Twilight
Game of thrones, for me. Made for a good basis for a show. Fucking terribly dull to read.
Yeah I finished the first book and put it down and said fuck this shit.
I enjoyed the suspense of wanting to see what would happen but then I realized that the author is a sadist who only wants the readers to suffer and that was enough to end the entire series for me. I got roped into watching the first episode of the first season and I was like oh it’s the entire first book in one hour fuck this shit and I’ve not watched anymore of it.
I hope you’re joking.
Martin knows how to write people. He can create the most vile, repulsive, irredeemable characters known to man and then teaches them mercy, honour, and sacrifice by forcing them into situations where they have to question who they are.
He redeems the irredeemable, not only in the text, but also outside of it by merit of the sheer humanism he expresses in his works.
I learned a lot about humanity, mercy, and forgiveness just by reading his books. No other author has come close to reaching me in such ways.
I don’t know if he’s joking, but seriously they sucked. I barely made it through them
I think it is great that you were able to gain so much from reading his books. I personally did not. That is not to say the values you drew from them are invalid in any way. It’s not an assault on you personally. You liked his books, I didn’t. Both of those things are ok. So no, I am not joking. While I have read other works that impress me to the level that you describe, Game of Thrones did not do so for me.
I think I’m bad at communicating the usual wink I have in my tone when I disagree with people: https://lemmy.ml/post/21428751/14330685
Hmmmmmm
I’m not sure about that“whilst I concur wholeheartedly with the detailed rebuttal you have given, I alas remain uncertain, caged by the incongruous gut feeling that compels me.”
I read them all (so far anyway) and they’re decent enough.
I don’t think he redeems anyone who is irredeemable or has any special insight into humanity. There are some awful people who are complicated and there are his favorites who get away with anything and come back from death multiple times. They all make good decisions and bad decisions and get good consequences and bad consequences and those don’t always line up.
I don’t want to diminish your experience but I really don’t see it.bah, humbug
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
On the Beach by Nevil Schute
There was a movie adaptation, which was also shit.
I haven’t read the entire book, but I’ve read like 10 pages of Fifty Shades of Grey when my then-girlfriend was reading it. Besides the story and subject matter, the writing itself is horrible.
Never read it, just some parts here and there because a girlfriend was reading it and it was hilarious LOL The descriptions are supposed to be sexy or alluring or god knows what but they are so cringey! It took me a bit to understand that my friend was reading it seriously.
First 10 pages was probably the bulk of the story; the rest was just email replies.
A fan translation of the Redo of Healer light novel.
If you know you know.
Ready Player One
The cringe is massive with that one.
The entire thing is the author wanking himself silly over his knowledge of pop culture references from his childhood. Some of it reads like it was written by a 14 year old who isn’t all that into books.
The bit about the gaming suit that wanks the user off but also means you’re exercising so you get fit from wearing it was honestly one of the cringiest things I’ve ever read. If I thought the author was capable of the level of self reflection required, I’d have thought writing that part of the book was him acknowledging that the book is literally a work of literary masturbation.
It should have received the same response as The Room; a bad book only made into a cult classic by the people laughing at it.
I enjoyed Ready Player One at the time even though some of it was just ridiculous. Re-enacting Ferris Buellers Day Off for example.
Armada, Cline’s next book was awful. So many references on every page, I stopped reading. I remember a line that was something like, “my mum wouldn’t let me past, like Gandelf in the mines of Moria.” Sheesh! Let it go!
I fully read Ready Player Two but the guy has no story telling abilities. Every time the main character encounters a problem, e.g. I need a level 49 sword to get past this problem, but there’s no way to get one, it was always solved with the same solution, “oh, I own the game and all Admins have level 1000 swords because we do!”
I think I reached my limit when he managed to shove in a Shaun of the Dead reference just because he mentioned a cricket bat!
Art of War in the Middle Ages. Just fucking interminable.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/44308/pg44308-images.html
It’s also FULL of errors
I’m sure I’ve read worse but one that stands out as making me question the time I put into reading it is Out of the Dark by David Weber. I go into it expecting a military sci fi, and for the vast majority of the book that’s what you get - aliens invade Earth and plucky humans resist etc etc. The aliens however have more reserves and air superiority so are slowly winning as the end of the book approaches, at which point you expect the main characters to pull a rabbit out of the hat and do something different. Except that’s not what happens.
spoiler
What actually happens is that Count Dracula appears out of (almost) nowhere and flies with a bunch of vampires up to the alien spaceships to kill the aliens, winning the battle for Earth.
I was definitely not satisfied with this ending, even if there was some foreshadowing earlier in the book that made sense after knowing this was a possibility in this universe.
Oh man. Thank you for bringing up that repressed memory.
The Alchemist, I had to read it for a community college class. It’s probably the most predictable book I’ve ever read, but not in an entertaining way. Just painfully boring.
I read Siddhartha for highschool a couple years before, I would say that the books are almost identical, except I liked Siddhartha more.
You want a book with similar themes but actually amazing? The wizard of Earthsea.
I know the books aren’t literally the same. But the vibes feel very similar. I want to say they have very similar structure, but my memory doesn’t work that great.
Ayn Rand’s fountainhead, by a fat mile. I was young and didn’t know better
I listened to Atlas Shrugged as an audio book and it was ok at best. One massive criticism of communism and how it doesn’t work but suggested anarchist society as the solution. Weird rape-y sex scene in the middle also. Should have stuck with the social criticism instead of anarco capitalism utopia stuff and it’d have been good.
God, me too. I thought I was too dumb to “get it”.
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50 Shades… terrible writing and the sex was boring AF. The books were recommended to me. I couldn’t get through the first one. Time I’ll never get back.
I haven’t read a whole lot, but so far: Madame Bovary. We had to read it in high school, because it was culturally significant and because it caused a large amount of controversy when it came out due to its subject matter. When I was reading it though, it felt like I was reading a literary version of every TV soap opera ever. It was a slog to get through and I was bored and annoyed throughout.
the Piers Anthony novelization of the movie Total Recall. it’s very bad!
I haven’t read that, but his original novel Firefly is the only book I ever threw away instead of adding it to my collection shelves or trading it back to the used book store. It’s horrifically gross. One of the main characters is shown in a flashback enthusiastically participating in her rape as a five year old. Anthony is a problematic writer already, but this was way worse than I could have guessed.
I read all the Xanth novels as a teenager and it probably made my brain mushy. More mushy.
My brain is just very mushy. The first few books were okay…ish, but they just got worse. And not just in a sexist way, but also a poorly written way.
Read the first book as a kid, thought it was pretty good, but was put off by all the sex stuff. Started reading the second book when I saw it in a library when I was about 15, and couldn’t get through the first chapter because of how sexist it was.
Yeah, they were fine for my low standards as a young teenager, but I reread a couple and they aren’t great. Heck, book one has the MC making an amicus brief on the wrong side of a rape trial.
Yeah, its a book series I’ll leave in the past where it belongs!
