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Books Not to Read

Anything written by Stephen King after about 1990.

The first couple Harry Potter books were okay, but Rowling (like King) became too big to edit and the quality went way down.

Yeah, the Fifty Shades books were awful. IIRC I only got through the first book.

The World According to Garp.

Disagree on Catch-22; that's a brilliant novel.
 
Apathia said:
I just don't make it through the whole book.
Many years back a friend recommended Atlas Shrugged.

Not many chapters after the rape, I closed the book and never went back to it. Galt and Dagny just kept losing cred for me.
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I never read "Atlas Shrugged" but I did read "The Fountainhead" and there was a rape in that story too. I managed to slog it out to the end but, meh. "If I can't have my artistic vision the way I want it then nobody can have it! I'm going to blow it up!" Real mature way to handle design specs and government mandated safety regulations.
 
theprestige said:
We all know what it's like to pick up what should be a good book, a book that comes highly recommended or has been highly anticipated... Only to discover too late that you've wasted hours of your life that you will never get back.

This is your chance to warn others before they make the same mistake.

I'll start:

Any Dune novel not written by Frank Herbert. Seriously.

Transition, by Iain Banks. Should be a fascinating multiverse novel, turns out to be elaborate revenge torture porn.

Also, any of Bank's "family" novels after Crow Road and Whit. The early ones are good, but later in his career he starts writing the same book over and over.

Wizard's First Rule and its sequels, by Terry Goodkind. The awfulness of these books is legendary.
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I don't disagree with your assessment of the quality of these books, however Banks's later novels are only really bad if you've already read the earlier ones, on their own they are OK (Song of Stone excepted, it's dire)
I have also read the Sword of Truth duodecalogy more than once, for me it is in the so bad it's good territory.

On the theme books not written by, any of the Rama series not written solely by Arthur C. Clarke



Dave Rogers said:
Or, indeed, any Dune novel that Herbert only wrote the first three-quarters of. That is to say, any Dune novel.



I'll join the chorus against that one; I thought it was a superb book. However, even if you liked Catch-22, don't read Good as Gold.



Oh god, you just reminded me that I read Anthem. Kids, just say no. Awful, awful characterisations.

And my own contribution: anything by Clive Cussler. I read one and actually felt embarrassed for him.

Dave
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Clive Cussler also passes over into the so bad it's good category for me, also I don't think he can see your embarrassment from his gold plated mini submarine.


To add one to the list A Desert Called Peace by Tom Kratman, a bizarre replaying of 911 on an alien planet by an actual US army colonel whose wife appears to have an almost pathological aversion to fellatio.
 
I love Atlas Shrugged.

Don't pick up the great American novelTM Harlot's Ghost by Norman Mailer. I wasted the summer of '94 on the hardcover and I still resent the time being robbed from my life.
 
Sherri Tepper writes brilliantly imaginative and highly entertaining novels.

Unfortunately, they all seem to be about how loathsome and deserving of being ruthlessly killed off humanity is.
 
d4m10n said:
Did you happen to notice any female characters in Heller's book that couldn't be easily replaced by a poseable sex doll?
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No.

Catch 22 is set during the Second World War in a US bomber squadron based in or near Southern Italy. The fact that almost all the female characters are prostitutes is probably fairly realistic in that scenario. In any case, Nately's Whore is certainly not portrayed as a posable sex doll.

Back on topic. My nomination is Foucault's Pendulum It's the first book I read that I failed to finish; due to being absolutely as dull as watching paint dry.

Also, I'd qualify the Dune series to any book in the series after the second one - which also isn't great, but at least it isn't very long.
 
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theprestige said:
We all know what it's like to pick up what should be a good book, a book that comes highly recommended or has been highly anticipated... Only to discover too late that you've wasted hours of your life that you will never get back.

This is your chance to warn others before they make the same mistake.

I'll start:

Any Dune novel not written by Frank Herbert. Seriously.

Transition, by Iain Banks. Should be a fascinating multiverse novel, turns out to be elaborate revenge torture porn.
Also, any of Bank's "family" novels after Crow Road and Whit. The early ones are good, but later in his career he starts writing the same book over and over.

Wizard's First Rule and its sequels, by Terry Goodkind. The awfulness of these books is legendary.
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I really liked Iain m Banks for the culture novels and his other science fiction. I bought Transition because it looked sci fi,it is sci fi but yeah I agree with you.

Back on point, Any sci fi trilogy.
 
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theprestige said:
We all know what it's like to pick up what should be a good book, a book that comes highly recommended or has been highly anticipated... Only to discover too late that you've wasted hours of your life that you will never get back.

This is your chance to warn others before they make the same mistake.

I'll start:

Any Dune novel not written by Frank Herbert. Seriously.

Transition, by Iain Banks. Should be a fascinating multiverse novel, turns out to be elaborate revenge torture porn.

Also, any of Bank's "family" novels after Crow Road and Whit. The early ones are good, but later in his career he starts writing the same book over and over.

Wizard's First Rule and its sequels, by Terry Goodkind. The awfulness of these books is legendary.
Click to expand...

As to Dune novels, I would expand that to any Dune novel other than Dune. At least, I liked the original, and read one or two of Frank Herbert's sequels, and didn't care for them much. That was when I was still a kid though, so maybe there was something I missed in the sequels.
 
All the Robert Jordan Wheel of Time series, except for Brandon Sanderson's contribution. The series was a very tedious lesson in how to take a 3-book story and tell it over 10 books.

ETA - no, it didn't take me 10 books to figure that out...
 
CORed said:
As to Dune novels, I would expand that to any Dune novel other than Dune. At least, I liked the original, and read one or two of Frank Herbert's sequels, and didn't care for them much. That was when I was still a kid though, so maybe there was something I missed in the sequels.
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My experience matches what appears to be the general consensus: The quality of the story goes steadily downhill after the first book. Brian Herbert's biggest contribution was to take a gentle straight-line function and turn it into a violently hyperbolic trajectory of failure.
 
I nominate Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Man, that book hurt to read. In my opinion, it was so all over the place that I didn't know what I had read when I finished it.
 
I also liked Catch-22, but Heller's later stuff is pretty dense.

In a more obscure category, back in the day, J.P Donleavey was recommended highly. I tried The Ginger Man and it's one of the few books over many years that I tossed in disgust.

I couldn't finish Robert Coover's The Public Burning, either.

There are a couple of authors whose books make better movies than books. Dickens is one, though he is also pretty readable in the right mood. Ian McEwan is another, and Michael Ondaatje another.

William Gass wrote some good criticism, one truly brilliant book of short stories, and a couple of utterly unreadable novels.

Most of the ones already noted here I can't vouch for, because when I got the advice not to read them, I didn't!

One SF novel I'd add to the list though is Robert Heinlein's The Number of the Beast. If you read Stranger in a Strange Land back in the day, stop there.
 
Aside from Atlas Shrugged there is another long book I read that was an even greater waste of time. That was Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (Both volumes 1&2, yeah I'm a literary masochist). I have never seen a man say so little in so many words. Really was a giant disappointment.
 
CORed said:
Interesting. I liked Catch-22, and read a couple of Heller's other novels (IIRC, he only wrote two or three others), and they bored me to tears. Catch-22 is a very strange novel, but I liked it.
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I, being an idiot teen, decided I would not do Catch 22 as everyone did book reports on that. I opted for Heller's Something Happened. I had to force my way through about half of it before I realized the teacher probably never read it either. I BS'ed my report and got a good grade. Unbearable novel.
 
Two classics I've read (or reread) in the last couple years --

The Catcher in the Rye
A Separate Peace

-- makes me wonder why anyone would want to read these without having been assigned to. Well, I guess I did, but it was only to find out why they are considered so important in literature. I didn't.
 
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