What’s a book or series of books you have kept reading despite it getting on your nerves a little (possibly for justified or even unjustified reasons)
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@futurebird 2/2
and discovered the source was often a book they relied on (usually an assigned textbook. If not, usually of the "Teach yourself X in Y days!!!" or the "The Complete Idiot's Guide to X!!" sort), and said book was full of misconceptions. I did encounter some good programming books, but they were the minority. (The internet is mostly similar to worse, which is yet another reason to be skeptical of LLM-generated code)
I read some of those when I was much younger. Teach Yourself Game Programming in 21 Days was fun: lots of detail in the early chapters with worked examples, but ‘day’ 21 is ‘and now let’s write Doom’, which has a high-level overview of the ray-casting algorithm and left everything else as an exercise to the reader.
When I wrote my Cocoa book, I read a few of the existing books on the market. There was one that dominated sales and it had so many errors in it that I had no idea how anyone wrote working apps after reading it. The fascinating thing was that all of the books talked about how to implement the Singleton pattern and the all did it in convoluted ways. Objective-C has a feature where you can implement a class method called initialize and it is guaranteed to be called, in a thread-safe way, the first time any other method is called on the class. So you implement singletons by implementing a initialize method that creates the singleton and a sharedInstance method that returns it. No explicit locking needed, the runtime guarantees all of the ordering that you need. This is used throughout the implementations of the core APIs, yet every Objective-C or Cocoa book I saw described a ludicrously overcomplicated alternative approach.
Lord of the Rings books. I must have read them > 20 times and skipped over parts > 15 times
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco: I get it Umberto, you did lots of research for this book… you don’t need to put it all in let’s get on with the story.
Have you read Les Miserables?
I love the book but there is a bit in the middle where he spends almost 300 pages with a detailed description of the Battle of Waterloo. This exists in the plot so that one of the main characters can loot something significant to another of the main characters from a corpse. That’s it. 300 pages of history (not even written as a story) in the middle to get one object into one person’s hands. The whole thing could have been done in two paragraphs without losing anything.
The Tillerman Cycle by Cynthia Voigt.
It peaked around book three: A Solitary Blue. We were forced to read that in high school and it's the third book and is missing a lot of context without reading the first two. I kept going but the rest of the books were really bad. I finished the final one earlier this year and it was a huge letdown.
I also finished reading all the Dune books last year. Everyone told me 5&6 were not that great, but I wanted to read them anyway for completeness. I'm glad I got through them, but they're really not good. The entire series gets a little jarring after the first book because Herbert's characters are not really human. They all think and act on these deeply complex and super human political levels, so they become less and less relatable as you keep reading. I only read the 6 main books. I doubt I'll ever read all the ones by other authors.
I read the Brian Herbert / Kevin J Anderson ones and they’re terrible. Frank does a lot of contextualisation of the Butlerian Jihad as a rejection of the idea of delegating your thinking externally, the prequels make it a stupid robot-overlords plot that makes no sense. The ending of Chapterhouse / Heretics is set up hinting that human evolution has continued down paths that are barely comprehensible by the old humans who didn’t leave in the Scattering, the sequels just rehash old characters and make it all about the robots again.
@futurebird I really pushed my way through the Gormenghast series, and stalled out halfway through the second book. The writing was awesome but the setting was so dark and depressing it really got me down.
@evan @futurebird the writing in Gormenghast is so evocative. I did finish the first book and glad I did to experience the writing style. Excellent scenecraft, but yes, depressing and often slow paced. But the way it paints a scene, and the language used to do so is high art.
I made it to the end of the first. The books were written in the trenches of World War One and it really felt like the kind of escapism that is attractive if your only alternative is a WWI trench.
I found the writing overly pretentious and self absorbed. The setting was interesting but the pacing was tedious. I guess it counts for this because I did force myself to finish the first one.
For me it was Audrey Niffenegger's _Her Fearful Symmetry_. It was a terrible book that I kept waiting to get better because I'd liked _The Time Traveler's Wife_ so much, despite it being kind of creepy at times.
But Her Fearful Symmetry was just awful all the way through. It never got better and it had a stupid and terrible ending.
@futurebird I think that was the book that I finally said, "there's no shame in quitting on bad books" and I don't think I've pushed through one since.
@futurebird when I was a child, it seemed that whenever the topic of science fiction books would come up, people would want to talk about Michael Crichton's books, so I felt like I had to read some of them, in order to have an informed opinion on him as a writer. As a result, I read to completion several Crichton books, despite being thoroughly annoyed with them. And my opinion is that he is a terrible writer, and nobody should waste any time reading his novels.
Michael Chrichton is one of the authors whose works are best enjoyed via their film adaptations. Heinlein is another.
@futurebird Anything by E. E. "Doc" Smith. I keep coming back to them for comfort reading.
I am also mostly done right now on a re-read of (the first few) Jack Ryan books by Tom Clancy. The geopolitics is just so... fundamentally *wrong*. But I do keep reading them, once a decade or so. The techno parts are fun, if just as jingoistic.
I find the Lensman series tedious, but I do reread Skylark every five to ten years. Nothing about them is objectively good, but I have a soft spot for early space opera. From the ‘huh, I guess Einstein was wrong’ early in the first book as they go faster than light to the entire model of physics built around the concept of the luminiferous aether (not explicitly stated), there’s no way you could accuse it of being science fiction. Fictional science maybe. The portrayal of women is not great by modern standards but is much better than a lot of contemporary writing in similar genres. The plots are driven by enormous jumps in technology that happen for narrative reasons. There’s inconsistency in the timeline.
But they’re fun. I wouldn’t say they get on my nerves, they’re great when I just want to turn off my brain for a few hours.
@futurebird The Name Of The Wind series is a fascinating experiment in how much technically-good writing and a world developed in a way that promises and regularly delivers on further nooks, crannies, vistas, and background-narrative throughlines, can outweight an uninteresting and unsympathetic 100% Gary Stu protagonist unironically and unhesitantly delivered.
@gaditb @futurebird heartily seconded. i only really fully realized that i no longer cared if there was ever a third volume somewhere after finishing the second. (i suppose i might still read it if it ever appeared, but i have... zero expectation of actual payoff.)
@brennen @futurebird Ehh I'll prolly read it eventually from a library or a friend or something if it ever happens(/happened?). I am also interested in the results of this experiment.
@gaditb @futurebird most of the books by Robin Hobb. After I realized that all her books only investigate what happens when something magical is handicapped (and all books have a happy ending), it was hard to unsee. Still kept reading though
@futurebird 1/2
I think I've read about 40 posts in this thread, and it seems nearly all (including mine) are on fiction. But for me, the majority of annoying books I've read to completion have *NOT* been fiction. Most of them have been about programming! I read many programming books in various quests to determine why people I was tutoring had such strange misconceptions about programming languages and concepts -