Books that Most Disappointed You

I'm curious to know which books have most disappointed you based on the high expectations that you had when you first picked up the book. I find sometimes that books that I thought were going to be great turn out to be so bad that I can't finish them...sometimes I believe the spin that the publishers put out, sometimes friends rave about a book, and sometimes it's the author's reputation that leads me to believe that the book is going to be great. Then it turns out to be a dud.

Have you had that experience?

Yes. Friends got me interested in Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, but I couldn't get through her most current books in the series, one of which was co-written with her son, Todd. I don't know if I'm just not as interested in the series, or if her writing quality has declined.

The same thing happened when I read the two most recent Kay Scarpetta novels by Patricia Cornwell, Blowfly and Trace. Blowfly has a plot twist that you have to read to understand the superior Trace, but they're both inconsistent in characterizations and plot.

Wuthering Heights was not what I expected. To me, the love story was never truly developed to support the rest of the story. I kept reading it hoping it would get better, no such luck.

This question came to me a couple of days ago when I read about 10 pages of a relatively new novel that I've seen on numerous 2006 Top 10 lists in the last couple of weeks. It's called "Absurdistan" and it's written entirely in broken English as would be spoken by a Russian immigrant to the U.S. It's supposed to be funny and clever, but I took an instant dislike to it and I don't have a clue as to what so many other readers and critics saw in it.

Yeah, I'm with you there on the broken English thing... I know it's usually done with a purpose but it irritates me too. I haven't read Absurdistan, but I had the same kind of issue with The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey. It got rave reviews and won the Booker, but it didn't grab me at all. The entire novel is written from the point of view of a (supposedly) semi-literate Ned Kelly, who was a 19th century Irish immigrant and probably Australia's most famous bushranger. So there's little in the way of punctuation (no commas, colons, semi-colons, or quotation marks - just full stops, but even then, not as many as would usually be required) although at least there aren't deliberately misspelled words.

From the point of view of being historically realistic, I suppose it's a worthy read, but I found it very slow(and I only made it a bit over halfway) because it just didn't flow. I frequently had to stop and reread a line or a paragraph for the sake of clarity because there were two or three sentences strung together without punctuation or capitalisation. Very frustrating!

I was actually dissapointed in The Great Gatsby which I read for the first time recently. It tops several of the best English language novels of all time lists so I thought it would be Great-er. I am afraid of Ulysses which is also on the tops of those infernal lists -- I am afraid I will either hate it, be baffled, or bored.

I agree Barb about the last few Scarpettas -- Horrible! I loved Wuthering Heights though homeschoolmom.

Another one that surprised me as being a poorly written novel is John Irving's Until I Find You.

It is ridiculously repetitive and, at almost 900 pages, Irving's focus on main characters with kinky sex problems grew very weary and boring. I guess I was most surprised by this one because I'm a big fan of Irving's other novels (with only a couple of exceptions).

loved John Irving until The Fourth Hand -- so bad that I couldn't bring myself to read Until I Find You. A Widow for One Year is one of my favorite books of all time though.

I pretty much feel the same way about Irving. Kind of makes one wonder if he's in some kind of permanent decline these last few years...and why that happened. I'm hoping that he still has some good novels to give us, but I'm starting to doubt it.

#5 - I absolutely agree with you on True History of the Kelly Gang. I can appreciate how clever it was for Peter Carey to use authentic bushranger punctuation, but I got really sick of having to copyedit the book in my head as I read. I eventually abandoned it.

My most recent disappointing read was The Name of the Rose. I'd sort of been saving it for ages and ages, and I was really looking forward to it, but it just failed to grasp me. There were too many tangents. Sometimes I embrace tangents as a quirky and interesting way of setting the scene and establishing certain things about the characters, but here I found them more annoying than anything else. The book kind of reminded me of Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" from The Canterbury Tales in that the author would say something to the effect of, "I won't tell you anything about anyone's physical appearance," then spend several pages describing exactly what someone looked like.

I was recommended The Birthdays, and was really excited about reading it. It really appeared to be a book I thought I would love. WRONG! I only read about 175 pages of it (about half the book), so take this review as such. I just could not bring myself to read any further. The plot was boring, the characters were boring and flat, and I just didn't care what happened. It read like a bad Lifetime movie. Overly formulaic and sentimental. Boo!

jhowell - it's so nice to hear someone else who doesn't like The Great Gatsby! I listened to the audiobook last year and the only reason I didn't turn it off was that a) it was so short, and b) I didn't have another book ready to go. Major disappointment.

#pilgrimess: I LOVED True History of the Kelly Gang and didn't find any of the problems which you encountered.

I heard on NPR about this book that I thought was going to be great, called LINT by Steve Aylett. It sounded just hilarious. I didn't want to buy it, but I talked my local library into getting it, so when it came in, I got it from them...and I hated it. It was so ridiculous and stupid and boring that I quit before I was halfway through it.

I didn't expect it to be great but so help me, I picked up The Notebook expecting it would be an okay read. And that was one of the worst books I've ever wasted my time on. I finished it...it didn't take me long to read, I guess, and maybe I hoped it would get better. But the writing was so awful, I don't know why I bothered.

You're not the only one. I borrowed The Notebook from the library and started the first couple chapters, then skimmed the rest of the book seeing if it would seem any more interesting but it didn't. I know tons of people love that story, but it definately wasn't one of my favorites.

The story is lame and the writing doesn't help...

I got accused of not liking romance because I hate that book *snort*

#2
If I recommend a series that has been going for almost 40 years, I mean for the person to start at the beginning. :-) I love the Pern novels, but I haven't bought a new one in 15 years or so. Often the author is sick and tired of a series, but fans want more, and why turn down the money? A co-author for later books doesn't auger well at all. If it sounds like your kind of book, pick up a used paperback of Dragonflight (first in the original trilogy) and see what you think. Betcha like it. :-)

#6 & 12
I like Gatsby. But I've never understood why it would rank as the greatest novel. I don't think that the Prof tried to sell us that when I studied it in "American novels." I'm beginning to wonder if I should tackle Ulysses. I suspect that bafflement would await me, but I'm starting to feel guilty about not giving it a try.

#10
I thought that The Name of the Rose was interesting, but far from wonderful. I can't see what all of the hype was about. Maybe it loses something in translation? Love your Knight's Tale analogy. :-)

My worst recent read? The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (So shoot me.) I figured so many people couldn't be wrong, and I'd better read it. Borrowing a little from bluesalamanders, the story is lame, and the writing is poor.

Absolutely Wuthering Heights I deemed as one of the worst and most pointlessly depressing books I ever read. Very disappointing. I was also unimpressed by The Turn of the Screw.
The Da Vinci Code ranks right up there too, but as I hadn't expected much but sensationalism from it in the first place I suppose I wasn't too surprised. Still, it was worse than my low expectations.

Just thought of another The Broker by John Grisham. I only read half the book and put it back on the shelf. I wouldn't have read that much, but I kept hoping it would get better.

#20
I haven't tried that one, but I know what you mean. I've come to like the movies better than the books, and that's rare for me.

Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday

>6 jhowell: & >12 fyrefly98:

Thank you, thank you, thank you jhowell and fyrefly98 ... I have to add my vote to both of yours that The Great Gatsby is one of the most overrated books of all time. In fact, I think F. Scott Fitzgerald is probably one of the most overrated authors period.

I didn't not enjoy (excuse the double negative) The Great Gatsby and I stayed interested right through to the end. But I just couldn't work out why it is considered the quintessential "Great American Novel"! Sheesh, only two weeks ago Time magazine just rated it the seventh greatest book of ALL TIME for crying out loud.

IMO, it is a highly forgettable and superficial read. The only thing I can still remember about this novel is the imagery right at the end where the task of rowing a boat upstream is presented as an analogy for the futility of life: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." (I just looked that up). Although that may rank as one of the better last lines of any novel, it is still not profound enough to drag the other 155 pages or so of mediocre prose up into the ranks of Tolstoy, Flaubert, Nabokov, Twain, Shakespeare and Chekhov. Give me a friggin' break!

Being so non-plussed by my experience with The Great Gatsby I subsequently did some research into why this novel was considered to be such a big deal. What I discovered is that it wasn't - this novel was not at all popular upon its initial publication, and it only sold The Great Gatsby was pretty much forgotten after it was initially published, and it was not until it was republished in 1953 that it started to find a wider readership; a readership that has continually grown into the status it now enjoys today. Why, I still have no idea!

During his actual lifetime it was primarily his short stories and novellas that gained Fitzgerald his primary income and literary notoriety. So my next attempt at reading Fitzgerald was his short story The Diamond as Big as the Ritz. This was rated to be one of the best of his 160 or so published short stories; Penguin even named its Popular Classics collection of FSF short stories after it. This was intended to be the first of over forty stories in my edition of his collected short stories that I was looking forward to read, but I found it to be so abysmally adolescent that I tossed aside the whole collection and have (so far) never gone back to read any of them.

I recently made a third attempt at engaging with FSF and last summer started reading his Tender is the Night - this was his first full length novel and it had earned FSF his immediate critical and financial success. I abandoned it after about a hundred pages, not so much because I totally hated it - because I didn't hate it - but more because all the time I was reading it I found myself constantly thinking about all the other books on my shelves that I could have been reading instead. Which told me that I was not sufficiently engaged with it - and life is too short to waste one's time reading books that are anything less than enthralling.

So for right now, two thumbs down for F. Scott Fitzgerald from me, and it may now be quite some time before I return back to him again. I also feel that James Joyce is grossly overrated but this post is already too long to go into that here.

Finally, another so-called quintessential American novel that I have made repeated attempts to complete but find chronically mediocre is Jack Kerouac's On the Road. A total waste of time as far as I'm concerned, and once again I find myself baffled why this adolescent drivel is held in such high literary esteem.

I can't say it often enough: The Old Curiosity Shop is proving a depressing disappointment. I adore Dickens and have read all his 'major' novels, some of them many times. I was 'saving' TOCS as a delicious treat to 'top off' my Dickens experience. I have spent a miserable week reading about Little Nell and the various creeps who are out to destroy her in nefarious and perverted ways. I am struggling to find anything nice to say about it at all and have had a permanent headache since I started reading. Last night's fifty pages was less horrid than usual, but I am sorely disappointed and keep eyeing my inviting TBR pile in the wee small hours of gloom.

Hera, are we going to have to do an intervention to get you to back away from horrid books?

:)

It's time someone stands up for F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby is a great novel, it is beautifully written and densely layered. Each re-reading reveals something different. That's why it is constantly voted near the top of best books. Tender is the Night, although flawed, is also a great novel - a pitiless look at the death of his own marriage.
Rule 42 - I'm not sure what your argument is regarding sales. There are any number of books that are now lauded that failed to find an audience when first published. Chekhov's plays were initially met with bafflement and disdain but now they are drama classics. Shakespeare would have been forgotten if it wasn't for folio editions that came out a century after his death.
I'm not going to argue on behalf of The Diamond as Big as the Ritz because I agree that the plot is adolescent. And I completely agree regarding On the Road. It's main claim to fame seems to be that it was written in such a short time - unfortunately, it reads like that also.

The Name of the Rose is a book that improves on re-reading, it is hard to take everything in the first time.

#21 - I have the same attitude to Grisham, the movies are better.

#25 - No, Morphidae! It's such a weird fluke that last week I had a depressing reading week. The only way to make it any worse would have been if I decided to re-read Tess, Jude and Grapes of Wrath at the same time.

That'll teach me to veer away from Greek drama, P G Wodehouse and timeless poetry into the realms of current fiction without doing my research first!

*hides prescription drugs. ;)

#24 Hera,

Don't despair. According to Oscar Wilde you have a good laugh coming if you keep reading TOCS.

#26 Jargoneer,
I did stand up . . . well, maybe sit up ... for FSF. I just can't buy TGG as the "best ever." I liked Tender is the Night, too. Maybe I just can't see them as being as timeless and universal as I'd expect the best novel to be. I may have missed something.

About Grisham, I'd disagree with myself in the case of A Time to Kill. :-) I liked that novel better.

Hera - I've yet to read TOCS, I am a Dicken's fan too, in infrequent intervals, but my daughter read it. She said it was most disappointing. The title brought up all sorts of great possibilities, but in the end it was just about one of those too good to be true children.

A big disappointment for me wasCatcher in the Rye. It was one of the banned books when I was in school, and then I watched 'Conspiracy Theory', so I was set to read a great book. Ugh. I felt as if I was stuck in the adolescent mind of a foul-speaking boy who didn't think very deeply. It had nothing exciting or even titillating for me. If you took out the foul language I don't think there would be any controversy, because there isn't anything else there. Boring.

I loved The Catcher in the Rye, it's one of my favorite books. I did read it for the first time in early high school; I wonder if that makes a difference in how one takes the novel.

Big disappointments are almost always recent American fiction including: History of Love, Memory Keeper's Daughter, Tender Bar, Truth and Beauty: A Friendship, and Music for Torching.

As far as older books that I've read for the first time and found utterly disappointing: Streetcar Named Desire and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are right up there. As is Handmaid's Tale.

>26 Jargoneer:

Hi jargoneer,

First let me emphasize that we completely agree on the Jack Kerouac and the FSF short story. The former is poorly written, adolescent in its outlook, and the subject matter is simply, to me at least, as boring as hell. I would never bother cataloguing this book on LT for the simple reason that I would not be able to give it the zero stars it truly deserves!

The complaint I have with the FSF short story is only that it's adolescent and materialistic in its values. It's not a particular brilliant piece of writing either - but it's not badly written like the Kerouac. My problem with it was mostly that this short story is frequently touted as FSF's best one - the consequence of that possible hyperbole being that I am currently no longer motivated to go back and read any of his other short stories.

WRT The Great Gatsby, I personally felt it was only an OK read (about 2-3 stars) - and IMHO that is just NOT good enough for it to be rated as the "Great American Novel"; and it is certainly NOT the "Seventh Greatest Book of All Time"! Calling it the "Great American Novel" is tantamount to an ignominious slap in the face to much, much finer twentieth century American novelists such as Vonnegut, Steinbeck, Roth, Vidal, Irving and Bellow - to name just a few.

It is my belief that FSF wrote a very simplistic novel that others have subsequently come along and read far too much into. That, BTW, was the thrust of my argument WRT to my pointing out the delayed exhortations of this novel regarding popularity and sales. I was NOT trying to claim that the only measure of great literature was contemporaneous financial success and/or immediate mass appeal. Based on that criterion, J. K. Rowlings and Dan Brown would presumably both be greater authors than Leo Tolstoy, Gustav Flaubert et al! (rolls eyes).

One could argue that it is a mark of truly great literature that it be written in such a manner that it can indeed be interpreted in many diversely different ways by each individual reader - i.e., that it just cries out to be over-analyzed and over-interpreted by later generations - and based on that criterion, The Great Gatsby duly deserves every bit of its current exalted status. However, I don't buy such nihilistic arguments. Using that criterion, a blank piece of paper would represent the greatest novel ever written!

You claim that the book "is beautifully written" - well, I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder and we will just have to agree to disagree on that point. You also claim the book is: "densely layered. Each re-reading reveals something different." I would also dispute that point but it would require some in-depth discussion of the existence (versus non-existence) of these "perceived layers" that is probably way OT and far too heavy for this thread. If you want to start a separate thread in order to discuss all the deeper layers of meaning hidden in the The Great Gatsby I would be quite happy to do my best to debunk all your arguments there.

Finally, I'm a big Eco fan so I also agree with you that The Name of the Rose is indeed a book - unlike The Great Gatsby - that reveals more with further re-readings.

>24 Hera:

I have to laugh, Hera, because one of the books that I put Tender is the Night aside in order to read is The Old Curiosity Shop. I have to agree with you that it is a very big disappointment (after reading other Dickens novels) and I have now also cycled this book to my back burner (you will have to read my profile to understand what I mean by that).

To be honest, I didn't find the novel particularly depressing; but then again, I haven't yet reached the part where Little Nell dies. (I probably should say here that, IMHO, it is not a smart idea to create an almost perfect, angelic heroine - someone who's almost too good to be true - and then kill her off! But then again, what do I know? I'm the louse that hates the "Great American Novel"!)

My problem with this novel is mostly with its "lack of continuity". It reminds me of any one of those cheesy sci-fi B-movies from the fifties where you can see the strings controlling the Martian monster; or the hero hastily throws some clothes into a case and rushes out of the bedroom in his shirt sleeves with bits of clothing dangling out of the half-fastened black suitcase, and then in the next scene you see him walking calmly downstairs wearing a jacket and a hat, and a light-colored grip that is neatly fastened!

Dickens starts this novel with an unnamed person narrating the first three chapters in the first person voice. Then, without any explanation why, he suddenly shifts over to an omniscient third person voice narrative style (in which most tales are usually told) for the rest of the novel. What I'm assuming happened is that he commenced writing this story as a serial in his newly-started weekly magazine Master Humphrey's Clock, expecting it to run for only a few weeks or so.

Many of his subscribers then presumably wrote to Dickens telling him how much they enjoyed the character Little Nell (and possibly also the shop - I have to admit that it has that same kind of irresistible lure for me as used book and antique stores do!) with the result that Dickens then decided to revise the intended scope of this enterprise; and thus the first person voice narrative (which was sustainable only for a short story) now had to go.

IMO, calling this novel The Old Curiosity Shop is about the equivalent of calling his Oliver Twist novel 'The Workhouse' instead. Because about as much of the action actually occurs in the shop in this novel as occurs in the workhouse at the beginning of OT. The main characters (Little Nell and her crazy grandfather) appear to spend most of the book wandering around the villages of the Midlands while everyone else, in pursuit of their own individual nefarious agendas, is trying to find them, and I don't believe the shop is featured very much again after the first 100 pages or so (about 20% of the way through the novel) until the very end. For me, that's the second clue that Dickens decided early on in this story to make it a serialized full-length novel instead of just the serialized short story (with the action focused almost exclusively in the shop) that he originally intended.

SPOILER ALERT: I don't know if you've finished reading TOCS, Hera, but if you haven't, you might want to avoid reading this next bit. And I assume this is what myshelves is alluding to with his Oscar Wilde reference. :)

Even though I have only read just over a third of the book I'm afraid I have to plead guilty in this instance of looking ahead to the ending. (Believe me, I don't normally do this.) It appears that the mysterious 'single gentleman' that has been trying to trace Nell and her grandfather (along with all the other folk) is, in truth, her grandfather's younger brother. And he's also Master Humphrey himself - the unnamed narrator of the first three chapters. Yet the narrator that meets Nell in the opening chapter never once mentions that he has a close family relationship to either Nell or her grandfather (his own brother) in those chapters.

That, for me, is the nineteenth century literary equivalent of the visible strings controlling the monster in the cheesy sci-fi movie! Come on Chuck, you can do better than that! :( Because I now know how contrived the ending is to this novel I don't know if I'll now be returning to it again ... I'll think I'll devote my Dickensian curiosity to David Copperfield instead.

>27 Hera:

"That'll teach me to veer away from Greek drama ... "

If you like Greek drama, Hera, then you'll probably really love The Great Gatsby. Tell me if this plot doesn't remind you just a little bit of that Greek tragedy they call 'The Great Oedipus Rex' ...

The philandering wife Daisy accidentally runs into and kills her husband Tom's lover (Myrtle) while driving with his cuckold (Gatsby) as she runs out to meet the car thinking it was her lover Tom (Daisy's husband) returning. Angered by Myrtle's death her widowed husband then goes after Tom (a natural suspect since he was balling his dead wife) in order to avenge it. But by confronting Tom before killing him, he gives Tom the chance to explain that she was really killed by Gatsby's car and not him. So the widowed husband next tracks the damaged vehicle to Gatsby's mansion where, without giving Gatsby a similar chance to explain, he shoots him (because he assumes that it must have been Gatsby, not Daisy, that was driving the car that killed Myrtle) before then turning the gun on himself.

Believe me, this story line - that would make the screen-writers of the television sitcom 'Soap' proud - doesn't sound any better when FSF drags it out to 160 pages than it does here!

" ... into the realms of current fiction ... "

I've got news for you, Hera, this is now the 21st century and TOCS is set in the 19th century. What kind of prescription drugs are those and where can I get me some of those babies?

Thanks, Rule42. You said it so much better than I could. I am genuinely non-plussed at how much I hate this novel. I literally feel sick at the thought of picking it up. I haven't had this strong an aversion since Midnight's Children. I will go against one of my sacred principles - not skipping to the end before I've read it properly.

In this case, I'd rather watch The Perils of Penelope Pitstop with the dastardly Hooded Claw than suffer the horror of Quilp and the ludicrously angelic Nell. Is it wrong that I wish something would happen to her, just so it's all over at last?

Now, David Copperfield is one of my all-time favourite books, I re-read it very recently and really enjoyed it. Much as I love Dickens, he's hopeless at fully-rounded women characters. His grotesques are what I enjoy, but TOCS is one step beyond.

Don't even get me started on the paedophilia subplot. Far too disturbing. :(

Rule 42 - you are not that far away with linking The Great Gatsby with a Greek text. The original title was going to be Trimalchio, a reference to a character from The Satyricon by Petronius.
Of course, the fact that FSF has included references to classical works in the novel would go against your theory that it is a simplistic novel that others have read complexity into.:-D
But I don't think either of us will convince the other that they are right.
I'm not convinced it is the great American novel either but I think it is a great novel. But then I'm not sure the list of great American writers you list is a list of great American writers - Vonnegut has written one great novel, as has Irving, Vidal is a better essayist than a novelist. I'll give you Bellow and Roth, who, if there is any justice, will win the next Nobel Prize.

Re Dickens - I was listening to John Mullan on a podcast talking about How Novels Work, and one of the topics that he was discussing was the structure of 19th century novels. Until the late 19th century they were actually written to be read aloud, and that they make more sense in that manner. Dickens was obviously aware as this fact as he toured widely giving dramatic (i.e., not writer in bookshop reading from the page)readings from his work.
Dickens liked the public to get involved in his work and it is known that he would change the direction of a novel following reader reaction. The death of Little Nell was one of the media events of the time, not unlike 'who shot J.R.?'.

The problem with Little Nell is not just a problem Dickens faced, it is an issue that many writers have failed at - how do you create a completely good character and make them interestiing?

Hera, who wouldn't want to watch 'The Perils of Penelope Pitstop" - she had the anthill mob to look after her. Perhaps Dickens should have created a similar gang to look after Nell, it would have made the book more interesting. (For the record, the anthill mob are Clyde, Dum Dum, Pockets, Snoozy, Softy, Yak Yak, and Zippy)

'The problem with Little Nell is not just a problem Dickens faced, it is an issue that many writers have failed at - how do you create a completely good character and make them interestiing?'

How bizarre: that was the topic of my dissertation (the 'Good' in Iris Murdoch). I like the way her good characters resemble Dostoevsky's Myshkin, The Good Apprentice was my favourite on that theme. Luckily for me, my lecturer was Peter Conradi, who wrote that recent biography of Murdoch. He was the best teacher I ever had, incidentally and a thoroughly decent human being.

>22 AsYouKnow_Bob:

"Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday"

>33 Hera:

"Is it wrong that I wish something would happen to her, just so it's all over at last?"

I have no opinion whatsoever WRT AsYouKnow_Bob's nomination above, but maybe this GKC quote about TOCS will go a long way to totally vindicate him in AYKB's eyes for whatever travesty he committed with TMWWT (gee, I hope that wasn't too many acronyms!):

"It is not the death of Little Nell, but the life of Little Nell, that I object to."

Until I actually read TOCS I could never have appreciated the true wit and profundity of that remark. So now I don't feel that all the time that I've spent on TOCs up to this point was totally wasted.

Just to let you know, Hera, that you are not the only person that feels the way you do about Little Nell. :)

I have to say that I just finished Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris yesterday and throughly disappointed. I was very excited about the prospect of finding how Hannibal became the deviant that he was in his older years, and quite honestly expected an enjoyable read. This book was quite clearly written as a money-maker only, and should be renamed Hannibal Sinking. It is a very far strectch for the rationales that made him kill in his youth would be the same ones that make him a deviant when he is older.

Total an utter rubbish and a major waste of time. (Afterwards, I checked out the reviews on the movie only to find it sounds worse than the book!)

I like Larry McMurtry's non-Westerns an awful lot, but Loop Group was a real dud. Not only did it seem to have been half-heartedly slapped together, but it could've used a lot of reworking. (I'm a copy editor, and I felt like marking it up and mailing it back to the publisher.) For instance, the characters rarely "said" something; instead, they "pointed out" something or "commented." It made a so-so story truly aggravating to behold.

Memoirs of a Geisha is one of my all-time favorite books, but it has the most abrupt ending. I wonder if either the author got sick of writing it, or the manuscript came due to the publisher before he was really done writing it.

In the Company of the Courtesan was a huge disappointment for me. I moderately enjoyed Dunant's earlier novel, The Birth of Venus, and heard Courtesan was better. It just got so boring and I had to force myself to finish!

I read Dickens' Great Expectations in ninth grade and didn't like it. I read it again in college and thoroughly enjoyed it. I read it again recently with much anticipation and fond college memories. When I finished it, I realized I didn't like it much at all. I guess that's just an example of how a book can strike us differently in different seasons of life.

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien for me. I tried to get into it before the movies started coming out and on the suggestion of a friend who was reading these three books every two years or so. I had to try twice before I could get past the place where they leave their county and encounter the black horses. I ploughed through to the end but did not care very much. I think the movies did a fantastic job.

There are very few books that I dislike but I have to add Moby Dick to this list. I had to force myself to finish that book and I still don't understand how it became as popular as it did. Saying that, I did also tell myself that later in life, I may try it again and see if it grows on me or whether I can appreciate it more. Not sure it will happen though.

#45 That is a book I had to put down to try later. My daughter loved it though, so I really do intend to try it again. I have enjoyed other works of Herman Melville, such as White Jacket.

#45

I feel the same way than you about Moby Dick, but there is one scene I found hilarious (although the intention of the author was _not_ to be funny):
After the author has raved on and on for a very long time about how the whale is the greatest and most terrible animal on earth, he winds up saying something like how whales are indeed so frightening that they are probably the inspiration for the legend of dragons. So that actually it was not a dragon that St George killed, but a whale. And that this is perfectly plausible if the whale was grounded on the beach, and St George was not riding a horse, but a _walrus_.

Seriously, I wonder what Melville was thinking?

LOL yep that scene was rather out there (understatement)

White Jacket? Hmmm. Maybe I should try that one sometime. I try to read plenty of stuff by authors so as to avoid being deterred by one bad experience. The exception being Bill Bryson. I just finished his Notes from a small island and I just found it pretty offensive. I have a pretty low tolerance for people, authors or not, who would resort to name calling or mocking a disease as devastating as parkinsons, showing no respect for the elderly and just raging at people the way he did throughout the book. I don't know what he was aiming for with that book, but he missed.

It really is a pity. I rarely dislike books and wanted so desperately to like that one. On a plus note it did remind me a lot of my homeland and I had a few fond memories raised by it.

Okay, I'm really embarrassed to add this to all the literary greats in this topic, but I was so very disappointed by Wicked! by my beloved Jilly Cooper. She writes bonkbusters (lots of sex and glam lifestyles) but I've always really loved her characters and settings and had lots of good laughs.

But this last one was set in the world of schools (rather than, say, polo fields or TV production) and there was some creepy underage sex going on, between both students and students and teachers and students, both consensual and non. And just when the main character's story wrapped up, the book kept going on and on. It could've used a huge edit and someone should've told her not to try and translate her usually successful formula over to teenagers and creepy pedophiles.

The most recent dissappointing book for me was Narcissus in Chains Laurell K. Hamiltons.

I knew going into it that alot of people had problems with the book but I had no idea that the series would have such a drastic change in the quality of writing/editing/plot/everything. Especially considering what an excellent read Obsidian Butterfly was.

I also agree with everyone who was dissappointed with Wuthering Heights there was definitly not enough time spent on Heathcliff and Catherine and frankly the narrator is one of the most irritating I've ever read.

Danielle

A recent disappointment for me - Danger`s Child by Jack Trevor Story.

I`ve read and enjoyed a few of his - The Trouble with Harry, The Season of the Skylark, Murder in the Sun, A Company of Bandits, Nine O`Clock Shadow and a couple of short stories.

For no sensible reason I know of I carried on reading this even when it was obvious it wasn`t going to get any better. That`s nobody`s fault but my own, but that won`t stop me blaming the author. I would hunt him down and kill him if he wasn`t already dead.

I have posted reviews of Danger`s Child, Nine O`Clock Shadow and Murder in the Sun if anyone`s interested.

Not too long ago, I read Dragonhaven, Robin McKinley's new book. Possibly the biggest book-related disappointment of my life. She's my favorite author and I hated the book. I wrote a big long review explaining exactly why, if you're interested.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Garcia-Marquez, was on of the books for an English class at college (Literature of the Fantastic). I just couldn't get in to this book. I disliked most of the characters and really felt that it drug on forever. Maybe we over-analyzed it and spoiled the fun... .

To Reign in Hell by Steven Brust, a book-group read about 20 years ago. I got so frustrated with this one that I hurled it across the room! I've tried to read twice since then and I just can't get into it.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I loved it at first, mostly because of the main character. But as the book went on, it got harder to follow, and the writing style started grating on me. I ended up not being able to finish it.