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Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1146 Joined: 27 Aug 2008     | |
Press Junketeer  Posts: 385 Joined: 12 Sep 2007    | Any Dune book with words other than "Dune" in the title. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1540 Joined: 6 Apr 2008     | No love lost for George R.R. Martin then eh? Okay...to avoid humm...most stuff by Gene Wolfe, and not because I think it's bad, but because some much of his work is so damn incomphrehensible. Not for the novice reader ^^' I still like a lot of it despite this, The Book of the New Sun series, Latro in the Mist etc. |
Copy Clerk  Posts: 116 Joined: 25 Aug 2008    | I don't want to argue with you i just want to know why you didn't like the sword of truth series. (i'm in the middle of it and i love it so no spoilers please)Remember im not trying to be rude so please don't take the tone of my question out of context i just want to know why you didnt like it. |
Paperboy Posts: 32 Joined: 15 Feb 2008   | The sword of truth series gets super convoluted. I agree with the dune books comment. |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 1540 Joined: 6 Apr 2008 |
Well, at first, it's standard fantasy stuff. A lot of interesting ideas. However, I wouldn't recommend reading further into the series unless you're into S&M ^^' Seriously... Then there's a lot of chapters in which everyone generally acts like idiots. |
Press Junketeer  Posts: 400 Joined: 2 Sep 2008   | I don't think the 'convolutedness' the sword of truth series is that bad, honestly. It might be because I've read most of the dune series though... I didn't like it because it became more of the same after you've read a book or 8 of it. Any book by Knaak, unless you're really into dragons (god, his warcraft books were fucked up). |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1257 Joined: 14 Oct 2007     | Hmm, care to explain about Heart of Darkness? I'm aware of some criticism, and to be honest, I haven't read it but I'd been thinking about giving it a shot. But still, there are certain aspects I'm not too thrilled about. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1603 Joined: 28 Aug 2008  | It's way too late now, but just incase, if anyone has yet to read The Da Vinci Code then just don't. Absolute arse that would have been ignored if not for the subject matter. |
Press Junketeer Posts: 400 Joined: 2 Sep 2008 |
I'm afraid I have to agree on this one. I was halfway through the book before anything happens. Oh, and I found two others: |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 1257 Joined: 14 Oct 2007 |
Funny, I really liked it. |
Web Developer  Posts: 831 Joined: 6 Jun 2007     | For the Sword of Truth series, I'm with Alleged_Alec in that they got repetetive; downright formulaic, even. I honestly can't differentiate between the last few that I read. Speaking of formulaic: Koontz. I read 3 books by him, and I swear they were all the same story and characters with a few names/traits switched. I suppose this just means to stop at 1 if you decide to read something by him. With The Song of Ice and Fire series I stopped at the 2nd book because there wasn't enough in them to keep me interested. The characters and plots I was interested got too little time per book, or just plain ended. However, other people would find different plots and people to follow, so your mileage may vary. The Wayfarer Redemption by Sara Douglass would be one to avoid. A better title would have been 'Stereotypes and Cliches'. |
On the Record  Posts: 5966 Joined: 7 Feb 2008    | I can agree with The Sword of Truth series, Terry Goodkind and his torture fetishism got a little out of hand. I can see WHY one may not like Song of Ice and Fire, I mean, they make you like all these characters, and then they kill them, all of them and replace them with all the characters they've taught you to hate... yeah, kinda wrecked the series for me. But they are very well written and George R.R. Martin is a wicked cool guy. |
Pulitzer Laureate  Posts: 846 Joined: 5 Aug 2008 | The Silmarillion I agree with. The problem with that one I think is that it was never finished by Tolkien himself. It was published by his son by compiling all of the notes he found and filling in the blanks, but he never took the time to turn the notes into something actually readable. |
Press Junketeer Posts: 400 Joined: 2 Sep 2008 |
I wasn't saying it was a bad book, but I wouldn't call it a fitting end for end for a series like that. It deserved better.
Good one. And for the dutch crow: Don't read more then one Baantjer book. They are just as formulaic. |
On the Record Posts: 5966 Joined: 7 Feb 2008 | For the love of all that is holy, if you haven't started it already DO NOT read The Wheel of Time until the last book comes out, I read it when Heart of Winter was released, and by the time book 10 came out I had forgotten who pretty much ALL of the characters were. That and Robert Jordan has that freaky harem thing going with the main character that always bugged me. |
Vault Legend  Posts: 2201 Joined: 30 Jul 2008    | Anything with Harry Potter in the title. |
Press Junketeer  Posts: 387 Joined: 12 Jul 2008   | The two final "Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy" books. The first three are very good, though they get progressively worse they were all entertaining. The fourth book jumped the shark in a huge way. Everything that was great about the three first movies, the humor, the weird science, quirky characters and surreal logic, it was all gone and instead we were treated to a mediocre love story. The fifth book wrote off the love interest introduced in the previous book in three sentences, rendering the entire fourth book even more pointless and to top it off, it had the most unsatisfying ending ever in a book. I mean, five books and like a thousand or so pages later and that's it? It's like getting a blowjob, and just when you're about to cum you get your dick bitten off. |
On the Record Posts: 5966 Joined: 7 Feb 2008 | varulfic is right, those two last books of Hitchhiker suck, mostly because Douglas Adams didn't want to write them. EDIT: If you're going to read Xanth, read A Spell for Chameleon, The Source of Magic and Castle Roogna, after that quit while you can, he pretty much just compiles puns and pervy fetishes after that. |
Paperboy  Posts: 33 Joined: 4 Aug 2008  | Twilight. |
On the Record Posts: 5966 Joined: 7 Feb 2008 |
My roomate threw that book out of her window, she then felt bad about it because it was a library book so she went and got it back. |
Copy Clerk  Posts: 71 Joined: 22 Dec 2007     | The Redwall series. Same book, same story every time. Same amount of deaths in the same types of characters (usually a newly introduced character is killed, along with an established character from a previous book, the lead characters and his female companion travel far away to collect a mcguffin to safe their copy+pasted home from their copy+pasted villain, finding some help along the way from a warrior in exile)
Amen to that! |
Muckraker  Posts: 281 Joined: 1 May 2008    | Series: Single Books: I could add more, but don't feel like wading through my bookshelf. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1871 Joined: 11 Jun 2008    | The Davinci Code A friend of mine loved it and gave me his copy, contanstly asking me if I read it. So I finally made an attempt only to discover that it read like a bad action movie. I just don't read crap like that. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1174 Joined: 24 Feb 2008 |
Me too :) |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1366 Joined: 27 Jan 2008    | I freaking LOVE A Song of Ice and Fire, but I see your points. |
Press Junketeer Posts: 400 Joined: 2 Sep 2008 |
My bad. I confused it with the Dutch name of the series. And again, it wasn't a bad book. However, it wasn't an ending worthy to the series, in my opinion. |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 1257 Joined: 14 Oct 2007 |
Ehm, relax, I wasn't poking fun at you or anything. It just seemed funny to me that I liked it and you didn't, period. Somehow the whole love fixes everything at the end was kinda lame but if you are to keep in line with paradise lost that's what you have to do. On a side note(spoilers): Historically, of the billions of mulefa that should have ever existed didn't THAT ever happen, EVAR in the whole planet?! Those mulefa folk must have been pretty frakking boring in what comes to romancing them couples. |
BANNED  Posts: 814 Joined: 23 Apr 2008  |
Is this because the subject matter pertains to sadomasochism, or were you just making a funny to the tune of "you'd have to be a masochist to read this crap"? User was banned for: Ballad (?) of an ex-goth. (Permanent) |
Press Junketeer  Posts: 369 Joined: 14 Aug 2008  |
I liked that book. The worst book for me was Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. It was really weird. I didn't understand what I reading half the time. The Redwall series is pretty generic. Artemis Fowl was not that bad, it was over hyped. Any Harry Potter book after number 2. |
On the Record Posts: 5966 Joined: 7 Feb 2008 |
It gets very into Sexual Torture and falling in love with your torturer, it's kinda freaky. There's at least 1 explicit torture sequence each book and it's always oddly sexual in a freaky kinda way. |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 1540 Joined: 6 Apr 2008 |
Yup the sadomasochism was it. Otherwise I quite enjoyed the first book. Also...they tend to put off this 'all women are bitches' kind of vibe. Not pleasant, but I've read worse. |
Pulitzer Laureate  Posts: 783 Joined: 27 Aug 2008 |
A thousand times this. I wanted to see what the big bloody deal was about, and when I read it was horrified at the prose, plot and characters in general. When I heard someone say it was the new Harry Potter, I felt offended. |
Muckraker Posts: 281 Joined: 1 May 2008 |
Yeah, it's one that tends to polarize people. They either really enjoy it or they really don't. I read 1984 and Brave New World back to back. Scary thing was that I saw today's society as a mix of the bad parts of both. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 2835 Joined: 1 Feb 2008 | Yet another vote against the Sword of Truth series. It's got a terminal case of Fantasy Bloat. (Terry, you don't have to put every single little idea, image, concept, sidequest, and joke you ever heard, read in someone else's bloated fantasy novel, or thought of while sitting on the toilet in every single book. You are worse than Stephan King who himself says that he "writes like fat ladies diet.") It's stuffed to the brim with Marty Stu-ism, god-mode attacks, stereotypes, and ideas harvested from other writers who did them better. All this sprinkled with little bits of what might as well be torture porn. Terry Goodkind almost put me off of fantasy altogether. I had to re-read all the Earthsea books to recover my love for the genre. Also, skip any Anne McCaffrey book written after "Moreta's Ride." |
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What books and series have you read, only to wish you hadn't spent the time later? I have several, but I review books for my blog.
Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind
Novels of Tiger and Del by Jennifer Roberson
Anything written by Robin Hobb
That godawful "Shadow" series George Lucas did that was nominally set in the Willow world. Blech.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad tops my list of single books.