Books Not to Read

Disbelief said:
I enjoyed The Belgariad by Eddings, as it didn't take itself too seriously and thought it was a nice easy read. Didn't need a retelling in The Mallorean and again in The Elenium and again in The Tamuli. How about some new ideas?
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I read all of The Belgariad, and about half of The Mallorean before giving up. I found them to be little more than a merely-competently-written collection of common fantasy tropes and cliches, with nothing particularly original or distinctive in how they were used. The only reason I got as far as I did is that I have profound aversion to leaving a book unfinished, and it has to get pretty bad or boring before I will drop it.
 
luchog said:
I read all of The Belgariad, and about half of The Mallorean before giving up. I found them to be little more than a merely-competently-written collection of common fantasy tropes and cliches, with nothing particularly original or distinctive in how they were used. The only reason I got as far as I did is that I have profound aversion to leaving a book unfinished, and it has to get pretty bad or boring before I will drop it.
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I liked it, and have fond memories of it.

I wouldn't recommend it to a 40 year old fantasy veteran, but for a 14 year old looking for something to read that's not bloody Rowling, it's superb.
 
3point14 said:
I liked it, and have fond memories of it.

I wouldn't recommend it to a 40 year old fantasy veteran, but for a 14 year old looking for something to read that's not bloody Rowling, it's superb.
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I like Eddings because his tone isn't so serious. His characters talk like actual people, they joke around, and it's not all gloom and doom. Makes a nice contrast from the oh-so-serious tone of Tolkien and clones.
 
TragicMonkey said:
I like Eddings because his tone isn't so serious. His characters talk like actual people, they joke around, and it's not all gloom and doom. Makes a nice contrast from the oh-so-serious tone of Tolkien and clones.
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So...


Which Feist books belong on this list...?
 
luchog said:
The best way to read Finnegan's Wake is to have someone else read it to you, ideally someone with the proper accent. Or at the very least, read it out loud paying special attention to the pronunciation (if you do it right, you should end up with a vaguely Dubliner accent). The music of his language really shines through.




The problem with most people who don't like Joyce is that they've only tried to read Finnegan's Wake or Ulysses. They've almost never picked up Dubliners or his early poetry.
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I've only tried A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I spent 30 minutes trying to decipher the first 2 pages and gave up. Simply incomprehensible to me. That was about 15 years ago though, I'd be prepared to give him another go now.
 
philkensebben said:
I've only tried A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I spent 30 minutes trying to decipher the first 2 pages and gave up. Simply incomprehensible to me. That was about 15 years ago though, I'd be prepared to give him another go now.
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When I first read Turn of the Screw I thought it was a really dense read, but when I finished I was really glad I stuck with it.
 
philkensebben said:
I've only tried A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I spent 30 minutes trying to decipher the first 2 pages and gave up. Simply incomprehensible to me. That was about 15 years ago though, I'd be prepared to give him another go now.
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No,no, no, philkensebben! Don't let anyone talk you in to it. It's just like Sushi! You're still going to hate it no matter how many times your friends wax rhapsodic about the quail egg and the California Roll. Now, when friends ask me to eat Sushi I think for a moment about how much fun it would be to sit there and laugh, roll my eyes and make fun of the food like the vegans do when they're invited to a "normal" restaurant. But then, I catch myself and politely decline the offer and think what a marvelous time I'm going to have with a bottle of Chianti, some fava beans and some human liver pâté all by myself!
 
Brainster said:
It's a period piece but extremely dated. It caught on in the late 1960s as everybody discovered drugs. IMHO the caution about reading it after age 20 is mostly because Kerouac is a terrible writer; before age 20 you may get into it for all the dope references. I remember a criticism of it years ago--that it wasn't writing it was typing, and I generally agree. Probably reasonably honest and astounding for what it reveals about the drug subculture of the 1950s.
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I read it in my late teens (circa 1970) after reading The Electric Koolaid Acid Test to learn about where Neal Cassady came from. I was more interested in it as a sort of history lesson rather than a novel telling a story. If I was reading it for the first time as a novel I doubt that I would have finished it.

Yes, drug culture did influence my reading material around that time :)
 
philkensebben said:
I've only tried A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I spent 30 minutes trying to decipher the first 2 pages and gave up. Simply incomprehensible to me. That was about 15 years ago though, I'd be prepared to give him another go now.
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Start with Dubliners. It's written in more standard language, and provides an interesting portrait of his times.
 
3point14 said:
I liked it, and have fond memories of it.

I wouldn't recommend it to a 40 year old fantasy veteran, but for a 14 year old looking for something to read that's not bloody Rowling, it's superb.
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I have to agree, I think I was also around 13 or 14 when my brother gave me Pawn of Prophecy to read and it turned me from someone who almost never read a book into a voracious reader.

I really do have to thank my brother for that. He originally just handed me a copy of it and I put it on my shelf and didn't look at it for a few months. Then he asked for it back and started reading it aloud to my younger sister every day. She talked about it every day full of excitement, which got me interested to the point that I started listening when he read to her. After a day or two I couldn't wait for the next session so I started reading the book on my own and then went through the rest of the series.

Older brothers are pretty awesome.
 
Elagabalus said:
No,no, no, philkensebben! Don't let anyone talk you in to it. It's just like Sushi! You're still going to hate it no matter how many times your friends wax rhapsodic about the quail egg and the California Roll. Now, when friends ask me to eat Sushi I think for a moment about how much fun it would be to sit there and laugh, roll my eyes and make fun of the food like the vegans do when they're invited to a "normal" restaurant. But then, I catch myself and politely decline the offer and think what a marvelous time I'm going to have with a bottle of Chianti, some fava beans and some human liver pâté all by myself!
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What? I love Sushi! And I dont have any friends.
 
Not sure if this was mentioned, I even might have said it - but worth pointing out again. Bio of a Space Tyrant by Piers Anthony. Not sure how I made it through, but it was just awful.

One I am torn on is The Messiah Stone and it's sequel The Dark Messiah, by Martin Caidin. Truly an awful human being as the main character, but I kind of enjoyed the read.
 
Classics I attempted but failed to finish:

Kidnapped. I found the protagonist too annoyingly stupid to bear.

Morte d'Arthur, the Mallory one. I enjoyed how very different it was from the current Arthurian mythos, amazing how much got dropped over the years, but the style was just too ponderous.

Ulysses. Everything just sounded so dreary and dull. I expected a work so scandalous to at least be fun.

Tales of Genji. Sorry, Lady Whatserface, it may be a significant work but damned if it's a readable one.
 
Oh, and Nine Tailors. I'm a fan of Sayers other books, particularly Murder Must Advertise and Have His Carcase, and hold Gaudy Night to be the best mystery ever written (sorry, Ngaio!), but Nine Tailors was just such an impenetrable slog! And yet Sayers reputedly considered it the best of her Lord Peter books!

Speaking of Ngaio Marsh, I love most of her books but recommend skipping all the ones written before Artists In Crime. Also skip Died In The Wool, she went experimental on that one and it came across like she wrote it while tripping.
 
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