Viewing 40 posts - 121 through 160 (of 201 total)
  • Your top 3 ‘WTF was that rubbish’ books ever
  • 13thfloormonk
    Full Member

    the characters just miraculously find what they need exactly when they need it. Oh we’re starving and there’s no hope of finding food, oh, here’s some. It lost all sense of jeopardy, which is kind of important.

    I liked this – this describes my frustration with ‘Stardust’ by Neil Gaiman, it just seemed a bit soft and fluffy and dreamlike and easy. But then I remembered my dad had read it and loved it whilst high on morphine and slowly dying of cancer, so I could see the merit of a book that was perhaps without jeopardy… Otherwise known as escapism which is justification enough for most trashy novels I reckon (Andy McNab probably included, not sure I’ve actually read any of his).

    Same reason I will re-re-re-read virtually any of the first 15 of the Discworld Novels, they’re popcorn, like re-watching Bojack Horseman endlessly. Some nights I’ll want intellectual and literary stimulation so will pick up Danubia by Simon Winder, other nights I just need to rest my eyes on something familiar, colourful and funny e.g. Discworld.

    nickc
    Full Member

    …And TBH, some ‘classics’ are properly rubbish. Many many were reviewed and promoted by friends of the authors or reflect the zeigiest of the time, and these days are pretty much unreadable. Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” falls into that category, as does fashionable (at the time)  stuff like “On the Road” To us it feels as clunky as your dad saying “Cool” in an un-ironic way…Plus for that book in particular; the main character is a total shit to everyone he meets, and as that’s Jack himself…you do start to form an impression of the man…

    Rich_s
    Full Member

    Most stephen king stuff, it’s like he gets to the end and thinks how am i going to finish this,

    Funnily enough, the book of his I enjoyed most (read it in a day) was Green Mile.
    It was written as a serialised novel, so every 1/4 ish of the book there’s a climax… so it keeps you hooked. Maybe I should read more of his other stuff.

    Fresh Goods Friday 696: The Middling Edition

    Fresh Goods Friday 696: The Middlin...
    Latest Singletrack Videos
    johndoh
    Free Member

    Maybe I should read more of his other stuff.

    I used to read loads of his stuff as a teenager and there was some pretty gripping stuff but his later work really does get a bit samey.

    nickc
    Full Member

    Most stephen king stuff, it’s like he gets to the end and thinks how am i going to finish this,

    See “It”…so wait, this is an multidimensional being and it’s deadly foe is a (world creating) Turtle from an alternative universe?…OK Stephen

    spursn17
    Free Member

    Catch 22 for me also, but I was about 15 so probably worth another shot.

    I read Catch 22 in my teens and thought it was utter bilge, reread it again in my late 40’s and thought it was really good.

    Jodeph Heller served in a B25 squadron in Italy in WWII, and started writing the book around 10 years later. He was probably writing from the point of view of someone that had had experiences that had aged him prematurely. I think that is when you have to read it, when you’re older and more jaded and cynical.

    I thought the film was rubbish, and still do. The TV series from 2019 was a different matter though as that was very good, it caught the spirit (and ridiculousness) of the book brillliantly!

    13thfloormonk
    Full Member

    He was probably writing from the point of view of someone that had had experiences that had aged him prematurely. I think that is when you have to read it, when you’re older and more jaded and cynical.

    Yep, when you work in construction and have to sit through meetings reviewing trackers of reviews of trackers of reviews, your thoughts immediately turn to Catch 22!

    The TV series from 2019 was a different matter though as that was very good, it caught the spirit (and ridiculousness) of the book brillliantly!

    I need to binge watch this some weekend, loved the first episode but am such a lazy TV watcher I never got round to watching any more.

    funkmasterp
    Full Member

    Stephen King is great at writing characters I think, but falls down on plot two thirds of the way through 90% of his books. Never understood why he’s classed as the king of horror either. I’m a big fan and most of his books aren’t remotely scary.

    When it comes to people not liking ‘The classics’ I think it comes down to a lot of them being of the time and written in a way that just doesn’t work for a lot of people now. I downloaded loads of them for free when I first got a Kindle. Only managed to finish Treasure Island and Heart of Darkness. Others such as Frankenstein, Sleepy Hollow, Grapes of Wrath etc were just hard work and/or extremely boring to read.

    I’m also not a fan of Pratchett, Tom Holt or Catch 22. Humour is difficult to hit in a novel and I just don’t find any of them remotely funny. I do love Jasper Fforde though. Mainly because he writes a bloody good story that happens to have some humour. Where’s the sequel to Shades of Grey Jasper?

    reggiegasket
    Free Member

    Wuthering Heights is the best bad book for me. I tried twice and didn’t get past page 30. Indulgent, wordy drivel.

    Rona
    Full Member

    Labyrinth by Kate Mosse

    I used to browse the local charity shops for reading material, and the common theme was that every one of them had at least one copy of this. 🙂

    Thanks martinhutch. Probably quite telling. 🙂

    Garry_Lager
    Full Member

    Some of the classics are hard work for sure – don’t know how widely read Henry James is these days but I found his novel The Ambassadors absolutely brutal. Each page felt like a heavy bench press. Very straightforwardly written as well but just a suffocating style – wouldn’t call it rubbish, I’m sure there’s a great inner book there, I’m just not interested in finding it.

    I thought Nabakov’s Pale Fire was rubbish. An early example of metafiction, it’s probably one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, by an acknowledged master, so it’s just barely possible I might be missing the point with it. But I thought it read like a giant nerd gotcha joke – ball-achingly smug and self-satisfied. To give a sense of this people argue over whether the central poem is either brilliant in its own right (it’s obviously not), shite (it is), or deliberately shite as a key to unlocking the book’s mysteries.

    jimw
    Free Member

    I thought the film was rubbish, and still do.

    I’d agree, apart from the mass B25 take-off scene. That’s wonderful, but only about two minutes of the whole two hours.

    richmtb
    Full Member

    Stephen King’s problem is that most of his books go:

    Beginning
    _
    _
    _
    Middle
    _
    _
    _
    _
    _
    _
    _
    _
    _
    _
    _
    _
    End
    _

    This only gets worse as his books get longer, he just pads out the middle even more.

    nickc
    Full Member

    I might be missing the point with it.

    theres so many ways of reading it (and the literary arguments have apparently split life-long friendships). I think you have to understand Nabakov’s own life to “get” it ( the exile, the mistaken murder and so on)… I can’t decide if it’s genius or like you, I’ve been had…

    sirromj
    Full Member

    What about Italio Calvino? Anyone think any of his books where shite? (I didn’t I enjoyed Numbers in the Dark).

    johndoh
    Free Member

    Grapes of Wrath etc were just hard work and/or extremely boring to read.

    :-O

    I LOVED that book – and it has the most perfect last page ever written.

    finbar
    Free Member

    Catch 22 and Heart of Darkness are good calls. Anything by Graham Greene, Henry James and John Le Carre here.

    moonsaballoon
    Full Member

    I’ve found my tolerance for sticking with books has diminished advice got older . When I was 20ish I used to go into fopp records in Glasgow and you’d be able to get bukowski and Douglas Coupland  and books like that for a couple of quid each and I’d read them and stick with them and force myself to finish , to be fair I really liked some of the Bukowski stuff . Now if something doesn’t grab me pretty quickly I don’t want to waste my time .

    <span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>Anything by Graham Greene, Henry James and John Le Carre here.</span>

    I started reading John le carre stuff after watching the film of tinker tailor soldier spy and got really into it , I love all the George smiley books .

    avdave2
    Full Member

    I LOVED that book – and it has the most perfect last page ever written

    I first read it nearly 35 years ago and it’s not something I’ll ever forget. I was on the number 73 bus just coming up to Oxford Circus and I remember thinking I want to get up and read this page to everyone on the bus. It was 30 years before I re-read the book, I was always fearful that it wouldn’t have been the masterpiece I remembered, I couldn’t have been more wrong, it was every bit as moving and powerful as I remembered and also just as relevant.

    johndoh
    Free Member

    ^ Thanks for that – I recently looked for my copy so I could re-read it (like yourself I read it some time ago and haven’t read it since) however I couldn’t find it so I will have to buy myself a new copy I think.

    thols2
    Full Member

    DavidB
    Free Member

    Page 4 and no mention of Sven Hassel? I somehow read several of these war books as a teenager. The worst pulp fiction ever.

    chamley
    Free Member

    I was given Along Came a Spider by James Patterson by a relative and at the time knew nothing about Patterson. After about 30 pages I got very bummed out that so many people enjoy this cliched garbage, god almighty it was awful! The best way I could describe it was if a teenager had written a shoddy fan fiction about a bad 90s Hollywood blockbuster.

    olddog
    Full Member

    Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace. Pretentious and ridiculously long.

    Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon. Long and ridiculously pretentious

    white101
    Full Member

    When we emptied the house of the mil after her death she had a few James Patterson books. I picked one up and gave it a try, what struck me that this book wasn’t his first novel and he wasn’t some teenager knocking out an essay for their mock GCSE English exam. He was a many times published author with about 100 books to his name and a ‘reputation’ as a brilliant exciting author (at least to the people who wrote his blurbs for him on the back cover)

    Every word was utterly contrived and cliche ridden bollox. Painfull, I lasted about 30pages and could take no more.

    My mother once gave me a book by Harlan Corben (sp) awful nonsense, just awful.

    twinw4ll
    Free Member

    You’re all lucky to be able to read, i had a very poor upbringing and never had the opportunity to learn, oh to one day read a book, any book.

    maccruiskeen
    Full Member

    Off topic slightly – has anyone ever taken a book back to the shop because it was bad? 🙂

    Non Fiction rather than non fiction…. Many moons ago I decide to teach myself a bit of basic web design and bought a book that promised to teach you how to use Dreamweaver in a week. Three weeks later I took it back to Borders and said that basically, it was faulty – it hadn’t taught me how to use the program at all, let alone in a week. So they gave me my money back. They said they’d regularly deal with returns for manufacturing faults  – miss-printing, missing pages and so on but they’d never had a book return because the content didn’t work.

    (it was a genuine issue of cover miss-selling the contents – it claimed to cover both PC and Mac versions of the software but in fact only covered Mac specific elements about 10% of the time and the two versions had different menus and GUIs)

    thols2
    Full Member

    dannyh
    Free Member

    I’m an utter philistine when it comes to supposed great books.

    My top three ‘this is crap, I thought it was supposed to be amazing’ books are:

    Catch-22
    One Hundred Years of Solitude
    Notes from a Small Island

    I can’t get into any of them and have tried several times.

    Also A Brief History of Time – but that is because my brain can’t cope with it.

    zippykona
    Full Member

    Tessaract by that bloke who did The Beach. No story whatsoever.
    Then some book by an American sniper who was the last man standing mainly because he was protected by god and George W bush.

    RustySpanner
    Full Member

    Stephen King is great at writing characters I think, but falls down on plot two thirds of the way through 90% of his books. Never understood why he’s classed as the king of horror either. I’m a big fan and most of his books aren’t remotely scary.

    As above, his characters are wonderful.
    I enjoyed pretty much everything up to IT, and disliked pretty much everything that came after.

    And not scary?
    Please, Pet Cemetery is utterly terrifying on the subject of grief and loss, as is The Shining on alcoholism and dysfunctional relationships.

    Timing is everything.
    Steinbeck is wasted on children, they don’t have the life experience to relate to it.
    And Catcher in the Rye is wasted on adults, because they do.

    doris5000
    Full Member

    Catch-22
    One Hundred Years of Solitude
    Notes from a Small Island

    I loved all of those! And a lot of others in this thread…

    Two books that I tried to read twice and gave up twice:

    Midnight’s Children (felt like it was desperately trying to be Great Literature)
    Brideshead Revisited (I hear enough about the aloof champagne-quaffing aristocracy in the news, I don’t want to read about them for pleasure too)

    And Catcher in the Rye is wasted on adults, because they do.

    Ha, true. I absolutely loved that as a self absorbed 16 year old with the weight of the world on my shoulders. I imagine I would hate it beyond words now at 41!

    mrmonkfinger
    Free Member

    LOTR, half a million words of overblown waffle. I couldn’t stand it, never got past the first half the first book. Conversely, I quite liked the Hobbit.

    People rail about the quality of writing by Rowling, but on the whole the Potter series is better, more to the point and hits the right notes for target audience at chez monkfinger, and yes, agreed, picks up greatly after the first two books. On a similar fantasy note, Le Guin is excellent.

    Stephen King is awful. A one page summary of each book is more entertaining. And the plots all go wrong, as has been noted. When he actually stuck to “short” stories he was good.

    Ayn Rand, just no.
    Dickens, no.

    I like Rushdies books in general.

    RustySpanner
    Full Member

    People rail about the quality of writing by Rowling,

    Her writing is fine.
    Her editor(s) lost their nerve as she became more successful.

    DrJ
    Full Member

    Anything by Shakespeare. It’s just not realistic. When was the last time you spoke in iambic pentameter, innit?

    Chaucer. Some dirty bits but the guy can’t even spell. Did he even get an English O level?

    Thomas Hardy. Even got the title wrong. Far From The Madding Crowd? LMAO It’s “maddening”, mate!!

    Spin
    Free Member

    Her writing is fine.

    That’s about the best you can say for the writing. They’re decent stories with some good themes but the writing is nothing special and decidedly clunky in parts. That’s not a criticism, I still like them, just an observation.

    Stevet1
    Free Member

    Moby Dick is excellent, although granted there are a few bits that are quite difficult to get through (mainly the “this is how a whale is chopped up bits” but I even found that interesting). My favourite quote:
    “there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.”

    nickc
    Full Member

    And Catcher in the Rye is wasted on adults, because they do.

    Nah, even at 16,  I thought Holden was an entitled prick.

    nicko74
    Full Member

    I am Pilgrim – Terry Hayes. Just utter dross, basically Dan Brown with a US military obsession. Bleurgh.
    Vanity Fair – found it in a free book box and it just drags.

    dickyhepburn
    Free Member

    More votes for Zen, Bourne, Hardy. Tolkien I did because I felt I had to and won’t do again, didn’t read any of his appendices (WTF)

Viewing 40 posts - 121 through 160 (of 201 total)

The topic ‘Your top 3 ‘WTF was that rubbish’ books ever’ is closed to new replies.