What Popular Book/Series Can You Not Stand?

I have read the first Hunger Games novel and at least started the English translation of Battle Royale and they have different tone, different story structure and different themes. The Hunger Games has a strongly featured noble protagonist and has to do with the struggle of the protagonist to resist the government and you pretty much know she will make it to the end of the book. (but how?) Battle Royale has a more cynical tone, theme of survival, ensemble cast and the selling point of you don't know who'll live to the end. (some nice person spoiled me on the end of the latter book, though, so I didn't know.)

don't mistake stories for plots! works can have similar plots but different stories.

 

Outlander. There are many book series I wasn't able to get into or finish, but the first book in THIS series went straight into the bin when I was only about 3/4 of the way through. So many things I disliked about it, it's hard to know where to start. I've heard they did a reasonable job with the TV series, but I've only seen clips ...and they didn't spur me to watch it.

 

Still a rip-off, no matter how it's dressed.

 

I understand all of those points, but it still rings false for me. The fact she is female has nothing to do with why I don't like the ending. I'd say the same if a male character did the same thing.

 

Literally anything written by Sarah J Maas. I absolutely hate her books. She has decent ideas, but absolutely no idea how to competently write any of them. And Calaena is literally every bad "strong independent woman" trope bundled into a single godawful character.

 

I didn't like the Golden Compass series. It just never hooked me the way Harry Potter did. Maybe because it plunges you into a completely unfamiliar fantasy world with no connection to the everyday world, unlike HP where he grows up in the normal world but gradually gets hints that he belongs to a different world, and then gets introduced to it by Hagrid. This means the reader gets eased into the world of magic as well.

 

I used to like trolling people over Harry Potter being a bad series. It is, and that was fun to do. I'd get comments like I 'wasn't the target audience' even though I was born in 1990, and was as old was Harry was. I even wore glasses, just to make him extra relatable. Harry Potter is just a mediocre series. Fun to hate, not the worst thing ever but it's still pretty bad.

Someone said Kingkiller on this thread. I agree. What a pile of self-agrandising rubbish that series is. Kvothe is just a hair's breath away from riding around on a moterbike with ACDC, punching God before jumping on stage with Jimmy Hendrix to wow the audience with his lute skills while also casually flicking through a copy of A Brief History of Time or something. Or at least, that's who Pat Ruthfus wants him to be, to me he always came across as the guy in uni seminars who would always try to correct the lecturers.

Also, as much as friends have tried to change my mind, I really don't like Brent Weeks' writing. Shame, he seems like a lovely guy.

 

I was a proud member of the HP hatedom back in the day. In my defense, at the time it felt like you couldn't have a discussion about fantasy books - or indeed very nearly anything else - without someone making a reference to Harry Potter. A certain amount of hype aversion was, I feel, understandable.

Ohhhhhh yeah. I actually like the books (sort of - the first a lot more than the second, to tell you the truth), but Kvothe is undeniably an ass. People have told me that that's intentional and that he's meant to be an unreliable narrator and not entirely likable, but... I don't see how you can know that from reading the text as written? Even the framing device doesn't do anything to suggest that Kvothe is a self-important jackass - if anything, it just further drills home how he's wonderful and brilliant and right about everything and shame on anyone who says otherwise.

 

Celine was a horrible person whose book Journey to the End of Night, while having some bleakly funny moments, is generally pretty horrible too. But some people say it's the greatest thing ever written in French. I hope not.

 

Think that's bad? World of Time puts those tropes into every female character. They're all identical cardboard cutouts.

 

Yeah, 100%. This shouldn't turn into a debate about Rowling's politics. This isn't the time, or the place.

On purely literary grounds, Potter is written badly. Rowling's over-reliance on cliches and adverbs to take just two. Not necessarily deal-breaking flaws, it's not like The Eye of Argon or something and lord knows there are worse written books, but Potter just isn't some literary masterpiece. I'll even admit the first two books, and the first book especially, has some decent characterisation, but other than that ... it's just so boring. And very clumsy on literary grounds.

Edit to show what I mean: Not a quote from the text, but you'll often see in Potter things like:

'Oh, Harry, back again I see,' Malfoy exclaimed sarcastically.

 

But that's the thing isn't it - it's not necessarily the best technically executed novels (or films or operating systems) that are the most popular. An engaging plot and accessibility are just as important.

I had a discussion elsewhere about simplicity in writing, and Asimov came up. He's not perhaps what you'd call a writer of literary fiction - certainly no Frank Herbert, but his writing is easy to read and the action is clear and straightforwards.

 

Personally, I don't like the idea of the 'wrong audience', or the argument you'll see that they are for children or young adults - which you'll sometimes see. Sales aren't a mark of quality either. I do think good books can be popular, like Nineteen Eighty-Four is (I think) a good book that is both popular and has literary merit. The Woman in Black, too, for something a bit more recent. Bad books are also popular, yeah.

I don't hate Potter. I used to because it was funny - and I was an inconsiderate jackass when I was 19/20. My niece loves them and I'm glad. But It's worth saying that as a series of books it's not all that great. I think people only saw it as special because of good advertising and word of mouth. That was my experience, I was the target audience and loved it when I was 9. Read them again as an adult, and just found them sort of bland.

I do get where you are coming from though, and I probably do sympathize. There's something they are doing right to make a living from this writing thing.

Edit: because I somehow missed what I wanted to say. Sorry @big soft moose

Absolutely!

 

Rowling and Meyer write competently, nothing more than that. There is nothing stellar about the writing, nothing that I would say rises to the level of 'artistic.' Both of them profited from their ability to tell a story in a way that connected with their target readers, such that the technical skill of the writing itself became unimportant. So long as events, emotions, and ideas were conveyed the prose was competent for its purpose and the readers didn't care whether either of them was James Joyce.

Looking at fiction that sells the best and makes the most money confirms my feeling that ability to engage the reader with events and invest them emotionally in the story (which I call "storytelling" as shorthand) is most important for commercial fiction, and the technical quality of prose is far, far less important.

 

Yeah, that's fair. Theoretically the best books can do both. I'm no fan of Dickens, personal taste, but he was both a great story teller and a fine example for writing - for his day.

 

Wayyyy back in high school I read the Hobbit, and loved it, so I took on the lord of the rings. It started getting tedious, I started scanning it to get to the end and in over forty years since, never got interested in another serial, with exception of the first three Dune books, and Harry Potter, and only actually read the first two Potter books and got the rest from the movies.

 

50 shades of grey.
I got 2 pages in and got rid.

Ive never seen anything published so poorly written.

 

Wheel of Time. I read the first one and it seemed like a straight up Tolkien knockoff.

 

The Shannara Chronicles and The Inheritance Cycle too - this is what happens when you borrow the bad elements of Tolkien (one-dimensional characters, basic good vs evil plot) with none of the good bits (revival of folklore and exceptional worldbuilding)

 

I only made it through a couple of the Shannara books, the second one I read (Elfstones?) being better than the first one (Sword). But overall it wasn't enough to keep me reading the series. I do find it interesting that it's a post-apocalyptic earth, however.

I couldn't get more than a chapter into Eragon. Just thought the writing was bad.

The two series seem to have staying power, though. Especially Shannara.