Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane: The most boring book I ever had to read. It is SO dull, nothing happens. All books we had to read in school were fine but that one sucks great.

Dies The Fire by S.M. Stirling.

I didn’t hate the plot of the book, but something about the writers treatment of the character interactions, physical descriptions, and sex scenes creeped me out. I just… I don’t know. It was gross. I got the feeling that the writer was fulfilling their own fantasies through the novel. I told this to someone about 10 years ago, and they also felt that way, so I feel slightly vindicated and not like a weirdo who reads too much into things.

The worst one I remember was having to read Great Expectations in high school. Maybe I might appreciate the book more today, but at the time I found it incredibly boring and it just seemed to drag on and on and on. It really felt like a written soap opera from the 1800's, which it kind of was as it was originally published a serial where the reader got a small part of it every week. Which probably accounted for how slowly the plot seemed to move.

Perhaps an honorable mention would go to "Triton", as that's the first book I remember where I started reading and actually got a decent way into it before putting it down as it was absolutely boring me out of my mind. Though I was a teen at the time, and one of my main sources of reading material was whatever I could find at garage sales for cheap. But nevertheless, almost always if I thought a book was interesting enough to buy it was also interesting enough for at least one read through, but that one stood out as an exception. Though I have to wonder if I tried reading it again today if I might manage to get through it this time.

Couldn't get over the accent stuff in Huckleberry Finn. I gotta be able to flow state a book.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley was good because it started off with a lot of stuff I can relate to, but in a kind of neat Time Travel storyline set in the near future which is also great because I really only like Time Travel stories. Stuff like Khmer Rouge and refugee child growing up in the west and all that kind of stuff, all wrapped up in a strong female lead character. And then halfway through, the dude unzips his pants and it turns into a shitty Oxford Study romance where the strong protagonist is completely undone and turns into a colonizer worshipping story. Bullshit. I stopped reading and I'm still angry about it two months later. Fuck that story.

Also, Stations of the Tide was dry and I never finished it. I've tried 2-3 times. Swanwick is my favorite sorta-contemporary author but I don't know how that won so many awards. Am I missing something? It seems like everyone wants to herald that novel as great because they don't want to look dumb, but it's just all over the place compared to his later novels, much like Killing is My Business has a bunch of good riffs but is all over the place with no structure and nothing ever repeats so therefore it isn't as refined and memorable as Rust in Peace.

States of matter by David L. Goodestein. Just read the first paragraph tbh

The Darkroom of Damocles.

The big "twist" in the book basically gets pretty obviously announced in the first chapter "oh this person is exactly like me but better in every way I can conceive, how vexing. Gosh would I like to be him". It's almost spelled out.

Once the twist is known, the rest of the book makes little sense. Sure, the main character becomes an unreliable narrator, but he's not just twisting details; hugely important events can no longer happen if you assume the twist, because there's no physical way of it happening, unless the narrator is so extremely unreliable that you might as well be reading Jurassic Park only to reveal it was actually Terminator or something.

And then the book tries to end all clever by dangling the whole "was this the twist? Was it all real? Who knoooowws" making the book feel like a massive waste of time. Clearly the author wanted you to doubt the narrator at the end so you'd go back and think "oh was this/that a hint?", but with the twist being so painfully obvious it lands flat on its face.

I was hoping there'd be some clever ending that meta-played on the whole "the reader has been distrusting of the narrator"-ordeal, but there was nothing. Very unfulfilling reading experience.

I read the Bible once... Meh, didn't liked the ending.

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. I thought it would be all James Bond shit. It was the most boring thing I ever read.

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 majority of the books we read in school. They almost seem like the only reason they're promoted in school reading class was as a deal by the authors and the schools to save the book from disinterest. However, I tend to get a lot of flak for it, especially when I bring up Of Mice and Men and A Christmas Carol. No matter how I read the first one (since everyone keeps telling me I'm reading it wrong), all that rings in my head is a plot demonstrating the struggle of two individuals in an old crochety version of rural America that leads up to a justification of euthanizing based on weaknesses that shouldn't have been set up to show in the first place, and a Christmas Carol is just an old man being bullied by three ghosts who could be out solving some of the world's biggest issues but somehow think some random old man who did the crime of refusing to give generosity to someone is the world's biggest priority.

It's a common meme to compare the aesthetics/style/ethics/accuracy of a book to the Twilight saga like the Harkness Test (e.g. "wow, the Quran has worse ethics than Twilight" or "this Harry Potter story might be misguided, but at least it's not Twilight"), and I wouldn't exalt the majority of the books I've had to read in high school above the Twilight books.