Reviews you wrote for books you didn't like.
We spend a lot of time reading books. Some of them, maybe a disproportionate number, we like. Others, not so much.
Disproportionate because, at least for me, it's difficult to get through 500 pages of something I dislike.
This is one of those occasions where you are encouraged to be constructive in your criticism. Hopefully, with some wit.
Leave a review for a book you didn't like and tell us what to read instead.
3 out of 5 stars A disappointment compared to expectations
I really wanted to like this book, but unfortunately, it fell flat for me. The ingredients of a great espionage/heist thriller are present and, the author is clearly talented. However, the book suffers from a few flaws:
The plot has no true conflict for the characters to overcome. Yes, they pull off a high-stakes heist through a shootout with cartel soldiers, but nothing goes wrong. They have a contingency plan for everything. The problem of moving over a billion dollars in cash half way around the world hits no snags. They easily buy gold bullion and launder the rest of the cash into banks with barely a pause. It all goes exactly as planned or is quickly mitigated through extensive planning. Nobody slips up, and nothing really unexpected happens, which makes stealing a billion dollars of cash seem like a low stakes operation in the end.
Every person the characters run into has some kind of encyclopedic knowledge of history, gear, conspiracy theories, etc., and wants to flaunt that knowledge immediately and at length. It ends up taking up a portion of most chapters and ultimately halting or entirely derailing the pacing and plot. I personally enjoy descriptions of the gear, weapons, and methods used but when relevant. Unfortunately, this turns into a recitation of items/manufacturers/people famous in those circles with no real relevance to the plot at hand.
There are other things in the content of the book that I personally disagree with, but I'm not going to knock the author for those. It reads a bit like a self-insert for the main character, but completely divorcing your own thoughts and views from the characters, especially in your first book, seems like a huge undertaking. Overall, I finished the book hoping it would improve but am disappointed with where it ended up. Hopefully the other books in the series are better than the first, but I'm not sure I can power through to find out.
Sorry, what was the book?
Do you recommend another in its place?
Oops, forgot that part. Door Number Three by Dan Kemp.
If you want a decent military thriller series, Tier One by Brian Andrews and Jeffery Wilson is a good place to start. Their spin off series Sons of Valor is also solid.
Three body problem. Oh cool let’s send signals into space. Oh we’ve found these humans and they are so smart. We have to change their laws of physics before they destroy us. Well now we get to destroy them. The end. Shallow premise, completely pessimistic and catastrophizing. And somehow boring. Do not recommend. 0/10
Funny, I enjoyed this series. Though, I admit, not at first. The prospect of an incoming alien species colonizing the Earth by frustrating any ability to continue our advance in technology, then figuring out a way to defeat them anyway was compelling.
Further, it helped me to think of it as my first novel told by a Chinese author. Cixin Liu's sci-fi voice is very different to what I am used to. All of the motivations and norms are different. So, I tried to keep an open mind.
Finally, I thought that the Dark Forest made the biggest difference in my understanding of the 2hole story. The reveal in that book stopped me in my tracks. It caught me as hard as the one in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. No spoilers.
War of the Spark: Ravnica by Greg Weisman
This book took everything that was decent about the Magic the Gathering universe and threw it directly into the trash. Poor writing, poor characters, lacks development.
The gross comments from Chandra about Gideon’s rippling muscles and sexiness were just completely not worth the read (and I actually love romance novels). The changes of making Chandra more straight than she actually is, does a complete disservice to the love story between her and Nissa. Very disrespectful to the characters and community from an otherwise decent author. Just no!
If you still want to read a Magic book, check out Children of the Nameless by Brandon Sanderson. It’s a far more compelling story about the spark of a new planeswalker.
My review of Abarat by Clive Barker from a few years ago:
I'm 27% of the way into this book and I give up. If Clive Barker's name wasn't on it, I never would have guessed this was him. It is baaaaad. Nothing like his other works.
The prose is . . . childish. I feel like I'm reading YA written by a particularly untalented teenager. Protagonist Candy Quackenbush is suuuper special, we're told. She has weird dreams, unlike most people, apparently. Her teachers and peers hate her for no discernable reason, in the most unrealistic way possible. I mean, I have actually had a teacher yell and call me weird in front of the whole class, so I can say with authority that the school scene was ridiculous.
I guess people like this for the world building? I only care about that in stories that are told well, with compelling characters and events that unfold with meaning. Like Imajica. Or Weaveworld. Or The Great and Secret Show. Even books like Sacrament and Galillee, which weren't my particular cup of tea, were well told and constructed, engaging enough to keep me reading. I just can't believe this dreck was written by the same guy.
I enjoyed Imajica, Great and Secret Show, etc, but have tried numerous times to read Weaveworld. I can't do it. It never grabs me.
The Haunting of Sunshine Gilr by Paige McKenzie:
Made it 3/4 of the way through before losing interest entirely. The Young Adult tropes are way too much. This girl is just SO SPECIAL y'all. She dresses in vintage clothes! She reads Jane Austin and likes photography! She's CLUMSY. She's definitely not the typical pretty girl because her hair is so thick (never thin, I've yet to meet a heroine with alopecia).
She shows empathy to a child ghost who was violently killed. Don't you get how special that is? No normie- I mean normal human would do that. She's Not Like Other Girls. She's the chosen one. But of course she doesn't want it. In spite of relishing her outsider status, she goes through this actual thought process:
"I'd rather not spend my life helping spirits and exorcising demons. I'd like to go to college, get a normal nine-to-five job, have health-insurance and a 401k."
My old review of Jeff Vandermeer's Authority:
This book was equal parts boring and frustrating. Annihilation set up an interesting mystery while letting us experience the creep factor of Area X. Authority took us out of Area X and never let us back in. It suffered from three major problems.
Teasing the mystery without giving us anything. If Area X is a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, Authority gave us maybe 2 or 3 piece to work on. And every time it brought up the mystery or made us think we were about to get an answer or even a new question--nothing. Just more "yep it sure is mysterious."
No action until the last few pages. So much boring inaction. Conversations that lead to nothing, the MC endlessly ruminating. There were two genuinely unsettling moments but the book needed far more of these.
The MC was awful. He's supposed to be a "fixer." He thinks of himself as understanding how people think and always being three moves ahead. Yet in Every. Single. Scene. He is baffled to find that the other person has out maneuvered him. It's like he thinks "I'm just going to put my hand in this nest of fire ants because if I'm not scared of them, they'll respect me. Ow my hand!" [Surprised Pikachu face.] I couldn't root for this moron.
Mr Martin skilfully manages to destroy all sense of intrigue in what the climax of the series might be about and who it might be between by calling his series ' A Song of Ice and Fire '. Perfect for those book fans who don't really want to be surprised or witness a multi-book arc unfold on its own terms.
In fact, these are books written for people who seemingly can only feel emotion when it is screamed through a megaphone painted in pink fluorescent stripes. Martin carefully assembles ideas of subtlety, empathy, letting the reader do the work and throws them all away with the satisfaction of a man who only has a hammer in his toolbox and therefore everything is a nail.
Martin develops plot points mostly by taking a disturbingly large amount of pages to highlight the sexual torture of several female characters who sometimes then end up falling in love with their torturer - nobody knows how to write women quite like a middle aged man after all.
His other main method of developing plot is to throw in thousands of characters who do 'good' things (like, not rape their partners/sisters/mothers I guess) and then kill them off. Forty years ago Martin would've been in his element as the lead script editor for shows like Dynasty or Dallas as he displays much the same level of talent and care for developing well rounded characters and plot points that make as much sense as Bobby Ewing emerging from a shower a year after he died.
It comes as no surprise that these books were optioned by Netflix, a company that encourages its showrunners to produce content that can be "on in the background" and that doesn't really require much more than a passing commitment from its audience. Just as this is a show you don't really have to pay much attention to, these are books that require no reader investment, just a lack of desire to enjoy reading.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
I had been hearing about Harry Potter since this book was published in 1997, but something about it put me off reading it. I think the fact it was marketed as a children's book, plus the gigantic paean campaign lionizing the author as a housewife who just created the greatest work of children's literature EVAR!!!!111oneoneoneeleventyone!, just set off my cynical marketeer alert, and when the further marketing of "it makes children want to read!" started I'd had my fill. Literally every snippet I'd heard from the book's text in reviews, online readings, etc. told me this was not the book for me.
Then I moved to China in 2001.
Doing something this extreme rewrites a lot of calculations. At the time there was a decided lack of reading material in English, so the vanishingly small expat community in the city I wound up in at first hoarded whatever written English they could find or bring or have sent to them and circulated the books so we could actually have something, ANYTHING, to read. That is how Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone wound up in my hands.
I swore to give it a fair shake. I would drop, as much as is humanly possible, my marketing-based aversion to the book and judge it on its own merits. And it turned out I didn't need the marketing-based aversion. There was plenty of aversion in the first 50 pages of this grotesquely verbose yet somehow thin novel.
First, the plot. Another "Chosen One" story. Another "despised outcast is secretly a badass" story. Harry can do no wrong, except for those times he does wrong so he can learn a quick lesson so that later in the story he does right. This is straight-up paint by numbers plotting. If you've ever read any cheap fantasy novel before you've read this story. Hell, go to the fantasy racks of any bookstore in the 90s, blindfold yourself, and shoot an arrow into the books and you'll get arrested for a great number of charges, likely, but you'll also certainly penetrate at least four novels that have exactly this plot, right down to the ludicrous "love saved you from the big baddie" ending.
THIS was the "innovative story" that captured not just children (who pretty much by definition have no taste because they've never had the chance to form it) but also adults!? THIS was the saviour of reading culture?! Frankly I'd rather have lived in an illiterate society ...
... than a society who thought this tripe was good.
And this is only the plot. The twee "British WHIMSY!" (yes, shouted, likely by someone who's got a garbage pail over his head and is otherwise dressed as a knight) was tiresome. The train to Hogwarts (and ... uh ... what's with the bloody names!?) is on platform 9¾. Get it? GET IT!? It's fractional because ha ha whimsy! The book is full of this kind of dreary nonsense. It tries to get passed off as whimsical fantasy but it wears out its welcome quickly. The sorting hat. The pictures. The house elves. The whole British boarding school vibe, with literally every screeching stereotype of a Bildungsroman torn from the pages of better stories, stripped of all subtlety, and thrown together into one gigantic mish-mash that is a tonal mess. And then on top of that you throw the Quidditch game, as the replacement for British boarding school field hockey or rugby or whatnot, a game whose rules make zero sense whatsoever.
So why did I say "tonal mess"? Well, let's look at some of the ... ah ... social assumptions. Hermione is bossy because a woman telling people what to do is being bossy. Others (specifically male others) telling people what to do are leaders. Or just assertive. And ... was I the only one skeeved out a bit by the servility of the house elves? Or the ... I won't be putting too fine a point on this ... stereotypical Jewishness of the gnomes? And let's not forget the dismissively arrogant term "Muggles" tossed around as an epithet all the time.
From beginning to end this book was painful for me to read and when the time came to swap around our libraries again I gladly passed it on so that I would never have to read that ever again.
So as for what to read instead?
Better Books
If you want a classic children's story that will be a dramatic eye-opening when read again later as an adult for nostalgia's sake, it's hard to beat Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince. What a child gets from this whimsical story is enormously different from what an adult gets reading it. I was positively obsessed by this book when I was a little girl. When I came back to it, just for fun, at the age of 25 or so ... ah ... yeah. Very different book. Despite the same words. If you want a modern children's story that doesn't have the forced whimsy, the incoherent sport at the core, and a plot that isn't a tired, recycled dead horse beaten to fine mist, there's Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights. There's no Chosen One plot armour. There's just a fiercely independent little girl who has to claw her way, using only grit and determination, through a universe that actively wants to crush her; a child navigating a deeply coherent, rigorously thought-out world filled with genuine stakes.
If you're an adult and want to read classic epic fantasy at an adult level, I'd recommend J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings for fine world-building and complex theme. (You'll find the plot very ordinary, but that's because most fantasy novels since him basically followed his tune well into the '90s before branching off finally.) If you want a different take on classic epic fantasy, writers like Ursula K. LeGuin did fantastic stuff, and the Earthsea novels are a fascinating example of epic fantasy that isn't Lord of the Rings and its imitators. (They're also nice in that the protagonists aren't all white and European in style.) For more modern takes on epic fantasy, there's N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy, a series that takes the ... ah ... problematical social structures of Hogwarts and Rowling's books and places them under a microscope where you can't squirm your way out of the implications. Here there's no Chosen One for whom all others serve as whimsical backdrop or Pure Evil™ conflict. They are instead complex people navigating their own way through a profoundly unjust world.
I wish I still had my high school paper on Catcher in the Rye. Still got an A despite all the points taken off for swearing because most of it was just shit talking Holden for being a whiny baby.
The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones by Clare Morell
The cloying moralizing didn't really become clear until chapter 10. I should've known back in chapter 2 that the strident, clutching-at-pearls, "won't anyone think of the children?" point of view was a tad hyperbolic.
She's right in one regard: the Internet is a casino in a strip club in a strip mall designed to keep you gaming for the next dopamine rush. Social media apps are the fentanyl to the heroin that is the Internet. Tiktok is carfentanyl. That doesn't mean we all must abstain from technology. That Purityrannical view is a different problem.
Instead, as she so briefly mentions, there is the original intent of creating a community of linked people, machines, and commerce: problem solving. People, because children are people too, can be trained to build new solutions. To be creators instead of consumers.
Were it not for the disposable, single use, capitalist version of morality she supports, she might see that the plethora of distractions and traps the current media environment offers is the obstacle — a characteristically American obstruction. Seeing beyond the bright lights, the flashy colours, and all the porn, there is an infinity of forms. The tech exit forecloses on that creative potential, relegating it to the same tech lords her preferred President serves.
This book is only moderately useful. Sure, I agree, delay smart phones and social media until your kids can smoke, drink, do drugs, and join the military. But that's a pamphlet that does the job of this book.
Go read Johnathan Haidt's "The Anxious Generation" instead.
Do you like adventure?
Do you like nostalgia, especially for the eighties?
Do you like a relatable quirky hero?
Do you like a happy ending where the world is changed for the better?
If you said no to all of those then boy have I got the book for you!
Ready Player One promises a fun filled adventure where you get to go with a quirky but kind young man as he relives the best of the 80s on a virtual quest to find treasure left by the creator of a digital game. A real metaverse made by someone who isn't a lizard person in a skin suit and actually gets why we still only count to three, no more no less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shalt be three.
Instead we get Wade Watts, a down on his luck teenager who thinks obsessing over the tiniest details in old databases and memorizing the most boring list of facts from the 80s is the best thing ever.
This isn't a fun filled nostalgia trip. This is Wade masturbating over the fact he knows more useless factoids than you and touching himself while thinking about being Zuckerberg. Think of that weird kid from your class, thats right, that kid who spent all their time sitting in the corner and mumbling to themself about how everyone else just doesn't get how cool their obsession is. That's Ernest Cline and his book Ready Player One.
And don't even get me started on the "romance" plot where he chooses the girl in spite of/because of her physical deformity. Ho boy.
Things to read instead?
I agree. It is the literary equivalent of Date Movie/Epic Movie.
It has nothing to offer but hundreds of "Remember this thing?!" references.
What’s funny is I 100% agree with both of you and I still enjoyed that book. I read it as a vacation book a few years back. I refer to it as a popcorn book; quick, easy to read, mostly forgettable once done. But when it cringes, it cringed so hard.
And Snow Crash was definitely better
For popcorn books I point more to like The Expanse series or something. Quick easy reads, nothing groundbreaking, but still relatively competently done.
I think part of my hatred for Ready Player One is just how many people raved about it as this new amazing book that was the pinnacle of modern sci-fi when a much better example already existed instead of just the vacation book you read it as.
Actually hold up. Why haven't we gotten a Snow Crash film yet? Dang it Hollywood
I have to disagree with The Expanse as a popcorn book. I’ve read all the books 2-3 times, all the novellas, all the graphic novels, played the Tell Tale game, waiting on the next game, I own the tv series, and have Detective Miller as my desktop background. It’s a universe that, if you really want to, you can get obsessed with it. That’s one of my all time favorite science fiction series, but I do agree they are fairly easy reads.
Yeah, RP1 was definitely not groundbreaking scifi at all, it was way too hyped up. It was alright and even when I recommend it to someone I think would like it, I always include caveats of the cringe and other weird stuff. Like, I know Watts is a younger guy but some parts are just 🤢 And don’t even get me started on RP2, just ugh! Bad bad bad!!
Snow Crash was far better and I’m glad I didn’t read it as a vacation book. I absorbed more of it reading it at home rather than while traveling. I remember way more of Snow Crash than I remember Ready Player One. We absolutely deserve a Snow Crash show!
I consider John Grisham books as vacation/popcorn books. Easy to digest, don't stick around, don't need deeper consideration, etc. Read it and leave it at the beach 🤓
Klara and the Sun. The reviews hyped it up, and it is by an award winning author, but I found it terribly boring. I like slow moving stuff usually, this just had nothing to it and became a slog to finish.
Notes online mentioned the author original wrote it as a story to tell his child... Well I guess a kid might like it, it even reads like a kid wrote it.