I’ve read so many it’s hard to say but recently the Star Wars book about Phasma stands out (most of the books since Disney took over are not great). Also a series someone on Reddit recommended that turned out to be basically a guy writing down a game of Stellaris. I don’t remember the name of it but it was awful.
The Alchemist, I had to read it for a community college class. It’s probably the most predictable book I’ve ever read, but not in an entertaining way. Just painfully boring.
I read Siddhartha for highschool a couple years before, I would say that the books are almost identical, except I liked Siddhartha more.
You want a book with similar themes but actually amazing? The wizard of Earthsea.
I know the books aren’t literally the same. But the vibes feel very similar. I want to say they have very similar structure, but my memory doesn’t work that great.
The bible. Inconsistent, unethical, and immoral.
Tried a few times and can never get past the first few chapters.
LOL. Try the Quran, it has the same characters and same stories but written in a way that makes much more natural reading
Thanks, but no thanks. :)
I can’t really remember of all time, but recently I started reading Dune: Messiah, and I had to stop reading it was so bad. I might be in the minority but the tonal shifts, changes in character attitudes, and jumping right into these assassination plots, all of it just came out weird and misplaced. Definitely did not slap with even 1/4th the power of Dune.
Herbert didn’t want to continue Dune and was pressured to write a follow up. It was an era when most science fiction was still published in periodicals. The first half of Messiah are the results that were then compiled into the start. It is like a really shitty draft. Everyone experiences the same thing. I put it down for quite a while too. If you can make it to the second half, it will become one you can’t put down, like the first. It does setup well for what is to come. After I got back into Messiah, I read all the way to the end of the entire series, even the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson stuff. Those last two are not like Frank’s writings, but are their own thing and still more readable than the first half of Messiah. IMO the first half of Messiah is a great example of what happens when Art takes a back seat to an anxious banking type mentality. Bankers make terrible artists and advisors.
GEoD is IMO the best book in the series as it eviscerates many cultural norms and deep assumptions like fascist altruism, eternal boredom, the coexistence of misogyny and feminism, manipulation that is both brutal and kind, and if an alien can be human. It even infers the question of potential delusional prescience in my opinion. It will make you think about the motivation of leaders and what you may endure because of their vision of a future.
I read the first four dune books this year and I think they all suffer from the same problem, that is they have interesting characters, original lore, great world building, but nothing interesting happens until the very ending of the book. They all felt like a slog to get through to me.
Hell yeah this is great to hear, thank you. I’ll have to open it back up and try again. Then its time to read the Foundation.
The two prequels to foundation are awesome, don’t miss them.
Don’t read the prequels by Brin and Bear, they are not only awful but also steer the lore into really dumb place which i’m pretty sure was not intended by Asimov. Though to be honest the two prequels by Asimov are also much worse than the main series.
I mean, none of that is true, and Herbert stated he had parts of Messiah and Children written before Dune was even finished.
In the forward to Heretics of Dune: “Parts of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune were written before Dune was completed. They fleshed out more in the writing, but the essential story remained intact.”
A sequel to Dune (1965), it was originally serialized in Galaxy magazine in 1969, and then published by Putnam the same year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_Messiah
I forget where the rushed admission and poor quality was blamed on the periodical and premature release, but am certain that is somewhere out there.
Parts of theserialized story were fleshed out and became Dune.
Wait until you get to chapterhouse!
The Pearl by John Steinbeck. Its technically a novella but still. Hated it.
Oh sad face. It is one of my favorite books and also think the movie is a piece of art.
Might be different for me today if I reread it but I just mean from my first and sustained reaction reading it that was how I felt at the time, but I was also quite young
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Tom Sawyer. I don’t think i’d hate it as much if I read it today, but having to read it in middle school was a bitch
Hmm, maybe that’s why my English teacher assigned Huck Finn instead (which I remember liking).
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. I am usually a huge SciFi fan, but I like the genre for it’s ability to reflect on humanity by extrapolating on current technologies/trends or comparing our culture to unique alien ones.
Revelation Space was technobabble and descriptions of weapons for pages upon pages, and it was totally devoid of any philosophy or reflection on humanity. I never DNF a book, but this one I almost gave up on.
Ayn Rand’s fountainhead, by a fat mile. I was young and didn’t know better
I listened to Atlas Shrugged as an audio book and it was ok at best. One massive criticism of communism and how it doesn’t work but suggested anarchist society as the solution. Weird rape-y sex scene in the middle also. Should have stuck with the social criticism instead of anarco capitalism utopia stuff and it’d have been good.
God, me too. I thought I was too dumb to “get it”.
A fan translation of the Redo of Healer light novel.
If you know you know.
Canonical answer is The Homecoming Saga by Orson Scott Card, since it turns out that if the good guys have a mind controlling god computer that’s always right on their side it gets really hard to have meaningful conflict.
You’re saying that the book couldve been an essay?
I don’t think it would’ve made a very good essay either
You didn’t make it past the first book??
Lucky.DISCLAIMER: Orson Scott Card is a bad person and I have since gotten rid of my collection and tell everyone not to support him because he uses his platform to hurt marginalised groups of people for religious reasons.
Now, I would argue that you’re skipping over a lot of interesting stuff.
The Overseer (mind-controlling satellite robot) was built by humans to keep rewriting human brains so they would perpetually forget how to invent the wheel until they proved that they’d evolved beyond their barbaric nature and would not go on to invent the nuclear bomb. The satellite then dies of old age millions of years later because humans are just kind of shitty. The book ends with the main character’s family hopping onto an Ark rocket back to Earth aaand… Hundreds of years have passed and all the characters you’ve invested in emotionally are long dead, here’s some bat furries I guess.Some pretty cool ideas in there, despite who it was written by.
Now, the worst thing I have ever read was also by Orson Scott Card and I refuse to speak about it.
I did read it up until about halfway through the last book, thinking that it would eventually get better while it instead just got worse. Decided that the whole thing had been a complete waste of time besides maybe giving me a greater appreciation for the fact that the real world was less of a slog
Ooh, if you want waste of time read the Alvin Maker series. Oh but I think he wrote another one since I read them (not that I’m willing to give it the chance to change my opinion).
Ooo, I was trying to think of what to answer in this thread and you just reminded me of another Orson Scott Card book, Empire.
Absolute trash. Prior to that I had read all of the Ender and Bean series and loved them. Didn’t know much about Card personally, but picked up this book because it was supposed to be tied in with a video game I was looking forward too.
Reading this book is how I found out what a shitty person he really is. It was basically all him hitting you over the head with his shitty fascist ideology while jerking off to a bunch of military porn like a dollar store version of Tom Clancy. I never did play the game.
a novelization of one of my favorite video games
I suffered through it because I love the franchise so much and it wasn’t that long but holy shit, I was the writing quality of a grade schooler but with added unnecessary and gross romance between two children.
Worst book I’ve quit is Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. What a horrible book!
Worst I’ve finished is Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, immediately followed by Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I’ll throw in a special mention for The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby. All terrible books that I finished only because they were required reading in school.
Huh. I loved Seveneves.
Same. Loved the world building over millenia. I was hoping to see another book each on the miner people, the Navy men, and the spacefarers who went out into the wilds after water.
My older sister hated it, she wants stories about characters and not the world-building. She compares the pages on moving through 3D space with small jet thrusts to the pages of whale info in Moby Dick.
It’s a book I recommend with caveats. Not everyone is going to like it. Lesson learned, as much as I liked Snow Crash and Anathem too, I won’t recommend them to her. And moving beyond Stephenson, I’m confident she would immolate Canticle for Leibowitz halfway through.
As much as I loved many of Stephensen’s books, I could not get into Anathem.
I tend to quit books if I don’t find them very good. One I did finish that I fucking hated was The Girl on the Train. All of the characters were fucking insufferable.
I thought the film was good.
Z for Zachariah. I read it when I was like 15 for school. Man I remeber feeling the book is like a farming manual when they tried to survive after the nuclear war. The older man trying to rape the other 16 year old girl survivor also made me super uncomfortable. Maybe it would be better if I read it now. I just remeber it being a drag.
