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.
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.
Is there even a protagonist? Yeah, I agree though.
It was seriously like 3 massive books of almost nothing happening.
I remember struggling so much to get into Inheritence that I gave up, not sure if it was because of the writing or I was still annoyed at the end of Brisingr.
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!
Interesting. Loved that book!
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.
I read 50 shades of grey and 50 shades darker. It wasn’t that awful, kinda hilarious actually especially the fact some women would believe that could happen Irl.
“A most uninteresting and normal looking hardware store employee is wooed by a billionaire. Also, please sign a contract so that we may have intercourse.”
- Honest Book Reviews
Isn’t Anastasia above average looking though? Just badly dressed and no, that simple premise could actually happen, but Christian grey would be a 65 year old Bezos/Trump/Epstein looking mf
Dropped the book on my face scratching my eye
A 1200 page book on architecture too
On the opposite side of the spectrum a friend used my wood book shelf library for a nude model shoot… so book adjacent nudity
Seveneves. Halfway through when they don’t kill that monster on sight. A rare point when I’ve been nearly stopped a book midway and thrown it away. And it just kept getting worse, so maybe I should have.
It was an interesting read I did not repeat.
Well, I tried reading it. Then I tried again. I even made a bet with my father who could finish first. We both lost.
It’s just a terrible reading experience. Don’t know why critics love it, but I have the feeling nobody really understands that gibberish but pretends to do so just to look smart…
Fighting through it at the moment, it just feels like I don’t even get half of what is written.
Just stop reading. It should be a nice and relaxing experience, not some sort of accomplishment. I know, school teaches otherwise…
My wife is reading through some top 500 books or whatever list and she always struggles with this. If you give it 50-100 pages and get nowhere, just put it down and call it a loss.
Meanwhile, I’m just reading scifi and fantasy stuff that comes well recommended and rarely have to give up on a book.
THIS. Had to read it at university. Holy moly was that a hard earned seminar.
Ulysses is a rough one. There are some novels that are so dense that you have to have already read it through once before you can really read it for the first time. I think Ulysses might take three or four.
I started reading it after hearing Robert Anton Wilson talk at length about why he loved the book. He made it sound amazing. And having read it, and read about it, I get why the people who love it really love it. It’s a meticulously crafted, ultra dense, heavily embroidered, masterwork of English literature. You can spend years and years reading and re-reading the book, picking apart layer after layer, and still find new elements to explore, and new threads to pull, which still all end up being perfectly internally consistent. It’s really an amazing literary achievement.
But it fucking sucks to read for the first time.
You need like a companion reference book, the Internet, a French to English dictionary for one of the chapters, and a map of Dublin. It’s not entertainment; it’s a project. And honestly, I’ve found it a lot more interesting to listen to Ulysses experts explaining the book than it is to actually read the book itself.
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Well it’s a series, but Three body problem. It should have been right up my alley, but I got so tired of every decision by every character being stupid that I couldn’t be bothered to read the last fifty pages of the last book.
Even if I charitably assumed the point of the book was to show that people are weak and stupid, the series was such a ham-handed strawman as to undercut its own commentary. And even worse, it had just enough interesting ideas to lead me to believe it was going somewhere worthwhile, but it never did.
It’s been years and I’m still pissed off that I wasted a week on it.
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Not read the book, but isn’t it meant to be quite dramatically different in some aspects? I’m sure I heard that all those annoying young adults characters were invented for the show? Someone who knows can correct me on that.
Agreed though that the show was a pile of crap. I enjoyed the first couple and quite enjoyed the last in the season, but the in between was pretty awful.
I couldn’t tell you, TBH. I have only read the series of books.
Oh, sorry, I totally misread your post I thought you had seen the show but not read the books. My bad!
Yeah, I recommend people don’t read that book, but do read the one chapter about the aliens, what is it, second to the last chapter of the book? That chapter is some of the best sci Fi I’ve ever encountered, the rest of the book… you can skip it.
Can you name the chapter specifically? I guess it will spoil a lot of the first book no?
It looks like that was chapter 33, Trisolaris: Sophon
If you want to jump in and read that chapter, all you need to know is this:
!the aliens are on a planet in the alpha centuri/proxima centuri trinary star system, the closest stars to the sun. Also, apparently the three suns means it sucks there and they’re desperately looking for a new star system.!<
Thank you, I’ll read that chapter!
It’s not just that characters make stupid decisions, the same characters keep making the same mistakes and nobody ever learns from those mistakes or grows as a character. It’s so extremely frustrating.
Same. Gave up after trying for a year and a half. Made it through half the series.
Agreed- the series is massively overrated
I enjoyed those, but you’re not wrong. The author cited Foundation as his inspiration for the books, and it suffers from all the same problems. Interesting concepts told with cardboard cutout ridiculous one dimensional characters.
Heyo!
I’m surprised you got tired of the stupid decisions if I’m honest.
I wasn’t aware the characters were making any.
When I realized there are a lot of dumb people out there, 1984 by George Orwell.
… username checks out I guess? 1984 was also my first painful read. A true Mindfuck. It’s a good story though, but I felt like I needed a blanket and kitty therapy for like a month after finishing reading it. Maybe I was too young
1984, the go to citation by people misusing the word “fascism”.
Have you read Jack London’s The Iron Heel?
It is really the prequel to 1984, even Orwell said as much. 1984 stays with you but The Iron Heel will haunt you.
Never read it but I will thx for the info 👍👍
the main character has a couple speeches but I remember one in particular is so on spot for what capitalism is, that it was like OMFG THAT IS WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW!!! FUCK!!!
Like 1984, it does not have a happy ending.
The Wheel of Time series.
Great story; bad books. Literally, the books fell apart while I was reading them. Cheap-ass paperbacks…
I think they would be good books if he took the whole plot and compressed it into 3, maybe 5 books. It’s just too long, too many pointless tangents, too many random characters to remember who may or may not reappear at some point in the next 10 books… as soon as you get to an interesting part it switches perspectives to the most boring events imaginable.
I liked how there was a multi-book background subplot of some Aes Sedai investigating the Black Ajah in secret, only for them to get killed off between books (and their deaths only mentioned in passing during the next book’s prologue) and the Black Ajah plot thread put on hold, then for the solution to the Black Ajah to be handed to Egwene with a wrapped bow a few books later.
I get Jordan was trying to cut out extraneous subplots and actually finish the series, but it sucks that so many pages were wasted on something that went nowhere, and the eventual resolution didn’t even need them in the first place.
I actually thought that subplot was one of the more interesting ones
It was, which is why it sucks that it got snuffed out instead of one of the dozens of less interesting subplots.
Twins! But I hated the protagonist more than the book’s quality.
There are over a thousand named characters in the Wheel of Time. I think I actually liked less than ten, and only one of them was part of the Emon’s Field crew (Matt, after he stops whining and becomes an actual competent person - due to magic, of course, because positive character development only happens via deus ex machina in this series).
Same! I loved Matt once he started becoming a master general and strategist. But the other 999 characters were not worth suffering through to get to his chapters.
Matt and his crew, Thom, Aviendha, Min, Verin… There are so few likeable characters, especially amongst the women (you could write an entire book about how WoT handles women - I should note two of the three I listed as likeable are tomboys and were therefore saved from Jordan’s normal characterization). And due to the aforementioned thousand named characters, the good ones get almost no screen time.
But there’s always time for Egwene and Faile, the two worst “good” characters. Don’t you want to know what Salidar or the Shaido are(n’t) up to for the billionth time?
It’s funny. I actually liked the Wheel of Time, but any time I talk about it it’s to rant about its flaws.
That’s because the characters just serve as tour guides for the detailed and compelling world building. It’s funny that I’ve read the books over and over and couldn’t tell you much about the plot or what happens when or why but I can tell you about how Seanchan nobles wear their fingernails and the meaning of those knives Ebou Dari women wear around their necks or how seafolk political hierarchies work in a nomadic ocean based society. I think I read it over and over again just to spend more time in that world.
I loved the descriptions of the Carheinien Game of Houses, where everything was political theater and anything you did in public was scrutinized for multiple deeper meanings. It’s a shame the actual politics shown in the series was mostly pampered and immature nobles complaining that preparing for the literal imminent apocalypse was too inconvenient.
It’d make a great RPG setting, but IIRC every attempt at a licensed adaptation (aside from a forgettable FPS like twenty years ago) has ended up in development hell or terrible. Or both, in the case of the show.
The Stone Angel.
It’s a miserable story about a dying old woman regretting all her life choices. It’s also required reading in Canadian high schools because the author is Canadian.
And then, on top of all that, my teacher absolutely insisted that its only major theme was “hope” and docked marks for having any other interpretation.
Hagar was an OG, she would have argued with your teacher in class. The only major theme is ‘I do what I want’.
120 Days of Sodom was a tough read. I don’t think it’s satire despite what the critics say. Marquis de Sade was literally a rapist but for some reason it is taken as being a meta-commentary on contemporary French society.
He was just a crazy sadist but he’s French so let’s call him a philosopher
I didn’t know people take it as satire. It clearly isn’t. It does have some solid social criticism but Sade is in for all the dirty he writes first and foremost - any social commentary is just an afterthought.
We read Macbeth in high school, but they dragged it out over a whole year. It was so painful!
Theatre should be seen instead of (or at least as well as) read IMO. I bet if you’d been taken to see a decent production first you’d have got a lot more out of reading it later.
Yeah absolutely.
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LOL. I had read it before we were taught it in school.
One of the three spirits is described as “An armed head” and the teacher was like “Yeah, nobody really knows what that description means, is a head in a helmet or what it’s supposed to be…”
So I raised my hand… “I hope I’m not giving away the ending or anything, but Macbeth is beheaded at the end… it’s an arm holding up a severed head. Each spirit is foreshadowing what’s going to happen. Armed head, bloody child, king holding a tree.”
At my high school we had a teacher who had an advanced degree in Shakespeare studies, and she would teach a different play every quarter. They were great classes, but a single quarter was plenty of time for a very comprehensive look at each play. I can’t imagine stretching it out over an entire year and have it be anything but absolutely tedious.
That sucks. Macbeth rules so hard. We did it over a couple weeks in school and it was awesome.
I think it was called “the horror of remson high” or something like that, that we had to read in high-school. Imagine being a teen, already struggling with the changes of one’s own body and then reading a book about tentacle aliens coming out of the pimples of the students, to wreak havoc in the town. It even started with one alien killing the family’s dog and growing to its size… Didn’t even bother finishing it and gladly accepted a bad grade for doing so.
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.
