For me, it’s definitely the Witcher novels. The first two books, The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny, were books with each chapter being its own story. It was just a collection of great and interesting short stories, each focusing on a new character and their problems.
Then I moved onto the novels, and I have never been this disappointed in a book series. In fact, I hated them so much, that it absolutely killed my drive to read for a year. The first book was okay. It was pretty boring, but I didn’t expect much seeing as it was setting up the story.
Then I realised that all his novels are like that. Every novel contained about 15% of relevant story, while the rest was focused on random name drops or characters that were never relevant again. For example, a 40 page chapter would go on and on about a random King or location and what has happened there, never actually revealing what the event was. Imagine someone coming up to you and discussing the last chapter of a book series without revealing what has happened to provide context. This doesn’t happen once, but almost every chapter.
Then you have the different POV’s. Instead of the book focusing on the interesting characters such as Geralt, Yennefer, Ciri, Triss or Dandelion, a large quantity of the novels is from the POV of random characters, who once again are never mentioned again. There was a chapter in the 4th novel that had an interesting, edge of the seat moment, then it randomly switched perspectives to a random soldier who was discussing how best to proceed in raping the women for ten pages.
That brings me to the 3rd issue; the rape. Why is every character either a rapist or is raped? Geralt forces Yennefer to love him through a wish. Yennefer forces / manipulates Geralt into sex with magic or manipulation. Triss, using Geralt’s amnesia, tricks him into thinking she’s Yennefer to have sex. Ciri is also later sexually assaulted.
Rant over. Anyone have any rants of their own?
by VoxPopuliVS
28 Comments
Nothing but Blackened Teeth, that book will forever haunt me due to how God awful the dialogue was. The narration was fine but those characters….wuff. I literally could not get past the first chapter, it was just too painful.
i remember loving the witcher books and got a lot out of them thematically, and was kinda obsessed with the series for a while
but i was 16 so maybe i need a reread. i hope i still love them tho
Hot take maybe but the only book that can truly recall hating and DNF was
*The Overstory*
Boy howdy.
Under the Dome. Worst thing Stephen King ever wrote, in my opinion. Even ignoring the blatant political bias, the ending was absolutely horrendous.
>!Beg your bullies to show you mercy and if you’re lucky, maybe they might.!<
Midnight library. By the title and premise, I thought it’d be similar to borges Library of babel but accessible.
End up with a vanilla, predictable, unimaginative self-help book. It was the first time I actually hate ranted over a book.
For a Booker Award Short List, **The Trees** was a real stinker, imo.
Strongheart: The Power to Control Diabetes- a romance novel about diabetes, written by a doctor. Other than the painful clichés and misspellings, it had factually wrong descriptions of diabetes.
A lot of people like Red Rising but I hated it. I didn’t like the POV or the word repetition. It reads like YA. The story was predictable. I just think it was poorly written. It turned me off from the rest of the series.
A Highly Unlikely Scenario, or A Neetsa Pizza Employee’s Guide to Saving the World.
Awful. Awful book. Nonsensical for much of the book. The author refused to use quotation marks. I was trying to get into book reviews, though, so I read it and reviewed it. But it has stuck out in my mind as one of the worst things I’ve ever put myself through.
The boy in the striped pajamas. Everything about it was just bad.
Things We Hide from the Light – it has great reviews but was so embarrassingly bad I couldn’t even finish it.
The Stand by Stephen King was fun, up to a point, and then took a sharp left into endless, boring nonsense. Which would be alright, if my copy wasn’t 1600 pages long
I mostly agree with the Witcher. It doesn’t cut it as a longer work. It works if you approach it as what it got turned into: a series of quests and mini quests, tangentially related in an RPG based world.
Atlas Shrugged and 50 Shades of Gray are the worst offenders for me. I got 2/3s of the way through Atlas Shrugged and just couldn’t do it anymore, it is a truly awful read.
50 Shades of Gray on the other hand was exactly as I expected: badly written fanfic which I assume was written by a horny high schooler. What I don’t get what its popularity. There are some very well written romance novels out there, and they can get quite steamy, so why would you settle for this drivel?
Ready Player One
My problem was that I identified with the protagonist at first… then I felt like I was listening to a nerdy Cliff Clavin.
An old friend loved it so I compelled to finish the book.
Could not get on with, or finish, King’s The Regulators. As far as I could tell its only redeeming feature was that as it progressed, more of the multitude of unremarkable characters were killed off and I stood slightly more chance of remembering who was who – although by that point I’d lost all interest and gave up.
Agree with you entirely – the short stories were fine but the epic arc of the novels was extremely poor in comparison
Before the Fall. I was so excited to find out the show creator for Fargo and Legion had a few novels out because I a love those shows dearly but this did not stick for me.
I DNF’d it when it became The Ciri Show.
Falcó by Arturo Pérez Reverte. There’s a sex scene that’s like
*”-Tell me I’m a pig*
*-Pig*
*Her German boobies were happy”*
I’ve already posted about this, but “Dark Matter”
The Covenant of Water. It’s definitely someone who paid to be on Oprah’s book club, the story line sucks.
the midnight library by matt haig
Just started reading the Fourth Wing this past week and oh my god. It’s incomprehensible.
I still don’t understand the appeal of the Eye of the World. (Wheel of Time series).
Recently read “Extremely Online” which was advertised as a critical look at the rise of social media…
It was just a breathless regurgitation of various Twitter beefs and online drama. I could give a duck less which Insta stars get product deals.
No book has ever weirded me out as much as “I Will Fear No Evil” by Robert A. Heinlein. Seemed like nothing more than a skeevy old man’s pervy fantasy writ long.
A pity too, I was making my way through his written works in release order and I was so close to finishing, but this book just killed it for me. Needed a palette cleanser after that but didn’t end up coming back.
I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai
Makkai tries to make a statement about the complicated ethical dilemma of true crime stories. The fact that this story is written as a letter to the teacher that Bodie FIRMLY believes was the murderer…it just emphasizes how dangerous true crime junkies/redditors can be when they try to weigh in on cases like this. Bodie tries so hard to prove that she’s not somebody with a white savior complex but like… she really did insert herself into a 20+ year old court case that she didn’t really have much to do with. Towards the end she really did seem like an internet sleuth that wanted to try and make a ~difference~