly overwritten with every action requiring two adverbs and every object at least two adjectives. It felt like reading a thesaurus, but with more songs.
Thank You, Thank You, Thank You. I came in here to say the same thing. After reading (part) of it; I got the impression that it’s one of those books that everyone says you MUST read; but then you later find out that no one has actually read it.
This is what I came to post almost word for word. I friend with normally great taste in everything, she raved about the series until I gave in.
I will never trust her taste in books again.
I’ve read it twice. And until the Internet and Straight Dope came along, I had no idea it was something that people recommended like wildfire. The problem is something is interesting and unusual and people want to share the experience with someone else. And then that someone goes in all expecting to be wow’d and doesn’t appreciate what made such a work interesting.
Hype. It’s a problem.
I agree with a lot of the ones here - Art of Racing in the Rain, several Terry Pratchett books, and I “get” others - Pillars of the Earth is bad if you want serious, and Confederacy of Dunces was pretty good, but I could see it would be grating.
Kite Runner really disappointed me. Plenty of stock phrases in the writing, lots of obvious stuff, lots of overdone stuff, and it seemed like the protagonist didn’t get it in the end. Maybe it was the author’s intention that the hero not quite get it, but I didn’t get that sense.
I love A Confederacy of Dunces. I like The Secret History even though I know it is crap. It’s evocative crap.
I didn’t like The Devil in the White City. I thought it was padded. He had a good idea and not enough to fill it, so he just kept writing.
That would be me … actually, pretty well all of the books I love have someone go “meh” about 'em.
There is a reason for that.
If a book has something really special about it, is unusual in some way, some will like it and some will not. That is sort of inherent in the fact they are unusual.
You managed one more book than I did then. 
FTR I loved both Let the Right One In (less is more - great translator IMO) and The Secret History.
It’s almost as if what different people enjoy is… subjective or something. Which can’t be true, surely, because my opinion is correct.
Can you explain a little bit about what you didn’t like about them? I ask because a couple of people have recommended them to me just in the last few weeks and I’d been contemplating getting the first one to try.