Eat Pray Love.
My god it was so self-important and out of touch.
I don’t know, I think it offer the incredibly valuable life lesson that the secret to being happy is to convince a publisher to give you a $200,000 advance to spend on “spiritual and personal exploration” so that you don’t have to get a real job.
I forgot the name of the book, but it starts out with some alien overlord dying, and a whole bunch of people commit ritualistic sewer slide over the death of the alien, and i just couldn’t force myself to care.
I even started writing down names and details on the characters, just to try and make it stick. But I don’t remember anything happening, to the point I just forgot to finish it.
Edit: Recommended by my brother, but I just didn’t get what he got out of it.
Could it be The Praxis by Walter Jon Williams? If so, I didn’t enjoy it either.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner!
The Praxis: Don’t bother remembering the title, you won’t remember the story.
I hope you just coined “ritualistic sewer slide,” because that’s great.
Alas, I can’t take credit, heard it in a Red Letter Media review of The Home.
Sounds like one of the L. Ron Hubbard trash… Battlefield Earth?
Hubbard trash is fun with friends. We used to do shitty movie night before the plague, and one of the last events before lockdown was “Drinking and Dianetics”… It was a choice, really eye opening and deeply stupid. Plus the story of how the nerd herd aquired the DVD was hillarious.
It started off normal enough, a self-help video with a bunch of sunny California people and a higher than expected budget. Tons of power imagery and hints that you would get if you watched south parks “Scientologists believe this” bit.
After that it starts getting weird, bad psychology, incorrect biology and theories that were clearly written by a sci-fi author. The worst was their search for “the original trauma” thing, absolute hog-wash.
People were already out of it by the time we got to the DvD extras, but we all remember the skit with the panther and the actor putting up his dukes like Popeye the sailor man.
The showing was all in good fun, but there was a thing in the back of peoples heads, this is a cult that ruins lives and people fall for this crap.
If you see that book or film, help that person and be excellent to each other.
You can say “suicide”, it’s fucking fine to use dirty words on the internet.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but several people heavily and repeatedly recommended me the Dark Tower series by Stephen King.
I had read a few books by King before and really enjoyed some of them. Even the first book in the series (written well before the others) was interesting but the whole series is just unbearable. It’s long and disjointed and while there are some interesting moments, there are three times the amount of adding grotesquerie for no narrative reason, literal self-inserts, or worse, grabbing references to other IPs that get shoehorned into the story.
I know there are a lot of people that liked the series and I am happy it exists for those people, and I realize not everything is made for my tastes, but the ending was just so irredeemably bad. It makes the ending of GoT look like Breaking Bad.Yeah, the Dark Tower series was a big ol’ DNF for me. I just wasn’t really able to get invested in anything. I stopped at the part with the train.
dnf?
also the next one “Wizard and Glass” is just a big retrospection and might be one of his best books imk
DNF is short for Did Not Finish.
The first three were good. When I got to the fourth, where it explains how he became the most feared man on the planet I noped out.
you disliked Wizard amd Glass?
Yes.
I couldn’t make it past the endless beach with the lobstrocities
The worst part was that there were references to cool things that he’d find in the tower once he got there, such as music that was enjoyed by people on a particular floor, and then
spoiler (but please do read this so that it robs you of any desire to read the series)
Stephen King had the last book end with a time loop going back to the first book like a coward.
I dragged myself through the last couple of books to find out what was in that stupid tower and was so incredibly disappointed…
(I will say, though, that, the city of people who used their psychic powers to destroy the Universe because someone was going to destroy it anyway so it might as well be them because the job paid really well was pretty apt, though!)
I mean I enjoyed them at the time, but looking back, the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind had some questionable stuff in it. Pro death penalty, heavy objectivisation of women…
I had a friend recommend me Sword of Truth, which was, and is still, his second favorite book.
He just had a kid and named it Atlas after the Ayn Rand novel which is his first. I almost spit out my coffee when he told me that.I think your friend might suck
Agreed.
God I tried SO HARD to like that book. Liked the show growing up because Legend of The Seeker is campy and weirdly ABC channel sexy (blond leather ladies touching you with Pain Dildos, essentially) but it was just trash.
The main character, by all means, should be the least knowledgeable and probably the least ‘wise’ character, but in comes Richard educating the Men of Mud on proper government structures and how their primitive tribal society was stupid and the way they made decisions was dumb.
And you’re right, don’t get me started on the confessors and how anyone with eyes wants to get bent over the table by the protagonist within minutes of meeting him.
…still like the shitty CW show though.
I didn’t even know there was a show! I’ll look up the trailer… But that’s as far as I’m willing to go, really 😅
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. It was a while back, so I can’t remember exactly, but I do remember my friend not doing it any favours by really praising that book. Perhaps I was expecting too much, but by contrast, I found it to be a rather naïve, consensual, and superficial self-help book trying to masquerade as something more profound with a thin veneer of new-age spirituality.
Hope I don’t offend someone who loves it. I don’t feel strongly about it now, it was a while back, so maybe I missed something then. If someone disagrees with me I won’t die on that hill.
I canceled reading it after 50 or 60 pages. It felt dusty and predictable. I also remember the language to be kind of prophetic, like it has something important to say, while failing at doing so.
The book might have proven me wrong, if I finished it. Who knows.
Don’t thing you have. If memory serves me right, it’s about being mindful and focusing on what matters, but wraps it in a ridiculously artificially “spiritual” setting.
This book is to literature what Instagram inspiration quotes are to poetry.
Is that the one where the boy has a bag of pebbles?
Paper factory or something?
I honestly couldn’t remember any specifics beyond the fact I eyerolled many more times than one should when reading a book.
Something about a boy in a desert, meeting a wise old man who helps him find himself by telling him a few mystical stories…
That’s so funny. I was in somebody’s house and they picked up the alchemist and told me I should read it, and I asked them the same question.
“I think I have read that, is that about the boy who collects pebbles?”
And they told me
“Yea- well, no. I’m not really sure, i can’t remember the specifics, but it was really really good”.
And I was nice about it, but obviously if you cannot remember the main character or the point of the book at all it couldn’t have been a very significant experience for you.
Yeah I mean, it’s utterly forgettable. I’ve just not had that many book recommendations from friends, but I did really enjoy most of them, so I had to really scratch my head a bit. Best I could find to fit the bill was that.
I’ve read my fair share of shit books all on my own though, like a big boi.
The alchemist is a good shout out for being so uniquely forgettable.
So far, other commenters have a pretty clear reason they didn’t like their book.
With the alchemist, we’re all just shrugging into the void left behind by something we’re sure was a disappoiintment.
It felt like one of those sappy motivational posters, but dragged out over 200 pages.
I literally have that book at home because of how much I agree with this. A friend highly recommended it and borrowed it to me when I was ~15. I never gave it back purely to avoid having to tell them how eye roll inducingly fake deep I found it. To be fair though, I don’t remember much of it either.
interesting take. I don’t remember much of the detail but I do remember it helping me to big next steps more confidently when I read it at 16.
Totally fair.
We all seem to agree that we kind of don’t really remember it though. It’s at least reassuring that that’s a shared experience.
Had to read that for summer reading in high school. All I remember about it was how utterly forgettable it was.
Sex at Dawn. Proposed as a ethno-biographic history of monogamy / non-monogamy which is an important topic, but good god so stupidly written.
The Bible
I skimmed it but all I ever saw was just a bunch of begat this and begat that with some quotations sprinkled in between.
And this fucking thing is partly responsible for why numerous things are going wrong with humans today and humans of history.
HE LIVED FOR 942
DAYSYEARS AND THEN HE DIED.Edit how incredibly stupid I am saying “days”.
942 days is nothing though… 2 and a half years?
Cancer
Honestly it’s probably just a poor translation/carry-down from what would now be understood as “months”. That makes it 72 years which is entirely reasonable.
what’s wild to me is the people who swear by it as the answer to all lifes questions and yet…they’ve never read it.
if i thought and all knowing all powerful being put answers to all lifes questions into a book i’d be reading the shit out of it
When I was around 20 and looking for purpose in life, I actually really tried to get into Christianity.
I mean, they seemed to have a light guiding them through life, something that takes away the feeling of senselessness and chaos in the world. I especially loved the idea that “you can never fall deeper than into god’s hand”.
So I prayed to god to show me the way to him, went to the local church every Sunday, and started reading the bible.
All of it. Cause I obviously wanted to know what I was supposed to believe in. And it completely killed my desire to become a Christian.The only way to make sense of it, for me, was to interprete the old testament as a collection of the stories that goat herders told each other to make sense of world history, followed by a heavily propagandized history of the Israelite people, legitimizing their claim to Israel after displacing and genociding the people who had lived there before.
The new testament is the story of a wandering preacher who tried to establish an early version of peaceful communism.
But when that became too popular, the Roman state embraced and co-opted the message and turned it into the basis of a hierarchical state church, which later turned into Christianity as we know it today.Since I read God’s book while praying to God and that was the interpretation I was left with, I have to assume, it’s the one God agrees with ;)
It sounds like you missed the part where He rose from the dead…
…and promptly disappeared to heaven, but he’ll be back soon, promise! (according to the people who wrote down the story to popularize his teachings and gather followers about 100 years later)
It’s not 100 years later. The first mention of Jesus’ resurrection that we still have was written 20 years latest after the fact. Which is shockingly close compared to other records from that time that are typically written decades if not centuries after.
1 Thessalonians 1:9-10
For they themselves shew of us what manner of entering in we had unto you, and how ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.
For comparison, the earliest written records we have of the 79AD eruption of Mt Vesuvius - something that killed a lot of higher ranking Romans and was possibly witnessed by a quarter of a million people was written by Pliny the Younger in a letter to tacitus at 107AD earliest. Being generous, that’s 25 years after the fact (mathematically speaking though it’s 28)
That’s mostly the first chapter, genesis, the begat this stuff.
R crumb, the comics artist, has a fantastic graphic novel of Genesis where he communicates the emotions through his drawings of what the words are trying to communicate. This made genesis, the most boring and pedantic part of the Bible, more interesting.
The Bible has undoubtedly led to incalculable suffering as a cult, but just as a book, it’s nowhere near the worst piece of literature I’ve ever read.
That’s mostly the first chapter, genesis, the begat this stuff.
But then, don’t discount the chapter where the twelve Jewish tribes send their gifts to Moses (iirc), and the full account of the lavish gifts is given, per each tribe. I’ve read through the whole thing to confirm the madness that the list is identical for each tribe, and is repeated twelve times.
I’d like someone in a US church choose that chapter for their Sunday reading of the Bible, and then see the faces of the congregation sitting through it.
Whoever wrote those books, didn’t have much consideration for the reader.
graphic novel of Genesis where he communicates the emotions through his drawings of what the words are trying to communicate
I have a long-standing dream of someone just adapting the Bible to the screen exactly as it’s written — at least the first parts up to and including Moses’ wanderings. I have a feeling that a direct retelling would cause more than a few butts to be hurt.
Pasolini, an atheist and communist, came close in the approach with ‘The Gospel According to St. Matthew’, but the result is a rather romantic vision of the life of Jesus, perhaps dictated by both the chosen source material and Pasolini’s ‘nostalgia for belief’.
Whoever wrote those books, didn’t have much consideration for the reader.
Sizable chunks of the Old Testament were documentation, rather than formatted with the intent of being engaging. It’s like how a family bible often has genealogy hand-written inside it, except it’s the contents of the book itself.
That’s cool and dandy, but I still think that writing “every tribe brought exact same shit” would work swimmingly.
A direct retelling wouldn’t be allowed to air. Murdering your wife in Christ’s name for not cooking you dinner, divinely owning slaves as an entitled Christian, lobster sending you to christian hell; the production wouldn’t get very far.
What are you on about?
Whats that?
When did someone murder their wife in Christ’s name for not cooking you dinner
Love that you’re like “we all know shrimp sends you to christian hell, but wife discipline? Seems farfetched!”
Corinthians, ephesians, most books of the Bible reiterate that women must submit to their husbands:
“Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.”
And to not submit to their husbands is to go against God.
“But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.”
And guess what happens if your husband asks you for dinner and you say no?
“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate.”
Eve’s decision to prioritize her own desires over God’s instructions led to disastrous consequence including physical death and eternal obeisance.
“Your desire shall be for your husband, And he shall rule over you.”
“Genesis 2:18-24 “And the lord god said, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him”
Christian women are servants to men, and if they defy men, they defy god. Through all of every version of the bible, the Christian punishment for defiance is death.
Why?
“For the wages of sin is death”.
And this fucking thing is partly responsible for why numerous things are going wrong with humans today and humans of history.
No no no no. It’s the gays that are responsible. THE GAYS!!!
No no no no. It’s the gays that are responsible. THE GAYS!!!
That’s not even what it says. The Bible doesn’t really mention homosexuality too much.
But what it says about it is really horrible.
By what standard?
Ok, you just told on yourself. There is no standard by which Leviticus 20:13 is not really horrible. It was really horrible when it was conceptualized, it was really horrible when King James edited it, it was really horrible when Gutenberg printed it, and it’s really horrible now. I attend a UCC church and my pastors do not defend what the Bible says about homosexuality the way you just did. God is still speaking, I encourage you to listen.
How do you define “really horrible”?
Also, it’s universally accepted that Leviticus 20:13 is not a command for today. It was a law for Israel to show that even earthly means and men cannot keep Israel’s purity. Christ set us free from the law. We don’t need to kill each other for sinning. Because we cannot be pure. So Christ died to make us pure.
I attend a UCC church and my pastors do not defend what the Bible says about homosexuality the way you just did.
UCC has been known to be rapidly spiralling down into heresy. They say vague things like “God is still speaking” and that god for whatever reason always affirms what the white cultures believe is right. Convenient that your god changes his mind just to placate the culture about what white people living in the west think, huh. Once again like Israel of old, man thinks he stands in judgement over God.
for whatever reason always affirms what the white cultures believe is right.
I assume that by this you’re trying to paint homosexuality and the acceptance of it as exclusive to white cultures. This is complete and total bullshit.
There’s plenty of history of non-white cultures that were fully accepting of homosexuality. Japan is a clear example. Samurai wrote so many gay love poems to each other that they had established literary conventions about it.
What happened, around the world, is that colonizers and missionaries went around the world destroying indigenous traditions and customs and instilling bigotry regarding homosexuality. At the same time, suffering under the yoke of colonialism stifled social progress and the potential for the sort of organic social movements that happened in the West.
Even then, we are seeing in the US a rollback of LGBT rights that we only recently managed to achieve. I don’t think it’s fair to generalize “white cultures” as believing LGBT people have rights, just as it’s not fair to generalize non-white cultures as not believing that.
How do you define “really horrible”?
Once again, telling on yourself. What’s not horrible about saying people should be put to death for their private consensual bedroom behavior?
UCC has been known to be rapidly spiralling down into heresy
Oh give me a break. “No true Christian” much?
If you can get hold if it, look out for Thomas Jefferson’s The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. It’s the New Testament with all the spirituality, supernatural, etc edited out. Instead you’ve just got a book about morals and ethics as taught by some guy.
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"but Jesus never actually talked about slaves
Yeah, and that’s a major fucking problem
And this fucking thing is partly responsible for why numerous things are going wrong with humans today and humans of history.
That’s like blaming a doctor’s diagnosis of cancer for someone’s death. The Bible is just a diagnosis of humanity’s problems with a crapton of examples, as well as the solution/hope (although it also makes it clear that people will never try and solve it because of the aforementioned problems)
Except the Bible is less a diagnosis and more a treatment plan. And people definitely have been killed by bad treatment plans before.
The treatment plan is “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved”. It’s more like being killed by misunderstanding or misinterpreting the treatment plan. Which can be deadly
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Okay then. What’s the cure?
Bible.
The DaVinci Code
I managed one page and gave up. Dreadful stuff.
I read it and then the other three that were out at the time (Digital Fortress, Angels and Demons I think and something else I can’t remember) because I was morbidly curious. Four physical books. Apart from the general awfulness Brown tried to cover up with frenetic pacing, the biggest thing I noticed was that even though there were four books, there were effectively only two stories, just repeated with different character names.
Ha ha, amazing! I salute your fortitude in getting through them all 😁
I threw it across the room after 5 pages. Utter crap.
I bought the illustrated version in high school because I was taking an art history class and liked looking at the pretty paintings. The story itself did not leave any impression on me lol
I have now!
This is in my discarded drafts; I thought I was the only one
It’s far from the worst book I’ve read, but it’s the worst that’s been recommended to me by someone I’d listen to.
I noped out about page 3 where the author wrote ‘world famous symbologist.’
I knew there was no such word,
Harry Potter back when I was a child and the first book was released. After reading a few pages I was already fed up with that horsecrap and continued reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.
I read this when I was in my mid 20s, so I wasn’t the target audience. It might have been nostalgia, but I compared it against similar things I’d read as a child and it came out poorly. Derivative and twee. I understand that as the series went on it got less twee but I didn’t bother reading any more.
I will say that at the time when it got really popular I thought it was great that so many kids were getting into reading books, so for that it deserves some credit, I guess.
Honestly I read it when I was a preteen-teen so right in the intended age range and I liked it quite a bit, not my favorite by any means but it was good. Not going to reread it now for obvious reasons, at least not legally.
The Harry Potter books don’t start getting good until he finally ditches the Dursleys full time. I think starting with the 3rd book?
The first two books are definitely geared towards kids/preteens. I was obsessed with the first book when I was young, getting an owl and being whisked off to fairytale land, so much fun. By the time the series is rounding out azkaban going into goblet of fire, it begins to present more mature and relatable themes that resonated more re-reading as a late teen.
Well, since JKR is a horrible person and a terrible writer, I’m glad I dodged all that shite anyway.
Beast by Benchley. I’m still mad at the time I wasted.
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
I hated every minute, and hated all of my classmates for kissing the teacher’s ass about how great it was when I know all they read were the Cliff Notes
I mean, I liked it, but it is a weird book, I don’t think everyone will like it, but part of it’s appeal is how nonchalant it is about its weirdness. Not sure if the translations capture it, for example I don’t think the beginning of the book has the same impact in English: “Many years later, in front of the firing squad”, in Spanish that phrase is very weird, it’s the continuation of another phrase, it’s similar to opening a book and the first page starting with something like “of those, the one of his father taking him to see ice was the most cherished”, it makes you pause and look at the previous empty page thinking you’ve missed the actual first page.
But if anyone is thinking on reading it, do so with a pencil and start a family tree, the book covers 100 years of a family where everyone has the same names over and over.
I’m sorry, but you’re wrong, that’s a truly amazing novel.
I don’t bring this opinion up in polite company for this reason.
But I hate that book.
Mein Kampf. Apart from being a bad person, Hitler was a terrible writer. Low quality thoughts articulated badly. I only read it so I could nail neonazis when they came at me with their stupid arguments.
I listened to parts of it as an audiobook. I felt like I was going insane. Helped me pass the time at work though.
I’m always a little bit scared that what I’m listening to will start blasting out of my phone speaker because I forgot to turn on my headset or something.
I’m terrified of that personally
By the way, one big takeaway of ‘Triumph of the Will’ is that the Nazi rally was extremely fucking boring after the first ten minutes or so. But apparently seven hundred thousand people had nothing better to do than stand and listen to Nazis shout at them for hours.
I think it’s even worse in German. It comes across as a toddler trying to sound grown up.
Who recommended it to you?
A friend of mine years ago. He was a history buff so he always tried to help me understand historical things better.
Adolf Hitler was a modern-day edgelord and an incel. He didn’t have any original thoughts, he stole the ideas from the magazines he read while he was poor and unemployed
It’s a good thing people don’t act like that any more /s
And when he finally did get laid he got syphilis. Loser.
Modern-day edgelords and incels are…edgelords and incels. Maybe “premodern” would be more accurate? Probably not, I’m not sure.
That was the modern era, we live in the postmodern era.
I couldn’t get through the first chapter. Utter babbling nonsense. It’s not that I disagreed with it, I had no idea what it was supposed to be saying!
It doesn’t get better after chapter one haha.
Was that helpful or necessary in the end? Or was is such trite that you could have done without?
It is extremely babble-minded and not at all worth reading or decinstructing.
I read it in the mindset of your first question.
Turns out, any argument you can think up in 2 seconds against bigotry is going to be more insightful and well-founded than a rebuttal against nascent nazi scribblings.
Well I’ll save myself the trouble of being put on some sort of list for reading it then, thanks.
You got it.
I finished it and was like omigod at least nobody I ever talk to has to read this.
Only way I can look at reading that book not being a complete waste of time.
If nothing else, it’s worth it just to see how brain-dead nazism really is. They’re not Machiavellian masterminds, they’re thugs with an ideology built on brainfarts. Also quoting from the book (in the original German) is a good way to kill a conversation with one of the modern spawn.
Many years ago, I posted about how horribly written it was, and right on cue, a neo-Nazi pipes in asking which translation it was, because apparently all the faithful translations are a Jewish trick, or something…
No reply when I posted the introduction in original German, of course.
Yeah, that’s probably the one thing that makes the book almost (ALMOST) worth reading. Using their own tripe against them.
I’m guessing it’s the same kinda situation as one having to actually read ‘Atlas Shrugged’ to see for themselves that it’s a complete turd of a book.
A Friend of mine with similar political inclination keeps telling me I should read it, for the same “know thy enemy” kind of argument.
I just can’t bring myself to it, we all get bombarded enough with that shitty ideology, and have to push it back irl constantly, so I’d love to escape it, a bit, in my downtime.
It does in fact help a little bit, when you see how Rand portrayed the libertarian paradise for which she advocated: where everyone is a genius at the top of their game, and a few dozen of these geniuses build the shiny libertarian utopia. It’s juvenile, just like her other literary attempts. The ‘utopia’ wouldn’t stand against just a few real-life problems. It’s also notable that Rand herself was on social security and Medicaid in her late years.
Furthermore, it’s fun to read some of Aleister Crowley, e.g. ‘The Diary of a Drug Fiend’, compare it to Rand’s ‘objectivism’, and ponder as to how Crowley was called ‘the most wicked man’ while Rand became the torchbearer of USian unabashed corporatism. At least, Crowley actually could write, had a soul, and was generally a fun man — but he didn’t have a Red Scare to ride on.
Reading Dune books ATM and the original is one of my all-time favorites. But fuck me, Dune Messiah is incomprehensible. It’s 80% about Paul navel gazing. I’d read a paragraph and think, “I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.” 80% of the words in the book hit me like that.
I’m like a third of the way through it right now, and either the french translation clarifies it or I haven’t gotten to the confusing part yet. It’s very different from the first book but I don’t hate it, it’s a good “what would happen after the big heroic tale” that the first book sets up well.
I read Dune in a book club, and honestly for the majority in the club even the first book was near incomprehensible. The group absolutely hated not understanding any of the nomenclature it throws at you from the start, and there’s was a lot of discussion that started “stick with it you’ll get used to it.”
I fucking love dune but took a few attempts to buy in and get through it. Glad I did though.
Sometimes, a piece of fiction does not want you to understand every part of the fictional world from the get go. It’s part of the art. For Dune in particular, it’s a hard vs. soft world building distinction. Some fiction, harry potter comes to mind, builds up the world slowly and eases you into it, explaining every little thing that makes it different from our own. Some just dumps you into it and lets you experience it as an outsider slowly gaining understanding.
From what I gather, most people nowadays are much more used to the first method, to the point of expecting it and thinking they’re missing something when the second method is used. I think stuff like that, including Dune, would be more enjoyable to many if they realised they aren’t, in fact, missing anything and that’s how the experience of consuming that piece of media was intended to be like.
Reading Dune without Messiah is like reading half a book. They’re two acts of the same story.
The wheel Of time series. I got through the first 2 books before realising that I disliked every character. Also every female character was written so poorly it made me want to “Tug on my braid and stamp my foot”
I loved Wheel of Time for the world building and the background mythology. I did trudge though till Jordan’s last book and I have not returned to it. The only character I liked at all was Mat. It just seemed like a long D&D game that got a little out of hand.
Did you at least lament tugging your braids wistfully? :)
Don’t make me box your ear!
The first book I really enjoyed. The second was good. It started sliding downhill quickly from there… So much stuff needed to be either cut or at least re-written! His wife was his editor. She was a professional, but I feel like she didn’t have the heart to be tough on him. Or possibly he felt he didn’t have listen to her like he would an editor he wasnt married to… Could have been a great series with another draft or two. One of the rare instances of the movie versions being better than the books.
