Ask Lemmy

Well it's a series, but Three body problem. It should have been right up my alley, but I got so tired of every decision by every character being stupid that I couldn't be bothered to read the last fifty pages of the last book.

Even if I charitably assumed the point of the book was to show that people are weak and stupid, the series was such a ham-handed strawman as to undercut its own commentary. And even worse, it had just enough interesting ideas to lead me to believe it was going somewhere worthwhile, but it never did.

It's been years and I'm still pissed off that I wasted a week on it.

I can't remember details since it was in HS, but reading The Catcher in the Rye was a painfully slow and boring process. I didn't get the story, the meaning, the struggle. It was a guy complaining about everything and being miserable and then I had to write a book report about it. Icky, icky, gross.

Maybe if I read it now it'll be different but I dun wanna!

I don't remember what book it was but I walked into a metal pole reading it. I wasn't seriously injured or anything but it was pretty embarrassing.

Pride and Prejudice was the most unrelatable book I was forced to read in school. A rich, noble, Victorian family whose main problems are, while they are rich and noble, they are not as rich and noble as they'd like to be. They have no real skills or assets, so rather than pursue trade or business ventures, they put all their eggs in the basket of their daughters being able to swoon and marry the bachelors of richer, nobler, families.

As someone who does not live in Victorian England, grew up poor, and is generally bored when shallow romance is the main theme, that book was hell. It's often praised for showing the differences between classes in that period, which makes zero sense to me because the only classes it compares are the Upper Class and the slightly less rich Upper Class. It would be like a modern book talking about the "struggles" of a family that only has a net worth of $100 million and how hard they have it compared to billionaire families. Boo-fucking-hoo.

I genuinely do not understand how that book is a classic. It's basically Keeping Up with the Kardashians in Victorian times. It's a trash story with trash characters and trash themes. It is the first, and only, book I felt compelled to burn once I was done with. I wouldn't even wipe my ass with it.

I've really wanted to get into Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and bought the first few books. I've never managed to make it through the first one, The Gunslinger, even though I've given it probably five or six attempts. I always make it to the same part in the book where Roland and the kid are using the hand-cart through the tunnels, and it just takes so. fucking. long. to get anywhere and for anything to happen, and my mind starts drifting as I'm reading and then I start missing things and have to go back... That section of the book is so frustratingly boring that I can't make it through.

We read Macbeth in high school, but they dragged it out over a whole year. It was so painful!

The Stone Angel.

It's a miserable story about a dying old woman regretting all her life choices. It's also required reading in Canadian high schools because the author is Canadian.

And then, on top of all that, my teacher absolutely insisted that its only major theme was "hope" and docked marks for having any other interpretation.

This was, oh, a decade ago or more. Was reading a book on polyamory and ethical non-monogamy. I can't remember the title, but it was one of the early "big" books on the topic.

It actually made me angry. Not because of the topic, I'm fine with the topic or I wouldn't have picked it up in the first place.

But the author said such STUPID shit like "There's no such thing as a 'reverse gangbang'." And I'm like "Well, shit, man, your search engine must suck!"

It made me angry that he took an important topic and got it so thoroughly and completely wrong. And that people held it up as like this "Important" work on the topic.

Some books are not to be set aside lightly, they are to be thrown with great force.

Atlas Shrugged.

There are very few books that have left me with a "This is the face of evil" impression. I tried to give it a fair shake, but this one did, alongside the fact that it devolves into stimulant-addled ranting.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not inherently opposed to stimulant-addled ranting - I like On the Road, for instance - but it just left an awful taste in my mouth.

On the other hand, I enjoyed the Fountainhead, but I was young, usually stoned, and took away an 'integrity of artistic vision' interpretation that resonated. I do not know if this would survive a re-read.

Not one book, but almost all of Asimov's Foundation series. The first one is one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time because I love seeing how each group has to use game theory to solve their own unique issue in order to survive and flourish as a society built on science and reason. While I admit that it's not always written well, I love the mindset that Asimov wanted to emphasize: violence should be the last resort for solving conflict between nations. When the factions outside of Foundation threaten them with war, they respond with soft power like economic pressure, religious sway, and focusing on making better advancements to science and engineering to defend themselves by being too valuable to destroy.

The fatal problem with the series arises in Book 2 though. Book 2 (Foundation & Empire) introduces the interesting concept of "what happens when a massive wrench is thrown into the meticulously calculated 1000-year plan?" Unfortunately, you can tell that at this point is when the concepts of the story become too smart for Asimov to handle, and he instead begins his trend of doubling and tripling down on deus ex machina characters with mind control powers for the rest of the series. All of the interesting methods of sociopolitical problem solving are thrown out the window to become sub-par adventure stories.

Books 4 and 5 (Foundation's Edge and Foundation & Earth) were written particularly poorly, and was probably the point where I should have cut my losses. The books follow not-Han-Solo adventure man, contain a sexist female sidekick that only serves to be a hot piece of ass for Asimov's self-insert character to have sex with, and then has an extremely uncomfortable "happy ending" where a traumatized child is left to be groomed by a robotic parental figure so that the robot can one day mind-wipe the child and insert it's own consciousness into their body. What's more is that they completely ditch the core premise of the 1000-year plan, and the ending undercuts any direction that the story could have gone from there.

The prequel books 6 and 7 (Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation) aren't nearly as bad as 4 or 5, but they completely undermine the importance and intelligence of the character Hari Seldon from the first book. Instead of him being a great man and brilliant mathematician on his own, he's essentially led around by his nose by undercover robots that are the secret architects of everything just because Asimov wanted to tie-in elements from his books about robots.

L. Ron Hubbard's "Mission Earth" series. I was young, and I'd read damn near all the sci fi that my local library had, I was acught up on the Wheel of Time that had been published to that point (I think it was still about five books before Jordan died), and gave it a try.

It was fucking awful.

Given that I was maybe 12 at the time, that's saying something; it was just trash.

Friends don't let friends read Hubbard.

Ulysses

Well, I tried reading it. Then I tried again. I even made a bet with my father who could finish first. We both lost.

It's just a terrible reading experience. Don't know why critics love it, but I have the feeling nobody really understands that gibberish but pretends to do so just to look smart...

These days I tend not to persevere with books that I'm having a bad experience with. There are just too many good books out there.

Poor writing sucks but even worse is when the author misjudges how much they can expect from the reader. Sometimes things can get 'bad' in a book for just long enough that the reader feels they have risen to a challenge and been rewarded at the next change. Some authors are aware of this and incorporate the dynamic but end up prolonging it too much or over-egging it. I actually feel abused as reader when that happens and end up rage quitting. Unfortunately, deleting an ebook doesn't come with the same satisfaction as burning a physical one in those cases.

The other thing that is a bad experience for me is overly long dialogue expositions, where a character does an infodump to provide background and context and justify the plot. It totally jangles me, bores me and breaks immersion in the story by making me cynical about the authors laziness. An example of this is all the Librarian's waffling about biblical stuff in Snow Crash. Rather than making me care more about the outcome of the plot it just yanked me away from what was a really enjoyable story and setting and destroyed the pace.

BTW, if anyone is interested; Bookwyrm is a fediverse platform for discussing and rating books. Much like a federated FOSS version of Goodreads.

I once dropped a book on my face. True story.

I was reading a book at home at age 7, and then my dad slapped me in the bsck of the head.

I tripped over a cut-down street sign and smashed into the concrete, scraping my knuckles and brushing my nose and elbows.

Life of Pi.

2 of my kids had to read it for school, I was looking for something to read, picked it up, they both said "NO, it's so bad." I thought, whatever, it's a slim volume, short read, how bad can it be?

I want that hour or two back. They were right and I wish I'd never read it.

The Wheel of Time series.

Great story; bad books. Literally, the books fell apart while I was reading them. Cheap-ass paperbacks...

A series, but The Wheel of Time becomes insufferable around book five. There's like five chapters of lore/world building for every sentence that moves the plot forward. Also, the worst protagonist in the history of book writing. The side characters are the only reason I made it to book five.

Almost every book I read back when I was a school student.

Each month we had to read a boring book chosen by the school, and at the end of each month we had a annoying test with questions like: "When the protagonist discovered the truth, what was the emotion he felt?" Or "How did the author felt when writing this?" So I had to read 300 pages of a boring book and pay attention to each detail each month.

I don't dislike reading, actually I enjoy good books, but reading something against my will is sickening.

120 Days of Sodom was a tough read. I don't think it's satire despite what the critics say. Marquis de Sade was literally a rapist but for some reason it is taken as being a meta-commentary on contemporary French society.

The red/blue/green mars trilogy. The first book was pretty great and the themes were good throughout but the main characters devolve into this weird privaliged manifest destiny hippy cult that doesn't give a shit about the rest of humanity and acts like they got to mars all by themselves and not on the backs of the billions supporting the economies that made the journey possible.

Its the only serie series I've read where I ended up rooting for the oligarchic corporate overlords because even a mars owned by megacorps works out better for humanity than the mars envisioned by the protagonists at this point who are basically turning into a kind of proto-version of the spacers from asimov.

Xenocide, from the ender series. Enders game was good. Speaker was OK I guess. Ender was a whiny bitch the entire time but the descolada mystery was interesting. Now that's solved and he's still a whiny bitch and then he just solves basically every single problem with his super ai that can do magical space/time bullshit. The worst deus ex machina I have ever laid eyes on. I physically threw the book across the room at one point. I hate leaving books unfinished, so I slogged through the rest at like 5 pages per sitting, rolling my eyes out of my head the whole time.

I did not finish children of the mind.

The german version of Ready Player One. Just the most disrespectful drivel about nerdom i have ever read. Absolutely embarassing and god damn was it a slog. I think that was the only book i ever hated and regretted reading. And after reading a bit of the english original i was even more disgusted as it was even worse...

2071: the third oddesy.

I had heard good things about the first one and happened to just see this one in my high-school library. I had a book report due soon so I binged it.

This is the single most boring Sci fi novel I've ever read. It goes on and on and on about the various technologies of the various vehicles of the future. The most exciting part is a flashback to a previous book in which a character kicks a plant, second most is a relatively relaxed flight through a comet.

Normally I can plow through the couple hundred pages in a night, this one took me a bit longer because of how dry it was. There was a entire section on some kind of spinning windshield design used on boats to make sure visibility was always crystal clear.

the underage sex in Snowcrash

the character could have just as easily been made an 18 year old and it didn't need to be there for the story. it was like a record skipping at that moment and I understand wanting to make a crossover for the character to have a sympathetic link to the other character but it was gross and makes it really hard to recommend the book to someone

The Scarlet Letter.

It's like it's designed to engender a lifelong hatred for the printed word.

Reading The Road as a new father. Fuck that. Made me cry.

When I was a kid I would read the sexy parts of the Illuminati and jerk off.

My brother caught me and ratted me out. Handing over the book was terrible.

Been rereading all the books I can ever remember having read in school lately. For the most part they are actually more enjoyable as an adult.

The Scarlet Letter still doesn't hold up though. It's so dry, so boring, so archaic. I crawled through it a few pages a day for like three months because I didn't have the motivation to do any more than that. The movie was even worse.

The Great Gatsby was kind of a slog at first - I actually just gave up on it at some point. But when I eventually came back and started from the beginning again it was fine and reasonably enjoyable.

For those curious, the "books I can remember having ever read in school" are A Doll's House, A Modest Proposal, Animal Farm, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Ghost Cadet, Hatchet, Holes, I am the Cheese, Inherit the Wind, Lord of the Flies, Maniac Magee, Night, Number the Stars, Of Mice and Men, Pygmalion, The BFG, The Great Gatsby, The Kid Who Became President, The Man who was Poe, The Metamorphosis, The Most Dangerous Game, The Old Man and the Sea, The Pearl (?), The Scarlet Letter, Crash, To Kill a Mockingbird, Bud Not Buddy, The Lottery, Fahrenheit 451, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Crucible. Plus a lot of Shakespeare. So far I've reread all of those before Mockingbird, and none of them from Mockingbird. This only includes books we were made to read, or which our teacher read to us in earlier grades (BFG, Hatchet, Mixed-Up Files, etc)

Thankfully I can't remember the title or author of the book. I only got six pages into it before I put it in the "return to the library" pile.

I think it was supposed to be a fantasy novel set in a medieval European alternate world.

It was first person and the MCs train of thought was trope and cliché filled drivel, including a multi paragraph description of an alcoholic drink made from potatoes and turnips. The author called it "voka."

That was the final straw.