Books you finished and just thought: "Well...that was shit"

[Shiftygiant]

I guess if I can't say any school taught ones I guess The Hunger Games. It was... well... battle royal. I suppose that I can see why the lawsuit happened. also updates of fairy tales into EROTIC books. They all failed for me. American psycho was good though. Hey everyone, lets get collectively drunk and read Brent Ellis.

 

[FalloutJack]

House of Leaves.

Oh, I'm sorry, I mean...

House of Leaves.

Incomprehensible is the start of the troubles this book has, and hardly the end of it. I do believe there is a conclave of writers who love putting just anything at random together and head off to the editor going "I HAZ A STORY!", and the editor just...wants to move it along before the guy tries to explain it to him...

And no, I don't want you to try either. I prefer House of Pancakes.

 

[Oz Draconis]

Maximum Ride: The Final Warning. It's the fourth in the Maximum Ride series which were for the most part pretty good, although the science was a bit strange at times.

I won't go into detail, but the book is about the main characters having nothing to do, so they go to Antarctica, play with penguins, defeat a brain in a jar(yes, really.) by accident via hurricane, then they talk to Congress about global warming.

Oh, and a talking dog grew wings for absolutely no reason.

AHHHHH GOD! Just... Never mention that book ever again. I had managed to successfully forget it even existed until you came along.

It's like the writer just decided to throw all sembalance of the characters actually behaving in character and just generally making sense to make a really terribly presented statement about global warming and how teh warld is gonna b ruined 4evar by it.

Hmmmm, apart from that there's... Maybe the last few Darren Shan books in the Vampire and Demonata series'? He really seems to have a problem ending a long running series without throwing a "world resets from zero" plot device into it.

That oneshot he did about that executioner? Did anyone read that? Was actually really good I think. He just has to up the stakes to ridiculously high levels in his long running stuff so he can't really end things well without it coming off as Deus Ex Machina levels of contrivance


Anything else? Well I think that the last book in The Night Angel trilogy came close to having a shit ending but somehow managed to end things rather well, all things considered. I could go back and read those again just so I can read 'bout Vi again. I always liked her

DUDE! I loved The Night Angel Trilogy!! Although the ending did flirt a little too much with the concept of either SUPER HAPPY ENDING or EVERYONE DIED IN A FIRE. Seriously. Either a character's subplot ended miraculously perfect or they got torn to bits/ tortured and eaten to death. Still awesome series though.

 

[Setrus]

Stuart Hill's 'Cry of the Icemark'.
I kept thinking "Well it has to have some sort of twist, I mean come on, he can't possible try to make me take this seriously."...but yep, he did.

Two Mary Sues, a constant lecturing about the wonders of nature and the evil of industry, plot driven by coincidences, laughable easy diplomacy considering half of those they talk to are supposed to be enemies of generations of warfare, un-modified mythology from all corners of the world mashed together and the bits the writer clearly loved given first place in a miss-mash, painting up the idea of some superior threat with a superior general, only for the superior threat to lack teeth in any engagement we actually see and the superior general being a blockhead...not to mention a severely lacking imagination in how to describe events and the book turned into a chore. (whew, that was a lot of stuff...)

I was not impressed.

 

[F-I-D-O]

Screw it, I don't finish shitty books, so I'm going to mention two from school:
Jane Eyre
What a FANTASTIC piece of shit. Jane spends the entire book reaching a stable point in her life, and running from it. She then (note: this was presented as a "strong female character" and had "great feminist ideals") spends most of the book bowing down to the man. Rather than standing up to views she disagrees with, she runs from them. Granted, the "run from a man who has the crazy 'ex'-wife in the attic instinct is probably right, but that is the exception. She then goes back to him. Her motivations are poorly planned, and it is evident the author was payed by the word. Descriptions are pages too long, for all the buildup of a character there is no payoff, etc.
I disagree that you have to judge a book based on the time it was written. Context is important, but a time difference doesn't excuse bad characters, horrid dialogue, and just poor writing.

Raisin in the Sun
Raisin makes some good points about racism and the quality of life of black in American cities in the early to mid 19th century. But I despised Walter's character so much. Rather than work to reach his goals, he puts his hopes in get rich quick schemes and cries about it when it falls apart. For all of the time he spends saying how he doesn't get respect, he does NOTHING to earn it.

I did like Frankenstein and Inherit the Wind, two books I remember from school. I also like Shakespeare, and have nothing against "classic" literature.

EDIT: Forgot about God-Emperor of Dune
It seemed to ramble and never really go anywhere except when you reached the "We found/he told the story about the plot-advancing McGuffin!" and killed my enthusiasm for the Dune series. Granted it was waning after Children, but God-Emperor felt like he just abandoned the universe he had spent so long to set up. I don't want to hear the jihad stories in the past tense, just as I read them in the future tense before, I want to experience them. It felt like the build-up lead to a period of time he had no intention of writing about, other than as a way of the character to say "That was/That's going to be crazy"

 

[Wackymon]

Meh, I never really enjoyed the hunger games. Don't know why, just found it perplexing and boring. I suppose I must be thick or something, or just have vastly differing opinions on things in life. I say that's the worst thing I can remember. The rest is just a blur of black smudges on paper.

 

[Danny Roberts]

The Stand by Stephen King.

Talk about a whole bunch of nothing that book is about 1000 pages long and just never gets going. It suffers from King's syndrome of having boring protaganists but for a book about the end of the world it shows a staggering lack of closure.

After I was done my reaction was: "is that it?" ...after 1000+ pages: "is that it?"

 

[Leodiensian]

House of Leaves.

Incomprehensible is the start of the troubles this book has, and hardly the end of it.

It's not incomprehensible; it's postmodern!

*ba-dum-tish*

(I'm not disagreeing with you, by the way; that's basically the point I made earlier about the misconception that it can't be comprehensible and artistic/literary at the same time)

Yeah, as a story I really don't like House of Leaves and I've just never been able to stick with it the whole way through to the end, but it's a text I do keep coming back to a lot (especially to reference in literature essays) because of what it does with form and structure. I love epistolary fiction, I love postmodernism and layered narratives but House of Leaves is kind of an example of 'too much'. Like, how there are all those footnotes? Some of them from different sources? And sometimes the footnotes FIGHT? I love that.

If it had a better narrative to make you care about just getting the pages turning, it'd have been one of my favourite novels of all time. It's still one of my favourite BOOKS of all time (but purely in terms of the actual book, rather than the novel, if you get my distinction)

 

[MasterOfHisOwnDomain]

I remember reading The Hobbit and when I finished I put the book down and said out load I have no idea what I just read. It wasn't that the book was bad I just couldn't tell what was happening mind you I read this when I was like 9-11 years old area.

I implore you: Read it again. I only managed to read part of the book when I was younger... got bored and gave up. Came back to it recently. Absolutely great.

 

[Theogrin]

I'm afraid I'm going to have to follow in the footsteps of many in this thread: the biggest disappointment of a book of late, for me, was David Weber's Out of the Dark. War between Humanity and well-meaning (in general) aliens, religious motivations on both sides, a struggle which was absolutely believable, the book reaches an incredible climax - and then, suddenly, Dracula.

I don't even want to spoiler that, because warning people off this work is a public service.

David Weber, you wrote so many wonderful books. Honor Harrington was a barrel of fun and excellent writing. Why did you feel the need to reduce yourself to this?! Slamming this against a wall was not enough; I want this thing to be hit by a .50 in midair.

---

ETA: The Narnia series, as read by a 12-year-old. I loved nearly every one of the books, but when I reached the seventh, the message that 'oh, this is a Christian allegory' beat me about the head and neck. I still love the series, as an example of fantastic writing, but C. S. Lewis abandoned all pretense at that point, and it lost me there.

 

[Klitch]

I recently decided that I wanted to read all of Michael Crichton's books and, to my great surprise, some of his earlier works are absolutely terrible. The same guy who wrote Jurassic Park, Congo, and State of Fear is also responsible for stuff like Disclosure (perhaps the most boring legal "thriller" that I've ever set eyes on, not to mention blatantly sexist) and Rising Sun (which was supposed to be a police procedural based around the social quandary of foreign direct investment in American business but instead came across as a paranoid, racist rant about those underhanded, deceitful Japanese).

Crichton was always really good about wrapping a story around a social issue, but those two books (written in the 1990s) were all about how it was inevitable that the American corporate world would be ruled by hateful shrews of women and an Illuminati-esq collection of Japanese companies. Ignoring for the moment the sexism and racism, reading about the imminent collapse of American industry in a book written 20 years ago makes it hard to take anything he says seriously. Worst of all, the stories weren't even interesting...

Edit:

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Just awful on every conceivable level. Condescending, preachy, mystical mumbo-jumbo horseshit. Damn, fifteen years later and I'm still angry that I read this fucking worthless crap.

...but that book is amazing...I guess it all depends on how you interpret his philosophy.

 

[RVzero]

I got Dan Browns Digital Fortress last christmas so I felt obliged to read it... It was crap, just like everything else he's written. Mainly because the characters who are supposed to have IQ's of over 140 (in the main characters case 170) act like they have IQ's of 50-70, and the fact that the whole climax could've been solved by JUST UNPLUGGING THE GOD DAMNED COMPUTERS INTERNETS CABLE!

The one bit I liked was the plot twist about the digital fortress itself... Even tho I saw it coming from miles away.

 

[Mandalore_15]

Transition by Iain Banks. The book laid lots of interesting groundwork that just never went anywhere. Characters were brought up that seemed to be important but were never developed, there were loose plot threads and the whole thing led up to an anticlimactic and unsatisfactory ending, which sort of made you think "well, what the fuck was the point of all that?".

It seemed like the kind of book that had been left open for a sequel, but as far as I know he has no plans to write one. =/

 

[DefiantGoblin]

Cell by Stephen King.
The metaphor of mobile phones turning people into brainless zombies and the development of this into zombies that had a pshycic link to demonstrate the positive idea of us being bettter connected was a fantastic idea it just didn't work in practice.
Ultimately it was just a poorly written, generic survival story. The characters weren't fleshed out aswell as they could have been, they relied on a school boy as some authority on what was happening and the ending was left open ended to leave the reader thinking, in much the same vein as McEwan (although he does this successfully), which comes across as a bit of a cop-out.

 

[JasonBurnout16]

Atlas Shrugged. It took me months to finish that tedious load of crap. I thought it would be interesting, but damn, you could use it to put an insomniac to bed.

I salute you sir, I got to the chapter with the 70 page speech and have given up.

I think I can rightly say FUCK THAT! I've had your ideology for the last 1000 pages, I do not need it condensed any more.

 

[gideonkain]

I'm reading Insomina by Stephen King, I wouldn't describe it as shit it's just a tad disappointing no where near as good as I thought it'd be. I've got to the last 194 pages and I just can't be arsed to finish it. Sorry, King old friend you've lost this one man.

Insomnia starts really slow, but the last half of the book is probably some of his best work - especially if you follow the Dark Tower series

 

[gideonkain]

Cell by Stephen King.
The metaphor of mobile phones turning people into brainless zombies and the development of this into zombies that had a pshycic link to demonstrate the positive idea of us being bettter connected was a fantastic idea it just didn't work in practice.
Ultimately it was just a poorly written, generic survival story. The characters weren't fleshed out aswell as they could have been, they relied on a school boy as some authority on what was happening and the ending was left open ended to leave the reader thinking, in much the same vein as McEwan (although he does this successfully), which comes across as a bit of a cop-out.

Contrary to Insomnia, Cell starts awesome and ends lame...Raggidy Man, w/e.

 

[Total LOLige]

I'm reading Insomina by Stephen King, I wouldn't describe it as shit it's just a tad disappointing no where near as good as I thought it'd be. I've got to the last 194 pages and I just can't be arsed to finish it. Sorry, King old friend you've lost this one man.

Insomnia starts really slow, but the last half of the book is probably some of his best work - especially if you follow the Dark Tower series

I loved the first half of the book but it started to get a little below par when Ralph found out Lois could see the auras.

Captcha: my better half