Which books don't do it for you?

The Hunger Games trilogy

I bought a pirate DVD of the first movie and it wasn't as bad as I expected so I started reading the trilogy. I think the movie was better than the book. The second book was worse. I haven't seen the second movie but they gave it the length that Ender's Game needed.

So maybe I'll watch the movies when they come on cable.

psik
 
j. d. worthington said:
I still like the old Conan stories but I figure it is nostalgia again because I read them so young.
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I'm not at all sure about that. While there are numerous faults with them, and they are definitely uneven, Howard was a master at building a world in a very few sentences, good pacing, and not a few passages of simply beautiful, poetic prose and imagery. Not high literature, but by and large they remain quite readable.

Never could get into Panshin's Rite of Passage -- I made it through, but gritting my teeth most of the way.
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I am not sure. When I read criticisms of works by other readers I get the impression that I care more about the story and less about the writing than many other readers. Like in discussions of Panshin's Rite of Passage I see almost no discussion of who has the right to the ownership of knowledge which was central to the workings of the entire story. I do not understand why nearly every country does not have a National Recommended Reading List. It is like the schools are designed more to control the distribution of knowledge than make it easy for everyone to obtain.

psik
 
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Oh, I'm so glad stumbled across this thread - it's really interesting to read about what others read and rate.

I've always loved The Hobbit, LotR. Others I've read and loved - that I'd recommend without question:

Mervyn Peake's Gormneghast trilogy
Michael Moorcock - Behold The Man; and The Golden Barge
Robert Holdstock - Mythago Wood; also The Fetch
Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Tad Williams - The War of the Flowers
Elizabeth Kostova - The Historian
...most recently - The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern; I absolutely love this book...totally absorbing; beautiful.
 
I adored the Hobbit and then hated Lord of the Rings!
Perhaps I just not cultured enough:D
 
I'm determined to finish some hard sf, so I bought both Peter F Hamilton's Pandora's Star and Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space as audiobooks.

I'm a few hours into both as I lost interest in Revelation Space, then swapped to Pandora's Star. In neither book have I found a protagonist or emotional theme with which I can identify. Just as I become interested in a protagonist or subplot, the plot and protagonists shift.

I find the science in both stories irritatingly under-explored, in terms both of what and why, and of its social implications. It seems more like "I'll see you one wormhole and raise you a neural disruptor" than genuine interest in the potential of science.

To be fair, Pandora's Star may have lost some magic with the passage of time. Every time a protagonist consults his e-butler, I'm reminded of those people who are constantly checking their cellphones.
 
Katharine Kerr's Deverry novels. I picked one up and for the life of me I could not get into it. It has everything a good fantasy novel should have: magic, warriors and mages, a developed world, and a somewhat formed social messege. However, the world is too developed... any book where I have to keep checking back to read a full page of an explanation on what a single word means is bad in my opinion. She relies too heavily on the intricacy of her created world to tell the story, rather than the story and the characters. She mixes way too many elements in...what got me was how mages could 'activate chakric centres' to peer into the persons past life. I also felt she took too much for granted...not really explaining or showing us why some things were important. I get that in a series, you rely on the fact that people read your prior books...but the way she wrote it was just too much.
 
Oops...I forgot to include any of those I've tried/failed to get engaged with:


Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow - repeated attempts to read this but have always faltered around 150pages in!


Game of Thrones - Season 1-3 box-set dvd is still sitting unlooked at; not bought the book(s); I just can't seem to get excited at the prospect... (!?)
 
I've never seen GoT either. I don't have the channel and I've lost interest in the series as a whole. I have Dances with Dragons still unread. Same goes for the last three books of the Wheel of Time.
 
Vince, the wheel of time really lags int he middle but the ending books pick up the pace a lot. I really recommend maybe reading some plot summaries and diving back in. Aren't you curious how it all ends?! Us readers spent years on those books :D
 
barrett1987 said:
Vince, the wheel of time really lags int he middle but the ending books pick up the pace a lot. I really recommend maybe reading some plot summaries and diving back in. Aren't you curious how it all ends?! Us readers spent years on those books :D
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I know. I'll get to them eventually, but for now my interest is at a low ebb.
 
Here is my list of books that didn't do it for me:

Soldier Son series by Robin Hobb. The opening book was slow and everything went downhill from there. To be fair it might of seemed worse to me since i enjoyed her first three trilogies so much.

Malazan Books of the Fallen were way too long with so little payoff for me. I also couldn't find a character than I really cared about. Gardens of the Moon might be the worst book I ever read.

Deed of Paksenarrion by Moon. This is different than my other books listed here in that I thought the writing was pretty good but the story was so slow I just couldn't wait for it to end.

Memory Sorrow and Thorn by Williams started well for me but couldn't keep my interest.
 
Mr Fraaz said:
I struggled for 4-5 months with Elric: The Fortress of the Pearl by Moorcock. I really wanted to like it. Michael Whelan's Elric art made such an impression on me when I was a kid, but I never got around to reading the books back then.

This autumn I decided to do it, but found that I had to force myself through it. There was too much wandering around in dream realms where anything could happen and you just had to accept it happened, because it was dreams and thus incoherent and weird. Way too abstract for my taste.

I'm still going to try Stormbringer! but if that is the same I'll give up. Or try the graphic novels, perhaps.
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Interesting. I read everything I could find by Moorcock as a teenager in the late 70s and early 80s, usually in the Mayflower editions. Lots of it was easy to pick up for pennies in second hand bookshops. I still have dozens of these on my shelves.
I started with the novellas Elric of Melnibone and The Knight of the Swords, and was sort of inspired to read the books by a popular Rodney Matthews poster of Tanelorn (I wonder how many teenage bedrooms of the time were decorated with this and the Jimmy Cauty Lord of the Rings poster?):

tanelorn.jpg


Needless to say the books were nothing like the poster. However I found them engaging and coherent, with an interesting line in anti-heroism and perversity.
Some of Moorcock's stuff is difficult (especially the latter Cornelius books) but most of the early Eternal Champion stories have a fairly straightforward narrative and easy prose.
With respect to the Elric stories: Stormbringer is quite odd, so avoid if you dont want particularly dreamy stuff. A lot of the old Mayflower editions were collections of Elric short stories, which were OK in themselves, but repetitive if read in one go.
 
I couldn't get through the following books:

Gormenghast trilogy - Mervyn Peake
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Perdido Street Station and Embassy Town - China Mieville
The "Matched" trilogy - Ally Condie

I really wanted to but I just couldn't. I found them all really tedious.

I also admit that I skipped all the song bits in LOTR...
 
The_Bluestocking said:
I really wanted to but I just couldn't. I found them all really tedious.

I also admit that I skipped all the song bits in LOTR...
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Has anyone ever done a psychoanalysis of reading and readers.

I would think that the various aspects of books and personalities of readers could be analysed to determine how to better match books to readers.

Would publishers want that? The sale of a book is still a sale if the book is never finished. But if we could match books better would that bring in more readers?

psik
 
Perdido Street's on my list too. I didn't get as far as 50 pages in. Maybe 5. Too clever for me.

I can't read GRRM. I looked forward to them for ages. I tried, and tried again. As I've said elsewhere, all the intestines put me off. There are some similar stories around, and I can normally tell by the first battle scene if I'm going to be reading on. Any book that kills someone in the first couple of pages is generally not a book I'm going to enjoy.

Thomas Hardy. Oh God.

Apart from that I can't think of anything much. I loved Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, The Lord of the Rings (I learned all the songs off by heart... oh dear), American Gods, Harry Potter, sparkly vampires, Anne Rice (the older ones, anyway -- haven't read her for a while); loved Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye etc etc etc.

I had to abandon Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman because it scared me so badly. Does that count?

Incredibly unfairly, anything based on mythical beasts like dragons or griffins has to work much harder to get me interested (which is stupid because The Dark Lord of Derkholm and Seraphina are two of the best books I've read and they contain griffins and dragons so...).
 
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