Kevin J. Anderson’s Saga of the Seven Suns. I started reading it a long time ago, got about twenty pages in and gave up. Much later, I forgot I had tried, and tried again, and got even fewer pages in when I remembered how it is chock full of the most inane pandering exposition I have ever read. Just a torrent of trite, hackneyed, cliché. I can’t understand how it got published, let alone warranted 7 books. Maybe it gets better. I will never find out. I haven’t heard much good about the Dune books he co-authored, either.
I should add that I’ve read Battlefield Earth, and actually enjoyed it. I generally do not have super high standards. If something is entertaining, I’ll give it a chance.
I haven’t heard much good about the Dune books he co-authored, either.
I’ve read the first prequel trilogy, and for the life of me I can’t say why. I got no enjoyment from it.
Just tried to read some of Anne Rice’s books last week because I was enchanted by the AMC adaptation of Interview with the Vampire.
I can’t even adequately express how much I dislike her writing and “story telling”, if you can even call it that. Her vampire lore/rules for her vampires are cool, but that’s pretty much all she has going for her.
Interview with a Vampire:
8/10
3/10 with RiceI enjoyed the books because I enjoyed thinking about the sort of author who would write something like that. Kind of getting into her head even though she didn’t intend it. Especially Queen of the Damned.
And I love the idea that elder vampires are easily strong enough to reveal themselves and conquer the world, but they just don’t because they’re too lazy and decadent to rock the boat.
I prefer the White Wolf / World of Darkness setting though. “We don’t reveal ourselves because humans would wipe the floor with us and then hunt us to extinction, like they’ve always done with everything that’s ever threatened them. Despite our power, we can’t beat their industry.”
One Second After - W. R. Forstchen
Please everyone, read this book. It’s sad, disgusting and heavy, but it’s probably a documentary for events that may happen one day. It’s very well researched and the plausibility and realism make it even scarier. It hasn’t turned me into a prepper, but in part motivated me to make our house as self-sufficient as possible. Also it made me aware of small useful things in my surroundings that I used to be blind to.
Can I at least get a summary?
Dies The Fire by S.M. Stirling.
I didn’t hate the plot of the book, but something about the writers treatment of the character interactions, physical descriptions, and sex scenes creeped me out. I just… I don’t know. It was gross. I got the feeling that the writer was fulfilling their own fantasies through the novel. I told this to someone about 10 years ago, and they also felt that way, so I feel slightly vindicated and not like a weirdo who reads too much into things.
I tried rereading both of those series recently (there were maybe 6 Change novels out when i read them, so it was many years ago) and I just couldn’t.
Island in the Sea of Time is worse. Some credit for having some better developed female characters than most male authors at the time, I guess. But the SA scenes were fuckin awful.
Reading The Road as a new father. Fuck that. Made me cry.
Two separate and very distinct oof moments in that book.
The Scarlet Letter.
It’s like it’s designed to engender a lifelong hatred for the printed word.
The red/blue/green mars trilogy. The first book was pretty great and the themes were good throughout but the main characters devolve into this weird privaliged manifest destiny hippy cult that doesn’t give a shit about the rest of humanity and acts like they got to mars all by themselves and not on the backs of the billions supporting the economies that made the journey possible.
Its the only serie series I’ve read where I ended up rooting for the oligarchic corporate overlords because even a mars owned by megacorps works out better for humanity than the mars envisioned by the protagonists at this point who are basically turning into a kind of proto-version of the spacers from asimov.
When I realized there are a lot of dumb people out there, 1984 by George Orwell.
1984, the go to citation by people misusing the word “fascism”.
Have you read Jack London’s The Iron Heel?
It is really the prequel to 1984, even Orwell said as much. 1984 stays with you but The Iron Heel will haunt you.
Never read it but I will thx for the info 👍👍
… username checks out I guess? 1984 was also my first painful read. A true Mindfuck. It’s a good story though, but I felt like I needed a blanket and kitty therapy for like a month after finishing reading it. Maybe I was too young
Dropped the book on my face scratching my eye
A 1200 page book on architecture too
On the opposite side of the spectrum a friend used my wood book shelf library for a nude model shoot… so book adjacent nudity
I read the book Paper Towns by John Green as a teen, and out started out good, then just kept getting better and better and way more adrenaline inducing. The characters were going on this crazy exciting midnight excursion and I was up reading until like midnight.
At a certain point, the mood just dropped straight off of a cliff. It was so depressing and draining but I was in too deep at that point, so I kept reading. After like two chapters of emotional torture, I knew I had to stop so I stopped reading and fully deleted the book off of my kobo and went to sleep.
The next morning though, I woke up desperate to know what happened, so I booted up my computer, went through Adobe’s proprietary mess of a program to redownload the book onto my kobo, skipped the entire middle section, and kept reading. In the end, the ending was okay, but definitely not worth that rollercoaster of emotions.
I read John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars right after, and I enjoyed it!
Xenocide, from the ender series. Enders game was good. Speaker was OK I guess. Ender was a whiny bitch the entire time but the descolada mystery was interesting. Now that’s solved and he’s still a whiny bitch and then he just solves basically every single problem with his super ai that can do magical space/time bullshit. The worst deus ex machina I have ever laid eyes on. I physically threw the book across the room at one point. I hate leaving books unfinished, so I slogged through the rest at like 5 pages per sitting, rolling my eyes out of my head the whole time.
I did not finish children of the mind.
I thought ‘Children of the mind’ was good, could have been merged with Xenocide.
Whatever you do, stay away from ‘The Last Shadow’. What a terrible way to finish a series.
Only read Enders shadow and it was decent. Made me realize that ender was a little bitch all along and not when he left.
Anything with Ender after the first book is terrible. But the series that sticks with the happenings on earth after Enders Game is pretty good. I especially like the book that has Bean from a child through battle school.
So I’m usually pretty careful with my “nonfiction”, but somehow I got suckered into opening an absolute shit heap of utter nonsense called Power vs Force. I had to make a separate goodreads category called trash just so it didn’t show up on my actual “read” list. Also, I finish damn near everything and couldn’t get through more than about a chapter before wanting to vomit.
It’s about on par with the South Park “this is what Scientologists actually believe” segment (no clue if that was faithful), except not funny.
The southpark scientologist thing is 100% what they believe. They did a lot of research and had some “very highly levelled” people who quit the cult helping them with the research.
They’re usually pretty good about having a firm handle on whatever they’re talking about, behind the absurdity. (I’m a particularly big fan of how they covered “freemium isn’t free”.)
I just can’t assume because of their love of utter bullshit lol.
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
Beowulf. The version I was given in high school was kinda half-translated from ancient English to modern English, such that I had to struggle to figure out what the modern equivalent of a lot of the words were supposed to be in order to understand it.
Also every time a character is introduce it goes for like a whole page about their family tree and sword collection.
I never imagined a book about fighting monsters could be so boring.
the underage sex in Snowcrash
the character could have just as easily been made an 18 year old and it didn’t need to be there for the story. it was like a record skipping at that moment and I understand wanting to make a crossover for the character to have a sympathetic link to the other character but it was gross and makes it really hard to recommend the book to someone
Snow Crash is one of those books that is both hugely influential and also impossible to recommend for so many reasons
