Most Disappointing Big Book Experience

[Anonymous No.7363252]

What is the most dissatisfying reading experience you've had with a long novel? You can take "long" to mean whatever you think qualifies.

Mine was The Royal Family by William T. Vollmann. Started out good, and I kept thinking he felt some obligation to bring it all together and make it all worthwhile. He did not.

I didn't really enjoy Underworld, but some people I respect think it's the greatest novel of the last 20 years.

[Anonymous No.7363440]

Have you read Europe Central? I haven't read any Vollman but I found that one in a used book store for like $2 recently so I'm gonna try that.

War & Peace is a slog. And while I like the book I think Ulysses probably needs a 2nd read from me to feel like the effort I put into it was worthwhile - there's so much work and relatively little payoff in terms of connections I made. Some chapters (especially Oxen of the Sun) were basically all work and no reward for me. But the stuff I got was pretty great and has stuck in my head for a while. So with all that in mind let's say War & Peace because I did not need a repetitive quarter-book-long essay about how Napoleon is powerless before the inexorable march of history.

[Anonymous No.7363961]

I haven't read Europe Central. It won the National book Award or something, but after The Royal Family and a disappointing short story collect (The Rainbow Stories?) I've sworn him off. I have You Bright and Risen Angels on the shelf if I ever have second thoughts, though.

I enjoyed Ulysses so very little that I can't imagine reading it again.

War & Peace is one of those books I really want to have read but I never care enough to actually pick up.

[Anonymous No.7364092]

>>7363252
Madame Bovary. Total shit, start-to-finish.

[Anonymous No.7364106]

I found Buddenbrooks really boring and unrewarding, to the point of verging on annoyance at times

There were a few good heartfelt and genuinely funny moments in it but that's pretty rough for an 800 page book. I kinda liked Mann's style though and generally know what the magic mountain is about so I might try reading that someday really far from now

I only finished it because I had to read it for class, and even then I regretted wasting my time on it

[Anonymous No.7364122]

>>7364092

I can no longer reliably differentiate Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina in my mind.

[Anonymous No.7364155]

>>7363252
What's the story with this picture? I couldn't find any info with google.

[Anonymous No.7364199]

>>7364155

Just happy-go-lucky Bill Vollmann! Have you seen the pictures of him in drag? Harrowing.

[Anonymous No.7364200]

>>7364155
William Vollman is crazy and likes guns, thats about it

[Anonymous No.7364360]

>>7364200

Evidently he kekolded a guy I used to quasi-know on a message board; he was fucking his wife in Sacramento while this guy was home with his step-daughter.

Ouch.

[Anonymous No.7364368]

>>7364200
Evidently he kekolded a guy I used to quasi-know on a message board; he was fucking his wife in Sacramento while this guy was home with his step-daughter.

Ouch.

[Anonymous No.7364374]

>>7363252
>Crime and Punishment

boring as sin, and in the end it was just christfaggery

[Anonymous No.7364375]

>>7364092

did you read it in french? did you discard the fact that novels have copied it relentlessly since it was published and it was actually a wildly original novel for its time?

Even if you didn't do the above, I still think you're probably just a sloppy reader

[Anonymous No.7364385]

>>7364092
flaubert is a fucking beast, so somehow i doubt it, maybe you're just a pleb

[Anonymous No.7364389]

>>7364374
*tips fedora*

[Anonymous No.7364398]

1Q84 was a good read but it had a ton of frustrating loose ends that were never adequately resolved

[Anonymous No.7364414]

>>7364374
>>7364389

[Anonymous No.7364416]

It's interesting you bring up Underworld. My local used shop has 3 of them in hardcover in great condition but I have always put off buying it.
What did you find lacking?

[Anonymous No.7364421]

Did anybody else feel that Gravity's Rainbow is really overhyped? I didn't get much out of it and am maybe missing whatever the point was, philosophically. The writing's good, the narrative structure's pretty interesting, but I basically got a lot of weird sex and bombs dropping and some Nazi comedy.

[Anonymous No.7364422]

>>7364421
Sounds fantastic.

[Anonymous No.7364424]

>>7364416
There's no plot to speak of. If you get off to really high quality prose and well done dialogue, you might like this book, but for me, I need things to be happening in my fiction, and nothing ever happens in Underworld. Just people having affairs and talking about this baseball that represents failure and some graffiti dude that might have AIDS and the state of waste management and also there's a nun who is a real bitch while young but chills out when she's older. That's basically all of Underworld, for the sake of your time, please don't read it.

[Anonymous No.7364430]

>>7364422
Fun, sure, but why kill the time if there's no point?

[Anonymous No.7364435]

>>7364430
>He says, posting on 4chan

[Anonymous No.7364442]

>>7364435
Valid point.

[Anonymous No.7364475]

Cider house rules

[Anonymous No.7364476]

>>7364375
I can respect its historical importance and also acknowledge that I'm not reading it in the original French. It was a terrible read for me in the English language in the year 2012.

[Anonymous No.7364490]

[Anonymous No.7364904]

>>7364424
I'm going to be honest this makes it sound amazing but I've already read 4 DeLillo books and I love him so I know what I'm getting into

[Anonymous No.7364913]

>>7364490
This.

[Anonymous No.7364917]

>>7364374
Wow.

I would have to say Les Miserable. I really didn't enjoy reading it very much, and felt as if I got almost nothing from it. After I finished I had to look up online why it's so well regarded.

[Anonymous No.7364925]

>>7364385

I didn't care too much for Sentimental Education, tbqh.

Didn't hate it, but it wasn't extraordinary either.

[Anonymous No.7364943]

>>7364913
>Liberals
>Harry Potter
sounds about right.

[Anonymous No.7364944]

>>7364943
Literally everyone on the list has shit taste save black people and arguably Hispanics.

[Anonymous No.7364946]

>>7364913

What is that from?

[Anonymous No.7364960]

>>7364946
Some poll
http://www.adweek.com/galleycat/the-bible-gone-with-the-wind-lead-americans-top-10-favorite-books-harris-interactive/86290

[Anonymous No.7364967]

Underworld. Wasn't bad but beyond the large concepts behind the novel, the thing itself wasn't very interesting. And it struck me as lacking balls in a way, you could tell delillo really wanted to make a sentimental nostalgia piece but he steeped himself too far in irony and self doubt to go all out on that aspect of it.

[Anonymous No.7364971]

>>7364398
1Q84 was an enormous money-grab and read like one. It was like Murakami was acutely aware of what he had become known for as an author, and just wanted to capitalize on the niche he'd made for himself.

[Anonymous No.7364973]

>>7364424
I agree that the dialog was great but I don't think the prose was exceptional. It was readable but it didn't seem varied enough to support such a wide novel of such differing tones.
Oh also all the characters were banal as fuck. Except maybe Lenny Bruce but does that even count?

[Anonymous No.7364975]

>>7364475
...was awesome. I'm super biased, though, since I read it as a kid and found it hilarious that someone had made it an AR testable book.

[Anonymous No.7364976]

>>7364971
>It was like Murakami was acutely aware of what he had become known for as an author, and just wanted to capitalize on the niche he'd made for himself
That's like his whole career from the 90s on

[Anonymous No.7364978]

Gravity's Rainbow. I threw the book at my wall in incomprehensible rage. Such a pointless waste of time.

[Anonymous No.7364979]

>>7364944
Blacks are just obsessed with Dick

[Anonymous No.7364980]

Atlas shrugged was pretty bad

[Anonymous No.7364982]

>>7364978
But it's fun!

[Anonymous No.7364983]

IJ or: >>7364980

[Anonymous No.7364988]

>>7364976
Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Kafka were so entertaining, though. The well scene in the former is still so vivid to me. I'm biased, because no matter how objectively bad everything he wrote after Norwegian Wood was, his books still awakened a sense of imagination and visualization in me that I thought I'd lost when toys stopped being fun.

[Anonymous No.7365003]

W-what do people have against underworld?

Tbh it was a lot better than infinite jest which is a not very good book

[Anonymous No.7365007]

>>7363252
Nightfilm Marisha Pessl
holy fuck worst shit ever.

[Anonymous No.7365075]

>>7365003

It was nowhere near as entertaining or enjoyable as IJ, IMO.

I resented it at the time because it came out around the same time as Mason & Dixon and got all the attention, when really M&D was the much better read and much more impressive achievement, in terms of the writing.

[Anonymous No.7365228]

>>7364979

[Anonymous No.7365320]

2666. Wasn't awful but pretty mediocre.

[Anonymous No.7365361]

>>7365320

Fuck, I have the Spanish version. Should I even bother? It will take me a long time to read.

[Anonymous No.7365464]

>>7364971
It was the first and only book of his I've read and going in I didn't really have any preconceived notions of him as an author. I enjoyed the characters and the fantastical elements of it all but it was super annoying that so much went completely unexplained or ignored by the end and there wasn't enough concrete information to really draw any conclusions on some important plot aspects.

[Anonymous No.7365565]

>>7365464
>>7364971

Personally, I'm not a fan of authors that like to close every little thread in a neat package. I'm ok if alot is left up to speculation, but I can see how it can be frustrating if that's the kind of story and resolution you want. He does do magical realism, and much of that genre is composed of fantastical events and characters that are meant to be portrayed as normal or without needing explanation becuz magic, bro.


tl; dr: It's magic I aint gotta explain shit

[Anonymous No.7365569]

>>7365361
It's worth it. I think that anon has head problems.

[Anonymous No.7365579]

>>7363252

The Night Land, by William H. Hogdson

Amazing setting and scenery
Plenty of opportunities to introduce one hell of a cosmic horror story

Author turns it into one regular love story, a.k.a "knight rescues fair maiden and travels back through a terrible land"

So much wasted potential

[Anonymous No.7365581]

Oblomov jumps to mind first. I found it one-dimensional, repetitious and dangerously unfunny for a comic novel.

[Anonymous No.7365596]

>>7365581

Quick-read the basics of the plot in Wikipedia. So the novel is about some lazy guy whose life is pointless? How can that be comedic?

[Anonymous No.7365629]

>>7365596
How can that not be comedic, even if unintended?

[Anonymous No.7365634]

>>7365596

Well, I kind of get your point. I suppose this novel would be like reading about a 19th century NEET

[Anonymous No.7365658]

>>7365565
I don't mind if there are things that are left open to reader interpretation at the end of a book, and I think in some scenarios going into too much detail would undermine those magical elements, but to cite one example there was a character in the book who gets written out as "irretrievably lost" over a phone call with no further explanation and she is never mentioned again and you'd just like to have some semblance of insight as to what happened to her.

[Anonymous No.7365901]

>>7365658
I felt the same way at first, but remember the cult was supposed to be really powerful and had connections and so on, so they probably just made her disappear. But yeah this could also be a product of Murakami's tendancy to just move on and leave things unexplained.

[Anonymous No.7365943]

>>7365569

How does it compare to The Savage Detectives? I loved that book.

[Anonymous No.7366206]

>>7365943
I've never read Savage Detectives but I fucking loved 2666 and blew through it in like 4 days.

[Anonymous No.7366219]

>>7364943
better than gone with the wind

[Anonymous No.7366227]

>>7363252
Underworld by DeLillo.

Not a bad book by any means, overall it was quite good. But the prologue was so insanely good, I promised myself I'd read the rest even if it was shit. Well, it wasn't shit, but nothing was as good as that prologue part.

There are great themes, characters, dialog. And some written sections are fantastic, nearly as good as the prologue, like the female artist living in NY, the Madison Avenue ad guy in his office, and the weapons testing stuff. The ending is awesome as well, great epilogue and final chapters. But for how long it is I feel it's a lot of filler bookended by some great work.

[Anonymous No.7366268]

>>7364092
This.

[Anonymous No.7366276]

>>7363252
I read twilight in high school when it first came out to impress some girl

[Anonymous No.7366837]

>>7363252
Not a novel, but "The smartest book in the world" by greg proops. I was going through a "Read all the comedians" phase, and it was just 100% snide pretentious bullshit.

[Anonymous No.7366846]

>>7363252
without a doubt "The Idiot" Dostoevsky

[Anonymous No.7367688]

>>7366206
I'm currently reading a collection of short stories which I'm not enjoying at all. Is he just the kind of writer that isn't good at short stories?

[Anonymous No.7367707]

hemingway in its entirety, the man was a hack.

also a la recherche du temps perdu. i'm certain it gets better but man...

[Anonymous No.7367813]

Atlas Shrugged

[Anonymous No.7368096]

>>7367707
not gonna say Hemingway was a hack, but For Whome the Bell Tolls failed to capture me
I can stand Hemingway, but only up to novella length
also, bleeping curse words in print is just sloppy

[Anonymous No.7368105]

>>7365361
It's great. IJ and mason Dixon for me

[Anonymous No.7368122]

>>7368096
you absolutely could not get past censors back then. It was rather clever how he did it in For Whom The Bell Tolls but still it's not his best work.

[Anonymous No.7368127]

>>7363252
Atlas shrugged. I don't even give a shit about Rand's philosophy, the writing itself was the worst thing I've ever read.

[Anonymous No.7368139]

>>7364980
>>7367813
>>7368127
Atlas Shrugged for me too. I even read it in my edgy libertarian teenager phase, still hated it.

[Anonymous No.7368141]

>>7368127

But she's very considerate of the reader. When she makes a point fully, so that nothing more needs to be said, she knows you might have missed it, so she makes the same point 50 or 60 more times. That is thoughtful.

[Anonymous No.7368147]

Cryptonomicon.

[Anonymous No.7368244]

>>7368127

THIS.

[Anonymous No.7368307]

>>7368096
I've found that with every longer work by Hemingway I tend to only enjoy parts of it. So I can bear the parts I don't like in a sort of neutral mood but good God are his good parts comfy as fuck.

[Anonymous No.7368316]

>>7368139
How is an objectively superior position an edgy phase? What are you now?

[Anonymous No.7368342]

Atlas Smug, definitely. Rand needed an editor so badly, who the fuck actually reads the entire thing and declares it their favorite when it easily could have been cut down to half its size and still held enough material to be something digestible. When someone claims it is their favorite, remember the eighty page monologue where literally everything was rehashed from previous dialogues.

[Anonymous No.7368357]

>>7368316

I don't think 'objectively' is the word you wanted there. Ditto 'superior.'

[Anonymous No.7368379]

>>7368139
Socialism was the babby conformist phase for me, where everyone pushed it without any deep thought. Swinging all the way right is contrarian adolescence. I don't see how you would think Libertarianism is an immature phase when it's clearly the most refined perspective.

[Anonymous No.7368627]

>>7363252
The Wheel of Time series.

Even after all these years, the mention of scarves makes me cringe.

I remember that by the 5th book I skipped through 50% of the content because I only cared for 3 out of the 200 characters, all of which were seperated at all times and required a chapter entirely dedicated to them tying their shoelaces or churning butter.

[Anonymous No.7368632]

I'm surprised people are so divided on Underworld. Do you like White Noise better? I picked the former due to critical acclaim, but apparently DeLillo was surprised it became so popular. I'm not far into it, but the storytelling is well done.

[Anonymous No.7368657]

>>7364092
The book is supposed to be boring so you can feel how Bovary felt during her time home.

[Anonymous No.7368685]

>>7368379
*tips fedora*

Just had to make sure someone told you that. Now fuck off back to reddit, we don't need this shit.

[Anonymous No.7368726]

>>7368685
>*tips fedora*
Social shaming, the premier weapon of leftists and women -- those who prefer conformity to personal responsibility.

[Anonymous No.7369358]

>>7364200
What's wrong with liking guns?

[Anonymous No.7369388]

>>7363252
2666 was a snooze suppository

[Anonymous No.7369401]

So I JUST finished reading Atlas Shrugged two days ago, after slowly chipping away at it for the last two and a half months.

I know everyone on here says it's crap, but I kind of expected more, because

a) it actually starts out strong--the first few chapters where new characters keep getting introduced is pretty decent

b) no matter how shitty most of the book was, the end felt like it was just thrown on because there was no conceivable way to wrap everything up, and

c) We the Living, her first novel, is actually a great fucking book. Fountainhead and Anthem are both meh, but We the Living is just a story, with a rich plot, and characters that are actually pretty interesting. Plus it's only 4 or 5 hundred pages, so it's over before it drags on too long.

As someone who really liked that novel, it was interesting to see how her Benzedrine addiction and shitty personal life actually made her a worse author, over time.

[Anonymous No.7369414]

I'm reading Underworld right now and it's a chore.

[Anonymous No.7369490]

>>7369414

That was my experience.

Still, people I respect say it's the best book of the last 20 years. I just can't fathom what the fuck they're talking about.

[Anonymous No.7369503]

Ulysses, but mostly, LOTR.

[Anonymous No.7369505]

>>7369358
Uh, nothing. He asked what was going on in that picture and the answer is that he likes guns and he's crazy so he's pointing it at his head.

[Anonymous No.7369513]

>>7363252
The Stand. Started out okay for what it was (ie a schlocky post-apocalypse plague pulp), but then it completely lost focus in the middle and the ending was some tertiary character blowing up almoar all the characters right before the climax, thus precluding anything resembling a coherent resolution.

This piece of shit was over 1000 pages. I cannot believe I read the whole thing.

[Anonymous No.7369523]

>>7364092
I have to wholeheartedly disagree. I wouldn't change a comma in Madame Bovary. It's prose doing what poetry is supposed to do.

[Anonymous No.7369743]

>>7369490
>>7369414
It went down easy for me, it's just that it was the biggest case of who gives a shit for the whole novel. Also easily the worst protagonist in a book I've read this year.

[Anonymous No.7369748]

>>7369523
And what exactly is poetry "supposed to do"?

[Anonymous No.7369767]

>>7363252
>if you just read this and open your heart, the Holy Spirit will reveal truth to you!

[Anonymous No.7369781]

>>7365228

Do you know the story behind that picture?

[Anonymous No.7369787]

>>7369781
Wasn't she about to get murdered or something?

[Anonymous No.7369876]

>>7369787

Yes. The guy who killed her cut her hair and made her pose for pictures like she was terrified, presumably to masturbate over at a later time. She doesn't look too scared, though. Maybe she still thought it would all turn out OK.

[Anonymous No.7369911]

>>7363252

[Anonymous No.7369945]

>>7365658
Maybe magical realism isn't for you? You're not even "supposed" to wonder what happened to her. It's the kind of mystery that must be left fully unexplained because what happened is /that/ mind-boggling.

Knowing how it tends to work, she probably was still around and perfectly alive but people just knew that wasn't really her so she was lost.

[Anonymous No.7371040]

>>7364913
Did they confuse Moby Dick with Muh Dick?

[Anonymous No.7371238]

>>7363252

IJ