Ever read a book so bad that you actaully stopped reading?

[A Distant Star]

Yeah this peace of crap right here.

http://www.amazon.com/Wizards-First-Rule-Sword-Truth/dp/0812548051

Bought it when my bookstore was selling it or a dollar in some promo to promote the latest release in the series and got about a 100 pages in and just stopped. It was so paint by numbers I couldnt bring myself to go on. People tell me the later books are great, and they very well may be right... but you know what? I dont care. Book didnt hook me and I see no reason to suffer along in the hopes that it gets better. I tried that with Wheel of Time and I got through 6 books before I realized that this really was as good as it was going to get... never again.

 

[hotsauceman]

All the crud they made us read in high school made me not pick up a book for a year. Thankfully some love craft horror saved me. I hav read alot sense the beggining of the semester.

 

[Squarez]

A book named Zlata's Diary.

The only reason I actually kept reading is because I needed to do that for school.

That book is the most horrible fucking book about the Bosnian War I've ever read.

I'd also wager that it was probably the best, too.

 

[walrusaurus]

Atlas Shrugged. Still got it but I haven't really tried picking it up again for awhile.

It's not necessarily "bad" its just I got bored quickly.

heh this was what i was going to say. I only got about a third of the way through it.

Also The Great Gatsby i found to be unbearable. I read the whole thing though because i had to for school.

Also The Scarlet Letter

 

[Quaidis]

I loved Eragon and Eldest from the Inheritance saga (Chris Paolini, dragon on the cover, in case you haven't heard of it) but whilst reading Brisingr, the third book, I simply couldn't get past halfway... It was too slow, and nothing was happening, and, he kinda killed the whole idea of battles by putting magicians in there. I lost interest in it, so I'm not sure whether I'll try again with it and get the 4th book, cause I would like to know how it ends (even though its probably predictable)

That's okay. I read Brisingr all the way through and wanted to hit something for a few unredeemable weeks afterward. But I'll still get the fourth book, since I wasted my money on the first three anyway.





I buy books from independent and/or new authors, then I read them and critique the books (either in public or to the author, depending on how personal the critique is.) There are very few gems in society when it comes to Indy books... So many authors think they can make a great 1200 page story out of their DnD campaign, refusing to find an editor or cut anything out after the product is finished... Seriously, I can't stress this enough, no one will enjoy your book if it's after a DnD (or furry larp) game, no matter how good you may think Mary Sue 3000 is as an elf... Or a wolf... And by the GODS get a fucking editor. You may think it's perfect as it stands once completed, but it's not. It never is. You can pay a little or reach out to someone that's somewhat professional to tell you to cut out about 400 pages of filler and add something integral to forward the plot.

I'm sorry, I went off on a bit of a rant there. There are too many books to name... And I wont, really. I'm sorry. As angry as I can get at an Indy author's writings, I'm not about to crucify them all over a forum like this.

 

[Something Amyss]

I will probably catch a lot of shit for this, but Lord of the Rings.

My dad read those books to me when I was young, and so it was only a sense of nostalgia that allowed me to slog through 'em.

I've rarely stopped reading because I thought a book was bad. I put them down because they don't interest me.

The God Delusion was one that I thought was BAD. Before anyone gets on me, I actually am on the same side of many arguments with Dawkins, but he comes off as a jerk and the book seemed more to stroke his own ego than to actually win any people to the fold.

And that's fine, if you're into masturbation.

 

[Something Amyss]

Also The Great Gatsby i found to be unbearable. I read the whole thing though because i had to for school.

Crap. Forgot this one. I never finished it, managed to BS a C on the test and keep my grade good in the class. I was seriously, that uninterested in it that I was willing to stake my grades on not finishing it.

 

[madster11]

Yeah half of the crap they shoved down our throats in high-school made me not read any books for a long time.
Idiots almost ruined my appetite for them, but now i ALWAYS have Reader minimized with a book in a series that i'm either reading through for the first time, or again.

Am i the only one in the world who prefers to read books on a computer screen, as opposed to actual paper?

 

[Sagacious Zhu]

Bonfire of the Vanities (1/4 of the way through)
Atlas Shrugged (Half-way through John Galt's speech)
Breaking Dawn (Up until the werewolf falls in love with the hell-fetus)
The Jungle (After the third unspeakable tragedy visited on the poor of New York, it gets old)
Pride and Prejudice (Four Chapters in)

 

[Aur0ra145]

The Village by David Mammet. It's a book about nothing really, just bored depressed people in a small town during winter.

 

[DJDarque]

Also The Great Gatsby i found to be unbearable. I read the whole thing though because i had to for school.

I had to read that for school my Junior year of High School. I was probably the only person in my class who liked it.

 

[DJDarque]

and to this man... Though I adore Lord of the Rings and Tolkien, I can see where you're coming from with this. It does get quite slow. I will accept 'boring' as an adjective for LotR, but what I don't like, is when people call it stupid. That is when I would start 'giving people shit'.

It also starts ridiculously quick in Fellowship. I've never made it past Fellowship because of the onslaught of characters. The Harry Potter series is a good example of books which handles having many characters well.

It is like 7 books long. It'd be pretty easy to introduce characters gradually over the course of 7 books.

Unless I'm mistaken Lord of the Rings was originally published as six books. Not that big of a difference.

 

[BakaSmurf]

The Old Man and the Sea. Fucking hated that book, couldn't even tell you why, I just hated every second that I had to spend reading that pile of crap.

 

[lacktheknack]

"Hunchback of Notre Dame", but that's because it was pure scenery porn, which I wasn't into when I was twelve. If I find it again, I'm going to try again.

Also, I DESPERATELY wanted to stop reading Elie Wiesel's "Night". I had to read it for class, and I was so pissed by the end that I made my entire final project about Nazi Concentration Camp experiments just to out-squick my teacher.

 

[SuperSuperSuperGuy]

Last year, my English teacher forced my class to read a book called "The Book of Negroes". It was just so bad that I couldn't finish it. It was confusing, overly long and boring because of ridiculously bad pacing. The characters were unlikeable and unrelatable. The protagonist was devoid of personality. No one liked the book.

The good thing was that it didn't matter because my teacher was going on maternity leave. The new teacher had way better taste.

 

[Enkidu88]

Ulysses by James Joyce, though that book pretty much prides itself on being unreadable so maybe that doesn't count.

I'll also put forward LOTR as an extremely difficult read that I never finished. I have a ton of respect for the man, I mean he created a really awesome world and he used his talents as a linguist to create an entire language for it, but...I just don't think he was much of a writer. He didn't have a sense of pacing, and he spent waaaayyyy too much time on describing things.

 

[vivalahelvig]

It can not be said enough!!!
Great Expectations is one of the most BORING books i've ever read, i stopped reading after 15 pages.
Honourable mention goes to The old man and and the peice of shit book sea! because i was forced to read it in middle school...and write a paper on it. I failed the paper because i couldn't be assed to care!

EDIT: Fuck ernest hemmingway.

 

[Gatx]

Cthulhu's Reign: a collection of short stories about what a world post Eldritch horror takeover would be like, which I thought was interesting and I'm a big fan of Lovecraft mythos stories in general. But when Cthulhu downsizes a human size Cthulhus (that keeps saying "thooloo," you konw, like a Pokemon) and basically stalks a group of survivors and gorily rips them apart B-movie sci-fi style, I could not keep reading. THAT IS NOT WHAT THE LOVECRAFT MYTHOS IS ABOUT!

 

[Gatx]

My bad, unintentional double post

 

[imperialwar]

I managed a few chapters in the first book on the "wheel of time" series but found the language and wording unnecessarily complicated and long winded with no real direction.