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

gideonkain

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ToTaL LoLiGe said:
gideonkain said:
ToTaL LoLiGe said:
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
It's been a few years since I read it, but I loved the Little Doctors that

Clip your soul's cord when you die

I recently just kinda gave up on the Talisman, not for any real reason other than the fact that The Wind Through The Keyhole just came out, but I finished reading that one in two days

If your a fan of Stephan King, besides Dark Tower, I think the short story "Everything's Eventual", "Low Men in Yellow Jackets" and "N." are probably his finest works.
 

Total LOLige

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gideonkain said:
ToTaL LoLiGe said:
gideonkain said:
ToTaL LoLiGe said:
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
It's been a few years since I read it, but I loved the Little Doctors that

Clip your soul's cord when you die

I recently just kinda gave up on the Talisman, not for any real reason other than the fact that The Wind Through The Keyhole just came out, but I finished reading that one in two days

If your a fan of Stephan King, besides Dark Tower, I think the short story "Everything's Eventual", "Low Men in Yellow Jackets" and "N." are probably his finest works.
I haven't read any of the Dark Tower books, I almost bought the Gunslinger but it was £10 and that's alot for 200 pages. I've been thinking of buying Pet Semetary or The Dark Half.
 

gideonkain

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Nov 12, 2010
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ToTaL LoLiGe said:
gideonkain said:
ToTaL LoLiGe said:
gideonkain said:
ToTaL LoLiGe said:
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
It's been a few years since I read it, but I loved the Little Doctors that

Clip your soul's cord when you die

I recently just kinda gave up on the Talisman, not for any real reason other than the fact that The Wind Through The Keyhole just came out, but I finished reading that one in two days

If your a fan of Stephan King, besides Dark Tower, I think the short story "Everything's Eventual", "Low Men in Yellow Jackets" and "N." are probably his finest works.
I haven't read any of the Dark Tower books, I almost bought the Gunslinger but it was £10 and that's alot for 200 pages. I've been thinking of buying Pet Semetary or The Dark Half.
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger is the finest book I ever read in my life, it's cheaper(as expected) online
http://www.amazon.com/The-Gunslinger-Dark-Tower-Book/dp/0452284694/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335756044&sr=8-1
 

SometimesSchizo

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yogibbear said:
SometimesSchizo said:
Speaking as a big Chuck Palahniuk fan, I can safely say that Pygmy was kinda crap. The protagonist was impossible to relate to and the ending was totally inconsistent with the rest of the book. It was so bad I went and read Choke again to make myself feel better.
WhhhhhhaaatTtt???

Pygymy WAS HILARIOUS! I was in tears of laughter on the bus to work every day for a week with that one. I do know a lot of people that struggled to get past the ending of chapter 2 but after that it is bent over in tears of horror/laughter funny.
I've noticed that most people either love or hate Pygmy. I just couldn't get past the hard to read broken English and the god awful ending. One of the biggest turn-offs in that book is that I just CAN'T relate to the protagonist at all. In all of Palahniuk's other books that I've read the protagonist deals with issues and reacts to the world in a way more relatable (even if not realistic) way. I just can't relate to a totalitarian sleeper agent who talks like Borat and rapes dudes in restrooms. And thank God I can't, right?
 

cdstephens

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Beloved by Toni Morrison, had to read it for my English class. It's basically about how an escaped slave is haunted by a ghost baby.

The ghost used to be her daughter. Also, the ghost baby later turns into a 10 year old that then casts a spell on the slave's new boyfriend to sleep with him. The ghost haunts her because when the slave's former master tried to reclaim her and her children, the slave attempted to kill all of her children in order to save them from slavery but only succeeded with her 2 year old daughter.
Needless to say it was pretty fucked up in terms of premise and plot. By the time I got to the end I wasn't exactly sure what I had just experienced.
 

Thamian

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Two books come to mind: Halo: Contact Harvest, and Salvation's Reach.

The former is shit, fucks with the canon established in the previous books like no tomorrow and iirc was filled with meatheaded bros rather than the intelligent, articulate, professionals I'd gotten used to dealing with in the other books.

Salvation's Reach on the other hand wasn't bad. It just wasn't good. And well, it's in the Gaunt's Ghost series. Only In Death is one of the best books I've ever read, closely followed by more or less the rest of the series. I'm not all that sure quite what's happened to Dan Abnett actually, because Blood Pact was also slightly underwhelming, and Salvation's Reach just went even more sideways. Meh.


For a bit of historical badness, most of the Star Wars EU books just don't really do anything for me, chiefly because they (atleast the ones I read back then) tended to focus on the cardboard cutout named Luke Skywalker, and got about ten times better when he was nowhere to be seen (the X-Wing series, esp. Mr. Allston's works, is fucking brilliant for instance).
 

MetalDooley

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Gavmando said:
Nigh Invulnerable said:
superbatranger said:
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.
By reading or by clubbing them over the head with it?

My wife is a fan of David Eddings, so I plowed through the Belgariad books and was simply left with a "Meh" sort of feeling. They were just sort of formulaic and simple for my tastes, but I can see young teens reading them for their first fantasy series and falling in love with them, which is pretty much the case with my wife's familiarity with them.
David Eddings' books were awesome!

...And then I re-read them as an adult and thought "meh" too. He wrote every series to a formula that he even spelled out in The Rivan Codex. One of his pearls of wisdom for writing a book was to belittle the reader so that they would be impressed.
Just try reading The Redemption of Althalus. His books got worse with age.
Think Redemption of Althalus is bad try reading "The Dreamers".A story that could easily have been wrapped up in a single book is instead dragged out over four novels.Then just to top it off it has one of the shittest endings I've ever read
 
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The Children of Húrin. It still astounds me that a story as simple The Hobbit could be in anyway related to some half-baked tragedy involving incest and suicide.
 

katsumoto03

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I've read a few Darren Shan books and they were all terrible. They were like something I'd have written when I was in the sixth grade.
 

userwhoquitthesite

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Michael Crichton's "Terminal Man"
Seems okay while you read, a little dull, but you still look forward to the payoff... which never really happens. You finish it, and just realize that it was terrible the whole time. Actually, there are a couple of his books of his that work out like that...

A book I hated every step of the way through was "The House On Mango Street". A piss-poor piece of literature without any merit.
 

II2

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Esotera said:
Neuromancer by William Gibson...it's hugely influential, coined the term cyberspace, but I literally could not get past the first 20 pages. It's as if it was written by a 5 year old.
Putting silliness the like of: 'it was written by a 5 year old' aside, what made you feel that way about it? I mean, sure, it's Gibson's first published book and attempt at a full novel with the high concept sci fi tempered with a youthful, counter culture vibe... is that what (I'm willing to meet you halfway on) seemed "juvenile"?

A couple of things to bear in mind, reading it, is that he was trying to capture 'cyber cool' in 1983, so its use of outlandish character names, punk rock attitude and 'outmoded' technical concepts are in part unavoidably associated in the time it was written.

If it's not for you, it's not for you, but I feel it really is a rich, edifying read and I'd encourage you to give it a second pass, with the time gap of culture in mind. A lot of the joy is projecting how cutting edge and forward looking it was *for the time*.

Anyway, penny for your thoughts.
 

Esotera

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II2 said:
Esotera said:
Neuromancer by William Gibson...it's hugely influential, coined the term cyberspace, but I literally could not get past the first 20 pages. It's as if it was written by a 5 year old.
Putting silliness the like of: 'it was written by a 5 year old' aside, what made you feel that way about it? I mean, sure, it's Gibson's first published book and attempt at a full novel with the high concept sci fi tempered with a youthful, counter culture vibe... is that what (I'm willing to meet you halfway on) seemed "juvenile"?

A couple of things to bear in mind, reading it, is that he was trying to capture 'cyber cool' in 1983, so its use of outlandish character names, punk rock attitude and 'outmoded' technical concepts are in part unavoidably associated in the time it was written.

If it's not for you, it's not for you, but I feel it really is a rich, edifying read and I'd encourage you to give it a second pass, with the time gap of culture in mind. A lot of the joy is projecting how cutting edge and forward looking it was *for the time*.

Anyway, penny for your thoughts.
I'll probably end up giving it another go at some point just because of the great reputation it has, but I believe I found it really hard to follow what was actually happening, thanks to a rapid pace & loads of made up words. I read plenty of other sci-fi from this era and before and it seems to have aged better. But maybe that's just personal preference.
 

crazyarms33

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Angels and Demons by Dan Brown just gets stupid at the end. I bought it to carry me over the flight from the US to Italy and I ended up finishing it AFTER the return trip back to the states. Just terrible.

I also didn't like the 3rd book in the Hunger Games series...whatever it was called. Mockingjay? Something like that...
 

Gardenia

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The Assassini by Thomas Gifford. Read it while on a long train ride, hoping it would be somewhat akin to the Dan Brown novels (ridicolous but exciting and entertaining), and boy was I disappointed! I spent the majority of the train ride admiring the mountains instead.
 

5ilver

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Danny Roberts said:
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?"
Also, this. I was very very disappointed by the Stand.
 

wintercoat

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The Sword of Shannara. It just dragged on, and on, and on and the plot was rather bad. The setting was interesting, and I liked The Elfstones of Shannara and The Wishsong of Shannara, but the first book was just painful.
 

Karma168

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None that i've immediately said are shit (apart from school mandated reads) but there are a few in my collection that I would struggle to remember the plot of if you asked.

A perfect example are books written by Karen Rose. I can give a brief overview - broken man meets broken woman and they fall in love and heal their wounds while trying to catch an evil killer - but that's mostly because every book she's written (that I've read) has that structure. Specifics of plot become really had to remember when you're not sure which one of the 10 books you have is the right one.

1984 is a book I think has a disappointing ending. I know what the author was going for and I can appreciate the message but the 'lie down and accept things' ending was a little grating.

Another is Peace and War by Joe Haldeman. It's a great book about a man getting to see human evolution first hand as he experiences time dilation during an interstellar war. The ending however just seems like he ran out of ideas, it was interesting at the time but when you look back you think "really?"

And Finally (since I just finished it) Embedded by Dan Abnett. Again great book but the ending is ridiculously quick (probably less than 50 pages) and it just looks like the publishers told him to wrap it up there and forget the rest. In the story a reporter goes looking for the cause of a war, finds it and the story ends right there, without us ever knowing for sure what it was.
 

JarinArenos

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John Ringo's "Looking Glass" series, final book. The series started as relatively solid sci-fi with a few fantastic elements, and over the course of the series undertook a slow downward slide into camp sillyness, culminating in
A weaponized anime space concert/lightshow a-la Macross 7.
No, I'm not kidding. Ringo has always had an unhealthy fixation on musical soundtracks for his action scenes (always the same four freaking songs, too), like he wants to be making movies, not books... but this was utterly ridiculous.

Kelley Armstrong's "Otherworld" series. Got through the first book, even if it had a disappointing lack of characterization (and oh god the stereotypes). Stopped a third of the way through the second book due to frustration at the utter lack of imagination lousy/weak plot devices. Possibly the worst faux-"strong female" protagonist I've ever seen. She shatters at the slightest pressure and has to have her psychopathic boyfriend/abuser rescue her.

... still a better love story than Twilight, though decidedly aimed at the same crowd.