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Books you hate

Looks like all the usual suspects have been addressed. I too found Da Vinci Code to be nigh-unreadable.

Other contenders include

It, by Stephen King. Booooooring. Incredibly boring. Threw it away after 250 pages.

Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. Hideously dull. Threw it away after 500 pages, when it became evident that no plot was forthcoming.
 
I'm quite done with Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake stories and the companion Meredith Gentry series.
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I keep telling myself that. But just like that gigantic chipotle burrito I get a craving for sometimes, I consume it anyway, knowing I will be worse off when I've finished.

My brand new book that I hate is, The Road, Cormac McCarthy.

It was sold to me as "post apocalyptic earth with cannibals!" I thought that it could not possibly be boring and I was so very wrong.
 
Retto_Pyrrah said:
My brand new book that I hate is, The Road, Cormac McCarthy.

It was sold to me as "post apocalyptic earth with cannibals!" I thought that it could not possibly be boring and I was so very wrong.
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Oh, that unfortunate. It was sold to me as a simple tale of father and son story that happened to be set in a post-apocalyptic world (no cannibals mentioned). I quite enjoyed it, and found the prose enticing. I read it to my son now.
 
We're talking just fiction, right?

Then my vote is for Dianetics, by L. Ron Hubbard. It's just some nutjob omniscient narrator pontificating about, "We know this," and "We know that," with a bunch of horribly convoluted Sci-fi contrivance thrown in. No plot at all. :D
 
Piscivore said:
I enjoyed Ender's Game, althought the short story did it better. I read the next two and was unimpressed, but I did not hate them. Card's Hart's Hope, on the other hand... It starts out with the brutal, torturous rape of a little girl- in public- and didn't have a single sympathetic character in the first three chapters- not even the rape victim. I gave up on it at that point.
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Hmm... I might read that one. I'm not easily dissuaded by lack of sympathy with characters. I liked Jealousy, after all.
 
I couldn't finish reading "Crash" by JG Ballard, and I don't mind pretty grim*, but that was just... eugggh. I managed about 30 pages.


*"Complicity" by Ian Banks, for example.
 
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jimbob said:
I couldn't finish reading "Crash" by JG Ballard, and I don't mind pretty grim*, but that was just... eugggh. I managed about 30 pages.
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I didn't get very far into Crash either, but just because I wasn't in the mood for something grim at the time. Plus I tend to read non-fiction. Incidentally, I like the film of JG's book quite a lot, but I'm a fan of Cronenberg.

A book I hated was "The Bottomless Well and Why We Will Never Run Out Of Energy." The use of the two words "bottomless" and "never" ignore the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But I wanted to give it a chance. Got about 1/3 through and I just couldn't take their generalizations and cherry-picking of data.

The Postman by David Brin. Got about 20 pages into it, and just couldn't take the obviousness of how David set about exploring his premise.

The Yearling. That was forced upon me in jr high. Way too descriptive for my taste. Yeah, that means I don't get along too well with LotR, either. Though I appreciate the way JRRT gives the impression of a world in transition from a mystical past to a less mystical future.
 
If we are talking about genres, I really loathe childrens books that are written without any thought. Often they are for sale as supermarket own-brand baby books.

They might have animal characters, but this is completely incidental to their natures, sometimes a crocodile plays with ikkle wikle lambs, then goes and eats roast beef, with said lambs as guests (for example).

At other times the language is tortuous,
trying to rhyme, but without bothering to scan, using random words that aren't very fortuious.

My favourite example
Christmas is coming and its snowing in the woods
And all the little animals are trying to be good
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Even if they did make the obvious rhyme, why bother?

I can only assume that these are part of a conspiricy to promote illiteracy.

I do however enjoy reading good children's books to my kids, these are often utterly barking*, but they do have a rigorous internal logic.

Plug for my thread on Favourite Children's books

*A usefull rule of thumb, if Quentin Blake has illustrated the book, it is quite likely to be suitably (utterly) insane, and worth reading....
 
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Senex said:
I know you shoujldn't judge a book without reading it -- but this sounds a bit like woo...
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Gotta love that disclaimer too:

Disclaimer: This book is a series of conversations with individuals in the spirit world. The ideas and views expressed here are not the ideas or views of Carter Shepard or Carolyn Cummings, the authors, but are merely transcriptions of the conversations. The authors therefore deny liability for any defamation of character or harm that is caused by the content of the conversations. As we cannot see the individual with whom we are communicating, we cannot make any guarantee as to the validity or truthfulness of the material.
 
Prometheus said:
Gotta love that disclaimer too:

Disclaimer: This book is a series of conversations with individuals in the spirit world. The ideas and views expressed here are not the ideas or views of Carter Shepard or Carolyn Cummings, the authors, but are merely transcriptions of the conversations. The authors therefore deny liability for any defamation of character or harm that is caused by the content of the conversations. As we cannot see the individual with whom we are communicating, we cannot make any guarantee as to the validity or truthfulness of the material.
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Hilarious. I wonder what Steve Irwin is doing there, among such luminaries as Einstein, Ben Franklin and Johnny Cash.
 
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I got I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell a selection of short stories about the adventures of a self proclaimed a-hole as he chases and beds women, drinks too much and his just being smarter and cooler than everyone else. I was given this because my buddy says that Tucker (the writer) reminds him of me. After reading it I may have to kill him.
 
Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore. I stopped reading after two pages. I couldn't get past the sexism. I hated it so much I cannot bring myself to read Lamb even though everyone I know who read it said how great it is.
 
korenyx said:
Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore. I stopped reading after two pages. I couldn't get past the sexism. I hated it so much I cannot bring myself to read Lamb even though everyone I know who read it said how great it is.
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I haven't read Coyote Blue, but have read other Moore efforts, I wonder if the "sexism" wasn't on purpose given that you didn't get past the second page?

Lamb was great fun, and some of his other stuff is at least worth a smile if not an outloud chuckle or gaffaw.
 
The New Space Opera. I saw it for half-price at the bookstore and brought it home, thinking it looked familiar but knowing I had not read it. I even checked the copyright to see that it was printed in the last year. Turns out I already had a copy in my (very large) to-read stack, bought when it was new. So I figured, since I was doubly interested in it, I better get around to reading it.

Now, I love space-spanning stories, if it is an entire book or series. As I found with this collection of short stories, the effort of absorbing the different universes in each of these was much more work than it was worth (at least for the first three stories). You have to get used to the spacey names, the political situation, the characters, and the milieu all in the space of a few pages. It's like reading a horribly long prologue at the beginning of a bad fantasy movie.

It bugs me most that I paid twice for this thing (and also that my memory is so short).
 
LOTR

page 245 before they leave the hobbit hell and something happens.

I suppose the film is faithful to that part of the story, it was on TV and I managed to watch an entire film on a different channel during a siege scene.

Still at least he wrote the poems in italics to make them easier to avoid.

And the ironic thing is that The Hobbitt is actually quite a reasonable book and an appropriate length for the amount of plot.
 
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