Books You've Thrown Away

[january]

Cold Mountain is just the most boring book ever. I bought it before the movie came out, thinking it was going to be this passionate romance, but you can tell the writer is a historian first and an author second because he just goes on and on about the most minute details. I have nothing against historical books, but gawd, was it ever boring. I gave up halfway through.

[Deleted]

The author, Zane, was recommended to me as a good sex read. I got AfterBurn and was primed for some good sex. I didn't get much and it was just OK. The problem was all the filler between the brief and unsatisfying sex encounters. And most of the characters were boring and not just in their sex lives.

The only interesting and arresting (and probably arrested) character was the Mother from Hell. I wanted to hear her life story and all her sex stories. She had plenty and she was always willing to give her daughter all the details.

[Deleted]

I am so ready to chuck Ordinary Horror by david Searcy. Wow, this guy is an awful author. The story premise is interesting - a widow who's really into his rose bushes suddenly starts having underground pest trouble, so he orders these plants from South America that are supposed to get rid of the moles w/o harming the rose bushes. Well, little does he know that these new plants are horrible and scary (in a way that hasn't been clear yet, and I'm over halfway done. ALl the stupid plants have done so far is grow beautiful blue roses and cause the guy's neighbors to stare at the garden. Ooh, scary!). Nothing has happened. If anything has happened it's just lost in the wordy dialogue and run-on sentences. Literally, every other paragraph is 13 lines long or longer, and you'll see exactly two periods in the whole thing. Two! I mean, come on! Break those puppies up a little! Here's an example:

What we needed was the mind of a laboratory animal trained in the pursuit of immediate possibilities, incapable of curiosity or calculated risk, immune to the beguilement, the drawing away of one's attention and purpose, their dispersion, as if onto a blotter, along every tangled channel and stream, entrained in the general mingling of substances.

I had to read that sentence three timesbefore I fully understood what he was trying to say. Unfortunately, 95% of the entire book reads like that.

Also, the protagonists starts reading this book about an explorer in the early 1900's who traveled through the Congo. For some reason, the author thought it was a good idea to make us read this book, too, and Chapter 8 is one big book excerpt. Couldn't he have just had the guy read it on his own time? Why do we have to slog through it? He could have given us a book report at the end or something.

I'm torn on whether I want to finish it just to find out what the horror is going to be, or if I should just chuck it and forget about it.

[Smilla]

The author, Zane, was recommended to me as a good sex read. I got AfterBurn and was primed for some good sex. I didn't get much and it was just OK. The problem was all the filler between the brief and unsatisfying sex encounters. And most of the characters were boring and not just in their sex lives.

Respectfully, Chatchien, that's the kind of sex I would have I expected from a book with that title.

[Deleted]

Yeah, well, you and I, both know it now, Smillia.

[cattywampus]

I've given up on a lot of books in the past year.

Hated Cold Mountain. Never finished it. Someone recommended Carter Beats the Devil and I got stalled halfway through. Started Running with Scissors but realized I hated it by about page 100, so I stopped. The Great Influenza is the most boring and repetitive book I've read in a long time. "The 1918 flu. It was bad. It killed many people from pneumonia. Blood came out of their eyes and nose and ears. Lots of people died. The end." There, now you don't have to read it and see how badly this author needed an editor with a huge red pencil.

As far as Ayn Rand, I liked The Fountainhead (read it a couple of times) and hated Atlas Shrugged (stalled in the middle).

[Smilla]

The Great Influenza is the most boring and repetitive book I've read in a long time. "The 1918 flu. It was bad. It killed many people from pneumonia. Blood came out of their eyes and nose and ears. Lots of people died. The end."

Wow. My mileage varies. I was very impressed by that book. Particularly the art. That was one of the most enlightening books on the pandemic I've ever read.

[caycepollard]

Jodi Picoult's The Pact. What can I say? I was going to be stuck in a hotel with sister's boyfriend's parents all weekend and I had limited time at a Border's Express before I had to get on a train and I had to pick something and I thought that would be about something--a little darker than what it was about. Which I couldn't even describe to you because I kept falling asleep.

[rosetta]

The Ishbane Conspiracy is the absolute worst book I have ever read. It was recommended to be by a friend, so I gave it a try. It deals with these demons in hell who try to corrupt and damn these four teens, and it shows their letters back and forth as well as the teens' daily lives. The demons' methods of corrupting youth include exposing them to the film Titanic, which demons think is just the best movie ever, because it tells girls they should take their clothes off to get boys to like them. Those stupid humans don't know how evilll that movie is, and we're gonna use it to manipulate them! It goes on like this, I kid you not. It's just the stupidest shit. I had no idea evil demons sounded exactly like unintimidating, overly sheltered wannabe-preachers when they wrote letters to each other. Thanks, The Ishbane Conspiracy! The letters got worse, but I've repressed it all and refuse to go back and read. Really, though--it would have been funny if it wasn't so obnoxious.

[loquaciousone]

The author, Zane, was recommended to me as a good sex read.

Argh! How I tired of hearing Zane trumped as the second coming (heh, I said "come") of black erotica authors. Her work is crap, unless you like sex by numbers scenes: "He did [insert horny thing here], then she [insert horny response here]." Ugh. Chatchien, I hope it was library book.