Books you regret reading

[WhovianBeast]

The Terminal Man, Sphere, and Prey by Michael Crichton. I like most of Crichton's work (Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Andromeda Strain, Micro, etc...), but these three just weren't working for me. These are some of the few books where I read it, and felt vaguely nauseous afterwards. Combination of a good premise, poor ending, and visceral writing.

[Durkoala]

Was that the one where he had leprosy and a white gold wedding ring? Even before I read LotR, it seemed like a poor ripoff of LotR.

Yep, and it's also a book I really didn't like, although I'll add a quibble that it didn't seem like any more of a poor Lord of the Rings than most bad fantasy too me. I only read the second book, but I really couldn't stand the protagonist, who seemed under-invested even for a man who believed that he was hallucinating the whole thing while his body and life fell apart in reality. None of the other characters really caught my interest, even the person who was all about picking out the protagonist's flaws. And of course, there's the fact that the love interest was his daughter by rape, he still pursues a relationship with her after learning this and it's implied that this is why she's attracted to him in the first place.

I do still have it on my shelf to remind myself how not to write a fantasy book though, so maybe it wasn't a total waste of my time. Somehow.

------

Before the absolutely awful trilogy I post up next, I have to give a dishonourable mention to Marathon Man by... William Goldman?

I actually had to google that to make sure it was the right person, and he's responsible for so much stuff that's either good, famous, or on my list of things to look at! I have no idea how somebody with so many great things to his name made... this. To be fair, 80% of it is a decent thriller, even if it some of the characters are somewhat grating. But the ending just upsets everything and makes it out that the hero (I suppose he's more of a Greek Anti-Hero, but I'm digressing) has overcome some kind of personal quest and defeated a great evil, after killing five people, losing everybody close to him, destroying his career path, changing to a philosophy of attempting to crush out any lawbreakers to preserve society (while fighting against a nazi, for the irony points) and talking to a policeman about to arrest him. There's certainly a plot in there, but I absolutely loathe everything about that ending and how it treats becoming a borderline serial killer as a triumph of spirit.

------
I don't really know how to describe this one. I found a summary on it and thought a post--apocalyptic adventure novel written in the 1910's sounded exactly up my street, if a bit uncomfortable with some of its values of sex and race, but expecting that to not be present is like taking a trip to the Amazon and not expecting any rain.

Darkness and Dawn (George Allan England) is a combination of the worst attitudes of its time: racism, sexism, gloating of Man's triumph over nature, the certainty that Western Civilisation (and in this particular case, America*) is the apex of human achivement and a protagonist who is a complete and utter Mary Sue. I might have forgotten a few there.

To summarise, our 'heroes' wake up at the top of a somewhat dilapadated* skyscraper to find that the world apparently ended a long time ago while they slept. In the interests of making sure I remembered this right, I took another look at it and... it opens with the heroine (or if you want to be less tactful, the eye candy) waking, and only waits one sentence before informing us of 'that full bosom', which.... also, she's naked. Then she has a little panic while basically acting like Alice in Wonderland if she had all her forthrightness removed, which to be fair isn't an unreasonable response to waking up in rusted wasteland. Then we meet The Hero, who, being a man, has a second to panic and then is immediately reasonable and heroicly unconcerned about waking up in his office to centuries worth of degradation and the probable (the possiblity is discussed in this scene) extinction of the human race.

^{*The skyscraper is falling to bits, but given that it's later revealed that they awoke after over 1200 years of civilsation being wiped out, it's held up remarkably well.}

This next bit is quite possibly the worst bit of all. It's seriously offensive unless you find it laughable. Viewer discretition blah blah. I really should have walked away when I found this.
The main antagonists of the first book are a massive band of roaming creatures called the Horde. There isn't an easy way to say this, so I'm jumping straight in: According to Mr England, they're what happens when black people are removed from the civilising influence of whites and are allowed to breed themselves into essentially being Morlocks. I don't even know where to start. There's many diatribes on their subhuman intellect, although they're perfectly capable of tool use, carving and setting traps when the plot calls for it. The reason they survived is something along the lines of their savage blood allowing them to withstand the volcanic poisons that wiped out the other race (no other ethnicities are mentioned: people were apparently only either white or black at the turn of the century). The reason civilisation fell over despite having a sizable amount of people around to run things is because they were just plain incapable of keeping it going for more than a few generations. They're cannibals. The obvious and correct response to being surrounded by an army of devolved humans is to make them worship you as a god with your firearms and racial superiority, although thankfully this plan falls as flat as it can without the death of the main characters.

Of course, when we finally find some surviving white people, they're perfectly human in form and have a functioning civilisation, although they still need to be taught the American Way to bring them up to speed on being full-fledged humans. The heroine asks if they should consider trying the god act again, but is shot down 'because it won't work on white people'. The fact that it didn't work on the Horde either is convieniently ignored.

Racism aside, there's a strange parabolic curve effect with sexism. At first, the female 'lead' simpers, panics easily and generally acts like a child in contrast to the Hero, who is so manly and unshakable and does everything while his lovely companion holds the tools. Then thankfully she gets, if not a spine, a thicker skin and some marksmenship skills. She's still solidly the sidekick and never takes the lead in anything, but she at least gets to do things instead of cowering behind the Manliest Man of Mannering Manor. Then she has a child and essentially becomes a basic damsel in distress (although iirc, she still isn't quite as bad as she first started out). Even the most generous critic would balk at calling her a feminist icon at any point, though.

Next, our Hero, like I said earlier, is an utter Mary Sue. At every point he takes living in the new world in stride and never despairs. The narration endlessly dwells on his 'unbreakable manly spirit' and his peerless intellect. This usually manifests as him retroactively knowing whatever skill is needed for the plot. Surrounded by cannibal sub-humans? It's a good thing he invented an explosive more powerful than dynamite that he has lying around to make improvised grenades out of! In a fight with the leader of a clan? How handy that he's a champion boxer! Discovered the wreck of an old aeroplane? It's a good thing he's flying instructor who has trained champion pilots and knows the workings of a plane! And on, and on it goes. There's never a time where his skills are mentioned beforehand, and they rarely are brought up again, with the exception of his flying machine.

He often espouses in the superiority of the American way of doing things, but then contradicts himself, such as when he says that it's time he got some democracy started here... but his followers are too primitive still to accept it, so he'll have to rule by force and fear until he decides they're ready.

Frustratingly, it was in many ways what I wanted, with many quirky or quaint happenings that could only be products of that time and genre. When the story was devoted to exploring a new quirk of the strange world, it was often enjoyable, in a bootleg Jules Verne way. If the Male lead wasn't so unutterably smug and assured of his way, or the female lead got to be a bit more proactive, I might have been able to call it 'bad but enjoyable'. As it is, though, with the purple prose, terrible science and awful thoughts on the treatment of human beings, it's a book I wish I had never found or decided to read all the way through, and even regret staying up so late to type this out.

Also, because it has to be mentioned, there's a scene where a gorilla randomly appears and tries to rape the heroine. That pretty much sums up the entire book: I wanted to see wacky oldfashioned ideas, and it delivered a boatload of the very worst ideas in that category.

[An Enemy Spy]

Why is it that bad authors can never resist sharing their weird sexual fantasies with the rest of us? It's like the book only exists so he can slobber over the sex object he created and then contrive a plot so he the hero can get into her pants(assuming he gave her any). I mean, I don't care if you want to get off through writing, we've all got our guilty pleasures, but please, keep that stuff in your desk drawer.

[georgie_leech]

Nope. The all-accommodating Universe is a frighteningly popular thing to take seriously. Granted, I do ride the bus, but given that it's one of Oprah's favorite strains of product to peddle, I doubt it's just limited to people who should, generally, be poor enough to realize the Universe is not actually bending to their aspirations, but don't because they're also a little crazy.

The poverty is one thing, but I can't help but look at that and view it as a possible justification for the worst sort of victim blaming. You didn't get better from cancer because you just didn't want to be better hard enough. It's totally fine to remain in abusive relationships, because wishing they will be better will magically bring about change. Victims of real-life-events-that-I-am-definitely-not-naming just focused too hard on their dire circumstances, so the universe didn't reshape itself so they had opportunities to escape.



Apologies, just thinking about it is getting me worked up. The fact that someone that usually spreads a message of hope and generosity promoted this delusion just makes it worse.

[tomandtish]

Before the absolutely awful trilogy I post up next, I have to give a dishonourable mention to Marathon Man by... William Goldman? ..... Snip

Your post reminded me of one I'd managed to forget I'd read (thanks for that! )..... The Gor novels by John Norman.

I stuck with them way too long because I thought they were going to be the hero battling AGAINST the woman enslaving culture. Silly me.

[Fri]

Why is it that bad authors can never resist sharing their weird sexual fantasies with the rest of us? It's like the book only exists so he can slobber over the sex object he created and then contrive a plot so he the hero can get into her pants(assuming he gave her any). I mean, I don't care if you want to get off through writing, we've all got our guilty pleasures, but please, keep that stuff in your desk drawer.

There's nothing wrong with writing fetish porn. It's a big industry. Though you do might should mention that you're writing porn.

And also, there's John Ringo's Paladin of Shadows series. It's specifically a fetish book, basically something he wrote which he never intend to publish and just to get the idea out of his mind in between his usual writings (it's a sci-fi military thriller rife with bondage, sexual slavery etc). But he showed the unpublished story to his fans at one point, and apparently it got good response that he published it.

[An Enemy Spy]

There's nothing wrong with writing fetish porn. It's a big industry. Though you do might should mention that you're writing porn.

And also, there's John Ringo's Paladin of Shadows series. It's specifically a fetish book, basically something he wrote which he never intend to publish and just to get the idea out of his mind in between his usual writings (it's a sci-fi military thriller rife with bondage, sexual slavery etc). But he showed the unpublished story to his fans at one point, and apparently it got good response that he published it.

There's writing porn for people who want porn, and then there's slipping in porn for people who just want fantasy adventure. And it's often very self indulgent porn.

[Rodin]

There's writing porn for people who want porn, and then there's slipping in porn for people who just want fantasy adventure. And it's often very self indulgent porn.

Robert Jordan springs to mind. Yes, Robert, you're very kinky. We get it. Can we get back to the epic fantasy adventure instead of having our heroes literally spank one of the villains into submission?

[The Glyphstone]

There's nothing wrong with writing fetish porn. It's a big industry. Though you do might should mention that you're writing porn.

And also, there's John Ringo's Paladin of Shadows series. It's specifically a fetish book, basically something he wrote which he never intend to publish and just to get the idea out of his mind in between his usual writings (it's a sci-fi military thriller rife with bondage, sexual slavery etc). But he showed the unpublished story to his fans at one point, and apparently it got good response that he published it.

Or as he calls it now looking back, 'Fifty Shades of Guns'.

[Knaight]

Robert Jordan springs to mind. Yes, Robert, you're very kinky. We get it. Can we get back to the epic fantasy adventure instead of having our heroes literally spank one of the villains into submission?

He's got nothing on Robert Howard, who manages to fit a naked woman tied up on a table being threatened somehow into something like 80% of the short stories he writes.

[Olinser]

Yep, and it's also a book I really didn't like, although I'll add a quibble that it didn't seem like any more of a poor Lord of the Rings than most bad fantasy too me. I only read the second book, but I really couldn't stand the protagonist, who seemed under-invested even for a man who believed that he was hallucinating the whole thing while his body and life fell apart in reality. None of the other characters really caught my interest, even the person who was all about picking out the protagonist's flaws. And of course, there's the fact that the love interest was his daughter by rape, he still pursues a relationship with her after learning this and it's implied that this is why she's attracted to him in the first place.

I do still have it on my shelf to remind myself how not to write a fantasy book though, so maybe it wasn't a total waste of my time. Somehow.

------

Before the absolutely awful trilogy I post up next, I have to give a dishonourable mention to Marathon Man by... William Goldman?

I actually had to google that to make sure it was the right person, and he's responsible for so much stuff that's either good, famous, or on my list of things to look at! I have no idea how somebody with so many great things to his name made... this. To be fair, 80% of it is a decent thriller, even if it some of the characters are somewhat grating. But the ending just upsets everything and makes it out that the hero (I suppose he's more of a Greek Anti-Hero, but I'm digressing) has overcome some kind of personal quest and defeated a great evil, after killing five people, losing everybody close to him, destroying his career path, changing to a philosophy of attempting to crush out any lawbreakers to preserve society (while fighting against a nazi, for the irony points) and talking to a policeman about to arrest him. There's certainly a plot in there, but I absolutely loathe everything about that ending and how it treats becoming a borderline serial killer as a triumph of spirit.

------
I don't really know how to describe this one. I found a summary on it and thought a post--apocalyptic adventure novel written in the 1910's sounded exactly up my street, if a bit uncomfortable with some of its values of sex and race, but expecting that to not be present is like taking a trip to the Amazon and not expecting any rain.

Darkness and Dawn (George Allan England) is a combination of the worst attitudes of its time: racism, sexism, gloating of Man's triumph over nature, the certainty that Western Civilisation (and in this particular case, America*) is the apex of human achivement and a protagonist who is a complete and utter Mary Sue. I might have forgotten a few there.

To summarise, our 'heroes' wake up at the top of a somewhat dilapadated* skyscraper to find that the world apparently ended a long time ago while they slept. In the interests of making sure I remembered this right, I took another look at it and... it opens with the heroine (or if you want to be less tactful, the eye candy) waking, and only waits one sentence before informing us of 'that full bosom', which.... also, she's naked. Then she has a little panic while basically acting like Alice in Wonderland if she had all her forthrightness removed, which to be fair isn't an unreasonable response to waking up in rusted wasteland. Then we meet The Hero, who, being a man, has a second to panic and then is immediately reasonable and heroicly unconcerned about waking up in his office to centuries worth of degradation and the probable (the possiblity is discussed in this scene) extinction of the human race.

^{*The skyscraper is falling to bits, but given that it's later revealed that they awoke after over 1200 years of civilsation being wiped out, it's held up remarkably well.}

This next bit is quite possibly the worst bit of all. It's seriously offensive unless you find it laughable. Viewer discretition blah blah. I really should have walked away when I found this.
The main antagonists of the first book are a massive band of roaming creatures called the Horde. There isn't an easy way to say this, so I'm jumping straight in: According to Mr England, they're what happens when black people are removed from the civilising influence of whites and are allowed to breed themselves into essentially being Morlocks. I don't even know where to start. There's many diatribes on their subhuman intellect, although they're perfectly capable of tool use, carving and setting traps when the plot calls for it. The reason they survived is something along the lines of their savage blood allowing them to withstand the volcanic poisons that wiped out the other race (no other ethnicities are mentioned: people were apparently only either white or black at the turn of the century). The reason civilisation fell over despite having a sizable amount of people around to run things is because they were just plain incapable of keeping it going for more than a few generations. They're cannibals. The obvious and correct response to being surrounded by an army of devolved humans is to make them worship you as a god with your firearms and racial superiority, although thankfully this plan falls as flat as it can without the death of the main characters.

Of course, when we finally find some surviving white people, they're perfectly human in form and have a functioning civilisation, although they still need to be taught the American Way to bring them up to speed on being full-fledged humans. The heroine asks if they should consider trying the god act again, but is shot down 'because it won't work on white people'. The fact that it didn't work on the Horde either is convieniently ignored.

Racism aside, there's a strange parabolic curve effect with sexism. At first, the female 'lead' simpers, panics easily and generally acts like a child in contrast to the Hero, who is so manly and unshakable and does everything while his lovely companion holds the tools. Then thankfully she gets, if not a spine, a thicker skin and some marksmenship skills. She's still solidly the sidekick and never takes the lead in anything, but she at least gets to do things instead of cowering behind the Manliest Man of Mannering Manor. Then she has a child and essentially becomes a basic damsel in distress (although iirc, she still isn't quite as bad as she first started out). Even the most generous critic would balk at calling her a feminist icon at any point, though.

Next, our Hero, like I said earlier, is an utter Mary Sue. At every point he takes living in the new world in stride and never despairs. The narration endlessly dwells on his 'unbreakable manly spirit' and his peerless intellect. This usually manifests as him retroactively knowing whatever skill is needed for the plot. Surrounded by cannibal sub-humans? It's a good thing he invented an explosive more powerful than dynamite that he has lying around to make improvised grenades out of! In a fight with the leader of a clan? How handy that he's a champion boxer! Discovered the wreck of an old aeroplane? It's a good thing he's flying instructor who has trained champion pilots and knows the workings of a plane! And on, and on it goes. There's never a time where his skills are mentioned beforehand, and they rarely are brought up again, with the exception of his flying machine.

He often espouses in the superiority of the American way of doing things, but then contradicts himself, such as when he says that it's time he got some democracy started here... but his followers are too primitive still to accept it, so he'll have to rule by force and fear until he decides they're ready.

Frustratingly, it was in many ways what I wanted, with many quirky or quaint happenings that could only be products of that time and genre. When the story was devoted to exploring a new quirk of the strange world, it was often enjoyable, in a bootleg Jules Verne way. If the Male lead wasn't so unutterably smug and assured of his way, or the female lead got to be a bit more proactive, I might have been able to call it 'bad but enjoyable'. As it is, though, with the purple prose, terrible science and awful thoughts on the treatment of human beings, it's a book I wish I had never found or decided to read all the way through, and even regret staying up so late to type this out.

Also, because it has to be mentioned, there's a scene where a gorilla randomly appears and tries to rape the heroine. That pretty much sums up the entire book: I wanted to see wacky oldfashioned ideas, and it delivered a boatload of the very worst ideas in that category.

I mean, blaming it on race exclusively isn't necessarily accurate, but there have been SEVERAL times throughout history where civilizations had their technology boosted by outside intervention and then massively regressed in just a couple generations when disaster/rebellion happened.

It really could happen to the modern world shockingly easily if a wide spread disaster were to happen. Forget high technology, seriously, just for fun, ask a few of your friends if they can actually explain how basic things like toilets and running water actually WORK. I guarantee only a tiny number could actually tell you how to construct even a primitive water/sanitation system without looking it up on the internet.

[Peelee]

I'm struggling to see the relationship between the two stories, to be honest, apart from they're both fantasies that include magic rings? Also, the Second Chronicles are a far better tale than the First.

Yep, and it's also a book I really didn't like, although I'll add a quibble that it didn't seem like any more of a poor Lord of the Rings than most bad fantasy too me.

Eh, sounds like I was wrong. Didn't get very far into it, just enough to get the idea of a magic ring everyone wants and a shadowy evil rising. I was also in my late teens, so this was quite a while ago, and I may have made snap comparisons that were more rash than reasonable.

Still hated the book.

[Emperor Ing]

I know a lot of people have said this already but...Catcher in the Rye. Required reading at my school and good God almighty. What total, pretentious nonsense! When ever I hear people complaining that kids don't read anymore, I think of this book and I am instantly reminded of why. To this day I am still baffled at the level of narcissism and pretentiousness one character can have. Characterization 101 is to give characters flaws to make them more relatable to the reader and to provide a contrast to their otherwise positive traits. The idea being that you want your readers to like your characters. The concept of the anti-hero subverts this somewhat, giving otherwise flawed and bad characters positive traits, but otherwise making them sympathetic, and in some ways still likeable. Holden Caulfield isn't a hero, he's not even an anti-hero. His character is so absorbed in his innumerable flaws that they're largely his defining trait. What moments of virtue he does exhibit don't even register as a candle in the darkness. One that not even 1/4th of the way through the book, I wished for him to literally drown in.

I believe the term for characters like this are Anti-Sue.

Coming of Age stories aren't my cup of tea. Or maybe they are and I haven't given them a chance because Catcher left such a raw taste in my mouth. Either way, Catcher is a good case-study in what not to do.

[Rodin]

He's got nothing on Robert Howard, who manages to fit a naked woman tied up on a table being threatened somehow into something like 80% of the short stories he writes.

Hmmmmm, didn't Jordan also write a bunch of Conan stuff? Birds of a feather and all that...

[Kalmageddon]

Ah what the hell. I'll chip in on the school books hate.
In Italy one of the main classics the they have you read at school is "I Promessi Sposi" (The Betrothed) by Alessandro Manzoni. You can be assured that teachers will talk about it as the best thing to ever grace a bookshelf, they will barely contain their laughter when remembering some small comical anecdote in chapter 8 and they *will* make you hate it.
The whole thing reads as if Manzoni was constantly going "wink-wink, nudge-nudge, aren't I clever?", you absolutely can't immerse yourself in the story at all, because Manzoni will drag you out of it two lines later to remind you how amazing he is.
It's like playing in a campaign where the GM interrupts the narration every two minutes to indulge in self referential humour.
It's the most infuriating book I've ever read.

[factotum]

I don't really know how to describe this one. I found a summary on it and thought a post--apocalyptic adventure novel written in the 1910's sounded exactly up my street, if a bit uncomfortable with some of its values of sex and race, but expecting that to not be present is like taking a trip to the Amazon and not expecting any rain.

Darkness and Dawn (George Allan England) is a combination of the worst attitudes of its time: racism, sexism, gloating of Man's triumph over nature, the certainty that Western Civilisation (and in this particular case, America*) is the apex of human achivement and a protagonist who is a complete and utter Mary Sue. I might have forgotten a few there.

OK, I'm a bit puzzled about this one. You admit that a book written in that time period would be expected to be racist and sexist, then complain in the next sentence about how racist and sexist it is? Yes, by modern sensibilities it sounds horrible, but at the time I'm sure it wasn't anything special. I wish I could remember the name of the *horrendously* racist story by L. Frank Baum I read once--the attitudes were just so different back then it's hard to see past that.

[Knaight]

OK, I'm a bit puzzled about this one. You admit that a book written in that time period would be expected to be racist and sexist, then complain in the next sentence about how racist and sexist it is? Yes, by modern sensibilities it sounds horrible, but at the time I'm sure it wasn't anything special. I wish I could remember the name of the *horrendously* racist story by L. Frank Baum I read once--the attitudes were just so different back then it's hard to see past that.

There's a certain level expected from any given era (including today), but some books blow way past that baseline. This sounds like one of those books.

[Rynjin]

Good rule of thumb on old literature (or media of any kind, really)...the typical amount of racism/sexism/other-isms inherent in the attitudes of the era will probably make you occasionally cringe or wince or feel uncomfortable.

Things that go above and beyond casual, thoughtless "-ism" are like to make your skin crawl.

There's a difference between attitudes that were ingrained in the culture of the time that we NOW find racist and things that, even AT the time were found racist.

[Jan Mattys]

Ah what the hell. I'll chip in on the school books hate.
In Italy one of the main classics the they have you read at school is "I Promessi Sposi" (The Betrothed) by Alessandro Manzoni. You can be assured that teachers will talk about it as the best thing to ever grace a bookshelf, they will barely contain their laughter when remembering some small comical anecdote in chapter 8 and they *will* make you hate it.
The whole thing reads as if Manzoni was constantly going "wink-wink, nudge-nudge, aren't I clever?", you absolutely can't immerse yourself in the story at all, because Manzoni will drag you out of it two lines later to remind you how amazing he is.
It's like playing in a campaign where the GM interrupts the narration every two minutes to indulge in self referential humour.
It's the most infuriating book I've ever read.

I loved it

[Misereor]

What are the books that you really regret reading?

There are plenty, but the one I remember best is Heidegger's Being and Time.
The original is written in a tone that only really works in German. The translation I read tried to capture that same tone, but in my language it came off as pretentious and over-academic to the point of being hellannoying.

[Eldan]

There are plenty, but the one I remember best is Heidegger's Being and Time.
The original is written in a tone that only really works in German. The translation I read tried to capture that same tone, but in my language it came off as pretentious and over-academic to the point of being hellannoying.

Oh, don't worry. Heidegger is famous for being pretentious, over-academic and hellishly annoying in German too.

[Durkoala]

OK, I'm a bit puzzled about this one. You admit that a book written in that time period would be expected to be racist and sexist, then complain in the next sentence about how racist and sexist it is? Yes, by modern sensibilities it sounds horrible, but at the time I'm sure it wasn't anything special. I wish I could remember the name of the *horrendously* racist story by L. Frank Baum I read once--the attitudes were just so different back then it's hard to see past that.

There's a certain level expected from any given era (including today), but some books blow way past that baseline. This sounds like one of those books.

Knaight has it on the head here. HP Lovecraft was published roughly ten years after Darkness and Dawn, and Lovecraft is far more respectful with the same subject matter: in his stories, being white won't protect you from worshipping a false god, or degenerating into a cannibal subhuman and while he was guilty of some really nasty descriptions of them, he always portrayed black people as people, capable of holding jobs, making their own way in the world (perhaps not in the sense that they could rise to a respected and powerful position, but I can't remember him express the idea that they couldn't in his fiction) and even having an ancient empire of non-whites that was wiped out for exactly the same reasons many of his white characters were similarly destroyed. I'm not sure if Lovecraft's attitudes were typical of his time or considered dated even then (I've heard both, but I haven't looked for any proof either way), but they are far more palatable than Mr England's.

Rudyard Kipling published most of his work a decade or more before Darkness and Dawn's publishing, and despite being often imperialist, it's very clear that he loved the culture of India and considered it and its people worthy of praise, even if this was sometimes expressed with a condescenion bordering on parody. I think I'll leave it there, as I'm becoming aware that I haven't read as much Kipling as I should have to properly judge how much of his writing was written ironically. I'm absolutely certain that he was far more respectful and even-handed in his treatment of race than Lovecraft and England were though.

Darkness and Dawn is quite frankly the most absurdly racist book I can recall reading, even including stand-in fantasy racism such as orcs or the entire series of Redwall, or books published a decade on either side. I also feel I should say that being racist is far from its only flaw: The hero comes off as incredibly self-serving, bullying and tricking his way to power and deciding to become a tyrant who rules by fear after deciding that the cavepeople who have followed him up to the surface aren't ready for democracy. The narration endlessly circles around the "virtues" of the protagonists and how fortunate mankind is to have themselves be delivered from their shame by such clever people a clever man, because he's the one that does all the work, unless he needs something sewn up, then it's a good thing he has a woman along.

ED: Also, the science is soft enough to be cut with a spoon. The big catastrophe is an explosion in the earth big enough to kick a miles-wide chunk of land up into orbit and alter the angle of the earth's spin, but somehow most of America's buildings are still standing.

[SuperPanda]

Another I'll throw in is Wicked, by Gregory Maguire. You know, the one about the Wicked Witch of the West? The one that inspired a Stephen Schwartz musical? Mild spoiler, it's nothing like the musical.

I don't need my stories to be sweetness and light. I read Dune in elementary school, for badness' sake. I can appreciate a tragedy in the classical Greek sense, where a character is brought to ruin by their own tragic flaws. But I don't react well to the sensation of true futility. Not a fan. And this book did to me what the movie Unforgiven did - it left me an emotional wreck for several days.

Unlike Eragon, it's not a bad book. It's quite good. It would have to be, to evoke such a profound cathartic reaction. (ProTip: Red Fel experiences catharsis the way most people experience a violent stomach illness. Nothing left inside and a queasy, weak, sore feeling for days.) But that said, I don't like having that done to me emotionally. I don't enjoy it. And given the chance for a do-over, I would set the book aside and just enjoy a campy, cheesy musical.

I'm not sure I'd agree Wicked was all that good as a book - the musical is plenty fun, but the novel was an unpleasant slog the entire way through. Almost every single character was unpleasant to an extreme. For a book that seemed set to try to be a commentary about prejudice and/or our perceptions of good and evil it instead delivered the futility you mentioned with a side note of "everyone is aweful and therefore thinking about good and evil is pointless."

I seriously disliked the book - though part of that was starting with high expectations because I had friends who loved the musical and I mistakenly thought they were more connected.

Catcher in the Rye ... partly because of how its proponents push it up to be the greatest book ever written about teen life, and it really fell short of the hype for me; but mostly because through the entire thing I could never bring myself to care what happened to Holden, at all. (I get the feeling that The Chocolate War occupies the same place for me that Catcher does for the people who enjoy it).

I know a lot of people have said this already but...Catcher in the Rye. Required reading at my school and good God almighty. What total, pretentious nonsense! When ever I hear people complaining that kids don't read anymore, I think of this book and I am instantly reminded of why. To this day I am still baffled at the level of narcissism and pretentiousness one character can have. Characterization 101 is to give characters flaws to make them more relatable to the reader and to provide a contrast to their otherwise positive traits. The idea being that you want your readers to like your characters. The concept of the anti-hero subverts this somewhat, giving otherwise flawed and bad characters positive traits, but otherwise making them sympathetic, and in some ways still likeable. Holden Caulfield isn't a hero, he's not even an anti-hero. His character is so absorbed in his innumerable flaws that they're largely his defining trait. What moments of virtue he does exhibit don't even register as a candle in the darkness. One that not even 1/4th of the way through the book, I wished for him to literally drown in.

I believe the term for characters like this are Anti-Sue.

Coming of Age stories aren't my cup of tea. Or maybe they are and I haven't given them a chance because Catcher left such a raw taste in my mouth. Either way, Catcher is a good case-study in what not to do.

I don't actually hate Catcher but I sure didn't enjoy it. The thing I got out of Catcher was that these reactions were the intended ones. I know about one person who understood the book and loved it because of how well it nailed that extremely annoying man-child who refuses to grow up and deludes himself that he is somehow talented and important - but also at all the people who that basically describes who love the book because "it gets them."

As for coming of age stories - there are much much better ones. For one things Holden never comes of age. He ends the book lamenting that children have to grow up and wishing he could stop them from it - but all the evils of the adult world he's trying to protect them from are exemplified in himself and not the adults around him. Certainly not a pleasant book but I don't think it was trying to be.

If anything I think Catcher helped me be happy to be getting over the teen stage of my life (read in the middle of the teen stage of my life) - because even then I found myself thinking "I am so done with this."

The Thomas Covenant Series (first series) by Stephen Donaldson.

I cannot agree emphatically enough. I never got past Covenant's first real act in the magical world. I was somewhat onboard with the leprosy angle to the story and the escapism/fever-dream angle with him never really knowing if anything he was experiencing was real - but even then that start was something which would have been difficult to redeem if the book had even tried.

The only other one I can think of is Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. His Calling of Lot 49 had pretty much the same theme at something like 1/8th the length - it was nonsensical, it ended abruptly, nothing was ever explained, and by the end of the book you have less idea what the character's motivations are than at the start. I can appreciate a ~150 page book which is essentially trying to say "nothing really has any meaning and nothing really makes sense so don't worry too much about that" - when the book is 1000+ pages with the same message it feels like the writer is conducting an experiment to see how many pages it takes for people to catch on and stop reading.

Oddly Pynchon's short stories weren't bad while his longer stuff felt like it was trying to punish people for reading.

[2D8HP]

Good rule of thumb on old literature (or media of any kind, really)...the typical amount of racism/sexism/other-isms inherent in the attitudes of the era will probably make you occasionally cringe or wince or feel uncomfortable.

Things that go above and beyond casual, thoughtless "-ism" are like to make your skin crawl.

There's a difference between attitudes that were ingrained in the culture of the time that we NOW find racist and things that, even AT the time were found racist.

The dividing line for me is:

Was it written before or after times I remember.

If the "hero", forces himself on the "heroine", which somehow becomes consensual afterwards in say a 1930's R.E. Howard story (which mercifully "fades to black"), which I think was even still a "trope" used (mercifully rarely) on Star Trek in the 1960's, I'm less bothered, than reading it in 1978's Gloriana, which I will add to the list of books I regret reading.

I know the 1970's is "pre-history" to most of the Forum, but for me, that's when I think "you should know better" begins, which is actually weird, because wrong is wrong no matter when, maybe it works similiar to how "white walkers" on Game of Thrones don't bother me, but The Walking Dead I find too disturbing?

Anyway, if something looks to be from the 1950's or earlier, I forgive things, that if I see the same thing in post 1960's media I don't.

Riddle me that.

[gomipile]

The Face of the Waters by Robert Silverberg. The character arcs and the plot went basically nowhere. It almost seemed as though something was about to be accomplished at the end, but then it seemed as though the book was missing about forty pages from the end.

The setting is similar to Kevin Costner's Waterworld. The two biggest differences between Waterworld and The Face of the Waters are that The Face of the Waters takes place on an alien world used as a future lifetime prison, and I actually enjoy and sometimes return to Waterworld.

[Telonius]

Nope. The all-accommodating Universe is a frighteningly popular thing to take seriously. Granted, I do ride the bus, but given that it's one of Oprah's favorite strains of product to peddle, I doubt it's just limited to people who should, generally, be poor enough to realize the Universe is not actually bending to their aspirations, but don't because they're also a little crazy.

Ditto on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. I have no idea how I can have blotted that one from my memory in such short order - I'm probably representing a small minority of the board just by liking Harry Potter at all, and in fact the series pretty much consumed my adolescence. And Cursed Child was a desecration, f'real. (Might help that, as desecrations go, it was awfully bland. One of the worst things it did, IMO, was write a villain reveal scene to be exactly what the audience expected with no misdirection tricks whatsoever, and that would fly in plenty of stories. Just not Harry Potter.)

I read Cursed Child, but didn't have the visceral hate reaction that most people here seem to. I was taking it as a play, trying to figure out the blocking and stage directions as I went. Just like any other play, you can't really judge it just on the script. (I did see a couple of places where it seemed it would be really problematic - like, "Did they skip all that because they didn't have the budget, or would it have made it too long?") I haven't seen it staged, but I wonder if not having "NAMED CHARACTER!" flashing above the villain's head wouldn't have an effect on what people were expecting for the reveal.

[Mikemical]

Dan Brown's books. Any of them. Because at first you think "Wow, this guy surely did his research!", then you open google and find out Symbology isn't even a real thing(The field of study of symbols and language is actually called Semiology, as in 'semantics'), and everything just goes downhill from there. There's a reason people say creators are 'Dan Browning' when they write about something after reading the wikipedia article's summary above the table of content. Like Kojima when he added the Fulton Recovery System in Peace Walker.
It makes you cringe when he says in Angels and Demons that CERN invented the Internet, when in Digital Fortress, he got it right saying DARPA invented the Internet while CERN invented the World Wide Web. And Digital Fortress is the first book in the series.

Also, Ripper by Isabel Allende. It felt like reading through a Scooby Doo fanfic, only instead of focusing on Shaggy's marijuana induced munchies for five minutes, we get over 70 pages detailing a secondary character's love for certain flowers, how she studied traditional oriental massage and has learned to read her clients' chakras, but she can't tell when one customer is posing as another despite knowing and sleeping with the two of them for years. And that's just the mother of one of the protagonists. I went in expecting Agatha Christie, and I got "AND THEN A SKELETON KIND OF FELL OFF THE JANITOR'S CLOSET! BUT IT WASN'T AN ACTUAL SKELETON, JUST AN ANATOMICAL MODEL!"

[Maryring]

Not sure if I can profess that I regret reading it, especially since I'm still reading it albeit mostly to see how much worse the book can get, but there is the Left Hand of God trilogy by Paul Hoffman. I'm currently on book 2. And I don't think I've ever read anything quite as ridiculously sexist before. Most of the characters are awful horrible people. The main character is an unlikeable prick whom the narrative bends over backwards to make out to be the super-awesome greatest thing ever. The story is a typical medievalish super-grim world that is on the verge of discovering gunpowder. Because some guy wants to create a particle accellerator. Doctors are useless at doctoring, and teenagers with absolutely no medical training are so much better at healing than trained physicians. There are several references to events that happened in the real world, but they're all modified. Often in groan-worthy ways.

Oh, and I did mention that it's sexist right? Because it's so ridiculously sexist. Girls exist only to be saved, get pregnant, and die horribly. The moment a girl shows anything resembling courage or drive or ability, it is a clear sign she's about to die. Martin Luther is turned into a girl and dies horribly. Abraham's son Isaac is turned into a girl and he sacrifices her. And don't get me started on the paragraphs describing our hero's justified desire in wanting to hurt a girl for being frightened of him, or just plain wanting to kill her. Oh, and they get together for quite a while too.

It's just... blergh. The book is ostensibly recent, but it'd be denounced as sexist drivel in the 1800s.

I still read it though, because if drivel like this can be published, then I too have a hope to get something published.

[Hagashager]

I absolutely hated Catcher in the Rye back in high school. I still hate the book now, however, I do owe it a certain degree of respect.

My school used Catcher in the Rye as a starting point for the concept of "Symbolic Reading". I hated the concept as a teenager, it was so incredibly pretentious and I just couldn't figure it out. The practice finally clicked with me one day when we read the part where Holden accidentally breaks his favorite record. He still picks up the shattered pieces and walks around with them though. My teacher stopped us at that point, and inquire to the class on why Holden would still hold onto the record pieces.

This scene struck closer to home for me than I would've liked since I was having to let go of someone I was very infatuated with at the time. I, begrudgingly, saw a part of myself in Holden then, which I hated, and then I realized, "oh, that's what this symbols crap is about, isn't it?" The book taught me to "read between the lines" as it were.

However, on its own, the book is awful. Holden is an incredibly pretentious character, even from the perspective of a teenager. At 17 I still found him incessantly whiny, spoiled, thankless, dumb and ignorant. The entire plot meanders, going nowhere, and most of the symbolism in the book, I frankly think isn't even there. I find it absolutely hilarious that with Catcher in the Rye there is no right answer. Everyone's got their own interpretation, and Salinger probably gave less than a damn about all of them.

The most logical one for me is that it's a commentary on teenaged angst, Holden is meant to be a deeply unlikeable character. It's a sign of maturity that one can look at Holden's behavior as an extension of his lack of growth and immaturity. However, my favorite interpretation is that it's an allegory for Post-WWII America. With Holden representing the average American having to grapple with the fact that they're not longer part of an Isolationist nation of free-enterprise, but now a global super-power that's expected to keep the peace in a post WWII Europe and Asia.

[SaintRidley]

Gnoman, if you can't see how A Christmas Carol levels a critique at capitalism, you may want to get your eyes checked. That's like, not even subtext.

And I think we all saw this in school at one point or another. My high school read the Iliad. I loved the Iliad. I was the only person in my class who loved the Iliad. To most everyone else, reading a long list-like poem about a bunch of people killing each other with an almost alien morality system, just isn't relevant regardless of whether or not it is one of the foundations of the entire Western Canon.

Honestly, relevancy is way overrated.