The Teeth of the Tiger by Tom Clancy, written in 2003 and desribing some terror attacks inside the USA and our response to them. I read most of his Ryanverse novels up through Rainbow Six. That’s where I stopped, because it was sort of hokey and it rehashed a major element of the story from the previous novel. I actually got into Clancy through someone I know who helped do some reseach for one of the novels. Anyway, I came across a used copy of this one. TotT is shorter than the rest and there’s just nothing there. There’s no depth to the story, and none of the detailed information on technology, tactics, politics or fieldcraft like in his earlier novels.
At one point he addresses the role of Islam in Islamic terrorism by having his young new hero crack open the Koran out of curiosity, just one time. He decides that it reads pretty much like the Old Testament, with similar, good moral teachings. Thus, Islam has no role in terrorism. The terrorists are just evil people who use religion as an excuse. I think he spends all of one page on that issue. We don’t learn who the villians are, what their politics are, or that religion has anything to do with it, just that they’re largely anonymous evil people.
The ending does seem to imply it’s a two-parter like Debt of Honor and Executive Orders. The final sentences illustrate this, they don’t spoil anything at all but I’ll put them in a box anyway.
They’d hardly met the teeth. Next, they’d meet the brain.
Well, I like both Brian Haig and Nelson DeMille, so…
But right now I’m reading L Sprague de Camp’s “The Reluctant King” trilogy, and it’s, frankly, horid. Take every single cliche of bad fantasy writing you know, and combine it with some of the most awkward sentence structures out there, and you have the book.
The last few books I’ve started and didn’t finish. . .
Diary by Palahniuk
Also, Cryptonomicon but that was a couple years back.
And, right now I’m slogging through The Soul of a New Machine. I bet it was good when it came out, but there have beeen better works in the area since. It’s about guys designing a computer. I don’t know if I’m going to finish it.
I didn’t mind reading Kostova’s The Historian–it wasn’t hugely compelling or fascinating, but it was fairly decent (maybe two stars out of four).
The one I couldn’t stand recently, though, was The Queen of Subtleties by Suzannah Dunn–God, what awful, wretched, miserable dreck. Anne calling Sir Francis Weston “Frankie”? Henry VIII’s motto “Declare, I dare not” translated as “No Comment”? Anne calling her dog, instead of Purkoy, “Pixie”? I couldn’t get through the first three chapters without gagging.
Not only did I not finish it, I will never touch another one of her books. I love true crime, but that book was neither. “Well, Sickert must have been the murderer because he put scarfs on the necks of the women he painted and Jack the Ripper slashed his victim’s throats.”
Leven Thumps and the Gateway to Foo. Godawful slapped-together Harry Potter rip-off (it’s even typeset similarly). The author has a super-smarmy style; you can just picture him cackling and drumming his fingers about what a clever scamp he is. Boring main characters. One-dimensional supporting cast. Loooong tedious exposition. And any time he needs to motivate a character, rather than the person having any kind of actual reason for moving the plot along, instead that character will “just have a feeling” that s/he should turn left/talk to that girl/look behind the door.
The plot is stupid, too: they spend the entire book running away from some very not-scary-or-threatening otherworldly creatures while Leven wrestles with feelings of inferiority. Whoopie ding.
Ha! My mom does that, too. Every time she gets a book that she doesn’t like, she passes it along to me. I guess her reasoning is that since she and I have very different literary tastes, it’s likely that anything that one of us hates will be enjoyed by the other. This, of course, is not true. There are some books that are so irredeemably crappy that hardly anyone will like 'em. How such books get published is a mystery to me.
Oh, please? I tried to read this a few months ago and couldn’t get beyond 30 pages despite my best efforts. It’s still on my to-read list, though, so any bold warnings to avoid it will be appreciated.
I appreciated the idea of writing a book that that mimicked the tone of 19th century authors and came with fake footnotes and such, but it just didn’t hold my interest.
The ex never replied, because Kevin actually killed him (and Kevin’s little sister, who he had already half-blinded) before going to shoot up the school. The correspondence was in the mother’s mind, and the book ends with her going to the prison and trying to reconcile with Kevin. It ends on a vaguely hopeful (but extremely sad) note.
There’s at least three copies of that book in every thrift shop in San Francisco, and more like six in most of 'em, but nobody seems to know a thing about it or to have ever heard of its author before.
Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews, by Konner. I majored in anthropology and I’m Jewish, so I figured this would be right up my alley. Was terribly disappointed. The author passes along several outright myths as facts, has a huge chip on his shoulder, and his chapter on Israel was so biased I about threw the book at the wall. A pity because there’s actually some good info in there, among all the crap, but I couldn’t in good conscience recommend this to anyone.
I very much enjoyed several of the books people have been lambasting in this thread, though. (I like Stephenson, what can I say?)
I think I might have said this previously but: Michael Crichton’s “Next” is…hmm how can I say this without offending anyone…oh, what the heck, it was a piece of shit.
It had like 6 storylines and each chapter continously shifted protagonists and events. It was boring compared to his other stuff. I think Crichton has to spend less time as a teacher an more time as a true fiction novelist, what got him to fame in the first place.