Harry Potter. Very shallow surface level magic where nothing made sense if you thought about it.
To add to this:
Hogwarts was well thought out and imaginative. The setting was practically a character in its own right.
But Harry Potter himself was unbelievably bland. He was nothing special, but was treated as if he were because of who he was related to or otherwise connected to.
Harry is bland because he’s the reader stand-in in the wonderful world of magic.
to be fair that is extremely English
Fully agree! The premise of a hidden magical society is really fun, but Rowling did a crap job of building a coherent world with what she had.
All GRR Martin. The writing is so dry I couldn’t get into it. Super word usage was just weird, like his insistence on “breaking the fast”, but most of it is still modern English, so this word choices stand out as sore thumbs.
After a while, it seemed to me that the white point of the books was to show how many plot twists the author could string one after the other. Still read the first four books, hoping it would get better.
Indeed! I read all of the GoT books, and they are just not good. There does not appear to be any logic to the world. The dude just keeps adding elements, never explaining how they fit in the world. Just cheap tricks and twists that are based on nothing.
I enjoy good fantasy, and magic is a part of that. But a good fantasy world usually only has a few sources of magic, and somehow they are connected to create a world that's coherent and follows its own rules. Bad books just keep randomly adding new incoherent elements whenever the author gets stuck and refuse to explain anything:
It all honestly reminds me of a book that was written and self-published by a friend of a friend. It was self-published because they couldn't find a publisher that was interested... And every two damn pages they added a new random type of magic. Martin is just better at dressing it up and selling his crap, but I think Martin and that friend of a friend have similar world building skills.
Less by Andrew Sean Greer. It disguised itself as an LGBT+ novel and in fact it started out like that. But it was an “American Idiot Abroad” story in truth. Dropped it after a couple of chapters.
Aw I really liked this one! I think it appeals to the idiot in all of us (that still needs and deserves love).
I liked it at the time but it was just very much forgettable. I still haven’t bothered with the sequel because I forgot what the first one was even about
Cryptonomicon. Neal Stephenson has written interesting, compelling books - Snow Crash is fun and breezy; Anathem is among my favorite novels - but Cryptonomicon just doesn't hold my attention. Lots of smart people love it, so I always have this nagging feeling that I'm the one in the wrong here.
Completely agree. I didn’t like Snow Crash either, but Anathem is also among my favorites ever.
Where the Crawdads Sing. The main mystery was predictable, the writing was nothing special and neither were the characters. After I read it I was kinda stumped why I had been seeing it everywhere.
There's a lot of demand for things that are unoffensive and easy to digest. I just watched Gran Turismo because the audience ratings on RottenTomatoes are so high. It's...terrible. Doesn't even qualify as being cheesy good. It's just so superficial and predictable, more like watching a TV commercial than a movie. But apparently there's a segment of the population who really love that vibe
Most of the romantacy recs on booktok are hugely overhyped. Like, yeah, 4th Wing was more readable than others, but it wasn't super addictive or anything.
I find recs in general hard because readers tend to over-rely on tropes making something good. But a good read needs a delicious trope and decent writing. I can't do without either
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Everyone seemed to hype it up as the best sci fi ever so it might just have been the hype that did it.
I thought it was a decent book but nothing really special. It just wasn't all that interesting to me. It didn't make me want to read the sequels.
Same. I don’t really know why, but the writing style did not do it for me. I couldn’t get invested in the story nor any of the characters.
I'm reading the Culture series by Ian Banks and I'm not sure if I want to continue. The first two books in the series just aren't doing it for me. I'm planning to read the third and if I don't like it I'm dropping the series!
I also have mixed feelings with Banks. I really like his idea of the Culture, but some of his books are really terrible. When I read them I enjoyed The Player of Games and Use of Weapons, but I disliked a lot Consider Phlebas and had to abandon Matter after a 20%...
I've only read consider Phlebas and The Player of Games and I haven't loved either.
The ending of The Player of Games left me really unsatisfied.
spoiler
Surprise! The library drone was actually a weapons drone and it swoops in at the last possible minute to save the day! Chapter 3 is even called something like "Deus ex Machina". Sure the player got the drone onto the fire planet using his gaming skills but the surprise "twist" just didn't do it for me.
Girl with Dragon Tattoo. Read it, put it down and went huh. Didn't grab me, didn't really like anyone in the book. At the time everyone was talking about how awesome it was and I was just like, really? This book?
Hyperion Cantos. The beginning was incredibly promising but then it all went to hell with the magic Mary Sue type girl that deflated any stakes to zero and one of the most insufferable baffoons for the main character. Ah yes and the romance between those two was an actual joke, one-dimensional, unjustified and kinda creepy. By the end of the series I was seriously pissed off at the author for squandering all of the potential.
Hitchhikers.
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