Maybe you didn’t finish it. Maybe it was really hot outside, and you couldn’t quite work up the energy to hate it. Maybe it was fine, and that’s it. But you must have them; at the very least, the majority of the books you have read in your sylph and supple life cannot have changed the course of it. Let us name them, the books that left us cold and unaltered, carrying on rather as we did before they swept into our lives.
All right, I’ll say it: Little Women. Maybe it was the age I read it (12? 11?), but all I could think of through the first couple of chapters was “SPARE ME,” so I never finished it. I still feel a weird pang of guilt about this, so I don’t consider myself blameless, but I honestly didn’t enjoy what I read of it.
Whoops, this is me too. I did read the whole thing and I tried so hard to love it as much as I thought a nerdy preteen bookworm was supposed to (because that was who everyone thought I was, and surely that many people couldn’t be wrong), but the feelings just wouldn’t come.
I tried reading LW as a child and could NOT get through it. Later, as an adult I tried again because several friends of mine kept waxing poetically about it. These were people who studied lit and are teaching at colleges/getting their PhDs in the subject so I figured Young Me just didn’t get it.
I still hated it.
Then I noticed that those same Lit Ladies HATED Jane Austen, whose writings I absolutely love with a fiery passion. Which has lead me to believe that people who have a similar fiery passion for either Jane Austen or Louisa May Alcott usually hate the other.
Hm. I adore Austen and quite like some of Alcott (though her work could get seriously weird, at least by modern standards. Eight Cousins has some humdinger weirdness).
But I can’t stand Bronte, who is pretty much the Anti-Austen, so there’s that.
Maybe if you throw in Bronte it changes the equation. I’ve yet to read any of her work, but perhaps had I read Charlotte Bronte I would have better appreciated Little Women. Also, now that I think about it, all my friends who are Alcott People have sisters with whom they maintain deep friendships while I do not, and that might also influence their views. (Perhaps I ought not to think about this too deeply, especially on a Monday.)
I don’t know about Bronte throwing the scale off – I doubt it’s that because I read Alcott as a child (and have re-read some stuff out of curiosity as an adult. I don’t think it ages very well, honestly).
But I also grew up in New England (and went to high school just down the road from Orchard House), so I might also have been identifying more with the setting and culture of New England and letting that build the bridge over the moralizing, Pilgrim’s Progress-y bits that I disliked.
Have you read Anne Bronte? She takes Charlotte’s tropes, laughs, turns them upside down and dances the polka on them. She was also a big Austen fan, while Charlotte wasn’t.
Books that didn’t change my life? Wuthering Heights. Bleah. Sorry, Emily.
I am only familiar with the iconic Kate Beaton cartoon, but clearly I need to repair this reading omission. Anyone who dances the polka on the melodrama and angst of the other Brontes is someone I want to hang with.
Agnes Grey is a fun read, and my favorite of all the Bronte books
All of this. Anne Bronte is awesome, Wuthering Heights is soooo booooring.
Also I love Little Women (def. not Jo’s Boys, though, ugh) and I love Austen, so there’s another data point for you.
I am indifferent towards both authors, so there you go.
(I know I read LW at some point in my childhood, but I don’t remember a damn thing about it; I tried to read P&P but couldn’t get through it.)
Louisa May Alcott wasn’t that into it either, so don’t feel bad.
My mother gave me her copy of Little Women when I was about ten. Inside the front cover, at age twelve, she had written something to the effect of: “I hope one day to give this book to my daughter who will treasure it as much as I do.”
. . . I could never get more than two chapters in, despite trying half a dozen times between the ages of ten and fourteen. At the time, I felt sort of guilty about letting down some distant past twelve-year-old version of my mother.
yuppp
My mom agreed to name me Margaret if she could call me Meg, in part because of Meg March.
I think I did read it when I was young and liked it well enough, but I honestly… don’t… remember most of it, and I’ve never had the urge to re-read. Oops.
Yep, I get that. I didn’t read it until age 25. I finished the whole thing (and I will say that it improves as you get farther into the book), but I just didn’t love it. I also think it was my age that was the problem. The moralizing was just way too heavy handed by that time. Also I think it’s a book that’s better if you had sisters growing up, and I didn’t.
Yeah, I think that was part of it, too. I was an only child, so the sibling love was lost on me at that age.
You’re absolutely correct. I was crazy for LW as a wee one and then re-read it as an adult with mounting horror as the lecturing slowly smothered me.
i will ride or die for the 1994 gillian armstrong movie and as a result i will always choose THE NOVELIZATION WITH EIGHT PAGES OF PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE MOVIE over 9000 pages of moralizing bullshit
I am relatively fond of the first two thirds of the book, but I must admit that the ’94 movie has my heart more. It’s a brilliant adaptation. Meta, but not too meta, making Jo much more like Louisa May Alcott (writing “Little Women” and all) and making the family much more like the real, fascinating Alcotts. The family were feminists, abolitionists and radicals and the Marches were moralizing and stiff. The movie balances these aspects perfectly.
Someone left a really beautifully illustrated copy in a free books pile in our apartment so I’ve been re-reading it and I’m not loving it. It’s so preachy and also the Little Women are ages 12-16 (in the beginning) but all act about 8.
Little Women, Anne of Green Gables…just not for me.
This was the first book I thought of too! I made it to the end of Book One, where Alcott says: “So the curtain falls upon Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. Whether it ever rises again, depends upon the reception given the first act of the domestic drama called Little Women.” (Thanks, Project Gutenberg.)
Until then I had always felt obligated to finish books I started, and I felt like she was actually giving me permission not to. Quitting felt great and I never looked back.
Huh, I don’t usually have guilt over not finishing books, but that would actually make me feel pressured to read it! I imagine Alcott trying to pull a guilt trip, like, “That’s fine if you don’t like my book, I’ll just sit here in the dark and not make any money. Don’t worry about me dear, you just go out and have fun.”
Mr. Barmaid has been trying to read LW all summer long, poor thing. He picked it up with an exasperated sigh last night and said, “I’m really trying to get through this because I feel like it’s something I *should* read [note: he is an elementary school librarian] but every other page it’s ‘Oh, Father, the party was ever so delightful!'”
Most of the stuff we had to read – especially for summer reading – was in the “you’re supposed to read this Because It’s Literature” category. I was forced to slog through Little Women in high school one year. I remember literally nothing about the book besides that there were teenage girls in it and it was awful and dull and it took me almost two months to finish because I could only stomach like 3 pages a day and I never want to go through that again, even for a Great Illustrated Classics version (I think also someone broke their leg in like the last two chapters, and one of the girls married one of the boys, but not the one she wanted to? I dunno).
A Tale of Two Cities was also on my summer reading list that year, and once I finally finished Little Women, I started that one. Made it all the way through the second paragraph before I quit in protest.
tbh I read very few of the books we were assigned to read in high school, and BSed my way through most of the papers. I think the only three assigned books I actually finished on my own were Great Gatsby, Huck Finn, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (I was and remain an odd person). I say “on my own” because we did have books we group-read in class, like an (extremely) abridged version of Great Expectations. Meanwhile I was tearing through stuff like I, Robot, various Star Wars novels, the Inherit the Stars series, and being addicted to Myst at home.
Oh thank God, so many comments echoing this. I just can’t with LW; it’s so preachy in a way that makes me angry because it’s doing Christianity wrong (imo). I don’t think I’ve ever read the whole book.
I read this within the last two months, having avoided it successfully during the 51 years of my life. Meh, total complete meh. Still can’t remember which was Meg and which was Amy.
My partner–who read it late and quite liked it, but would never reread–can’t keep a single one of them except Jo straight.
(I made him read it in order to appreciate “Dirtbag Little Women”, more or less.)
My law school roommate gave me a copy of Winter’s Tale and I tried really hard to get through it because I knew she loved it and I love her.
But nope, that book just slid off me like water.
Thank you. I hated that book with a passion!!!
Oh man, yeah, that one had absolutely no traction with me.
I have tried three times now. I still haven’t gotten past the first, like, 30 pages.
I think that’s where I fall off the book too, but I can’t really remember. I just know I never got far.
I finished it but, like… why??
Not one full chapter in.
As soon as I met the beautiful girl dying of consumption as to drive forward the man’s plot …… Nope.
From the Amazon blurb:
Thus begins the affair between a middle-aged Irish burglar and Beverly Penn, a young girl dying of consumption. It is a love so powerful that Peter Lake, a simple and uneducated man, will be driven to stop time and bring back the dead. His great struggle is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary stories of American literature.
I’m just sitting here wrinkling my nose. The prose would have to be damn good to rescue that dumb cliche of a plot.
The prose IS really good though. That’s the whole thing about this book — amazing prose. Makes up for the consumption and the fact that Mark Helprin used to be Bob Dole’s speechwriter.
You said it. The prose is good, the plot is not. I loved Mark Helprin’s other books. With A Winter’s Tale, I kept thinking ‘Is this the SAME Mark Helprin?” I couldn’t make it through the first third.
I love Graham Greene. But every time I try to read “Our Man in Havana” something happens. Death in the family, a migraine cycle, or simply not having any time for fun. Conclusion. That book is cursed.
“The Fountainhead.” Sorry, Mallory.
That is an impossible book to read.
Agreed for reading. But nobody’s novels can squash a bug like hers, though. WHAM. Changed SOMETHING’s life, that’s for sure.
“Nothing cracks a turtle like Leon Uris.”
No, it’s cool, it just means you’re weak and she can dominate you. Like the quiet masses of humanity, you’re FINE, it’s OK to be one of the ants that make her skyscrapers and railways a reality.
I mean, I gave my copy to a boy who was following me around too much and heavily implied that I didn’t want to talk to him until he finished it, so clearly I am like those people who reject the jewelry made of the cool new metal and tell the rich guy who supports me and my terrible family that he’s oppressing me by being productive.
Mallory is welcome to dominate me any time. Don’t think that’s her thing, or mine either, but if anyone’s earned it, it’s Ortberg. I’m just a moocher in comparison.
honestly I think that might be a point in your favor
What else is there to say about How Should A Person Be except that it was published in a print format and I read it? Ditto The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.
I had to read The Yiddish Policeman’s Union like 5 times before I actually enjoyed it, but I did really like it eventually. I wouldn’t recommend that though, I was on vacation with nothing else to read for nearly a month.
This is how I came around to The Matrix. Somehow it became a sleepover staple when I was a teenager. Buy the fifth time I saw it, I was like “fine, I’ll enjoy this”
Ditto with The Big Lebowski.
GASP! “How Should a Person Be” is one of my favorites.
SAME. I also found it obnoxiously navel gazey in the way I usually hate, but [spoilers I guess?] at the end they realize that they’re insipid and self absorbed and choose to transcend that through emotional vulnerability and human connection and it’s AMAZING.
Right!? I read How Should A Person Be and by the end all I thought was ugh, these are the insipid navel-gazing art students I meet at parties and make pleasant conversation with until the interaction quota has been filled. Only this one actually did something, they wrote a book.
Just realizing that maybe I did actively dislike it, now that I’m thinking about it, so maybe not in the spirit of this post :/
That is the best book review burn ever. “Well, this is certainly a book I read.”
My godson gave me the best movie review burn on Saturday night. After forcing me to sit through Shark Tale (literally holding my face turned toward the TV for a while when I tried to read a book without him noticing me) it fiiiinally finished, and I said “did you like it?” and he said “Well, it was a movie”.
I am surprised to report that I did not murder him.
I wanted to like The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. It seemed like it should work for me and yet….no.
I adored The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and when I read Yiddish Policeman’s Union immediately afterward, it was just like “well, that was fine I guess?”
Yes! I politely turned all the pages til it was the end, so I felt like I could bring it back to the library, and I have not thought about it one time since then – til just now.
I got How Should a Person Be for Christmas 2 or 3 years ago, and it’s been sitting on the shelf since then, looking at me, yellowly and redly, a little reproachful.
Agreed. But it was one of those books I wished someone else in my life had read so I had someone to bitch with. I just couldn’t believe it got the reviews it did when it all seemed so pointless and faux profound to me.
Totally agree on the Yiddish Policeman’s Union. It just felt so forced and hollow.
I had to read Catcher in The Rye for my freshman seminar class my first semester of college. I had about 100 pages left and class wasn’t until two in the afternoon. My plan was to finish it, but then the guy I was in to at the time was like “Hey, wanna come over and watch Firefly?” So I said yes. To this day I have never read the entirety of Catcher in the Rye and that doesn’t really bother me. (and no, I’m not sure how I made it out of high school without having it assigned)
Hahaha, I was going to post Catcher in the Rye if no one else did. JINX.
Those coming of age classics written by dead white guys, huh? 😉 Another one of those I found pretty unremarkable was The Great Gatsby. It was another I somehow didn’t read in high school, and didn’t pick up until a summer in college (around when the Leo DiCaprio movie came out) because I felt like I was missing out on a cultural touchstone. It was fine. That’s about it. Just fine.
I read both Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye in high school, and didn’t particularly care for either of them. (Especially after all the build-up I’d heard over the years about what Important American Novels they are).
Both of the protagonists just struck me as annoying whiners, and I didn’t particularly connect with anything on a deeper level with either book.
Am I not alone in thinking that most non-genre protagonists are annoying whiners?
Give me a good dystopian SF story with a protagonist who kicks as much butt as she can before being eaten by the zombies.
I liked Gatsby, but I couldn’t explain why other than “F. Scott talks all purdy like”. Also, I think I figured out that Fitzgerald didn’t actually want you to like Gatsby (or any of his main characters) and that made it much better. I couldn’t have cared less about Catcher in the Rye though.
I couldn’t even finish White Teeth or Proust though. Proust is like reading the worst facebook feed ever, but all in retrospect.
Gatsby is definitely a book to read when you want to burn holes in a book with your character-hate-beam vision. I enjoyed it, but I don’t think it did anything profound to me, aside from perhaps reinforce my budding disgust for misogynists and the foppishly wealthy and the specific combination of the two that is the husband in that book.
yes this! Either whiny white dudes or women who die. And it is TOO a genre, it is LITraChure, and I hate most of it. SFF and mysteries, wherein something happens, someone stomps about until it is fixed or everyone dies with rocks in.
Kate Beaton for you: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php/index.php?i…
I read Gatsby in high school and didn’t realize for a while that it was supposed to be that one book that everyone best remembers and likes from their English class. I liked it well enough, thought it was better than The Scarlet Letter, and wished that my teacher would stop grading us on annotations because it was taking me out of the book.
Then a couple years later I started college and a solid 40% of the people on my class’s social networking site listed it as one of their favorite books and I suddenly knew exactly who didn’t read much outside of class.
I think that Gatsby is assigned in high school mostly because it’s really short. I like it now much better than I liked it then, in no small part because I can appreciate it for being a story about someone trying to reinvent themselves and failing.
I actually really liked The Great Gatsby when I read it in school–but I’m still not sure if I ACTUALLY liked it, or just hated it less than every other book we read in American Lit.
When it was my turn to read it in high school, the grown-ups around me kept *really* pushing the “this won’t make any sense to you before your 30th birthday” line. So I’m officially sticking with “I liked that is was short and less burdensome to get through than Huck Finn or the rest of that ‘classics’ nonsense, so I could get back to my McCafferey faster” until that date, when society will accept my final decision to accept/reject.
I feel like my copies kept going missing somehow. I feel no loss.
YES. Cather in the Rye did absolutely nothing for me. I just remembering thinking the main character was so boring. Ugh.
I read it in high school on my own, and I knew dudes who thought their innermost thoughts were SO DEEP AND NEW when really they were just self-absorbed pricks, so yeah, I couldn’t stand it.
We didn’t have to read it in high school, either. I read it on my own senior year because it seemed like An Important Book and my only impression upon finishing it was that it’s boring as hell.
I was assigned it twice in college and didn’t read it twice. A lot of my English major went like that.
Same! I had to read in freshman English and even my teacher directly framing it as being about depression did nothing to make the protagonist/book in general any less unpleasant. I am, however, very fond of The Magicians, despite the two being very similar books.
Oh God, that book. We read it in high school, and I guess I was too old and/or too female to enjoy it. Holden Caulfield was that annoying boy who never shut up and looked you in the tits and not they eyes, not a great literary phenomenon.
I just remember Catcher in the Rye being way too bro-tastic for me to enjoy as a high schooler.
I went to high school in Canada, so didn’t read Catcher till age 40, which is way too old. I just wanted to ground that kid, and make him take a hot bath, drink cocoa, and go to bed early, preferably with a puppy in the bed.
That was the only assigned book I ever didn’t read. (Pre-internet, so I couldn’t just wikipedia a summary. No idea how I got away with it.)
Coles Notes? (they have a different name in the US.)
I’m in Canada, so it was Coles notes here. And no, I didn’t read them, I absolutely refused to (I still refuse to read the summary). I think maybe my English teacher was out for a few months? Or we were assigned a piece of short fiction in response?
I did read it all, and you’re missing nothing. It’s something teenage boys get weirdly attached to because it makes the kind of obvious observations that seem deep to someone who hasn’t left high school yet.
I did read the catcher in the the, beginning to end, and it just straight-up did not change my life.
Captain Tight Pants > Holden Caulfield
YES was just about to post Whedon > Salinger but yours FTW
The Fountainhead– I expected to either hate it or to somehow come out a believer, but instead it was just kind of adequate as a novel and entirely unconvincing as a philosophical work.
Absolutely!
I read something by Mercedes Lackey (Oath something) at the request of my best friend in high school, and I just didn’t care. As soon as I finished it, I couldn’t remember what it was about.
Oathbound. Oathbreaker. There may have been a third one. I LOVED THEM ALL.
Oathblood was the 3rd, not a full novel but a collection of her early short stories abt Tarma + Kerowyn!
My Mercedes Lackey love has a lot to do with my age+mental state when I first started reading her books, and I recognize this.
Same here. I still read them, but I definitely notice their shortcomings now.
A friend of mine loaned me “Winds of Fate” my freshman year of high school. There was no way I wasn’t going to love a book about magic and horses that could talk to you!
Hi hello I would like to go back to junior high and read this book can I get a do-over?
I mean, they were a lot of fun and I loved them, but I wouldn’t say they’re in any way worth going back and re-living junior high for.
exactly! I was a shy, lonely 12-year-old escaping into novels when my favorite librarian suggested I read Arrows of the Queen, and it turned out to be about a shy, lonely 13 year old with a similarly rich fantasy life, and then the fantasies turn out to be true and she gets a magic horse friend who will never ever leave her until they both die, and makes a ton of other great friends just by virtue of being a really good person, AND she gets to save the day!
Everyone else thought they were Hermione, but I will probably never stop overidentifying with Talia or crying my way through Arrow’s Fall. It’s fine.
oh, shoot, it’s Tarma and Kethry. Kerowyn is her granddaughter who ends up a Herald. Oops.
Unapologitically love Mercedes Lackey!!! I haven’t reread her stuff since early high school. The Mage Winds series is so cray I think I might just to be like, whaaaaaaaaaaaat?
Oathbound started it all for me in 7th grade for sure. I still think it’s her best series. Mercedes Lackey is at Dragon Con in Atlanta this year.
Mercedes Lackey is deliciously terrible. Like the books are so weirdly bad they start to come around to good again. For me anyway. I mean she literally wrote a book that legitimized a woman/ bird romance.
Don’t forget the man/horse romance.
Mercedes Lackey’s books that were written before she started co-authoring books with her new husband are orders of magnitude better than the stuff she wrote after she married him.
Before or after the werewolf series where coyote slept with a white woman (around about there. I gave up on the series, because seriously). The woman is also surrounded by werewolves who naturally have control issues and a mechanic. That series sure did not change my life, but my urban fantasy expectations are not high :).
Ah, wrong Mercedes. Mercedes Lackey wrote a bunch of YA books about angsty gay magicians and psychic teens with magic horses. Mercedes Thompson is the “I have no female friends because all the dudes want me and I’m so DIFFERENT from other women” coyote mechanic in the books by Patricia Briggs.
which is frustrating because Brigg’s Dragon books (Dragon Bones, Dragon Blood) are pretty terrific
Okay, but Black Gryphon was definitely my entry into the series and I hearted it so hard that I stayed up all night reading it in a single go (and made sure to get the white and silver checked out from the library the next day, they could never have lived up). Was that an exception or would a reread confirm your assessment? (Not that I think I’m likely to risk such a thing.)
Storm Winds was indeed boring-terrible, and I barely got a few chapters into the owls
My mother read the original novel of Jurassic Park, and was so unengaged that she didn’t notice that it was misprinted and a substantial chunk of the story was missing.
I got about 800 pages into Anna Karenina before deciding that I did not need to read the last 200. I get it, you’re living a virtuous life with the peasants now, good for you.
Oh things heat up over the final 200 pages. But you could just watch the movie for the sake of acquiring plot points. Or read the wikipedia summary or whatever. The writing was nothing to me.
Anna Karenina is the worst.
OMG SO MANY PAGES ABOUT COWS. The 2012 movie, however, was amazing and HIGHLY recommended. And is actually faithful to the book without including the boring parts.
Don’t forget cutting the wheat! That was some riveting stuff.
OK, so one time I was in a theatrical adaptation of “Anna Karenina” and it included the wheat scene and all of us who weren’t playing one of the important characters were the peasants. And the idea was that we should mime-thresh our way out of the vom and across the stage (it was in the round), the actor in front would say “Ho!” as the signal to turn around, and then we would turn, and mime-thresh back. Well, one night the Levin had had cabbage for lunch or something and he farted silently but powerfully right before we came out of the vom. So we made it about two-thirds of the distance we usually did before “Ho!” guy said “HO!” and we all threshed very quickly back to the vom.
And that is what I think of when I think of the wheat in “Anna Karenina”.
I skipped all the farming stuff, I had to
Me toooooooooo. It’s Russian though, so I assume she dies in misery somehow.
I loved Anna Kaenina but if I’m being honest the main reason I loved it was because of how much I just HATED all the characters. I would really like certain characters and then the more I heard from them the more I realized they sucked. By the end I hated all of them. Also, I still have no idea why the novel was called Anna Karenina. It wasn’t about her any more than it was about all the other characters. Really the only predominate “character” was Russian Aristocracy as a society at that time.
Loved it bc you hated the characters: this is how I feel abou Vampire Academy. I read the whole thing anyway, obvs.
My thoughts on Anna Karenina is that Tolstoy wrote one decent book (Anna’s story) and one mediocre story (Farmer dude who marries Kitty’s story) set in the same universe but for some reason he decided they needed to be smashed together and it just did not work.
So many pages about gathering wheat. So, so many. Konstantin/wheat otp
I fell off reading Anna Karenina right around there too, something about all those pastoral scenes. Ooof. I still feel guilty – but there were so many other books to read…
I made it until the last fifty pages or so and I.just.couldn’t.anymore. I skipped to the end, confirmed what I already suspected happened, and have gone the rest of my life pretending like I read the whole thing.
Delurking to say that I loved Anna Karenina. It took me years to figure out why, but I think I’ve got it — there is absolutely no subtext. Tolstoy spells out EVERYTHING. Maybe that’s annoying to some people (probably, and that’s legitimate!) but to 15-year-old me, it made the book so much richer and more compelling than other classic novels I had to read, just because I wasn’t missing any of the relevant information I needed to appreciate any given scene. That, and I actually liked Levin a lot (cutting the wheat and all!) because the questions he struggled with — what to do if you benefit from an unjust political and economic system, is there a god who cares about humanity, will your unrequited crush ever like you back — were also things I was wondering about!
On the other hand, I couldn’t get into War and Peace. Go figure.
I think I only got as far as the train stuff? Or is it all train stuff? I DON’T KNOW OR CARE.
Also I really liked the movie and would rather watch it any day than read the book.
I’d say “The Little Friend” by Donna Tartt. Except it didn’t leave me cold. It left me hot with seething anger at myself for making it all the way to the end.
Oh gosh yes!!
I remember absolutely nothing about that book, and it was the reason I held off reading The Secret History until last year.
Didn’t care for “The Goldfinch” either. Like, it was okay, but if I’m going to read 800 pages of something, it had better be SPECTACULAR.
I got to the end of the Goldfinch and was like….meh?
Yesssss! I am with you. I thought the story was OK but after all that time invested I really wanted more of a payout at the end. All I got for my efforts was a bunch of navel-gazing by the main character that went on for pages and pages. I wanted to get out the flashing “Wrap It Up” sign from that one episode of The Chappelle Show.
I gave up a few pages from the end! Spent so much time reading the first 99% and then just could. not. do. it.
I got “The Goldfinch” for Christmas last year, and since then it’s been sitting on my shelf, with a bird on the cover, a little reproachful. The fact that my family read it and hated it has not incented me to pick it up.
I think you could take that as a sign
I haven’t finished it (started it a year and a half ago) and I can’t tell you at all what happened in the first half that I did read. I love Secret History and liked Goldfinch but Little Friend has been painful.
There’s no payoff. Save yourself!
“The Brothers Karamazov.” Yawn, God, yawn, brothers, yawn, murder.
Oh man I feel the same way about Crime and Punishment, especially because half the time I couldn’t decipher who the fuck was speaking because of their multiple names.
I just wanted to put all the characters in Crime and Punishment in therapy. Those people needed professional help, not an audience.
Reading Crime and Punishment just kind of made me feel like I had a fever.
FISTFIGHT FISTFIGHT does God exist FISTFIGHT onion
…. so it’s basically that Monty Python sketch with the boxing match to determine the existence of God?
With long philosophical breaks, yeah.
I had to read it for a high school English class, and I quickly realized that I could skip about half the chapters and still pass the quizzes. Also– who the hell thought it was a good idea to make a bunch of 16-year-olds read the Brothers Karamazov?
I wish I could say the last couple Discworld books, but the enormity of their having been published at all, as obviously ghostwritten-or-worse as they were, did have a gloomy sort of impact on my life.
God, they were depressing. I couldn’t even bring myself to read the last one.
it was actually less terrible than Unseen Academicals, with its meandering back-and-forthing and all looking like…the face of Alzheimer’s. that just ached. Snuff was the one I couldn’t read. couldn’t handle the unrecognizable Vimes and Sybil.
I’d say Unseen Academicals was the one that did not have an impact on my life either way. Snuff and the last one (Raising Steam?) made my heart hurt. Especially Raising Steam.
Oh god, yes! My partner read ‘Raising Steam’ and described it to me and we both agreed it was better for my sensitive system not to read it. Haven’t read one of the main novels since ‘Going Postal’. *sigh*
I miss that man.
oh God, me too! I tried to flip through Raising Steam at the bookstore and was shocked at how off it felt. I couldn’t finish Snuff because it felt like retreading familiar ground in the latter half…:(
that is such a good articulation of how i felt about Snuff. reading it was really hard when i realized how different it was – up until that point i’d hoped unseen academicals was a fluke…
Oh yes, I tried to start Raising Steam and then… I just couldn’t. But if you did enjoy Going Postal then you might dig Making Money.
Okay, I haven’t even bothered picking up Raising Steam, and you all are convincing me that I may have inadvertently done the right thing. Still a little sad to hear about it though, I liked Going Postal and Making Money.
I read “Raising Steam”, and enjoyed it because of my great love for trains, but it did feel like someone was just following the template of “Going Postal” and “Making Money”. Whereas the early Vimes books, witches books, etc. each were different from one another even with the same characters.
Snuff felt the same in the sense that it was following the template of the books focusing on species-related prejudice, like Feet of Clay. Except Feet of Clay is wonderful and fills me with feelings, whereas Snuff was just … there.
It felt too heavy-handed morally, maybe? And Vimes was too much of a hero. Like, Discworld isn’t exactly known for its subtlety, but Snuff & Unseen Academicals crossed a line.
I sent Raising Steam to my mom for Mother’s Day, because I’d previously given her Going Postal and Making Money, which she liked, and she had a totally “meh – could not get into it” reaction. I just sent her an email with the 411 on what’s really up with that book, the ghostwriting, etc. So thanks, everyone, for the info.
What happened with ghostwriting? I thought the books sounded completely different, but assumed it was just Alzheimer’s/a result of dictating rather than typing.
Somebody mentioned ghostwriting upthread. It having been dictated could also be possible, I guess. The whole thing is just sad.
I think it’s just Alzheimer’s/a result of dictating. I know that his wife is credited on the latter two books, but I’m pretty sure her help is again a result of the Alzheimer’s.
Lyn Pratchett has always been on the copyright notice.
No ghostwriting.
And someone said those three books are much better as audio books. That they sound better as story told by voice. Which makes sense.
I read Snuff and liked it ok, though a) I have read the Discworld books super out of order and still only about half them so it’s one of basically 2 Vimes books I’ve read and b) I certainly wouldn’t put it up with my favorites.
Raising Steam was awful though. I got like, 5 chapters in? And thought, is this even Discworld? The character names are familiar but idgaf about anything that is happening and none of them seem like people. Going Postal was my gateway Dscworld and Moist Von Lipwig has a special place in my heart, so it was an issue.
but…on the subject of Discworld…the whole reason I still haven’t read a lot of them is that I tried three times to read The Color of Magic and never got very far. Rincewind was just a boring asshole every time. So I have not bothered to ready any of the books focused on wizards.
Don’t even bother trying to finish Color of Magic. Just skip ahead to The Light Fantastic. Or even better, to any of the books featuring Granny Weatherwax (and I say this as someone who loves Rincewind).
yeah, the first, like, five or six books are semi-terrible and I wouldn’t recommend them even to fans of the series. Pratchett didn’t truly realize what he was creating until Guards! Guards!. with Reaper Man, he figured out that he had a great gift for hamstringing his own cynicism about human nature, and things got magical.
Rincewind is seriously the worst. It is totally OK to skip all of the books in which he plays a major part, except then you’d miss out on The Luggage. But, really. The worst.
I still haven’t finished Unseen Academicals. I just… ugh. I loved so many of the other ones, and the Tiffany/Witches books give me life, but yes.
I had a friend who sang their praises at the time and I remember actually feeling angry about it, like, how could you possibly think that, did we even read the same books, are you gaslighting me? In retrospect, it’s possible she was trying to convince herself more than anything.
I think there was one review on Amazon that described Snuff the way I felt, and I was pretty much genuinely angry at all the people blithely talking as if nothing was wrong. things like that make me feel disconnected from the human race.
oh, you guys have no idea how good & validating it is to read this thread. Too many Discworld-fan friends gushing over these books while I can’t quite articulate what’s wrong but something IS
have you read his non-Discworld YA novels, Johnny and the Dead and Only You Can Save Mankind? they’re far too little known and easily rival the best of Discworld for a house of irony undercut with incredible heart
no! I should fix this.
Do! They are fantastic. (There’s a third, too Johnny and the Bomb.) Very much in keeping with the best of Pratchett – funny, sharp and compassionate. I love them.
sooo good. I only read Johnny and the Bomb once and didn’t like it so much (I didn’t like that Kirsty didn’t seem to have matured at all after Only You). should try it again some time.
They are SO GOOD. Also The Carpet People although I haven’t read that since I was a teen so YMMV but I still think about it very often.
So unrecognisable! Why are you saying that this is Sam Vimes, book? It’s an imposter wearing his skin.
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. I haven’t even cracked open Raising Steam yet.
Yeah, I felt this way too. On the one hand I love that he was expanding the world and adding more history and fleshing out minor characters from past books….but on the other hand it wasn’t the Discworld I fell in love with. Very hard to read the later books on their own merits without comparing them to my favorites.
Umm, I have probably read 2 or 3 Discworld books but I couldn’t tell you what happens in any of them except “hijinks with wizards” and something about the world being on a turtle. Or maybe elephant. I like British humor and fantasy but somehow they didn’t connect with me.
When I first discovered Terry Pratchett (via Good Omens, natch), I decided to read From the Beginning because I am an organized person, and I made it through the first two before going “UGH I DO NOT LIKE THIS MAKE IT STOP.”
But I kept hearing from other people that since there are like…several different ongoing groups of characters that the different books focus on, you actually don’t have to read the books in publication order? So I picked up a few other books that were not focused on Rincewind (the hijink-prone wizard) and enjoyed them way more. (Still not life-changing, but I at least had a sense of “OH, that’s why people are such fans of these!”)
I was like this. I picked up a book at random when I was 18 and couldn’t get more than 5 pages in. Fast forward 10 years, pick up the same book (Mort) and suddenly, I’m immersed. I sped through everything like a crack addict after that.
I stopped reading with Unseen Academicals. Actually no, I did pick up the Tiffany Aching book that followed, whatever it was called. I got about two chapters in before realizing that while it was interesting from maybe a medical standpoint about what Alzheimer’s does to the brain, that was pretty much the only reason to read it.
UA was flawed, but I’m choosing to see it as a wrap-up to the series, and from that standpoint, it’s not bad.
Yes, same. Actually the last one I read was Thud. I liked it but I had been feeling like something shifted. I thought maybe I’d grown out of them but when I heard his diagnosis I… well.
I’m doing a re-read of the Watch books at the moment. I haven’t read them for nearly a decade, I think. It’s amazing to read them as a different-kind-of-adult. I wonder how much they make sense because now I understand more of the world, or how much they make sense because these books were part of my DNA. Either way, it’s a relief to know that they are still there, still good, still worth reading.
I did read Going Postal last year at my boyfriend’s encouraging (I’d initially skipped it). I read it all but I resented it, and I made it about three chapters into Making Money before i got too stressed out. But that’s basically the Rincewind Effect. I have this rule, see, that I don’t read books about men who ruin everything but somehow are still heroes (I’m currently reading a bio of Ada Lovelace and I’m only up to the ‘and Lord Byron was her father’ but and man it’s a struggle).
I like your rule and would like to adopt it as well.
i’m going to read the last tiffany aching book but i’m going to be really sad about it
I’m not going to try and defend Snuff or Raising Steam, but I actually really love I Shall Wear Midnight. Now, I adore the Discworld witches and Tiffany Aching in particular, which probably makes me overlook flaws that others wouldn’t, but as a story about Tiffany coming into her own as an adult witch, I found it deeply satisfying.
I’ll admit the Feegles were sort of grating by the end. It was just the same jokes repeated, and Tiffany didn’t really need their help, but there they were all the time.
I watched the Going Postal movie this weekend and confirmed that my love for Terry Pratchett is all about the writing.
The movies are …thin.
They are ‘made for TV’ and don’t have the budget of theatre films, but still, someone should have listened to the radio or TV versions of HitchHiker’s Gide before writing the script.
It’s all about the footnotes.
There’s this miniseries that’s a mishmash of The Color of Magic and The Light Fantastic. It’s incredibly uneven: Twoflower is nearly unwatchably annoying, but Tim Curry is deliciously evil as the cutthroat wizard Trymon.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1079959/
And terrible terrible effects.
Twoflower is played by Sean Astin. Too bad they didn’t go for an Asian actor. He is not good. Too bad he didn’t inherit his daddy’s “chew up the scenery, the costumes, the cameras and all your fellow actors, and always be the most watchable thing on the screen” gene. (I’ve been watching him in Briscoe County Jr. Best thing in it, and that includes Bruce Campbell).
I liked the Hogfather movie, but the others are all non-existent to me
I’m really happy (? not precisely right but can’t think how else to say this) for this thread. I felt this way about the last few Discworld books and I thought it was because I’d outgrown them and it made me sad that something so integral to my teenage life was no longer something I loved. But it seems I may have been wrong, I just need to go back and re-read some of my favourites to know for sure!
My instinct is to reassure you that Reaper Man to Going Postal, chronologically speaking, still do it for me, as in, make me deeply and abidingly happy, with chortling.
Yes. Unseen Academicals onwards, for me, just seemed like such a depature from the rest of the series (due to Alzheimer’s, presumably). The narrative and characters’ voices sounded completely different, people were behaving out of character, and everything was just flat. So jarring and, yes, gloomy.
I do agree that the later novels (and I haven’t yet read the last three) show a decline in quality, but I think many readers read in their own assumptions about the affects of Alzheimer’s. As I am now given to understand, the early-onset variety that took Sir Terry is characterized by having primarily or even solely physical symptoms–while the writer lost the ability to write or type for himself and even to read, his mind apparently remained sharp. I suspect the strain of persisting in his work despite the immense challenges, and perhaps of racing to resolve his own vision in the face of death, did some harm; and to be honest, being so prolific seems to have led to some uneven work in earlier novels as well. Nevertheless, I’m writing this comment in hope that readers will approach the forthcoming final Tiffany Aching novel without the assumption that it can’t possibly approach the power, passion and insight found in the author’s best work.
Most books by Tamora Pierce (that weren’t Circle of Magic, which were *quite* the opposite), and The Hobbit. I just can’t do high fantasy, you guys.
Yup, The Hobbit. I snoozed through it. Sorry fellow nerds.
ETA: To be honest, I snoozed through about a quarter of it, and then enjoyed one of the movies on a plane.
I have never finished anything by Tolkein. I have seen the LotR movies once, maybe twice, and cannot keep most of the characters straight, unless they are funny. And actually, I don’t know which one is Merry and which one is Pippin, I just know that their scenes are what would be included in my edit.
For me, The Hobbit is “fine,” and the LoTR trilogy is “oh my god will this ever end.”
I had The Hobbit read to me as a kid and was like, “okay, fine” and then under parental pressure tried Fellowship and after the first 100 pages or so when they weren’t even out of Hobbiton AND there were no girl characters in sight? Nope.
Same! I read The Hobbit as a teen and it was OK. And I attempted The Fellowship of the Rings 2 or 3 times and finally gave up. It was SO freeing to finally declare that I just don’t do Tolkien.
I first read The Hobbit around 8 and loved it, still include it in my favorite books list, but I had to make myself finish LOTR in college. It took forever and I lost track of character names and plot threads. That’s the only time I’ve read it.
I think The Hobbit may have been one of those books that you had to have read as a child to get. I am a huge fan of it, but I reread it last year for the first time since I was very young and I can definitely see how it wouldn’t appeal to someone who first came to it as an adult.
I love the book of The Hobbit, but I saw the first film on a plane and failed to even enjoy it. I think the tiny aeroplane screen and the brain-numbing effect of a long flight might have been partly to blame, but it stirred no strong emotions whatsoever (except for “this is different from the book and it distresses me”).
I feel like people go on and on about the Alanna books, which while okay I could never quite love them like I should. The Circle of Magic series (trilogies?) were far more interesting to me, and it makes me a little sad they also seem to be harder to find.
Part of it seems to be reading order, part of it seems to be the age you come to them, and part of it seems to be what you’ve read before that.
For the people who read Alanna first (or nearly first), when younger than about 15, having not previously read many books where women had the option to be warriors, I see a lot of Devoted Fans. But she’s become a better writer in the intervening years, she’s become a lot better on inclusion (queer characters, characters of color/other cultures, characters of different body types, characters of different classes, poly characters), and simply having a female warrior be the main character is no longer as groundbreaking as it once was…… So there are lots of people who just don’t feel like Alanna is all that compelling, even if they enjoy some of her other stuff. I no longer suggest that people start with Alanna, if they’re looking to become familiar as an adult.
Yeah, I think this is right. I read the Alanna books first, when I was 12 or 13, and those books are (still) Everything to me. I’ve since read and loved pretty much everything else Pierce has written, and I can absolutely see the improvement you’ve mentioned–I think the Emelan books are particularly impressive and Daja is soooo important to me–but Alanna was first and that attachment runs deep.
Agreed, I read the Alanna books when I was younger and loved them. When I read them now, I’m conscious of how much better her writing is, and how much more inclusive she’s gotten; which makes sense, since the Alanna books are like 20 (30?) years old now. I enjoy them as a nostalgic thing, but her more recent books are my true unchanging favorites. The Circle series for sure (everything about them, I mean, !!!!) , but especially the Trickster’s Choice pair of books. Amusing, since they’re Alanna’s daughter, haha.
Although I will always claim Daine as my favorite Tortall character.
Yes, the Trickster books! Those are far and away my favorites of hers. I read the first Alanna books when I was young, and I went back to read the first one maybe ten years later. I was shocked by how bad the writing was. I appreciate that they exist, since they laid the groundwork for everything that’s come after (and I’m sure they were revolutionary at the time), but I wouldn’t recommend them.
I disliked the Circle series when I first started reading them shortly after they came out– I maybe read the first two, and then stopped. I went back as an adult and read the ones I’d been missing, and I now really appreciate them, especially as the protags are older, that more of the subtext is revealed as text- like, yes, L&R are lovers, it’s just not remarked upon explicitly when the kids are young because it’s doesn’t really come up.
I read the Immortals first, and despite that, Daine just wasn’t my thing. Aly, on the other hand, is my fav. As long as I ignore that weird short story with her giving birth which freaks me out a bit.
It is possible that I may have spent an evening at college with friends writing the names of nearly every male character in Tortall on index cards and then ranking them by desirability. I don’t remember much, other than Raoul being really high on the list.
I love the Circle books especially now, because I think they’re her most diverse with regards to the characters, sexualities, relationships, etc. Like I was just SO excited by the Daja revelation, for example. Although I do wish she’d get back to that world and focus on the actual four main characters, I was a bit disappointed by Battle Magic.
I liked Daine because of the age I was when I read her books, I think? And I always wanted to be able to talk to animals.
Oh yes, Raoul is way up there. George, too, and Numair. Not Jonathan though, even after he matured and became King he irritated me, haha. But I do love Briar!
Yes, definitely. I read Alanna at age 12 and she was incredibly important, but the books didn’t hold up so well on a re-read. She’s such a purple-eyed magic Mary Sue, and that was exactly what I wanted at that age.
Daine, in Wild Magic, left me absolutely cold, even though I was hungry for more Tortall after finishing Alanna. Love Keladry and the Circle of Magic books, which I didn’t read until adulthood; I can imagine how incredibly special they would be to a 12-year-old.
The Alanna books are not great in terms of prose, I will just come out and say it. But they were still kind of a Big Deal because she wrote them at a time when people were not writing YA fantasy that focused on female characters, period.
Honestly, I would start with the Kel/Protector of the Small books, which are my favorites and (IMHO) the best-written of the series set in Tortall. I feel like she starts that series off having really come into her own in terms of having a developed, richer writing style. But I also highly recommend the Beka Cooper trilogy, which doesn’t require knowledge of the other Tortall books, and which I pitch to people as “Law & Order: Fantasy City.”
I may have read the Hobbit?? I skimmed most of it? I just don’t remember. And I don’t carrrrre. (Like LOTR. Read those. Have actual memories of those. But after Return of the King I looped back to the coma-inducing-Hobbit).
Agreed about most high fantasy (did three pages of Song of Ice and Fire before giving in). I’m great with Russian novels and British epics with family trees in the front but elves and spellcasters just don’t stick in my brain.
You know, I tried at least three Tamora Pierce books as a preteen/teen (one Alanna book, once Circle of Magic, and I think Trickster’s Choice?) and my feelings on all of them was ‘meh.’ I have friends now who I share very similar literary tastes who looooooove everything Tamora Pierce and I just can’t get excited about her at all.
It took me nearly 20 years to get through the Fellowship of the Ring. Not an exaggeration. I started with it young–maybe 7?–and made it through the part when they’re in the inn and have just met Strider (before you know who Strider is), and stopped. And started it about a year later, only I had to start from the beginning because it was so boring I had forgotten everything. And repeat, average once a year until I finally finished it in my mid-20s. Tom Bombadil sucked so much momentum. My final attempt was successful only because I skipped all things Tom Bombadil.
I will love and adore LotR until the end of my days, but skipping all of book 1 of Fellowship and going straight to Rivendell is a completely legitimate tactic if someone is struggling with the Grand Hobbit Countryside Stroll.
The Hobbit was “meh” until after I finished it and went straight into Watership Down. YMMV but I started daydreaming about Hobbit snares.
Tamora Pierce books are kind of hit and miss for me. I like the Alanna books now (though I didn’t when I was a teenager), and I really like the Beka Cooper books, but the animal magic series or whatever it was called just sort of made me shrug, and the Trickster books… when I try to read them, I just don’t care enough to get past the first page. I have no idea why.
I love the Protector of the Small, because it is less about *magic* and more about effort and practice and coming of age and finding your mission in life. The Alana books didn’t do much, and the animal shape shifter stuff was just … squicky for me.
My parents gave me a copy of The Hobbit when I was nine and were really invested in me liking it, to the point of almost holding my other books hostage, but I just could not. get. into it.
Eventually they gave up and left me to my books about girls going on magical adventures. I gave it another shot when I was seventeen because the Hobbit movies had been announced and I liked the LotR trilogy. It was… fine?
I feel this so hard! Everyone, EVERYONE in my circle of friends in high school *loved* Tamora Pierce; one of my friends even attended the writing workshop summer camp for teens Tamora Pierce hosts every year. But I was always like…these are…okay? LeGuin is better?
I’m just not into high fantasy either, which seemed to confuse everyone because I loved science fiction and “weird” fantasy (urban fantasy?) like Lauren Beukes stuff or Dresden Files.
Okay, so I’ve finished 114 books this year. Here are all the books that were neither excellent, nor terrible. Shining examples of enjoyable-enough mediocrity, all:
(Numbering messed up because I just cut out all the excellent and terrible books from my existing list)
2. After I Do – Taylor Jenkins Reid
3. Dark Places – Gillian Flynn
4. The Pretty One – Lucinda Rosenfeld
5. The Appetites of Girls – Pamela Moses
6. The Silent Sister – Diane Chamberlain
7. Love and Other Foreign Words – Erin McCahan
8. The Here and Now – Ann Brashares
12. Ape House – Sara Gruen
13. Hidden – Catherine Mackenzie
15. The Last Days of California – Mary Miller
18. Stuck in the Middle With You – Jennifer Finney Boylan
20. The Girl on the Train – Paula Hawkins
21. Gulp – Mary Roach
22. House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
26. The Shadow Cabinet – Maureen Johnson
28. I Feel Bad About My Neck – Nora Ephron
29. When We Fall – Emily Liebert
31. The Tiger’s Wife – Tea Obreht
32. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
38. Crash & Burn – Lisa Gardner
39. Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood
40. The Year of the Flood – Margaret Atwood
41. Maddaddam – Margaret Atwood
44. First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria – Eve Brown-Waite
47. I Remember Nothing – Nora Ephron
48. Dear Life – Alice Munro
49. At the Water’s Edge – Sara Gruen
50. Find Me – Laura van den Berg
53. The Silent Wife – A.S.A Harrison
54. Someone is Watching – Joy Fielding
55. The Empty Room – Lauren B. Davis
60. Sharp Objects – Gillian Flynn
66. Mr Fox – Helen Oyeyemi
68. The Unlikely Hero of Room 13 B – Teresa Toten
69. All the Rage – Courtney Summers
70. Gemini – Carol Cassella
71. Saint Anything – Sarah Dessen
72. Church of Marvels – Leslie Parry
73. Inside – Alix Ohlin
74. On the Way – Cyn Vargas
76. Wallflowers – Eliza Robertson
78. Euphoria – Lily King
82. Everything I Never Told You – Celeste Ng
83. The One Who Got Away – Bethany Chase
84. Luckiest Girl Alive – Jessica Knoll
89. I Take You – Eliza Kennedy
90. Read Bottom Up – Neel Shah and Skye Chatham
93. Maybe in Another Life – Taylor Jenkins Reid
94. I Don’t Have a Happy Place – Kim Korson
97. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents – Julia Alvarez
98. Extraordinary Means – Robyn Schneider
99. The Girl With All the Gifts – M.R.Carey
100. The Full Spectrum – Billy Merrell and David Levithan
101.Come As You Are – Emily Nagoski
103. Oleander Girl – Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
104. Nobody Is Ever Missing – Catherine Lacey
105. Forgotten Country – Catherine Chung
107. Royal Wedding – Meg Cabot
110. Bennington Girls Are Easy – Charlotte Silver
111. The Beginning of Everything – Robyn Schneider
112. The Girl in the Road – Monica Byrne
113. Pink Sari Revolution – Amana Fontanella-Khan
114. Four Queens – Nancy Goldstone
(Thankfully, I excised slightly more wonderful books than awful ones from the list!)
yes to White Teeth (though I did persevere and read On Beauty which was amaaaaaazing)
I LOVED On Beauty. So much.
I also didn’t really like The Tigers Wife.
Thank you. That is just such a meh book. I actually read it twice because I thought I must be missing the magic but no. It’s just a nothing book. It’s the only book I ever left in a hostel, and I did it WITHOUT LOOKING BACK.
You’ve….read….114 books….THIS year??? HOW?????? You are my hero.
How have you read so many books?? Also, can you post your lists of terrible and really good books. I want to see!
I am assuming this is not a rhetorical question. If it is, just skip to the end.
I read a lot of YA, which goes quickly. I read very little nonfiction, and the nonfiction I do read uses accessible language. I travel a lot for work, and for whatever reason I seem to read twice as fast in airports/on planes. I don’t watch a lot of television. I do not have a terribly exciting social life.
As for really good books: I like Liane Moriarty for characterization and observations about human nature. I love Ruth Ozeki’s books and Maria Semple’s. Station Eleven was great. Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan. Redefining Realness by Janet Mock. Butterflies in November by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I thought Adam by Ariel Schrag was absolutely fucking brilliant, though I would hesitate to actually recommend it because of the subject matter. Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat. All the early Discworld books except for Pyramids. Pyramids was a slog. Get in Trouble by Kelly Link.
Terrible ones: The Memory Painter by Gwendolyn Womack. Nothing about that book worked, including her depiction of how long it takes to travel around Newfoundland. We Should Hang Out Sometime by Josh Sundquist – unfunny self-pitying Nice Guy ™ crap. Rent Girl by Michelle Tea – why the queer community worshipped this woman is beyond me. Cat Out of Hell by Lynne Truss – I loved Eats, Shoots and Leaves but her fiction leaves a lot to be desired. The Housewife Assassin’s Handbook – read it for a reader’s challenge; understood why it was not traditionally published. Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future by A.S. King – not the good kind of weird.
Oh yes! Inside by Alix Ohlin was the first one I thought of. So aggressively meh.
110. Bennington Girls Are Easy – Charlotte Silver
Sorry, I think you forgot to omit this from your list, because it was terrible.
(Also, I’m glad there is someone else who keeps a chronological list of everything they read during the year. I’m only at 56 though, because grad school consumed my life.)
I mean, it wasn’t the best or the most subtle satire ever, and I certainly wouldn’t want to spend time with people like the characters. I think it had its good points, though – the pacing was good; some of the satire was effective; I laughed out loud once. It takes a lot for me to call a book terrible.
Oh no! I LOVED The Girl With All the Gifts. Ah, well. Also, I bow to your book reading dedication!
It was fine! It was just that the whole time I was reading it, I was thinking “this would work better as a movie than it does as a novel”. Got to the end and discovered that the author was writing the novel and the screenplay at the same time, and yep, it showed.
As zombie narratives go, I thought the Girl With All the Gifts was pretty great. But you’re right, not life-changing.
I was super disappointed by Ape House. I was so excited by the description because I love linguistics and animal theory of mind, and then…meh.
I will say two things in favor of The Girl with All the Gifts: 1) I am profoundly indifferent to zombies, and this was the only zombie thing I’ve ever enjoyed, and 2) Melanie is the cutest fucking baby dyke and it filled my heart with joy. (Yes whatever you could read it heterosexually BUT WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO.)
I liked Gulp but Mary Roach books are usually my jam (exception: Spook). Have you tried the ones about astronauts, sex, or dead bodies?
Not the one about astronauts. All the others, yes. I like Mary Roach’s style but I lost interest in Gulp halfway through.
Atlas Shrugged. It did not convert me to Rand’s ideology, nor did it fill me with life-changing hatred. I thought it was a pretty engaging story that was several hundred pages too long and battered the point well past death. But it has led to amusing conversations with friends, and I understand the Ayn Rand Toast posts better because of it.
I read Atlas Shrugged, and I am pretty unchanged from it. It read as fiction. The same as Brave New World or 1984…sure, some interesting reflections on society, but it’s just a story in the end.
I hated Brave New World. I found that world neither brave nor new. It was bullshit.
OMG I hated House of Leaves. And I didn’t care much for Ethan Frome, neither.
Ethan Frome was terrible. As was Silas Marner.
Yes, SUPER AGREED. I love George Eliot, even Felix Holt, The Radical but I could not deal with Silas Marner. It was impossible.
Yes. Also I get them mixed up.
Agreed, House of Leaves was just tedious.
YES House of Leaves. So many people have waxed philosophically at me about this book for hours, and I’ve tried and failed to get into it ~4 times. I want to like it so badly, but I Just. Don’t. Care.
House of Leaves was the worrrrrrrrrrrrrst. I gave up on it for months during the section where it just lists every fucking kind of fixture ever made.
I liked the parts of House of Leaves that took place in the house, but the self-satisfied meta-fiction parts (i.e. anything with Johnny Truant) were so obnoxious I quickly began skipping them. Maybe I missed something important; I don’t care!
I did the exact same thing! I really really liked the house parts though, so it balanced out, I think.
Your experience appears to have been exactly the same as mine. About halfway through,
I was
just
done with
(new page)
that dumb book
Yes yes yes! I love the parts in the house, but could have totally left everything else.
You missed nothing. Johnny Truant is the worst. I’ve reread it a couple times and always skip him. So whinny. And so like all of my miserable exes.
He doesn’t add anything important to the story.
Same. I liked the creepy house, but Johnny Truant’s bits seemed irrelevant. I had no interest in Thumper or drugs or any of that shit.
And the meta-text was a bit too…self-aware and faux-clever.
I like Edith Wharton, but I have absolutely no idea why “Ethan Frome” is assigned so often in high schools. (Maybe just because it’s her shortest book? I’m pretty sure that’s also how we ended up studying “Hard Times” by Dickens).
It’s not one of her best, and the themes in it don’t exactly resonate with the average teenager.
I did so much Dickens in high school but Hard Times was definitely the worst of them
False! Little Dorritt is the worst because it’s not only more boring than Hard Times but it. is. so. LONG.
(I took a 400-level class on Dickens as a senior in college even tho I was never a fan and I read every last word for some reason and oh my god so many orphans)
I’m pretty sure that’s correct. Also this happens with Billy Budd.
Now I actually quite LIKE Billy Budd, but I don’t think it’s going to be your prime teenage read. Honestly, just save the Melville for college it’s okay.
Ethan Frome taught me that I could hate books, and English class.
And sledding
Ethan Frome was the worst. I have exactly two thoughts resulting from having read this book– a) who the hell keeps a specific dish just for pickles and b) what kind of suicide plan is “sled accident”?
Mark Danielewski is straight up cats walking on a keyboard, pretty sure
Ethan Frome did not change my life one bit, except to tarnish my love of Edith Wharton. But it did stay with me, I’ll give it that. If only because when I see the words “Ethan Frome” I think “oh god no…. that book… christ what a miserable read”
I wanted so very badly to love Shirley Jackson but I read The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle and only found them okay, and I doubt I’ll read any more of her work. They were okay, I guess?
I second this. I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle because it was recommended to me (and by that I mean it was mentionend in an episode of The Autobiography of Jane Eyre), and uh, it was alright, but left me with an uneasy feeling and I really don’t see the point in reading it again.
And yes, I DID base my handle on the book, but only because it fit so well with my actual name.
I’ve been too embarrassed to admit but yeah, finished WHALitC a couple months ago and… didn’t find it scary or atmospheric. Was the end supposed to be a “twist?” And I didn’t really understand the motivations of the villagers. I think it was a perfectly good book but had been soooo overhyped by the blogosphere that it came as a letdown.
Still have much respect for Shirley Jackson and will probably read Haunting soon, but I’m glad I’m not the only one who was not immediately Changed by her work.
I like Jackson, but WHALitC is my least favorite thing by her I’ve read for some reason. I think Haunting was a lot better.
The only book of hers that I’ve read so far was The Road Through the Wall and I really enjoyed it, so if you’re going to try something else I would recommend that one.
Dhalgren. Such dull characters such boring sex scenes such non-existent storytelling and/or narrative energy. I cast a heavy dose of side-eye in the direction of William Gibson for gushing about it so crazily in the introduction.
I agree. I couldn’t get through it.
It is of its time.
The 70s explosion on new SF writers — see Dangerous Visions for an overview– was a huge gamechanger.
It will be fun at Sasquan this weekend (the 2015 World Science Fiction Con in Spokane) to see how the challenge of the “Dead White Guys/SadPuppies” goes against the “Literary Diverse SFF is not just spaceships” view.
Yes! I still regret every minute I spent trying to get into it, or waiting for it to become good… William Gibson wrote the introduction? Because what was said in that at least doubled the amount of time I squandered on this book. Do.not appreciate, Mr. Gibson.
Catcher In The Rye
To Kill A Mockingbird
Slaughterhouse Five
Animal Liberation
ETA: Kushiel’s Dart.
re you ETA: everything past Kushiel’s dart. I mean, I finished it, but that’s it.
I recently tried to read Slaughterhouse Five. It was okay, I guess? It just felt like it was being so self-consciously clever. I stopped about 20 pages from the end, couldn’t summon the energy to finish it. I liked Bluebeard, though.
I mean I finished it, and it was alright I guess, but I only remember fragments of it and that it was supposed to be Very Important.
As for classics, I barely made it through “Jane Eyre.” For modern literature, “Kafka on the Shore” made me question all the hype around Murakami.
I never did get the thing about Murakami either. I was like, “None of this is actually new or interesting.”
I recently read 2 Murakami books in a row, and between the two of them, 3 totally different women get strangled by bathrobe sashes.
…I don’t know what that means, but probably nothing good.
“Kafka” almost reads like a parody of a Murakami novel to me. It might be better in the original Japanese, but man, every single plot and character just felt like a complete miss, and something done 10x better in his earlier novels and stories.
Here here.
Tried Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which gave me weird dreams and I couldn’t read before bed. It took so long to finish and I convinced myself I’d entered a weird time vortex where I was going to only read it for the rest of time.
Decided to give him another shot with Kafka, and also hated it.
This, however, makes me glad I tried: http://htmlgiant.com/craft-notes/breakdown-of-a-m…
I tried The Wind Up Bird Chronicle and partway through I realized that I was basically just reading an Updike novel. Later I read The Elephant Vanishes. Murakami’s women seem to be divided into two categories: unreasonable harridan or milquetoast doormat.
I liked the story in the latter collection about a dude who works in an actual factory that manufactures elephants. That was fine. Although I don’t remember anything else about the story.
Jane Eyre is a book I HATED the first time I read it (I was sixteen), but since had to reread it for college and realized it’s not THAT bad. It’s not really my cup of tea either, though. It’s a book I’ve read twice because it was assigned reading twice.
Same, but I was about 12 the first time (dad thought I should read it) and 24 the second. I don’t love it, but I got a lot more out of it and understood it better when I was older.
I read Jane Eyre when I was 10, but I thought it was a science fiction novel. I mean who ever heard of a world without electricity? I skipped the long paragraphs of description and everything about St,John.
Even before puberty, I knew he was a twit.
I don’t understand the Murakami thing at all. I fought my way through IQ84, despite hating pretty much everything about the last two-thirds of a ridiculously long book, and then for some reason thought it was smart to pick up Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki… never again, Murakami. Never again.
I spent most of my 9th grade English class having stopped reading Jane Eyre just whining loudly about how poor Jane was so plain that we all had to throw books at her. That’s all I’ve gotten from that book and I don’t plan to try again.
I cannot with Murakami. The Wind-up Bird Chronicles will forever be remembered as That Time I Flung a Book Across the Room Because the Author Made Too Many Cutesy Americana References.
I read Norwegian Wood and had similar feelings, because WOW that is a parody of a “nice guy” in that book and I hate him so much.
Kafka on the Shore is terrible. But Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is pretty great imo. Feel like Murakami suffers when he tries to be real. Kafka is insufferable. I like his worlds to be as distant as the tone of his writing and Hard Boiled is a complete fantasy.
Dune. Also, Pride and Prejudice. I tried to get through it, really, I did, but I flung it across the room about 25% in because I couldn’t tolerate how snarky everyone was being to one another.
100% agree re Dune and 100% disagree re Pride and Prejudice although that might well be influenced by the fact that I read it for the first time when I was about 11 or 12, and thought “Wow! Being an adult is going to be so fun and full of intrigue! I should start cultivating some witty retorts and cutting remarks to show how almost grown up I am.” So I’d say that probably changed my life by making me completely insufferable for the entire summer between elementary and middle school.
I also could never make it through P&P, thank goodness, I thought I was the only one. Mostly I thought it was too dry…
Did you read the books I hate thread/post? There were a few people on there who do not like Pride & Prejudice as well (I am firmly in the love camp, but feel no enmity for those that aren’t!)
I have tried 4 times. Four. That’s more than enough attempts, Austen, sorry. I only have so many years left.
P&P was one of those strange books that I enjoyed quite thoroughly when I was *actually* reading it at that very moment, and then disliked in a bland way as soon as I put it down. It was such a remarkable phenomenon that I noticed and commented on it at the time. It seemed so trivial! So dull! when I wasn’t reading it–but then I’d read happily through the next chapter.
YES to Dune.
I like P&P fine but also I think I might be done rereading it, I never need to reread it again (I am a frequent rereader so this is rare) It took me about five goes to start Sense and Sensibility because I was so frustrated, but now I love it. But I just am never going to read Emma, sorry. It’s just far too annoying and cringeworthy and annoying.
OMG Dune, I’ve read that opening section with the pain box so many times and never bothered to finish.
I’ve tried to beat my way upstream through Gravity’s Rainbow a bunch of times, too. No dice.
I like the one scene with the candy descriptions, but that’s it. Also, if you read that on public transit, prepare for unbearable conversational attempts.
This is on my list too. It was my ex’s favorite book and I just could not get into it.
I think your ex tried to talk to me on the bus.
Did he get defensive when you said “enh, that sounds like a boy book?” Because that’s him.
Your ex and mine would get along splendidly. You should check out the article on the “softboy” and see if it resonates. Another ex of mine’s sent it to me and I half laughed half cried.
I have no intention of ever reading that (despite any merits it may or may not possess), merely because it’s basically the ur-text of “Books Every White Man Owns”.
I had a professor in college who claimed that everyone she’d ever met who was a self-professed huge Pynchon fan was also a gigantic conspiracy theorist.
So far my experiences have agreed with that.
That sounds about right to me, too.
Ugh, that book has lived in my purse for three whole months now and I’ve only read to page 40. Am considering giving up
I read it, and I feel like I liked it, but I remember almost none of it (Candy scene and something something bananas in the beginning).
I’ve actually read it twice (wondered if I’d missed something the first time) because a (female) friend of mine whose opinion I otherwise respect thinks it’s the best book ever. To put it mildly, I disagree. That said, I will defend Mason & Dixon with my dying breath.
Goodreads likes to remind me that I started that one over 1200 days ago or something. I KNOW. I will never finish because… why.
I got about a 150 pages into it before realizing that a) half of what I was reading was just sliding over my brain without making an impression, and b) the German S&M subplot that I’d been trudging through for three days was really dorky. The strongest reaction I had to that book was the relief of deciding that I didn’t need to read it any more.
I love the shade of the cover picture here.
Books that Did Not Change My Life:
– Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin–my dad would be so sad about this
– Anything I’ve read by William Faulkner so far
– The Golden Compass, NO OFFENSE but daemons are not that crazy unique of a concept & definitely do not carry this boring series
Probably gonna think of more later, I’ll add them in a comment.
Yes to all of these. I feel bad about being meh about Left Hand of Darkness, though. I love LeGuin’s essays and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, but LHoD and the one other novel I’ve read by her have left me indifferent.
I think it’s the same problem I had when I read Catcher in the Rye in high school and was underwhelmed – it’s been the basis of so much other stuff that its own ideas no longer strike us as revolutionary or groundbreaking. But imagine LHoD in 1969 and it’s like whoa.
I went to a public school that was so violent (including not-infrequent assaults on teachers) that we had a permanent police presence there, so I guess a kid calling an adult a “phony” didn’t really strike us as being all that outré.
Although I have to amend my post to say that I LOVED daemons and they filled my young heart with joy–nonetheless, I was still meh about the books overall.
I tend to just pretend the two books after Golden Compass don’t exist. I like the first one well enough, and I like the ambiguous way it ends more than I like what actually comes after.
Totally. Read the first one, read a synopsis of the second, and skip the last one altogether.
DING DING DING. That last book is a giant hot mess of WTF.
Similarly, I have been aggressively avoiding any information about the content of Gathering Blue for the better part of a decade now.
Oh gosh! Gathering Blue was sooooo underwhelming. There is no need to read it. None.
CORRECT. I would mention Gathering Blue, Messenger, and Son here, but they did change my life in that they injected toxic levels of nonsense into one of my most formative SF worlds.
I thought Gathering Blue was really good! Then again I’m a sucker for any books that combine dystopias AND some random plant knowledge.
Also YEP
I really liked the first one. Even though daemons are not a unique concept they were definitely my favorite part of the book. Imagine though if you grew up and it became something boring and other people’s souls are like walking around being snow leopards or whatever – that terrified me. You’re soul is just hanging around with a big sign on it like “I AM BORING”. harsh.
I couldn’t get through the second one.
I remember literally nothing from the middle book but the scientist (Mary?) in the third book who gets to go to another world and reacts exactly like a nice and curious scientist is THE BEST. I always think it’s so unrealistic that people like Harry Potter or whatever never reflect on their new reality or try to find out how anything works, so I was very happy when I read those Amber Spyglass chapters where the scientist just wanders around and makes observations and educated guesses for her own enjoyment and lets herself be amazed.
ooh ooh ooh – Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: http://hpmor.com/
My husband keeps on saying “ARMORED BEARS!” every time I expressed any amount of apathy towards the Golden Compass book or movie, and I just keep on ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The armored bears were the only thing that book had going for it IMO
I’m the same regarding, well all of them but particularly The Golden Compass. I also couldn’t finish Gorssman’s The Magicians out of boredom, so apparently I’m not the person that realistic takes on Narnia are made for.
The thing about Grossman’s Magicians is it felt like Holden Caulfield goes to Narnia and it was so unhappy, and such a sausage fest I had to stop.
Divergent. I read the first third of it in one sitting and was really into it, put it down, and never managed to care enough to pick it back up and finish it.
I read it. It was fine. I am unchanged.
Same
This exchange is the perfect flower for this thread.
I read Divergent pretty quickly and went to the trouble of buying the second one, but by the time it got to my house two days later I did not care. My mom and sister maintained interest, however, so I gave it to them and they read it and saw the movie (movies? how many of these have come out so far?) and generally continue to enjoy the franchise while I care not one whit.
This is how I feel on that book as well.
I read through the sorting or whatever, went “The Giver did this better” and gave up. It was all just so … obvious. Like if the people in charge of forming the new society had zero sense of subtlety at all.
I made it into the “prove you’re cool enough for this tribe” and it just… went… on…. and I know my SF/Fantasy tropes and structures and just could not finish the slog through that section. She was going to get to know her fellow pledges! Adversity would bring some of them closer! Some would fail! It was going to be hard!
Okay, sure, great, but I don’t yet care enough about any of these people or your world-building to suffer through this with them.
If you are on Twitter I highly recommend @DystopianYA, it is pretty much the second half of your first paragraph and is fantastic. 😀
I read all 3 Divergent books. Didn’t love the first one and then found them progressively underwhelming. By the time I was done with the 3rd, I kinda hated them. But not because they were so terrible, but because everyone on my facebook posted about how they cried a million rivers at the end of the series. (These are grown adult people with generally good taste in books) And I was like, “Am I dead inside? This is dumb.”
The last one is genuinely terrible and makes very little sense. It’s also just annoying in the way it forces the new story arc. You’re not dead inside, the ending was forced and stupid.
What is with these super-popular YA series that crumble into nothingness by the end? The Maze Runner series did the same. Start off solid enough then it’s all downhill from there.
I can’t remember what happened in Insurgent. I saw Divergent with my husband and he would ask me questions about the world that I *knew* were answered in Insurgent, but I could not remember what the answers were.
MAN I AM A HATER, is what I’m learning today! Well, remembering, rather.
Hild. I love the *idea* of it, and I’m glad that it exists. But it didn’t grab me, and I didn’t even finish it. Meanwhile, many many of my friends gush thoroughly about it.
I…started it? It’s on my kindle still, so I’ll finish it…one day.
Hild near killed my bookclub. Nobody read it and we had an incredibly guilty meeting where we talked about the first chapter and ate a brunch we felt we didn’t deserve
Hild didn’t do so well in mine either. Partway through that month I checked in and I was the only one still reading it – I kept on out of a vague sense of duty to Hild, but we abandoned the book as a group in favor of The Age of Miracles (which I had already read before and was able to happily, quickly read through again before our meeting). I think there was just way too much of not a lot going on in Hild, even with all the Terrible Bloodshed.
It took me FOREVER to get through. Like, months. I know some people are like “wow I couldn’t put it down!” but I had to sort of feed it to myself in slow methodical doses. Which is weird, because I really did enjoy it overall, just…not all at once.
YES. I was coming here to say that. The prose was gorgeous and of course I want more queer women in historical fiction. But it meandered so much and the ending was just so icky.
I had seen so many people raving about Hild, and then read it myself and was really underwhelmed. It was fine! I liked a lot of things about it! But I couldn’t keep track of who everyone was and why people wanted to kill other people (and I did a lot of Old English at university, it is not a completely alien time period), which meant I was generally a bit hazy as to what was going on.
I’m still really mad about the lack of the coherent pronunciation guide because I WANT TO KNOW HOW TO PRONOUNCE EVERYONE’S NAMES, GODDAMN IT, DON’T JUST GIVE ME LIKE TWO OF THEM AND LEAVE ME TO FIGURE THE REST OF THEM OUT.
oh thank you!
Moby Dick. My reaction: “Wait, I thought this was about a whale, why is this guy having gay sex in an an inn, I mean I’m OK with that obviously but I’m just confused about where the whale comes in. Oh, here’s the stuff about the whale. Bored now.”
I read this as part of a “hard books” summer reading club that my English MA buddies and I started after grad school. I took two things away from it. 1) WHITE IS THE MOST AWFUL THING EVER. 2) Melville either did not know, or did not give much of a fuck about, whale hunting, because I LEARNED NOTHING.
Wait what, gay sex in an inn? You just made this book sound so much more exciting than the brief overview we did of it in high school English ever did.
Let’s just say that the gay subtext is pretty much full-frontal text…and it’s still not enough to make the book interesting.
There’s also a bit on the boat where they’re squeezing out the spermaceti and Ishmael goes into this trippy sort of headspace where he starts rhapsodizing about touching the other men’s hands.
Later someone runs around the boat wearing the skin of the whale’s penis. As you do.
I got to the “squeezing sperm” chapter and said aloud, “Okay, you are SHITTING me.” Plus there are the harpooners rubbing one another’s harpoons rhythmically before they head out for the chase. The whole book is a gay dick joke with biologically incorrect assertions about whales (spoiler: not fish), so when can we as a society stop taking it seriously?
This thread is the first convincing argument for reading Moby Dick I’ve ever seen. A classic tale about a man obsessed with unproductive revenge which is a deep comment on the human condition or whatever? Uurgh, boring. 400 pages of old-timey whale nerdery? Well, I might read that one day, not now, but maybe sometime. But 400 pages of gayness, penis jokes and random whale opinions? YES, that sounds great.
I actually really love Moby Dick for all its dense, symbolist tomery. Also for penis jokes though. It’s got a far more sly sense of humor than it gets credit for. But I will always agree that it is not for everyone and that is totally okay because I’m well past my book evangelist stage of life (thankfully).
I love it too, and I’ve found that the audio book really brings the humor out.
I read the sperm chapter aloud to my then-roommate, who laughed until he cried. Yup– extensive homoeroticism and dick jokes masquerading as a revenge novel.
I am about two thirds of the way through, as I have been for about the last decade, and I have been much more delighted by the digressions than by the plot proper.
“spoiler: not fish”
GODDAMMIT, YOU RUINED IT FOR ME (upends table, throws book across room)
‘bridegroom’s clasp”
My first ever paper in my first semester of college was on Moby Dick for a lit class and I wrote about the Ishmael/Queequeg relationship because that was also the only thing I cared about.
But since I had only been in college for maybe five weeks, I was terrified that I’d get in trouble for being too heavy-handed about the gay sex in an inn, so I tried to dial it back a notch.
I got the paper with: “B+, you should have talked more in depth about the homosexuality.” And I thought, “COLLEGE WILL BE OKAY.”
Other than that, yeah, the rest of Moby Dick was just boring whale stuff as far as I remember it. (And learning what part of a whale to make a raincoat from . . .)
Queequeg is like “We are all going to die.” and people are like “pat pat pat, what will make you productive again?” and he’s like “A coffin, a coffin that is suspiciously like a tiny boat, sealed against the waves, full of water and food.” and people are like “We can absolutely do that.” and Queequeg is like “Honey, my coffin is RIGHT HERE, do you see it? IT IS HERE. IF YOU WONDERED. IF IT COMES UP. Remember how I said half of everything I had was yours? Well this is my coffin boat, right here.”
Queequeg is my favorite.
Yes! Like I don’t care enough about anyone in this book to go through the work of finishing it. I don’t even actively hate it. That is too much emotion. It’s just tedious.
Moby Dick was the only book I was assigned in high school that I did not finish and had to use cliffs notes for. No clue why but I just could not make myself finish.
I’ve only ever walked away from two other books, so it was pretty memorable
Kafka on the Shore and another short story collection by Murakami that I read. I always expect to really love Murakami and then I never care about his writing at all.
Girl on the Train. I stuck through the boring-ness of it because it SEEMED like the kind of book that would have a big, interesting twist, and then it just … didn’t. Unless the fact that [REDACTED] did it was supposed to be the twist, but was anyone truly surprised by that?
Agreed with this, I just finished this and felt kinda let down by the ending. Plus, all the characters were kind of not that great people, but not great people for uninteresting reasons.
I enjoyed Girl on the Train but I definitely guessed who’d done it about halfway through.
YES. I couldn’t quit because I thought it was just about to get good and it never did.
Yeah, it was very underwhelming to me.
So boring! And so easy to figure out, but not in a fun way.
been saying this for months!
Little Women, Mists of Avalon, Stars My Destination, and Sophie’s World were all recommended to me on the basis that they were similar to something else I loved, but for whatever reason I found them uninspiring or unfinishable. Same with any number of fantasy series (Mercedes Lackey comes to mind) or anything with a vaguely feminist bent.
I wish I could add The Great Gatsby to this list, but in the face of so many people loving it my apathy towards it transcended “I dunno, I just didn’t like it that much” and turned into a crusade that has, I confess, changed my life. Damn you, Fitzgerald!
I have read the entirety of the Great Gatsby and watched the 70s movie adaptation, and every time someone brings it up I have to do a refresher of the plot. There’s a huge house and some parties, and … does someone die? Can’t be sure.
ohhhhh Sophie’s World. It taught me so much about philosophy that I forgot a week later :/
OMG YES MISTS OF AVALON WTF WHY IS IT LIKE THAT. SO TERRIBLE. I kept expecting it to be earth shattering but it was just 100% UGH.
I read Sophie’s World a few times as a teenager. I always started off strong – learning about philosophy! This is interesting! – and then it got into the weird breaking-the-fourth-wall thing and I stopped caring.
YES I came here just to add Mists of Avalon because I love that kind of book and everyone told me to read it and I was so bored I had to give up after like 150 pages, I couldn’t force myself to go on.
Mists of Avalon, where she never passes up a chance to reinforce a stereotype or engage in lazy storytelling and those damn mists get rung up and down like a bloody curtain…
yes.
I really want to hear you talk smack about Gatsby.
I will hate on the Great Gatsby with you ANY DAY. Please hate on The Great Gatsby with me.
Gah, that book. Overrated slick white guy pain. PLEASE.
Now if it had been a book about Nick getting with Gatsby, as it SHOULD have been, that would have been a book worth reading.
I don’t really know why Redshirts won a Hugo. It was…you know, it was fun! I enjoyed parts of it. Then I put it aside and haven’t thought about it except to occasionally wonder why it won a Hugo.
As a kid, I thoroughly failed to get anything out of the Chronicles of Narnia, and quickly gave up on them.
Redshirt’s Hugo was a huge bone of contention in the SF community – I agree with you, it’s a piece of fluff, not worthy of the award.
The weird part is, if I wanted to advance a Marxist SJW takeover of speculative fiction (and I HELLA do, naturally) there’s a lot better books to nominate towards that end than Redshirts. There’s better Scalzi books, even!
For me, it’s a piece of fluff that also made me cry. I really enjoyed that book, much more than I expected to.
Same. I like a lot of Scalzi’s work, but Redshirts did not do it for me… but I didn’t aggressively hate it or anything.
I liked Redshirts a ton, but I can see how people(/scifi nerds) might mistake ‘self-referential’ for ‘brilliant’
See Also: Ready Player One
UGHHHHH Ready Player One was just so… ‘meh’. Like aggresssively ‘meh’?. There was no real plot or anything, just ‘hey check it out, this entire society is built on knowledge of that obscure geek stuff you love, you’re cool now, isn’t that cool ha ha buy my book’.
Maybe I’m a little too young for the target demographic (born in 86) butI do not understand the flailing it gets.
no you’re right – it was the “everybody read” book for my daughter’s college freshman orientation, and the teacher thought they’d like it, because youth and videogames, amiright? and the class started taking apart the economic basis for the society, with glee and then my daughter reported this back to me along with some associated grar.
So I totally thought it was about the ethics of creative work and the way we think about the lives of others as opposed to our own lives. (As in, is it really okay to have these people and worlds who are sort of real to you and then you do terrible things to them or have them do terrible things? ((I’m looking at you Dante what with all that time you spent imagining the brutal torment of people you actually knew!)) and we are protagonists and other people are supporting characters except there can’t be a protagonist because real life doesn’t have a narrative structure unless we apply it retroactively which is still inaccurate.)
Right? Because “good death” is a garbage thing to ask for, when you have a creator in your grip.
I kinda feel the same way about Among Others winning. I like Jo Walton a lot, I even liked parts of Among Others very much, but I feel like it won mainly because of collective nerd nostalgia for loving golden age sci-fi as a child. I do have not any golden age nostalgia, even though I’ve read a fair bit of it, so the lengthy and detailed references seemed excessive.
though tbh I haven’t actually read any of the other nominees for that year, so maybe they’re just not any better?
I mean, I like Scalzi. I like his essays, but Redshirts is okay. Most of his books are okay, and certianly not life changing.
YES! I liked Redshirts. It was like a nerdy beach read. But it wasn’t anything super profound.
I totally like some of Scalzi’s other books better. I think Redshits def would not have gotten any awards if Scalzi was not already well know.
Redwall, almost all of them. I liked the IDEA of Redwall, warrior animals being brave and shit, but I think I skipped out on reading most of the actual books because they were all like:
-there is a mystery in a poem which cannot be solved by the reader and takes up half of the book
-mice monastery creates an elaborate feast which cannot be eaten by the reader
– bad animals be bad and mean. sad times.
srry Brian
Well as a friend once put it, “The thing about Redwall was that after a while they were all the same book, but it was a good book, so you didn’t mind.” And that pretty much sums up my (and everyone’s) Redwall experience. They were good. I liked reading them. I own many because I used to buy them when I was a kid. But they are all the same. I know the formula. I know the plot. I know the characters. I know the songs. I know the food. And so I have felt absolutely no hurry to finish the handful of them that I haven’t read yet.
Having read at least 12 Redwall books aloud, one chapter at a time, to my dyslexic son, I agree that they are pretty much the same book over and over. They did change my life though: I now speak mole dialect passively well. They definitely changed my child’support life though. His grasp of the adventure narrative is superb.
Oh did he love them! That’s so great! See now all of my personal ambivalence is magically gone because I taught reading stuff for kids and whenever they love books I get so excited.
I remember being disillusioned with the series when I read The Outcast of Redwall (I think that’s the title) where a baby stoat (weasel maybe? definitely not one of the “cute” woodland good guys) was adopted into the abbey and still grew up bad. Like I know it’s fantastical animals fighting each other, but I was turned off by the idea that if you’re born a certain species you are always bad.
Ferret. That book was one of my favorites, but mostly because it was pretty sprawling, for a Redwall story. So I loved the parts with Sunflash and his kestrel friend, and the way the rivalry between Sunflash and the ferret warlord spanned years and years, and the ferret warlord’s rise to power. That last one probably says something about me as a kid. The “baby ferret raised at Redwall” plotline actually was my least favorite part of the book, for the exact reason you mentioned.
Wait, did he grow up bad? I think my brain edited that out of the story and replaced it with a different ending that wasn’t so species-essentialist and depressing.
He’s bad right up until he makes a Heroic Sacrifice, thus putting an end to any additional character development. I think there are parts where he cares for another character, but not substantial.
I had never heard of fanfiction when I wrote an elaboration of the hinted-at romance between the fox healer and one of the stoat (ferret? weasel?) warlords in one of the books. I remember thinking that The Outcast of Redwall was ripe for some rewriting too.
Yep. I read the Redwall books at age 9-11 or so, and loved them, and then sometime in high school I was thinking back over the plots and realized how the species-essentialism could very, very easily be read as a thinly-veiled argument in favor of racism/xenophobia. (Not to mention the sparrows, who are ugly caricatures of Native Americans.) I eventually went back and read a few as an adult, and yep, the ugly stuff was right there in front of me, but part of me was still charmed by Brian Jacques’ storytelling skills. It was a weird feeling.
I loved Redwall and it genuinely was life-changing for me as a child but you are not wrong.
How old were you when you first read them? I’m curious because I generally find that those that LOVE them read them somewhere between the ages of 8 and 13, while people who didn’t don’t like them as much read them older/younger than those ages. Certainly it’s possible to not like them if you read them in that age range, but it seems less likely from the anecdotal evidence I’ve collected.
8/9 ish
We had a friend who was super into it and we would play Redwall forever and I was totally into that.
Like a book world where you like making fan-fiction about it better than you like the book itself.
Redwall did not change my life in the way I hoped it would, i.e. I never actually became a nimble and brave squirrel archer with a woodland walled village to defend 🙁
YAY! I was a Squirrel archer forever!
Who do you want to be?
Um a squirrel archer I think or maybe a badger… no a squirrel archer. A red squirrel though and I have a hood. It’s green.
the otters were always my favorite, but in my “one day I’ll be in Redwall-world!” fantasies I was a squirrel.
YAS I ALSO WANTED TO BE A SQUIRREL.
Jess was my heroine~!
I think most people who read Redwall knew it was pretty formulaic and bad, as well as racist, but they enjoyed it because they were idiot kids or were sucked into the lavish description combined with the comforting formula. I’ve read so many of those Redwall books so many times, but I know them to be rubbish and I don’t feel bad about anyone not enjoying them or not bothering with them.
Yeah, I recently reread Redwall and….don’t do that, it didn’t hold up for anything but nostalgia. The snake was still terrifying though.
Lolita. it was fine, I guess.
You should listen to Jeremy Irons read it. It’s a totally different experience.
alas, I’m not an audiobook person 🙁
The perfect mix of turned on and creeped the everloving fucked out. I made it half an hour before the cognitive dissonance was overwhelming and I had to turn on bad 80s rock to reset my brain.
yeah, “turned on and creeped the everloving fuck out” is pretty much how i feel about JI anyway, so i think i’d better not listen to that maybe.
Agreed! I’ve started it probably 4 times and I usually only make it 15 or so pages. Like, oh, I get it. You’re clever.
I read about 120 pages and that was enough. I get it.
Yes, you probably do. I mean, you’re on the toast. You’re probably like “this is gross, and also evocative of the way women and girls are treated, and I am creeped the fuck out.” and really, that’s the point. You don’t have to slog through the rest of the abuse to confirm that.
I JUST finished Lolita and felt very much the same. My partner loved it and I just felt ahh “ugh gross another old white dude story” though the first line is like, excellent.
Jane Austen. Never got why people love her so much.
Infinite Jest. Any book that requires one to make a detailed chart to keep track of is simply not worth the time.
Virginia Woolf. I really tried, you guys.
Franny and Zooey. One passes out on a date (right? don’t really remember), one shouts at his mother from the bathtub. Meh.
Ugh, Infinite Jest. Having footnotes at the back of the book rather than at the bottom of the page has always been a pet peeve of mine, so this book was basically just designed to irritate me.
Ugh yes! That’s the worst!
Reading Infinite Jest as an ebook changed EVERYTHING for me. Click on an endnote number, read it, click “back,” and resume. If I’d had to keep flipping back and forth in my actual copy I couldn’t have made it.
Wasn’t that the whole point? I dunno, never read it. My pretentious boyfriend said I was an idiot for not buying a paper copy, because that was the point. Didn’t matter, I didn’t read the book and I dumped him.
I will happily watch Colin Firth make googly eyes forever. I read ten pages into P & P and noped out.
I completely agree about Jane Austen. I’m about to start an English Ph.D. program and still haven’t gotten more than 100 pages into an Austen novel.
fistbump of solidarity on Jane Austen, I am so bored by it all
It always bummed me out that Jane Austen is such a fixture of bookish teenage girls everywhere, because I gave up on at least two of her books after fifty pages and then had to feign interest through literally years of lunchroom conversations.
I am saddened to admit that I only have read two of them all the way- Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey. But I love both of those like crazy.
I’m reading Northanger Abbey at the moment and was pleasantly surprised by how quickly I got into it. It’s hilarious.
“Oh no I’m richer than 95% of the people in the world, and if I don’t meet an appropriate partner I’ll only be richer than 92% of everyone.”
AND, why do people insist on calling Franny and Zooey a sequel to Catcher when they have no characters in common and WHY ON EARTH do people insist that Zooey’s name is pronounced Zoe when it is not Zoe it is Zooey and he is not female he is male?
Oh god, I didn’t even remember Zooey was a dude. I’m taking your word for it, though I read the book.
Did anyone else give up 2/3 of the way through 1Q84? Ain’t nobody got time for that!
…. I’m now sitting here wondering if that was a typo, or if you gave up 2/3s of the way through the first quarter of 1984.
ETA: oh, wait, there’s actually a BOOK CALLED 1Q84????? whaaaaaaaaaaa.
It’s sort of a bilingual pun. The author’s Japanese, and in Japanese 9 can be pronounced as kyuu, which sounds like Q and…yeah.
1q84 came out 3 days before I had a book review due for a college writing seminar and I was like “yeah, I should write my review on this book! Great idea, Sausagedog.” (I PULLED IT OFF. BARELY. And actually enjoyed the book but MAN it is a lot of book.)
Oh totally. I think I subconsciously planned to give up at that point even before starting it. Like, I know Murakami sucks at endings, but I like him just enough to attempt to read each new book. It’s like a little negotiation I do with myself.
I think the only reason I finished was because it was an audiobook – no way I would have finished if it were a hard copy. Wayyy to much creepy information about the lady and her amazing litheness.
I tried so hard and I just didn’t care and there was so much more to go.
YES.
On my shelf untouched since I put it there over a year ago. About a third of the way through. Just…kinda…eh. Still deluding myself that I’ll finish it though.
Books I should have, by all accounts, at least finished if not enjoyed:
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Game of Thrones
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
Good Omens (I tried SO SO HARD on that one)
And, yeah, Mists of Avalon
I’m glad I’m not the only one who had trouble getting into Good Omens! I only got a few chapters in and keep meaning to go back to it but I don’t know if I actually will.
Agreed in the last three. JSAMN just had too many goddamn white dudes in it–even though it is a book that is fundamentally about how privileged white duded ruin everything I was just so bored that I couldn’t finish it.
I was also surprised at how meh I was about Good Omens. I think if I had read it as a teenager I would have loved it. I also thought the pratchett bits were much better than the gaiman ones.
Yeah, I wanted to like Good Omens soooo badly! It just didn’t gel for me or something. I dunno.
I feel like it starts off REALLY GOOD and then gets REALLY MEDIOCRE AND KINDA CONFUSING. And then you just don’t finish it!
Yes!
First half: immortal bromance, wild cosmic backstory, ill tidings, prophecies and storms,
Second half: The Goonies
I’ve tried to read JSAM three different times and never managed to make it more than 1/3 of the way through. It’s EXACTLY my sort of book, and yet…
Me too. I did enjoy her story collection, “The Ladies of Grace Adieu,” so I really think it’s JUST JSAM that I have the problem with.
I got about 6 chapters into Game of Thrones and just couldn’t deal with it anymore. I feel you on that one.
I started it on a train ride from NYC to Albany and then when the ride was over I put it down and never picked it up again.
I got through right before Ned died and then stopped for a few months. Finished it, started the second one, then realized I absolutely DID. NOT. CARE.
I found the constant POV switching very jarring and it made it hard to latch onto who anyone was and what they were doing there.
I just found it all really depressing and not really that unique a setting. So not worth my time when there are so many other possibly life changing books to be read!
I read all five and seriously, by the time you remember who someone is and what they were doing when you last saw them 1000 pages ago, their chapter is over (probably with some kind of cliffhanger you won’t remember in another 1000 pages) and you’re off to the other side of the continent to start the process again.
Also walking. So much walking. Like put-Tolkien-to-shame levels of walking.
i’m still furious that jonathan strange was too boring for me to finish. how dare you defeat me with your tedium!!!! i am in the BUSINESS of tedium! you come into MY HOUSE etc.
YES I came down here to say Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell! I did, however, love the BBC miniseries.
I struggled through the first third of it, started watching the series and then raced through the book. It actually ends differently to the show (Lascelles gets a MUCH more satisfying ending) so I’d say it’s worth reading, but man, you really have to get through a good chunk of it before you get invested in any of the characters. I don’t think Strange even shows up till page 200 or something.
Mists of Avalon, in which a girl weeps inconsolably between weaving sessions. Or something.
any and all Annie Dillard. It made me so sad to not like her, since everyone under the sun thought I ought to! (If I had a penny for every time someone recommended Pilgrim at Tinker Creek…)
Right there with you. Everything she publishes is so painfully over-written and self-conscious, it’s vaguely embarrassing to have her in one’s head-space.
This almost belongs on last week’s post, but Ender’s Game. I mean, I didn’t read it until I was in college, so “what if the adults were bad and lying?” was not exactly a particularly novel or shocking revelation at that point, and I also knew what a jerk Card was. But I mostly just felt a resounding “well, this was adequate, I guess” upon finishing it. (In my mind it’s roughly equivalent to saying Divergent changed your life: like, yes, I super understand that all sorts of things can hit you personally very profoundly if they arrive at just the right time, but, also, really, that was what did it?)
I wondered the same about Divergent! I read all three books and they were, as you say, adequate, I guess. Not exactly world-shaking, and it kind of felt like the author went “whoops, the first one was too popular, better figure out what’s going on outside” since I couldn’t remember any foreshadowing of what was on the other side of that wall.
When my husband was a little kid he wrote to Orson Scott Card asking for permission to make a video game about Ender’s Game as a book report project and Card wrote back and told him no and that he didn’t think a video game was an appropriate project for school.
No feelings to be had when I read ‘The Year of the Flood’ which is severely disappointing to a lady that has had TOO MANY feels for Margaret Atwood’s books. And her general person.
Also to be mentioned: The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett – fell asleep trying to slog through it; The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen – I tried SO hard to like this book. EVERYONE ON NPR SAID IT WAS GOOD BUT THEY LIED AND I CANNOT FORGIVE THEM.
oh, The Corrections, I tried so hard because I thought something was wrong with ME that I didn’t like it. Thankfully the internet connected me to Franzen-haters (well, Franzen meh-ers) a few years later. WE ARE NOT ALONE!
I tried reading Oryx and Crake at least twice. I was maybe a quarter of the way through when I had to return it to the library and I really can’t say I have any desire to check it out again.
I had a very “meh” reaction to The Corrections, and a much stronger– outright negative– response to Franzen’s book of essays.
He’s just such a miserable git, and I’ve never wanted so strongly to give an author a wedgie before.
I somehow finished The Pillars of the Earth and I’m not even sure how or why. There are others in that series, I believe, but they take place like hundreds of years in the future? I don’t know and I don’t care.
I also made it through Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood but never progressed to MaddAdam. Not sure if I need to really….
Pillars of the Earth, oh man. I made the mistake of buying a paperback instead of a Kindle version and carrying it around everywhere until I finished it. The sex scenes were . . . interesting.
Pillars of the Earth: an encyclopedia entry about Cathedral building mashed-up with a novel written by a 15 year old. Such a waste of my valuable time. I have never read a book with so many one-sided characters.
Yes a million times about Jonathan Franzen.
THE GIVER and A WRINKLE IN TIME. I know, I’m a bad person.
I am supremely MEH on both of these. I think I just didn’t read them early enough?
I think that very idea is a critical thing in how much I (and tons of people I know) like or care less about a book. There is a specific time in life to read many books and, once that time has passed, it’s a waste of time to try.
There are some books that I pretty much inhaled as a teenager that I would probably find exhausting if I read them today (see: House of Leaves) and some others that I hated as a kid but loved when I reread them. Actually, I can kind of track my emotional state over time by which books I really connected with at that time. My study-abroad trip in Latin America neatly coincided with a major depressive episode, which might explain why ‘2666’ SPOKE TO MY VERY SOUL whereas most of the other people I know who read it found it disturbingly dark.
2666 was so…disappointing? But really beautiful? I feasted on the part about the critics and the part about archimboldi, but the novel ultimately felt incomplete and rushed. Definitely a much more interesting story than Savage Detectives (and that’s probably why I’m so torn about it), but a part of me wishes his estate hadn’t published it at all.
See, I wish I remember enough to articulate exactly why I loved it so much, but it’s probably mostly that it was very well-written and atmospheric in a way that I really dug at the time. I would like to tell you without reservation that I also loved the Savage Detectives, but actually I skipped about a hundred pages in the middle. The beginning and end were good though!
Yes, when I think of A Wrinkle in Time, my most vivid memory of my first reading was when Meg is talking to those aliens who can’t see and she’s trying to figure out how to describe what a colour is to them. I immediately attempted it myself, and found it a shockingly difficult task. I also remember spending a long time thinking about how the alien said that they prefer to know things as the ARE rather than see what they are LIKE. Not a revelation if you are an adult, but as a child these were very new ideas, and so that book had a huge impact on me.
No, but I’m with you 100%. We can be bad together.
Adult me realizes that people are different and different works speak to them or don’t. Childhood me is crying.
I just started reading A Wrinkle In Time, and I stopped when she was in the attic wrapped in a quilt bitching about being different. I’ll give this to my kids, but I’m well beyond that season.
Every book in the Wrinkle in Time series (except Many Waters) was boring and nonsensical to me, and I read them when I was exactly the right age. I also hated A Ring of Endless Light, which I really shouldn’t have because dolphins, so I think I must have some allergy to L’Engle.
I also hated all of her books except for Many Waters -my tween-aged self loved that book.
Yep! Tween jwhittz gave the nonsense in that one a big pass because of those twins.
I mentioned A Wrinkle in Time further down! I did actually like The Giver, but I think I took the wrong message from it, as I thought Jonas’s community sounded pretty appealing. No need to make difficult decisions like what career path to follow! Sign me up.
I’m having trouble naming these books, and I’ve been +1ing everyone who is mentioned a book that I feel this way about. So far the only book that comes to mind that no one has named yet is The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I actually do quite enjoy The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and Kavalier and Clay but I was pretty meh about this one. Of course, maybe no one has mentioned this book because everyone is too apathetic to mention it.
Also I tried reading Vonnegut once and just couldn’t be bothered to continue.
Oh my goodness I’ve been trying to read Wonder Boys for about a year and a half and I can’t get into it and I can’t admit it to a couple beloved humans who are really quite passionate about it.
It’s a rare case where the movie is actually a lot better. Cuts out a lot of unnecessary stuff. Plus it has Robert Downie Jr. And I say this as a Michael Chabon fan.
Yeah, Mysteries of Pittsburgh was pretty meh. Oh he’s gay? Oh there’s a manic pixie dream girl named Phlox (for fuck’s sake)? Yaawwwwwn.
I think I saw the Jezebel post on MPDG after reading this book and I was immediately like “ahhh that’s Phlox.” I guess there’s that!
If the book version of Dr. Zhivago is anything like the movie, than put me down for Dr. Zhivago.
[this is probably cheating but I don’t care]
Also, I really, really want to be crazy about American Gods, but I feel pretty meh about it. Maybe I should try reading it again? I’m someone who loves the Sandman universe too, so it’s not like I hate Neil Gaiman or anything.
I have no particular feeling about Dr. Zhivago but the movie did quite literally change my life in that it is the film my parents saw on their first date. So, not “changed” so much as “eventually led to”
I enjoy it, but not in the way I enjoy most of the rest of Gaiman. I think it has something to do with not being as familiar with mythology as other people are? Like, i think much of the joy in reading it is about recognizing all the existing myths he weaves into the story?
oh, this makes so much sense. I think a lot of my books on this list would be ones that require some knowledge of mythology, religion, great classic works, etc. A lot of that stuff I’ve only learned from reading those novels with a Wikipedia tab open…
YES YES YES to American Gods. I love a lot of Gaiman’s stuff, but I found it really meh overall and I had a hard time getting past how silly the underlying mythology was (I mean, the mythology of the novel, not the mythologies that inform the novel).
Whereas American Gods is the only Gaiman novel I have really fallen for in a big way. I love all the mythological references. I want to love Neverwhere, but every time I’ve read it I have forgotten that I had read it before until halfway through. It just doesn’t stick with me, for some reason.
Gaiman in general. I should love his stuff, from the descriptions (especially American Gods), but OMG he leaves me cold with everything of his I’ve tried.
I just don’t like his characters. I feel like his books are impersonal, I don’t get a sense of urgency from him. The main characters are boring blank slate generic white guys, and the colourful side characters are creatively thought out but only have one trait each. I think he may be better at ideas than at writing? Every dialogue sounds really generic, like “this is a dialogue, this right here is the part of my book where one person says a thing and the other person responds with a thing, this is what dialogue sounds like”. Terry Pratchett can be sloppy like that too, but his pathos, curiosity and sense of humour (an actual, emotional, humourous perspective on life, not just wit) shines through and gives life to his books, and I never got that from Gaiman. I wanted to like American Gods, but it just didn’t stick. Except the succubus, that was inspired.
I am having an extremely small dilemma of manners.
I think your points about Gaiman are good points, and that your critiques of character are accurate. However, his main characters in “American Gods” and “Anansi Boys” are both not white, and probably my favorite thing about those books is that Gaiman doesn’t make a big deal about it or state it explicitly.
This is not a good enough thing to make me want to re-read or recommend the books.
Basically Gaiman always writes the same protagonist, only in American Gods he tried really hard to make him tough. I like him, but I own this about him.
Mysteries of Pittsburgh made me actually angry, especially after reading Kavalier and Clay and Yiddish Policeman’s Union. It made me decide not to read any more set-in-the-current-world Chabon, though, so I guess it did change my life?
Mysteries of Pittsburgh made me angry too. I actually hated it and have read no other Chabon as a result.
Totally agree on Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I also just read Telegraph Avenue and it was okay? It was fun to read because I spend a lot of time in Oakland and it was fun to play spot that local reference (the same game which got me through lots of Infinite Jest, only with Boston instead of the Bay Area). I really do like Kavalier and Clay, so it’s disappointing that I found the other ones I’ve read so aggressively alright but nothing more.
My thoughts on Telegraph Avenue were: wow, this is a great 300-page book that is, for some reason, 450 pages long. I will give it to Wonder Boys and Mysteries of Pittsburgh that although neither is as amazing as Kavalier & Clay, neither pretends to be.
Yeah, I though Telegraph Avenue could have lost one plot and been significantly improved. No plot in particular, it just seemed like there were a few too many threads that took it from having the potential of being really excellent to just bloated.
I know you are NOT asking for recommendations, do what you want, but I enjoy Vonnegut’s short stories a bajillion times more than his novels.
Yup. I love Kavalier and Clay, and have enjoyed nearly everything Chabon has written since it, but any good feelings I have about The Mysteries of Pittsburgh are purely because I grew up in Pittsburgh and am deeply attached to it. Some of the language is really beautiful, and I can see where he is going to grow as a writer, but TMoP was his MFA thesis, and it’s just such a Dude in Your MFA book.
Catch 22.
It was a book. I read it. I quite liked it. The end.
If I’m honest an awful lot of the accepted ‘life changing’ books were things I enjoyed but otherwise got nothing from. And some were books I viciously hated (everything by Hemigway and China Mieville) whereas the the books I found genunely life-changing are often ones that go fairly ignored except in very specific circles?
It’s my favourite, favourite book, but I went in with literally zero expectations, not even knowing that it’s “supposed” to be life-changing (I didn’t know it’s considered to be Great Literature, I only knew it was kind of old and was supposed to be funny, so I expected maybe something like Three Men in a Boat) and I think that may be the key.
I think that has been the difference a lot of times for me. If I read a book knowing it’s supposed to be life-changing or whatever, I’m expecting too much from it and it can’t live up. The books that have hit me that way I went in more open-minded and willing to tak them as they were.
Also a lot of the time older books I read suffer from a thing where they may have been groundbreaking when they were published, but in the intervening years I have personally read so many other books that do the same thing, some of them better or more thoughtfully, and so the original book seems like the cheap knockoff.
Catch-22 was a book I could never finish.
Tam Lin sure was… a book.
Tam lin sure was . . . a book I never finished.
If Tam Lin is the book I think I’m remembering wasn’t it mostly a straight up young-woman-goes-to-college for most of it and then at the end it’s all AND OH YEAH, FAIRIES? My mom and I both read it and were completely nonplussed.
Yes, I think you’re right. I probably expected fairies, and that’s why I never finished it.
It certainly was. I’d read Fire and Hemlock first and still think Diana Wynne Jones did it better (and more concisely!)
Fire and Hemlock is one of these books for me. It suffers from Diana Wynne Jonesitis, where the beginning of the book is amazing, and the middle is amazing, and then end is amazing, but when you try to put together a chronology it makes no sense.
Tom is at the funeral of a fairy queen that will eventually drink his soul, and he sees a little girl who looks bored and is like “well obviously she’s a normal child who has normal parents at this funeral full of vengeful fae, we should hang out.” and then the entire plot unrolls from there. It doesn’t make any sense, and the conclusion doesn’t make any sense, but it’s fine. A fine book. Certainly a thing I read.
Yeah, I actually read a lot of Diana Wynne Jones as a kid, but was also constantly confused by her plots. I was never sure if I wanted to read more of her or not, because the *feeling* was right, but I could just never follow anything.
Diana Wynne Jonesitis is a real problem and when I reread Fire and Hemlock as an adult I have QUESTIONS (about, like, why are you grooming this kid to save you and doing it so half-heartedly?) but I sure love the whole incoherent thing.
Oh, that makes like 50% more sense! Tom is the worst! OK, that’s fine.
Wait, why is her grandmother OK with the grooming?
I mean, I was a freaking classics major. I should have been all over that. I just found it unconvincing.
I did, however, interview once for a job in that department at the college the book is based on, and I did ask the chair if ze was the Queen of Elfland, so that was fun. Did not get the job. No regrets.
Wuthering Heights. The only Bronte I can finish is Charlotte. Also, The Goldfinch, the thing would have been much better if half of it had been deleted.
I love WH but I agree it’s really hard to get through mostly because there is literally NO ONE in the entire book that has any redeeming qualities and I just want them all to get hit by a meteor.
Ugh, The Goldfinch. That one might have been life-changing in how much I hated it.
The only Bronte I ever enjoyed was Anne. Basically because of this http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=202
I got 15% into Goldfinch (thanks, ereader!) before peacing out. Never a better decision was made.
(reply to crabbysister5) A weird brag but I read Wuthering Heights at age 8, and was just so confused about the motivations of the characters. Heathcliff is obviously odd, so why doesn’t Cathy just transfer her love to her husband? Simple fix! When I read it later in my life I realized I’d missed out the sexual attraction aspect of things.
I also read Oliver at the same point, and not knowing anything of antisemitism I assumed that ‘the Jew’ and Fagin were 2 separate characters. I went to see the show and everything, and thought ‘interesting that they cut the Jew character. I suppose the 2 evil old men is a bit overkill.’
Which shows that reader reception is totally interesting, because readers can just wilfully misunderstand your book.
Catch-22. I tried. I tried so hard. but I really couldn’t have cared less about it.
The Alchemist. A guy I dated said it was his favorite book. Unfortunately, it was about as crappy and uninspired as he turned out to be. 🙁
I kept waiting for the Alchemist to do … something, anything, emotionally, for me, because I had friends who were like “THIS IS THE BEST BOOK OF MY LIFE”. I forced myself to finish it and then got mad I’d wasted the time on it, and immediately revised my opinions of my friends who’d recommended it, because apparently I’m judgey about book recommendations.
I have nothing but unbridled hate for that book. It was required freshman reading at my college. I developed an angry twitch by chapter 4.
Yes! I had to read it in a seminar in high school, and I was pissed. The teacher was a smarmy man, too.
…which basically sums up the entire work of Paulo Coelho.
Let this be a warning to anyone who is considering reading the Alchemist that it is a book apparently written for the sole purpose of sourcing the quotes you see on Starbucks cups.
i feel like this is one that’s promised as being LIFE CHANGING. I read it and it was okay? But have friends who say it completely changed their worldviews.
The Alchemist is a dippy inspirational poster masquerading as a novel.
The Alchemist changed my life because I am filled with a burning hatred every time I think about the Women of the Desert bit. I really wanted to like it! I was all on board for the non-nuanced, relentlessly saccharine optimism!
Exactly! I really enjoyed it from a book-reading-experience sort of way but I could not understand why we were reading it in religion class.
YES I read it because my ex gave it to me and I finished and was like …well ok. That was not an inspiring as it wanted to be.
The Alchemist had become a huge red flag in datingfor me. If a guy says it’s amazing and it changed his life, I know to run far away. Guaranteed he thinks his emotional problems and entitlement issues are a sign of his deep and introspective nature.
YES THIS
The Catcher in the Rye x 1000. My English teacher, who I adored, absolutely loved the book and spoke about it with such love and affection before we started reading. It was clearly a book that changed her life. I tried to like it, for her, but I could not do it. I read it, reluctantly discussed it, and if you were to ask me a thing about the actual plot today all I can remember is that a horrible child in bad hat complains about phonies.
“a horrible child in bad hat complains about phonies.”
That’s it, that’s the summary I’m giving from now on.
If anyone ever asks me to tell them about Catcher in the Rye, which I hope doesn’t happen because that means I’ve somehow managed to project the aura of someone who’s both definitely read it and also wants to talk about it.
I got about halfway through (mostly enjoyed it) and quit.. I guess I had my fill of teenage angst in my life.
Same thing but with my 8th grade Creative Writing teacher. I told him I was reading it, and then told him when I finished. He excitedly asked what I thought (I was one of his favorite students, something that was obvious/confirmed when I ran into him a few years later). I can’t remember what I said precisely but I do remember his face when I spouted off the an equivalent of, “meh.”
The respective Adventures of Tom Saywer and Huckleberry Finn were very dull to say the least. 6th grade me hated them,
My mom’s family is from Hannibal, MO (where Tom and Huck are from, and which is now a sort of Mark Twain-themed tourist town) and I honestly can’t remember if I actually read both of those or just absorbed their plots and themes from ambient exposure. But I’m not really worried about it, because eh.
I need to visit Hannibal! I love in STL and it’s like, a thing?
Anyway, yes to the ehh.
It’s super cute if you like interesting old houses and boutique shops. And as for Mark Twain, I’ve definitely read other stuff of his that I enjoyed, but I think the Tom Sawyer/ Huck Finn hype is way out of proportion.
45 year old me is hating them right now. Guess who’s kid had TS as a summer read? And lost the book twice? and school starts tomorrow? She’s only about a third of the way in. She’s never not finished anything before. Tonight there is going to be DRAMA.
Oh man, this was so totally me as well, I threw such a fit at that school project because TS was just not my thing. As far as I can tell those books didn’t leave me with lasting damage, I don’t know about my parents though.
Good luck with your daughter tonight!
I came here exactly to say how nothing Twain write ever changed my life. His books are pretty okay, and I can see the humor of them, but they aren’t exactly knee-slappers. I didn’t hate them though.
I remain vaguely fond of Twain, as he seems to be the only great wit who I would be able to spend an hour with in conversation and who would let me survive the encounter.
Lord of the Rings. Just awful. And I love fantasy!
Lady Chatterly’s Lover. I was expecting to be titillated, damn it!
Ha! Yes! I was really upset as well, and felt like Anais Nin had led me astray.
Oh man people would probably flay me for this & I have never admitted it before in my life but:
the Lord of the Rings books did not change my life, as you say, they were a bit awful. The Lord of the Rings movies totally did. FIGHT ME, GHOST-TOLKEIN.
YES EXACTLY THIS YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
I’ve never been able to watch the movies either! I fell asleep during both the first and second ones at the theater, leading me to save my money on the third. 😡
A bunch of grouchy gnomes walking in the woods. Meh.
YESSSSSSSS. The movies changed my whole life/high school experience. Then I read Fellowship and was like “so… that was not good…” (Why is book-Gandalf THE WORST and not at all as cool as Ian McKellan? IMSORRYNERDS :'( )
In spite of my name, I am totally with you. The movies are fantastic, and the books are pretty okay.
Lord of the Rings, yes. I mean, I didn’t find it awful. I read all three books, and I saw the movies. It was a pretty good time. I have nothing else to say about them. I understood the story fine but never felt like it involved, you know, characters, and the fact that other people are deeply interested in the characters is just vaguely puzzling to me.
Right? It’s a lot of “well, alright, they’re singing again, I guess?”
I made it through The Hobbit and could not be convinced to continue. I know they are different things, but it just didn’t seem like something I’d get enough enjoyment out of for that much time dedication.
I was given The Hobbit by my step-dad. It took two tries to read it, and I was bored most of the time.
I managed to read the first LOTR. And that was that. I want to be into them? I’m a huge fantasy nerd. But. I just. Can’t.
Lady Chatterly’s Lover was such a disappointment when I got my hands on a copy at age 14. It may have been a very good book, but it was so not what I was hoping for. Even worse, my mom found I had taken it off the bookshelf and made a sort of insinuatingly-voiced “Ohhhh, well I hope you’re enjoying it! *wink* *wink*” and it was CERTAINLY not good enough to endure the embarrassment of that.
I listed to LCL as an audiobook at work and when I started I was like, “Should I not listen to this here? Am I going to get too hot and bothered? Will my coworkers be able to tell I’m listening to something sexy?”
Nary a hint of bother was induced the entire time. 🙁
Agreed on Lady Chatterly. The miniseries adaptation (starring a strapping young Sean Bean) was another matter entirely.
I find all of Tolkien’s books to be mind-numbingly boring -all plot, no character.
The most memorable of the books I didn’t finish is Matters of the Blood by Maria Lima. But I think it may have slightly changed my life by being so aggressively dull that I remember it for its dullness. At least, the first seventy pages were aggressively dull; I have no idea what happens after that, nor do I care.
I do read a fair bit of enjoyable-but-not-lifechanging urban fantasy. Carrie Vaughn, Patricia Briggs, Kim Harrison, etc.
Everything Jane Austen. Tried for years, couldn’t get into it.
I liked the Rivers of London books fine while I was reading them, but I’m not really rushing out to read the one I have left.
Brave New World. I think I was expecting to be shocked and moved by the mirror it holds to society or something, but I just remember thinking “well, yes, that would be bad for sure” and I’ve since forgotten most of it. I also have trouble remembering that it is not 1984, which I haven’t actually read.
YES.
That said, I read 1984 in middle school and liked it. Read BNW post college and it took 2 – 3 tries to finish.
BNW was assigned reading in my freshman year of high school, and I can imagine why some people would find it life changing (although I didn’t). Only, one kid in my class seemed to find it life changing in the wrong way, as he then reorganized his AIM friends list by “alpha/beta/etc” based on how much he liked/respected people. I mean, he was mostly a nice enough kid, but after finding that out about him, I definitely was a bit more careful around him……
Brave New World also was assigned reading my HS freshman year. I overheard two classmates talking about me: One thought I might be beta. The other snorted and called me epsilon. It still rankles after five decades, so yes, somewhat life changing.
I read all the classic dystopian novels (1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, the Time Machine) in one summer and now can not tell them apart at all. They were all okay.
The Time Machine changed my life by giving me wicked nightmares. Other than that I’m unscathed.
Confession: I read Brave New World thinking it that large parts of it were supposed to be an appealing utopia (free birth control! robot wombs! pills that cure your psychiatric problems instantly, with no side effects! a place where all the hippies who don’t like computers can commune with nature, or whatever!) and was very disappointed to realize that Aldous Huxley was actually Very Against These Things.
Yeah, that all sounds pretty good, actually! Especially the robot wombs.
Yeah, I always thought that was the point of BNW, the only person it’s dystopic for is the protagonist. Everyone else is having a ball!
ugh, brave new world.
they worship a giant T! do you get it? the model T? mass production lines? do you get the connection here? wowie, what symbolism.
Night by Elie Wiesel. I read it in 10th grade and remember thinking I must be a horrible person for not being incredibly moved by this Holocaust memoir. But then he came out in favor of the Iraq invasion and I felt better.
I feel super bad, cause I’m this way with any Holocaust book, tbh… I’m sorry, it was utterly horrific, but “everything was crushingly awful” just does not moving reading material make, for me.
Yup, that one came off my to-read list around that time, too…
I wish that had been me- I prefaced my book report with a paragraph-long complaint to my teacher about having to read it because I had cried for, not kidding here, six hours straight after reading it. I got sick from crying. She said there wasn’t really an option to get me a “Very Sensitive Person” exemption.
Jane Eyre. Pride and Prejudice. Basically anything by Jane Austen or the Brontes. I think it’s all well and good, but that’s about it. No hate, no love.
The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach (I love baseball and gay dudes, but this was too long).
Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (SORRY NOT SORRY) but I love Junot Diaz’s short stories
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison (I’m going to Hell for this one)
ETA: Game of Thrones series. A dude I had a thing with tried REAL hard to get me to care about it and I just…didn’t.
I am totally the opposite! I loved Oscar Wao but Diaz’s short stories have been such a letdown for me.
Takes all kinds, I guess!
Not going to Hell. I was really moved by The Bluest Eye, and…. at least one other of her books? Maybe Beloved?? But I just wasn’t very into Song of Solomon for whatever reason.
Thank you. I feel like saying something Toni Morrison wrote DIDN’T change your life is like inviting forever the wrath of Oprah.
I mean, I figure that most people are gonna be moved by at least ONE of Toni Morrison’s books. But given how similar many of the themes are, the pretty consistent writing style, the fact that they’re novels of roughly the same length……. It seems implausible that if you read several of them, they are ALL going to change your life. At a certain point, try Zora Neale Hurston or Maya Angelou or Alice Walker. Like, a reading list that is a bunch of Old White Men plus one book by Toni Morrison is not actually a particularly diverse reading list, especially when you rely on Toni Morrison to be your diversity several years in a row (permanent side eyes at you, former high school.)
Oh man, thank you for saying Geek Love. That book was awful. I don’t know why I kept reading!
I KNOW.
I enjoyed Oscar Wao but LOVE This Is How You Lose Her, which is the one nobody else seems to like. 🙁
This Is How You Lose Her is my favorite. Stand strong!
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was not good and I did not like it AT ALL
Yes to The Art Of Fielding, gay dudes plus baseball should have equaled much better, points only because I like the cover.
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – I’ve gotten to page 10 twice. Not going in a third time.
Oscar Wao just about broke my book club. All I remember is that we all hated it, but there was delicious buffalo chicken bites so the evening was not a complete loss.
Great. Expectations. Halfway through, I threw it across the room, yelling “Who’s paying you by the word NOW, D?” And also: I HATE YOUR FACE, PIP, you are a prat and deserve your misery. I have still never finished that, or any other, book by Dickens.
I’ve been putting off Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, because I feel like I ought to read Great Expectations first, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. And then I think maybe Thursday Next wasn’t written for me, and that’s probably fine
There’s really no need to read Great Expectations before Thursday Next. You just need a cultural-osmosis level of knowledge of who Miss Havisham is.
I didn’t know miss Haversham was before I read the Thursday Next books, and it was just fine. You’ll pick up anything you need to know about her.
Re: not reading anything by Dickens. Don’t bother. He’s a big old jerk and I hate him, on my own behalf, on our culture’s behalf, and on Catherine Dickens’ behalf.
Edit: I have read Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities (through sheer force of will. OH my god what a terrible, boring book), and half of Bleak House. These only confirmed that he’s a big ‘ol jerk. I will allow A Christmas Carol but only because of the Muppet version.
I have read none of the background literature for the Thursday Next series, and I loved them! Really, I think they play off of literary tropes more than actual literature. However, I will say that Fforde’s fatal weakness is his seriously goddamn mind numbing romantic subplots.
True story. Each set of characters has a limited amount of time before the romantic rot sets in. But up until then it’s all good.
Yeeeesss! Dickens is on my “authors whose collected works I would take to a desert island and live happily ever after” list, but I would not be sad if, in the wreck that cast me ashore on said well-provisioned, but remote island, Great Expectations were to sink to the bottom of the ocean.
This makes me feel a lot better about my life choices, really.
D: I cannot hold myself together! I loved that book! (though oliver twist can die in a well for all I care)
The only Dickens I could stand was Tale of Two Cities. I have heard that it’s not like any of his other books which is probably why!
I have a long-abiding love for a Tale of Two Cities, which I sadly suspect is over-influenced by my mad crush on Ronnie Colman who played Sidney Carton in the 1935 film.
See, whereas that book inspired a life-changing level of hatred for me. I cannot claim ambivalence about Crushed Expectations. Screw that book.
Fair. Only with the years has my fiery hatred for Dickens subsided. O, and the pieces of paper that i can waft about in order to support my Dickens-is-the-worst claims. I get a lot less pushback now, even though I have read precisely the same amount of Dickens as before said papers were acquired.
the best thing dickens ever did was give william shatner something good to say as his eyes filled with tears for his dead husband
I… do not know what this means. Link please? I feel like my life will be incomplete until I know.
Shatner quotes the end of Tale of Two Cities at the end of TWOK
dammit i s2g his eyes are shinier with lost vulcan love on the blu-ray
R U D E
I love Dickens. I curl up with Bleak House like an old friend, at least once a year.
I HATE HATE HATE great expectations.
I absolutely hated that book, both times I read it for school. I’m still not sure I understand the ending.
Still a little bummed that I went to the effort of reading War and Peace this summer, expecting to have Big Feelings about it, but mostly just felt, “Well! That’s out of the way now. Tolstoy was quite the sexist, wasn’t he?”
I feel the same way about Pushkin – actual Russians who love literature love him, but I just don’t caaaaaare.
Yes! I read W&P one summer, and I was like “well, that was a thing that I can say I have read”.
I read War and Peace for a Tolstoy class in college, which seems like the one thing that could force one to appreciate W&P, but I did not come away with an appreciation for W&P. It doesn’t matter how historically contextualized your book is, you need to give me at least one character that’s developed enough to invest my time in.
I have never come out about Little Women before this. Thank you, thank you, you brave people who made it possible here and now.
Little Women and Pride and Prejudice (THE FIRST TIME), the book thief, David and Goliath, Robinson Crusoe, Gone Girl, Twilight, Lolita, anything by Germaine Greer who I love but cant get a grasp on paper for the life of me.
I first read P&P in the third grade and dubbed it “the most boring book I have ever read ever”. I reread it in seventh and then regretted everything.
PRIDE & PREJUDICE, yes! I read it for class senior year, and actually never completed it! I just.. watched the movie and managed to do just fine on the tests for it.
Ugh, Robinson Crusoe. Except that tipped over into hatred for me because my mom was so enthusiastic about it
I threw Robinson Crusoe across the room. The only Crusoe I like is Elizabeth Bishop’s Crusoe, who is now headcanon for me.
I also didn’t get P&P the first time I read it (I was also way too young). Then I read it again in college and immediately went out and bought more Austen. P&P is still my favorite, though, by far.
Totally with you on The Book Thief!
me too!
Me three.
And me! It was fine. That’s about it.
Book Thief can suck it. I have special loathing for that one because I gave it multiple tries.
Oh my god THE BOOK THIEF, I thought I was the only person ever who was bored to death and couldn’t be bothered to finish it. Everyone else raved about it.
I haven’t finished it either. I’m not sure if it’s because it bored me, or because I just expected everyone to die and didn’t want to get attached.
Did anyone else just look at the headline and then the cover picture and sigh deeply in remembered disappointment? I guess The Mists of Avalon did sort of change my life in that, having read it, when I periodically think, “Wouldn’t an Arthurian retelling that focuses on the women be fantastic?” now I follow that thought with, “Oh . . . or not.”
The Mists of Avalon was the first book I ever punched. So I am far from apathetic about it.
I was a huge fan of everything MZB ever wrote -until after her death when the news of her sexual and physical abuse of her son and daughter came out. It sheds a whole new light on the brother-sister incest in The Mists of Avalon.
Yeeahhhh… the Mists of Avalon didn’t so much “not change my life” as “filled me with utter rage.” I mean I was impressed by its scope and scale, and I appreciate how unique it must have been when it was first published, but good god was its version of feminism messed up. I mean, the preachy fake pagan goddess religion, despite the way it hated on Christianity for oppressing women, still forced women into predetermined roles (and the women had to go through periods where they couldn’t speak at all? I mean what?). It also had some really weird restrictive stuff surrounding virginity and heterosexuality.
The nail in the coffin for me was the part where Gwenhwyfar was kidnapped; Bradley ADDED a brutal rape scene to that story, a tale which in its original medieval incarnation was explicitly devoid of rape. Because Gwenhwyfar was made out to be such an odious character, it all just felt so needlessly vindictive. Overall the book was filled with really distasteful choices from a supposedly feminist author. Sure, it was the product of second-wave feminism, but it was still grating for me.
eh – it wasn’t just second wave feminism, she just never passed up a stereotype, never let people assume goodwill instead of malice, relied heavily on shorthand lifted (as far as i can tell) from soap operas, and ick. Rage. Exactly.
I own the omnibus edition, and yes. Just so bummed. I felt like I should have loved it as high school me, and i just didn’t. At all.
ETA: I was so into Authurian retellings too! Just another layer of disappointment!
Surely we can somehow agree that that particular retelling was horrible and/or a profound letdown and still hold out hope that someone, sometime, can and will write an Arthurian retelling that focuses on the women and *is* fantastic. Right? I mean, that could still happen? Please?
Personally I think Vera Chapman’s Three Damosels trilogy is quite good!
I think I read Mists of Avalon in my HS pseudo-witchy phase, was supremely nonplussed by the whole shebang, and went back to obsessively rewatching The Craft.
Thanks for the rec! Off to the library I go.
Uh oh. Some presumably feminist (also, presumably women) recommended it to me and currently the omnibus is by my bed, as yet unread. “Who wouldn’t love a woman-centred retelling of the Arthurian Legend,” I thought, smugly, as I signed it out.
It might work for you! Who knows? The New York Times gave it a glowing review when it was first published, so clearly not everyone had their life remain unchanged upon reading it.
just don’t. It’ll piss you off.
I actually worked in a bookstore when this was newish (I am ancient I tell you) and a nice fellow came in and said he wanted Mists of Avalon and I said ‘No you don’t’, and he boggled. He said his girl friend wanted it, and he was doing a good thing, so I showed him where it was and then said if he really wanted an Arthurian retelling he should also get Mary Stewart’s Merlin books because she was at least not hating every single character she was writing about.
My people. Thank goodness.
I gotta pre-Creed my arms for this one: anything by Margaret Atwood. I admire her writing while I’m actively reading it, then I close the book and poof, tabula rasa. “The main character was…a girl? Something about trees? Stuff definitely happened, I think.”
I was just about to Creed my arms for Margaret Atwood. I’ve only read one book though, but it was supposed to be good? Some kind of dystopia sex slave thing. Can’t think of the name for the life of me, but I definitely read it when I was making money doing a medical study thing and it definitely left me entirely unchanged. My synaptic pathways are entirely unmarred by all but a vague impression of the book’s cover. Had a lot of orange, is my impression.
The Handmaid’s Tale? I too was not as moved as I felt I should have been.
Yes! That one. Heard about it many times, before and since. Got through it. No idea what happened other than it was depressing, I guess? Being a conservative (?) sex slave misogynist dystopia, though, my impression that it was “depressing” is really more an educated guess than a memory. No clue how it ended, despite reading to the end.
Ha, this is how I felt reading The Blind Assassin. I enjoyed it, but even as I was reading it the memory of what I had just read began to fade. It was particularly unnerving because it’s narrated by an old woman who supposedly remembers all of this stuff from her youth in absolutely exquisite detail. By the end I was actually starting to wonder if I had memory problems.
I’m glad to know I’m not the only one. I LOVED the penelopiad, but apart from that I’ve not been able to make it through an MA novel. I did read Handmaid’s Tale in primary school. I have no memory at all of how anyone allowed this to happen (SERIOUSLY) but I was recently having a ‘books we read as children and can’t quite remember what they are’ conversation with my partner and I described it and he was like ‘dude. That’s the Handmaid’s Tale.’ So that’s… a thing? #formativemisandry
I read a Handmaid’s Tale and it just didn’t connect for me. I think I kept getting thrown by the idea that the transition to this sex-slave dystopia seemingly all happened within a few years? Which I think was pretty much the point, but I was just sort of like ‘okay yeah, that would suck’ and then went on with my life.
ALSO: the book which, apparently, was completely life-changing for me in high school, I went on and on about how much I loved it, but to this day I remember not a single line or character or plot point:
Look Homeward, Angel (and presumably also You Can’t Go Home Again)
According to my mom, I never shut up about these books and yet I had to look up the wikipedia entry just now to make sure I got the titles right.
I slogged through Look Homeward, Angel and all I’ve got is that…he slept with a black woman one time?
We Are Not Ourselves : the beginning was ok enough to make me read the rest, but it was mediocre. One of those books where the narrator is a woman written by a man who apparently does not know how to write believable female characters.
Also, Narnia. All of it. I thought it was a bit hokey and overly allegorical until I got to The Last Battle, where the problem of Susan absolutely ruined me.
omg, Narnia. I liked The Magician’s Nephew, and that was about it. But I have had friends who just never let it go how allegorical it is. I just try not to bring it up in conversation anymore.
Little House on the Prairie. My fourth grade teacher read it aloud to us after lunch and I found it so insanely dull I’d read better books that I kept hidden on my lap.
My aunt bought me the boxed set of Little House books. She grew up as a navy brat and thought they were “charming”. I grew up on a working farm and consider them the stoic documentation of more than two decades of unmitigated horror brought on by tragedy and/or incompetence.
I loved them but reading them as an adult I’m like ‘gdi pa we just got windows and now you want to move AGAIN’. And also now I know almost all of it was lies. And also I suspect Laura of being a horrible person.
I think you’re almost too old for them once you know how to read. My kids loved it but I did them as audiobooks, and my husband at the time couldn’t deal with the pig butchering and wouldn’t let us finish. He was fine with Harry Potter for kids from 10-3, but pig bladder balloons apparently were too much.
Awww, the pig bladder balloons are the best part!
I was a historical fiction/classics junkie as a kid and I barely got through the second book, let alone the next six.
My elder daughter called them, en mass, the little house in the middle of nowhere books, and refused to read any of them. The younger one liked one of them on tape but was soon seduced away by more interesting stories.
I began The Blind Assassin, then stopped a quarter way through. Started it again a year later from scratch, as I’d forgotten everything. Stopped AT THE SAME POINT again. I went on Wikipedia and spoiled it for myself so I won’t be tempted to try it a third.
Likewise, it took me two tries in two years to finish Oryx and Crake.
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The Sea! I think I could have gotten into it if it had maybe some of that plot stuff that I enjoy in other books.
I couldn’t do Wuthering Heights either, although I tried about three times.
But you do love the Kate Bush song, right? RIGHT?
Or at least her interpretive dance?
That dance changed my life.
I read it, but I was like “…well, this is certainly…a book that a lot of people seem to like. Those characters are…er…passionate, I guess, aren’t they?” But also, meh.
That’s the thing! I have spent a lot of time trying to read books that everyone seems to love and revere as incredible classics, and a lot of them I’m just not into it at all. I feel guilty for getting only a few pages into 100 Years of Solitude and peacing out from boredom.
The Hunger Games sequels. The first one was worth reading, but if it wasn’t for the movie fandom I honestly wouldn’t remember what happens in the next two.
Same! I liked the first one quite a bit, but after about three chapters into book #2 I just couldn’t bother. I wanted to like it, but it was distinctly meh.
Books like Pride and Prejudice and Heart of Darkness did change my life in that they filled me with burning ire, and once I felt that Hamlet did not change my life but then I had to read it 6 times in four years and now it is the prime example of English classes at the HS and college level beating dead horses. As for books that are usually referenced as “life changing” (or at least really good) that didn’t really affect me at all:
On the Road
Ginsberg in general
The back half of the Hunger Games (I actually really liked the first one but the other ones left me “meh”)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Veronica
and many more that left that left a similar impression on many more people because they hang at around 3 stars on goodreads and no one ever talks about them.
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: I started it since my step dad had a copy on his kindle (when they just came out) and my reaction to the narrator was a solid “ugh.” Stopped there and am happy to never read them.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo changed my life because I STILL DON’T UNDERSTAND. Most of the time, I can somewhat understand why some people might like a thing that I don’t care for.
I don’t think I can in good faith include Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on my list, because I read about a chapter, yelled, “NO GOD THIS WRITING IS AWFUL” and threw it down decisively. So I don’t think I am lukewarm on it so much as actively negative.
It just seemed like SO MUCH telling rather than showing? Like the main characters are always sitting around in meetings planning shit and drinking coffee and deciding what to do next, and there is not a whole lot of there there.
there are sooo many descriptions of Apple products. it’s 100 pages of Apple product descriptions and then a graphic rape scene, and repeat, and repeat, and repeat.
Also: Tamora Pierce. I read her stuff in middle school right along with everyone else and was not moved by any of it.
The Hunger Games. That sure was…a YA dystopia trilogy.
Maybe it’s because I grew up reading all the YA fantasy I could get my hands on, but I am continually underwhelmed by the YA fantasy that becomes wildly, insanely popular and gets movies made, etc. (Yes, this includes Harry Potter, which I do like in a “that was a pleasant read” sort of way.) I just keep thinking about all the phenomenal books that don’t get star treatment.
Oh yes to Harry Potter! No hate at all and I love watching Rowling in interviews but I just found the books so unimpressive and yet giant cultural phenomenon???
I read the hunger games books when I was in bed recovering from Pneumonia. They struck me as the perfect thing to read while floating in and out of consciousness.
Yeah, I read the first Harry Potter book when it came out and thought it was a perfectly fine version of a plot I’d read a hundred times before. Then one day I got to school and everyone was really excited about it. I’ve read all the books, mostly in one sitting each, so they’re certainly compelling, but not life-changing for me.
I don’t even need a star treatment, but I am still sad more people don’t know about/read the Green-Sky trilogy, which I think is way more subtle and respectful of child readers’ intelligence than most of the big popular series (and has actual moral dilemmas/ambiguity, not just, “gee, is genocide bad? Why yes!”). D’ol Falla > Dumbledore. Yes.
OH HAI!! Because (I have thought about this a lot) popular books are POPULAR, not necessarily good or excellent or awesome or interesting – they have a solid hook and a singable chorus and are readily accessible to a LOT of people. Pop music in story form, if you will.
Pretty much anything popular enough to be made into movies has all the depth, texture and interest of soggy cornflakes.
American Gods by Neil Gaiman, I love most of his work but I got about a third of the way through a decade or so again and…eh. It’s still sitting on my bookcase staring at me somewhat reproachfully.
It reads like a comic book. That was my complaint.
I tried to read it! Everyone said that I would like it, and it does fit the categories of things I normally like. But I couldn’t get more than 15-20 pages in before quitting.
Yes! I actually read it a couple of times to make sure. I can only think that Gaiman did such a good job of creating a main character without identifying characteristics or, well, character, that I could never care about any of it.
Flipside: that is the only thing of Gaiman’s that I have successfully finished. Everything else is a resounding meh. I did like Good Omens, but mainly for the Pratchett part.
This makes me feel better. I’ve tried to read it twice now.
It’s solidly just okay. Nothing to right home about. You’re missing nothing at all by not finishing/ reading it.
Agree. I liked it just fine. The end.
That’s the only Neil Gaiman I’ve ever read and I feel really bad because everyone raves about Neil Gaiman and he seems like a lovely human being but I really did not like that book.
This was going to be my contribution. The first Neil Gaiman I read was the Sandman series (which is wonderful whether you’re into comics or not), and that seems to be enough for me to keep considering his other stuff. I kind of want to try “American Gods” again…but I also don’t. It’s like 500 pages of waiting for something to happen.
I find Gaiman a lot better on audio than on the page. If it is important to anyone where to be able to say they finished a Gaiman story, try audible.
I don’t love any of his work – i feel like I should because he is revered, but his work just leaves me utterly flat.
It’s terrible to say, because I love Ursula Le Guin, but The Dispossessed kind of bored me and I gave up reading it after that awkward party scene. I feel no desire to pick it back up.
Haha this is my favorite book, and my brother and I call each other filthy properterians all the time, but I also can completely understand why a person would feel the way you do.
The party scene is hideously awkward.
I just read it and the whole time I was thinking, “I don’t really ~get why this is a book?” I love all of her short stories though.
The Great Gatsby. I have read it, in full, at least three times, waiting for the lightbulb to click on. Nope! (I would not normally do this with a book I didn’t enjoy, but in this case, (a) the themes are compelling to me and (b) it’s short. And yet, still nothing.)
I reread The Great Gatsby whenever I have trouble sleeping.
“In my younger and more venerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.”
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
100 Years of Solitude!
Tried so, so hard to like this book. Then just tried to finish it. Neither happened. Does anyone else find that whole “magical realism” thing kind of… lazy?
I guess my last comment was about the classic ladies. Here are some men who, yes, they are writers who exist so I guess there’s that: Ian McEwan. J.M. Coetzee. Haruki Murakami. Jonathan Franzen. Most Don DeLillo. Paulo Coelho. Charles Dickens. Victor Pelevin. Milan Kundera. John Updike. William Golding. John Le Carre. William Burroughs.
And many more.
Milan Kundera. I think I finished The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but the only thing I remember from it is its discussion of kitsch. And the woman being grossed out by the smell of the dude’s hair after he spent all day going around town screwing around on her.
People keep giving me Jonathan Franzen books because we went to the same undergrad (not at the same time). Which is all the more reason I don’t need to read them! I already know! (Also, having met him three times–he is exactly how you would expect him to be in person. EXACTLY.)
Wuthering Heights. I definitely read it about 12 years too late; mostly I was SUPER annoyed at everyone, including the framing narrator, and abandoned it halfway through because once you get to 100 pages and you still hate the book you should be allowed to stop.
I hear you. The story is a good story and I’ve read it a number of times but I’m always disgusted by the end with how absolutely AWFUL everyone is. Especially the maid person, she is the WORST.
A Wrinkle in Time. I think I was just too old when I finally read it. To top it off, it was so underwhelming that I forgot most of what happens, so I gave it a second try a few years later. Same result. Just meh. Sold my copy and never read any of the sequels.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I finished the first. Never continued on to the next. Nothing bad to say about it, though.
It is maybe better as a radio play? The original BBC radio play is through the roof funny, although dated, and VERY British. I loved the books, tho (until the 3rd sequel. Then it just got boring), so I am maybe not the best person to take recommendations from.
That’s one of those books that seems like I should really like it, but I just can’t get into it despite several attempts.
THIS IS MINE TOO. Several friends recommended it to me as something I’d love because it was so WITTY and HILARIOUS and CLEVER. And it was just sort of…jokey and smarmy. I think that if I’d read it when I was in elementary or middle school, maybe, so in between devouring Roald Dahl books and devouring Lemony Snicket ones, the humor might have endeared it to me and I’d have found the writing hilarious. But I read it as an adult and kept asking myself, “This is what everyone loves so much?”
Yeah, I found the first one mildly amusing, but not enough to track down the rest.
I tried so hard, because my friends loved it, but it was just MEH to me. I loved the Dirk Gently books, though.
Just about any Neil Gaiman. Have I read `em? Yup. Liked `em? Yup. Dude is a fantastic writer. Ever understood what the big deal is? Noooope.
I’ve read American Gods and Stardust by Gaiman and… yeah. I mean, guy can write a fantasy novel. Those books had beginnings, middles, and ends. Are these the wrong Gaimans? What am I missing, people?
exactly! Stardust was such a fun tale to read, I enjoyed it, definitely a refreshingly straight-up STORY with nothing overwrought or tedious to bog it down. Ocean at the End of the Lane, nicely spooky & with some great turns of phrase. American Gods & Good Omens, read em too long ago to say exactly why I liked em. Absolutely cannot reconcile any of this goodness with the level of fandom.
I actually really enjoyed most of the Gaiman canon, but, man, Ocean at the End of the Lane? Like, ahead of being released it was getting all sorts of press about being much more personal, and SO GOOD and I read it and was…… underwhelmed. Like, it was fine. If it hadn’t been hyped as much, I probably even would have found it pretty good. I just didn’t find it as amazing as other people did, I guess.
I felt the same about Ocean. I think it may be that I am too young for it at the moment since it’s main ideas seemed to be about adulthood and memory and I am not that far into adulthood.
I mean, some of the fandom comes through his graphic novels. Another bunch of it comes through his social media presence. Dude is good with the online personal marketing, and he is often held as an example for authors to follow so I think that may account for your puzzlement.
I love Neal Gaiman, but largely because I started with Sandman and liked that and his general persona enough that my fandom was unfazed by about finding some of his other books underwhelming. Anansi Boys is probably my favorite of his non-comic books, if you ever want to give him another try.
Same here, generally, although I loved the Sandman graphic novel series. Was never particularly excited by any of his books.
Me too. I loved Sandman, but find him ‘meh’ as a novelist.
My sister.
I really liked ‘The Graveyard Book’ and then I reread ‘Johnny and the Dead’ and I realised the reason I liked TGB is because it reminds me of JatD…
I think people prefer the idea of Gaiman to the reality of his novels. I know that as a teenager I so wanted to love his novels because they were a little different – fairytale+fantasy+postmodern prose ought to = everything I love BUT I tend to find something rather cold in his writing. I think it has something to do with the distance Gaiman places between the reader and the narrative – you are always on the outside looking at the mechanics of the work rather than what it is actually doing. You are never properly complicit in the story.
I don’t know if this actually makes any sense though – it is a continuation of my attempt to articulate this “not-quite-enoughness-but-I-should-love-it”.
(although I must admit I adored the audiobook of The Ocean At The End Of The Lane so we shall see how I feel about it when I actually get found to my paper copy)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera is one frequently referenced book that I just don’t see the point of. I got about halfway through it before I quit out of boredom.
I am tempted to say the same about The Great Gatsby, but my indifference to that book actually contributed to the ending of a relationship I was in, so I guess it did change my life.
Generally just anything written by rich white Westerners about their existential ennui leaves me completely cold.
Yes to Unbearable Lightness. People love it and frequently ask me if I’ve read it, and I have, technically: I finished it, and I am pretty sure it had a plot and probably it had characters. But I cannot tell you what they were. It was totally underwhelming to me.
I think I read it twice…once because I wanted to know what the fuss was…didn’t get it… and again because the guy I was dating had a copy and I thought maybe I would be magically enlightened through love, and we could have deep conversations about it. Dumbest reason ever to read a book.
Ugh, god, yes. There was a man and a woman, and they were miserable, because they were together, or was it because they were apart? BORRRRINNNGGG. So, so, boring.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book for people who tend mistake the obscure for the profound. (“I don’t understand it, so it must be deep!”)
Oh my god, so much yes. With a side dose of “running away from my life makes me deep!”
(It didn’t leave me cold. It filled me with rage.)
I did really enjoy the episode of I Don’t Even Own A Television where they talked about it, but it made me really glad I never read it. (The episode on Ready Player One was actually really good, too)
Aw yiss another IDEOAT listener. I love that podcast!
I also just re-listened to the Zen and the Art… episode followed by the Wild Animus episode so it was a great time for me when it comes to mocking white male guilt and faux-intellectualism.
The episode on Stranger in a Strange Land is also great.
Stranger in a Strange Land was the first one I listened to (having only weeks before given up on my re-read of the book) and I never looked back.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide books. I read them in middle school and came across them recently and realized I had no memory of them. I tried to reread them but there were no stakes and they weren’t funny enough to keep me engaged.
It is weird. I remember reading them, then giving them away to the library book sale, but I remember next to nothing about the content. I think there’s something about putting fish in your ears. And the people could fly or something? I didn’t really care what happened to them otherwise.
I sure hope that doesn’t make me a fake geek girl.
Same. I borrowed a giant anthology that had all books in one binding, and I enjoyed the first one enough, was eh about the second one, and didn’t even get halfway through the third. Meh.
I actually gasped out loud when I read this and then I thought about it and was like ‘yeah… yep’.
I think what the comments as a whole are showing me is that a lot of the books that were meaningful to me were more about reading them at a susceptible time of life or, in the case of Hitchhikers, just having it be such a part of my life that it became meaningful. There are definitely some that were genuinely, of themselves, meaningful, but not that many.
Mists of Avalon is the photo for this post and I applaud you whole-heartedly. Husband can attest I spent the week I was slogging through that book yelling, “When is something going to happen? Everything is happening and yet NOTHING IS HAPPENING. I hate everyone! Why am I still reading this? WHY AM I STILL READING THIS?” Sorry, husband.
I want to say the works of Chuck Palahniuk, but my feelings were less “meh” and more WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE THAT YOU SAY HE IS YOUR FAVORITE, EVERYTHING IS FUCKED UP IN HERE
I liked one or two of his books then read Haunting which made me throw up in my mouth a little and generally I have quite a strong stomach. Ugh ugh ugh.
A friend of a friend was looking at my bookshelf one time. She was like, “Oh, you don’t have anything by my favorite, Chuck Palahniuk!” I told her that I’d read some and wasn’t into it. (I was being polite.) Then she went, “Yeah, he’s not for everyone,” as if I just didn’t get it and not as if he writes terrible fucking books, which he does.
I feel like if he stopped being so aggressively gross, there just wouldn’t be anything left.
thisssss. I can put up with nastiness for the sake of nastiness in exchange for a good story. But it’s nastiness all the way down.
RIGHT??? I made it 100 pages into Choke and just couldn’t anymore.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
anything by Robert Heinlein
and Isaac Asimov too, let’s be honest
Heinlein usually manages to make me mad. But I totally agree about Asimov. Like, okay great, yeah ‘robot rules’. Now I want to see a compelling story where the robots don’t bend-or-break the rules. But, alas, he couldn’t manage it. Not even when, inevitably, the robots broke the rules.
Oh, Heinlein. Repugnant gender relations, characters whom I find unmoving (though I’m clearly supposed to admire them), clunky writing. And yet–
What I remember about Stranger in a Strange Land, the only book of his I’ve been able to finish (largely because it was so important to my brother), is the visit to the monkey house, where Valentine Michael Smith finally figures out why people laugh. That passage (which BTW relies on a Freudian interpretation of laughter that is somewhere between contested and discredited) was my introduction to a bunch of theoretical and cognitive science writing on comedy and laughter– an ongoing interest.
Decades later, I’m still drawn to tragedies with “inappropriately” funny bits, or comedies that rely partly on pathos for their effects. Those are the books I want to think, write about, and discuss in a classroom. And that’s also the sort of book I want to write.
So I guess Stranger did change my life, but largely by accident– not because of anything that was pivotal to the plot, but because of a scene that no one else seems to remember.
Yeah, I may be a little bit to angry at Heinlein for him to totally belong on this list.
I couldn’t even get to the half way point in Jonathon Strange. I should have loved it! It should have been like crack to me! But alas, not to be.
I might watch the BBC Adaptation, they might get to the things I like without all the brambly FORESTS OF WORDS OBSCURING EVERYTHING.
Assimov is… fine. As long as he doesn’t attempt to write women. Just don’t try. Just don’t even write them, just pretend we don’t exist. PLEASE.
His non fiction essays are pretty ok though.
Everything by Colleen McCullough is aggressively adequate, except The Ladies of Missalonghi, which is a goddamn treasure.
Thornbirds? Meh. The Roman books? *shrug*
Their adequacy is actually what keeps me reading them. McCullough is a safe bet for a good story, if not a life-changing one.
The thing I like about these threads is that you guys give me permission to not read books that I already know I’m not going to like but feel like I should read.
Honestly, unless a novel makes me go HOLY SHIT THIS IS CRAZY GOOD I CAN’T PUT IT DOWN within the first hundred pages I just don’t finish it. I feel like a bad Toast reader to admit it, but I read a complete work of fiction maybe once or twice a year. And even the ones I do finish usually aren’t ~changing my life~. So my contribution to this thread would be… most books?
There are too many awesome books out in the world to read anything “enh” past page 85 (or 20% in e-book form).
In my opinion.
Speaking of my mother and Little Women, the most baffling thing she’s ever said to me was “I can’t be a feminist because Meg March is my favorite sister, not Jo.”
To which I said, “wait, what??”
the explanation: “Feminists don’t like Meg because she never rebels against getting married and having kids, but she was my favorite because she was devoted to her family and married a rich guy in order to provide for her sisters. Feminists only like Jo, so I’m not a feminist.”
My mom is definitely more feminist than she apparently thinks, but I’m pretty sure I gave up arguing about it because I was too busy trying to wrap my head around that.
It’s not like her favorite sister was Beth.
HEY.
As if we all didn’t wish we could just not leave the house and play music and hang out with cats. Beth was a feminist introvert hero before her time!
Which, apparently, is why she had to die.
I thought Meg DIDN’T marry a rich guy? Amy married a rich guy. Right?
Well, see, I don’t remember enough of it to be sure.
I know Meg is definitely my mom’s favorite (see: the story about my name), but maybe she liked her for marrying… a not-rich guy? even though she was devoted to her family?? This entire screed made little enough sense as it is, so it’s very possible I misremembered that part.
But Amy didn’t marry the rich guy she liked but didn’t love; she ended up falling in love with Laurie so she managed to marry into loads of wealth without sacrificing her principles. Some people have all the luck.
I agree that you can still be a feminist if Meg is your favorite sister, but at the same time, reading all these comments about Little Women I realize that one of the reasons I did like the book was that I didn’t see it as a heartwarming tale of sisterly love but as Jo’s (semi-successful) struggle to get the hell away from her family and become a writer.
Same. And of gender non-conformity/inability to ‘correctly’ perform your assigned gender (THE HAIR INCIDENT)
(I’m sure Alcott would roll in her GRAVE)
Ha, well it could be worse her favourite sister could be Amy.*
*says the feminist whose favourite sister is (adult) Amy and who has never understood the appeal of Jo March.
ok ok I don’t feel bad about my last two contributions but I DO feel bad about not having been changed by The Chronicles of Narnia. I remember feeling like I wasn’t capable of seeing their hidden depths when my friends did? Oh, how I wanted to love those books and join all my fellow pre-teen nerds in their endless fantasy book discussions!
I loved the Narnia movie and yet trying to read the book I always put it down and then just forget about it until it comes due at the library
So absolutely dull.
Yeah. That’s Tolkien for me. My friends were like, “Wow. Wow. WOW! Orcs and elves and dragons! Named Swords!” And I was just not enchanted. Not in the slightest.
I felt so vindicated when I read Matilda and Matilda said she liked Narnia except the fact that they should have had some funny bits. I liked to have fun reading books at that age, and Narnia just wasn’t as fun or funny as the books I loved. I tapped out after book three or four, I don’t clearly remember which. I feel like I both missed a formative experience and escaped a psychic wound, given how much fanfic there is fixing Susan’s ending…
I read it as a little kid and remember being turned off the sexism. Then I never read another book afterwards.
I saw a tweet the other day that said “I just tried Turkish delight for the first time. It was pretty good. Not sell your family to the white queen good, but pretty good” and this pretty much encapsulates my feelings about this book. Dumb kids doing annoying things for pretty much no reason. And lion Jesus.
Edmund was my favourite character, and I wish there was more of him in the books.
One Hundred Years of Solitude was exhausting. I wanted to appreciate it, I really did, but reading it was a mentally strenuous task more than an enjoyable, immersive experience. I got maybe 40% through before I had to stop.
Yes, I get it confused with Love in the Time of Cholera, and my take away from both was that the characters were generally either sickly fainting types, or sexually screwed up, or masochists, or all of the above. Also the weather was always hot and there were a lot of flowers with heavy cloying scents, or something.
I couldn’t finish it, either. The characters spent too much time getting in the way of their own happiness, and I couldn’t bring myself to sympathize with, or even really care about, any of them
Also maybe this is a safe space to admit that I am just not a capital-f Fan of very many things. I like things, sometimes, but I very, very rarely LOVE them. The internet is a lonely place for the moderately enthused.
This is… so painfully true to me. I watch “fandoms” from the outside and envy their passion but am just not capable of it myself. And sometimes I feel hypocritical because I often talk about things in captical-f Fan terms–it changed my life, I LOVED it, etc–but quickly move on to other things.
I had to get off of Tumblr for this very reason. Everyone around me was making hundreds of gifs declaring their love for their favorite TV show or whatever and I’m like.. I found this cool picture of a tree? Do you guys want to hear a knock-knock-joke? Fuck it, I have little to contribute here.
I feel you! I think my tumblr must come across as belonging to a person of very muted feelings. I get excited about *talking* about books; it is a pursuit I enjoy very much; but it’s not especially common for me to shout and enthuse about anything. If I say something is extraordinary then I really mean it–not everything can be extraordinary!
This goes for more than books. I was just today remembering a conversation I had while teaching in China, after a professional orchestra played a concert at our school: “How was the orchestra?” “It was pretty good.” “It was the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and it was only pretty good?” “Well, the flutes were off-key.”
Moderately enthused people, unite! But not too enthusiastically. That may be the truest thing I’ve read all day.
The Elegance of the Hedgehog. It was supposed to be a wonderful book but I hated it so much. I’m still bitter at myself for forcing myself to finish it.
Haha! Yes! I got like a quarter of the way through it–after BUYING it because I heard it was so good–and went over and put the movie on Netflix instead. Still didn’t enjoy it.
Yes! It was just. . .unpleasant feeling. Very nagging/grating all the way through.
I’m so mad about the end of that book, years later.
I don’t even remember the end of the book. Really all I remember about it is it was sooo tedious/proud of its own cleverness (which is what I hate most about it).
The only marginally interesting character dies so the main, boring character can Learn a Lesson about Life. Because older women are just props in others’ journeys of self-discovery.
ETA: spoilers, I guess?
Ohhhhhh yeah. It’s all coming rushing back to me. In all its smug tediousness.
I still haven’t finished it. It is so. damn. tedious.
If you’re still chugging through just in case something happens to make it better/worth it I can tell you it won’t. Save yourself the time.
Yes! Nasty little thing, that was. And I’d really expected to like it from what I’d heard. If only it had altered my life so far as to help me look upon the book review with more suspicion….
I didn’t mind it, but I hated the ending and also I totally forgot that I read it until just now and I can’t really remember anything about it except that I hated the ending, so….
Catcher in the Rye
The Great Gatsby
anything by Jane Austen
The Scarlet Letter
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Perks of Being a Wallflower
All just… meh.
PERKS. Of all the books that didn’t change my life, that was the only one that was lent to me with the literal assurance, “This book is going to change your life.” I can’t remember a single detail of the plot or the characters, just those quotes that everyone quoted.
I think part of the problem may be that I had a pretty solid time in high school with no major crises? And read it at 25? Yeah, I just don’t get it.
My book club read that last year. I’m 30 and am the youngest there by over a decade. It turns out that we were really not the target audience for that book.
I enjoyed it okay (and the movie’s good. the movie is better than the book) but it didn’t move me in any way except to doubt my relationship when my boyfriend (I was 19) gave it to me and sad it was his favorite/ changed his life/ blah blah. And he was all excited and how did you like it? And all I could muster was that it was fine and the only thing I retained from my reading was that non-important anecdote about using a sandwich bag as a condom.
Things I remember about Infinite Jest, every word of which I read in my early 20s:
Tennis
Addiction
A 15-page fictional filmography footnote
Sponsored years
One of the characters is maybe a little person?
Sorry, David Foster Wallace. Your essays are much more memorable.
IJ, man, all I learned from that was that David Foster Wallace needed an editor. Badly.
That book unnecessarily scared me about having seizures. Poor Tony said they hurt. Mine don’t.
I also remember the PGOAT, which was kind of an entertaining term to use from then on.
I only made it 200 pages in and that’s all I remember as well. Life choice affirmed!
Ha! I too read it all in my early 20s and I too remember those same things. I *do not* get what the big deal is with that book. But I really like the idea of sponsored years, because it’s a great mix of absurd and totally feasible. Oh and that arc with the video phones where people went from live video to using special effects and props more and more, because really who wants to actually use a video phone? So true.
Just about anything British and assigned in high school: Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, Great Expectations…I’m just not a Brit Lit lady, and Jane Eyre infuriated me. Likewise, Candide. I actually threw that across the room when I finished it.
Kindred by Octavia Butler. Maybe I just didn’t have the right mindset for it (I did read it on a plane, IIRC). I read it for an (online) book club and everyone else was all “wow this was so moving and intense” so I ended up not even participating. I felt like I was completely underwhelmed by her writing style and the premise felt like the “if you could go back in time” stories we wrote in third grade.
Also Pride and Prejudice. Tried to read it multiple times and it was just so boring. I couldn’t get through it.
every. damn. book. that promised to be a sweeping, sensual, epic story (or, alternatively, an extremely witty, incisive satire) that perfectly captures love and family and their places in our society, and is IN FACT just a story about someone cheating on their spouse.
there are SO MANY and they are SO CAREFULLY DISGUISED
A Confederacy of Dunces. I just cannot. get. through it. At all.
Villette! I read it after seeing it rec’d here and on the Hairpin constantly and it was…just alright. I like Jane Eyre better. *hides*
Same! The stuff on the Hairpin about it was so positive and enthusiastic, and then I read it and just didn’t care about any of the characters. (Except for hating Paulina.)
“Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.” So many smart, lovely people just rave about this book, but I gave it a shot and was bored outta my gourd. At the upteenth “Poor Mr. Norrell!” I just put it down. May pick it up again someday, but the idea makes me tired.
Yes! I am 300 pages into it and NOTHING IS HAPPENING. WHY DO PEOPLE LIKE THIS?!?
Yes! I just lost steam somewhere in the middle. Something about someone getting taken off to faerie country and time passing…I just…couldn’t. And exactly! Smart, lovely people! Sometimes I feel like I’ve lost my ability to like highbrow genre fiction. Give me Jacqueline Carey anyday.
At least there’s a TV show about it now. My spouse is super into it and I’m trying to read it now but it is not really my style.
The Number One Ladies Detective Agency. It was…fine.
Someone gave that to me years ago and now I feel really justified in never reading and then donating it.
I’m always here for mystery novels in interesting settings. I had to give up on the series, though. Too much “good thing we here in Botswana lead simple lives, unlike those Europeans.” From an African author, it would be one thing. From a Scotsman, it just feels like a colonialist fantasy.
Yes. I lived in southern Africa for a while, and I read a lot, and people recommend these to me endlessly. But I read one, or maybe two? And they were totally…fine. And so I thought, well, at least it’s nice to read something by an African author? But then it turned out they are not even written by an African, or a lady. But they were not terrible enough to HATE, so I just forgot about them.
Exactly. African people are just as multi-dimensional and morally ambiguous as everyone else is. I don’t think an African person is likely write books like these. I was able to suspend my discomfort with this for a book or two because I thought, well, an author has a right to focus on one person in one moment. But after book 3, it became clear that the author had nothing else to say. Plus I feel that the stories are all about the mood. There was not enough plot or character development to justify 200 pages of mood. This goes for his Scottish series too.
Yes. I’ve read a bunch of Alexander McCall Smith books, and they’re all… fine.
Ah finally, a non-lifechanging book I can remember reading! Yeah, they’re fine. I agree with the poster who brought up the colonial weirdness. It just doesn’t sit right that they’re written by a white dude.
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I had three different women tell me that it changed their lives. I read it and thought, “This is a really poor imitation of pretty much anything by Gabriel García Márquez, with even less well developed female characters.” I recommended Love in the Time of Cholera to them after. But I don’t think they read it.
Y’all, I think there are people out there that don’t follow up on book recommendations from friends. The world is a strange place.
same, it did nothing for me
The Catcher in the Rye, for sure. Is there anyone born after 1970 who actually cares about this book?
I can’t remember who it was, but some Toastie once said she dated a guy in college who used a worn copy of Catcher In The Rye…as his wallet. That guy. That is the guy who cares.
I taught Catcher to university students born in the 1990s. I was like ‘what is this boring psychopathic whiny kid thing?’ Which didn’t go down well with the girl who declared “I AM Holden Caufield”.
YMMV, clearly.
I was born in 1988, and it’s one of my favorites. But to each their own.
The Silmarillion (Couldn’t finish. Tried hard)
Lucky Jim (I feel really bad about this because it was a gift from a misandrist librarian of whom I think very highly)
A Confedaracy of Dunces (My husband loved it. I tried to).
OMG, Lucky Jim is terrible. You are not alone. I read that book, and my review of it would literally be “? I am not sure of the point of this”.
American Gods. You can hate me now.
I’m a die-hard, frothing Neil Gaiman fan, but I have read American Gods only once and never picked it up again. I feel like something vital was left out of the story and everybody is just standing around awkwardly. Characters die and still continue talking and contributing to the plot, we spend a lot of time in somebody’s grungy apartment and a merry-go-round while quietly chatting and drinking, the last act of the book just straight up takes place in a small town With A Dark Secret unrelated to the rest of the plot… It’s still Gaiman, so it’s not terrible, but it’s not a fun experience either
I keep trying to read it, but just can’t get into it. I am curious to see what Bryan Fuller will do with it, but mostly because of Bryan Fuller being amazing
I tried. I couldn’t. I have a hard time with books with plots amount to no more than moving around some slightly animated chess pieces around a board.
Amen.
Cloud Atlas? I tried so, so hard to like Cloud Atlas. I like all the things that are like Cloud Atlas! However, I read it and felt an overwhelming sense of ‘eh’.
The problem with Cloud Atlas is the stories get progressively more interesting (this is subjective obviously but for me at least there is a definite trend upward), but you know you are just going to have to read them all in reverse and the book is going to get more and more boring again after the halfway point.
Watching the movie actually pushed me from my initial “meh” to actively liking Cloud Atlas, actually. I mean, the book might be kind of a pretentious mess, but at least it isn’t single-mindedly about the Magical Power of Heterosexual Love Throughout the Ages via Reincarnation.
yes. this is exactly the problem. yes.
Requiem For A Dream. I hated it from page one. Simple as that.
The most meh book I’ve read lately was The Time-Traveler’s Wife. After hearing people talk about it (Toasties & IRL) I was read to Hate it with a passion. But it was just… okay. Nothing special. I have zero feelings about it.
More books I have read recently that have left me cold/ angry not at the book but at wasting time reading it:
1. both of Jenny Hubbard’s books
2. The Invaders by Karolina Waclawiak
3. The Hypnotist’s Love Story by Liane Morarity
4. Birds of America by Lorrie Moore (I’m horrible, I know)
5. Many YA books (including ones by Huntley Fitzpatrick and Kasie West)
6. The Beekeepers Apprentice by Laurie R. King (didn’t finish it)
See, I really liked the Beekeeper’s Apprentice (the only one on this list I’ve read) but yeah. It’s fine. It’s a perfectly good book. That’s all.
I like all Salinger’s other stories, Franny and Zooey in particular, but I just wanted to get poor Holden Caulfield on a regimen of prozac and exercise and forget about him. I tried and failed to get anything out of Henry James or Edith Wharton. And if you have read anymore than 5 pages of Proust I heartily congratulate you but I would have to wonder why.
The Secret History of Wonder Woman got a ton of hype when it came out last fall, but I read the damn thing and I am here to tell you: there is no there there. (Not that this book was ever supposed to be life-changing. It’s just my most recent didn’t-live-up-to-the-hype read.)
I just listened to this on tape on a six hour car ride yesterday! And you are exactly correct! I’m not quite done with it, so maybe my thoughts will change, but I downloaded it bc it was available from my library and I half-remembered reading (or just seeing??) a review. I don’t know what I expected but I didn’t expect to be pretty bored by the creator, or for sooooo much time to be spent on his youth and college years though it got more interesting once Margaret Sanger’s niece became a character. Who knows, I might listen to the rest of it.
God DAMN it. I just bought this a week ago, based on an interesting NPR interview when it came out (that is the most middle class white liberal lesbian sentence I’ve ever written.)
Here’s hoping I like it anyway….
Here’s hoping!
I have to confess I didn’t delve into the extensive footnotes at the end, so maybe they make the whole thing worthwhile. It could happen!
You’re probably all going to hate me for this but, Anne of Green Gables. The whole series. I read it because my grandma loved it. I just wanted to tell Anne to sit down, shut up, and listen to Marilla. She’s such a brat
yyyyeah, me too. I tried to read it just a couple of years ago, and I couldn’t finish the first book. I might have liked better as a child, maybe? I am definitely past the “precocious child has heartwarming adventures” stage of my reading life. But then maybe not, I don’t think I ever actually had that stage.
I was 11 I think when I read them (all of them, I was a fast reader, still am), so I don’t think I had that stage either, apart from loving Boxcar Children and Nancy Drew in 2nd grade.
Yeah, I can’t reread much of the first two for that very reason. The later books I still enjoy, though.
I love the videos with Megan Fellows (which I am given to understand are very faithful to the books), but I just cannot with the texts themselves.
THANK. I read the first one as a kid, went ‘no thanks’ and didn’t read any more. Now it’s yet another pop culture thing I missed out on?? Great.
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. So many people loved it and I thought it was just awful. So much so that I pretty much blocked out that I’d read it and picked it up at a used bookstore AGAIN. Halfway through the book (the second time), I was like WAIT A MINUTE. It sucked as much the second time around.
I forgot about this book! Yes! It keeps showing up on Must Read lists but whyyyyy?
Yeah, Goon Squad was not nearly as good as I had been promised. And it was promising–I kept waiting and waiting for it to coalesce into something brilliant, but instead it coalesced into… that weird techphobic last chapter about how terrible babies on iPads & textspeak are.
ugh, yes, I gave maybe…2/3rds of the way through. I just do not ever care about the self-absorbed miseries of a bunch of jerks who have made themselves miserable by being jerks.
YES YES YES THANK YOU
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Love history. Love Lincoln. Wow was this boring.
JANE EYRE *Creed arms into a sea of haters*
I really liked Jane Eyre… until my classmates started talking about how romantic it was and they wanted their own Mr. Rochester… killed my enjoyment really fast
I love Jane Eyre and this comment equally, I think
James Joyce, with the exception of Dubliners. Portrait is fine, but Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake–forget it. I barely made it a third of the way into Ulysses before giving up. Also, Faulkner. I just can’t get into his books.
After reading through all the comments, I’d say it’s time for an organized campaign to ban Catcher in the Rye from our nation’s public schools. (On the grounds of boringness and excessive whining).
I have read many convincing essays on exactly this subject. I remember trying to slog through it and being so disappointed that this “dangerous” book fell so flat.
“Never let me go” by Kazuo Ishiguro was a huge disappointment. I love dystopian novels but wow, the narrator was unbearably milquetoast.
Yeah, I immediately forgot everything that happened as soon as it was over. There were clones? Now when I think of it I just picture Carey Mulligan’s face because it is nice.
*Minor spoilers*
why did they not rebel against the dystopia?!? Who just casually accepts life like that?
*Spoiler alert*
Yeah, I was yelling at the book, “Come on! What have you got to lose–I mean, literally? They are going to steal your body parts slowly until you die, is there really a worse fate?!?”
That was kind of the whole point of the book, though? That, like, most dystopian novels have these big dramatic confrontations, but the actual nature of oppression is that most people who are oppressed just live their lives, and maybe try to find a way to make it better within the system, but most people don’t even think of actually taking a system down personally.
I’m feeling a perverse satisfaction whenever someone on this post names a book that I love. Like my inner selfish hipster is saying “I was right! I AM the only one who could possibly have that experience of that book! It is special and all mine!”
Ooh, what an excellent reaction! I will imitate it, and please take that as the compliment I intend it to be! My previous reaction had been, “Oh, I was so wrong! I loved a book I should have hated, and am a Bad Misandrist Librarian”.
I’ve had an entirely different reaction when someone expresses indifference to a book that was important to me, neither smug nor shattered. I just think: “Huh. The world is wide, and there are all kinds of people in it . . .”
I wanted to try one of Salman Rushdie’s and ‘Midnight’s Children’ was the first I came across in a used bookstore. Not feeling it…and I am usually committed (to a fault) to finish books I start, but I had to put this one down about a third of the way through. But really, I don’t feel that bad about it. He’s supposed to be a pompous arse anyway…
Gonna chime in here and confirm your excellent instincts: Midnight’s Children is super boring. Don’t listen to all those Booker prizes it won. Not worth finishing!
I started with Shame and liked it a lot. (IF you want to give him another shot, that is) Then I read Midnight’s Children and loved the first few chapters about Salim’s grandparents in Kashmir. Then it got kinda boring. I finished it but never picked up Satanic Verses after that (This was in 2012)
I loved ‘East, West’, his collection of short stories, but his longer novels don’t work as well for me.
I think this might actually get me beat up and stuffed in a locker, but … Good Omens. It was …. OK. I think that it was just way overhyped. I read it only very recently after not-getting-the-reference one too many times. I don’t know. I felt like I had to read it and the whole time it was just a task I needed to check off. There wasn’t really any joy in it. “There is that joke,” “here is this reference,” “ha ha, I guess.”
Same
Kushiel’s Dart
Ancillary Justice
Slaughterhouse-Five
Frankenstein
To the Lighthouse
Fledgling
Foundation
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Catcher in the Rye
Dragonlance
Earthsea
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Pretty much anything by Lovecraft, although, strangely, I love it when other writers parody Lovecraft or borrow elements of his universe
I think I read some of these too early or too late in life to get the full effect. Others were objectively good novels, but not for me personally.
I was going to say the whole interminable Wheel of Time series, but it was part of wee Greentipped’s gradual realization that fantasy could do better than nagging women being saved by the Prophesied Hero, so in that sense it did end up shaping a lot of my future reading choices.
So glad to see another Ancillary Justice meh person. Wanted to love it so much but I just didn’t. Think I didn’t even finish it, though I did buy the sequel.
I wanted to like it so badly! My boyfriend also gave up on it. Then the Sad Puppies started trashing it and now I feel disloyal admitting it just wasn’t for me.
I did not like The Book Thief! So many people adored that book and I just could not get there.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
I read Amy Poehler’s Yes Please a few months ago and it didn’t seem as great as all my friends said it was. Good message, sure, but it wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before and the writing seemed disorganized. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I was always a backstage kid rather than a theatre kid?
I think the celebrity memoir genre is usually just not great. I didn’t love Bossypants or Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? either. Fun, light, plane reads, but that’s it.
Plus you have to slog through those parts where they decide to show exactly how much sexism and racism they’ve internalized, which has soured my enjoyment of a number of ~comedians~.
Can the next one be about musicals that didn’t change our lives? Because Rent. Didn’t care for it. Didn’t care for the people. And Wicked was fine. The end.
I could have skipped Wicked, Chicago, Annie, Grease, Hairspray, Guys and Dolls, and Hello Dolly. They’re all just okay. All other musicals are great (Sondheim!) or terrible (ALW, Schwartz)
I identify with the Broad City “Rent” quote so hard. Can’t find a gif but it’s “Do you guys know that play ‘Rent’? Yeah. Like, I don’t understand how they thought that they just didn’t need to pay rent, like, at all.”
David Rakoff (RIP, sweet prince) had the greatest rant about Rent in his book of essays Half Empty, and you can hear part of it here: https://soundcloud.com/missjessicadavis/david-rak…
So happy you linked it! I actually feel a growing-up moment for me was hearing Rent at 13, and then by 18 being. . .wait. . .why, exactly are you not paying Rent? That’s not a thing!
I do not understand the appeal of Wicked at all. The people I know who love it say it has a “good message,” but I dunno, do people really love their pop culture just because of the good messages??
All the old white guy author books I was made to read off the very narrow syllabus for my Science Fiction course. Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, 1984, Blade Runner, Ender’s Game… blah blah blah. I was unchanged, but I was also offended more than once, tbh.
Chocolat the book. It’s so bad compared to the movie. Atonement is one of those books that does not understand the motivations of its own characters. Maybe I’ve read too much Edwardian and world war era lit, but Atonement was a terrible, unnecessary torture.
I went to see the film of Atonement and spent the whole time waiting for the plot to start. It didn’t.
Love in the Time of Cholera.
…Yeahhh. I just finished this and I agree. Florentino Ariza is the absolute worst.
Wow. I’ve been reading through the comments and I realized…I’ve…never had a book change my life?
I’ve re-read a precious few a couple times because I enjoy them, but I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a work of printed fiction that influenced how I feel about the world. This is a surprising realization, friends!
I feel the same way! Some titles here I liked a lot, some I didn’t, but the more I scavenge the corners of my brain, the less I’m finding in the way of books that made a measurable impact on my day to day life. It’s kind of creepy.
You’re not alone. While I love consuming art in all medium, none has ever changed my life beyond being influenced by other writers in my own works.
I’m the opposite, I think. Just about everything influences me. Either it’s amazing and inspiring or it’s horrifying and traumatizing. I think I’m a Level Six Susceptible.
So many of these. OH so many…
I find Pride and Prejudice remarkably ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. See also Mill on the Floss. And North and South. And the less said about The Corrections, the better (so many people said it was amazing! And they were wrong!) I sped through The Leftovers as I just found it tedious. And I am one of those people who slogged all the way through The Luminaries, only for it to leave them cold. (It took me a month to read that book, but BY GOD I did it!)
I was waiting for someone to mention The Luminaries! I wanted to like that book so much but by the end I was just ??? personified.
This is a non-fiction work, but I can’t stand Stacy Schiff’s book Cleopatra. I’m sorry, my historical heart can’t take it that someone who cannot read in any of the original text’s languages can win a Pulitzer prize. I’m not knocking her writing, just her scholarship. She uses the same old tired Roman sources and can really add nothing to current studies. Ugh, that really gets me! I’m also here for anyone that wants to talk about the downward spiral of Alison Weir (so glad she started writing fiction!)
Among Others. That book made me angry.
Anne of Green Gables. Which is odd, because I like her other books.
ooh, if you remember why about Among Others I’d love to hear it. I remember a vague ickiness about it, and it turned me off anything else she wrote unless the cast is all dragons who wear hats. (I liked the Small Change trilogy more or less, I guess.)
OH DO I REMEMBER. (So, here’s the thing: I think Walton writes lovely prose but her plotting leaves a lot to be desired. I liked the dragon book a lot, though. Dragons!)
I was also a weird kid and felt awkward etc, but I didn’t feel that friendships were based solely on liking the same books. (It’s great when it happens, but it’s neither sufficient nor necessary.) And it was so weird about true fannishness being “your entire life is about this and you only feel ok with people who already like the same stuff” which is a weird, reductive way to be a fan. Plus the creepy incest thing.
The book felt like “fans! we’re so awesome! [reference to a book] did you catch that? awesome right? [reference] we are the most special because we get it!” but without any further depth to that idea. I understand that teenagers might feel that way, but we mock adults who try to prove other fans are true enough about comics or whatever. It won all sorts of prizes because it panders to readers being told they are special for reading.
She also keeps putting in the same VERY ANNOYING character in all her books — it’s the extra naive teenage girl or, sometimes, young woman. (She appeared narrating all three Small Change books, again in Among Others, My Real Children, The Just City, The Philosopher Kings — I keep reading her books because the concepts nad the writing is so good. Though I actually rather liked The Philosopher Kings.)
And she ends a lot of books the same Deux Ex Machina way, which usually doesn’t work. (I don’t remember how she ended Among Others, and My Real Children was a much worse ending than a Deux Ex Machina would have been.)
I have a lot of feelings.
As much as I love him as a essayist, I never have been able to read more than a chapter of David Foster Wallace’s fiction.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay just sort of slid off me, although my roommate said it moved her to tears.
I was so excited to read Hild, and it did not live up to the hype. It’s a good enough book, but it’s not even the best piece of long historical fiction I read last year.
Heinlein. I loooove the Starship Troopers movie as a prime piece of B-movie satire, so I was really excited to read the book in a, “Oh boy! If the movie was that funny, then this book must be really fucked up!” sort of way. But it was just kind of boring. And weirdly juvenile? Not in a “lol titties” kind of way, but like it was a book where all the characters were marines but no one swore once.
And then I tried reading The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, which had a blatant Gary Stu author insert and random information dumps about physics, and I couldn’t get more than halfway.
Heinlein’s women characters are usually introduced by breast descriptions. Even as a wee sci-fi lover without a clue that made me set his books down.
Don’t forget all of the “consensual” parent-adult child incest in Heinlein’s later books…
AUGH. YES. FUCKIN. YES. WHAT THE FUCK.
Seriously, what the hell was that book? I got 40 pages in and there were guys in suits jumping over houses and I’m like “this is not my cutting satire of fascism and conformity”. I think Verhoeven deserves a lot of credit for the movie because the source material is total rubbish. .
I mean, I knew that the movie satirized ideas that the book presented seriously because Verhoeven thought the book was crap. But I was expecting something that was more over-the-top or something. It does present some objectionable ideas, but they’re pretty mild compared to other things I’ve read – hell, even compared to Heinlein’s other stuff. I was hoping to hate-read the book, and I couldn’t even muster the energy for that. It was just… eh.
Heinlein actually did change in my life, in that his books inspire a level of hate hardly anyone else has managed.
Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
Spent two years after college reading it with a book group because I needed to feel intellectually stimulated (I guess?). I put off reading the last 50 pages for a week to “savor them” and then just.. never did. I only think about it when I think about the time it took to read it. TWO YEARS
books I have thrown across the room:
The Bonfire of the Vanities. So many exclamation points. the most memorable part is a two-page ode to some sort of metal polish (simuchrome?) that I only knew existed because I had a motorcycle at the time.
Confederacy of Dunces. just, nothing happens. I can’t even remember stopping.
Little Women.
books I pretended to finish in high school: pride and prejudice. The two above are funny, because I love the movies. But as a teen, reading that book? All I wanted to do was shake her.
Books I never opened, because my mother in law recommended them: some book that was a history of England/fantasy novel type thing? Sarum?
The girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Book it took me seven years to finish, I swear: The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Bonfire of the Vanities–I just thought it was so obvious. The characters had no insight whatsoever and there was no tension about what would happen to them. Will he make the right choice? NO. Will his career be saved at the last moment? NO. Will his marriage heal? NO. Does anyone care? NO.
Outlander, Twilight, 50 Shades.
All came to me enthusiastically recommended and were undertaken with high hopes, and all were eyerollers by page 10. I riffled through the rest looking for the spicy bits.
Their popularity is interesting to me, though, as sort of an American Idol of what the US bookbuying public thinks is sexy. Damn, people.
I had expected some inoffensive highland spiciness with Outlander, but YIKES, the wife beating.
Yeah I was really excited for Outlander and then it was so…meh. Like it was offensive, so I felt kind of moral for giving it up, but really I just gave up because it was so slow. And boring.
When someone recommended Twilight to me, I was like, “Oh. Vampires in high school. Could be interesting.” And it was not interesting at all. So much potential for fun squandered on boring characters and situations. At least Anne Rice makes her vampires sexy and amoral, even if her writing is not great.
I started reading Outlander because of the costumes on the show. Then I had to read the next one so I’d know what was going on. I’m treating it like racier Agatha Christie…she is pretty good at out-of-left-field plot twists. Like Agatha Christie, and popcorn, it is easy to just keep going without much effort.
Ready Play One. Many of my friends loved it. I made it 25% of the way through (according to my Kindle) and just thought, eh, another dumb guy with fulfillment book.
Also (and I feel like this is blasphemy): I read 2 and about 1/2 of the N.K. Jemisin Inheritance trilogy (Kingdom of Gods, Broken Kingdom, and that other one). I was plodding through #3 when my loan expired and the book was slurped off my Kindle by the library gods. I was relieved.
I too gave up on Ready Player One. It was such a specific type of wish fulfillment that I couldn’t participate in because I have no interest in 80s trivia. All the heroes were gatekeeping nerds–literally, they are trying to get through a gate with the power of trivia.
I thought it was a really, really fun story! And…that’s it. I barely got the references. I told myself the “girl as prize” trope was deployed with knowing irony because I had snarky feminist friends who loved the story & would have criticized it if it were sincere…but…I dunno. I loved it for the fun parts but it would not stand up to a second of Overthinking It and I can’t NOT do that.
Yeah, I was gonna say Ready Player One, too. Nerds sure do love reference humor, geez. Reading about that guy getting a virtual Delorean with, I don’t remember exactly, an “I break for Sith Lords” bumper sticker or whatever it was, it was a lot like reading that part in Dorian Grey where he’s just describing curtains for forever.
That reminds me, A Picture of Dorian Grey also did not change my life.
Armada, his new book, is much worse on that front.
Yeah, that dude…sure has carved out a niche for himself enshrining a very particular sort of (white, male) nerd nostalgia.
It’s like…the Futurama episode on the same subject wasn’t even all that good and that was only 1/3 of an Anthology of Interest.
GOD, I too disliked both these books. Ready Player One is truly bad and I can’t fathom it’s popularity beyond that white male nerds will be congratulated for anything these days.
I really, really wanted to like Hundred Thousand Kingdoms because… WoC in sci-fi! Imaginative new worlds! Politics! Somebody even compared it to my girl LeGuin! But NO. It was shitty Twilight romance on top of a paper-thin world with a passive-ass main character. So disappointing.
Next time can we do authors who write one book you love and then write others that you really don’t? Martin Millar and Christopher Moore, I’m looking at you.
Go on….
Literally everything by John Green.
A Fault in Our Stars is the only one I managed to get through without rage-quitting and it was fine. Maybe I’m too old to get it?
Also, if I see “DFTBW” one more time I will THROW SOMETHING.
Not book related but also very much in the Do Not Get It vein: WTF is it with people and Homestuck?
I wrote a long rant about John Green’s books after I finished reading all of them. My conclusion was yeah, I’m just too old for the moral being “turns out she was just a flawed human like me all along!”. It’s a good moral for a YA book, but for an adult…like yeah I assumed basic empathy was a thing.
heh it’s ALMOST like you dismantle the MPDG trope by writing regular human being female characters, not writing MPDGs and saying J/K! at the end.
Oh, God, I can’t with John Green. I read one book co-written by him and I felt like I was going into mental hyperglycemia or something. It just seems–and his internet personality seems–so effortfully Twee but Deep! Tweep!
TWEEP! This needs to be a word.
Oh my god, I followed Homestuck for SO LONG before realizing that it was needlessly convoluted, the author clearly has no goddamn clue where he’s going with it, and every time he gets stuck he puts in an entire interlude full of meta jokes and/or adds 15 more unnecessary characters to keep track of. Also, 90% of its fans are insufferable. For awhile it was this weird thing where I was reluctant to jump ship because I had read nine thousand billion pages of it already, so I might as well finish…?
But no. Not worth it. Don’t even start.
Sad but so true. It gave such an impression, early on, that it did know where it was going, and that all the puzzle pieces were going to come together into a satisfying whole, but, at this point, I think it’s just shaping up to be the longest imaginable shaggy dog story.
I can’t say it didn’t change my life, though, because anything that eats up that much of your time has ipso facto changed your life.
*DFTBA
*ducks before you can throw something at me, quite rightly*
<3
Comment misfire! Although I once read a bit of Homestuck fanfic posted on a discussion group and I was so confused/
It took me a couple of tries to get into Homestuck, but once I got into it, I was hooked. I have several theories as to why. First, the Mere-Exposure Effect, which states that people tend to develop a preference for things simply because they are familiar with them. So when you apply that to an 8,000-page webcomic, it kind of makes sense that we develop a bit of an oversized passion for it. It also reminds me of these roleplays I did with friends online when we were all young and all of our characters were overpowered self-inserts. It was absolutely delightful because we saw no reason not to, say, make ourselves a magical dragon shapeshifter. And I really enjoy that Homestuck has no truck with imposing sensible and realistic limitations on its characters’ powers.
I also love the characters–well, enough of them–with an unwavering love. I really enjoy the humor, but it’s probably not for everyone. And really, I want to see where the heck this convoluted magical epic goes. It lampoons a bunch of fantasy and video game tropes and yet does something completely new with them. And I have no idea what’s going on half the time. I can’t explain it. But I am in deep.
Okay, I’ve read all the John Green and found most of it fine. Looking for Alaska actually provoked emotion, and The Fault in Our Stars was set in my hometown and therefore fascinating on that front.
…but what is “DFTBW”? I googled and still couldn’t figure it out.
It’s actually DFTBA and stands for “Don’t Forget to be Awesome” (I thought the last word was “weird”) and it is EVERYWHERE on Tumblr
I like John Green as an alternative internet hero to teenage boys than, say, Tosh. But as an author? He’s…okay.
His pop history videos are cute, tho
The Goldfinch. Man, was I bummed by how little I cared about The Goldfinch.
I know I read A Wrinkle in Time at some point, but it left next to no impression on my brain. Seeing posts here about the series and all the enthusiasm for it made me wonder how it was that I could remember nothing about it.
That happens sometimes though. I have no recollection of the Earthsea Cycle, which I know I read and loved when I was nine. I’m sure it was a good series, especially considering the adult LeGuin novels that I love, but my vague memory is a student wizard releases a shadow monster, and then…I dunno, four books worth of story I guess.
I did The Handmaid’s Tale for A level, and it … had words in it. Sorry, Canada and Feminism.
Mark me down as another in the Mehs of Avalon camp.
I feel that I should like Gail Carriger more than I do. There was one scene in Soulless where Alexia holds Lord Akeldama so he can finally see the sun set for the first time in, like, millennia that I found incredibly moving, but everything else is just, “why am I not enjoying this as much as I think I should? What exactly is missing?” Maybe it’s that I just don’t care for werewolves.
But the thing about the mehs is that a) I read very fast, and am often finished with a book before I realize that it’s not very good, and b) I am also a compulsive re-reader, and it is soooooo contextually dependent on how I’ll take a book at any given time. I can love, hate, and meh a book completely at random.
I really enjoy the Carriger books, but it’s precisely because I do not have engage very much. Everyone is breezy and witty and comes to no harm. Perfect long flight reading for me. Nothing about them sticks to the soul.
I loved the first book for it’s breeziness but was a little disappointed and surprised at how certain issues were handled in the sequels.
Yeah, you would think that whole “werewolves can’t reproduce” issue would have been raised significantly earlier in the relationship, wouldn’t you? Not to mention that it’s moot anyway, since I’m pretty sure they must have been in physical contact when Prudence was conceived, ergo Alexia’s preternaturalism trumps his lupinity.
I also want to like Gail Carriger more than I do. Everything about them just feels too deliberate and winky, like it was workshopped for the smart, librarian-ish young woman demographic (so, me) rather than being organic. It’s like a really excellent book I’d love to pieces, but someone filed all its edges and genuinely weird bits off.
I think part of it is that Alexia became kind of Elizabeth Peters’s Amelia Peabody with supernaturals, and I find a little of Amelia goes a hell of a long way. (I love Peters’s Vicky Bliss series, though–which again, I think, gets down to the “not so keen on werewolves” thing–Emerson is a werewolf in everything but actual physiology, whereas I find John Smythe’s constant whining and trying to coward his way out of things quite amusing–on paper.)
Waiting for the ‘Mehs of Avalon’ t shirt.
I was trying to scrape out the dust bunnies from behind the bed and I found Don Delillo’s Underworld. I guess it fell behind the bed one night, and forgot I was even reading it until that cleaning jag three months later. I’d gotten two-thirds into that tome, but I guess I wasn’t *into* it. I didn’t hate it. But I did just shake the dust out of the pages and put it back on the shelf.
Tipping the Velvet. I expected to like it, but got really bored and abandoned it about halfway in.
Fight Club, Dune, pretty much all Jane Austen (the only exception being Persuasion, which only really impacted me due to the idea that it could be very sexy and romantic to roll your ankles a lot), A Clockwork Orange, The Secret History, a truly boring book about dull, pretentious people with an entirely predictable plot and the only redeeming feature being that the characters were as unfulfilled in their lives as I was reading about them, The Great Gatsby, On The Road, Anna Karenina, etc etc etc. I read far too many “classics” when I was too young to get them, and now my tastes are so lowbrow I think they’re technically a goatee. What can you do!
All output of Gillian Flynn and Ian McEwan. I feel violently neutral towards them and their works, despite enthusiastic recommendations by friends/ family/ professors.
when I was a teen my parents bought me The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens. I read the whole thing, but it did not make me a Highly Effective Teen.
Yeesh, who WANTS to be a Highly Effective Teen? Ineffectiveness is like, the whole point of being a teen. Unless it’s about how to just effectively be as Teenage as you can be, in which case I consider the volume of time I spent in the woods trying to smoke pot out of a tin can Highly Effective.
I actually remember it being reasonably interesting to read, in a “I can see how this will be useful knowledge someday” kind of way, but yeah, becoming some kind of super organized non-procrastinator at 16 was just not going to happen.
Pride and Prejudice, Pillars of the Earth, the entire Hemingway catalog, Sarah Waters’ The Little Friend,
Game of Thrones. Finished the first book only by dint of skimming. Will never venture onto the sequels. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. It’s all right. I haven’t finished it yet. I started reading it last summer. I dip in every now and then.
Eleanor and Park – rather dull. Stereotypical depiction of all the non-white characters, whose lives of course revolved around the white girl lead.
Magic Christian – couldn’t make it past 20 pages
Lord of the Rings – boring
Everyone lovvvvvves Eleanor and Park, so I read it, and it did nothing for me. It was sweet, I guess?
It was NOT really all that sweet. I mean I guess it was but it wasn’t even GOOD sweet, it was just predictable and boring and destroyed my book club.
Wolf Hall. I tried SO hard. And when I was like, “Maybe I didn’t get it,” I watched the BBC series and still could not engage with it. It was just so boring.
not that into jonathan strange and mr norrell
I tried to read Lord of the Rings when the movies first came out, because I was one of those very bookish children who thought that one should always read the book before you see the movie. I read all of them up until halfway through Return of the King and then thought to myself “you know what? I don’t actually have to read this!”
I still maintain that it would be great to have an alternative abridged version of LOTR, with just the story and no hobbit family trees, long linguistic explanations that go on for half a page about 1 word Legolas said, or songs by Tom Bombadil. It’d probably be just one book in length.
Also, The Handmaid’s Tale, which seems to be compulsory if you are a queer woman, or a feminist or both – but in my mind, is dour and terribly written. Gotta love the way it suddenly speeds up towards the end as if Margaret Atwood is getting bored with her own story. Also, the contradictory epilogue that says that Offred was recording everything on tapes. If she was, then why did she spend so much goddamn time describing tiny minutiae, like “The matches were the wooden kind that come in in the cardboard sliding box.” What matches AREN’T? IF this world has some kind of plastic matches, then you should describe THEM!
Not as annoying to me, but A Room With A View was very nothing. Everyone says it’s so lovely and better than Maurice, but I see it as a bit of useless froth, whereas Maurice is about something the author actually cared about and thus was a lot more interesting to me.
I’ve always held that if you cut the hobbits out of LOTR entirely, it’s a 100% better story.
Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (so boring)
P&P, but I love the BBC version
Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson (anything by Brandon Sanderson)
Tamora Pierce’s Daine books (boring / creepy Numaire dynamic)
John Green
I hate saying this, but the latter half of the Artemis Fowl books
TERRY PRATCHETT’S ENTIRE BODY OF WORK *flees*
OH MY GOD, hello dear soul sister.
I love John Green’s online presence, he seems like a delightful guy. But the most I feel for any of his books are, “hat was pleasant.” His characters feel too polished, I relate to none of them, I just don’t understand the fanboy/fangirling. And I feel incredibly guilty about it.
Also, not enjoying P&P makes me feel like I’m not a real feminist. Thankfully, I read it when my roommate was a feminist with a degree in literature and she was like, “You’re reading that? Meh. No need to bother.” So I felt less alone.
OMG the last half of the Artemis Fowl books! You are so right. Honestly the last one I liked was the fifth, but can agree that really only the first four (three, it could be argued) are good.
* Jane Eyre (started it, never finished it)
* Wuthering Heights (half-assed my way through it)
* Treasure Island
* A Tale of Two Cities (otoh, I liked Great Expectations)
* Emily of New Moon
* Jane of Lantern Hill (even though I’ve seen the TV movie, I’ve never made it through the book)
* Johnny Tremain (DO NOT LIKE)
Oh my gosh, I forgot about Johnny Tremain! We all had to read that in 7th grade and I loathed that book with a passion.
I think it was eighth grade for me. Sigh.
Actually, I think I can safely say almost all my required school reading was far from life-changing.
My friends and I got in trouble in 7th grade for throwing numerous copies of “Johnny Tremain” out the window into a dumpster. I am still unrepentant.
aaaawwwwwww Jane of Lantern Hill.
I….. love that book with every fiber of my being and don’t fault you at all for not being able to finish it. My love has a lot more to do with coincidence and circumstance and what I bring to the book rather than any sort of inherent worth or craft.
My partner is watching Newsroom, and I am sort of in the room as he’s watching it, and every so often we try to talk about it and we can’t keep any of the names of the characters straight, and at one point I said out loud “the guy from Law & Order”? ……… I then confessed that despite never having seen the tv movie, and despite having seen a million episodes of L&O, I don’t associate him FIRST with L&O, it’s JoLH.
Oh, and everything by Hemingway. He’s ot great, not awful, just okay.
samsies
Where’d You Go, Bernadette (Maria Semple). I never comment but I felt so compelled this time.
John Fowles The Magus. It was pressed on me by two men who generally have decent taste, so I slogged through it, and felt mostly, ugh, so Freudian. And kind of ick.
Kim. Yes, yes, repeat the words The Great Game over and over again.
And I still have never really read Tess of the D’urbervilles, despite having a semi-amused acquaintance with Hardy elsewhere.
Hatchet. OMG Hatchet. I just can’t. I don’t know if my utter lack of interest in man against nature survival stories predates that, but it was cemented therafter (along with official confirmation from my fifth-grade teacher that yes, girls were expected to suck it up and read about boys, but not vice versa.)
I could never get through Under the Lilacs, even with my childhood compulsion to completion. Also, weirdly for my general tastes? Caddie Woodlawn. I read the hell out of Baby Island, so idk.
Pretty much everything by John Updike. I can occasionally find interest in the odd short story, but I shut down when faced with the novels.
a Jonathon Frazen book, sorry I can’t remember which one. it was the one with neurotic upper middle-class white people if that helps any. I guess it was okay but obviously I can’t remember much about it so it didn’t stick with me.
The Great Gatsby – overrated erotic friend fiction at best.
Anything by D H Lawrence, who was too repetitive and mother-obsessed for me to tolerate.
My partner ADORES Terry Pratchett but I find the silliness to vacuous to take.
LORNA DOOOOOONE. MY NEMESIS IN BOOK FORM.
damn you LORNA DOONE. damn you straight to hell.
Lorna Doone aren’t just cookies? You learn something new every day.
If only they were just cookies!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorna_Doone
“overrated erotic friend fiction”
This is a PERFECT description.
The only good thing about DH Lawrence is how easy it is to forget anything he wrote. Women In Love? Annoyed me intensely while reading it for a lit class, couldn’t tell you the details of the story today if my life depended upon it.
I read something that called his writing “febrile” and that is a perfect description.
I expected to really like One Hundred Years of Solitude. I finished it but can’t remember anything about it, except for something about dust blowing away in the end. Never finished Catcher in the Rye, too annoyed at the main character, what’s his face. Related topic, I signed up for an online writing class and one of the things they want you to list in your bio is your favorite writers. Everyone else has listed Great and Important Authors, Many of Which I Have Never Read or Don’t Really Like. It is filling me with shame. I think I might just leave that section blank.
Nah, fill it out and be honest! I took a Children’s Lit class as an English credit (which meant a final project of writing a children’s book, as opposed to designing a lesson plan as it is for Education majors) and our icebreaker was to make a list of the books, series, and authors we loved as children. A lot of people wrote a list of classics–Narnia, The Hobbit, Newberry Medal winners–and I wrote what I really loved by age. This meant including Captain Underpants, Junie B. Jones, Bruce Colville’s ‘Magic Shop’ books, the super-girly-princessy Gail Carson LeVine books. I had maybe *one* Newberry Medal winner on the list. And people loved it! After I was willing to say, yes, Captain Underpants made me lmao when I was eight, and I snuck the books in the house behind my parents back, there was a collective sigh of relief. Everyone had stories like that, and suddenly they felt they could be honest too.
Eat Pray Love
I expected to hate it, but instead… it is certainly a book that I read? It was short on pasta recipes?
Ishmael
Middlemarch. Sorry, Toast, I’m trying to like it, and there are likeable parts but then the focus shifts to uninteresting parts that put me to sleep. This is my third attempt at it and I WILL finish this time (3/4 through – does the last 1/4 get more consistently interesting?)
I’ll leave my Toast membership card on the table by the exit…:(
Watch the miniseries with Judi Dench! Retain your card and enjoy sympathetic characterizations and wonderful costumes.
I hated Middlemarch. I hated Adam Bede more.
I ended up really liking Middlemarch in the end, but I would NOT have finished it if I hadn’t been reading it for a class.
For 90% of this book I was like “no you are all marrying the wrong people why can’t you see that”
I’ve been halfway through Middlemarch for like a decade. I keep restarting it and then getting to one of the bits that are boring and being like…. nah. OR up to bits where something rull bad is going to happen and being like… NAH.
One of these days I might finish it.
Well, I think I’ve read Middlemarch, but I can’t actually remember anything that happened in it or anything at all about it, so yeah.
Claire Messud’s “The Emperor’s Children.” So many people were swoooooooning over it that summer, and I read it and had angry thoughts of “Fuck these rich white people and their cosmopolitan white people problems” SO HARD. (I liked Meg Wolitzer’s “The Interestings” so much better, like, good, let’s look seriously at class envy and disappointment and problematic love for family members who do bad things, yes.)
Also, “Fight Club.” Even at seventeen, I was all, “Ugh, SPARE ME.”
Kushiel’s Dart. I couldn’t do it. Not even halfway through I wanted to set it on fire. I now actively avoid anyone that cites the series as their favourite because if you like that much rape in your reading I will side-eye you ’til judgement day.
By the time I read Mists of Avalon I’d already been really into this *other* Arthurian retelling involving like particle physics and a lot of fucking in the woods or wanting to be fucking in the woods, or longing to be fucking in the woods, so by the time I got to MoA I was like, “This shit is tame.”
Please tell me about this other Arthurian retelling, it sounds amazing.
I think the first one is called The Dragon and the Unicorn? Haha, it’s probably not as great as I remember/am describing it.
The Lord of the Rings books. I liked The Hobbit well enough, but I read the first LotR book and halfway through the second, until one day I just put it down and…never picked it up again. Didn’t hate it, just…meh. I consider this a very fair try and am fine with this decision.
(I’d consider reading a detailed linguistic analysis of all Tolkien’s languages though. That’s what he really cared about anyway, and the Quenya alphabet is ingeniously designed.)
Life of Pi. People kept saying it was great, but I can’t even think about it without being rageful. Maybe it’s because my mother was not an orangutan and I am envious, or maybe it’s because this book was super overrated. The fact that people assume since I don’t like it that I didn’t understand it just further fuels my hatred. I GET IT; I JUST HATED IT.
Also: Cryptonomicon. Neal Stephenson should not write women. Ever.
I;ve said this before, but somehow my brain is convinced that ‘Cryptonomicon’ is pronounced ‘crypto-omnomnom-icon’
I liked Life of Pi, but I HATE HATE HATE when people assume that someone who doesn’t like something doesn’t get it. This is a matter of opinion, not understanding.
OOooooohhhhh…I’m made at those people on your behalf right now. How *dare* they!
Ugh, I hated Life of Pi, and then felt guilty because it was given to me as a gift by my very well-meaning brother. But yes, world, I got the book, and I thought the point of it was fucking stupid.
This seems like a good place to share this story: a while back, I noticed that the fridge in my apartment is missing a foot, and in its place is two books holding up that corner. I was like OOOH FREE BOOKS and got down there with a flashlight to determine the titles. They are: Life of Pi and Eat, Pray, Love. I was like, “Meh?” and decided they are already achieving a far higher level of usefulness than they would as books (Eat, Pray, Love in particular.)
Life of Pi! I read that and thought, “I can give this book as a gift to non-readers.” So I did.
This is my new sick burn for books.
Once when I was hideously depressed in France for six weeks, the only English-language books I had were Life of Pi, a Ken Follett book about an old-timey aeroplane, and a Russian spy novel. I read one a day in turn until I left, over and over and over again, and could not tell you what happened in a single one.
I’m pretty sure that I listened to the audiobook of that same Ken Follett book about the old-timey aeroplane when I was depressed in France! It was not very good.
Walden. Favorite teachers and friends all loved it, and encouraged me to read it.
I couldn’t wait to read it, and was convinced that it was going to be a new favorite.
It took me damn near an hour to get through the first 38 of pages. If there was anything about nature in there, I couldn’t hear it over the sound of his ego. I decided fuck this windbag, and threw the book across the bus.
The more I read about Thoreau, the better I feel about not reading Walden.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Fresh off the Boat by Eddie Huang
Goodbye Columbus by Philip Roth
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf 🙁
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
They fit this criterion because I had to go through my Goodreads list to remember I’d ever read them.
Ulysses. I read is because of Fun Home and Asteryos Polyp. I found that (probably because of Proust) I mush prefer reading other people’s commentary on Ulysses than actual Ulysses.
I would rather re read my dissertation (which I was writing at the time) than Ulysses.
I’d forgotten that I had forgotten to keep reading Ulysses! Thanks for giving me the opportunity to forget about it all over again!
East of Eden
The Kite Runner
…is it just me? Everyone I know LOVES these two
yesss, I came here hoping someone else said The Kite Runner! Even the movie to me was just *shrug emoji*
I couldn’t get past the second chapter because I can’t deal with children breaking each other’s hearts.
Good- nobody’s posted in an hour and nobody will know that I found “Quicksilver” and “Anathem”…..rather long?
Oh! I don’t know if this is entirely in the spirit of this thread but I know I read, like, dozens of Goosebumps books. I can’t remember anything about them now except that every time I saw a new cover I thought, “Oh! Maybe this one will be scary!” They never were.
Also, they were printed on fantastically cheap paper.
Oh man, I was hugely into Goosebumps as a kid. Every month we’d have a new Scholastic Book Club thing, and I’d get the new Goosebumps book on the list. I got them all the way through grade school, up until one month when I missed the cut-off to turn in the order form and then I just… stopped getting them. Some of ’em were kinda creepy, some of ’em were gross-out stuff, but most of ’em were just weird. They’re like longer, more fleshed-out campfire stories. On a related note, the upcoming Goosebumps movie looks like it’s going to be a… thing? that exists? I’m not sure how to feel about it, besides perhaps that the route they’ve chosen to take is perhaps the only one that may actually fit in with the Goosebumps not-actually-quite-all-that-scary approach.
I’d say Goosebumps wasn’t really life-changing, except that looking back I can kinda see how they could be seen as fetish fuel too. (And now that we’ve entered TMI territory, I shall bow out as ungracefully as possible.)
I read one which was the “giant cat eats livestock, dude cuts off giant cat paw, local woman has bleeding stump” myth, and it was TERRIFYING, so the only reason you could have been not frightened of that one is if you are also a shape-changing witch.
This would explain some things about you. Probably Pockets is your own kitten that you bore in the jungle and then brought home and were like “look I accidentally got a kitten.”
I would think that the only reason that story would be scary would be if you were a shape-changing witch or perhaps someone in the habit of maiming carnivorous megafauna.
Therefore it is clearly you that is the shape-changing witch! This would explain some things about you. Like your very suspicious familiar, a peculiar black cat.
It’s a fair cop.
It’s flea season, he’s working very hard on being a bald cat, getting rid of all that pesky fur.
Oh fuzzy bunnies! I missed one month of topspot for our kitties and damned if we didn’t end up with fleas in all our furniture. We fogged the bed, the couch, the computer chairs, the dog beds… and everything else went into a washing machine with hot water and then a drier set to “never wear these pants again” heat.
I am proud to announce that after two dedicated weeks, we are apparently flea free.
I highly recommend fogging your furniture. Your lips will go numb, but it’s worth it.
Though I suppose it’s also a pretty scary story from the perspective of livestock…
But really, every story is a scary story from the perspective of livestock.
IT’S PEOPLE!!!
The truck had PEOPLE in it!
Walden.
-Boring.
-Pretentious.
-Not actual wilderness living.
The Interestings was the most profoundly mediocre book I have read in a long time.
Also, The Magicians. I thought it was such a cool idea and the book was so meh, and although the second book was better whenever Julia was narrating, the part with the god at the end made me so mad I threw the book and scared the cats.
I had no idea that so many unimpressed reviews of books I have loved would make me feel so melancholy…
The Witch of Blackbird Pond. I was confused by the lack of witches.
Jacob Have I Loved. Just, huh?
Despite many friends telling me I would love Beloved, I could not get more than a chapter or two into it. I felt like I had been dropped into the middle of a party and did not know who anybody was or whom anybody was talking about. I approached Life of Pi, The Little Prince, and The Alchemist all with high expectations, but found all of them to be what I particularly dislike in books, ham-handed allegories about supposedly big ideas but with cookie cutter characters that do boring things with what little they have. I particularly disliked The Life of Pi. If I wanted to read an essay on the meaning of it all, I would not be picking up a novel. Essays are okay, but I like them to be labelled as such.
books by Marilynne Robinson. I know I’m supposed to…
Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. I gave up on it twice before taking a class where it was on the reading list, at which point I decided to knuckle down and finish it. I got to the end, sort of let out a half-sigh of disappointment and unsatisfaction, then put it down and immediately forgot how it ended (but still nodded along intelligently while everyone in the seminar waxed lyrical about how great the ending was). I’ve never heard anyone else admit that this book is wildly overrated but I have a strong suspicion I’m not the only one who thinks this – it can’t be coincidence that there’s a always copy of it at every single second-hand book shop and flea market.
I was just about to post because I hadn’t seen this on the list yet! I rage-read this book: I hated it so much that I had to see how it ended, and then I saw how it ended and I wanted to write to Zadie Smith demanding a refund of my wasted time. If you don’t know how to tie your story together, maybe work on it a little more instead of shrugging at your readers and going, ‘You make the call!’ Ugh, such cutesy bullsh*t.
Fortunately I found someone soon after I read it who had the same feelings about it I did. I still feel weird about talking about it, though, like I’m a traitor to women or some nonsense. When in fact, I just HATE GARBAGE BOOKS THAT ALSO DONT HAVE PROPER ENDINGS AAARRRRRGGGGHHH.
See I really loved White Teeth until I got to the end. Deciding that the last 1/4 of the book didn’t happen made it all better.
White Teeth was awful, but I did love On Beauty. This has caused a major rift with one of my best friends (who feels the opposite is true), so I guess it would be unfair to say that it hasn’t impacted my life at all.
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Such an intriguing concept, and what a tedious book.
Le Morte d’Arthur and the Aeneid. Love Arthurian Legends and Greek Mythology even more, but those 2 just bored me to death.
While you are indeed my spirit animal, Mallory, I have to say I’m sad that the thumbnail for this is Mists of Avalon, which did change my life. The budding teenage pre-feminist in me was obsessed and to this day identifies with Morgaine. Besides all the feminist/witchy women opressed by new Christianity themes, the “devil’s threesome” part with Gwenhwyfar, Lancelot, and Arthur was just plain awesome, I mean come on.
I was going to say ‘Life of Garp’, which I read at the behest of an acquaintance who insisted it had changed her life. But actually it was my first recongisable misandry moment when I thought ‘man I just do not care about this dude AT ALL’. So maybe it did change my life…
” Cryptonomicon”. Everyone told me I would love it, and I liked what I read, but then went through a weird state of enjoyable-but-bored. I didn’t get past the first few chapters. I’ll try again one day.
Neal Stephenson is this way for me in general.
Books I probably should have liked, but didn’t:
–Game of Thrones. Never finished the first book.
–Catcher in the Rye. I feel like this one has been mentioned a lot, but it holds a special place in my life for being the first book I ever just gave up on and read the sparknotes. It’s so short and still so boring! Nothing happens, there isn’t actually a plot. Bonus points for clearly being one of my English teacher’s faves.
–Akria, the graphic novel. Maybe it was just my group of nerds, but everyone loved this book and it changed their life, and I didn’t *dislike* it? But…it’s like, it’s okay. It’s weird. Weird and okay.
–Same with ‘Watchman.’ Actually, ‘Watchman’ was pretty much every negative stereotype I’d ever heard about American comics up to that point (violent, dark, sexist, crude linework) and I’m not sure if it was worth the read just to be able to talk about it.
–Also I recently tried to re-read Sandman and it is way more meandering and slower than I remember, and there are so many characters that just show up once and then again at the end and it’s like, “wait, who are they?” I actually did *love* Sandman in high-school, though, so I’m not sure that it counts for this thread.
I feel bad complaining so I’m going to throw out there that I loved Carla Speed McNeil’s fantasy graphic novel series ‘Finder,’ which actually did change my life, and hopefully that makes up for my being less-than-into the classics in the genre. Also should out to ‘Locke and Key’ by Joe Hill.
I similarly read about 95% of the first Game of Thrones book, right up to what was certainly supposed to be A Very Important Moment — Can You Believe This Book! and I just… put it down and never picked it up again. I was even on a plane and had nothing else to do or read. It just… wasn’t worth the braincells.
Just so happy to find people that hate Game of Thrones.
Life of Pi. Everyone raves about it and I didn’t make it more than 50 pages in. I still wonder what the fuss was about.
You speak truth, a great truth shines out of your fingers like a golden light.
Oh God, The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton. Everyone was in raptures about it, and just before I bought it I remember reading a review that said “Surely a book this good can never be too long” or something. I discovered that yes, yes it can.
I genuinely can’t even remember anything from Grapes of Wrath. It could have been about the Dust Bowl or the Super Bowl, for all I cared.
Oh, also VERY SECRETLY anything by JD Salinger. Catcher in the Rye? High school meh. Frannie and Zooey? College meh.
Dude you should read Dreamcatcher (his daughter’s memoir) and then you can HATE HIM WITH PASSION.
Sorry. Sorry. I read it last week. He was a garbage father and a garbage spouse.
Re-reading this whole thread just makes me want to scream TOY STORY 2 WAS OK
(thanks Demetri Martin)
Let me just list them en masse, so I only have to use one set of italics tags: The Catcher in the Rye, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Seven Arrows*, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge**, A Separate Peace, On the Road***. They were promoted to me by friends and teachers and therapists in all earnestness and I can’t fault them for that, especially because I’ve done the same to others with various books (including, of all the things, Watchmen).
*Seven Arrows seems to have pretty much vanished; the only other time I’ve seen it mentioned was in the book Vision Quest, which was pretty good, and which got made into a so-so film in the 80s that’s probably best known now for a cameo by Madonna. The book included the helpful news that I wasn’t the only one who only read the dirty parts in Seven Arrows.
**Allegedly nonfiction, apparently 100% bogus.
***The fact that Kerouac typed this out on one continuous roll of paper is very, very evident in the text.
Bless: my parents made me read all these when I was a teenager over one long hot summer, and it is a weird insight into the minds of Baby Boomers.
But not fun, not good, weird brain place for a big chunk of a huge generation.
Anne of Green Gables. The Secret Garden. The Little Princess. Alice in Wonderland. All of Robert Heinlein.
All of Robert Heinlein. I cannot agree more.
“The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack” by Mark Leyner. I understand it was supposed to be surreal and unhinged but it was also so very clearly written by THAT GUY in your MFA class that I couldn’t focus on the redeeming qualities I’m sure it must have possessed.
I cannot handle Hemingway. 200 pages to blow up a freaking bridge in “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. Blah blah talking blah blah tangent blah. I love John Donne so I was jazzed as hell to read a novel the title of which was an allusion to him. Nope. It sucked. Dry as the Sahara.
Also, “This is Where I Leave You”. It sure was a book. About the best thing I could say about it is that it belongs on that list of “books white dudes own”.
The only time it is OK to talk about bridge collapse for 200 pages is when you are writing an engineering document on preventing bridge collapse. Or a law funding bridge maintenance.
I’m looking at you, “Bridge of San Luis Rey”.
Agree with Mallory about Chonology of Water.
To Kill a Mockingbird is on my “didn’t change my life” list. As is Walden Pond. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Sheila Heti’s book. That hippie seagull book.
I had actually completely forgotten that I bought and read We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves until I saw another Toastie mention Ape House a couple of pages back and I thought “was that the book with the chimp that I think I loaned someone and never missed? No? What was that?” So thank you for reminding me that I read it, and that it was a book.
I will refer to this book as “that hippy seagull book” from now until the end of time.
The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up did not change my life in a magical way. But I did learn how to fold t-shirts.
Cannot figure out why anyone would pray for Owen Meany, much less read about him.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I feel like I have to turn in my Tumblr cred.
The Notebook (duh)
Ender’s Game
The Adventures of Augie March
and also every book written by someone I’ve met in real life. Sorry, IRLs. I wish twere not so.
The Doomsday Book, time travel, ancient plagues, people lost, and…stuff.
The Sirens of Titan is about what now?
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is…a book…and a long one.
The Passage had zombies…no wait, vampires…no wait vampire zombies. Zompires? Either way, it was a book that happened.
OMG, The Doomsday Book. I wanted to kill them and myself. The WHINING!!
Tess of the D’ubervilles and To Kill A Mockingbird, OH MY GOD. (They’re connected, I promise.)
I felt compelled to read Tess because my favourite English teacher gave it to me when she caught me reading something she thought was below me when our class was reading TKAM (in typical fashion I had read ahead at home already and was boooored). I kept pushing through but I realized how poorly I was paying attention when (SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS!) I only realized Tess had been raped and had a child when she talked about burying it outside the consecrated church ground. I think I quit then, and I’ve tried since but I can’t get into caring.
I’ll never understand the appeal of TKAM, but I wonder if that’s partly because I’m Canadian? I don’t know if that’s relevant. I remember getting to the end and wondering if I’d missed something (and I feel that way when people relate how it CHANGED.THEIR.LIFE. and I’m like, Did you not know racism was bad before you read this book?) I will say I thought my English teacher was clever to play both that film and A Time To Kill in the same unit. But it kind of painted racism as a southern-US problem which I think gives people a pass on their own racism. So.
The Thomas Covenant Chronicles by Stephen R. Donaldson
Atlas Shrugged & the Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler
The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
and
Almost anything written by Ernest Hemingway or John Steinbeck
In no particular order:
* The Wind In The Willows. Everything I know about this book is via pop culture. Luckily, pop culture doesn’t really devote a lot of time to TWITW, so I’m in the clear on this one.
* Anything by Alexandre Dumas. The guy himself seemed to have been cool. I can’t say the same about his prose, though.
* All’s Quiet On The Western Front. That was my first experience where the act of reading felt more like a chore instead of a joy, to the point where that is honestly all I remember about it.
* The Prince. Can’t remember why I even bothered trying with this one (being able to declare myself ‘well-read’, maybe?) but I didn’t even make it through the first chapter before I decided it wasn’t worth it and shoved it back onto the bookshelf.
* Paradise Lost. I actually forgot that I even bothered trying with this one until I saw it on the bookshelf. That’s how much it didn’t stick.
* The Marble Faun. I read two pages and then shut the book.
Neil Gaiman is a pretty cool dude–I follow him on Tumblr, I enjoy reading one-off articles and blog posts and stuff, and I genuinely enjoyed American Gods, even though I’ve not bothered to re-read it in the 11 or so years that have passed since my one and only read-through. But literally everything else I’ve ever read by him has left me just…. Not even cold. Room temperature? Completely unfazed. I feel like this would have been less of a problem if I hadn’t had a slew of friends in college who basically wanted to have his babies and kept getting me to read his works promising that “you’ll love THIS one!” I didn’t. I just plain DIDN’T. Most of his stuff just made me want to read similar stuff that had been written more engagingly by other writers.
Anything John Updike. I feel like he’s not talking to me at all. He’s addressing men and their problems in this super-white, super-WASP world and I don’t care and I am bored and I can’t relate and these people’s issues do not merit a book.
Oh no for the cover image! I must retaliate- I loved and still love The Mists of Avalon and it did really change my life. Jane Eyre was my meh book. I studied it for school and I find it fine, but just fine. Nothing more. I’d be happy not to read it twice.
People keep trying to get me to read Margaret Atwood and I have to keep telling them that I have, already, and that I’m physically incapable of being less interested in discussing her.
Oryx and Crake in particular entirely failed to change my life, except to make me feel like I needed to shower a little more often, for a while, to get the grime of it off me.
not to be super cranky, but it’s actually all the unfinished manuscripts i read for work, 99.9999% of which range from ohdeargodhidethechildren kind of terrible to straight up meh. i keep sneaking passages from p&p because it’s just nice to read a finely tuned sentence… it’s also august & i’m not on the beach enjoying a good book that isn’t work, so being stuck in an over-AC’ed office makes all the meh worse.
i found a clockwork orange unreadable, but mostly it was probably a head-space thing. super agree that confederacy of dunces is no more or less than okay.
also, harry potter books 4-7 (and OMG book 7 is the WORST) are just…awful. liking book 7 must be pure nostalgia for the charms of books 1 & 3.
I’d like to put in a word against Tom Wolfe. Someone gave me A Man In Full when I moved to Atlanta. The only thing it changed was to make me just that much more sorry I’d moved to Atlanta. Not one single character had even one single redeeming feature.
Neil Gaiman’s books. ALL of them. Even the thing he wrote with Pratchett. I have wanted and wanted to like them and never found myself more than meh about any of them. So.
1. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
2. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
4. Wurthering Heighs by Emily Bronte
5. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (adore Pride and Prejudice and Emma though. It makes sense that Austen’s first novel would be her weakest).
Ann Patchett. I made it through Bel Canto and Truth and Beauty: A Friendship, trying to find what it was about her writing that fascinated everyone else. Never could finish State of Wonder… and never really “got it” about her writing. So unimpressed I had to go look her up on Wikipedia to remeber what the titles actually were.
Catcher in the Rye. Portnoy’s Complaint. The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Just about any book about affluent young men’s coming to age angst leaves me stony cold.
Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman; it’s a modern day retelling of Wuthering Heights, which works about as well as you’d think. So bad I’ve never been able to read any other Alice Hoffman, which is probably a shame. (So I guess it has affected my life, come to think of it).
The Da Vinci Code – profoundly stupid, in addition to being very poorly written. My only consolation is that it was given to me by a friend who didn’t want it back, so I just threw it out, which I don’t often do with books.
Ovid’s “Metamorphosis.” Here’s what I remember about it: Some characters do bad things and are punished by being turned into birds. Other characters are wonderful and heroic and are rewarded by being turned into birds. Huh?
Also, Tess of the D’Ubervilles. She’s a poor innocent milkmaid has sex (well, gets raped by a rich dude) and gets knocked up and is TAINTED FOREVER! With many, many intervening pages of pastoral scenes featuring picturesque cows. PLUS LOTS OF PEARL CLUTCHING! And more cows. AND SCANDAL! Plus extra cows, frolicking. (On the whole, it just did not do it for me.)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — the author might have considered editing the rough draft. I don’t appreciate lectures on some scientific digression in the middle of a novel. And about the fourth time the author used a kinky sex scene to spice it up because the whole story was bogging down, I got fed up with that ploy. The hero/journalist was so full of himself professionally and so smug with how he juggles his love relationships, I wanted to roll up an issue of his investigative journal and give him a bop on the head.
I have read so many books that have left me cold. off the top of my head is a partial list: Madame Bovary, Huckleberry Finn, East of Eden, Grapes of wrath,Water for Elephants , Harry Potter, the Hunchback of Notre Dame,A Separate Peace. Virginia Woolfe.I am bored by feminist literature- there is no joy in them as far as I can tell( except some of Vita Sackville-West).
My favourite books tend to be long( War and Peace,Vilhelm Moberg’s ‘Emigrant ‘series, Far from the Madding Crowd) but don’t seem as long winded .
Anything by Jane Austen. The Great Gatsby. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Not bad enough to hate, just…meh.
Me, too! I’m a voracious reader, and a few years ago I tried to read all of the books I was supposed to read in high school – except this was the 70’s, and we read everything but (except Faulkner. I fell in love with Faulkner). I really got into Austen, but Anna K. just slogged along, and I never got more than halfway through.
Mere Christianity. A friend lent it to me as an agnostic, and I was underwhelmed. Later I would develop a love for Lewis and convert to Christianity, but he wasn’t The One just yet, not in 2008.
The Scarlet Letter. Uggh.
I can't remember what happened in Insurgent. I saw Divergent with my husband and he would ask me questions about the world that I *knew* were answered in Insurgent, but I could not remember what the answers were.
This is a great post. It should be re-visited every year.
Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon. Nope.
I like many of Le Guin’s books, but it took me weeks to slog through Left Hand of Darkness. It is so highly praised, etc. that I really felt I should at least admire *something* about it. The gender thing at least. But it was so. freaking. DULL to me. The politics, the wearisome toil of the personal relationships, the journey across the glacier, and yes the gender thing. NOT life-changing at all. I did finally finish it by pure strength of will. Never again.
Afterward I read Ancillary Sword and it was pure delight.
The Buddenbrooks. I read it in honour of my late professor who was a huge fan of Thomas Mann, but it was one of the most boring books I have ever read. There are no characters to connect with. Noithing happens. People marry, divorce, have kids, occasionally die in yawn-worthy ways, and there is this one embarassing uncle. Also, boring family Christmases and general Bourgeois Decline. Like, would it be so hard to throw in some incest or gay or murder?
His short stories are amazing, but this did not convince me to try his other (even longer) novels…
Pretty much everything I’ve ever read by Terry Pratchett. He always seemed like a lovely, intelligent, very clever man and I admired him greatly. But his books always feel like when someone tells a joke and then continues to explain, at length, why the punchline was funny because they thought you didn’t laugh hard enough at it.