poenadare
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That Very Popular Book Everyone Loved But You Hated
Anne Rice Vampings - I did read like the first three. I thought they were interesting and original but I failed to fall down and swoon like just about every other person out there.
The Wheel of Time - My ex loved these. I ran into a dry spell in 2006 and was forced to read them. It was e x c r u c i a t i n g.
What say you?
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GrimTempest
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i'm going to answer this one with a picture
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vn_jurojin
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GrimTempest posted:
i'm going to answer this one with a picture
Truth
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Ravynmagi
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Sword of Shannara. I kinda like parts, but it just seems like he rambles on and on way too much. Disappointed me because I really loved the Magic Kingdom series.
PS. I also tried the audio book format. Even got bored listening to him rambling on and on. 
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Natoli
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GrimTempest posted:
i'm going to answer this one with a picture
This.
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poenadare
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GrimTempest posted:
i'm going to answer this one with a picture
Ha! If he had simply blacked out every passage where Thomas whines the books would have been GREAT. There was less whining in the second trilogy but it generally wasn't as good.
Yeah I can understand the sentiment.
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Stiger
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I was recently in the mood for a good fantasy series, so I decided to start Raymond Feist's Riftwar Cycle series. It gets good reviews, people seem to really like it. 3/4 of the way through Magician I was really bored so I started skipping forward hoping something interesting happens. Eventually I gave up and took the book back to the library because I just didn't care any more. Most things that I've read say that Magician is better than the books that follow, so that kind of killed the series for me.
In the reviews, everyone seems to love the mixture and clash of the two old cultures, but it did nothing for me. Very disappointing because I was looking forward to having a great series to read. I read slowly, so the series would have given me reading material for a looooonnnnnngggg time.
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larael
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I hate:
1. Wheel of time - ugh all the female characters where so annoying, and then nothing happens for ages.
2. Assassins Apprentice - utterly depressing
3. Anything by Eddings - just no
I've been underwhelmed by:
1. A Song of Ice and Fire - it's the complete opposite of 80's formula fantasy which is good. But most characters don't live long enough to do anything worthwhile - doubly so if they're even slightly likeable. The books (especially the later ones) have too many lists of stuff eaten and chapters where absolutely nothing of importance happens. Oh and if I hear "words are wind" again I will scream.
2. Magician - it wasn't terrible but Pug gets so powerful I ceased to care
3. Thomas Covenant - first trilogy wasn't that bad, although Covenant whines way too much. The later books are best avoided.
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Yossarian_42
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I could write a series of essays on this one.
Fantasy:
1. First Law. The characters are all unlikable bastards. The undeserving get everything and the only people who aren't completely and utterly reprehensible end up losing. I'm not one to need a happy ending but when I can't like the characters on any level it isn't engaging. On top of that I found parts of the series excruciatingly boring and slow.
2. Drizzit. Those books are astoundingly bad. The man managed to write 20 books and have ZERO character development. He should get some sort of medal for managing that. Salvatore is a hack in every sense of the word.
3. I suppose disliking Covenant doesn't count anymore since everyone here mentions it. The character is too unlikable and the author writes these pointless chapters that add nothing to the story, characters or plot. The second trilogy was shockingly bad even in comparison.
4. Sword of Truth. A lot of people recognize that this stuff is garbage but a lot of others do not.
5. Piers Anthony. Boring, generic stories that lack everything that makes characters or stories engaging and interesting. The books are just dull as hell. Throw on all of the perverted pedo stuff and Piers gets a 110% pass from me.
6. Odd Thomas. I was reading book one and the second I realized he was going to kill Stormy I put the book down in protest. I refuse to read that.
"Literature"
1. Fahrenheit 451. This book was godawful. All of the culturally relevant stuff was a 1984 rip-off and the ending was laughably stupid. Boring book that gets credit it doesn't deserve.
2. The Catcher in the Rye. A book that persists on people without the confidence to admit they didn't like it alone.
3. Finnegan's Wake. Just because the author is a master and the book goes 100% over your head doesn't mean it is good. It was just nonsense.
4. All of Faulkner. I admit that the books have more merit than I see in them but I get nothing from them. Everything about Faulkner and his topics avoids what is relevant to me and my interests.
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Stiger
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Yossarian_42 posted:
2. Drizzit. Those books are astoundingly bad. The man managed to write 20 books and have ZERO character development. He should get some sort of medal for managing that. Salvatore is a hack in every sense of the word.
Yep. It was slightly interesting the first time Drizzit and Entreri fought to a stalemate. The next 50 times they fought just got to be tiresome.
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GrimTempest
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forgotten realms blows hot and cold for me. some of it is good and some of it is bad. the dark elf trilogy for example was pretty good. later i thought it got interesting again during the legacy of the drow books and then again during the sellswords and hunters blades books. all the books in between those though, which is half the series, were either dull or just plain bad. the transitions trilogy was the first one where only part of the trilogy was good, the first two were bad and the third fairly good. the neverwinter trilogy started out good with guantlgrym so maybe this trilogy will be decent. they're complete junk reading though, junk food for the brain.
he just randomly goes from good to bad with the series, its almost like two people are writing it. the good ones make for entertaining light reads its just unfortunate that they're mixed in with just as many bad ones.
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purplehugmonkey
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Yossarian_42 posted:
4. All of Faulkner. I admit that the books have more merit than I see in them but I get nothing from them. Everything about Faulkner and his topics avoids what is relevant to me and my interests.
Agreed 100%. I hate Faulkner with a burning passion, and every English teacher seems to orgasm just thinking about his horrible books and inflicting them on a new generation of unsuspecting people.
Also, the Dune books for me.
First couple were sort of ok, nothing special, and later it was just boring boring boring.
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poenadare
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I think As I Lay Dying is important because the South isn't all that far away from where it was in Faulkner's day. Yah gotta forgive him - he did a good job on the script from To Have and Have Not even if it meant recompiling Hemingway.
Piers Anthony is AWESOMEly over-productive. Here is a simple rule: If it's a PA series of more than 3 books then he should have stopped at three. If he did manage to stop at three then he should have made it one book only. Stop while you are ahead fer goodnesssakes!
Me, 14, reading Catcher in the Rye: "I woulda had sex with her. Wow this guy is clueless!"
Dune: Stop at three. Herbert should have too. Great otherwise I thought.
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purplehugmonkey
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I don't know, I just reject the idea that a work of fiction can be important just because of what it is attempting to portray.
For example, if you wanted to understand the inner workings of a mentally handicapped individual, you could either go the route of a scientific description of their life(which might fail to reveal their true nature), their life from the perspective of a friend or family member that is not similarly mentally handicapped but interacts with the individual enough that you learn their nature vicariously, or their life from their own first person perspective, which would be relatively inaccessible to the average reader, but still firsthand and so supposedly the most "true" to the goal.
The problem with Faulkner is that his writing is mostly inaccessible imo. Sure it is true to his goal, but taken on its own merits it really is quite horrible.
Emily Dickinson and Hemingway are other good examples of that. Is it really some deep and profound writing style or did they just have a nice goal in mind, but they happen to not be very good at choosing how to go about it so that people might actually enjoy reading it?
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Blisteringballs
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Take your pick of R.A. Salvatore works. They're hackneyed and awful for the most part. I gave a few of his more acclaimed works a shot and couldn't get into them at all.
But I'm not into really into series, even when it comes to genre fiction.
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Harry Potter
Twilight <---not that i would read that garbage
The Southern Vampire Mysteries<---the books true blood is based off of
Narnia books
Da Vinci Code
Anything written by Danielle Steel
Anything written by John Grisham
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el_antonina
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Those Twilight books. I don't get the hysteria with this series. I really don't.
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Galois2005
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Loved Martin's works and noticed Erickson's series consistently recomended as an alternative, absolutely hated it.
Not that he is a poor writer, some of it is exceptional, from a strictly literary perspective he may very well be the finest author in the genre. I just found that where Martin sticKs to standard fare of dragons that breath fire and zombies that have to be burned type stuff - creating a framework of fantasy that has "rules", Erickson falls way to the other extreme and while incredibly creative all too often every page seems to reek of devine intervention.
It struck me as reading this as the inherent limitation of SF fantasy, why shows like Star Trek can be initially rather poorly recieved, but grow as audiences accept "the rules" You can beam from orbit to surface but not from planet to planet - thats against the rules - irregardless that both concepts are ludicrous.
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Harry Potter. Could not even finish the first book. Maybe if I had been much, much younger but I still feel I would have laughed it off then as well.
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Caoilin
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the fk is wrong with you? harry potter books are awesome. 
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Forgotten Realms is both hot and cold for me too.
Salvatore did good in the original 3 where Drizzt left Menzoberenzen and came to the surface. Once he hit Icewind Dale, the store got boring and stagnant.
In the same 'world' I dislike all books Ed Greenwood wrote, however I loved the Avatar Trilogy and the whole theory of Gods being made and Cyric's rise to power.
I read and absolutely hated everything in Twilight including the movies.
I read mostly history books tho... I just finished the Rise and Fall of the Third Reicht.
Oh I know.. the Narnia series.. I absolutely hate with a passion, tho my sister loves them. /shrug
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GrimTempest
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Lexi_Necrodiva posted:
Salvatore did good in the original 3 where Drizzt left Menzoberenzen and came to the surface. Once he hit Icewind Dale, the store got boring and stagnant.
I think the reason behind that is he actually wrote the Icewind Dale books first. He had to go back and write Drizzt's story afterwards. Drizzt was supposed to be Wulfgar's sidekick but he kinda stole the show. So they had to adjust for it and write him in as the main character and he did that by creating the Dark Elf Trilogy. If you find the books in stores now the Dark Elf trilogy is listed as books one through three but if you check publication dates the Icewind Dale books were published first 
So i think he had more to work with going into the Dark Elf books because of that. At this point i think the main reason i still follow the books is the "bad guy" characters. They're all much more interesting. Following Jarlaxle, Artemis, Arthrogate etc...much more fun than following stories about Drizzt.
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Raiztlin
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Jaraxle isn't a character, he's Salvatores way out of Drizzt's problems.
I agree though, the Dark Elf Trilogy is one of my most read trilogies. There are alot of good moments there, and some actual character development.
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I can't remember the author, but the story had to do with a sinister online affair with a large Indian bush and an eventual banishment.
I dunno, the guys on VN loved it but I was like, Meh.
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Anything by Salvatore. Awful. Simply awful.
Just about anything else i've read i've either liked, loved or found *some* redeeming quality to them.
Well, except for Ayn Rand, but there's plenty of haters out there on that so it doesn't fit the topic at hand.
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twilight
narnia
im trying to like The Simarilian (sp) but its like reading the bible and a history book mashed into one
edit and anything by John Gresham makes me want to stab kittens
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Dresden Files  I just couldn't get into them
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ok well if you weren't letting me stay in your holiday home in september i'd never speak to you again for dissing dresden. (btw the first 2 books are kind of terrible when compared to the rest of them.)
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GrimTempest
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Caoilin posted:
(btw the first 2 books are kind of terrible when compared to the rest of them.)
very much this. i will often start people with the second or third book and i always tell them if you don't absolutely hate it stick with it through book four. if your not hooked by then you prolly won't be but the change in how good those books are comparing books 1 and 2 vs 3 and 4 (and everything after) is leagues apart.
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JoAyanami
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I couldn't finish the Icewind Dale trilogy.
-Jo
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