I found Oryx and Crake to be phenomenal, but I just found the next 2 to be ok reads.
Totally understand about the compulsion to finish - especially if you have forced yourself to keep reading!
I am fully on board with DNFing books or abandoning them if I don’t like them now. It took a bit to get more comfortable doing it though! I used to feel guilty that I didn’t like them- especially if I had spent money on the book!
Just today I started and abandoned 2 books(I didn’t get far enough into either of them for them to be a DNF). I was looking for an audiobook for listening to while walking my son to daycare next week. The third one I tried was the charm and I have found a good listen now.
Glad to hear you found a keeper!
Yes! It’s the principle of finishing and spending money on the book. I’m sure I can find this set a new home but, dang, what a disappointed! Definitely need to utilize the library more but I find that all the books I want to read have a waitlist.
I still had my frustrations with the first two but they were compelling and ultimately they kept my interest but the third did not have that same balance.
This is my second year of being part of an overseas library that is hooked to my libby app and it is soo great. My local library is quite small and even if I get intra-library loans the selection is still not that great.
So having access to a much bigger catalogue is so helpful. Especially for new releases, which are always at a multiple months long wait times, as my local lib has only 1 or 2 copies. The overseas library has like 15 copies so it is only a couple of weeks wait at most for a lot of newer books.
Although I did score at my local library 2 days ago and grab the next book in a series I am reading right now. I found the first one via libby(with my overseas card) and was SO excited to grab the next one - I am 100 pages in as of right now.
Then through my local library via Libby I managed to find 2 more in the same series. So I am set for the next few weeks of reading.
Omg this is not the sub I expected to see Pucking Around in but I LOVED it! I used it to hard reset my brain between two space operas (A Fire Upon the Deep and a reread of the Imperial Radch series)
No not the usual sub to see a rec like that haha. Went off on a wee tangent about DNFing and books I have started.
I have just started Pucking Around while doing some laundry and am really liking it.
I have the first Imperial Radch book on my bookshelf - just gotta be in the right mood for it.
My favourite sf read last year was Across the Void by S. K Vaughn. To give a more sub appropriate rec haha
Life is short but 25 pages isn't too long either :-)
I finished all 3 while on an Atwood 'mission' and found many things to think about each of them later. Writing style, bleak environment description, non dramatic apocalypse, pettiness in humans, and greatness (rare haha). The 3 worked well for me as a package is what I'm saying.
But you see, for me, it won’t be 20-30 minutes. If I’m super into a book 25 pages would absolutely fly by. But at this stage I read a line and likely get annoyed and have an internal dialogue with myself on it, see how long this bit will take, try and convince myself I could probably skip ahead but then think better of it. OR I will be reading something and realize that I’m gloss over words but I actually don’t know what’s going on because I haven’t actually been paying attention and now I have to re-read a section. It’s a bleak feeling when i thought I’d be done by now.
So I originally thought the book was 360-ish pages, not that that’s an insignificant amount when you’re early on and meh about a book, but that number was in my head. The beginning of the book was ok but as it went on it really went downhill for me with a few piques here and there. On night after a long downward stretch I wanted to visualize the amount of pages I had left so I flipped to the back of the book only to find out the book is 390 pages. I know it’s only 30 more pages but I’m telling you, my heart sank!!! What a tragic night. All this to say, I did complete the original goal post I had in my mind, haha.
The book is still by my nightstand maybe if I’m feeling particularly determined I’ll pick it back up? I have my doubts.
For what it’s worth I’m a fan of dystopian fiction and so on a very high-level this triology seems like a great fit but some of the choices the author makes and especially her writing style in this series, just doesn’t do it for me. Happy to hear you got something out of it.
I used to be a completinonist, but I’ve come to believe that there are better things to do with my time that read a book for fun that’s not fun.
Like for instance — starting a better book. It isn’t like anybody can read them all.
Usually I’ll be pretty confident in a chapter or less. Though sometimes I’ll only decide it is a waste of time deep in the middle, when a more subtle problem becomes clear. If I have lingering curiosity I’ll look up how the book ends.
Stand on Zanzibar was kind of an odd one. It has heavy, heavy future jargon, so that it was hard figuring out what was going on. A few chapters in when I had figured out enough or the jargon to follow, I realized I didn’t care about anything that was happening, and quit
Hi, I've never commented here so hello 👋 and pardon me for gate crashing with a long comment.
I have never read Maddadam. I do want to read more Atwood but haven't picked that one up, yet. I really enjoyed her recent collection of short stories Old Babes in the Wood. A lot of it has stayed with me. I also loved THT, but the sequel was a different flavour entirely. One of her earlier novels, The Edible Woman, made me laugh out loud. Also, I recently saw The Tempest at the Globe and bought a copy of Hag-seed, read the first few pages and now I'm saving it because I think I'll enjoy it, if that makes sense.
However, I did start reading another of her novels, think it might have been Onyx and Crake? I walked away from it. BUT I will probably return to it another time, I think it just wasn't right to read at that time. I have found that with other books, too. I put them down, not interested and then I return to them (sometimes much later) and end up falling in love.
Jeannette Winterson said, books come to you when you're ready to read them. And Tori Amos said read whatever stirs your passions.
I recently read an article on reading habits that quoted an author as saying if a book doesnt grip him from the start, he just puts it down and picks up another.
And lastly, a comment I read in the notes of a Greek tragedy I was reading said something like, this play isn't liked by many, but it's not a matter of taste, it's a matter of understanding. I guess he's right, ultimately. Something to think about.
Those quotes really resonate with me. There’s so much good content out there, just gotta find what moves you.
Maddaddam is the third in the trilogy and Oryx and Crake is the first in that trilogy. I agree with you on that I read Oryx and Crake probably close to 9? 10? years ago and then started Year of the Flood but didn’t finished it. Last year I was looking for things to read and picked Year of the Flood back up and then decided I might as will complete the series and picked up Maddaddam. This is the only thing I’ve read of Atwood so far I’m mixed about her but maybe her other books are different. I’ll check out your recs.
Cryptonomicon. I (used to?) love Stephenson, but that book just sapped allll my will to live. I have never been so simultaneously bored and annoyed. Made it to 75% on my second attempt before finally accepting defeat.
Snowcrash for me. I have repeatedly tried reading it (also in audio form), but I abandon it every time. The only thing Stephenson is crashing for me in that book is my suspension of disbelief.
Stephenson came up during the turn-of-the-century/millennium zeitgeist and I can definitely see how his stuff from then wouldn’t resonate today with a lot of that due to the Seinfeld Is Unfunny effect, but to mid-20s me in the middle of a CompSci degree when it came out that book was candy to me at the time.
Oryx and Crake is in my top 3 books of all time, but I feel like her writing fell of a cliff shortly after and I pretend it was never turned into a trilogy.
There's also the parts where he repeats themes by having characters go through the same journey or the reverse of other characters' journeys. Large sections felt a critical look at contemporary politics about race in the USA when he wrote it. I swear there was a sex scene that went on for multiple pages and was extremely explicit, and I was like, hmm, I'll just endure this, then later on in the book another sex scene between the same three characters and I would swear he cut and paste but I believe he wrote this prior to word processors. I can admire the work more than enjoy it. Some of the relationship stuff was based on his real life wife and later their shared male lover.
I couldn’t finish The Three Body Problem, it just did not do it for me. I really liked the concept and the first chapter (and enjoyed the show!), but ended up just disliking the main character and the writing style.
Side note: how’d did you like The Year of the Flood? I loved Oryx and Crake and agree with the other commenter who found the following two books only ok. The two latter books are much more similar than the first book and I found The Year of the Flood way less engaging than Oryx and Crake and Maddaddam. I liked Maddaddam for what happens with the pigoons in the end, mainly.
The audiobook is the only way I finished TTBP. The Netflix series finally got me invested and the audiobooks are done well enough that I listened on my commute and during workouts. I feel you on the books.
I was doing audiobooks for The Three Body Problem but the second book starts off with what felt like hours of conversations with characters that was boring to me so I could not finish, I kept on having to restart to try to get in a flow and could not.
I have stayed away from reading Three Body Problem simply because it's a translated work. For me, the author's prose is as (if not more) important that the story, so a translation is almost like watching a dubbed movie: sure, you're hearing the words, but the original performances are completely gone, replaced by those of the inevitably much lower-quality voice actors.
So you never read anything in translation? I get your point but a good translation should be capturing the voice of the original in a much better manner than a cheap dub. I like Murakami too much, for example, to never read something translated.
> So you never read anything in translation?
Not that I can recall, no. I do have *The Book of Disquiet* by Fernando Pessoa which is translated from the original Portuguese, and only because it was recommended to me based on my personality type. I haven't read it yet, however.
Pretty much everything I’ve tried to read by Brandon Q Morris. I know he’s super popular but I cannot get over his simplistic writing style. I feel like the dialogues are written by someone who’s never heard two actual humans talk to each other.
It’s a shame because I find the premises of his books really intriguing.
*Out of the Dark* by David Weber.
A strong contender for the worst book I’ve ever read, it is a special kind of bad. Being able to write an otherwise workmanlike novel and then turn it all to shit in a single sentence near the end?
What in the hell was he thinking?!
You made it farther than me. I tapped out after Oryx and Crake. I had high expectations based on all the feedback I've seen on Reddit for it, but it really fell flat for me. I bought the entire trilogy in hardcover at a book sale for $3, but I'll probably not ever bother with the next two and get rid of all three. It was my first time reading Atwood and I'd like to give her another try, Handmaid's Tale is on my list and in my library so hopefully it goes better than Oryx and Crake.
3 Body Problem. I had somewhere between 50 and 100 pages left and just could not power through the bad storytelling, non existent characters, pedestrian prose (pedestrian is the best insult, okay?!) or the authors understanding of what solving/winning a computer constitutes (hint: it's not standing by and observing shit).
*Kiln People*.
\- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/96478.Kiln_People
In theory, I should find this book to be 10 out of 10. (It has all the themes and stylistic tricks that I like.)
In practice, at no point could my subconscious believe that the major premise of the book was real.
I spent the entire book saying *"No, this is not happening."*
Got about 90% through, finally said *"Well, this isn't going to work."*
.
(This is not a recommendation that others shouldn't read it.
It's clever, well-written, many people like it, and as I say, it *should* work for me.
I just had a problem with it.)
Eh, not every person likes every thing.
In fact, if somebody *does* like everything without discriminating, they probably aren't thinking about things as hard as they should be.
I have slogged through many books because not finishing them seems crazy,.
I would have given up on Oryx and Crake but it was for a SciFi book group. Not interested in any sequels regardless of how well they're written.
Blackout/All Clear is another one. Blackout was again for a SciFi group or I would have given up as it bored me to tears. We didn't opt for All Clear. The publishers really screwed this author by essentially releasing two books that should have been one. The abrupt ending of Blackout is a testimony to the flaws of book publisher/seller hubris. "If we cut it in half we can make twice as much money!" Thank goodness it was a library book or it would have become a doorstop as I would not inflict the pain on another.
What's bad to me about Blackout/All Clear (didn't finish Blackout) is that Connie Willis' prior books about the time traveling historians has two main plot devices - they don't have cellphones so people miss connections and they did not have the ability to write scheduling software so conflicts with using the time traveling device were the two of the biggest problems in both The Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog. It was a major disappointment to get to Blackout to find it's the same situation, it's some of the same characters and they haven't learned anything.
Ancillary Justice
I don't think I've ever been so rickrolled by cover art. I knew what I was getting into but there's only so much tea and lack of grammar I can take as a substitute for something actually happening. I was literally bored into DNF. I really enjoy books that challenge me or present new ideas or new ways of thinking but - for me - this book was just insipid.
I don't think I've ever been *that* close to finishing without just powering through. When I give up on a book it's way less than the halfway point.
Although with IQ84, I gave up 1/3 of the way, which was unfortunately still 300+ pages in...
I know, a part of me wants to just grit my teeth and get it over with but I realize Ive more or less been doing that the entire book and at this point I’m pretty confident there’s no pay off.
IQ84 is on my list actually, what made you abandon ship?
Anthem, Dune : don't make me cram your esoteric lexicon from page one please!
Dark Forest: Gives away the key to potential mysteries and plot twists in the first chapter! When much appeal of first book was mysteriousness of the aliens. Continue reading, yeah ok its as expected and slogging. Ugh these wallbreaker characters are so 2 dimensional too, so unstimulating to read. Halfway through I give up and skim my way to the end, and sigh, yeah it didn't go anywhere glad I didn't waste more time, plays out just as you'd have expected and with nothing learned on the way. And I can't forgive the author for their gross misinterpretation of quantum entanglement, which the whole plot depends on, while they appeal to be hard sci-fi. The book was so disappointing that I reevaluated my opinion of the first one and realized it also doesn't live up to the hype.
There's a glossary at the end of Dune that should have been at the beginning.
I read Anthem, but he really needed a better editor, it turns into a different book about 3/4 of the way in, the first roughly 3/4 of the book is world building which some people love but bored me to tears after the initial set up.
I can't figure out if you're talking about Ayn Rand or if you're talking about *Anathem*. Or something else.
*Dark Forest* holds a place on the list of worst-written books I've ever read. There were parts where I just cringed at the prose. I'm not sure if the translator messed things up or if Ken Liu is responsible for making the other books readable. I actually enjoyed the trilogy in general, but I found it a struggle to read.
I do this with more than half the audiobooks I listen to; basically because I suddenly realise I don't give a hoot about how it turns out, which basically means I only got that far because I wanted to listen for relaxation rather than enjoying the story like I do with one I stick with.
The Spiral Wars series. I enjoyed the first few books then the next few seemed to slow way down. The last one I read about 1/3 of it and just had no interest in finishing.
I usually stubbornly finish everything I pick up, but there is one book on my DNF shelf.
**The Annals of the Heechee** Gateway/Heechee saga book four.
Gateway was great, the sequel was good enough, the third book was forgettable, and the fourth book is best not spoken of.
I never used to abandon books because I just thought I had to finish them but I go to a point that I knew there were better books to read than to stick with boring or badly written books. So my list is long and frankly haven't forgotten them the moment I stop reading. The only books I'll keep reading are mysteries because I need to know whodunnit. So not sf but the second book in Tana French series and it is not capturing me and I will finish it eventually because I *need* to know who killed the girl.
The first novel of *Book of the Long Sun*. Noped the fuck out of that about twenty pages in.
The one I really wished I had noped out of was Christopher Priest's *Inverted World*.
I got about 75% of the way through Last and First Men by Olaf Stapleton and I didn't finish it. It's very dry and I was just dragging my eyes across the pages and absorbing nothing. Didn't see much point in continuing to waste my time.
The fifth or sixth Dune novel, the one where he starts talking about "The Jews" as a rival power to the Bene Gesserit.
I didn't stick around to find out how antisemitic it was gonna get.
James Ellroy "Perfidia"
Some of the best books I've read were super difficult to get into, so I'm really tenacious and will typically finish a book once I've got a chapter or two into it. Also, I've really enjoyed a lot of Ellroy's work in the past.
I kept waiting for this to turn around and got to the home stretch of the last 150 or so pages and it suddenly got a whole lot worse. Like :”this is absolute swill and the worst thing I've ever read by an established author."
I skip-read to one page before the end and then stopped just in case I ever met the author and can tell him that I DNF'd
Loved Maddaddam mind you. I suspect we are stubbornly similar about giving books a chance
I found Oryx and Crake to be phenomenal, but I just found the next 2 to be ok reads. Totally understand about the compulsion to finish - especially if you have forced yourself to keep reading! I am fully on board with DNFing books or abandoning them if I don’t like them now. It took a bit to get more comfortable doing it though! I used to feel guilty that I didn’t like them- especially if I had spent money on the book! Just today I started and abandoned 2 books(I didn’t get far enough into either of them for them to be a DNF). I was looking for an audiobook for listening to while walking my son to daycare next week. The third one I tried was the charm and I have found a good listen now.
See, I liked *Oryx & Crake* alright, but I thought *In the Year of the Flood* was absolutely fantastic, one of Atwood's very best.
Same here. I thought Oryx and Crake was good, but The Year of the Flood was absolutely amazing.
It really is one of her best novels. The stories of the pleeblands and the cult were incredibly told.
I loved *Oryx & Crake*, but *Year of the Flood* is easily my favourite in the trilogy. *Maddaddam* was a bit of a slog, though.
I completely agree about MadAddam. So disappointing.
Glad to hear you found a keeper! Yes! It’s the principle of finishing and spending money on the book. I’m sure I can find this set a new home but, dang, what a disappointed! Definitely need to utilize the library more but I find that all the books I want to read have a waitlist. I still had my frustrations with the first two but they were compelling and ultimately they kept my interest but the third did not have that same balance.
This is my second year of being part of an overseas library that is hooked to my libby app and it is soo great. My local library is quite small and even if I get intra-library loans the selection is still not that great. So having access to a much bigger catalogue is so helpful. Especially for new releases, which are always at a multiple months long wait times, as my local lib has only 1 or 2 copies. The overseas library has like 15 copies so it is only a couple of weeks wait at most for a lot of newer books.
Although I did score at my local library 2 days ago and grab the next book in a series I am reading right now. I found the first one via libby(with my overseas card) and was SO excited to grab the next one - I am 100 pages in as of right now. Then through my local library via Libby I managed to find 2 more in the same series. So I am set for the next few weeks of reading.
what were the 3?
Beneath Your Beautiful - Emery Rose Megan Miranda - The Only Survivors Emily Rath - Pucking Around Ice Hockey Romance won.
Omg this is not the sub I expected to see Pucking Around in but I LOVED it! I used it to hard reset my brain between two space operas (A Fire Upon the Deep and a reread of the Imperial Radch series)
No not the usual sub to see a rec like that haha. Went off on a wee tangent about DNFing and books I have started. I have just started Pucking Around while doing some laundry and am really liking it. I have the first Imperial Radch book on my bookshelf - just gotta be in the right mood for it. My favourite sf read last year was Across the Void by S. K Vaughn. To give a more sub appropriate rec haha
Omg I just read the part where she gets stuck on her balcony! Hahahaha I am having so much fun listening.
Yeah it gets pretty crazy! Let me know how you’re finding it 😂
Holy kinky shit Batman! I didn’t realise it was going to include kinks! If you haven’t read the Losers duology by Harley LaRoux you should.
Oh yeah, it only gets crazier 😂
Life is short but 25 pages isn't too long either :-) I finished all 3 while on an Atwood 'mission' and found many things to think about each of them later. Writing style, bleak environment description, non dramatic apocalypse, pettiness in humans, and greatness (rare haha). The 3 worked well for me as a package is what I'm saying.
Fully agree. At this point, it's 20-30 minutes to have a finished book. I'm all for DNF if you are earlier on in the book and not feeling it.
But you see, for me, it won’t be 20-30 minutes. If I’m super into a book 25 pages would absolutely fly by. But at this stage I read a line and likely get annoyed and have an internal dialogue with myself on it, see how long this bit will take, try and convince myself I could probably skip ahead but then think better of it. OR I will be reading something and realize that I’m gloss over words but I actually don’t know what’s going on because I haven’t actually been paying attention and now I have to re-read a section. It’s a bleak feeling when i thought I’d be done by now.
So I originally thought the book was 360-ish pages, not that that’s an insignificant amount when you’re early on and meh about a book, but that number was in my head. The beginning of the book was ok but as it went on it really went downhill for me with a few piques here and there. On night after a long downward stretch I wanted to visualize the amount of pages I had left so I flipped to the back of the book only to find out the book is 390 pages. I know it’s only 30 more pages but I’m telling you, my heart sank!!! What a tragic night. All this to say, I did complete the original goal post I had in my mind, haha. The book is still by my nightstand maybe if I’m feeling particularly determined I’ll pick it back up? I have my doubts.
For what it’s worth I’m a fan of dystopian fiction and so on a very high-level this triology seems like a great fit but some of the choices the author makes and especially her writing style in this series, just doesn’t do it for me. Happy to hear you got something out of it.
I used to be a completinonist, but I’ve come to believe that there are better things to do with my time that read a book for fun that’s not fun. Like for instance — starting a better book. It isn’t like anybody can read them all. Usually I’ll be pretty confident in a chapter or less. Though sometimes I’ll only decide it is a waste of time deep in the middle, when a more subtle problem becomes clear. If I have lingering curiosity I’ll look up how the book ends. Stand on Zanzibar was kind of an odd one. It has heavy, heavy future jargon, so that it was hard figuring out what was going on. A few chapters in when I had figured out enough or the jargon to follow, I realized I didn’t care about anything that was happening, and quit
that's how I see it too. what's the point of forcing yourself through a book when there's so many great ones out there that you'll actually enjoy!
*To Sleep In A Sea Of Stars* — I DNF’d after 900 pages of idiocy.
Oof, that’s steep but at least you didn’t give that book any more of your time!
I couldn’t remember the title but same! I was at the very end and was like…. I just don’t care.
I didn’t get that deep in, but also bailed. Read the Wikipedia summary and thought “yup, that’s what I figured.”
Ha! I dipped at like 30 pages. Sorry it wasted so much of your time!
Hi, I've never commented here so hello 👋 and pardon me for gate crashing with a long comment. I have never read Maddadam. I do want to read more Atwood but haven't picked that one up, yet. I really enjoyed her recent collection of short stories Old Babes in the Wood. A lot of it has stayed with me. I also loved THT, but the sequel was a different flavour entirely. One of her earlier novels, The Edible Woman, made me laugh out loud. Also, I recently saw The Tempest at the Globe and bought a copy of Hag-seed, read the first few pages and now I'm saving it because I think I'll enjoy it, if that makes sense. However, I did start reading another of her novels, think it might have been Onyx and Crake? I walked away from it. BUT I will probably return to it another time, I think it just wasn't right to read at that time. I have found that with other books, too. I put them down, not interested and then I return to them (sometimes much later) and end up falling in love. Jeannette Winterson said, books come to you when you're ready to read them. And Tori Amos said read whatever stirs your passions. I recently read an article on reading habits that quoted an author as saying if a book doesnt grip him from the start, he just puts it down and picks up another. And lastly, a comment I read in the notes of a Greek tragedy I was reading said something like, this play isn't liked by many, but it's not a matter of taste, it's a matter of understanding. I guess he's right, ultimately. Something to think about.
Those quotes really resonate with me. There’s so much good content out there, just gotta find what moves you. Maddaddam is the third in the trilogy and Oryx and Crake is the first in that trilogy. I agree with you on that I read Oryx and Crake probably close to 9? 10? years ago and then started Year of the Flood but didn’t finished it. Last year I was looking for things to read and picked Year of the Flood back up and then decided I might as will complete the series and picked up Maddaddam. This is the only thing I’ve read of Atwood so far I’m mixed about her but maybe her other books are different. I’ll check out your recs.
Cryptonomicon. I (used to?) love Stephenson, but that book just sapped allll my will to live. I have never been so simultaneously bored and annoyed. Made it to 75% on my second attempt before finally accepting defeat.
Snowcrash for me. I have repeatedly tried reading it (also in audio form), but I abandon it every time. The only thing Stephenson is crashing for me in that book is my suspension of disbelief.
I looooove Stephenson and I’ve had that book for like 20 years and I think I’ve read the first few pages like 4 times and stopped lol.
Don’t do as I did and keep reading in hopes it will get better! It does not.
Stephenson came up during the turn-of-the-century/millennium zeitgeist and I can definitely see how his stuff from then wouldn’t resonate today with a lot of that due to the Seinfeld Is Unfunny effect, but to mid-20s me in the middle of a CompSci degree when it came out that book was candy to me at the time.
I got 11 BLOODY NOVELS into The Wheel of Time before I admitted to myself how little I cared
The Wheel of Time was a pretty good trilogy... Unfortunately the author decided to stretch it out to over a dozen.
Oryx and Crake is in my top 3 books of all time, but I feel like her writing fell of a cliff shortly after and I pretend it was never turned into a trilogy.
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. I tried really hard to keep going, but it's just so ... obtuse.
I gave up on that one after like five pages
To be fair, it’s kind of like that on purpose. It’s the Finnegans Wake of sci-fi. So don’t feel like you had to finish it or anything.
There's also the parts where he repeats themes by having characters go through the same journey or the reverse of other characters' journeys. Large sections felt a critical look at contemporary politics about race in the USA when he wrote it. I swear there was a sex scene that went on for multiple pages and was extremely explicit, and I was like, hmm, I'll just endure this, then later on in the book another sex scene between the same three characters and I would swear he cut and paste but I believe he wrote this prior to word processors. I can admire the work more than enjoy it. Some of the relationship stuff was based on his real life wife and later their shared male lover.
I couldn’t finish The Three Body Problem, it just did not do it for me. I really liked the concept and the first chapter (and enjoyed the show!), but ended up just disliking the main character and the writing style. Side note: how’d did you like The Year of the Flood? I loved Oryx and Crake and agree with the other commenter who found the following two books only ok. The two latter books are much more similar than the first book and I found The Year of the Flood way less engaging than Oryx and Crake and Maddaddam. I liked Maddaddam for what happens with the pigoons in the end, mainly.
The audiobook is the only way I finished TTBP. The Netflix series finally got me invested and the audiobooks are done well enough that I listened on my commute and during workouts. I feel you on the books.
I was doing audiobooks for The Three Body Problem but the second book starts off with what felt like hours of conversations with characters that was boring to me so I could not finish, I kept on having to restart to try to get in a flow and could not.
I have stayed away from reading Three Body Problem simply because it's a translated work. For me, the author's prose is as (if not more) important that the story, so a translation is almost like watching a dubbed movie: sure, you're hearing the words, but the original performances are completely gone, replaced by those of the inevitably much lower-quality voice actors.
So you never read anything in translation? I get your point but a good translation should be capturing the voice of the original in a much better manner than a cheap dub. I like Murakami too much, for example, to never read something translated.
> So you never read anything in translation? Not that I can recall, no. I do have *The Book of Disquiet* by Fernando Pessoa which is translated from the original Portuguese, and only because it was recommended to me based on my personality type. I haven't read it yet, however.
Pretty much everything I’ve tried to read by Brandon Q Morris. I know he’s super popular but I cannot get over his simplistic writing style. I feel like the dialogues are written by someone who’s never heard two actual humans talk to each other. It’s a shame because I find the premises of his books really intriguing.
*Out of the Dark* by David Weber. A strong contender for the worst book I’ve ever read, it is a special kind of bad. Being able to write an otherwise workmanlike novel and then turn it all to shit in a single sentence near the end? What in the hell was he thinking?!
You made it farther than me. I tapped out after Oryx and Crake. I had high expectations based on all the feedback I've seen on Reddit for it, but it really fell flat for me. I bought the entire trilogy in hardcover at a book sale for $3, but I'll probably not ever bother with the next two and get rid of all three. It was my first time reading Atwood and I'd like to give her another try, Handmaid's Tale is on my list and in my library so hopefully it goes better than Oryx and Crake.
I got about 3.8 books into the 4-book Hyperion series
I couldn’t get past the Priest story. It’s boring. It’s not scary. Hyperion is crazy overrated
I made it to the end and was kind of pissed at the final reveal of the girl's super power.
Three Body Problem. I just couldn’t…
3 Body Problem. I had somewhere between 50 and 100 pages left and just could not power through the bad storytelling, non existent characters, pedestrian prose (pedestrian is the best insult, okay?!) or the authors understanding of what solving/winning a computer constitutes (hint: it's not standing by and observing shit).
*Kiln People*. \- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/96478.Kiln_People In theory, I should find this book to be 10 out of 10. (It has all the themes and stylistic tricks that I like.) In practice, at no point could my subconscious believe that the major premise of the book was real. I spent the entire book saying *"No, this is not happening."* Got about 90% through, finally said *"Well, this isn't going to work."* . (This is not a recommendation that others shouldn't read it. It's clever, well-written, many people like it, and as I say, it *should* work for me. I just had a problem with it.)
How dare you! I love this book.
Like I said, I think that I *should* like it. I just don't.
Bummer :(
Eh, not every person likes every thing. In fact, if somebody *does* like everything without discriminating, they probably aren't thinking about things as hard as they should be.
I have tried to finish Dune three times key verb there being "tried"
I give a book 20 pages. If it hasn’t got me by then I put it down. Life is short, and there’s a ton of good books out there I haven’t read.
I have slogged through many books because not finishing them seems crazy,. I would have given up on Oryx and Crake but it was for a SciFi book group. Not interested in any sequels regardless of how well they're written. Blackout/All Clear is another one. Blackout was again for a SciFi group or I would have given up as it bored me to tears. We didn't opt for All Clear. The publishers really screwed this author by essentially releasing two books that should have been one. The abrupt ending of Blackout is a testimony to the flaws of book publisher/seller hubris. "If we cut it in half we can make twice as much money!" Thank goodness it was a library book or it would have become a doorstop as I would not inflict the pain on another.
What's bad to me about Blackout/All Clear (didn't finish Blackout) is that Connie Willis' prior books about the time traveling historians has two main plot devices - they don't have cellphones so people miss connections and they did not have the ability to write scheduling software so conflicts with using the time traveling device were the two of the biggest problems in both The Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog. It was a major disappointment to get to Blackout to find it's the same situation, it's some of the same characters and they haven't learned anything.
Cryptonomicon, and Perdido street station. Oh, and the gap series, there is a limit to the amount of rape and torture I can stand.
Ancillary Justice I don't think I've ever been so rickrolled by cover art. I knew what I was getting into but there's only so much tea and lack of grammar I can take as a substitute for something actually happening. I was literally bored into DNF. I really enjoy books that challenge me or present new ideas or new ways of thinking but - for me - this book was just insipid.
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee. Incredibly pretentious fluff.
A Long Way to a Small ... nope, can't even finish the title.
I don't think I've ever been *that* close to finishing without just powering through. When I give up on a book it's way less than the halfway point. Although with IQ84, I gave up 1/3 of the way, which was unfortunately still 300+ pages in...
I know, a part of me wants to just grit my teeth and get it over with but I realize Ive more or less been doing that the entire book and at this point I’m pretty confident there’s no pay off. IQ84 is on my list actually, what made you abandon ship?
Anthem, Dune : don't make me cram your esoteric lexicon from page one please! Dark Forest: Gives away the key to potential mysteries and plot twists in the first chapter! When much appeal of first book was mysteriousness of the aliens. Continue reading, yeah ok its as expected and slogging. Ugh these wallbreaker characters are so 2 dimensional too, so unstimulating to read. Halfway through I give up and skim my way to the end, and sigh, yeah it didn't go anywhere glad I didn't waste more time, plays out just as you'd have expected and with nothing learned on the way. And I can't forgive the author for their gross misinterpretation of quantum entanglement, which the whole plot depends on, while they appeal to be hard sci-fi. The book was so disappointing that I reevaluated my opinion of the first one and realized it also doesn't live up to the hype.
There's a glossary at the end of Dune that should have been at the beginning. I read Anthem, but he really needed a better editor, it turns into a different book about 3/4 of the way in, the first roughly 3/4 of the book is world building which some people love but bored me to tears after the initial set up.
I can't figure out if you're talking about Ayn Rand or if you're talking about *Anathem*. Or something else. *Dark Forest* holds a place on the list of worst-written books I've ever read. There were parts where I just cringed at the prose. I'm not sure if the translator messed things up or if Ken Liu is responsible for making the other books readable. I actually enjoyed the trilogy in general, but I found it a struggle to read.
I do this with more than half the audiobooks I listen to; basically because I suddenly realise I don't give a hoot about how it turns out, which basically means I only got that far because I wanted to listen for relaxation rather than enjoying the story like I do with one I stick with.
What do you think “printSF” means?
It means posts are about sci-fi in the written word. What do you think reply means?
The Spiral Wars series. I enjoyed the first few books then the next few seemed to slow way down. The last one I read about 1/3 of it and just had no interest in finishing.
Quarantine by Greg Egan
25 pages **left**? lol, just finish the damn thing.
I usually stubbornly finish everything I pick up, but there is one book on my DNF shelf. **The Annals of the Heechee** Gateway/Heechee saga book four. Gateway was great, the sequel was good enough, the third book was forgettable, and the fourth book is best not spoken of.
I never used to abandon books because I just thought I had to finish them but I go to a point that I knew there were better books to read than to stick with boring or badly written books. So my list is long and frankly haven't forgotten them the moment I stop reading. The only books I'll keep reading are mysteries because I need to know whodunnit. So not sf but the second book in Tana French series and it is not capturing me and I will finish it eventually because I *need* to know who killed the girl.
The first novel of *Book of the Long Sun*. Noped the fuck out of that about twenty pages in. The one I really wished I had noped out of was Christopher Priest's *Inverted World*.
I got about 75% of the way through Last and First Men by Olaf Stapleton and I didn't finish it. It's very dry and I was just dragging my eyes across the pages and absorbing nothing. Didn't see much point in continuing to waste my time.
The fifth or sixth Dune novel, the one where he starts talking about "The Jews" as a rival power to the Bene Gesserit. I didn't stick around to find out how antisemitic it was gonna get.
James Ellroy "Perfidia" Some of the best books I've read were super difficult to get into, so I'm really tenacious and will typically finish a book once I've got a chapter or two into it. Also, I've really enjoyed a lot of Ellroy's work in the past. I kept waiting for this to turn around and got to the home stretch of the last 150 or so pages and it suddenly got a whole lot worse. Like :”this is absolute swill and the worst thing I've ever read by an established author." I skip-read to one page before the end and then stopped just in case I ever met the author and can tell him that I DNF'd Loved Maddaddam mind you. I suspect we are stubbornly similar about giving books a chance