Dissapointment

Stabshauptmann

Is there any novel you've read that didnt meet expectations, I mean a really famous or highly recomended book that just didnt do it for you? Personally, I didnt really enjoy Moby Dick

munkeehaven

''zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance''..im into philosophy but this book has to be the most boring thing i have ever read in my life.....it was stiff and repetitive ...rambling off about nothing...and really had no point to it.

Pirsig takes us on a literary chautauqua that dives into the split between romanticism and classicism, and speaks magnitudes about the philosophies and sciences of Eastern and Western Cultures. The book has seized rave reviews across the globe, and held best-seller status for record amounts of time. One wonders, what could possibly be in this book that has made it so accredited for such a long time? The answer is that the book takes the reader on a journey that was never supposed to happen. Pirsig elucidates, in four hundred pages, about the conflicts with his son, and himself.

Dancing duck

100 Years of Solitude.

It almost felt like we were going through stacks of characters because we didn't have the talent to let those we had grow.
Was it a memory game or was it a book? :eek:

oeNeo

Insomnia by Stephen King. I had just read The Stand and was really impressed by it, but Insomnia was really dull I thought.

pork99

1 - Thomas Pynchon

I know I tried to read one of his novels once but I cannot remember which one or much about it. Maybe so bad I've blocked out any memory of it.


2 - Lord of the Rings

Got to page 350, then I hit puberty and lost interest.


3 - Anything by J. P. Sartre

Tedious

Manach

"The 4 Feathers" by Mason. I very much enjoyed the film of the book, but the book itself was utterly tedious.

OfflerCrocGod

Ulysses - terrible, boring, pointless, rambling crap:mad:

Stabshauptmann

Originally posted by OfflerCrocGod
Ulysses - terrible, boring, pointless, rambling crap:mad:

More and more ppl have started saying that since last year, somebody from some paper said something in a conference in america or something and since then ppl have been , well you know.

Personally I think Ulysses is one of the better books ive read, not the most intersting granted but diffinitly the best constructed

Still its all about personal taste, after all Moby Dick is considered one of the all time greats but I found it boring and rambling although the psychology was well done the description was too much for me, too much detail, not enough story, thats actually what I liked about LOTR

CuLT

Great Expectations


...wasn't all I was hoping for...

dod

I must say I loved "Zen and the art...", and indeed its' successor "Lila".

I never managed to read Ulysses, and I reckon I've bought three copies of it, swearing on each occasion that this was the time I was definitely going to read it.

munkeehaven

what did you like about ''zen and the art..'' dod?? there were patches here and there that intrigued me esp about the ghosts of science and whatnot, but i just found my mind deadening everytime he mentioned his motorbike...also i really thought that the whole argument about quality was pointless, well constructed and argued, but pointless. i guess i must be a romantic aesthetician as he says then.....but i like science so i dont really fit exactly into that category..**rambles on ....**

OfflerCrocGod

Originally posted by Necromancer
More and more ppl have started saying that since last year, somebody from some paper said something in a conference in america or something and since then ppl have been , well you know.

Na I've thought it crap for a long time (since I finished it, in about two weeks but it seemed like 2 years).

Originally posted by Necromancer
Personally I think Ulysses is one of the better books ive read, not the most intersting granted but diffinitly the best constructed

I don't read books for their "construction" but for their stories - I read to entertain myself, not to baffle and bore myself.

Originally posted by Necromancer
Still its all about personal taste, after all Moby Dick is considered one of the all time greats but I found it boring and rambling although the psychology was well done the description was too much for me, too much detail, not enough story, thats actually what I liked about LOTR

So you are saying there is a story in Uly??, as hard as I looked I couldn't find it.

RE*AC*TOR

Originally posted by Dancing duck
100 Years of Solitude.

It almost felt like we were going through stacks of characters because we didn't have the talent to let those we had grow.
Was it a memory game or was it a book? :eek:

Read it again, dear god read it again!

Oh, and I found Jack Kerouac's, "on the road", the definition of tedium.

martarg

The Da Vinci Code (although that probably doesn't count, not a big personal disappointment, but it must be the most overrated book ever)

Wuthering Heights

Anything by Virginia Woolf (perhaps it's just a matter of taste, I hate books where characters suffer a lot and no-one knows exactly why)

As for 100 Years of Solitude, I did like it, but not as much as I had expected...

Cactus Col

The Diceman by Luke Rhinehart


really liked it when I first read it at about 19 ... read it again a couple of years later ... and was surprised to find that I really didn't think too much of it at all ... maybe I matured or something

TomTom

I liked the da vinci code, but angles and deamon is way better. Digital fortress on the other hand is a majore let down. I picked up a book in a gostel a few weeks ago called want to play by pj tracy, after finishing it I felt like burning it.
I was dissapointed by fever pitch also

Dancing duck

Originally posted by RE*AC*TOR
Read it again, dear god read it again!

When I'm in the mood for a bit of torture.

Frankie Smith

Ulysses: life is too short

For Whom The Bell Tolls: read a hundred pages, thought the writing was wooden. logan mountstuart agrees. does it get good?

Dracula: Was good ol' Abraham under deadline pressure? the ending is like he was asked for 20 000 words and by the last chapter he already had 19 500. and the print was really small.

more will occur to me ................................................................................................
..............................................

Ghormenghast: spent two weeks lookin' for that!
The Woman Who Rode Away and othe Stories by DH Lawrence: I thought I was going to expand my horizons! huh! never again.

Paladin

100 Years of Solitude.

It almost felt like we were going through stacks of characters because we didn't have the talent to let those we had grow.
Was it a memory game or was it a book?

I agree.
It felt like 100 years reading the f-ing thing.

martarg

It felt like 100 years reading the f-ing thing.

I wonder if it was a matter of language. Most books do not feel the same way in translation, and 100 years of solitude looks like it loses a lot. It was not my favourite book ever, but I enjoyed it, and I did not find it boring at all...

karma kabbage

Interview With A Vampire yeah it was ok I suppose, in some other cultures!! I found it very yawn-filled. The only benefit was I understood (FULLY) why they referred to louis as a whinging gyt in the movie!

grumpytrousers

Bonfire of the Vanities disappointed me.

It's one of those books that as you make your way through it you're really enjoying it. The action is slow, the descriptions exhaustive and Wolfe seems to try and get inside the heads of all the characters.

Unfortunately, come the end of the book, and it's like he just did the word count, realised he'd done enough and upped the pace at the end.

It didn't sit right, it didn't resolve everything - frankly it left me hugely disappointed - the last 5% spoiled the other 95

Earthhorse

The Great Gatsby - Not terrible by any means but I just couldn't figure out why everyone thought it was so great.

Can't say I liked "Zen and the Art..." either but I wouldn't class that as a dissapointment as I hadn't heard too much hype about it before reading.

Stabshauptmann

bewcause of the sacrifice he took?* the moral delema? his conscience? the intrigue?

Stabshauptmann

read zen the other week, good but it must have been very influential cos i can see nothing new in the philosophy. the story comes in at all the right moments, very well written and when you realise that its actually a true story (and that chris was murdered after words (totally unrelated to the book)).
I liked zen a lot

elivsvonchiaing

Catcher in the Rhye- Salinger. This book had its moments for me as a teenager- but looking at it as an adult - (luckily I'm a paedomorph and can speak with some authority on this :-) - I feel Salinger wrote this to demonize the society he belonged to, he never fully understood how it worked, why it worked the way it did, consequently was outraged by it. I believe he never dealt with his childhood experience; as an adult, I think he maybe a paedomorph.

To be honest I only really felt this after Mark Chapman & John Lennon.

I read it first after the event - understood later - I'm not that old!

lilo moo

Catcher in the Rye was my choice also

fate turner

The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli.

---

not fun, but at the time quite helpful i presume

PonderStibbons

Dancing duck wrote:

100 Years of Solitude.

It almost felt like we were going through stacks of characters because we didn't have the talent to let those we had grow.
Was it a memory game or was it a book? :eek:

So it doesn't improve then? I'm about half way through, I was very excited about it before I started, but I'm finding it quite tedious. And why to all the names have to sound the same, for feck's sake?! If there is one more Jose/Arcadio/Buendia I'm going to crack up!

Deer

I found double point by Lionel Shriver a disappointment. I had read it after We Need to Talk about Kevin and it was such a let down for me.

Dades

lilo moo wrote:

Catcher in the Rye was my choice also

Likewise. What is all the hype about?

I think a lot depends on what stage of your life you read a book. Books you hated later in life you may have loved as a teen. And vice versa.

BossArky

The Atheist wrote:

Likewise. What is all the hype about?

I think a lot depends on what stage of your life you read a book. Books you hated later in life you may have loved as a teen. And vice versa.

I liked Catcher in the Rye. The main character reminded me of a fellow I knew and the way he seemed to think. I was about 20 when I read it.

Moonbeam

The great Gatsby was definately the worst.

Macker

Not the worst book by any means but hitch-hikers guide was a big let down ,started very well but lost me half way through ,the Salmon of doubt was a better book IMO

Shaybo

The Atheist wrote:

Likewise. What is all the hype about?

I think a lot depends on what stage of your life you read a book. Books you hated later in life you may have loved as a teen. And vice versa.

Classic books are like classic films in some sense. Their reputations are partly based on the context of the time in which they were published/released.

I watch Orson Welles' Citizen Kane and wonder what all the fuss was about but the techniques used by Welles at the time were absolutely revolutionary which is one of the reasons it's considered a classic. It also dealt with the life of William Randolph Hearst, a very powerful media baron at the time.

Likewise Catcher in the Rye was published in the early 50s when the behaviour of Holden Caulfield would have been seen as shocking and even outlandish. Remembe this was pre-Elvis America when children were younger versions of their parents by and large. Was 'teenager' even a word then?

So whether people enjoy them nowadays does little to diminish their reputation as classics nor should it.

tHE vAGGABOND

agreed 100% about Gatsby..

Read it, and all I thought was what's the fuss was about - its was nothing special at all..

Earthhorse

Where were all you Gatsby haters in 2004, when I needed you most?

BossArky

If you hated Gatsby then your going to love reading Day of the Locust, for the added hate factory . Of the two I preferred Gatsby - didn't think it was that bad.

JackKelly

I read the Great Gatsby, and for the first half, i really disliked it. Didn't really get what was going on to be honest. Sometimes I'd read a section, continue on about 2 or 3 pages and realise I had completely misunderstood what happened a few pages back. But by the time I came to the end, and did a bit of research, I loved it! Need to read It again though.

treefingers

Dancing duck wrote:

100 Years of Solitude.

It almost felt like we were going through stacks of characters because we didn't have the talent to let those we had grow.
Was it a memory game or was it a book? :eek:

with you all the way here buddy! got about half way through it a couple of years ago and constantly found myself having to look back at that family tree at the start. i gave up.

after some persistent badgering from a friend, i recently began it again, and i am still finding it painful reading.

i have a few different books that i read at night, but i can usually only manage a chapter of 100 years of solitude before i turn to something more enjoyable...