Ask Lemmy

Not one book, but almost all of Asimov's Foundation series. The first one is one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time because I love seeing how each group has to use game theory to solve their own unique issue in order to survive and flourish as a society built on science and reason. While I admit that it's not always written well, I love the mindset that Asimov wanted to emphasize: violence should be the last resort for solving conflict between nations. When the factions outside of Foundation threaten them with war, they respond with soft power like economic pressure, religious sway, and focusing on making better advancements to science and engineering to defend themselves by being too valuable to destroy.

The fatal problem with the series arises in Book 2 though. Book 2 (Foundation & Empire) introduces the interesting concept of "what happens when a massive wrench is thrown into the meticulously calculated 1000-year plan?" Unfortunately, you can tell that at this point is when the concepts of the story become too smart for Asimov to handle, and he instead begins his trend of doubling and tripling down on deus ex machina characters with mind control powers for the rest of the series. All of the interesting methods of sociopolitical problem solving are thrown out the window to become sub-par adventure stories.

Books 4 and 5 (Foundation's Edge and Foundation & Earth) were written particularly poorly, and was probably the point where I should have cut my losses. The books follow not-Han-Solo adventure man, contain a sexist female sidekick that only serves to be a hot piece of ass for Asimov's self-insert character to have sex with, and then has an extremely uncomfortable "happy ending" where a traumatized child is left to be groomed by a robotic parental figure so that the robot can one day mind-wipe the child and insert it's own consciousness into their body. What's more is that they completely ditch the core premise of the 1000-year plan, and the ending undercuts any direction that the story could have gone from there.

The prequel books 6 and 7 (Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation) aren't nearly as bad as 4 or 5, but they completely undermine the importance and intelligence of the character Hari Seldon from the first book. Instead of him being a great man and brilliant mathematician on his own, he's essentially led around by his nose by undercover robots that are the secret architects of everything just because Asimov wanted to tie-in elements from his books about robots.

I tripped over a cut-down street sign and smashed into the concrete, scraping my knuckles and brushing my nose and elbows.

These days I tend not to persevere with books that I'm having a bad experience with. There are just too many good books out there.

Poor writing sucks but even worse is when the author misjudges how much they can expect from the reader. Sometimes things can get 'bad' in a book for just long enough that the reader feels they have risen to a challenge and been rewarded at the next change. Some authors are aware of this and incorporate the dynamic but end up prolonging it too much or over-egging it. I actually feel abused as reader when that happens and end up rage quitting. Unfortunately, deleting an ebook doesn't come with the same satisfaction as burning a physical one in those cases.

The other thing that is a bad experience for me is overly long dialogue expositions, where a character does an infodump to provide background and context and justify the plot. It totally jangles me, bores me and breaks immersion in the story by making me cynical about the authors laziness. An example of this is all the Librarian's waffling about biblical stuff in Snow Crash. Rather than making me care more about the outcome of the plot it just yanked me away from what was a really enjoyable story and setting and destroyed the pace.

BTW, if anyone is interested; Bookwyrm is a fediverse platform for discussing and rating books. Much like a federated FOSS version of Goodreads.

Dune, I spent my time flipping to the glossary every 5 minutes. Ulysses by James Joyce was even worse, I had to keep a website open that explained the barrage of references to me for almost every page.

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 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.

I tripped up some stairs reading ASOIAF

Just tried to read some of Anne Rice's books last week because I was enchanted by the AMC adaptation of Interview with the Vampire.

I can't even adequately express how much I dislike her writing and "story telling", if you can even call it that. Her vampire lore/rules for her vampires are cool, but that's pretty much all she has going for her.

Almost every book I read back when I was a school student.

Each month we had to read a boring book chosen by the school, and at the end of each month we had a annoying test with questions like: "When the protagonist discovered the truth, what was the emotion he felt?" Or "How did the author felt when writing this?" So I had to read 300 pages of a boring book and pay attention to each detail each month.

I don't dislike reading, actually I enjoy good books, but reading something against my will is sickening.

When I realized there are a lot of dumb people out there, 1984 by George Orwell.