Books that weren't all that good.

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Feb 13, 2008
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Blindswordmaster said:
I have been reading Bran Stoker's Dracula lately and I really don't like it at all.
Read The Historian, similar premise...terrifying. :)

Pyromaniac1337 said:
What's with all the Catcher in the Rye hate lately?
With J.D.Salinger dying, lots of pseudo-critics attacked lots of pseudo-intellectuals for holding a great writer up as a great writer. Hate breeds.
 

mesoforte

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Jan 5, 2010
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Sad to say, but A Tale of Two Cities was just too boring for me to get past. -_-

I couldn't get far into Frankenstein either.
 
Feb 13, 2008
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Valksy said:
I sort of suspect that I should slip into some fire retardant garments before I say Lord of the Rings.

I hated it. I hated the huge passages where feck all happened and I hated the appalling doggerel every five pages. One of the few books I have never managed to read to the end.

Every time I hear someone whine that the movies left out Tom Bombadil, I have the desperate urge to slap them...
I agree totally. However...see the One Man Lord of the Rings show. It's wonderful.

Books I hated:
Thomas Bloody Covenant - Dear god that was atrocious.
Even a Doctor Who story called Blood Heat(?) - atrocious misuse of the licence to bully the Doctor and his companions. It's just a 200 page torture scene.
 

mesoforte

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The_root_of_all_evil said:
Thomas Bloody Covenant - Dear god that was atrocious.
Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever right? I still haven't made it past when he left the town. :\ It wasn't that interesting.
 

RobThePrezodent

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Oct 2, 2009
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bleachigo10 said:
Twilight. How could such a cool word be the title for a crappy book.
i just realised, twilight did used to be such a cool word, like the twilight princess and all that lark.
 

Chrono180

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To kill a mockingbird: Horribly boring, and the plot never seemed to go anywhere. It was less entertaining than reading a documentary on racism in the early part of the twentieth century, and more pretentious.

Harry Potter: they may have been good compared to most children's books, but were illogical, full of plot holes, and just plain STUPID when compared on any adult level. Why I read all seven of them I have not the faintest idea.

The Giver: or, as I like to call it, "Baby's first dystopia."

Animal farm, which, while being a good enough metaphor for the soviet union, disturbed me so much as a child when I read it, that I wrote a fanfic where all the characters die in a nuclear strike.

Fahrenheit 451: yes, it made important points at first, but when it degenerated into essentially a rant about television making people stupid, it pissed me off so much that I actually thought the ending was an appropriate coda.

Plato's Republic: Hitler aint got nothing on Socrates!
 

Malkavian

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Jan 22, 2009
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The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons. Neither were well written. It had potential plotwise, but Dan Brown simply can't write well enough.
 

felicia_angel

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Oct 23, 2009
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Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Dafoe (sp?) and Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert.

Don't get me wrong either, I love reading at times, and yes some of these get boring, but those two...URGH. I loved Dune and felt that when you're able to skip half the story and STILL have a good idea of what was going on at the end, it's bad writing.

Crusoe was just...annoying. I hated it, not because it was boring but because I just didn't like the guy. I couldn't feel sorry for him because he washed up with pretty much the whole ship. Hell, CASTAWAY had more stuff to do then this man did when it came to survival!

and I think most of us have a different view of how things are, compared to when they were written. Dracula would've been better but it at least set the stage for the badass vampires later on.
 

A Weary Exile

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Aug 24, 2009
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Kryzantine said:
...The Scarlet Letter...
I definetley agree, it had quite a weak plot and was boring beyond measure.

OP: Atlas Shrugged. I slogged through that 1000+ page book just to learn more about Objectivism (Which I did) but christ on a cracker was it boring, preachy, and predictable. Rand lets her eagerness to showcase her new philosophy get in the way of telling a decent narrative. The Fountainhead isn't as bad, but I just couldn't finish it after reading Shrugged.

Brave New World by Alduos Huxley wasn't bad, but that stream of conciousness style (I think is what he uses) really got hard to understand sometimes.

EDIT: I've forgotten my most hated book of all time: For whom the Bell Tolls by Earnest Hemingway. I was going to read it for a school assignment because I thought it sounded interesting. I was mistaken. Hemingway just had to describe EVERY LITTLE GOD DAMN THING and nothing was happening in the middle of a civil war, I don't need action every second, but come on Hemingway! Give me something! It was esentially a romance novel set during the Spanish Civil war yet had next to nothing to do with it.
 

crimson5pheonix

It took 6 months to read my title.
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Jun 6, 2008
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Most everything that popped up in English class but Life of Pi takes any and all accolades of useless. There are so many things wrong with the logic of this book combined with bad writing.

Contrary to most people on this thread, I liked Dracula. I think it had great pacing.
 

Captain Pancake

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maninahat said:
Captain Pancake said:
Amethyst Wind said:
The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck. 400 pages of tedium.
I saved myself the trouble of reading it and just saw it in the theatre and picked up the same message in about 2 and a half hours.
I didn't like it much either. I prefered Cannary Row. Though that wasn't what I expected it to be (something about life in an actual factory).
I quite liked Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men", I read it a couple of years back and wrote an essay that managed to surprise the bejeesus out of my English teacher, which started up a whole train of them. I watched the movie with Gary sinise too, that was pretty good.

OT, while I'm at it:

I was actually quite disappointed by "Do androids dream of electric sheep", the novel Blade runner was based on. The movie actually made me think alot more than the book did, and the book over complicated things (Like the part with the mood organ, which made no sense in the context of the novel), and the grand finale when he takes down about 4 androids at once didn't really feel like it had an impact. I suppose the messages between both films are supposed to be different though. The book's meant to warn us that if we don't change our ways, then we will live in a world where farmyard animals will be status symbols and cost a fortune, whereas the film looks closer at human nature, as towards the end of the film the androids really do become indiscernable from humans, particularly Roy Batty. But still, the book didn't leave me wanting to read it again.