Jump to content

Popular Book series you’ve tried and failed to get into:


Varysblackfyre321

Recommended Posts

Mostly teenage YA book series' such as Hunger games , Divergent, Maze runner, Mortal instruments, The Inheritance cycle. I've also picked up and failed to get into Dune, but I plan on getting back into it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Elaborate on your problems with the way he writes women? 

They spend an absurd amount of time obsessing over their looks, run around underdressed, think they're over the hill after 16, sexuality substitutes for characterization and personality, and the worst for me, there's way too much of women being catty to other women because they're mainly viewed as competition for men (often meaning competition for Geralt). It left me with the weird impression that Sapkowski had never known a real woman before and had no idea how to write one. 

Goodreads reviews cover this well, but just google around. 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 3/31/2019 at 7:15 PM, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Perhaps I’ll give it one more go.

Of course, the reverse also applies.  Wert did a good job of summarizing the good, but the bad aspects of WoT have aged really poorly and make the series much worse.  Things like:

 - There are lots of powerful women characters, but they all act sorta the same, and the gender dynamics are incredibly repetitive and frustrating.

 - The series is terribly bloated, with side quests and tertiary characters taking over the narrative for hundreds of pages.  Books 8-10 have (barely) one book's worth of actual plot between them. 

 - Jordan died after the publication of book 11, and thus books 12-14 were written by Brandon Sanderson.  Taking over someone else's fantasy series is a shitty, thankless job, but the shift in narrative is noticeable and some characters just "feel" totally different.  The final epic battle between good and evil in book 14 is not well executed, and left a lot of fans like myself very underwhelmed. 

So on the whole, if you tried to read WoT and didn't enjoy it, I'd just leave it at that.  There are better things to read. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, Lollygag said:

They spend an absurd amount of time obsessing over their looks, run around underdressed, think they're over the hill after 16, sexuality substitutes for characterization and personality, and the worst for me, there's way too much of women being catty to other women because they're mainly viewed as competition for men (often meaning competition for Geralt). It left me with the weird impression that Sapkowski had never known a real woman before and had no idea how to write one. 

Goodreads reviews cover this well, but just google around. 

 

Huh it does sound worse than the Witcher Video-game-which also has problems in how they depicts women-literally the first scene of Wlid Hunt has Yennefer, as full on naked, just reading a book. I wondered if the books were better. Apparently not.

But I’ll reserve condemnation until I read the series for myself.

Or revisit it. I don’t know why but I just kinda stopped reading after the first chapters of the first book and never really returned to it again.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I read the first three of the Witcher books, so I don't know about the rest, but I do not recall anything as cringy as certain sex (or rape) scenes in SoIaF. The female characters might not be all that great (Ciri is not yet central in these books) but I don't think they are worse than in "typical" or average fantasy. I certainly do not remember anything so grossly "objectifying" the video games apparently abound with (maybe also due to the difference between the media). Despite racial conflicts being a central theme of the books one should not expect a man born in the 1940s writing in the 1990s to show 2019 levels of wokeness.

To get closer to topic, I was not sufficiently entranced by those books to continue the series.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I would agree. I think that Sapkowski is not great at writing female characters, and the books also have the same problem as the game where too many women want to have sex with Geralt. But I don't think he's bad either; he does give them prominent roles and their own voices. I'd say the best book of the main series is book 3, Baptism of Fire, which is like A Feast for Crows done right and in many fewer pages, and which introduces some of the more interesting female characters and develops Ciri more.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 4/11/2019 at 7:04 PM, Caligula_K3 said:

I would agree. I think that Sapkowski is not great at writing female characters, and the books also have the same problem as the game where too many women want to have sex with Geralt. But I don't think he's bad either; he does give them prominent roles and their own voices. I'd say the best book of the main series is book 3, Baptism of Fire, which is like A Feast for Crows done right and in many fewer pages, and which introduces some of the more interesting female characters and develops Ciri more.

Geralt is the perfect fuckbuddy though. He is sterile and can't get STDs. Witchers remove all the shitty side effects of pre-condom sex. Although I guess that is not really relevant for sorceresses. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

I have been thinking about the book series I could never get into and it all comes down to the religiousness of the characters. The more religion appears the less I like it.. I loathed the Narnia books, and anything I have read by Guy Gavriel Kay felt like a waste of effort.. Reading about Gene Wolfe in his obituary and his Catholicism just about kills any interest I have in his writing. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 7 April 2019 at 8:58 PM, Lady Anna said:

Perhaps this is the best place to ask. Is The Witcher series worth reading? What did you guys think of it?

I enjoyed it a lot.  It's surprisingly funny for a series which features genocide, torture, racial hatred, child abuse, cannibalism, and bubonic plague.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I tried Hunger Games but it was as if I was reading some fiction written by teenagers during boring lessons. The style is dull, the characters bland -same people who can be found in any teens/young adults novels.

I'm still waiting for a new LOTR/Hyperion/HP/ASOIAF/Dune/whatever... (despite their flaws you could not put them down before the last page)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I could not get into The Name of the Wind at all. It was just Kvothe licking his own arse for page after page.

I wouldn't say I couldn't get into it, but I gave up on Wheel of Time after about 5 or 6 books. I couldn't handle anymore long descriptions of how great Aiel are or their many customs for being awesome. I'd had enough Nynaeve pulling her braid and being an asshole too. Part of me still wants to finish it, but every time I try I end up giving up again. I even tried the audiobooks, but that meant spending my lunch breaks hearing about the Aiel and their god damn customs instead of furthering the plot. Shame as I'd really enjoyed the earlier books.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The chunk of the first Malazan book I read did nothing for me, likewise with Meiville's Perdidot Street Station. I forced myself through Michael Sullivan's first book but have no interest in reading further. All of those seem quite popular among certain sectors of fandom.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Read the first two Ketty Jay books and realized I just didn't care about the mysteries being teased out.

 

Very much like grape Hubba Bubba in that at first I was like, this is just so great and in the end, the flavor dissipated so much quicker than I thought it would. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I can now say that I've failed to get into Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn.

I've only gotten about 20% into The Dragonbone Chair, on my 2nd attempt, and I find it really boring. There is nothing here to grab me. Maybe if I had tried to read it years ago, when LOTR was the only other thing I had read, this would have been fine, but not now.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 3/7/2019 at 8:50 PM, Iskaral Pust said:

Bakker's Prince Of Nothing series.  I tried it twice and found the opening prologue/chapters about Kellhaus to be OK but then the opening chapters in the faux Middle East to be so boring.  The characters especially felt cliche, their internal ruminations were flat and dull, the prose was uninteresting.  

I managed to finish the last book in The Prince of Nothing series despite it feeling like I was wading through treacle and I'm now on The Aspect Emperor with one book to go. It feels like a trap almost because the first book of each series are really good.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

Oh it’s definitely a trap. :(

Full Admiral Ackbar voice on that one.

I still haven't finished Unholy Consult myself, because I read quite a bit of the disappointment on the forum when it came out and could totally understand where people were coming from, which sapped at my enthusiasm until I moved on to something else.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I finished it, but honestly I had pretty much no fucking idea what was going on for hundreds of pages at a time. I certainly wish I'd stuck to just the original trilogy. I am not ashamed to say that I felt like a 5th grader asked to sit in on collegiate philosophy and history classes. Fuck's sake, just let me have fun on the playground sometimes. 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...