My least favourite book, that I really wanted to like, was the Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks.

It reads like a carbon copy of the Fellowship of the Ring, if all the characters had been replaced by complete arseholes. I mean, it started well. I liked the idea of a modern day torch surviving through a magical apocalypse and being regarded as an ancient and powerful artefact. That kind of thing is right up my alley. Everything else was not.

 

I agree. This has been the only series in the last 5 years that I have not been able to finish. The sexism in this book is awful, especially with it being a female dominated world. Instead of having proud, well written, powerful female characters who thrive; they all turn into whiny girls who can't do anything without a man protecting them.

They all instantly fall in love and suddenly need help to do the most basic tasks. He has no idea how to write women or romance. I wish he just kept everyone as friends and hid the romance in the background. It would have made the series better (and shorter).

My boyfriend owns the whole series and loves it, and I can't finish the seventh book (the sixth took me like 6 months to read). I just get more and more annoyed as I go along.

The world should have been fantastic. It is completely unique, but his characters ruin everything. Plus Rand and his three women just make me want to roll my eyes. It is like a fantasy for men.

 

Hated hated hated Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R Donaldson. Worst book I have ever read. Unlikable protagonist who ends up in a fantasy land and one of the first thing he does is rape a girl. Ugh. I read it when I was maybe thirteen and haven't rage quit a book quicker since then.

 

The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I read it last year because literally everyone around me loved it. Never have I been more disappointed, both with a story and with my friends for their literary tastes (or the lack thereof). With superficial characters (hated Charlie, damn it!), juvenile writing, and all the pretentious shit in it, the book truly was a waste of time and trees.

The worst thing was that so many of my friends were talking about how they could relate with the book, and yet I found it completely meaningless! Now, I'm usually okay with teenage angst stories. In fact, The Catcher in the Rye is probably one of my favorite stories. But this book, man, I wanted to punch a wall while I was reading it. There were no perks of reading this book.

/rant

 

Fuck that book with a rotten tree branch. Holden Caulfield is the single biggest whiny douche I have ever seen. Hated him in high school, hate him now. Book was not memorable for me in the least. Simply do not get the love for it.

 

I liked Name of the Wind well enough, but that sequal...It's like he was going through a list of every cliche possible: 1) Become a sex god - check, 2) Become a ninja - check, 3) Solve your money problems forever - check etc. I enjoyed the first book because there were problems that you couldn't entirely solve ever, because protagonist didn't have the 'complete set of skills', so to speak, so he had to be creative with the stuff he was good at.

Pacing was bad, too. Yes, I get that the old folklore stories Kvothe and his new mercenarie buddies exchange in front of camp fire every single night carry clues about future and past events, but did they had to be introduced in such manner? Reading about a rather monotone week-long (or was it longer?) journey, where you get a complete account of every single day and night made the whole thing seem at least twice as long from my perspective.

It wasn't all bad (introducing a being like Cthaeh was a great move IMO), but still a big drop in quality compared to first book.

Yeah, that shit was terrible. I'm pretty sure the 'magic' of that world was not even explained in the first 200 pages (I didn't read any further) and the protagonist was just so fucking generic. I can't believe the same guy wrote DF .

 

Iron Druid Chronicles. God, what a shitty little series. I was hooked on Dresden Files, and was recommended this as something very similar in Dresden Files, but with a twist, it's explicitly “everything ever believed is real”. And it has a Druid as the MC and I love Celtic mythology, so I was interested.

God it sucks. The MC has no personality, his powers are extremely boring (and neither discussed or developed in any way), for a 2000 man he acts and thinks like a 21 year old college drop out. Nothing of Celtic Mythology is explored besides name drops and a few appearences by “Gods” who also behave like 20 something idiots. The Bob of the series is a magical dog who is as annoying and unfunny as Bob is funny and interesting.

Then there is the painfully pathetic worldbuilding, which the own author seems to not care besides the “everything I feel like or need writing exists. Don’t think. It just is”.

For the most part there are no supporting characters, and when they appear, they are so forgettable that even the author forgets them and continues the story without them. There is one who I remember though. The protag LI. A fucking huge Mary Sue, and such an obvious one that I was sure for three books that she was a bait. But alas, no, for that could have be interesting.

After her, if there was any doubt that this series was nothing but a wish fulfilment series, where the author's Avatar is a superpowerful magic entity because reasons and has a super hot perfect girlfriend and lol! Sofunny dog, they got erased

 

Currently reading 'Armada' by Ernest Cline and it is just such a drag. Iloved Ready PLayer One but this book is just so boring.

It starts okay, setting the scene until I realized it is just a collection of references trying to make you like the main character. There is no depth besides him liking videogames and not knowing what to do with his life at eighteen. I am starting to think 'Ready Player One' may be the same so I'd rather just have the fond memories than reread it to be sure. Then I hit mid-way through the book and things seemed that they would finally pick up. The aliens were on their way and they were ready to attack! Exciting stuff - only somehow it was not exciting, at all.


EDIT: Enter key fucked me up.

 

I came into this thread thinking I would make more or less this exact post. The copy I was reading claimed that Donaldson was the natural successor to Tolkein, which seemed to me to be slander of the highest order. It remains one of two books I've given up on (not counting various others that I've never finished, but haven't intentionally stopped reading...), the other being 'Bleak House', which is one of the most mind-numbing experiences I've ever had. (Possibly) interestingly, I loved the BBC adaptation from a few years ago, starring Gillian Anderson, which suggests it was the way it was written rather than anything else - I believe Dickens deliberately set out to write a book as impenetrable as the legal case at the heart of it. Well, he certainly succeeded.
LittleChicago: I had a similar experience with 'Words of Radiance'. I'd been waiting with baited breath for it, then couldn't get into it at all. Once I pushed through the initial stages I really enjoyed it, and I think you'd find at least some of your issues addressed if you carry on, but it isn't his strongest book. Completely agree about Steelheart as well, although IMO the worst thing Sanderson has written is the Alcatraz Smedry series.

 

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

Despite having its own problems (the leads being unable to pronounce "Hecate" being just one), I have a great fondness for the movie. So I decided I'd read the book. After all, the novel is always better than the movie that it inspired, right?

Fucking hell, this book- I'd say it's a flaming piece of trash, but I've gotten way more enjoyment, excitement, and philosophical enrichment out of watching trash burn than I did out of this book. The cool aunts from the movie? Barely even mentioned in the book. And forget their cool old house, too, because this story takes place in Sally's house in the suburbs. The interesting Owens sisters? Banal, angry, spiritless characters with none of the charm of Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman's versions. And the daughters aren't even worth mentioning. Every character seems to be both hateful and flaccid all at the same time. It's hard to believe you could get so worked up with disgust over such bland characterization, but there it is. They're all just so unlikeable!

"Oh, but what about the magic in Practical Magic?" you ask.

There is none. Well, maybe a smidgen, if you look with an electron microscope. There's more magic in the dirt on the soles of Dumbledore's high-heeled boots in the opening chapter of Harry Potter than there is in this entire novel book. Calling it a novel carries the vague implication that something novel happens in it.

Even taken as a mundane slice of life book, it fails on every level to be engaging or interesting.

The other danger of reading this book, aside from just being bored to death, is getting fat. The author mentions food on nearly every damned page, either literally or as a metaphor, in a way that must be neurotic if it isn't pathological. Someone actually made a list* of all the mentions of food in this spineless collection of maunderings: It's long, coming in at nearly 160 items.

Frankly, it's a testament to the combined talent of screenwriters Robin Swicord, Akiva Goldsman, and Adam Brooks that they were able to turn this damp dishrag of a book into something so many people enjoy. The title and the characters' names are about all that's left of the novel in that movie. If you're looking for a good read, and you're bound and determined to read something called Practical Magic, try the opening credits of the movie; it's just as engaging and at least the credits have background music. I guarantee there's more atmosphere in those opening minutes of the movie than in that book.

Maybe, maybe, if you're a thirty-something widow, raising your teen daughters on your own, and you're tired of bailing out your tart of a sister, you'll find something relatable in this book and imagine the characters have more personality than a bowl of congealed oatmeal.

The best part of the book was the cover... and that depends entirely on which version you get. Hoffman's lucky you can't be sued for false advertising over the title of a fiction. It wasn't magical and reading it instead of watching the far superior (whether you liked it or not) movie wasn't practical in the slightest.

Book 6 is Lord of Chaos. I have to confess, I find that an odd place to quit.

The end of that book is pretty spectacular. If I were on the fence about continuing the series, and I read what happens at the end of that book, it would definitely keep me hanging on for at least one more novel.



Edit: * You can find some recipes inspired by Harry Potter at that site, too, if you're curious/interested.

 

I bought and read Jack London's The Iron Heel recently and, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed what I could parse but the printing, the font size, pretty much everything about the book's actual production made it completely illegible. Basically it's styled in a way that it is written as a diary that's been found hundreds of years later and there are supposed to be little post-scripts and annotations from the perspective of those who're living in a future utopia who found the diary.

The book I bought was a ridiculous copy. The people selling it obviously wanted to save as much money as possible and made the font as small as it could go and crammed several pages worth of text onto each page, including the annotations which basically turned into those annoying author notes you sometimes see in fanfiction in the middle of a scene. It completely ruined my experience and I was fucking pissed.

 

As I said, don't know if it was book 5 or 6. Has been a few years. Might very well have been book 5.

 

I'm reading The Name of the Wind right now and I just got through that part. It was almost enough to make me stop reading so I definitely see where your coming from.

 

I think the first book was great as a kind of immersion reading where you just let the words wash over you fairly quickly so that these weird quirks don't get you down and many of the annoying plot elements just fade before they aggregate you.

The second book was too damn blatant with its stupidity, although I did love the Evil Tree

 

Yeah, and if you're still in the first book, get ready. It only gets worse in that sense. The mentions of eye color were subtle in NotW compared to WMF.

It wasn't just that though, for fear of sounding nitpicky. It was more that the novel was written in such a way as to make it so that it wasn't just Kvothe who thought he was the coolest. That would have been okay. It's that everyone around him is also constantly reassuring him of this fact

All the way through book 1, and like 150 pages into book 2, and we STILL have yet to encounter like, a single female who doesn't find him uberhawt.

It's like all the worst HP fanfic tropes rolled into a single published nightmare.

 

The Sword of Shannara was the first fantasy book I ever read and as a kid it was pretty decent but now, looking back after having read much more I feel the same way as you. I'll always feel somewhat warm towards the book but I'm very unlikely to go back an read it again. I will say that the other two books in the trilogy (elfstones and wishsong) are better books that are more original.

As for a book that I hated, I'm going to have to second LittleChicago. I read Steelheart after having read Worm and I was looking for something with a similar premise. In the end I was sorely disappointed, there was no character development, the world was bland with very little world building to speak of and the actual climax of the book was pretty poor. Also, the romance was terrible considering there was nothing for it to be built off of other than the love interest being hot.

 

Just gonna second this. I actually started reading the Shannara series on the fourth book, and really got into. Then I went back to read the first book, and was very glad I didn't start with it, or else I probably never would've gone past it.

I did especially like how, as the series got further along, Brooks really started exploring the fact that his fantasy setting is actually post-apocalyptic Earth. Can't think of many fantasy books where the characters go up against a rogue AI.

 

Eragon/ Inheritance cycle. The author is terrible and probably would never have been published if wasn't his parents publishing company. Even when I was a naive 15 year old with no standards when it came out, I still find it to be very meh.