Books you should have put down, but didn't?

[Snorkel]

So, what are books / book series that you slogged through, finally got to the end and went "Why on EARTH did I make myself do that?"

The first ones that come to my mind are:

Jean M. Auel's Earth's Children series.  Don't get me wrong, the first book was amazing.  But then I had to know how it ended, and each book got progressively worse.  Land of Painted Caves, in my opinion, only had enough actual content for a short novella. The rest of the novel should have been harshly pruned!

Kylie Chan's 9 book Xuan Wu series.  I think I really picked them up because I'd never seen this genre before: modern Hong Kong, but Chinese gods are real.  Martial arts, mythology, and the modern day!  To be fair, I found the book Dark Serpent to be REALLY exciting, but then the next book just felt like a slog, without any real progress, and then finally nine books worth of horrible un-attained goals are finally reached in the final book.

Both series suffer from huge Mary-Sue-ness (in my opinion).  Weirdly, Jean M. Auel's books seem to get MORE Mary-Sue-ful as they progress, she puts a full extra author-insertion-character in as well as the main protagonist :-O.  While Kylie Chan seems to make a concerted effort to handicap her protagonist, and make her less of a Mary-Sue . . . but she still gets away with being rude to everyone around her, they just find it cute and funny for some reason.  >_>

Tad Williams' Otherland series.  I can't actually remember what bothered me about the series.  I really desperately wanted to enjoy it, and instead I found myself shouting at the book for how annoying it was in places.  But for some reason, I kept reading.  Sunken cost fallacy?  I did spend actual money on the series.  I've kept it on my shelf for years.  I should really say goodbye to it, I'm never going to read it again. :<

Edited August 31, 2020 by Snorkel

[Weltall]

Hmmmmm, I can probably think of a few here.

The first that springs to mind is Elisabeth Kostova 's The Historian, which started out well enough and then dropped the ball around the same time the framing device disappeared. A vampire story set in modern times where you're not sure whether or not the vampire part is actually true, as related to the narrator by her father set to the backdrop of interesting places around Europe. There was some nice buildup, an interesting mystery and then it kind of fell apart when the story began actively happening in the 'present day' segments and the ending made me want to pitch the book across the room.

Anything I've ever read by Dan Brown that I actually finished, I don't think it requires much more explanation. While the Langdon books get most of the flack for obvious reasons, Digital Fortress was really insulting to the intelligence. I was running on spite more than anything else there at the end. I did eventually give up trying to read his books, so those are brain cells spared and better books read or reread in their places.

The Shadow War trilogy by Chris Claremont (with co-credit to George Lucas). A sequel to Willow, you say? Why yes, I would like to read that! And I did... right until the second chapter began. When you kill off roughly half the cast of the film in between the last two sentences of the first chapter just after reintroducing them, you've really got to work hard to muster more than apathy from me. And the first book failed to do so on every conceivable level. More fool me, I not only finished the book but finished the entire trilogy. That the author was clearly used to working primarily with comics and not prose was beyond obvious, and between annoying 'funetic akksents', randomly capitalized words run together and really stupid plot points that come out left field or which lead nowhere, the whole experience was just painful. In quite a few cases one was left with the distinct impression that Claremont was making it up as he went along and had forgotten things he'd already established.

15 minutes ago, Snorkel said:

Kylie Chan's 9 book Xuan Wu series.  I think I really picked them up because I'd never seen this genre before: modern Hong Kong, but Chinese gods are real.  Martial arts, mythology, and the modern day!  To be fair, I found the book Dark Serpent to be REALLY exciting, but then the next book just felt like a slog, without any real progress, and then finally nine books worth of horrible un-attained goals are finally reached in the final book.

Well damnation, because that description of the genre makes it sound awesome. If this was another topic about recommended books I'd probably be running to grab that. Would you say the first one is satisfying if you just read it and ignore the rest, or is it one of those stories that leaves too many unanswered questions to be completely satisfying on its own?

[Snorkel]

18 minutes ago, Weltall said:

Well damnation, because that description of the genre makes it sound awesome. If this was another topic about recommended books I'd probably be running to grab that. Would you say the first one is satisfying if you just read it and ignore the rest, or is it one of those stories that leaves too many unanswered questions to be completely satisfying on its own?

Hmm. . . It's one of those series that mostly just has the same major end goal the whole way through, and it takes all nine books to get there.  It is split into three trilogies, after book 3 would probably be an OK place to stop.

[Spren of Kindness she/her]

Keeper of the Lost Cities, which I'm kind of still keeping an eye on.  It's... it's okay, but it's kind of spiraling.

[datalaughing he/him]

I found the First Law trilogy to be firmly unpleasant, but by the time I realized it wasn't going to become fun, I was deep enough into it that I pressed through to finish the story. The whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth. Wish I'd just put it down when I first started thinking, "Man, these characters are all terrible people, and I'm not rooting for anyone."

Also, The Gunslinger. I had never tried a Stephen King book before. Figured if I was going to like something by him, it would be his epic fantasy series. So I picked up The Gunslinger. I have never read something that felt more like work. I had college textbooks that weren't that dull a slog.  

[Negative_Null]

Maximum Ride. I hung on for five books and then realized it was never going anywhere. He'll introduce plot threads or arcs and they never go anywhere, and then something will come out of nowhere and be the focus of an entire book. In addition, he changes details and retcons things between different books, like Max's hair color or her relationship with Fang. It just was really not consistent and seemed more like a badly written tv show desperately reaching for plot points than a good book series.

There was The Power of Five series by Anthony Horowitz. Maybe it actually is good, but by the last book I was thoroughly confused and very depressed. I only vaguely remember all of it, but the magic system was fairly poor, none of the characters were especially interesting, and the plot point that ended up being the climax was some sort of time loop that wasn't very well explained.

[+ILuvHats he/him]

14 hours ago, datalaughing said:

 

I found the First Law trilogy to be firmly unpleasant, but by the time I realized it wasn't going to become fun, I was deep enough into it that I pressed through to finish the story. The whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth. Wish I'd just put it down when I first started thinking, "Man, these characters are all terrible people, and I'm not rooting for anyone."

 

Interesting. I can sympathize without agreeing to dislike the books. Honestly, I didn’t realize the characters all ranged from the incompetent to monstrous until part way through book 3, and by then I was committed. I knew they weren’t great, but I had hope for improvement for some of them until then. The ending to the First Law Trilogy was so masterfully disgusting that I swore off ever reading Abercrombie again. So I used to regret reading it, but I somehow found myself reading A Little Hatred, the first book in the follow up series. And since doing so I’ve come to appreciate what Abercrombie did with the ending of the first trilogy. Guess we have different tastes. And by that I mean you’re normal while I must be a masochist since I somehow enjoy the pain I endure while reading the books.

On a separate note, one book I regret reading was the second Lies of Locke Lamora book. It was just so meandering compared to the first one. There was no drive to the plot, and the ending was not satisfying enough to justify the time I sunk into it.

[Condensation she/her]

Probably all of them.

[Snorkel]

15 hours ago, Condensation said:

Probably all of them.

You take that back! X(

[Condensation she/her]

No, I really like books so I don't put them down when I should go to bed or do my chores or something like that.

[Snorkel]

5 hours ago, Condensation said:

No, I really like books so I don't put them down when I should go to bed or do my chores or something like that.

Ooooooh!  Yeah, that type of not putting a book down, yeah, that's totally understandable!

[Condensation she/her]

Yep. That applies to most books I read. Or plausibly all of them. Just maybe. Okay yes it applies to all of them, leave me alone!

[Kasimir he/him]

On 9/1/2020 at 5:48 AM, Snorkel said:

So, what are books / book series that you slogged through, finally got to the end and went "Why on EARTH did I make myself do that?"

The first ones that come to my mind are:

Jean M. Auel's Earth's Children series.  Don't get me wrong, the first book was amazing.  But then I had to know how it ended, and each book got progressively worse.  Land of Painted Caves, in my opinion, only had enough actual content for a short novella. The rest of the novel should have been harshly pruned!

Kylie Chan's 9 book Xuan Wu series.  I think I really picked them up because I'd never seen this genre before: modern Hong Kong, but Chinese gods are real.  Martial arts, mythology, and the modern day!  To be fair, I found the book Dark Serpent to be REALLY exciting, but then the next book just felt like a slog, without any real progress, and then finally nine books worth of horrible un-attained goals are finally reached in the final book.

Both series suffer from huge Mary-Sue-ness (in my opinion).  Weirdly, Jean M. Auel's books seem to get MORE Mary-Sue-ful as they progress, she puts a full extra author-insertion-character in as well as the main protagonist :-O.  While Kylie Chan seems to make a concerted effort to handicap her protagonist, and make her less of a Mary-Sue . . . but she still gets away with being rude to everyone around her, they just find it cute and funny for some reason.  >_>

Tad Williams' Otherland series.  I can't actually remember what bothered me about the series.  I really desperately wanted to enjoy it, and instead I found myself shouting at the book for how annoying it was in places.  But for some reason, I kept reading.  Sunken cost fallacy?  I did spend actual money on the series.  I've kept it on my shelf for years.  I should really say goodbye to it, I'm never going to read it again. :<

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who slogged through and disliked Xuan Wu. I think at some points I was outright hate reading. It's not irredeemably awful but is still one of my three examples of how not to write Chinese-inspired urban fantasy. 

[Dunkum he/him]

The Godwars Trilogy by Angus Wells.  I picked them up at a used book sael for less than $5 total, and I read them all the way through, but even from the start it was pretty clear just how bad they were.  Just for an example, one of the main characters gets mad any time anything is 100% straightforward.  if a prophecy or hint is even slightly obscure, he starts ranting about riddles - and this trait manages to get worse the farther into the series you get; it's like he gets dumber as the series moves along.

[Güve she/her]

 The two pearls o wistow by Alison Goodman. I was reading that book when I was teenage. I think its a good book. I had finished it. 1 week later, I recognized that it is a book series 2th book. I didn't read firsth book because I was feeling myself like fool. Thanks.