Reply With QuoteNo. Just no.
Didn't see one of these threads for the book lovers or haters i suppose...
Clive Barker. I've read several of his books and each time after i finish one i'm left feeling disappointed which leaves me to wonder what all the hype was about.
Cather in the Rye - blech, maybe it just doesn't age well or maybe I just can't relate to the main character Holden, but I didn't like it.
No. Just no.
I thought tiohn's first book sucked. Second was alright.
Let's see:
- Dan Simmons wrote a really dreadful book in The Terror, so bad that I suspect Hyperion and his earlier stuff I held in high regard as a kid are actually terrible.
- Then We Came to the End made a very bad mistake in comparing itself to Catch 22.
- Treasure Island's pretty lousy.
- John Hodgman's bit is only funny for one book, not two.
- GRRM isn't much of a stylist.
- JG Ballard's overrated. Crash would have been a good novella, but doesn't work as a short novel.
- I Am Legend was about as good as the movie it inspired.
- Primo Levi wrote a better Holocaust testament than Elie Wiesel.
- The Road doesn't match up to Blood Meridian (not sure if this is unpopular or not)
I love all of Heinlein's books, and I don't think he's creepy.
I like many of his books, but his juveniles are better than most of his other novels. Unfortunately, I can't escape the suspicion that he thought his Starship Troopers society was a good one. That being said, I hated the movie because it so snidely mocked Heinlein's original work.Originally Posted by Athryn
I mean the ones that people think are really odd, like Number of the Beast, and whatnot.
And I don't necessarily think he thought that his society was the right one in Starship Troopers, remember he did also write Stranger in a Strange Land.
I really like a bunch of Cormac McCarthy's work, but will never understand the love for The Road. It's certainly atmospheric and contains some great prose, but the style is frequently grating and the plot consists of vast stretches of nothing punctuated by the occasional deus ex machina.
Unlike music, TV and movies I cannot consume a book in one sitting. I find that often it takes me weeks to finish a book that I am tremendously enjoying. I could say something like Neil Gaiman is the best dark fantasy author I have read...but I haven't picked up anything since Good Omens which I didn't care for and I've only read one China Meiville book. So this form of entertainment is too broad. So...no just no.
However I will say that the 5 or 6 novels I have found on the Oprah shelf were of the highest caliber..
A Song of Ice and Fire provides nothing of interest to the fantasy scene, and it's a pity that it's been the big thing for as long as it has.
Everything that I've seen written about The Road comes with the caveat that it's a relatively minor work.
My big one is that I've never understood the love that Agathie Christie gets. Maybe she was good in her day, but I can't believe people still like her creaky plots.
I also don't understand the English Lit love for Thomas Hardy. I ended up laughing at Jude the Obscure, because after a certain point the tragedy is just so over-the-top.
I think that real poetry has, if not meter, some sort of metrical scheme; otherwise it's just prose broken up into funny line lengths.
All Bibles should filed in the Fiction section.
Except the Wiley ones.
The movie does no such thing, as the people who made it had no idea the book even existed until about halfway through pre-production. The rights were purchased in an effort to avoid a lawsuit, because the subject matter was so similar.
Christie pretty much invented the plot elements that now read as cliche in the mystery/suspense genre. In her day, nobody had ever read anything like it, but today we've been exposed to hundreds of stories that swipe from Christie and it all seems totally trite. Sort of like how that one Sherlock Holmes story in which Holmes thinks he has the right guy but he has an alibi that checks out and then it turns out he has an identical twin who was the actual culprit was a jaw-dropper at the time, but a modern reader is like, "Really, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? Really?"
You spin me right round, baby, right round, like a record, baby, right round round round.
I disbelieve. Reference?
Agh! I don't want that running through my head all afternoon. Goddamn it.
Oh, man. I loved the premise of The Terror, the setup, and the historical oddities of the actual event. I think a ship stuck in ice, the crew preying on each other, all the while terrorized by a killer bear would make a great movie. (Syfy.) I think the first three-quarters of the book was pretty good if a bit longwinded.
Then, the whole thing just fell the fuck apart. No spoilers, but man! What the fuck was going through Simmons' mind?
I know that. But the good Holmes stories are still fun to read, and I can understand why they're still in print. I'm baffled as to why Christie stays in print. (For comparison, Hugo Gernsback invented a bunch of sci-fi ideas, but nobody keeps his stories in print).
Yeah, skeptical on this. I saw Ed Neumeir and Paul Verhoeven speak at a screening of Starship Troopers and they seemed to have a pretty good idea of what it was they were adapting. I suppose it's possible that at some point in the development cycle an "original" project was merged with the adaptation, but I don't think this ignorance would have been in effect by the time Verhoeven/Neumeier were at the helm.
I don't personally think the movie is a case of mocking Heinlein so much as the filmmakers disrespecting* the source material and appropriating it for their own purposes.
*I have no particular objection to an adaptation which disrespects the source material, as long as the result is interesting in its own right.
It was my impression the filmmakers somehow felt embarrassed about the material, and mocked it to show their intellectual superiority. Having that minor character (I forget the details now; it's been a while -- a childhood friend of the protagonist?) strutting around in the leather gestapo uniform seemed like a statement that the government were like Nazis. Some other aspects of the movie seemed to be mocking the us-against-them mentality of the main story, but I confess I only remember my reaction now, not the actual movie elements that made me feel that way.
Man, Neil Patrick Harris being referred to 'that minor character' is a sad thing.
Anyway, unpopular opinion. I respect what the author did as far as taking the concept of the epic and doing with it what he did as well as laying the groundwork for the vast majority of fantasy in the years to come, but man do I find Lord of the Rings to be a dull, dull read.
Judging by the reaction around here, I'd say this was the popular opinion while my love for the book, especially its end, is the unpopular one.
I'm pretty sure Verhoven was mocking the book, the studio's order for a big summer sci-fi blockbuster, and the audience that would think it was awesome to watch good looking model/actors blow shit up with nary a thought for why it was happening.
It certainly was such a statement, though I never quite read it as Verhoeven saying "Heinlein is a fascist" -- more him using the book to air out his own interests and preoccupations. But it's not a reading I'll defend with too much vigor. If the movie mocked Heinlein, and mocked him well, that would be fine with me. My main problem with Starship Troopers is that it's never seemed to me as clever as it wanted to be, and is dragged down by certain technical flaws (including poor acting) which, whether intentional/satiric or no, are still there. I think it's an interesting film but pales to the previous Verhoeven/Neumeier collaboration, Robocop.strutting around in the leather gestapo uniform seemed like a statement that the government were like Nazis.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the worst crime against humanity ever.
OK, Wikipedia says they started with an original concept and optioned the book in the middle. But parts of the plot of the movie clearly follow the precise plot of the book (though there is a lot of deviation), some of the character names match up, and so does much of the setting. So despite Verhoeven claiming he couldn't bear to finish reading the book, the scriptwriters obviously did read it and someone decided to deviate from it in ways that seemed to be self-referentially mocking their own material.
Well, compared to the ending of Drood...
Brave New World is a better dystopian novel than 1984.
Conversely 1984 had a brilliant film of it made, BNW didn't.
I'd been under the impression the ending of The Terror was the only unpopular thing about it. Certainly I loved it except for that.
For my part: the current wave of steamy vampire/werewolf/whatever urban fantasy romances is an unadulterated positive and there's some really sharp writing going on in that area. (Other than Laurell K. Hamilton.)
I, too, loved Number of the Beast.
....when I was 12. They had an entire discussion in that book about bra size, if I remember. Woooohooooo. Boobies. I also liked Jack L Chalker and Piers Anthony when I was 12. I was a real fan of the Boobies.
I recently tried re-reading Anthony's Split Infinity. I apparently was either drunk or incredibly deluded when I was younger. That sort of drivel is exactly why people shove science fiction into a corner and tell it to be quiet while the adults talk amongst themselves.
Can you name some names? I like urban fantasy
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