I guess that would be fucking Kierkegaard’s Either/Or that used to give me what I believe was some sort of physical panic. I couldn’t finish it, great book.
A series, but The Wheel of Time becomes insufferable around book five. There’s like five chapters of lore/world building for every sentence that moves the plot forward. Also, the worst protagonist in the history of book writing. The side characters are the only reason I made it to book five.
Is there even a protagonist? Yeah, I agree though.
It was seriously like 3 massive books of almost nothing happening.
I made it about this far as well. The thing that frustrated me the most was that early in the series they had to get from one place to another quickly, and they used that extra dimensional underground path or whatever, and they were like “oooooo, this is super dangerous, someone could definitely die!” and then later in the series it was just like, “yeah, we gotta take this route, nbd.” So the stakes just felt really low and overall things got repetitive.
Lol yeah that was a big issue with the books. He made this massive, detailed, multicultural world with all of this dimension, but then he wanted the same few characters to go everywhere and do everything in it. So getting them from place to place was super tedious. He started off trying to make them just walk, then take a boat, then the Ways, then alternate dimensions, then the dream world, then he straight up gave up and said “fuck it, they can teleport”.
Don’t forget Skimming, which is plot relevant like twice after teleporting is introduced (and one of those times isn’t even for traveling, it’s to throw an invincible murder golem into the void between dimensions).
I do like that the portal to alternate dimensions ended up being how the Seanchan acquired the weird monsters their army used. That was some quality world-building.
L. Ron Hubbard’s “Mission Earth” series. I was young, and I’d read damn near all the sci fi that my local library had, I was acught up on the Wheel of Time that had been published to that point (I think it was still about five books before Jordan died), and gave it a try.
It was fucking awful.
Given that I was maybe 12 at the time, that’s saying something; it was just trash.
Friends don’t let friends read Hubbard.
I read Battlefield Earth and actually enjoyed it, but in the same I enjoyed eg. watching Plan 9 from Outer Space (or the Battlefield Earth movie for that matter.)
It’s an abject piece of shit as a book, written late enough in Hubbard’s life that nobody dared edit him so there’s whole chapters that just sort of repeat, and many of its premises are so stupid it hurts, but its old-timey pulp scifi schlock feel was often very fun.
So yeah, not a good book by any definition, but it was sorta fun and also interesting to read knowing that Hubbard tried to inject his world view into it too. For example the reason why the Psychlo were so eeeeeevil was that they were ruled by the Catrists who’d eg. use psychosurgery or electric shocks to make Psychlos more compliant – knowing that Hubbard absolutely loathed psychiatrists, it’s not hard to see that Psychlo Catrist = psychiatrist.
My sci-fi lit class used to vote on what book we would do next. We once voted on Battlefield Earth partially as a joke, but we were also curious about how bad it could be. We regretted it.
Heh, yeah I guess it’s different if you have to read it for some assignment. I sort of enjoyed it in a masochistic way, although I definitely skipped parts (especially the repeating crap) and like I said I wouldn’t call it a good book by any stretch of the definition
I, too, enjoyed the gawdawful trash that was the Battlefield Earth movie. Yeah, it’s dumb, but if I only watched good sci-fi, that would be, like 50 movies total.
Maybe.
I’m pretty sure that one of my favorites, Event Horizon, would not make the list of good sci-fi.
Oo I love Event Horizon. It’s a bit of a scifi horror cult classic though isn’t it? Not exactly Blade Runner, but not Battlefield Earth either.
One of my favorite trashy scifi movies is maybe Saturn 3 (Zardoz doesn’t count!). It’s a godawful piece of shit featuring Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett, and a baby faced Harvey Keitel. It’s astonishingly bad and great fun to watch, and there was some sort of fairly hilarious story behind how it got made too (I’ll have to see if I can dig up the blog post I read about it)
I tried to read the mission earth series but I just couldn’t connect with it. There was too much in the universe that it just expected you to relate to but gave no explanation of what it actually was. That being said, I was also young when I tried to read it.
I read Dianetics and I’m still not “clear.” Must’ve done something wrong before birth.
Instructions unclear: thetans stuck in volcano
Every time i read the water babies my grandfather had a stroke.
Oh shit, this made me remember my experience. As a kid, I had two books that were definitely cursed. Every time I cracked one open, something awful would happen to my family. Being renovicted from our apartment. A parent developing epilepsy. The other parent losing a job. And so on.
The books were sentimental so I held on to them for a long time. When I was an older teen, I even opened one of them to “test it out”… sure enough, parent had a seizure that same day.
I have since gotten rid of them and I steer clear of books on similar topics.
Goddamn
I love audiobooks. There are some amazing books that are narrated by Wil Wheaton
He sounds like a fucking meme of someone reading a book and trying too hard to inject character. He also sounds like he’s chewing marbles when he talks
Book - Warren the squirrel looked in the mirror
Wil - Woaaaarn thu squooooorl lucked in the meeeeeer
The only audio book that I know of that he reads is Ready Player One, Which yeah isn’t a good book but I thought he did an okay job reading it. Be put off by him being the narrator of other books.
He’s no Nathaniel Parker but I don’t think he’s as bad as you say.
The first edition of the audiobook for The Martian was done by Podium Publishing and read by R. C. Bray. If you’ve previously purchased it you can still download it but it is no longer available for purchase or distribution, instead they’ve replaced it with one read by Wil Wheaton.
The Winds of War. I enjoyed the Caine Mutiny so much, I plowed right through it and wanted more. Winds completely deflated that. I tried to read a couple other Woulk books and just couldn’t get into any of them.
Dickens - A Tale Of Two Cities.
In ninth grade my class was forced to read it. No lie I actually never got past the second page. I tried so hard but was bored to death and confused by that intro. I used cliff notes to get through the assignments. Worst reading experience ever.
When I was a kid I would read the sexy parts of the Illuminati and jerk off.
My brother caught me and ratted me out. Handing over the book was terrible.
The Scarlet Letter.
It’s like it’s designed to engender a lifelong hatred for the printed word.
Not one book, but almost all of Asimov’s Foundation series. The first one is one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time because I love seeing how each group has to use game theory to solve their own unique issue in order to survive and flourish as a society built on science and reason. While I admit that it’s not always written well, I love the mindset that Asimov wanted to emphasize: violence should be the last resort for solving conflict between nations. When the factions outside of Foundation threaten them with war, they respond with soft power like economic pressure, religious sway, and focusing on making better advancements to science and engineering to defend themselves by being too valuable to destroy.
The fatal problem with the series arises in Book 2 though. Book 2 (Foundation & Empire) introduces the interesting concept of “what happens when a massive wrench is thrown into the meticulously calculated 1000-year plan?” Unfortunately, you can tell that at this point is when the concepts of the story become too smart for Asimov to handle, and he instead begins his trend of doubling and tripling down on deus ex machina characters with mind control powers for the rest of the series. All of the interesting methods of sociopolitical problem solving are thrown out the window to become sub-par adventure stories.
Books 4 and 5 (Foundation’s Edge and Foundation & Earth) were written particularly poorly, and was probably the point where I should have cut my losses. The books follow not-Han-Solo adventure man, contain a sexist female sidekick that only serves to be a hot piece of ass for Asimov’s self-insert character to have sex with, and then has an extremely uncomfortable “happy ending” where a traumatized child is left to be groomed by a robotic parental figure so that the robot can one day mind-wipe the child and insert it’s own consciousness into their body. What’s more is that they completely ditch the core premise of the 1000-year plan, and the ending undercuts any direction that the story could have gone from there.
The prequel books 6 and 7 (Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation) aren’t nearly as bad as 4 or 5, but they completely undermine the importance and intelligence of the character Hari Seldon from the first book. Instead of him being a great man and brilliant mathematician on his own, he’s essentially led around by his nose by undercover robots that are the secret architects of everything just because Asimov wanted to tie-in elements from his books about robots.
Rereading the series for the second time, i just finished book 4 and i agree that having everything be about mind control is tiresome and honestly makes the galaxy feel very small. Also the stupid “lightning rod” idea for the character pisses me off, h’es just a plot device
a short story i forgot the name of.
the writing style was poor in a way that instead of the narrator persona narrating (3rd person), it is conversing to you instead (2nd person).
I read a book like that once. Think it was called Faster Faster, Kill Kill or something like that.
EDIT - Wrong way round, it was Kill Kill Faster Faster:
loool, i’ll try to give this a read. something about a mystery theme makes me feel the writing style here could be redeemable
First thing that comes to mind is The Witcher (books), but my interpretation of worst is “its been the worst a book has left me feeling” and I don’t read a lot of books.
Tap for spoiler
The most recent was the final bit in the witcher series when Ciri is pushing the boat with her parents corpses out in to the water and being helped by the spirits of everyone who died helping them along the way. I held off crying while reading it on the train home but finally let loose talking about it later with a friend and fellow fan of the series.
I know there’s a lot of post book retconning and hand waving but it’s pretty obvious at the end of The Lady of the Lake that Geralt and Yennefer are not ever going back to the world their daughter lives in and that shit left me pretty emotionally exhausted.
I’ll probably get downvoted for it, but The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. The protagonist of the novel, first in a series, is the best example of a Marty Stu I have ever encountered in a book; Kvothe is the dullest, most offensively boring protagonist it has ever been my misfortune to meet. There’s absolutely zero narrative tension because the situation always boils down to “Kvothe wins immediately or Kvothe wins harder two chapters later.”
I peaced out around two-thirds of the way through. Amusingly one of my complaints, that the book had an unnecessarily high amount of smut for something not advertised as, gets even worse in the second book. No thanks
This is exactly how I felt. There is always a response that “it’s intentional. Unreliable narrator…blah blah blah.” Which doesn’t make it better. It’s that “jokes on them I was only pretending” meme, but in literary form.
The red/blue/green mars trilogy. The first book was pretty great and the themes were good throughout but the main characters devolve into this weird privaliged manifest destiny hippy cult that doesn’t give a shit about the rest of humanity and acts like they got to mars all by themselves and not on the backs of the billions supporting the economies that made the journey possible.
Its the only serie series I’ve read where I ended up rooting for the oligarchic corporate overlords because even a mars owned by megacorps works out better for humanity than the mars envisioned by the protagonists at this point who are basically turning into a kind of proto-version of the spacers from asimov.
I can’t remember details since it was in HS, but reading The Catcher in the Rye was a painfully slow and boring process. I didn’t get the story, the meaning, the struggle. It was a guy complaining about everything and being miserable and then I had to write a book report about it. Icky, icky, gross.
Maybe if I read it now it’ll be different but I dun wanna!
I enjoy reading unreliable narrators, and so while you’re totally correct. Holden is nothing more than an angsty privileged teenager who is angry at the world. That’s what made the book fun for me, at a certain point his self serving lies and his cringe attempts to act like an adult are just funny.
I’ve found it’s a good litnus test for people, just like Fight Club or Rick and Morty. You’re absolutely allowed to like these pieces, but if you think those charcters are admiral than it’s a super duper red flag.
Holden is nothing more than an angsty privileged teenager who is angry at the world
While that is true, you do have to consider that he is
Tap for spoiler
still devastated from his brother Allie dying.
Interesting. Loved that book!
