Destiny Road, by Larry Niven. It's a slow-moving story. The society and its power base is well crafted, but I just never felt much attachment to the main character. The power base depends, as is historically often the case, on control of a life-critical resource. The book could have been more interesting at half the length.
Shadows Fall by Simon Green. Admittedly most of Green's work are the literary equivalent of a Hersey's chocolate bar (not the really cheap, horrible stuff, but not the high end either), but it didn't offer any serious insights into the world he created and had some plot holes you could drive a truck through. Some of the vignettes included, however, were quite enjoyable.
To me, Catcher in the Rye. I don't know if it's because I read it when I was so young--maybe around 10, but I could understand it perfectly--that made me despise it so much at the time. The plot of such an angsty, who-gives-a-crap teenager is a great idea, but at the time I thought it was bad. Maybe I should go check it out again to read, and make another decision.
^ You might have thought you were understanding it perfectly, but if you were just 10 then, I can almost guarantee you weren't....you should definitely try rereading it...
^ I didn't get Catcher in the Rye either...it was really hard to connect with the main character. It wasn't terrible, or badly written--it just didn't make an impact on me at all. In books I've read more recently: John Twelve-Hawks' Traveler was readable, but unengaging and under-developed, on pretty much every level. I never felt empathy for anyone, and I wasn't wowed by his prose or the setting. If he'd slowed down and developed his world and his characters, it might have been a really good story.
Like datura said, it was really hard to connect with the main character. It also made no impact on me. At the time it just seemed to heap on the angst and fury, and that made me take a step back from it.
Brisingr It wasn't a terrible book, but It didn't seem to have any of the intensity of the previous two novels, and the ending was rather disappointing, I can't say there weren't parts I didn't enjoy or that it was a train wreck, it was just ehhh.
Anything by Nicholas Sparks. I decided to read him to see what all the fuss is about (having seen the movie The Notebook, I was wondering if his books were any good) so I read True Believer and The Lucky One, and I hated them. I HATED him as an author. The plot of True Believer isn't a bad one, but the way he went about it was awful. He said Jeremy was "a ladies' man" so I assumed he'd be some horrible big-city hotshot who at the end would learn something. Instead he predictably falls for some random small-town girl and instantly is cured. Ugh. I can get the same story--YET BETTER--watching the movie Cars.
