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Like all media, there are good books and there are bad books....and then there are the bad books. Reading a book and hating it can sting more than watching a bad movie, because a book is a much bigger time investment. Let's piss and moan about books that we hated. The first books that jump to mind are the sequels to Arthur C. Clarke's subtle hard-science-fiction masterpiece Rendezvous with Rama. While RwR was a story of discovery and exploration as humanity suddenly realizes that they're not alone in the universe by way of a giant unmanned spacecraft floating through the solar system, its sequels Rama II, The Garden of Rama and Rama Revealed were increasingly ridiculous farces written mostly by awful hack Gentry Lee. In the first novel there were thoughtful discussions on the physics of BASE jumping in low-artificial-gravity environments, by the third novel a child in a teenager's body is playing with anal beads with a mafia don (who has reprogrammed a robotic version of Abraham Lincoln to mow down everyone at a nearby wedding with 1920's style Tommy guns). There's an entirely too long discussion on how best to breed the only woman for millions of miles to create a genetically diverse family, which is obviously problematic since one of the only available sperm donors is a devout Catholic. It's all sex and drama and presidential robot gangsters for hundreds and hundreds of pages and it never manages to be interesting even when one of the male leads is raped by a race of glowing sentient spiders. Next up I would like to take a moment to bitch about The Dark Half by Stephen King. King is obviously hit or miss in a lot of his work, and even his great novels aren't really for everyone, but this book flat out sucks on every single conceivable level. King has writing chops, he manages to make an old hotel a force of evil in one book and in another he builds someone named Randall of all goddamn things into a convincing villain - no easy feat. But The Dark Half takes stupidity to a whole new level. It's about a writer whose darker pseudonym is exposed, so it turns itself real and begins killing off his publisher and editor and poo poo, I don't even loving know. The bad guy is a pseudonym who was a fetus that the main character ate in the womb, and the book is over when his shambling living corpse is carried away by a flock of loving sparrows and gently caress you King I feel dumber just for writing about it. You can tell it was a passion project for King written as a "no, gently caress YOU" after someone exposed him as Richard Bachmann, but that doesn't in any way excuse how god-awful this book is. Anyway I just wrote a lot of words about crappy books, now it's your turn to do the same.
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Jul 1, 2015 17:43
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GOTTA STAY FAI posted:Why is Brian Herbert not in the OP or the thread title Because I knew enough to avoid Brian Herbert.
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Jul 1, 2015 18:22
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CannonFodder posted:Empire by Orson Scott Card. The beginning is kinda decent, but then it turns into hovercrafts and power mech suits that nobody had ever seen before, and then the dumb keeps coming. Ooooh you reminded me of another one, Xenocide by OSC. It was ridiculously dry in a way that even the lackluster Speaker for the Dead didn't match and it lacked the sheer absurdity that made Ender's Game and Children of the Mind kind of fun.
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Jul 1, 2015 23:15
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Just thought of another one: Seven Deadly Wonders by some guy I won't honor by looking up but I think there was a Matt in his name or something. A friend recommended it to me and so I gave it a shot. And don't get me wrong, on some levels it's fun because of how goofy it is. But...the main character is a grizzled dude with a hawk and a mechanical super arm who needs to go raid the trap-filled seven wonders of the ancient world to Do Magic poo poo at the great pyramid. And he quizzes his adopted magic daughter on Lord of the Rings trivia, which saves both of their lives at one point. Even looking past all that, if you can, the writing is just flat out bad. (And I still kind of want to read the sequel.)
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Jul 2, 2015 22:43
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Dresden's first couple books were awful but they've picked up steam, and every other character in the series with maybe two exceptions sees Harry himself as the nerdy gently caress up that he actually is. The first person narrative makes it hard to catch sometimes because Harry, despite all his annoying self aggrandizement, is just that clueless about how bad he is. The Iron Druid books are terribly written but a shitload of fun anyway, you can burn through one in a lazy afternoon and still have time for a nap. They're ridiculous but if you don't want to read about an ancient druid drinking tequila with Mexican Jesus, talking about chumping Odin and Thor, well...I don't know what to tell you because that's fantastic. These did remind me of an actual godawful book, by Jim Butcher of the Dresden Files. Apparently at some point he wrote a Spider Man novel. My fiancé works at a used bookstore so I see all kinds of bizarre poo poo, and when this came in for a quarter I grabbed it. It's literally just 300 pages of Harry Dresden fighting some fourth-string Spider Man villain except with science and webs instead of magic and potions - the voice and style is 100% identical. And overall, it's boring. Nothing important happens through the whole book, and I'm pretty sure the ending is some terrible Deus Ex Machina. (But hey. It was only a quarter.)
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Jul 7, 2015 19:55
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Looking at the Ender books through a more critical lens it's clear that Card had some issues, but...holy poo poo. I had no idea about any of his other stuff.
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Aug 2, 2015 06:52
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They're super dumb but also super fun. You can burn through one in a couple hours, I suggest giving it a shot.
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Aug 22, 2015 05:07
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Klaus88 posted:
How about Clive Cussler? He has an entire line of books devoted to his Gary-Stu car-collecting ultra-badass Dirk Pitt. I've read more of his novels than anyone really should, which I think comes out to about two or three total. In one, some vague bad guys have some vague bad guy weapon that makes people on cruise ships throw up and then die or something. Dirk gets captured by the vague bad guys and then shot and tossed in the ocean - but it's okay, he swam over three miles to shore in salt water with a gaping chest wound. How? Just by being that badass. I can't remember if that's before or after he's stranded on a raft with a sexy babe and catches them fish to eat by using a chunk of his leg he dug out with a knife as bait. Maybe that one is from a different book. I'm all for goofy over-the-top feats of derring-do and pulp machismo, but Dirk Pitt is just so tremendously boring and void of personality that it falls flat. There's no substance to him - he just does whatever is the bloodiest most badass thing someone could do in any given situation and moves on towards the end of the book like the inevitable march of time. Bonus: there are versions of his books edited for young adult readers.
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Aug 31, 2015 20:21
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Heath posted:Shadowrun does this, although "modern" setting is debatable Shadowrun is a really cool setting for how balls-out ridiculous it is but the actual novels set in the universe are godawful trash even by licensed genre fiction standards. But still - a dragon was elected president and then immediately assassinated by a wizard outside of his limo. That owns.
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Dec 2, 2015 17:35
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My favorite Salvatore thing is the first two Drizz't books being very close to retellings of the first two Dune books in a D&D universe, right down to the sword fighting instructor father figure with a goofy name being resurrected as a zombie assassin in the second book.
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Dec 6, 2015 20:01
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malal posted:Thank whatever deity you may or may not follow. I've never read a book with such a bad final act. I even finished "The House of Leaves" with a better taste in my mouth, and that book is just a throw away episode of "the Twilight Zone" with extra poo poo thrown in to make you feel like you earned the twist ending. What was the twist ending there? I've never been able to plow through it even though I like it on a superficial level.
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Dec 7, 2015 03:35
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Yudkowsky is living, breathing proof of why we need bullies in our schools. On an unrelated note I bought a copy of Seven Deadly Wonders for a dollar and gave it to my fiancé. I am excited to hear her thoughts on Grizzled Badass McRobotarm's adventures with Awesome Pet Hawk and Precocious Magic Girl.
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Feb 2, 2016 00:31
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Congo was awesome, surely you meant to write "Timeline" or "Rising Sun" there, right? Man, for having a couple of fun hits, Crichton wrote a lot of abysmally stupid poo poo.
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Mar 24, 2016 15:34
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One night I got drunk and ranted at a friend for like an hour about how godawful Rising Sun was. The next day on the news I saw Crichton had died, right around the timing of my rant. My critiques are fatal.
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Mar 24, 2016 16:52
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muscles like this? posted:The thing that bugged me about Timeline was that it seemed like he kept forgetting it wasn't actually time travel. It's even worse than that because the characters keep insisting its not actual time travel while completely ignoring that literally none of the plot makes any kind of sense if it's not. Davros1 posted:Congo's the only Crichton book I've read, and what annoyed most about it was how in the midst of the story, there was a part that started off with something like "After they got back to America" (or something, been 20 years since I've read it). Basically, he just told the readers who had survived this ordeal, destroying any sense of suspense. The worst part of Congo is at the very beginning where they see the video feed of the apes and surmise that somehow it's a mutated pinball video game leaking into their digital footage, because obviously that's how computers work.
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Mar 25, 2016 16:40
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I got Only Revolutions for like four dollars new at a Borders and I feel like I overpaid. I've never tried reading it the "proper" way which is reading every seventh page then starting at the back and reading every fifth page or whatever absurdist way you're supposed to do it but seriously, what a mess. It's a shame because that kind of ultra-meta-surreal storytelling is a cool idea but I've never seen it done well on the scale Only Revolutions attempted.
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Mar 29, 2016 03:49
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shelley posted:Prey was such trash, but somehow it gave me existential terror as a child. I thought my mom was nanobots. I was a dumb child. Prey was awesome because it was about killer robots and at one point I think a Jeep was used as a makeshift firebomb. Timeline is awful on about a million levels and doesn't even attempt some kind of internal consistency or coherence. It's all different universes instead of actual time travel but somehow everyone manages to pass notes through history, the scientists' machine is so outlandish and nonsensical that it is literally hand waved as "someone in another universe got this to work and is helping us teleport people even though we have no way of communicating with them", the fact that half the dialogue reads like something you'd overhear at the smelly D&D table down at the game store, ugh. And Timeline was still better than Rising Sun.
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Jun 1, 2016 21:09
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Where does Disclosure fit on the awful-Crighton scale?
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Jun 1, 2016 22:18
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Over the past two pages I kept thinking you guys were talking about Mieville's King Rat and was a little confused.
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Jul 26, 2016 21:59
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I loved the setting and prose in Perdido Street Station but thought the ending was really bleak for no reason other than to emphasize what we already know about the characters and their flaws. The Scar, on the other hand, is one of my all time favorite books and I need to get my copy back from whoever I lent it to 
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Jul 28, 2016 16:34
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As someone who lived in Wisconsin for over twenty years in various parts of the state, let me confirm for you that I have never heard anyone say "c'mere once" in any context or recognizable variation.
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Jul 28, 2016 21:55
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Tiggum posted:
You have actually reminded me that I drunkenly grabbed the first book for like a dollar on my Kindle a while back, I might have to fire it up.
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Aug 11, 2016 19:07
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Crosspost from the terrible headlines thread; some authors do NOT take criticism well. What in the actual gently caress. I love his implication that Sting's song about a stalker isn't actually about a stalker at all.
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Aug 25, 2016 13:22
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:Name of the Wind, holy poo poo what a slog. Ambitious Spider posted:I've had lots of people whose taste I otherwise respect recommend that. I was even given a signed copy for christmas one year that I still haven't read I'm actually reading this right now. It's weird because it's pretty generic and the main character is a massive wish-fulfillment self-insert Batman type, but it's still really fun and not too offensive (yet?) I have no idea how it got this weird cult popularity, though, I mean it's really pulpy fantasy stuff.
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Aug 30, 2016 17:09
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I actually like a lot of his prose so far. It's obvious that it's been edited to hell and back and has this weird air of pretension about it like he's super-sure that he's writing the next LotR but it seems to flow a ton better and be all-around more fun to read than what little I got through of A Song of Ice and Fire, which is pretty much my only other modern-written traditional fantasy book. I think I realized why Kvothe's Gary-Stu-ness doesn't grate on me as badly as it normally probably would - it's the framing device of Kvothe detailing his exploits as he sits around his lovely tavern. It's all presented as gospel truth, not something that he's making up as he goes, but just the fact that it's a guy reflecting on adventures that have already occurred rather than new challenges as the book progresses changes the scope from "wait, do they seriously expect me to believe he can pull this off?" to "wow, that's insane that he managed to pull this off!" It's just a little bit of mental rewiring, and it's pretty cheap on the author's part, but it seems to make things a bit more palatable.
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Aug 30, 2016 20:10
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Oh. My. Zeus. posted:That's funny, since the Penny Arcade guys love Patrick Rothfuss so much they made this cringey, unironic comic as an endorsement Uh considering it's a comic and it's only funny at all if you read it as an indictment I'm going to say that you're wrong there.
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Aug 31, 2016 21:54
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E: ^^^^ who the gently caress didn't like The Pearl and why? That book owned. The Saddest Rhino posted:People having hang ups against the books they had to read in school is so weird I feel like a lot of schools teach books that are certainly important for the literary canon but the average teenager doesn't give two shits about that and just sees an exceptionally dry novel. The only books I hated in high school were A Scarlet Letter (which I still had some grudging respect for, even if reading it was a maddening experience) and A Patchwork Planet, a book I read for some contemporary lit elective course. That book could maybe go here: it has a sort of interesting main character but his journey to not being a total fuckup and living his own life rather than vicariously living the lives of others (through breaking into peoples' homes and looking at their pictures - before you could do this on Facebook) is just boring trite poo poo. Even as a teenager with zero life experience I thought he was a loser from beginning to end. He ends up banging his short tomboy lady friend and her breath reeks of pork rinds. Phyzzle posted:I read most of The Ambassadors by Henry James, and agree with this review: That Robert Young quote slays me.
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Sep 9, 2016 18:19
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Strategic Tea posted:To be fair schools tend to give you essays about verb choices in chapter 3 because the book is well known and there are specific verb choices in that chapter that have a point. I went through a lot of honors and AP English courses in high school and never, not once, was asked a question like that. It was all questions about interpretations, themes, and (obviously) some basic comprehension stuff to make sure you did the reading in the first place. You know, pretty basic reading and critical analysis, which seems fair. I would be very surprised to find out that that is not the norm. Did you maybe get beat up once by a test once in high school and the stress is making you generate false memories?
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Sep 9, 2016 18:50
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A chalkbed? 
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Sep 22, 2016 23:22
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The Lone Badger posted:That sort of stuff does happen. What doesn't happen is that malformed tissue rises as an angry murderous adult from a mock grave that it wasn't even buried in to begin with, going around and killing all of the people that led to him being outed as the protagonist's pseudonym, before rotting like a zombie and getting carried off into the sunset by a bunch of sparrows like some hosed up Mary Poppins pastiche. The Dark Half is really shockingly bad. I heard somewhere that he just wrote it to blow off steam when his Richard Bachmann pseudonym was revealed against his will and some dire, unforgivable villain convinced him to publish it. No idea if it's true, though.
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Oct 28, 2016 14:06
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Seldom Posts posted:If that's seriously your objection to the book then you need to reconsider whether you should be reading fiction at all. My objection to the book is that it's a masturbatory garbage fire of bad prose and worse ideas, what the gently caress are you talking about? Maybe you should live up to your name.
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Oct 28, 2016 16:33
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Perestroika posted:From the looks of it, it seems like once upon a time the idea was to build Kvothe up as this huge impossible legendary hero first, and then show the actually pretty mundane and lovely reality beneath the myth. Except apparently Rothfuss at some point decided that the latter part was too much effort and instead just plays the whole thing completely straight. Have you actually read the book? Because it ends with Kvothe almost getting killed by some random mook demon at his run-down lovely country tavern because of a nasty and apparently permanent case of magical erectile dysfunction. The whole point really is that no matter what heroics he's done in the past, he's completely washed up by the time the first book starts and he begins telling this huge story about himself. I haven't read the second book with the sex-demon yet so maybe that goes off a cliff but I really liked that the first book goes out of its way to bookend all these tales of grandeur about Kvothe with him being a worried middle age guy literally waiting for death and hoping nobody notices him.
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Dec 5, 2016 17:48
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Ready Player One made me ashamed to like a lot of things that I enjoy, and made me think less of the myriad people who recommended it to me. I burned through the whole thing waiting for a delayed flight and the whole premise could have been fun and popcorny but every character is so smug and insufferable.
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Jan 26, 2017 19:14
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I read all but the last two thirds of the last Left Behind series. I started when only the first three were out and kept up with the series even as each book got worse and worse. The second to last one ended with one of the two main characters we'd been following since chapter one of the first book giving up and dying, and it didn't tell you who it was. They were super dumb and badly written, and their place of outright reverence in some circles is really creepy, but they did have some ridiculous action scenes scattered throughout the thousands of pages of bad evangelical screeds. The first book (I think?) ends with the Antichrist going to some UN summit thing, pulling a gun and shooting a guy at such close range that it also takes out the guy next to him. Then, splattered with blood and brains, he calmly brainwashes the gathered dignitaries into thinking it was a murder-suicide. Later on the incredible Jewish stereotype-turned-convert (who, iirc, pretty much singlehandedly achieves peace in the middle east offscreen early in the first book after accepting Jesus), has been turned into a paraplegic, and slices the antichrist's head half off with a molecule-edge sword on international live TV from a motorized weelchair. The future is really bad about metal detectors, apparently. Maybe they got Raptured? You'd think LaHaye and Jenkins would have mentioned that.
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May 24, 2017 23:40
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zoux posted:I'm sure they're terrible, but I loved the Frank Peretti books when I was a naive evangelical teen. One of the pervasive ideas in non-denominational evangelical Christianity in the US is that demons and angels are real and constantly intervening in our lives in a spiritual battle over the souls of mankind. His books This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness were all about this, and half the books are about people struggling with sin and poo poo and the other half is about these invisible demons loving with people and making them do things like take drugs and have abortions, while angels would show up and they'd have badass* unseen battles over the soul of Tammy who works at Wendy's. Peretti is an absolute goldmine for bonkers terrible books. I read a bunch of his stuff from a young age - he's had a few young adult series by now, the one I got started with was basically like super-Jesusy Indiana Jones kids. I mean it sounds trite but I'm pretty sure one of them ended with the kids (and their adult parents/friends) finding an actual gate to Hell itself and closing it after it was inadvertently opened. That is cool poo poo for a kid. His "adult" stuff is similarly really hit or miss. "The Oath" is really awful for a lot of reasons, but kind of interesting among evangelical Christian literature in that the protagonists explicitly aren't Christians themselves until pretty much the end of the book - meaning they have PREMARITAL SEX!!! Also I'm pretty sure the book ends with a guy killing a giant worm-demon-dragon with a spear some dude welded up in a garage by sticking it in the ground and reciting scripture at the worm so it backed up into it. "Prophet" is a four hundred page poorly researched screed about how Abortion Is Wrong. "The Visitation" I remember actually being pretty cool as a horror/thriller book, despite kinda falling away from the ideology of the books by then. Also, "This Present Darkness" was his first book and was honestly pretty cool, if insane from a theological standpoint even on the very face of it. "Piercing the Darkness" was awful and half the plot was "PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE TRYING TO PUT DEMONS IN YOUR KIDS THROUGH TEACHING THEM MEDITATION!!!" This book sold hundreds of thousands of copies and won an award for best fiction of the year.
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May 28, 2017 18:23
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I just finished The Girl on the Train and while it certainly wasn't the worst thing I've ever read, I'm gobsmacked that it was apparently the fastest-selling hardcover adult novel of all time when it was released. How...does that even happen?
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Jun 14, 2017 21:40
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After such a disturbing/hilarious book this almost feels trite but god drat, I my wife and I tried to power through the audio book of "Truly Madly Guilty" and it was incredibly bad. I mean, it was so offensively bad that we listened to strange talk radio for background noise rather than letting it play on a long drive. I looked up the ending because the entire. goddamn. book. is one long cocktease about ~~the barbecue~~ that all these horribly unlikable people regretted going to so much. They'd all be whining about THE BARBECUE and how they wished they wouldn't have gone, or said this, or done that, and then it cuts back to THE DAY OF the BBQ and tells you thirty more seconds of banal nothingness, all while dancing around the only thing that seems to be the slightest bit interesting in these characters' lives. It was so awful. I think every other chapter literally ended with the words "the barbecue".
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Jul 14, 2017 04:10
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Barudak posted:So what happened? It sounds a lot like The Slap so far which was a major event in Australian Television im led to believe but died after like 2 episodes in the US because nobody gave a poo poo about slapping a kid. The whole book kinda teases that one of the characters' kid dies but it turns out they just fell in a pool and are totally fine. It's just awful for the sake of being awful. It's several hundred pages of an author really trying to avoid telling you things that all the characters already know in increasingly artificial ways.
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Jul 17, 2017 00:51
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Arcsquad12 posted:What is ready player one and why did it get a movie trailer which made me embarrassed not only for myself but everyone involved. theflyingexecutive posted:EVERY MORNING I OPEN PALM SLAM ANOTHER CHAPTER OF MY BOOK INTO MY WORD PROCESSOR. ITS READY PLAYER ONE AND RIGHT THEN AND THERE I START COPYING ARTICLES FROM MY FAVORITE WEBSITE, WIKIA. I TURN EVERY BULLET POINT INTO A SENTENCE AND I DO IT HARD. MAKING WHOOSHING SOUNDS WHEN I SLAM DOWN THIRTY COMMAS OR EVEN WHEN I MESS UP A COPY PASTE. NOT MANY CAN SAY THEYVE BROUGHT IN EVERY CHARACTER FROM EVERY KNOWN GAME CARTOON COMIC MOVIE TV SHOW AND BOOK REALITY FOR A HUGE PARTY. I CAN. I SAY IT AND I SAY IT OUTLOUD EVERYDAY TO PEOPLE IN MY WRITING CLASS AND ALL THEY DO IS PROVE THAT PEOPLE IN WRITING CLASS CAN STILL BE IMMATURE JEKRS. AND IVE LEARNED ALL MY NERD REFERENCES AND IVE LEARNED HOW TO MAKE MYSELF AND MY APARTMENT LESS LONELY BY WRITING A BOOK ABOUT WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE IF MY PARENTS WERE PROUD OF ME. 2 CHAPTERS INCLUDING WINDDOWN EVER MORNing. THEN I BATE.
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Jul 28, 2017 16:32
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Perestroika posted:I actually read RPO cover to cover because it was gifted to me, and I basically can't remember a single drat thing that happened in there. Not having grown up in the US just about 80% of the references were pretty much white noise to me, and the actual plot was so drat barebones it might as well not have been there. I can't even recall how it ended. Pretty much the only thing I do recall is that at one point the protagonist starts to get fat from playing videogames all day and having his food delivered, and his solution to that was buying some sort of integrated treadmill thing so that he could work out while still playing. Also he shaved off all his hair so he wouldn't have to deal with hygiene. This was supposed to show some sort of admirable devotion, rather than the mother of all red flags. Uh you totally missed the part where he talks about how much he loves masturbation and pornography, but he returned his VR-capable gently caress-bot because he's not a pervert like some people. It was almost a whole chapter.
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Jul 29, 2017 14:20
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