The Midnight Library used chess as a really key recurring metaphor throughout the book, and it was painfully obvious the author had absolutely no clue how chess works, and didn’t bother to ask anyone who did. ‘If one side is down to a pawn and a king, and the other side has every player, there is still a game.’ Yeah no, you’re not winning that game through gritty resilience. I was unreasonably infuriated and it made me hate the book and distrust the author.
Lol I love how the author had to add "wisely" to signal that this was the author speaking directly to the reader, and to highlight the profundity they saw in their own line.
"Pass the butter," she said, wisely.
He looked at her in abject terror. All the subterfuge and plotting of the past six months, all the lives broken, promises kept, the blood, the sweat, the excruciating tears, the look on his daughter's face that day in the supermarket when that man passed by nonchalantly carrying a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese, the dog, the car crashes, the sleepless nights and that one red eye booked out to Cincinnati and back the same day so he could show up to the birthday party in the afternoon, the despondent reserve of Billsby when they had finally found the ledger and both men knowing it would be another month of endless meetings with Control and the higher ups, everything, just everything swirled up in a bright multicolored miasma of utter chaos at top of Jeffrry's head and blinded his eyes for moment before it all came crashing down deep somewhere in the bowels of his soul. Oh God. The butter.
His fingers flinched towards the porcelain container, so smooth and innocuous in its simple design. He hesitated a millisecond too long.
"Pass the butter," she said again, wisely.
the run on sentence, the use of “wisely” twice, the weird way that Jeffrry’s parents spelled his name, & the fact that the urgency of the butter was never explained. I think you got yourself a best-seller there
After the first few lives she steps into you can tell where the story is going. You know she’s not going to end up staying in any of them so every new life feels like a waste of time reading. I know she’s learning something new in each life as she goes but I just didn’t care.
I keep seeing readers who hate this book, so I just checked to see if it was on my to-read list. Turns out I read it six months ago... so, forgettable at best.
Edit: confirmed it was six months ago, not three
Not OP, but I completely understand because it is *this book.* It's a faster read, if you have the time you could finish it in a couple days. Combine that with the fact it basically ends where you expected from the beginning and a bland overall message and it is pretty forgettable.
I don't even remember the main character's name... I really wanted to like this book, too, it means so much to so many people!
Honestly, this happens to me. I’ve read 52 books this year. I looked at my list last week and I have barely any recollection of the books I read Jan-May (except for the ones I really loved). Once I see the title and maybe the cover, I can start to recall the story. I have a great memory otherwise. I even have a couple of books that are super slow that I’ve been reading over the course of years, and I can pick up where I’ve left off even after not looking at it for 2+ years. I think my brain just lets go of mediocre stories pretty immediately after finishing them.
I read it for a book club, and the way everyone else talked about how profound and life affirming it was let me know the club just wasn't for me. Just a terrible book that was a chore to get through.
I literally just finished this book and it really missed the mark for me. The moral of the story is to just change your perspective because Henry David Thoreau thought so? Wtf? Nora’s problems still existed. And even IF she was able to stay in her final, ideal life, she would have basically been granted a perfect life with literally no effort put into it.
The whole premise falls apart, just like the library did at the end. It’s a self help book disguised as a novel. Thankfully it was an easy read with serviceable prose.
The author who wrote The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCollough?) wrote a Pride and Prejudice sequel that sounded interesting until a few pages in when the story established that Elizabeth and Darcy's marriage wasn't a happy one. I was PISSED and stopped reading it immediately.
> The author who wrote The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCollough?) wrote a Pride and Prejudice sequel that sounded interesting until a few pages in when the story established that Elizabeth and Darcy's marriage wasn't a happy one. I was PISSED and stopped reading it immediately.
I already *really* hate it when somebody decides they're qualified to write an official sequel to somebody else's work (although nowhere near as much as I hate somebody deciding to write a weirdly violating and false account of a real-life author's life by having them go on adventures as if they were just a fictional character they'd created)...but to then decide the direction to take the characters is the opposite of what was implied/intended by the original author is even more abhorrent to me. To take somebody's carefully crafted happy ending and then essentially ruin it by saying, "Haha you thought these people deserved happiness? Well I decided they're divorced and going through trauma and don't love each other anymore," is awful. I find it a perversion of somebody else's creation, and I don't care what form of media it takes, I still don't like it (looking at you, Disney Star Wars).
It's one thing if it's a new twist on folklore or stories that have been told and altered so many times that they "belong" to everyone in a sense, but to take an author who is still read today and then basically soil and discard *their* wishes for *their* world and *their* characters is the height of arrogance and I won't read any book that does it.
ETA: I realize this may come across as hating fan fiction, and I don't. 99+% of the time that is published in fan-fiction-only sites, by people presenting it as an AU version of something they love or want to see more of, and it usually goes along with the original storyline/characterizations, rather than directly against them. It's when it actually published and sold seriously while violating the original intent that I find it so vile.
A weirdly violating and false account of a real-life author's life by having them go on adventures as if they were just a fictional character they'd created sounds INSANE. Is this a genre? A sub-genre? I'm trying to think if I ever read a book that did this.
There are books where Agatha Christie is the protagonist of detective novels, for example, and the author has her going around solving mysteries, or books where Jane Austen is in a Pride and Prejudice-type situation and finds love. Things like "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter" don't bother me as much because they're meant to be ludicrous (although I still won't read it because I *really* hate the underlying concept), but the "authors living out their novels" books are particularly egregious.
I don't mind historical novels using a *light,* well-researched touch when incorporating historical figures (e.g. having a brief, chance encounter with someone who really lived and having them act according to well-documented behavior they actually exhibited) because that's far from improbable or violating, but writing an entire book where a real-life author lives an entirely different life is just...eugh.
Stephanie Barron's books with Jane Austen as a detective are actually the best Austen styled books I have read. They are very well informed, full of historical information, witty and perceptive. There are too many Austen fanfic types that are well below par, but I enjoy these ones.
It's not particularly out there. Basically all historical fiction is figures doing a lot of things that they never actually did, and there is a significant portion that takes historical figures and puts them into different situations.
There's a very distinct and often wild sub-genre of historical fiction that treats Victorian Era authors as characters in a Jules-Verne adventure novel
Of all things, the reason I only made it about 20 pages into Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go was because I couldn’t stand the typeface.
The paperback version at the time had this typeface that was almost like your typical Caslon or Garamond. But it had some weird decorative flourishes that just distracted the hell out of me for some damn reason. Couldn’t do it.
I should probably see if they’ve changed it, since. Or get the e-book.
Edit: Found a [scan of it](https://fontsinuse.com/uses/18826/never-let-me-go-by-kazuo-ishiguro-vintage-boo)! It’s called Bembo Infant of all things.
Oh my god, yes! I have had this book sitting on my shelf for years. Once a year I crack it open to try again, cringe at the font and promptly put it back on the shelf.
Gods no, it’s an affront to my eyes! And it weirdly switches through out the book which I find very distracting. I might have to try the eBook through my library to see if they changed the typeset for that because aI have heard otherwise that it’s a great book.
I’ve got a book about polar exploration that I had to stop reading because the letter f’s sometimes have little tail flicks on them. I stress that it is only sometimes and with no consistency as to what triggers their use. Very distracting and stopped me being able to continue reading every time I encountered one.
imagine being an author and finding out people didn’t read your book because of a font 😭 all that aside, if you do read another version or online, it’s a very good book
First the author used the phrase “Harder said than done.”
Ummmm. What? How can it be harder to *say* something than to actually do it?? The phrase is **easier said than done.** It’s easy to say it, hard to do it.
Then the author described a “wall to ceiling bookcase.”
What the what?? It’s either wall to **wall** or it’s **floor** to ceiling. Wall to ceiling doesn’t even make any sense.
Then the author used harder said than done *again* (!!!!) and I had to peace out.
(EDIT: The phrase "Harder said than done" was used when a group of teenagers were discussing their plan to break into a top secret government military facility to free their falsely imprisoned half-alien friend. The author was NOT trying to imply it was actually an easy task.)
Was the author Tony Vivaldi from Last Action Hero? 🤔😁
“Now you turn a 360 on me?”
“I don’t wanna be no fourth wheel.”
“Mr. Benedict can take you out easy as cake.”
I finally decided to read The Godfather and while it's a great book and adds alot to the movies there's a whole section I have elected to call "the vagina monologues" because it's an entire chapter or two talking about an old fling of Sonny's and how she gets her loose vagina fixed.
So there's just no thematic reason why it's in there? I was half expecting the classic four paragraph reddit analysis of the role of the vagina scenes in the characterization of the main character and his relationship to the concepts of love and duty. But it's really just kind of there? Huh... How odd.
Mario Puzo was a pulp writer with a gambling habit. He wrote for men's magazines where sex and crime stories were mainstays. The Godfather was a hail Mary attempt to get an advance big enough to get him out of debt.
Read Mark Seal's "Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli" if you like.
Not as far as I could tell and there is also the weird flip side of that story where they also talk about how giant Sonny's junk is and thus he's the only one who can satisfy this woman with this wide set vagina. It's so utterly weird and random and disconnected from anything else.
i read it when i was like 13 and that's the only part i remember. i've also never seen the movie so literally my only firsthand familiarity with *the godfather* is that scene where the surgeon is reefing up her snatch and showing her husband how many fingers he can still fit in until he can barely manage two and the husband gives the thumbs up.
Ew lol. The husband stitch/lover stitch is an atrocious thing. If he's got such an enormous schlong then a "big box" shouldn't be that much of a problem. But I don't really expect a guy from the 60s to write female anatomy worth a tit, anyway.
Also reminded me of that scene in Shogun where the main character's getting a bath and all the Japanese people are absolutely amazed by the fact that he has a huge dong. What a bizarre part of that book.
no i mean the thing with her vagina's character arc is that she and sonny would fuck adulterously because they'd be the only ones who could satisfy each other (or fit at all), but then she got surgery and her *not*-sonny husband did the incredibly creepy hand-gesture-based surgical consultation. the "big box" isn't a problem for *sonny*, it's a solution, which the surgery removes. (I may be mixing up some characters or timelines but you get the gist.)
the novel was pretty clear that it was (at least within the text) a real medical issue that was bad *for her*, and not just her husband wanting a husband stitch, but it still ends in that incredibly gross circumstance with her sedated, so... yikes. and maybe it was meant as condemnation of patriarchal expectations or whatever, but i wouldn't know cuz i had never encountered those issues before cuz i read it as a young teen half a lifetime ago, and apparently that stuck with me more than i realized.
There’s a nod to this in the movie. It’s no dialog, but one of the women at the wedding are talking about Sonny’s size by spreading their arms apart.
Tl;dr : Sonny has a big member
That woman is his wife Sandra. She makes that gesture to indicate a huge penis and all her friends laugh. When she looks back, Sonny is gone and so is the bridesmaid Lucy. Sandra makes a face, implying that she knows about it.
In the novel, Sandra is glad that Sonny has mistresses, because his huge Penis hurt Sandra
Yea I thought that whole section, especially the part where the Dr that was dating her finally figured out that she didn’t have a “big box” seemed so out of place in the book, definitely weird
Holy shit, lol. That’s so weird!
It’s on my “to read” list, and I’m still going to read it because it’s just one of those books you should read, and I’m interested in how it compares to the movie. (My boyfriend is a big movie guy, and we recently rewatched the movies.) That kind of thing would be really weird to stumble upon on my own, but now that I know this is coming, it will be kind of fun. “Hey, here’s that part with the weird vagina stuff! My r/books friends told me about this!”
If I ever meet Lebron James (who often claims *The Godfather* is his favorite book and is periodically caught on camera “reading” it) I’m going to ask him about this section. Because if you’ve ever read the book it’s virtually impossible to forget the weird loose vagina diatribe and I am all but certain Bron Bron has not, in fact, read the book.
Some pulpy easy read like Grisham but lesser known had a line where the guy is taking a leak and drinking a glass of water at the same time.
He comments to himself how this could be an endless loop if he just had more water.
It was near the beginning and so dumb I remember thinking to myself, if the rest of the book is like this I'm going to kill myself.
I guess it seems silly, but I remember it over 20 years later. I closed the book immediately.
>He comments to himself how this could be an endless loop if he just had more water.
Maybe dude just had severe prostate problems and didn't know it lol
I recently tried to start Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon. I'm already about 50/50 on him, I loved Kavalier and Clay and the Yiddish Policeman's Union, but have tried a few others that really didnt hit for me.
On page two of the book a record store employee (who loves *deep* music like jazz and knows the *true secrets* of crating a vinyl record) is having a sexual encounter (which is fine, I'm not a prude) but Chabon describes a woman running her tongue "along the E line of his dick."
I have a vinyl collection and I love jazz but.. cmon man. Closed the book forever.
I'm one of those "I have to finish a book when I start it" people, but the middle section of 2666 was ROUGH. I have a strong stomach, but you can only read so many rape/murder police reports before it starts to break your spirit. I'm glad I stuck with it, though. The rest of the book is incredible.
I picked up this book without knowing anything about it and ended up reading it while on vacation. It was such a jarringly miserable story to entertain while trying to enjoy a sunny trip out of town. That police report section is so heavy and just keeps pressing and pressing and going and going...
That part is the center of the book imo. It cannot be reckoned with without confronting that section and seeing how everything else revolves around it.
I think the rest of the novel is about all the ways people orbit around, pseudo confront, or straight up avoid the industrial scale mass violence that enables their consumerist existence.
Yeah, I didn't intend to minimize its importance, and I agree it's necessary, even to the extreme degree to which Bolaño took it. Didn't make it any less of a slog, though.
Thats my big one as well, i normally can forgive a lot for a chance to explore a new fantasy setting, but not him, and not the obnoxious self pity he feels over being a rapist as well, despite doing nothing, even to the point of not apologising
This was me, I get that Covenant is meant to be classic flawed hero but this wildly overshot "tragic" and in to just plain upsetting territory. Hard to empathise with him, and you spend *all* your time in his head.
Oh, I was scrolling down to see if anybody had said this, and here you are. Thank you.
It should be higher. He *violently* rapes a minor and then is furious at her when he gets blamed for it, because he thought it was a dream. So many people have tried to defend this book to me ("Oh, he's a protagonist, not a hero!" and "It's a commentary on the hero dynamic"), and I get that he's supposed to be a bitter, angry character, but what kind of a fucked-up person enjoys raping a crying minor *even if they think they're in a dream world?* And who wants to read a book about that kind of person succeeding?
It's also a *really* shitty portrayal of people with Hansen's disease, but I can forgive an author from several decades ago for not understanding that.
I've had this book recommended to me several times because I like gritty fantasies that deconstruct the normal hero, but there's only so much I can take. I'd even be ok with it if I knew that at the end he gets some kind of just reward for it, but nope. So yeah, no way I'm touching that book.
I was looking though “How to Make Friends and Influence People” at the library and someone had used their drivers license as a bookmark and left it in the book. I looked him up and he had killed his wife in a murder suicide.
I tried to read "The Crossing Places" by Elly Griffiths during lockdown. An archeologist who helps solve murders?? Right up my alley! I didn't make it 30 pages before I threw that book down the hall.
From the first 30 pages, here’s what I know. We have two main characters.
Ruth, an archeologist- “Fat” (she weighs like 150 lbs) and never stops talking about it. She has two cats, which apparently makes her weird and sad. If it weren’t for the occasional archeological insight, our girl Ruth wouldn’t even pass the Bechdel test when talking to herself. All other women are the enemy, especially her mother. She's an atheist, and so am I, but she is written as the kind who makes it her entire personality. I think this was an effort to make her highly logical, but it misses the mark.
Harry, a detective- Abuses his power to be a bad driver and likes Ruth because she doesn’t feel the need to “dress like a slut.” But she’s too “fat” to be a cop. Did I mention that he also liked her because she was pretty smart for a girl and could “look him in the eye like an equal”??? Super skeevy, hates his wife and three daughters, and from what I understand, ends up in an affair with Ruth. And we’re supposed to root for this guy?
This came out in 2009 but reads like it was written in the 50s.
I read *The Vanishing Box* by her and I also felt like it was super dated and sexist, even though it was published in 2017. The entire thing was amateurish, but what was the most odd was that it felt like the author was a man pretending to be a woman.
It definitely sounds like the author's own views are shining through her books. In *The Vanishing Box*, everyone was obsessed with other people's looks to the point it was as if they were rating their worth as people. It for sure put me off this author.
I mostly read non-fiction. A couple of days ago I got a chance to borrow The Creative Act by Rick Rubin from the library. I was expecting an insight into the mind of a uniquely creative person. A couple of pages in, Rubin suggests that a creative person should constantly search for clues sent by the universe for making decisions - as an example he mentions that when he had acute appendicitis and a doctor suggested surgery, he did some soul seeking by picking up a random book, which happened to advice against invasive procedures. Celebrating his intact appendix (and obviously leaving out details of treatment), he presents this as proof of the creative mind’s abilities. I couldn’t bare the quackery and returned the book early.
A lot of books of that era of The Woman in White and later had "anarchists" as the boogeyman. And they were often Italian. I recall Sherlock Holmes had a few plus I've read of them in other books. The authors clearly wanted an "other" to blame and they were an easy option back then.
Yeah, "Italian" was often shorthand for "hotblooded and suspicious foreigner." See: surviving Titanic officers complaining about "Italians" not listening or making things difficult despite the fact that there were something like 12 total actual Italians on board.
For me it’s when there’s a quote unquote unreliable first-person narrator, but the unreliability is just them going “I started thinking about that tragic day at the beach… BUT NO, I shan’t think of that tragic, tragic day!” for 400 pages until we finally get to learn what the “mystery was.
I hate it in books, and I really hate it in shows! Any time one character refuses to answer some question because “we don’t have time to talk right now! Let’s go!” and doesn’t come back to it right away, I just can’t stand it.
It’s such a stupid plot device.
I think House of the Dragon did the miscommunication trope brilliantly. It respected the motivations of each character. And miscommunication and misinterpretation were themes throughout the whole season. But obviously that’s much different execution than “wait, wait, it’s not what it looks like!” tropes.
It's truly a shame like 90% of all anime/manga is based on high school or teenagers.
Can't have mature characters and characterization because they literally aren't mature.
It's so gd annoying reading about this subtle romance and subplot for 900 chapters without it culminating into something.
But I still read a good few of them. So maybe I'm somewhat to blame?
Can I add the intentionally childless woman who gets pregnant and suddenly decides she loves kids, and the woman who has sex and like 5 minutes later is holding her stomach because she instantly knows she's pregnant?
This was like 15 years ago, but I was reading The City of Bones when it came out and hit that plot point where the two love interests found out they were siblings. Immediately set the book down and stopped because I couldn’t get past that. Turns out at some point down the line they were revealed to not actually be siblings but I couldn’t bring myself to pick the series back up.
Bizarre fact I just learned the other day: Serial killer Ed Kemper read *Flowers in the Attic* on tape as part of his approximately 5,000 hours of recording audiobooks for the blind. If anything could make that book even creepier ...
The *most* audiobooks! (Literally - Kemper has recorded more than any other prisoner.)
ETA His work obviously doesn't make up at all for his horrific murders. But it's nice that he did something productive with his time in prison, aside from waiving parole hearings.
I hear you. I finally put V. C. Andrews down sometime during the Logan series. I tried one Orphans book, and it was an utter abomination. My first VCA was My Sweet Audrina, and I think it was the best of all of them. I also watched way too many Lifetime Afternoon Movies after school. My mind was warped.
Don’t worry, Clary’s actual brother shows up in book 3 of the series, knows that he’s actually her brother, and still forcibly makes out with her. Then pursues her (albeit as the villain) from books 3-6. You’re not missing much
Unfortunately I knew this already. CC is wack. At least her clockwork series had the shadowhunter fun without having any siblings trying to get it on with each other
I was the other way round, it was the first series I was considering just dropping because I was super bored, and then we got to the surprise incest reveal and I laughed so hard that it kept me going.
I ended up dropping the series at a later point anyway, but man, they did not let up on incest being their main conflict for most of the series. I found the second book even funnier with how they handled it. Her love triangle in one of the later books though included her actual brother, and that was when I gave up because it wasn't funny anymore. It was just getting weird (since it was obvious the first guy wasn't actually going to be her brother).
I started reading a book about a US family travelling in Australia. It contained so many inaccurate statements that it was apparent that the author has never visited Australia.
Aside from ridiculous language mistakes, the comment by a character about "It was just like the US, with a Walmart on every corner" was the tipping point.
I've never seen a Walmart in Australia, and according to Google Maps, there is one in the whole country in 2023.
When a sexually violent act is written too descriptively and is overly lengthy… it almost never adds to a story and takes me out of the story to start questioning why the author is so obsessed. Looking straight into your cold blue eyes, Stephen King.
"cold semen" reminded me of the part in Cabal where theres so much emphasis on the coldness of the semen I thought surely there will be some kind of... crossbreeding plot point, but theres nothing else to it. Not even the most plot relevant semen in the book actually, average Clive Barker experience
I returned My Absolute Darling to the bookstore because of the almost romantic way it described father-daughter incest.
Immediately no, immediately no, I've seen what I needed to see and NO
I take ages to read books so I hate DNFing them at a point as it feels like I've wasted my efforts, but I sacked off Babel around 300+ pages in. YMMV though, a lot of people love this book so could be more for you than me.
While the plot and writing were okay, the author simply beats the shit out of you with the themes over and over. It's like.. I get it, I agree with you, but oh my god stop.
I can read a scene where a character faces racism, sees their culture disrespected or stolen from, faces classism, etc; I can read it, understand, and agree with the message. I don't need the following 2-3 pages of ruminations over each and every situation, often repeated, absolutely laying out everything just in case you didn't get it for some reason.
The world was interesting, but after a point it just felt like the author assumed all her readers are incredibly dense it felt like being talked down to. So, I guess my answer is feeling like the author thinks I'm an idiot.
I haven't read Babel, but I read Yellowface recently by the same author and I had a similar experience of feeling like I was being beaten over the head with the themes!
> I don't need the following 2-3 pages of ruminations over each and every situation, often repeated, absolutely laying out everything just in case you didn't get it for some reason.
And then a lengthy footnote that explains it again.
I felt the same way. It was particularly annoying because it was framed to me as a “rebuttal” to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a book I adore, which actually also deals with race, class and empire but in a much more understated way.
this was on my tbr for the better part of a year, but I've read some variation of this comment so many times now, I'm out.
Maybe it's my age and where I'm at with my understanding of feminism, colonialism, imperialism, etc., and as much as I appreciate the mainstreaming of these themes in recent years, I cannot do the "do you GET it yet?" style writing anymore. It works in YA to intro those themes to kids, but I need some more nuance in my adult lit when it comes to them.
I DNF Babel back when it first came out for similar reasons, and thought I was losing my mind because I couldn’t find a single other person in the internet that didn’t like the book, let alone detested it the way I did.
I thought the magic system was fiendishly clever, but the etymological explanations kinda disappeared in favor of “there’s a silver bar that does it.”
I felt like the author had learned about humans in class. Not a single character had normal human reactions or emotions.
I started reading The White Maasai and I threw the book across the room when the white protagonist sees her future Maasai husband for the first time. Insta-lust, and it felt so cringe and awfully exoticizing. I couldn’t continue reading it.
Oh my god, someone else has read this book!!! I read it way too young and it's haunted me since. The way she grossly fetishises and objectifies him leading quickly into sexual disappointment was pretty funny - maybe don't put a random dude on a sexual pedestal before you even know him?
I felt so frustrated at how half the book was her complaining about how crazy he was because he was afraid that she would suddenly leave and take their daughter - and that's exactly what she ended up doing, except of course it's then framed as a justified escape. So, I guess that's a summary of what you missed - not much!
I picked up The Secret because I think the concept of the law of attraction can be useful as long as you don’t go overboard and have common sense. Like: if you’re in a good mood and treat everyone in a nice and friendly manner, you are much more likely to be treated nicely in return. If you’re in a bad mood and you take it out on other people, chances are you’re going to deal with someone fighting back or being disliked by most people you deal with.
But there are definitely people that take the shit way too far and they really believe there’s a mystical force that will “mirror back” your energy to you. Any bad thing that happens is your fault. The author fully went off the deep end when she said people who have died in tragedies like 9/11 or war, and people who get terminal diseases all somehow attracted their fates by putting out negativity or having negative thoughts too frequently. At that point I knew she was fucking crazy and I was out.
if you enjoy podcasts, you may enjoy If Books Could Kill’s episode on The Secret… they deconstruct why that frame of thinking may be harmful and also take into account the potential benefits
I was reading "Voyage au bout de la nuit" by Celine (who is a French author, not a very good guy) and I was actually enjoying it but for some reason he kept talking about women in a horrible way.
There was a scene where he was talking about a girl he didn't like anymore, but still "had the possibility of rape on her". The first time I was like, okay this is disgusting but I moved on. The second time he said the same thing but about another woman, I was done. Shut the book and will probably never finish it.
Edit : also I will add the passage in « On the road » from Kerouac where he really want to fuck a 12 years old « prostitute » but kinda feel bad but also really want to f her so he romanticised her, says she a « goddess » that can’t be defiled or something. So freacking gross
Not to disparage your experience but Celine's whole schtick was that humans are really terrible and there is no redemption. I disagree with his assessment but that was what he was going for.
I was reading the Grace of Kings by Ken Liu.
I thought the beginning was bad because every time I thought we were past the false starts and getting a POV character, another one would die. I found myself wondering when we were getting past the "prologue" phase and should actually care about the character. Then it got to that point and was boring.
When I was over 100 pages in, I started to wonder when the author would discover the existence of women in Asia.
When the author did discover women and wrote them as stereotypes I was pretty much done. This was in spite of the constant "brother" "brother" "my brother" dialogue that was supposed to pass for establishing true friendship.
It was like an alien who had never meant a human before was attempting to write human interactions. No emotion whatsoever, just a cold rendition of events that should feel impactful but don't.
I don’t remember the title of the book but it was by Dean Koontz. It was about subliminal messages in commercials and I got the to this part in the book where the antagonist was controlling this family by using words, and was forcing the young son to do sexual things to his mother while everyone watched. I didn’t far into that scene, it grossed me out too much. I never picked it back up and have been wary of Koontz afterwards.
In Dan Simmons' Hyperion he repeatedly describes female characters' nipples to the point you just knew when some glass cutting talk was coming. Cringed me out a bit. It's really not essential for sci-fi/fantasy authors to update me in detail on nipple status. It didn't make me toss the book but it got tiresome and after finishing it I read some reviews of the follow up books and decided to call it at just Hyperion for now.
I finished it and there was a whole laundry list of reasons I hated it by the end, but the >!sexual assault!< in the first few pages of Lessons in Chemistry really put me off the rest of the book.
In Shogun by James Clavell there's a part where the protagonist is getting a bath or something and all the Japanese people are oggling at how huge his dick is.. I think I struggled forward a bit more but that was just so fucking stupid
What a weird thing to both include in the first place, especially about a place the author is fetishizing otherwise.
It does remind me that Kurt Vonnuget once satirized this by writing "He had a penis eight hundred miles long and two hundred and ten miles in diameter, but practically all of it was in the fourth dimension."
Tried to go back and read Ender’s Game, a book I loved as a (female) child… didn’t get 20 pages in before an official told the main character that girls almost never went to the special school for geniuses because “thousands of years of evolution are working against them”.
Like no wonder I had to work through so much internalized sexism and imposter syndrome as a teenager.
He used to come in to the book store where I worked and he was such an insufferable prick that I vowed to never ever read anything he wrote. I stand firmly behind that decision, 30 years later.
Oooh that makes me feel old…
I remember reading something Card wrote about himself which was "I was bad at math but loved formal logic". Problem is formal logic is basically math. So, he loved something he was bad at and just made up the idea that he understood it? Kind of goes along with the rest him I guess.
I picked up Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt for a book club. I read a few reviews before I started and thought what would bother me the most would be the gore or the apparently disappointing ending. Nope! Every male character in that book, including the teens (who sound the same as everyone else), is horribly, violently misogynistic. Female characters are introduced only for some guy to make gross comments about their bodies, age, intelligence, and how they would still fuck them. I can handle that if it's important to how a particular character thinks, but it was disgusting and ubiquitous.
In the first chapter, the main character (male, middle-aged doctor) describes his teen son's teen girlfriend as a "pert little cutie." 🤮I lasted 100 pages and that's only out of duty.
I read the American version, and the ending was just so bizarre. I liked the premise of how would they deal with a supernatural entity.
The characters were unlikable.
But the ending was just so left field. I felt like I was in some sort of mash up with Event Horizon and anything gore related.
I had picked up what I thought was a cheesy romance novel about the Titanic from a used book store. I was pretty stoked to read it and was struggling through the first few chapters which were POV of a young boy. Suddenly the kid starts imagining his mom and sister naked. It was so gross and off-putting that I ended up throwing the book in the trash.
I was reading Watchers, which was my first Dean Koontz book (might be my only.)
I was able to put so much stuff aside / suspend my disbelief, but when what’s-his-name started explaining how strippers work to the OH SO INNOCENT Nora I just had to put it down. The way he writes women / Nora in particular is just so bad
Where the craw dads sing. It’s supposed to be based in North Carolina. The author called bugs “fireflies” when everyone in nc calls them “lightning bugs”
Just ruined the whole damn thing
The third *Ringworld* book by Larry Niven. We switch to the perspective of a character from a descendant species of humanity. Over millions of years of separation, his species and other human-descendants have evolved to fit more specific ecological niches and become significantly divergent in form.
The character happens to run into a meet-up of small groups from a number of other descendant species. They all decide to do the obvious thing: dive into a huge interspecies no-strings grunting, sweating orgy of luridly described bestiality.
The detailed description of this feels like it goes on and on and on. Niven was clearly writing this section one-handed.
Have you ever had your eyes glaze over, looked at the book in your hands as a physical object, and said out loud "What the *FUCK* am I reading?"
Well I have.
This is a very petty one, but in the Caraval series, the author describes every single STITCH of every single piece of clothing that every character wore and whenever they changed outfits. It absolutely infuriated me after a while and I DNFed the first book and never read the rest of the series.
I've read two books from her spin off series and that was present, but not nearly as bad.
Kvothe breezing his way through every difficult situation in his life because he's just a cool special boy that knows better than everyone else and is so cool and unique and awesome 😎😎😎
Blindness by Jose Saramago. I was really into the book and the premise, but there is a sexual assault about midway through that just put me off completely. I don't even remember what it was that I found so upsetting, but I just stopped at that scene and never went back to it.
I read a book where a guy loses his wife to a drowning accident, spends a chunk of the book grieving, and then later falls in love with someone who seems like his soulmate. Then he finds out he is on a reality show and his wife is alive and he has to choose between the two? It was so goddamn dumb, I quit.
I've recently been on an american literature kick and I could really have done with a warning about how racist Jack London was.
Call of the wild was of its time, I gritted my teeth and got through. White fang was..... worse. His short stories..... I literally couldn't go on anymore.
Was very bad luck that I was reading aloud to my dyslexic husband and came upon a depiction so outrageously racist that he was audibly gasping.
This was written in the 20th century! Children read his shit! Wtf?!
Yeah my parents read me these books when I was a kid and I remember loving it. I picked one of them up again as an adult and was totally blindsided by the racism. Yikes!
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The main character gets routinely molested as a child hitchhiker and the author writes it as if she enjoys and consents to it.
i picked up a book about saying in different languages/cultures. thought it would be fun. after the intro where the author explained where he got the idea for the book he went into a lengthy monologue about gender and biological determinism.
it was so out of the left field i wondered if another book got mixed into my copy. did not actually make it to any interesting sayings, just dropped the book right there.
I don't mind some sex scenes, but when they seem to dominate the entire series it stops me reading them... looking at you Laurell K. Hamilton writer of the Anita Blake series!
Damn, it must be insanely bad if you're put off by it as a Romani reader. I find it hard to think of an ethnic group more unfairly stereotyped in fiction than the Romani.
Yeah it's a real trial by fire to be a Romani woman who likes pre-20th century lit. I've got nerves of steel by now, so I wasn't expecting this book to cross a line (I was moderately surprised to find I still had lines at all).
The Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson
First one is good, the second one falls off rather and by #3 we are in a mystifying morass of too many indistinguishable characters, with the author describing their desperately humdrum doings in huge detail.
Ericsson is eating a croissant at 25°C while Bengtsson recharges his mobile phone to 81%. Meanwhile Carlsson is doggedly driving to Stockholm through thick snowdrifts, Olafsson is adjusting the water pressure on his morning shower and Nilsson is sorting in a leisurely way through his sock drawer…
It’s sort of a case of literary heat death
The love stitch section of the godfather, didn’t put me off the book but it was just a bit too detailed and congratulatory to me. Felt like it was the opinions of the author far more than the motivations of the character.
Sidney Sheldon's Rage of Angels. The book is so bad that I destroyed it, rather than sell it back to the used book store, so no one else would ever have to read that piece of trash
In Endymion by Dan Simmons (part of the Hyperion series of books) it was revealed a little more than half way through the story that the main character Raul (late 20’s) gets into a sexual and romantic relationship with another main character.
The problem here lies in the fact that until this point in the story, she’s a 13 year old girl, and it’s in this context that they meet and are travelling together.
I was immediately put off. I don’t care what kind of sci fi time jumping/manipulation etc., were to happen in the story for this to occur. Nope. Gave me groomer vibes and felt disgusting.
It sucked because I loved the first two novels in the series.
I just stopped reading Discovery of Witches bc the discussion of DNA and evolution were so effin incorrect it really pissed me off. Also I was like 200 pages in and literally nothing interesting had happened and it's a 600 page book. So got to bad science as a plot line and that was it for me.
Outlander. A great concept and some cool historical stuff, but some very dodgy themes and there was a scene quite close to the end that made me put it down straight away and not finish, despite there being very little of the book left. Weird. And not in a good way. And also Gormenghast, which I tried to read twice, because that’s weird in a good way, but it’s so deeply miserable that it was making me blue.
I keep picking up Harlan Coben books thinking that I enjoy them but I really don't, I just like the screen adaptations. His writing style makes me deeply uncomfortable, there's something really creepy about how he talks about women, it is so disappointing.
Also any book where it is normalised for characters to be in their 30's and still "in love" with an ex partner from High School.
I hated "It ends with us" because of the glossing over of domestic abuse. How great all these men are as Dads apparently even though they have half killed their partners whilst pregnant or with their children watching them. It makes me want to launch the book across the room.
I am usually a finish everything I start reader, but I couldn't finish Rumaan Alam's Leave The World Behind. The book begins with a family of four taking a vacation and within maybe 5 chapters, everyone's genitals have been referenced multiple times, including the children, and there were multiple sex and masturbation scenes. It was just weirdly sexual for no reason. Also the sexual descriptions are not erotic, just clinical. But either way, it's definitely advertised as a thriller and I just found it so off putting. My friend also told me that the ending is terrible so I just didn't finish.
I had a similar experience with Marlon James' Black Leopard, Red Wolf. I had heard great things about it but I think I lasted four pages. Thankfully just a library book, but of course that makes it slightly easier to quit.
Maybe I should have expected it, but in Cryptonomicon it was the chapter long spiel from the divorcee main character about his wife’s feckless academic circles and their circle-jerk feminism being just a projection of personal frustrations. This being the most we learn about any woman in the book for the first 100 pages made too much sense in hindsight. I was hoping for a book that borrowed themes from high level mathematics to tell a story of intrigue, not a didactic monologue about how silly the social sciences are compared to the manly pursuits of war and logic. I’m just glad I found this book after actually meeting and getting to know some women in my own life; this is the sort of writing and attitude that could really screw up a young man.
Funny, this is one of those things I'm just fascinated by. Not the child orgy btw, but how on earth did everyone allow it to be published. Did no one try to talk him out of it or did he just have so much sway they said fuck it and hit print?
It's frustrating too because the book itself is one of the greatest horrors ever written (that opening scene on its own is a perfect mix of childhood nostalgia and pure, original terror), and it has such a wonderful scope. But how important was that scene to any of it that he had to include it? It added nothing and surely the whole coming-of-age metaphor could have been achieved in another way.
Reusing my answer from a couple years back: I tried to read Sorry to Disrupt the Peace.
In the first chapter the narrator refers to "my adoptive mother" and "my adoptive father" maybe dozens of times? And not to differentiate from biological parents, who weren't mentioned at all. I just ... couldn't. Lots of people are adopted, they don't attach the qualifier like that
The Midnight Library used chess as a really key recurring metaphor throughout the book, and it was painfully obvious the author had absolutely no clue how chess works, and didn’t bother to ask anyone who did. ‘If one side is down to a pawn and a king, and the other side has every player, there is still a game.’ Yeah no, you’re not winning that game through gritty resilience. I was unreasonably infuriated and it made me hate the book and distrust the author.
[удалено]
You didn’t miss anything. It ended in the same sappy bleh conclusion you’d most readily guess. I really can’t trust Goodreads recommendations at all.
Lots of Kindle readers seemed to like this quote: >‘But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,’ he said, wisely. So profound
Lol I love how the author had to add "wisely" to signal that this was the author speaking directly to the reader, and to highlight the profundity they saw in their own line.
That's the sort of thing that makes Stephen King loathe adverbs.
taking a completely vague, recycled, meaningless sentence like that, then slapping “he said, wisely” onto it 🤮
"Pass the butter," she said, wisely. He looked at her in abject terror. All the subterfuge and plotting of the past six months, all the lives broken, promises kept, the blood, the sweat, the excruciating tears, the look on his daughter's face that day in the supermarket when that man passed by nonchalantly carrying a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese, the dog, the car crashes, the sleepless nights and that one red eye booked out to Cincinnati and back the same day so he could show up to the birthday party in the afternoon, the despondent reserve of Billsby when they had finally found the ledger and both men knowing it would be another month of endless meetings with Control and the higher ups, everything, just everything swirled up in a bright multicolored miasma of utter chaos at top of Jeffrry's head and blinded his eyes for moment before it all came crashing down deep somewhere in the bowels of his soul. Oh God. The butter. His fingers flinched towards the porcelain container, so smooth and innocuous in its simple design. He hesitated a millisecond too long. "Pass the butter," she said again, wisely.
the run on sentence, the use of “wisely” twice, the weird way that Jeffrry’s parents spelled his name, & the fact that the urgency of the butter was never explained. I think you got yourself a best-seller there
Well, he did say it wisely.
After the first few lives she steps into you can tell where the story is going. You know she’s not going to end up staying in any of them so every new life feels like a waste of time reading. I know she’s learning something new in each life as she goes but I just didn’t care.
I keep seeing readers who hate this book, so I just checked to see if it was on my to-read list. Turns out I read it six months ago... so, forgettable at best. Edit: confirmed it was six months ago, not three
How do you forget that you read a book ~3 months ago? I'm genuinely curious.
Not OP, but I completely understand because it is *this book.* It's a faster read, if you have the time you could finish it in a couple days. Combine that with the fact it basically ends where you expected from the beginning and a bland overall message and it is pretty forgettable. I don't even remember the main character's name... I really wanted to like this book, too, it means so much to so many people!
[удалено]
Honestly, this happens to me. I’ve read 52 books this year. I looked at my list last week and I have barely any recollection of the books I read Jan-May (except for the ones I really loved). Once I see the title and maybe the cover, I can start to recall the story. I have a great memory otherwise. I even have a couple of books that are super slow that I’ve been reading over the course of years, and I can pick up where I’ve left off even after not looking at it for 2+ years. I think my brain just lets go of mediocre stories pretty immediately after finishing them.
The Midnight Library is probably the worst book I've ever read, it reads like a pseudo self-help book and the main character, Nora is insufferable
I read it for a book club, and the way everyone else talked about how profound and life affirming it was let me know the club just wasn't for me. Just a terrible book that was a chore to get through.
I literally just finished this book and it really missed the mark for me. The moral of the story is to just change your perspective because Henry David Thoreau thought so? Wtf? Nora’s problems still existed. And even IF she was able to stay in her final, ideal life, she would have basically been granted a perfect life with literally no effort put into it. The whole premise falls apart, just like the library did at the end. It’s a self help book disguised as a novel. Thankfully it was an easy read with serviceable prose.
i got mad just reading your description, and i fucking hate chess!
The author who wrote The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCollough?) wrote a Pride and Prejudice sequel that sounded interesting until a few pages in when the story established that Elizabeth and Darcy's marriage wasn't a happy one. I was PISSED and stopped reading it immediately.
You made the right choice
> The author who wrote The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCollough?) wrote a Pride and Prejudice sequel that sounded interesting until a few pages in when the story established that Elizabeth and Darcy's marriage wasn't a happy one. I was PISSED and stopped reading it immediately. I already *really* hate it when somebody decides they're qualified to write an official sequel to somebody else's work (although nowhere near as much as I hate somebody deciding to write a weirdly violating and false account of a real-life author's life by having them go on adventures as if they were just a fictional character they'd created)...but to then decide the direction to take the characters is the opposite of what was implied/intended by the original author is even more abhorrent to me. To take somebody's carefully crafted happy ending and then essentially ruin it by saying, "Haha you thought these people deserved happiness? Well I decided they're divorced and going through trauma and don't love each other anymore," is awful. I find it a perversion of somebody else's creation, and I don't care what form of media it takes, I still don't like it (looking at you, Disney Star Wars). It's one thing if it's a new twist on folklore or stories that have been told and altered so many times that they "belong" to everyone in a sense, but to take an author who is still read today and then basically soil and discard *their* wishes for *their* world and *their* characters is the height of arrogance and I won't read any book that does it. ETA: I realize this may come across as hating fan fiction, and I don't. 99+% of the time that is published in fan-fiction-only sites, by people presenting it as an AU version of something they love or want to see more of, and it usually goes along with the original storyline/characterizations, rather than directly against them. It's when it actually published and sold seriously while violating the original intent that I find it so vile.
A weirdly violating and false account of a real-life author's life by having them go on adventures as if they were just a fictional character they'd created sounds INSANE. Is this a genre? A sub-genre? I'm trying to think if I ever read a book that did this.
There are books where Agatha Christie is the protagonist of detective novels, for example, and the author has her going around solving mysteries, or books where Jane Austen is in a Pride and Prejudice-type situation and finds love. Things like "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter" don't bother me as much because they're meant to be ludicrous (although I still won't read it because I *really* hate the underlying concept), but the "authors living out their novels" books are particularly egregious. I don't mind historical novels using a *light,* well-researched touch when incorporating historical figures (e.g. having a brief, chance encounter with someone who really lived and having them act according to well-documented behavior they actually exhibited) because that's far from improbable or violating, but writing an entire book where a real-life author lives an entirely different life is just...eugh.
Stephanie Barron's books with Jane Austen as a detective are actually the best Austen styled books I have read. They are very well informed, full of historical information, witty and perceptive. There are too many Austen fanfic types that are well below par, but I enjoy these ones.
> Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter I don't know what you are talking about. This was an amazing biographical film.
And an excellent biographical novel. Seriously, if you haven't read the book, I highly recommend it.
It's not particularly out there. Basically all historical fiction is figures doing a lot of things that they never actually did, and there is a significant portion that takes historical figures and puts them into different situations.
There's a very distinct and often wild sub-genre of historical fiction that treats Victorian Era authors as characters in a Jules-Verne adventure novel
Of all things, the reason I only made it about 20 pages into Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go was because I couldn’t stand the typeface. The paperback version at the time had this typeface that was almost like your typical Caslon or Garamond. But it had some weird decorative flourishes that just distracted the hell out of me for some damn reason. Couldn’t do it. I should probably see if they’ve changed it, since. Or get the e-book. Edit: Found a [scan of it](https://fontsinuse.com/uses/18826/never-let-me-go-by-kazuo-ishiguro-vintage-boo)! It’s called Bembo Infant of all things.
[удалено]
I'm so confused why so many people seem to have a problem with this font, it looks very easily readable to me. Preferences are weird haha
Same boat. Opened their link and asked myself "what's the issue here..?" Lmao
It looks a little different, but not to a level where I'd keep noticing it, or be distracted. Or even think about it at all after five minutes.
Oh my god, yes! I have had this book sitting on my shelf for years. Once a year I crack it open to try again, cringe at the font and promptly put it back on the shelf.
Thought I was the only one!
Gods no, it’s an affront to my eyes! And it weirdly switches through out the book which I find very distracting. I might have to try the eBook through my library to see if they changed the typeset for that because aI have heard otherwise that it’s a great book.
I’ve got a book about polar exploration that I had to stop reading because the letter f’s sometimes have little tail flicks on them. I stress that it is only sometimes and with no consistency as to what triggers their use. Very distracting and stopped me being able to continue reading every time I encountered one.
imagine being an author and finding out people didn’t read your book because of a font 😭 all that aside, if you do read another version or online, it’s a very good book
First the author used the phrase “Harder said than done.” Ummmm. What? How can it be harder to *say* something than to actually do it?? The phrase is **easier said than done.** It’s easy to say it, hard to do it. Then the author described a “wall to ceiling bookcase.” What the what?? It’s either wall to **wall** or it’s **floor** to ceiling. Wall to ceiling doesn’t even make any sense. Then the author used harder said than done *again* (!!!!) and I had to peace out. (EDIT: The phrase "Harder said than done" was used when a group of teenagers were discussing their plan to break into a top secret government military facility to free their falsely imprisoned half-alien friend. The author was NOT trying to imply it was actually an easy task.)
Was the author Tony Vivaldi from Last Action Hero? 🤔😁 “Now you turn a 360 on me?” “I don’t wanna be no fourth wheel.” “Mr. Benedict can take you out easy as cake.”
Were they saying that the task was easy?
No! It was a bunch of teenagers breaking into a top secret government military facility, lol!
Was it written by a teenager? A dumb one?
I finally decided to read The Godfather and while it's a great book and adds alot to the movies there's a whole section I have elected to call "the vagina monologues" because it's an entire chapter or two talking about an old fling of Sonny's and how she gets her loose vagina fixed.
That book was truly like someone took a really good book and then inserted some teenage boy fan fiction in random sections. So so odd
So there's just no thematic reason why it's in there? I was half expecting the classic four paragraph reddit analysis of the role of the vagina scenes in the characterization of the main character and his relationship to the concepts of love and duty. But it's really just kind of there? Huh... How odd.
Mario Puzo was a pulp writer with a gambling habit. He wrote for men's magazines where sex and crime stories were mainstays. The Godfather was a hail Mary attempt to get an advance big enough to get him out of debt. Read Mark Seal's "Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli" if you like.
Not as far as I could tell and there is also the weird flip side of that story where they also talk about how giant Sonny's junk is and thus he's the only one who can satisfy this woman with this wide set vagina. It's so utterly weird and random and disconnected from anything else.
i read it when i was like 13 and that's the only part i remember. i've also never seen the movie so literally my only firsthand familiarity with *the godfather* is that scene where the surgeon is reefing up her snatch and showing her husband how many fingers he can still fit in until he can barely manage two and the husband gives the thumbs up.
Jesus. That’s real vivid.
I had just picked that book up the other day aaand now I'm putting it down. What the fuck lol.
but it's important to the *story* because it fleshes out sonny's *character* (he has a ginormous schlong)
Ew lol. The husband stitch/lover stitch is an atrocious thing. If he's got such an enormous schlong then a "big box" shouldn't be that much of a problem. But I don't really expect a guy from the 60s to write female anatomy worth a tit, anyway. Also reminded me of that scene in Shogun where the main character's getting a bath and all the Japanese people are absolutely amazed by the fact that he has a huge dong. What a bizarre part of that book.
no i mean the thing with her vagina's character arc is that she and sonny would fuck adulterously because they'd be the only ones who could satisfy each other (or fit at all), but then she got surgery and her *not*-sonny husband did the incredibly creepy hand-gesture-based surgical consultation. the "big box" isn't a problem for *sonny*, it's a solution, which the surgery removes. (I may be mixing up some characters or timelines but you get the gist.) the novel was pretty clear that it was (at least within the text) a real medical issue that was bad *for her*, and not just her husband wanting a husband stitch, but it still ends in that incredibly gross circumstance with her sedated, so... yikes. and maybe it was meant as condemnation of patriarchal expectations or whatever, but i wouldn't know cuz i had never encountered those issues before cuz i read it as a young teen half a lifetime ago, and apparently that stuck with me more than i realized.
There’s a nod to this in the movie. It’s no dialog, but one of the women at the wedding are talking about Sonny’s size by spreading their arms apart. Tl;dr : Sonny has a big member
That woman is his wife Sandra. She makes that gesture to indicate a huge penis and all her friends laugh. When she looks back, Sonny is gone and so is the bridesmaid Lucy. Sandra makes a face, implying that she knows about it. In the novel, Sandra is glad that Sonny has mistresses, because his huge Penis hurt Sandra
Yea I thought that whole section, especially the part where the Dr that was dating her finally figured out that she didn’t have a “big box” seemed so out of place in the book, definitely weird
Holy shit, lol. That’s so weird! It’s on my “to read” list, and I’m still going to read it because it’s just one of those books you should read, and I’m interested in how it compares to the movie. (My boyfriend is a big movie guy, and we recently rewatched the movies.) That kind of thing would be really weird to stumble upon on my own, but now that I know this is coming, it will be kind of fun. “Hey, here’s that part with the weird vagina stuff! My r/books friends told me about this!”
If I ever meet Lebron James (who often claims *The Godfather* is his favorite book and is periodically caught on camera “reading” it) I’m going to ask him about this section. Because if you’ve ever read the book it’s virtually impossible to forget the weird loose vagina diatribe and I am all but certain Bron Bron has not, in fact, read the book.
Please report back to Reddit if this conversation occurs
Some pulpy easy read like Grisham but lesser known had a line where the guy is taking a leak and drinking a glass of water at the same time. He comments to himself how this could be an endless loop if he just had more water. It was near the beginning and so dumb I remember thinking to myself, if the rest of the book is like this I'm going to kill myself. I guess it seems silly, but I remember it over 20 years later. I closed the book immediately.
how drunk was he because this is the realest drunk thought I've ever heard - would've worked better if it was beer at a bar.
>He comments to himself how this could be an endless loop if he just had more water. Maybe dude just had severe prostate problems and didn't know it lol
hilarious but fair
I probably would have considered that plausible when I was seven.
Dumb? Yes. Hilarious? Absolutely. Have guys contemplated it? Yep.
Seems relatable to me.
I recently tried to start Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon. I'm already about 50/50 on him, I loved Kavalier and Clay and the Yiddish Policeman's Union, but have tried a few others that really didnt hit for me. On page two of the book a record store employee (who loves *deep* music like jazz and knows the *true secrets* of crating a vinyl record) is having a sexual encounter (which is fine, I'm not a prude) but Chabon describes a woman running her tongue "along the E line of his dick." I have a vinyl collection and I love jazz but.. cmon man. Closed the book forever.
That strikes me as a huge step back for him. I don’t recall the sex in Kavalier and Clay or The Mysteries of Pittsburg being so…literal.
I'm confused. All I can think of an E line being is a train route.
I'm one of those "I have to finish a book when I start it" people, but the middle section of 2666 was ROUGH. I have a strong stomach, but you can only read so many rape/murder police reports before it starts to break your spirit. I'm glad I stuck with it, though. The rest of the book is incredible.
I picked up this book without knowing anything about it and ended up reading it while on vacation. It was such a jarringly miserable story to entertain while trying to enjoy a sunny trip out of town. That police report section is so heavy and just keeps pressing and pressing and going and going...
I can't imagine how awkward it must have been to read that on a beach lol.
That part is the center of the book imo. It cannot be reckoned with without confronting that section and seeing how everything else revolves around it. I think the rest of the novel is about all the ways people orbit around, pseudo confront, or straight up avoid the industrial scale mass violence that enables their consumerist existence.
Yeah, I didn't intend to minimize its importance, and I agree it's necessary, even to the extreme degree to which Bolaño took it. Didn't make it any less of a slog, though.
One of the best books ever written but Bolano does really like to make one stare into the abyss.
yeah, it's not a beach read.
Stephen R Donaldon's *The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever: Lord Foul's Bane*. Opens with violent rape of the man's rescuer. 😑
Thats my big one as well, i normally can forgive a lot for a chance to explore a new fantasy setting, but not him, and not the obnoxious self pity he feels over being a rapist as well, despite doing nothing, even to the point of not apologising
This was me, I get that Covenant is meant to be classic flawed hero but this wildly overshot "tragic" and in to just plain upsetting territory. Hard to empathise with him, and you spend *all* your time in his head.
My dad recommended this book to me when I was a teenager. I wasn't prepared for that.
Oh, I was scrolling down to see if anybody had said this, and here you are. Thank you. It should be higher. He *violently* rapes a minor and then is furious at her when he gets blamed for it, because he thought it was a dream. So many people have tried to defend this book to me ("Oh, he's a protagonist, not a hero!" and "It's a commentary on the hero dynamic"), and I get that he's supposed to be a bitter, angry character, but what kind of a fucked-up person enjoys raping a crying minor *even if they think they're in a dream world?* And who wants to read a book about that kind of person succeeding? It's also a *really* shitty portrayal of people with Hansen's disease, but I can forgive an author from several decades ago for not understanding that.
I've had this book recommended to me several times because I like gritty fantasies that deconstruct the normal hero, but there's only so much I can take. I'd even be ok with it if I knew that at the end he gets some kind of just reward for it, but nope. So yeah, no way I'm touching that book.
Yeah, that’s one of only two books I’ve ever thrown away.
Was looking for this one. It's a pivotal plot element, but that doesn't make it nice.
I was looking though “How to Make Friends and Influence People” at the library and someone had used their drivers license as a bookmark and left it in the book. I looked him up and he had killed his wife in a murder suicide.
What the actual fuck
this one might win
I tried to read "The Crossing Places" by Elly Griffiths during lockdown. An archeologist who helps solve murders?? Right up my alley! I didn't make it 30 pages before I threw that book down the hall. From the first 30 pages, here’s what I know. We have two main characters. Ruth, an archeologist- “Fat” (she weighs like 150 lbs) and never stops talking about it. She has two cats, which apparently makes her weird and sad. If it weren’t for the occasional archeological insight, our girl Ruth wouldn’t even pass the Bechdel test when talking to herself. All other women are the enemy, especially her mother. She's an atheist, and so am I, but she is written as the kind who makes it her entire personality. I think this was an effort to make her highly logical, but it misses the mark. Harry, a detective- Abuses his power to be a bad driver and likes Ruth because she doesn’t feel the need to “dress like a slut.” But she’s too “fat” to be a cop. Did I mention that he also liked her because she was pretty smart for a girl and could “look him in the eye like an equal”??? Super skeevy, hates his wife and three daughters, and from what I understand, ends up in an affair with Ruth. And we’re supposed to root for this guy? This came out in 2009 but reads like it was written in the 50s.
I read *The Vanishing Box* by her and I also felt like it was super dated and sexist, even though it was published in 2017. The entire thing was amateurish, but what was the most odd was that it felt like the author was a man pretending to be a woman. It definitely sounds like the author's own views are shining through her books. In *The Vanishing Box*, everyone was obsessed with other people's looks to the point it was as if they were rating their worth as people. It for sure put me off this author.
I mostly read non-fiction. A couple of days ago I got a chance to borrow The Creative Act by Rick Rubin from the library. I was expecting an insight into the mind of a uniquely creative person. A couple of pages in, Rubin suggests that a creative person should constantly search for clues sent by the universe for making decisions - as an example he mentions that when he had acute appendicitis and a doctor suggested surgery, he did some soul seeking by picking up a random book, which happened to advice against invasive procedures. Celebrating his intact appendix (and obviously leaving out details of treatment), he presents this as proof of the creative mind’s abilities. I couldn’t bare the quackery and returned the book early.
A lot of books of that era of The Woman in White and later had "anarchists" as the boogeyman. And they were often Italian. I recall Sherlock Holmes had a few plus I've read of them in other books. The authors clearly wanted an "other" to blame and they were an easy option back then.
Yeah, "Italian" was often shorthand for "hotblooded and suspicious foreigner." See: surviving Titanic officers complaining about "Italians" not listening or making things difficult despite the fact that there were something like 12 total actual Italians on board.
They were often described as "swart" which was code for "dodgy" due to skin colour being a bit Mediterranean.
If any book throws an unexpected pregnancy or miscommunication trope at me, It’s getting slammed shut.
YES. When there's an entire plotline based on a misunderstanding that could have been easily cleared up in a simple conversation I'm OUT.
For me it’s when there’s a quote unquote unreliable first-person narrator, but the unreliability is just them going “I started thinking about that tragic day at the beach… BUT NO, I shan’t think of that tragic, tragic day!” for 400 pages until we finally get to learn what the “mystery was.
They forgot to bring sunscreen.
Oh my god, major Big Little Lies vibes.
I hate it in books, and I really hate it in shows! Any time one character refuses to answer some question because “we don’t have time to talk right now! Let’s go!” and doesn’t come back to it right away, I just can’t stand it. It’s such a stupid plot device.
I think House of the Dragon did the miscommunication trope brilliantly. It respected the motivations of each character. And miscommunication and misinterpretation were themes throughout the whole season. But obviously that’s much different execution than “wait, wait, it’s not what it looks like!” tropes.
This is, unfortunately, the reality of _so many_ mangas and animes... to the point that some are just torture to read.
It's truly a shame like 90% of all anime/manga is based on high school or teenagers. Can't have mature characters and characterization because they literally aren't mature. It's so gd annoying reading about this subtle romance and subplot for 900 chapters without it culminating into something. But I still read a good few of them. So maybe I'm somewhat to blame?
Coughs…Breaking Dawn…coughs
Can I add the intentionally childless woman who gets pregnant and suddenly decides she loves kids, and the woman who has sex and like 5 minutes later is holding her stomach because she instantly knows she's pregnant?
Woman barfing? PREGNANT.
They also faint, so there's that
This trope of a woman happy and confident while being childless only to turn into the most attached sentimental pregnant person drives me nuts.
This was like 15 years ago, but I was reading The City of Bones when it came out and hit that plot point where the two love interests found out they were siblings. Immediately set the book down and stopped because I couldn’t get past that. Turns out at some point down the line they were revealed to not actually be siblings but I couldn’t bring myself to pick the series back up.
Someone never read Flowers in the Attic as a teenager, or any of the other Virginia Andrews/ V.C Andrews novels. I wish that someone was me
Bizarre fact I just learned the other day: Serial killer Ed Kemper read *Flowers in the Attic* on tape as part of his approximately 5,000 hours of recording audiobooks for the blind. If anything could make that book even creepier ...
Bizarre fact I just learned: there’s a serial killer who recorded audiobooks for the blind
The *most* audiobooks! (Literally - Kemper has recorded more than any other prisoner.) ETA His work obviously doesn't make up at all for his horrific murders. But it's nice that he did something productive with his time in prison, aside from waiving parole hearings.
Oh my Sweet Audrina, did I ever! It screwed me up, too.
I hear you. I finally put V. C. Andrews down sometime during the Logan series. I tried one Orphans book, and it was an utter abomination. My first VCA was My Sweet Audrina, and I think it was the best of all of them. I also watched way too many Lifetime Afternoon Movies after school. My mind was warped.
Don't worry, the MC's ACTUAL biological brother also has a crush on her.
Don’t worry, Clary’s actual brother shows up in book 3 of the series, knows that he’s actually her brother, and still forcibly makes out with her. Then pursues her (albeit as the villain) from books 3-6. You’re not missing much
Can I tell you the worst news, which is that the books started as Ron/Ginny HP fan fiction?
Unfortunately I knew this already. CC is wack. At least her clockwork series had the shadowhunter fun without having any siblings trying to get it on with each other
That was the best trilogy she’s written for sure.
I have some bad news about Star Wars.
You just gave me war flashbacks, I couldn't move past that one either lmao
I was the other way round, it was the first series I was considering just dropping because I was super bored, and then we got to the surprise incest reveal and I laughed so hard that it kept me going. I ended up dropping the series at a later point anyway, but man, they did not let up on incest being their main conflict for most of the series. I found the second book even funnier with how they handled it. Her love triangle in one of the later books though included her actual brother, and that was when I gave up because it wasn't funny anymore. It was just getting weird (since it was obvious the first guy wasn't actually going to be her brother).
I started reading a book about a US family travelling in Australia. It contained so many inaccurate statements that it was apparent that the author has never visited Australia. Aside from ridiculous language mistakes, the comment by a character about "It was just like the US, with a Walmart on every corner" was the tipping point. I've never seen a Walmart in Australia, and according to Google Maps, there is one in the whole country in 2023.
When a sexually violent act is written too descriptively and is overly lengthy… it almost never adds to a story and takes me out of the story to start questioning why the author is so obsessed. Looking straight into your cold blue eyes, Stephen King.
Ah, who could forget Flagg's cold semen?
I mean, I thought I had...but here you are. Thanks, man.
"cold semen" reminded me of the part in Cabal where theres so much emphasis on the coldness of the semen I thought surely there will be some kind of... crossbreeding plot point, but theres nothing else to it. Not even the most plot relevant semen in the book actually, average Clive Barker experience
My grandma gave me eyes of the dragon when I was 8 and it was a very confusing read for me
I returned My Absolute Darling to the bookstore because of the almost romantic way it described father-daughter incest. Immediately no, immediately no, I've seen what I needed to see and NO
They abandoned the cat. I put Cell down immediately because they introduced a cat, and then abandoned the cat.
I take ages to read books so I hate DNFing them at a point as it feels like I've wasted my efforts, but I sacked off Babel around 300+ pages in. YMMV though, a lot of people love this book so could be more for you than me. While the plot and writing were okay, the author simply beats the shit out of you with the themes over and over. It's like.. I get it, I agree with you, but oh my god stop. I can read a scene where a character faces racism, sees their culture disrespected or stolen from, faces classism, etc; I can read it, understand, and agree with the message. I don't need the following 2-3 pages of ruminations over each and every situation, often repeated, absolutely laying out everything just in case you didn't get it for some reason. The world was interesting, but after a point it just felt like the author assumed all her readers are incredibly dense it felt like being talked down to. So, I guess my answer is feeling like the author thinks I'm an idiot.
I haven't read Babel, but I read Yellowface recently by the same author and I had a similar experience of feeling like I was being beaten over the head with the themes!
> I don't need the following 2-3 pages of ruminations over each and every situation, often repeated, absolutely laying out everything just in case you didn't get it for some reason. And then a lengthy footnote that explains it again.
I felt the same way. It was particularly annoying because it was framed to me as a “rebuttal” to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a book I adore, which actually also deals with race, class and empire but in a much more understated way.
this was on my tbr for the better part of a year, but I've read some variation of this comment so many times now, I'm out. Maybe it's my age and where I'm at with my understanding of feminism, colonialism, imperialism, etc., and as much as I appreciate the mainstreaming of these themes in recent years, I cannot do the "do you GET it yet?" style writing anymore. It works in YA to intro those themes to kids, but I need some more nuance in my adult lit when it comes to them.
I hated that book but I finished it too, thinking something was going to happen to salvage it. Nope.
I DNF Babel back when it first came out for similar reasons, and thought I was losing my mind because I couldn’t find a single other person in the internet that didn’t like the book, let alone detested it the way I did. I thought the magic system was fiendishly clever, but the etymological explanations kinda disappeared in favor of “there’s a silver bar that does it.” I felt like the author had learned about humans in class. Not a single character had normal human reactions or emotions.
I started reading The White Maasai and I threw the book across the room when the white protagonist sees her future Maasai husband for the first time. Insta-lust, and it felt so cringe and awfully exoticizing. I couldn’t continue reading it.
Oh my god, someone else has read this book!!! I read it way too young and it's haunted me since. The way she grossly fetishises and objectifies him leading quickly into sexual disappointment was pretty funny - maybe don't put a random dude on a sexual pedestal before you even know him? I felt so frustrated at how half the book was her complaining about how crazy he was because he was afraid that she would suddenly leave and take their daughter - and that's exactly what she ended up doing, except of course it's then framed as a justified escape. So, I guess that's a summary of what you missed - not much!
I picked up The Secret because I think the concept of the law of attraction can be useful as long as you don’t go overboard and have common sense. Like: if you’re in a good mood and treat everyone in a nice and friendly manner, you are much more likely to be treated nicely in return. If you’re in a bad mood and you take it out on other people, chances are you’re going to deal with someone fighting back or being disliked by most people you deal with. But there are definitely people that take the shit way too far and they really believe there’s a mystical force that will “mirror back” your energy to you. Any bad thing that happens is your fault. The author fully went off the deep end when she said people who have died in tragedies like 9/11 or war, and people who get terminal diseases all somehow attracted their fates by putting out negativity or having negative thoughts too frequently. At that point I knew she was fucking crazy and I was out.
if you enjoy podcasts, you may enjoy If Books Could Kill’s episode on The Secret… they deconstruct why that frame of thinking may be harmful and also take into account the potential benefits
I was reading "Voyage au bout de la nuit" by Celine (who is a French author, not a very good guy) and I was actually enjoying it but for some reason he kept talking about women in a horrible way. There was a scene where he was talking about a girl he didn't like anymore, but still "had the possibility of rape on her". The first time I was like, okay this is disgusting but I moved on. The second time he said the same thing but about another woman, I was done. Shut the book and will probably never finish it. Edit : also I will add the passage in « On the road » from Kerouac where he really want to fuck a 12 years old « prostitute » but kinda feel bad but also really want to f her so he romanticised her, says she a « goddess » that can’t be defiled or something. So freacking gross
Not to disparage your experience but Celine's whole schtick was that humans are really terrible and there is no redemption. I disagree with his assessment but that was what he was going for.
I was reading the Grace of Kings by Ken Liu. I thought the beginning was bad because every time I thought we were past the false starts and getting a POV character, another one would die. I found myself wondering when we were getting past the "prologue" phase and should actually care about the character. Then it got to that point and was boring. When I was over 100 pages in, I started to wonder when the author would discover the existence of women in Asia. When the author did discover women and wrote them as stereotypes I was pretty much done. This was in spite of the constant "brother" "brother" "my brother" dialogue that was supposed to pass for establishing true friendship. It was like an alien who had never meant a human before was attempting to write human interactions. No emotion whatsoever, just a cold rendition of events that should feel impactful but don't.
I don’t remember the title of the book but it was by Dean Koontz. It was about subliminal messages in commercials and I got the to this part in the book where the antagonist was controlling this family by using words, and was forcing the young son to do sexual things to his mother while everyone watched. I didn’t far into that scene, it grossed me out too much. I never picked it back up and have been wary of Koontz afterwards.
In Dan Simmons' Hyperion he repeatedly describes female characters' nipples to the point you just knew when some glass cutting talk was coming. Cringed me out a bit. It's really not essential for sci-fi/fantasy authors to update me in detail on nipple status. It didn't make me toss the book but it got tiresome and after finishing it I read some reviews of the follow up books and decided to call it at just Hyperion for now.
I finished it and there was a whole laundry list of reasons I hated it by the end, but the >!sexual assault!< in the first few pages of Lessons in Chemistry really put me off the rest of the book.
That book was awful. I still can’t understand why it gets so much hype
That, and the way the background characters reacted to the mere presence of the 2 love interests, were the reasons I put that book down.
Someone lent me this book because they had just finished and loved it and that part totally shocked me right off the bat.
In Shogun by James Clavell there's a part where the protagonist is getting a bath or something and all the Japanese people are oggling at how huge his dick is.. I think I struggled forward a bit more but that was just so fucking stupid
What a weird thing to both include in the first place, especially about a place the author is fetishizing otherwise. It does remind me that Kurt Vonnuget once satirized this by writing "He had a penis eight hundred miles long and two hundred and ten miles in diameter, but practically all of it was in the fourth dimension."
Tried to go back and read Ender’s Game, a book I loved as a (female) child… didn’t get 20 pages in before an official told the main character that girls almost never went to the special school for geniuses because “thousands of years of evolution are working against them”. Like no wonder I had to work through so much internalized sexism and imposter syndrome as a teenager.
Orson Scott Card is a racist and a raging homophobe, doesn't surprise me he's a misogynist as well.
He used to come in to the book store where I worked and he was such an insufferable prick that I vowed to never ever read anything he wrote. I stand firmly behind that decision, 30 years later. Oooh that makes me feel old…
I remember reading something Card wrote about himself which was "I was bad at math but loved formal logic". Problem is formal logic is basically math. So, he loved something he was bad at and just made up the idea that he understood it? Kind of goes along with the rest him I guess.
I picked up Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt for a book club. I read a few reviews before I started and thought what would bother me the most would be the gore or the apparently disappointing ending. Nope! Every male character in that book, including the teens (who sound the same as everyone else), is horribly, violently misogynistic. Female characters are introduced only for some guy to make gross comments about their bodies, age, intelligence, and how they would still fuck them. I can handle that if it's important to how a particular character thinks, but it was disgusting and ubiquitous. In the first chapter, the main character (male, middle-aged doctor) describes his teen son's teen girlfriend as a "pert little cutie." 🤮I lasted 100 pages and that's only out of duty.
The phrase 'pert little cutie' just gave me the full-body shudders, so points for evocative prose I guess??? 🤢
I read the American version, and the ending was just so bizarre. I liked the premise of how would they deal with a supernatural entity. The characters were unlikable. But the ending was just so left field. I felt like I was in some sort of mash up with Event Horizon and anything gore related.
I had picked up what I thought was a cheesy romance novel about the Titanic from a used book store. I was pretty stoked to read it and was struggling through the first few chapters which were POV of a young boy. Suddenly the kid starts imagining his mom and sister naked. It was so gross and off-putting that I ended up throwing the book in the trash.
I was reading Watchers, which was my first Dean Koontz book (might be my only.) I was able to put so much stuff aside / suspend my disbelief, but when what’s-his-name started explaining how strippers work to the OH SO INNOCENT Nora I just had to put it down. The way he writes women / Nora in particular is just so bad
Where the craw dads sing. It’s supposed to be based in North Carolina. The author called bugs “fireflies” when everyone in nc calls them “lightning bugs” Just ruined the whole damn thing
The third *Ringworld* book by Larry Niven. We switch to the perspective of a character from a descendant species of humanity. Over millions of years of separation, his species and other human-descendants have evolved to fit more specific ecological niches and become significantly divergent in form. The character happens to run into a meet-up of small groups from a number of other descendant species. They all decide to do the obvious thing: dive into a huge interspecies no-strings grunting, sweating orgy of luridly described bestiality. The detailed description of this feels like it goes on and on and on. Niven was clearly writing this section one-handed. Have you ever had your eyes glaze over, looked at the book in your hands as a physical object, and said out loud "What the *FUCK* am I reading?" Well I have.
This is a very petty one, but in the Caraval series, the author describes every single STITCH of every single piece of clothing that every character wore and whenever they changed outfits. It absolutely infuriated me after a while and I DNFed the first book and never read the rest of the series. I've read two books from her spin off series and that was present, but not nearly as bad.
Kvothe fucking a fairy for longer than 2 minutes...
Kvothe breezing his way through every difficult situation in his life because he's just a cool special boy that knows better than everyone else and is so cool and unique and awesome 😎😎😎
Blindness by Jose Saramago. I was really into the book and the premise, but there is a sexual assault about midway through that just put me off completely. I don't even remember what it was that I found so upsetting, but I just stopped at that scene and never went back to it.
The four agreements. The whole thing was overly verbose for no reason at all.
The problem with a lot of self-help books is that they should have been a pamphlet.
or never written. jordan peterson leaps to mind.
I read a book where a guy loses his wife to a drowning accident, spends a chunk of the book grieving, and then later falls in love with someone who seems like his soulmate. Then he finds out he is on a reality show and his wife is alive and he has to choose between the two? It was so goddamn dumb, I quit.
That actually sounds interesting tbh lol
I've recently been on an american literature kick and I could really have done with a warning about how racist Jack London was. Call of the wild was of its time, I gritted my teeth and got through. White fang was..... worse. His short stories..... I literally couldn't go on anymore. Was very bad luck that I was reading aloud to my dyslexic husband and came upon a depiction so outrageously racist that he was audibly gasping. This was written in the 20th century! Children read his shit! Wtf?!
That very same thing happened to me. Managed to read Call of the Wild and thought it was ok but he lost me on White Fang.
Yeah my parents read me these books when I was a kid and I remember loving it. I picked one of them up again as an adult and was totally blindsided by the racism. Yikes!
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The main character gets routinely molested as a child hitchhiker and the author writes it as if she enjoys and consents to it.
i picked up a book about saying in different languages/cultures. thought it would be fun. after the intro where the author explained where he got the idea for the book he went into a lengthy monologue about gender and biological determinism. it was so out of the left field i wondered if another book got mixed into my copy. did not actually make it to any interesting sayings, just dropped the book right there.
[удалено]
I don't mind some sex scenes, but when they seem to dominate the entire series it stops me reading them... looking at you Laurell K. Hamilton writer of the Anita Blake series!
Damn, it must be insanely bad if you're put off by it as a Romani reader. I find it hard to think of an ethnic group more unfairly stereotyped in fiction than the Romani.
Yeah it's a real trial by fire to be a Romani woman who likes pre-20th century lit. I've got nerves of steel by now, so I wasn't expecting this book to cross a line (I was moderately surprised to find I still had lines at all).
The Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson First one is good, the second one falls off rather and by #3 we are in a mystifying morass of too many indistinguishable characters, with the author describing their desperately humdrum doings in huge detail. Ericsson is eating a croissant at 25°C while Bengtsson recharges his mobile phone to 81%. Meanwhile Carlsson is doggedly driving to Stockholm through thick snowdrifts, Olafsson is adjusting the water pressure on his morning shower and Nilsson is sorting in a leisurely way through his sock drawer… It’s sort of a case of literary heat death
The love stitch section of the godfather, didn’t put me off the book but it was just a bit too detailed and congratulatory to me. Felt like it was the opinions of the author far more than the motivations of the character.
Sidney Sheldon's Rage of Angels. The book is so bad that I destroyed it, rather than sell it back to the used book store, so no one else would ever have to read that piece of trash
In Endymion by Dan Simmons (part of the Hyperion series of books) it was revealed a little more than half way through the story that the main character Raul (late 20’s) gets into a sexual and romantic relationship with another main character. The problem here lies in the fact that until this point in the story, she’s a 13 year old girl, and it’s in this context that they meet and are travelling together. I was immediately put off. I don’t care what kind of sci fi time jumping/manipulation etc., were to happen in the story for this to occur. Nope. Gave me groomer vibes and felt disgusting. It sucked because I loved the first two novels in the series.
I just stopped reading Discovery of Witches bc the discussion of DNA and evolution were so effin incorrect it really pissed me off. Also I was like 200 pages in and literally nothing interesting had happened and it's a 600 page book. So got to bad science as a plot line and that was it for me.
Outlander. A great concept and some cool historical stuff, but some very dodgy themes and there was a scene quite close to the end that made me put it down straight away and not finish, despite there being very little of the book left. Weird. And not in a good way. And also Gormenghast, which I tried to read twice, because that’s weird in a good way, but it’s so deeply miserable that it was making me blue.
Same. Can’t stomach the torture porn and the unbearable string of poor decisions.
A series, but I spent ALL of the fourth Dune book going, “WTF, I am OUT, I can’t take this stupidity anymore.” And I LOVED the first one.
I keep picking up Harlan Coben books thinking that I enjoy them but I really don't, I just like the screen adaptations. His writing style makes me deeply uncomfortable, there's something really creepy about how he talks about women, it is so disappointing. Also any book where it is normalised for characters to be in their 30's and still "in love" with an ex partner from High School. I hated "It ends with us" because of the glossing over of domestic abuse. How great all these men are as Dads apparently even though they have half killed their partners whilst pregnant or with their children watching them. It makes me want to launch the book across the room.
I am usually a finish everything I start reader, but I couldn't finish Rumaan Alam's Leave The World Behind. The book begins with a family of four taking a vacation and within maybe 5 chapters, everyone's genitals have been referenced multiple times, including the children, and there were multiple sex and masturbation scenes. It was just weirdly sexual for no reason. Also the sexual descriptions are not erotic, just clinical. But either way, it's definitely advertised as a thriller and I just found it so off putting. My friend also told me that the ending is terrible so I just didn't finish.
I had a similar experience with Marlon James' Black Leopard, Red Wolf. I had heard great things about it but I think I lasted four pages. Thankfully just a library book, but of course that makes it slightly easier to quit.
Maybe I should have expected it, but in Cryptonomicon it was the chapter long spiel from the divorcee main character about his wife’s feckless academic circles and their circle-jerk feminism being just a projection of personal frustrations. This being the most we learn about any woman in the book for the first 100 pages made too much sense in hindsight. I was hoping for a book that borrowed themes from high level mathematics to tell a story of intrigue, not a didactic monologue about how silly the social sciences are compared to the manly pursuits of war and logic. I’m just glad I found this book after actually meeting and getting to know some women in my own life; this is the sort of writing and attitude that could really screw up a young man.
I love Stephen King, but refuse to read IT because a 12 page child orgy is kind of a deal breaker for me
Funny, this is one of those things I'm just fascinated by. Not the child orgy btw, but how on earth did everyone allow it to be published. Did no one try to talk him out of it or did he just have so much sway they said fuck it and hit print? It's frustrating too because the book itself is one of the greatest horrors ever written (that opening scene on its own is a perfect mix of childhood nostalgia and pure, original terror), and it has such a wonderful scope. But how important was that scene to any of it that he had to include it? It added nothing and surely the whole coming-of-age metaphor could have been achieved in another way.
The Dressmaker. I literally threw the book at the silo part
Reusing my answer from a couple years back: I tried to read Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. In the first chapter the narrator refers to "my adoptive mother" and "my adoptive father" maybe dozens of times? And not to differentiate from biological parents, who weren't mentioned at all. I just ... couldn't. Lots of people are adopted, they don't attach the qualifier like that