Richard Clarke’s novel Scorpion’s Gate. A counter terrorism adviser in the Clinton and Bush administrations, his non-fiction Against All Enemies is much better written, and more frightening.
Exactly, yes.
I started to mention that one but decided it wasn’t fair since I couldn’t even finish it. I’m glad it was a library copy.
Since you ask about books I’ve read recently rather than recent books, I’ll add Christ the Lord by Anne Rice (starts off okay and then quickly makes up for it) and The Broker by John Grisham (I think that’s it’s name- a corrupt arms dealer is pardoned by a hated president and goes to Pisa and does something or other thaonf aoj aiodu faoidf - Grisham, take the money, enjoy it, stop writing until you have a new book in you.)
Well, I tried and completely failed to read A Song Of Ice and Fire by George Martin. By the end of the second book, there were no characters left that I liked and I could not force myself to read the third. I know it’s supposed to be like that, but it does not work for me.
Si
This is going to be an unpopular nomination, I know, but I tried really really hard to read Gravity’s Rainbow, but gave up in sheer frustration. The words just sort of washed over my brain without me being able to focus on them. It was like one of those optical illusions where you can only see something out of the corner of your eye, but when you look at it straight on, it disappears.
Georgia Blain The Blind Eye. The only reason I even tried to read this book is that my daughter picked it out for me at the library. She’s three, so she has some excuse. It’s all about a boring annoying spoiled rich kid who goes off to some coastal town for no apparent reason except that he’s boring and annoying and can’t think of anything better to do, and then he becomes infatuated with a boring annoying blind homeopathist who unfortunately turns out to be bonking the boring annoying hippy who lives next door. Oh, and there’s also some sort of framing story involving homeopathy, but I think my eyes glazed over at that point.
This is definitely current holder of the title “Worst Book I’ve Ever Read” - having taken over from Peter Hamilton’s The Reality Dysfunction which I somehow managed to slog through all eleventy-hundred and two pages of a few years ago.
But I really liked the Cryptonomicon. So sue me.
Shoshana , I agree with you about Cantor’s book. Fortunately I got my copy for free, because I would have been peeved had I paid for it. I’ve read a couple of his other works and he’s a pretty crap writer IMO.
I liked Plagues and Peoples by William McNeill a lot more.
The Rising Tide by Jeff Shaara. He and his dad did a great series on American history from Rise to Rebellion to WWI (To the Last Man), but as he points out in the preface, it is impossible to do a WWII novel. You already know the characters and how it ends.
He never addresses how it was to live in that remarkably screwed-up time. Didn’t anyone bitch about it? All the people are happy warriors in some sort of Stalinisque land of brave soldiers, resolute officers and whatnot.
I swear, I could write a better WWII novel (and when NatNoWriMo come around I might, unless the lesbian love story wins out).
Thanks for the warnings about The Historian. It’s such a pretty book, and it’s just gone into the cutout pile at B&N. I almost bought it the other day but I seemed to remember that the dopers didn’t like it.
I’ve had a good year, nothing terrible so far. I did read my first Dean Koontz books this year - the Odd Thomas series. I enjoyed the first one, but by the third one I was tired of him and I’m not inclined to seek out any more of his books.
I really enjoyed his early science fiction, but dislike his Stephen King genre.
Well, I just finished it. Let’s share the hate. No–not hate. Just disappointment. The writer is well-traveled & educated–just not very good at telling a story. I’m pretty tolerant of weighty books. Gravity’s Rainbow & The Cryptonomicon are fine with me. And I love a good vampire book. So I kept slogging…
And why did the narrator point out, in the introduction, how the story illustrated the eternal split between Judeo-Christian Europe & Islam? There were ancient & modern Muslim allies of the anti-Dracula historians. (Should I have spoilered that?) The story recounts events in the 1930’s & 1950’s–but only once mentions the fairly drastic problems that Jewish Europeans had with the Christian ones in the 1940’s. And the evil Ottoman conquest of Byzantium was lamented endlessly–while the Fourth Crusade’s shameless sack of the city (Christian versus Christian violence) was only mentioned in passing.
Another recent waste of time & money was The Arcanum by Thomas Wheeler. Such a tastefully art-directed trade paperback with an interesting premise! How could it go wrong? I already ranted at length in another thread. Short explanation: The author cannot write.
For those with a taste for a good Holmes/Watson pastiche, I heartily recommend Mark Frost’s The List of Seven.
Right now I’m reading Snow Crash by Stephenson (well, okay, listening to it on audiobook). It’s not the worst book I’ve ever read, but I know where you’re coming from. His writing is…not good. His ideas are more or less interesting, but the writing is exceptionally dry and longwinded. And because it’s an audiobook instead of a regular book, I couldn’t easily skip the portion where he recreates a fictional hyperbureaucratic memo in all its parenthetical glory. I thought my brain was going to leak out of my ears. I’m determined to finish it, though.
I did try listening to Cryptonomicon once. After 15 minutes I realized I wasn’t paying attention to a single word and decided not to listen further.
*The Intuitionist * by Colson Whitehead. A choice made for me by my book club. It’s about elevator inspectors. One sect of them fixes broken elevators using empirical data, the others use intution. Need I say more?
I read and enjoyed Gravity’s Rainbow (reading it along with A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion was a big help) as well as all of Pynchon’s other novels, but I tried, and failed, to complete Against the Day recently.
I tried, really I did, and I consider it a failure to give up on a book. But by around page 850 (of approximately 1100) I realized that my eyes were merely moving over the pages as my brain resisted absorbing anything. He was still introducing apparently major characters on top of the hundreds of majors and minors that had already been introduced—many of whom literally disappear for hundreds of pages to resurface only when I’d forgotten who and where the hell they were, and really didn’t give a shit about their travails or motivation anymore. There was no discernable timeline, and the narrative jumped freely forward and backward across a number of years without warning— which, being that one of the recurring themes of the novel was time travel, made sense, but “getting” that didn’t make it any less punishing for me, as the reader, to try to navigate.
I’m sure there are readers who appreciate the challenge of a mammoth tome that requires one to cover the floor with graph paper and spend hours scribbling flowcharts and vector diagrams like some kind of demented meth freak, but for me it exceeds the boundaries of “recreational” reading. It’s too bad, because for every few pages that had me tearing my hair out, there would be at least one passage that stunned me with its brilliance.
I like to wander the erotica section of the bookstore and pick up stuff that interests me. I grabbed one a couple months ago, though the name escapes me at the moment.
It’s horrible. I kept reading because the sex scenes weren’t completely bad (at first) but the plot that supposedly holds it together? Ugh.
I’m a vampire fiend, I love reading new (to me) ideas about their creation, existence etc and have a very high tolerance for crap if the ideas are interesting or the sex gets me hot enough (for example, I still read the Anita Blake books, though we’ll see how long that lasts as I’m losing interest). This one involves vampires, and lots of sex… can’t go wrong, or so I thought.
Basically the girl is a vampire, but she doesn’t know it and she’s hit puberty/the change. Which means she puts out tons of pheremones and the first guy she meets latches onto her and they screw silly so she can get pregnant (two ways vampires are created, born and made and the born are just females, no males except those changed by the females). This is the only time in her life she can get pregnant as she is still human enough to carry a child, once the change is complete it is impossible, and other vampires take her and him to their mansion outside of New Orleans to ensure he gets her pregnant and she doesn’t drink him dry before he can.
Lots of screwing (which gets worse and worse) and undercurrents of politics that could be interesting but are just dropped in as an afterthought.
I got 3/4 of the way through and it’s still there, sitting on my dresser. I can’t bring myself to finish it, it’s not even sexy anymore. Just stupid.
Ah, yes…a book so awful that it - and its author - were Pitted for it on the SDMB a couple of years ago.
Tripping the Prom Queen by Bashares.
I’m downright embarassed for her. Her methodology boiled down posting flyers for women to respond at a YMCA and then making grandiose conclusions about the manner in which women interact based on her personal interviews with them.
A very important and interesting subject but she ruined ALL credibility with me with her “I’m going to create a survey that would get an F in ‘Intro to Stats 101’” attitude towards it.
Oh yeah, and please don’t write some pseudo-feminist crap and then use Sex and the Frocking CITY as a basis for your arguments.
I felt that way about both Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, especially The Diamond age. Really interesting ideas, some interesting settings, but it works better as a series of notes or framework for a novel than actually being a novel.
I tried to read March, by Geraldine Brooks, in late winter. I ranted about it recently- I was totally unable to believe that Mr. March (of Little Women) was an adulterous agnostic coward, and that Mrs. March was a proto-feminist Underground Railroader and Liberated Twentieth-Century Woman. Nope. Impossible. Anachronistic. Bad.
Thank you for the link. What I don’t understand is the rave reviews the vile thing got from professional reviewers. When I was a reviewer for a national magazine, I read the books. The positive reviews make me wonder if the reviewers skimmed it. It’s still holding with 2 stars and 161 reviews at Amazon, with 70 at one star. This is the grade inflation problem with “one star = ‘I hate it.’”
The last book I threw across the room upon completion was Map of Bones by James Rollins. It’s a summer reading kind of book, described as “Tom Clancy meets the DaVinci code”. So I really wasn’t expecting much, you know? But the ending was soooo stuuupid!!! It was a total cop-out in every possible way. It makes the end of the DaVinci Code look like utter genius. The really sad part is that I was really enjoying it all the way up to the end. Grrrr. Don’t write a book unless you know how it’s going to end.
Then there was The Devil Wears Prada. Horrible protagonist, horrible antagonist, horrible plot, horrible horrible horrible. At least, I thought to myself, at least there will be some kind of great revenge, some major payback in the end. But, no. The payback? She tells her boss to fuck off. That’s it. Whoop-dee-doo! Hated it.
And don’t even get me started on Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.