Why are you telling me all this?

[reddragdiva]

From katyha: What's the worst novel you've ever completely failed to finish?

We should exclude from this, I think, the famously awful. No-one seriously expects L. Ron Hubbard or Jeffrey Archer not to suck. To be truly awful, a work of art needs hope on the part of the reader.

My second prize winner: V. by Thomas Pynchon. Apparently it's l33t litritchoor. The writing and some of the scenes were okay, but I found myself underwhelmed and never went back.

All time prize winner: Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. It's a thousand pages of unmitigated plotless toss. I could put up with the toss if it was going somewhere, but I battled through to page two hundred and something still waiting for the story to start. Apparently it's even l33t3r litritchoor and the plotless, circular eternal now is the point. I remain comprehensively unconvinced.

I barely read fiction any more. My last serious burst of fiction reading was fifteen years ago, when I was living in Perth, reading all the J.G. Ballard and similar British new-wave SF and being keenly aware I was in Vermillion Sands. I'm not sure Burroughs counts as "fiction," even when he claims to be; it's all his stand-up routine. Spoken-word Burroughs is amazing.

Comments

[kixie.livejournal.com]

Ugh, Thomas Pynchon really gets my goat, sheep...my whole flock. He's so bloody overrated and so unworthy of most of the praise he gets.

[reddragdiva]

The writing and some of the scenes were pretty good — he can manage a sentence or paragraph just fine — but they didn't string together at all. It was when I asked "why are you telling me all this?" one time too many.

[mangosteen]

"Atlas Shrugged". I tried to read it while still in university. I really did. I wanted to know what all the Randroids at school were going on about. That's the thing about Ivy-League schools. You get people who really are convinced that they will become the ruling elite of the country, and in a few cases, they might actually be right. And I suppose that as long as you're convinced you're at the top of the heap, and that you'll never ever fall, due to your current top-of-the-heapness, Objectivism looks pretty good.

There's only so much self-important wankery I can stand, though.

[reddragdiva]

Yep.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I finished Dhalgren. I remember women turning into trees, holding our for arbitrary thursdays, shagging, the shift to journal form part way through and the characters figuring out that they were in an SF novel.

[siani-hedgehog.livejournal.com]

The Mists of Avalon. bought for me by a misguided friend. OMG. never has anything sucked so hard. i can't describe how much it sucked very enticingly, because there was no redeeming anything.

[reddragdiva]

I'm glad I didn't make it that far. If I'd reached the self-referential bit, I'd have been forced to track down Delany and make him pay for his crimes, even thirty years after the fact.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Personally I thoroughly enjoyed Mists of Avalon. It's certainly a more original take on the whole Arthurian mythos.

Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, on the other hand.... I'm surprised I persisted as long as I did. It doesn't so much crawl, as ooze imperceptibly towards some vague promise of plot.

[reddragdiva]

Ah, plot-teases. That's how to get away with multiple volumes.

[siani-hedgehog.livejournal.com]

see, i didn't mind some L. Ron Hubbard stuff (eccentric SF collecting relatives have it all). but it still sucked hard. i just didn't expect anything more. Mists of Avalon... well... i've read other Marion Zimmer Bradley (non Avalon) stuff which did not entirely suck. so i really wasn't expecting such an appalling heap of predicteable fantasy cliches lumped into one. ugh. you could read one page in ten and just fill in the blanks with fantasy standards...

Wheel of Time... i have a feeling i've read, having been to the website, but i cannot remember a damn thing about it. ringing endorsement, eh? :P

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

The thing I can't stand is Isaac Asimov. Lots of other people like his novels, but I don't, so they can keep them all. In my perception the plots are very clever, but they're acted out by innumerable different appearances of the same character. They all respond to each other in exactly the same cynical, slightly quizzical way, and the women are either still this same person as the men, but with breasts! or vacant Barbie dolls who all respond the same in a different set of false and predictable ways to a different set of things. This is compounded by the bit where he spends a page talking about each bit of technology we encounter, but two sentences describing the people. Maybe I haven't read enough of it and it gets better, but to be honest I couldn't read any more of it. It took me six months to read halfway through the first Foundation book because I kept forgetting who the characters were, and then I got really stuck because I ran out of different skin colours to associate the names with, which was the only way I was so far managing to keep track of the plot because there were bugger all other distinguishing features. I decided I'd either have to start again and keep a running dossier of the characters with names, who they were friends with, what their role in which organisation was and what they'd already done and to whom, or I could give up and do something that was actually fun, and I chose the latter.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

And please post your letter bombs in response to this comment to... :)

[reddragdiva]

There is one pretty good LRH book: Fear. It's any good because John W. Campbell really kicked his arse.

[reddragdiva]

His short stories are much easier to cope with, but yeah, the novels ...

[mr-e-cat.livejournal.com]

l33t litritchoor, it's sort of like the other war stories you get.
You know the stuff! A few blokes get together and try the one-upmanship game.

I've drunk so much piss I had to have my stomach pumped.
I once slept with a woman so ugly I chewed my arm off to get away.
I once read V and thought it was good

that sort of thing.

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

*cough*

I think you'll find he's Delany, not Delaney. ie, one of the Prod branch.

[reddragdiva]

"I've heard of Black Irish, but this is ridiculous."

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

I once met Robert Jordan. He was such a complete wanker that it cured me of any desire to ever open a book he had written ever.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

Completely agree. Very overrated, can't write characters that pass for people at all.

[seahorsemystic.livejournal.com]

I would have to say, A Once and Future King, by T. H. White. How many ways can you describe trees? I can honestly see several ways, but 100? Yes, that is an exageration, but alas, for me the entire book was too much like being read to, instead of being read. I still have it for the day I actually decide to try again.

[ruthi.livejournal.com]

The fiction I read most, recently, comes in comic-books (and often says Warren Ellis on the cover, but I am sure that is just a coincidence).

[vatine]

I would probably enjoyed it more, had the 300 pages of "Nothing happens" and "Nothing happens, again" been edited out. The bits I remember are (basically) "cool stuff, worth reading" (maybe half the book) and "useless wankery" (the remaining half). It is one of the few books I look at in the shelf and go "life is too short to re-read this".

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

Check out the Delaney sisters. No, not me and mine, nor a reference to Star Trek: Voyager, but a real set of real Delaneys (you can tell, cos they have the extra e) who lived in New York.

[vatine]

Asimov is definitely "cardboard people". Can't say I recall if he ever wrote aliens, so can't compare him to Forward on that front. Robert forward has one human character that gets re-used as protagonist, antagonist and serves as both genders. Surprisingly enough, his aliens tend to be interesting.

[reddragdiva]

We still have your copy of Global Frequency!