Ask Lemmy

Clear and present danger. Only book I’ve ever quit, and 600 pigs in to boot. Shit author, shit book, shit material. The people who enjoy this shit are the same people who jack off to guns and ammo. ‘What’s this author re*arded? Give me back my $15’.

Any book where the pages aren’t cut together. Fucking pain in the ass turning pages, and forget about flipping through the book.

Okay nobody said His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman. So that's my hated reading experience.

The first book was okay, seemed promising, the rest got worse and worse by the page. I've picked up lousy books and I can quickly tell if they would be a waste of time, so I drop them early. I have no beef with those books. But His Dark Materials? What a disappointment. I want my time and money back.

The Winds of War. I enjoyed the Caine Mutiny so much, I plowed right through it and wanted more. Winds completely deflated that. I tried to read a couple other Woulk books and just couldn't get into any of them.

I was about to finish the book (it was mine) when my teacher asked to borrow it. I never got it back.

The worst one I remember was having to read Great Expectations in high school. Maybe I might appreciate the book more today, but at the time I found it incredibly boring and it just seemed to drag on and on and on. It really felt like a written soap opera from the 1800's, which it kind of was as it was originally published a serial where the reader got a small part of it every week. Which probably accounted for how slowly the plot seemed to move.

Perhaps an honorable mention would go to "Triton", as that's the first book I remember where I started reading and actually got a decent way into it before putting it down as it was absolutely boring me out of my mind. Though I was a teen at the time, and one of my main sources of reading material was whatever I could find at garage sales for cheap. But nevertheless, almost always if I thought a book was interesting enough to buy it was also interesting enough for at least one read through, but that one stood out as an exception. Though I have to wonder if I tried reading it again today if I might manage to get through it this time.

Couldn't get over the accent stuff in Huckleberry Finn. I gotta be able to flow state a book.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley was good because it started off with a lot of stuff I can relate to, but in a kind of neat Time Travel storyline set in the near future which is also great because I really only like Time Travel stories. Stuff like Khmer Rouge and refugee child growing up in the west and all that kind of stuff, all wrapped up in a strong female lead character. And then halfway through, the dude unzips his pants and it turns into a shitty Oxford Study romance where the strong protagonist is completely undone and turns into a colonizer worshipping story. Bullshit. I stopped reading and I'm still angry about it two months later. Fuck that story.

Also, Stations of the Tide was dry and I never finished it. I've tried 2-3 times. Swanwick is my favorite sorta-contemporary author but I don't know how that won so many awards. Am I missing something? It seems like everyone wants to herald that novel as great because they don't want to look dumb, but it's just all over the place compared to his later novels, much like Killing is My Business has a bunch of good riffs but is all over the place with no structure and nothing ever repeats so therefore it isn't as refined and memorable as Rust in Peace.

The Darkroom of Damocles.

The big "twist" in the book basically gets pretty obviously announced in the first chapter "oh this person is exactly like me but better in every way I can conceive, how vexing. Gosh would I like to be him". It's almost spelled out.

Once the twist is known, the rest of the book makes little sense. Sure, the main character becomes an unreliable narrator, but he's not just twisting details; hugely important events can no longer happen if you assume the twist, because there's no physical way of it happening, unless the narrator is so extremely unreliable that you might as well be reading Jurassic Park only to reveal it was actually Terminator or something.

And then the book tries to end all clever by dangling the whole "was this the twist? Was it all real? Who knoooowws" making the book feel like a massive waste of time. Clearly the author wanted you to doubt the narrator at the end so you'd go back and think "oh was this/that a hint?", but with the twist being so painfully obvious it lands flat on its face.

I was hoping there'd be some clever ending that meta-played on the whole "the reader has been distrusting of the narrator"-ordeal, but there was nothing. Very unfulfilling reading experience.

States of matter by David L. Goodestein. Just read the first paragraph tbh