The Robert Jordan Wheel of Time books. By book 7 I hated the main characters and really hated the writing style. The repetition. The repetition. The repetition...
The Sanderson books were ok, but they couldn't rescue the series and I got no joy from finishing it. A lot of relief though to be done with it.
Agreed on the wheel of time. Every character has one and just one quirk and they repeat it in every occasion. Also it's quite troubling, once you start thinking on it, this fixation on men/women relationship.
I rage quit after book 3. I'm sorry you had to suffer so much longer.
Read Sanderson's own books though. They're pretty good, IMO
Same man. I generally thought the first book was entertaining but it was not long into book two that I was permanently annoyed and just couldn't get even a quarter into book 3.
I think I made it to book 6 and just stopped. I was utterly bored by that point.
Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell. After that book I gave myself permission to DNF though, so it was a maturing experience for me. I mostly wanted to know what happened to Stephen and that's what drove me, along with the "No mere book shall defeat me" attitude.
I really enjoyed all of the Fae short stories actually. I'm not really a horror fan, but I found Fae, and mortals interaction with it, particularly gripping and memorable. I never put the book down when I was in Fae, trapping me along with the victims, perhaps that's why I wanted Stephen to just be ok.
It was just everything else in the book I couldn't enjoy. The titular characters I found uninteresting. The setting, fae excluded, I was apathetic about. The structure, the footnotes, dear god the footnotes.
But the Fae stuff? I'll take 10 more of them in an anthology please.
I agree with you about Strange and Norrell. The pacing was poor and it was over-long.
But!
Susanna Clarke's next book, Piranesi, is actually really good. Like, really, incredibly good. I recommend it to everyone and so far no one has said anything but positive things about it. I rarely re-read books but this is one that I've come back to.
As it happens, I read Piranesi first, so I found JS&MN a bit disappointing, but I'm glad I read them that way around otherwise I might have skipped Piranesi, and that would have been a mistake!
I really liked Piranesi!
Blasphemy but you can always Google if you just wanna know one thing but can't finish. I did to the WoT and don't regret it.
I could have but for the other two reasons I wrote about. Namely, I wasn't mature enough to DNF, and the Fae stories are really good.
I suppose in the end it did one better by causing me to grow as a person. Sure, books have taught me a bunch of stuff but not many I can describe as being "the" reason I "grew".
Today I wouldn't have read enough of JS&MrN to even hear about Stephen, let alone grow to care about him.
I'm sure I'm missing out on a great number of good books, great books even, possibly even formative books, by how willing I am to DNF. But, there's so many good books out there that my calendar always seems to be full anyway.
But the Fae stuff? I'll take 10 more of them in an anthology please.
Have you heard of "the thinking woman's guide to real magic"? I thought it was rad.
The Bible was a difficult read for me. I pushed through just because I wanted to have at least read it when using it's words to contradict Supply-Side Christians.
Fucking “IT” by Stephen King. That book started so good, but it’s about 400 pages longer than it needed to be and the child orgy at the end really didn’t help me cross the finish line. That book became a chore to get through.
Fahrenheit 451 but I wanted to put it down because of the bad translation. I switched to reading it in English and everything went smoothly after that.
Les Misérables. I love Hugo's way of writing, and his descriptions of Jean grappling with his conflicting feelings or breaking down when he was finally shown love were breath taking. There were certain parts of the book in which I couldn't put it down. But the chapters that described the battle of Waterloo and the layout of the Paris sewer system bored me to tears.
Malazan: Book of the Fallen.
Having no idea what's going on and not really even being able to comprehend what I'm reading should not be a 'feature' of a fiction book.
I know exactly what you mean. It suffers from the very worst fantasy tropes of meaningless words. I did not finish.
The Count of Monte Cristo. I did like it, but I expect the abridged version would have been better for me. There were parts that were a struggle to get through. It just seems like the unabridged version is more recommended, so I felt compelled to get through it
There's a reason behind it. When it was first published, it was serialised, so Dumas had an incentive to drag it along, also it romanticizes travels around Europe because it was fancy at the time.
The plot behind it is still one of the most compelling I have ever read and a revenge story that few modern works of art can match.
Moby dick ( complete unabridged edition).
The parts where they go into detail about whale hunting was like reading a manual, I did not know there where other editions and just got the frost one I saw. Maybe it was my part for not investigating before.
Plato, Complete Works.
Now, it was required for a class, so there were external factors to why I finished it. However, it's the only book I've ever wanted to burn and bring forced to read it likely exacerbated that feeling. I haven't yet, but one of these years, it's going to be ash.
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack was really bad. It was meant to be 'experimental' but it was literally just a very boring story with, get this, no punctuation (an 'experiment' first conducted about a hundred years ago). There were literally pages and pages where the narrator complained about a building with poorly poured concrete foundations at one point (yes, really). It was quite short, so I got through it, but it was just totally pointless!
Shoshana Zuboff's "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" - way too narcisstic for my liking.
I agree though I did finish by double speeding the audiobook. The ideas/themes discussed were interesting and important but it was extremely melodramatic.
Gunslinger, first part of The Dark Tower series - The style just wasn't for me. I finished the series though, 100% best series I'll ever read.
Interesting that one actually grabbed me pretty quick
Oh I bailed on Gunslinger because I was simply not interested in whatever it was trying to do. Maybe I should go back to it.
It’s a marmite book..
This is how you lose the time war. Not my style of book, was a slog to get through but its so short I wanted to finish it.
I pushed through Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, and I honestly regret it.
I can't find any redeeming qualities in it looking back, just awful.
Nueromancer. I struggled with grasping some of the descriptions of the cyberworld and virtual personas the characters inhabited as hackers. It's a short read but a chore at times.
Catch-22. The first five chapters or so are disconnected and confusing, a lot of people never finish the book because of it. I nearly didn't but for some reason slogged through and was greatly rewarded.
Right after you have a headache and want to give up, the pieces start coming together. It's like starting to see through the fog of war. And then magic happens, and you see the true genius of the book.
Xenocide by orson scott card. I thought enders game was neat enough, but I fricken loved speaker for the dead. Then the story continued, 3rd book was eh, 3/4 out of 10. But only if the conclusion made good. It did not. I dont know how speaker for the dead was so great, and the rest felt amateurish rushed and retreated.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. The speech patterns the characters used almost made me DNF. I pushed through to the 2/3rds point before it really started to hook me. It now stands in my top 10 of all time books
@Coherence @CurlyWurlies4All I remember dropping stranger in a strange land because of how the journalist spoke. If it was really worth making it through, maybe it's time I give Heinlein another shot. It's been like 10 years since I tried and maybe I have the patience for it now.
I didn’t care much for Stranger in a Strange Land. Not to spoil too much but felt it had a heavy handed messiah bent to it, just not my cup of tea. I did finish reading it, as it seemed a creation of it’s time and I like to experience time capsules through books. Almost prescient of later history of the decade.
I'm attempting a run of the wheel of time at the moment and it's just so long winded. I'm taking a break with other books for now.
Boys from Biloxi by John Grisham.
I found the first part (the boys) very boring, and unnecessarily detailed. I could have skipped it without consequence. But the rest of the book was pretty good and enjoyable.
