Well it’s a series, but Three body problem. It should have been right up my alley, but I got so tired of every decision by every character being stupid that I couldn’t be bothered to read the last fifty pages of the last book.
Even if I charitably assumed the point of the book was to show that people are weak and stupid, the series was such a ham-handed strawman as to undercut its own commentary. And even worse, it had just enough interesting ideas to lead me to believe it was going somewhere worthwhile, but it never did.
It’s been years and I’m still pissed off that I wasted a week on it.
It’s not just that characters make stupid decisions, the same characters keep making the same mistakes and nobody ever learns from those mistakes or grows as a character. It’s so extremely frustrating.
Agreed- the series is massively overrated
I enjoyed those, but you’re not wrong. The author cited Foundation as his inspiration for the books, and it suffers from all the same problems. Interesting concepts told with cardboard cutout ridiculous one dimensional characters.
Well, two dimensional at the end
Heyo!
Same. Gave up after trying for a year and a half. Made it through half the series.
Not read the book, but isn’t it meant to be quite dramatically different in some aspects? I’m sure I heard that all those annoying young adults characters were invented for the show? Someone who knows can correct me on that.
Agreed though that the show was a pile of crap. I enjoyed the first couple and quite enjoyed the last in the season, but the in between was pretty awful.
I couldn’t tell you, TBH. I have only read the series of books.
Oh, sorry, I totally misread your post I thought you had seen the show but not read the books. My bad!
Yeah, I recommend people don’t read that book, but do read the one chapter about the aliens, what is it, second to the last chapter of the book? That chapter is some of the best sci Fi I’ve ever encountered, the rest of the book… you can skip it.
Can you name the chapter specifically? I guess it will spoil a lot of the first book no?
It looks like that was chapter 33, Trisolaris: Sophon
If you want to jump in and read that chapter, all you need to know is this:
!the aliens are on a planet in the alpha centuri/proxima centuri trinary star system, the closest stars to the sun. Also, apparently the three suns means it sucks there and they’re desperately looking for a new star system.!<
Thank you, I’ll read that chapter!
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I’m surprised you got tired of the stupid decisions if I’m honest.
I wasn’t aware the characters were making any.
I can’t remember details since it was in HS, but reading The Catcher in the Rye was a painfully slow and boring process. I didn’t get the story, the meaning, the struggle. It was a guy complaining about everything and being miserable and then I had to write a book report about it. Icky, icky, gross.
Maybe if I read it now it’ll be different but I dun wanna!
I enjoy reading unreliable narrators, and so while you’re totally correct. Holden is nothing more than an angsty privileged teenager who is angry at the world. That’s what made the book fun for me, at a certain point his self serving lies and his cringe attempts to act like an adult are just funny.
I’ve found it’s a good litnus test for people, just like Fight Club or Rick and Morty. You’re absolutely allowed to like these pieces, but if you think those charcters are admiral than it’s a super duper red flag.
Holden is nothing more than an angsty privileged teenager who is angry at the world
While that is true, you do have to consider that he is
Tap for spoiler
still devastated from his brother Allie dying.
Interesting. Loved that book!
I don’t remember what book it was but I walked into a metal pole reading it. I wasn’t seriously injured or anything but it was pretty embarrassing.
I am more of a naturalist and walked into a tree
Pride and Prejudice was the most unrelatable book I was forced to read in school. A rich, noble, Victorian family whose main problems are, while they are rich and noble, they are not as rich and noble as they’d like to be. They have no real skills or assets, so rather than pursue trade or business ventures, they put all their eggs in the basket of their daughters being able to swoon and marry the bachelors of richer, nobler, families.
As someone who does not live in Victorian England, grew up poor, and is generally bored when shallow romance is the main theme, that book was hell. It’s often praised for showing the differences between classes in that period, which makes zero sense to me because the only classes it compares are the Upper Class and the slightly less rich Upper Class. It would be like a modern book talking about the “struggles” of a family that only has a net worth of $100 million and how hard they have it compared to billionaire families. Boo-fucking-hoo.
I genuinely do not understand how that book is a classic. It’s basically Keeping Up with the Kardashians in Victorian times. It’s a trash story with trash characters and trash themes. It is the first, and only, book I felt compelled to burn once I was done with. I wouldn’t even wipe my ass with it.
It’s also not written ironically. It was genuinely written as the characters actually suffering due to their lack of obscene amounts of money.
I’ve gone back and forth on my opinion of pride and prejudice over the years, even held this opinion at one point. Like why the hell should I care about rich women who want to marry rich men?
Except taken in context, the book has a different meaning. Before Pride and Prejudice, there weren’t many stories about women in that time period. Since women in that class couldn’t really own property or run businesses, their lives depended on their family and ability to find a husband. Maybe what they experienced was banal by our standards, but it was life and death for some people, or the difference between a pleasant life and one of suffering. The stakes were high for something we treat as optional these days. It’s less or a morals story and more of an insight into social politics for women of the time, something that wasn’t widely written about until the book came out.
Is it good? That’s up to the reader. It’s unique and insightful literature, though.
I’ve really wanted to get into Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and bought the first few books. I’ve never managed to make it through the first one, The Gunslinger, even though I’ve given it probably five or six attempts. I always make it to the same part in the book where Roland and the kid are using the hand-cart through the tunnels, and it just takes so. fucking. long. to get anywhere and for anything to happen, and my mind starts drifting as I’m reading and then I start missing things and have to go back… That section of the book is so frustratingly boring that I can’t make it through.
I honestly despise King’s longer novels. The Dark Tower series is the epitome of his inability to stay focused and well paced.
It’s like he set a goal of some ridiculous book length, thought he needed a bunch of padding to get there, hit the mark and abruptly ends it.
Give me Salem’s Lot, Carrie, Pet Semetary, etc all day but I can’t with Dark Tower.
The Dark Tower series is the epitome of his inability to stay focused and well paced
Probably in part because of the time span over which it was written.
Which is weird because the first book is just a collection of short stories, it’s not even a single narrative and IIRC is under 300 pages?
(checks notes)
216 pages. 224 with the Afterword.
The entire first half of Salem’s Lot is 95% just him going on random tangents about various townsfolk and it’s excellent.
I heard from quinn’s ideas is you have to be a pretty big reader of king’s other works in order to read the dark tower.
That’s pretty funny to me. I read the start of a King novel when I was probably too young for it (pretty sure it was It?), and just got bored with it. Never tried reading another for years. A decade or two later I tried the Dark Tower series and ended up binge-reading the first 5 books.
I really love those books, although I absolutely see their flaws and understand why people wouldn’t like them.
Either way, I definitely don’t think you need to be a Stephen King fan to enjoy them. I mean, I’m certainly not and I certainly did. Still haven’t read any of his other works…
Man, that’s one of the most intense parts of that book too! “Go then, there are other worlds than these…”
Took me about 3 attempts to finish the first book. Skip it if you can’t finish it, that series is by far the best series I’ve ever read and nothing will top it
Try listening to it as an audio book. It’s really great if someone else pushes you through the dry parts.
Be warned. There’s some real…racist choices made in the audiobook reading.
Are you referring to how he reads Odetta/Detta’s voices?
Definitely. I know it’s kinda written that way but I was not ready for that old man to fully lean into it. I was perplexed and wanted to turn it off.
I listened through that over a decade ago and that’s still what I remember most from that audiobook.
I agree that it’s uncomfortable, but I do think it was true to how it was written. I’m not sure I’d call it racist in the overt sense of the word, but as I white person, I’m not sure I’m qualified to make that judgement.
Some people just think everything is racist.
I’ve only attempted it once and can’t remember much of it except for those fucking tunnels being the reason I gave up also
I hated book 7, ruined the whole series
When I finished reading that I audibly laughed and said “You stupid son of a bitch.” and I couldn’t tell if I was talking to myself or directing that at Steve.
I did really enjoy the series but I don’t think I’m going to be reading it again.
I hated book 7. Ruined the whole series for me. I read the last 3 books (excluding Wind through the Keyhole, I’m done) when they came out, book 6 was just a setup/tease for book 7 and I was so excited for it. But it was so dumb and disappointing. I’ve talked to people who liked the ending and I just don’t get it. 6 books building up the existential evil that lived at the center of all existence, and when he gets to the tower to face the evil it’s just an old guy on a balcony throwing Harry Potter hand grenades. You have to suspend so much disbelief to get there, trudge through thousands of pages, and it’s just a sad, pathetic, uninspired, lazy ending.
6 books building up the existential evil that lived at the center of all existence, and when he gets to the tower to face the evil it’s just an old guy on a balcony throwing Harry Potter hand grenades.
Funny, I absolutely loved this. The banality of evil. And good, too. Everything. The world is falling apart. Even the great evil is not, in the end, that great. Two old (REALLY old) men at the ragged ends of their lives trying to do this one last thing.
through thousands of pages, and it’s just a sad, pathetic, uninspired, lazy ending.
I mean, it does literally warn you to stop reading when the characters other than Roland get their happy ending, so if you kept going that’s on you… /s
Also, it’s thematic to the story at hand. It also ends hopefully, as Roland has the horn he did not have the first time through, which is implied to be incredibly important to his quest going well. We see the cycle right before victory, when he gets everyone else their happy endings and redeems his sins enough to earn the horn and, on the next cycle, likely end his quest. Which can be read as very hopeful, but your take isn’t invalid or anything
Its been a long time, like I said I read it right when it came out. I’m glad people enjoyed it! It was quite an investment, and I loved most of the books leading up, even the Wizard and the Glass. You all make some good points but it just didn’t hit me that way and I’m not liable to go back. I hardly read any fiction anymore, except the occasional classic, Philip K Dick, or whenever Joe Abercrombie comes out with a new book I’ll usually pick it up.
We read Macbeth in high school, but they dragged it out over a whole year. It was so painful!
LOL. I had read it before we were taught it in school.
One of the three spirits is described as “An armed head” and the teacher was like “Yeah, nobody really knows what that description means, is a head in a helmet or what it’s supposed to be…”
So I raised my hand… “I hope I’m not giving away the ending or anything, but Macbeth is beheaded at the end… it’s an arm holding up a severed head. Each spirit is foreshadowing what’s going to happen. Armed head, bloody child, king holding a tree.”
At my high school we had a teacher who had an advanced degree in Shakespeare studies, and she would teach a different play every quarter. They were great classes, but a single quarter was plenty of time for a very comprehensive look at each play. I can’t imagine stretching it out over an entire year and have it be anything but absolutely tedious.
Theatre should be seen instead of (or at least as well as) read IMO. I bet if you’d been taken to see a decent production first you’d have got a lot more out of reading it later.
Yeah absolutely.
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That sucks. Macbeth rules so hard. We did it over a couple weeks in school and it was awesome.
The Stone Angel.
It’s a miserable story about a dying old woman regretting all her life choices. It’s also required reading in Canadian high schools because the author is Canadian.
And then, on top of all that, my teacher absolutely insisted that its only major theme was “hope” and docked marks for having any other interpretation.
Hagar was an OG, she would have argued with your teacher in class. The only major theme is ‘I do what I want’.
Atlas Shrugged.
There are very few books that have left me with a “This is the face of evil” impression. I tried to give it a fair shake, but this one did, alongside the fact that it devolves into stimulant-addled ranting.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not inherently opposed to stimulant-addled ranting - I like On the Road, for instance - but it just left an awful taste in my mouth.
On the other hand, I enjoyed the Fountainhead, but I was young, usually stoned, and took away an ‘integrity of artistic vision’ interpretation that resonated. I do not know if this would survive a re-read.
I thought it was kind of interesting until the 50 page long rant that John Galt has where he explains why greed and selfishness is good, but all his arguments only work within the bubble of the made up, fantasy society that Rand created. I don’t know how anyone could read that and come away thinking “Boy, this sure is relative to modern society. I better base my whole ideology off of it!”
For anyone that didn’t know, Ayn Rand was a welfare queen 💅
I had the same experience with the Fountainhead. I read it when I was young going to an art school and saw the commitment to Roark’s artistic vision as heroic, despite hating brutalism and his general architecture style as described in the book haha. It was way too long but at the time I was ok with it enough to finish it. Then I found out more about the author…
It just now occurred to me: Anthem is a book about pronouns.
Dafuq is it with these people and pronouns?
Yep. I tried. Three times. Made it about 2/3 of the way through. Eventually just gave up. It is just sooooo bad.
This was, oh, a decade ago or more. Was reading a book on polyamory and ethical non-monogamy. I can’t remember the title, but it was one of the early “big” books on the topic.
It actually made me angry. Not because of the topic, I’m fine with the topic or I wouldn’t have picked it up in the first place.
But the author said such STUPID shit like “There’s no such thing as a ‘reverse gangbang’.” And I’m like “Well, shit, man, your search engine must suck!”
It made me angry that he took an important topic and got it so thoroughly and completely wrong. And that people held it up as like this “Important” work on the topic.
Some books are not to be set aside lightly, they are to be thrown with great force.
My search engine must be bad too, so can you elaborate about these reverse gangbangs?
“CFNM” ;)
L. Ron Hubbard’s “Mission Earth” series. I was young, and I’d read damn near all the sci fi that my local library had, I was acught up on the Wheel of Time that had been published to that point (I think it was still about five books before Jordan died), and gave it a try.
It was fucking awful.
Given that I was maybe 12 at the time, that’s saying something; it was just trash.
Friends don’t let friends read Hubbard.
I read Battlefield Earth and actually enjoyed it, but in the same I enjoyed eg. watching Plan 9 from Outer Space (or the Battlefield Earth movie for that matter.)
It’s an abject piece of shit as a book, written late enough in Hubbard’s life that nobody dared edit him so there’s whole chapters that just sort of repeat, and many of its premises are so stupid it hurts, but its old-timey pulp scifi schlock feel was often very fun.
So yeah, not a good book by any definition, but it was sorta fun and also interesting to read knowing that Hubbard tried to inject his world view into it too. For example the reason why the Psychlo were so eeeeeevil was that they were ruled by the Catrists who’d eg. use psychosurgery or electric shocks to make Psychlos more compliant – knowing that Hubbard absolutely loathed psychiatrists, it’s not hard to see that Psychlo Catrist = psychiatrist.
I, too, enjoyed the gawdawful trash that was the Battlefield Earth movie. Yeah, it’s dumb, but if I only watched good sci-fi, that would be, like 50 movies total.
Maybe.
I’m pretty sure that one of my favorites, Event Horizon, would not make the list of good sci-fi.
Oo I love Event Horizon. It’s a bit of a scifi horror cult classic though isn’t it? Not exactly Blade Runner, but not Battlefield Earth either.
One of my favorite trashy scifi movies is maybe Saturn 3 (Zardoz doesn’t count!). It’s a godawful piece of shit featuring Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett, and a baby faced Harvey Keitel. It’s astonishingly bad and great fun to watch, and there was some sort of fairly hilarious story behind how it got made too (I’ll have to see if I can dig up the blog post I read about it)
edit: there’s a whole website https://saturn3makingof.com/
My sci-fi lit class used to vote on what book we would do next. We once voted on Battlefield Earth partially as a joke, but we were also curious about how bad it could be. We regretted it.
Heh, yeah I guess it’s different if you have to read it for some assignment. I sort of enjoyed it in a masochistic way, although I definitely skipped parts (especially the repeating crap) and like I said I wouldn’t call it a good book by any stretch of the definition
I tried to read the mission earth series but I just couldn’t connect with it. There was too much in the universe that it just expected you to relate to but gave no explanation of what it actually was. That being said, I was also young when I tried to read it.
I read Dianetics and I’m still not “clear.” Must’ve done something wrong before birth.
Instructions unclear: thetans stuck in volcano
Not one book, but almost all of Asimov’s Foundation series. The first one is one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time because I love seeing how each group has to use game theory to solve their own unique issue in order to survive and flourish as a society built on science and reason. While I admit that it’s not always written well, I love the mindset that Asimov wanted to emphasize: violence should be the last resort for solving conflict between nations. When the factions outside of Foundation threaten them with war, they respond with soft power like economic pressure, religious sway, and focusing on making better advancements to science and engineering to defend themselves by being too valuable to destroy.
The fatal problem with the series arises in Book 2 though. Book 2 (Foundation & Empire) introduces the interesting concept of “what happens when a massive wrench is thrown into the meticulously calculated 1000-year plan?” Unfortunately, you can tell that at this point is when the concepts of the story become too smart for Asimov to handle, and he instead begins his trend of doubling and tripling down on deus ex machina characters with mind control powers for the rest of the series. All of the interesting methods of sociopolitical problem solving are thrown out the window to become sub-par adventure stories.
Books 4 and 5 (Foundation’s Edge and Foundation & Earth) were written particularly poorly, and was probably the point where I should have cut my losses. The books follow not-Han-Solo adventure man, contain a sexist female sidekick that only serves to be a hot piece of ass for Asimov’s self-insert character to have sex with, and then has an extremely uncomfortable “happy ending” where a traumatized child is left to be groomed by a robotic parental figure so that the robot can one day mind-wipe the child and insert it’s own consciousness into their body. What’s more is that they completely ditch the core premise of the 1000-year plan, and the ending undercuts any direction that the story could have gone from there.
The prequel books 6 and 7 (Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation) aren’t nearly as bad as 4 or 5, but they completely undermine the importance and intelligence of the character Hari Seldon from the first book. Instead of him being a great man and brilliant mathematician on his own, he’s essentially led around by his nose by undercover robots that are the secret architects of everything just because Asimov wanted to tie-in elements from his books about robots.
Rereading the series for the second time, i just finished book 4 and i agree that having everything be about mind control is tiresome and honestly makes the galaxy feel very small. Also the stupid “lightning rod” idea for the character pisses me off, h’es just a plot device
I was reading a book at home at age 7, and then my dad slapped me in the bsck of the head.
I was expecting more answers along these lines. Slightly disappointed with the tangent that people’s answers have taken.
I was harassed at one job for reading a book during lunch
Well, I tried reading it. Then I tried again. I even made a bet with my father who could finish first. We both lost.
It’s just a terrible reading experience. Don’t know why critics love it, but I have the feeling nobody really understands that gibberish but pretends to do so just to look smart…
Ulysses is a rough one. There are some novels that are so dense that you have to have already read it through once before you can really read it for the first time. I think Ulysses might take three or four.
I started reading it after hearing Robert Anton Wilson talk at length about why he loved the book. He made it sound amazing. And having read it, and read about it, I get why the people who love it really love it. It’s a meticulously crafted, ultra dense, heavily embroidered, masterwork of English literature. You can spend years and years reading and re-reading the book, picking apart layer after layer, and still find new elements to explore, and new threads to pull, which still all end up being perfectly internally consistent. It’s really an amazing literary achievement.
But it fucking sucks to read for the first time.
You need like a companion reference book, the Internet, a French to English dictionary for one of the chapters, and a map of Dublin. It’s not entertainment; it’s a project. And honestly, I’ve found it a lot more interesting to listen to Ulysses experts explaining the book than it is to actually read the book itself.
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Fighting through it at the moment, it just feels like I don’t even get half of what is written.
Just stop reading. It should be a nice and relaxing experience, not some sort of accomplishment. I know, school teaches otherwise…
My wife is reading through some top 500 books or whatever list and she always struggles with this. If you give it 50-100 pages and get nowhere, just put it down and call it a loss.
Meanwhile, I’m just reading scifi and fantasy stuff that comes well recommended and rarely have to give up on a book.
THIS. Had to read it at university. Holy moly was that a hard earned seminar.
I once dropped a book on my face. True story.
I dropped a Wheel of Time hardcover on my chest, about knocked the breath out of me. Nice way to wake up
These days I tend not to persevere with books that I’m having a bad experience with. There are just too many good books out there.
Poor writing sucks but even worse is when the author misjudges how much they can expect from the reader. Sometimes things can get ‘bad’ in a book for just long enough that the reader feels they have risen to a challenge and been rewarded at the next change. Some authors are aware of this and incorporate the dynamic but end up prolonging it too much or over-egging it. I actually feel abused as reader when that happens and end up rage quitting. Unfortunately, deleting an ebook doesn’t come with the same satisfaction as burning a physical one in those cases.
The other thing that is a bad experience for me is overly long dialogue expositions, where a character does an infodump to provide background and context and justify the plot. It totally jangles me, bores me and breaks immersion in the story by making me cynical about the authors laziness. An example of this is all the Librarian’s waffling about biblical stuff in Snow Crash. Rather than making me care more about the outcome of the plot it just yanked me away from what was a really enjoyable story and setting and destroyed the pace.
BTW, if anyone is interested; Bookwyrm is a fediverse platform for discussing and rating books. Much like a federated FOSS version of Goodreads.
