Well it’s a series, but Three body problem. It should have been right up my alley, but I got so tired of every decision by every character being stupid that I couldn’t be bothered to read the last fifty pages of the last book.
Even if I charitably assumed the point of the book was to show that people are weak and stupid, the series was such a ham-handed strawman as to undercut its own commentary. And even worse, it had just enough interesting ideas to lead me to believe it was going somewhere worthwhile, but it never did.
It’s been years and I’m still pissed off that I wasted a week on it.
I enjoyed those, but you’re not wrong. The author cited Foundation as his inspiration for the books, and it suffers from all the same problems. Interesting concepts told with cardboard cutout ridiculous one dimensional characters.
Yeah, I recommend people don’t read that book, but do read the one chapter about the aliens, what is it, second to the last chapter of the book? That chapter is some of the best sci Fi I’ve ever encountered, the rest of the book… you can skip it.
Can you name the chapter specifically? I guess it will spoil a lot of the first book no?
It looks like that was chapter 33, Trisolaris: Sophon
If you want to jump in and read that chapter, all you need to know is this:
!the aliens are on a planet in the alpha centuri/proxima centuri trinary star system, the closest stars to the sun. Also, apparently the three suns means it sucks there and they’re desperately looking for a new star system.!<
Not read the book, but isn’t it meant to be quite dramatically different in some aspects? I’m sure I heard that all those annoying young adults characters were invented for the show? Someone who knows can correct me on that.
Agreed though that the show was a pile of crap. I enjoyed the first couple and quite enjoyed the last in the season, but the in between was pretty awful.
I can’t remember details since it was in HS, but reading The Catcher in the Rye was a painfully slow and boring process. I didn’t get the story, the meaning, the struggle. It was a guy complaining about everything and being miserable and then I had to write a book report about it. Icky, icky, gross.
Maybe if I read it now it’ll be different but I dun wanna!
I enjoy reading unreliable narrators, and so while you’re totally correct. Holden is nothing more than an angsty privileged teenager who is angry at the world. That’s what made the book fun for me, at a certain point his self serving lies and his cringe attempts to act like an adult are just funny.
I’ve found it’s a good litnus test for people, just like Fight Club or Rick and Morty. You’re absolutely allowed to like these pieces, but if you think those charcters are admiral than it’s a super duper red flag.
I don’t remember what book it was but I walked into a metal pole reading it. I wasn’t seriously injured or anything but it was pretty embarrassing.
Pride and Prejudice was the most unrelatable book I was forced to read in school. A rich, noble, Victorian family whose main problems are, while they are rich and noble, they are not as rich and noble as they’d like to be. They have no real skills or assets, so rather than pursue trade or business ventures, they put all their eggs in the basket of their daughters being able to swoon and marry the bachelors of richer, nobler, families.
As someone who does not live in Victorian England, grew up poor, and is generally bored when shallow romance is the main theme, that book was hell. It’s often praised for showing the differences between classes in that period, which makes zero sense to me because the only classes it compares are the Upper Class and the slightly less rich Upper Class. It would be like a modern book talking about the “struggles” of a family that only has a net worth of $100 million and how hard they have it compared to billionaire families. Boo-fucking-hoo.
I genuinely do not understand how that book is a classic. It’s basically Keeping Up with the Kardashians in Victorian times. It’s a trash story with trash characters and trash themes. It is the first, and only, book I felt compelled to burn once I was done with. I wouldn’t even wipe my ass with it.
I’ve gone back and forth on my opinion of pride and prejudice over the years, even held this opinion at one point. Like why the hell should I care about rich women who want to marry rich men?
Except taken in context, the book has a different meaning. Before Pride and Prejudice, there weren’t many stories about women in that time period. Since women in that class couldn’t really own property or run businesses, their lives depended on their family and ability to find a husband. Maybe what they experienced was banal by our standards, but it was life and death for some people, or the difference between a pleasant life and one of suffering. The stakes were high for something we treat as optional these days. It’s less or a morals story and more of an insight into social politics for women of the time, something that wasn’t widely written about until the book came out.
Is it good? That’s up to the reader. It’s unique and insightful literature, though.
I’ve really wanted to get into Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and bought the first few books. I’ve never managed to make it through the first one, The Gunslinger, even though I’ve given it probably five or six attempts. I always make it to the same part in the book where Roland and the kid are using the hand-cart through the tunnels, and it just takes so. fucking. long. to get anywhere and for anything to happen, and my mind starts drifting as I’m reading and then I start missing things and have to go back… That section of the book is so frustratingly boring that I can’t make it through.
I honestly despise King’s longer novels. The Dark Tower series is the epitome of his inability to stay focused and well paced.
It’s like he set a goal of some ridiculous book length, thought he needed a bunch of padding to get there, hit the mark and abruptly ends it.
Give me Salem’s Lot, Carrie, Pet Semetary, etc all day but I can’t with Dark Tower.
I heard from quinn’s ideas is you have to be a pretty big reader of king’s other works in order to read the dark tower.
That’s pretty funny to me. I read the start of a King novel when I was probably too young for it (pretty sure it was It?), and just got bored with it. Never tried reading another for years. A decade or two later I tried the Dark Tower series and ended up binge-reading the first 5 books.
I really love those books, although I absolutely see their flaws and understand why people wouldn’t like them.
Either way, I definitely don’t think you need to be a Stephen King fan to enjoy them. I mean, I’m certainly not and I certainly did. Still haven’t read any of his other works…
Try listening to it as an audio book. It’s really great if someone else pushes you through the dry parts.
Be warned. There’s some real…racist choices made in the audiobook reading.
I hated book 7. Ruined the whole series for me. I read the last 3 books (excluding Wind through the Keyhole, I’m done) when they came out, book 6 was just a setup/tease for book 7 and I was so excited for it. But it was so dumb and disappointing. I’ve talked to people who liked the ending and I just don’t get it. 6 books building up the existential evil that lived at the center of all existence, and when he gets to the tower to face the evil it’s just an old guy on a balcony throwing Harry Potter hand grenades. You have to suspend so much disbelief to get there, trudge through thousands of pages, and it’s just a sad, pathetic, uninspired, lazy ending.
6 books building up the existential evil that lived at the center of all existence, and when he gets to the tower to face the evil it’s just an old guy on a balcony throwing Harry Potter hand grenades.
Funny, I absolutely loved this. The banality of evil. And good, too. Everything. The world is falling apart. Even the great evil is not, in the end, that great. Two old (REALLY old) men at the ragged ends of their lives trying to do this one last thing.
through thousands of pages, and it’s just a sad, pathetic, uninspired, lazy ending.
I mean, it does literally warn you to stop reading when the characters other than Roland get their happy ending, so if you kept going that’s on you… /s
Also, it’s thematic to the story at hand. It also ends hopefully, as Roland has the horn he did not have the first time through, which is implied to be incredibly important to his quest going well. We see the cycle right before victory, when he gets everyone else their happy endings and redeems his sins enough to earn the horn and, on the next cycle, likely end his quest. Which can be read as very hopeful, but your take isn’t invalid or anything
Its been a long time, like I said I read it right when it came out. I’m glad people enjoyed it! It was quite an investment, and I loved most of the books leading up, even the Wizard and the Glass. You all make some good points but it just didn’t hit me that way and I’m not liable to go back. I hardly read any fiction anymore, except the occasional classic, Philip K Dick, or whenever Joe Abercrombie comes out with a new book I’ll usually pick it up.
