fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3314 ]

[ SECRET POST #3314 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3314 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

__________________________________________________

02.

__________________________________________________

03.

__________________________________________________

04.

__________________________________________________

05.

__________________________________________________

06.

__________________________________________________

07.

__________________________________________________

08.

__________________________________________________

09.

__________________________________________________

10.

__________________________________________________

11.

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 072 secrets from Secret Submission Post #474.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Rant about them here!

Young adult books!

I tried to read Alexandra Bracken's "The Darkest Minds" because I loved her book "Passenger" but Darkest Minds is first person and the narrator is super unreliable and even 100 pages in, I was still piecing things together. I didn't like the characters or the world,so I gave up.

I tried to read "The Haven" by Carol Lynch Williams but I figured out the twist way too early and it wasn't that much of a twist.

Re: Books you read recently that you hated.

(Anonymous) - 2016-01-30 22:52 (UTC) - Expand

The Forest House by Marion Zimmer Bradley. All the protagonists were so unlikable and their actions were so full of hypocrisy, blergh. I was glad when everybody died in the end.

Re: Books you read recently that you hated.

(Anonymous) - 2016-01-30 21:56 (UTC) - Expand

Robin Hobb's Dragon Keeper was so bad I had to be coaxed by multiple friends and acquaintances into even bothering with her new Fool-related trilogy, and I love the Fool.

Skulduggery Pleasant was so boring and cliche, the only reason I didn't toss it immediately was that I was at camp and didn't have anything else to read.

The Secret of Platform 13 was so heavy-handed and predictable from the beginning that I actually held out hope until about halfway through that it would deliver a plot twist. I just couldn't believe that anyone could write something so typical from start to finish with a straight face.

I also reread Roald Dahl recently and was disappointed. Esio Trot was only accidentally funny, George's Marvelous Medicine was ridiculous (though I'll give it allowance for probably being funny to boys exactly 8 years of age), and Matilda is such a Mary Sue I just couldn't get past the first quarter. Would regret buying the box set if it hadn't come so cheap.

Re: Books you read recently that you hated.

morieris - 2016-01-30 22:02 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Books you read recently that you hated.

ibbity - 2016-01-30 22:10 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Books you read recently that you hated.

badass_tiger - 2016-01-30 22:12 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Books you read recently that you hated.

ibbity - 2016-01-30 22:38 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Books you read recently that you hated.

sadiesockmonkey - 2016-01-30 23:11 (UTC) - Expand

La Chambre des Morts was a detective novel edgy for the sake of being edgy, the 2nd half of the book is the main character trying to find the killer before he kills another girl BUT you never actually find out if the girl made it or not, and at the end there's the random death of a random cop so you're afraid for about 30 sec for the main character.

It got praised and won two prizes so I guess French detective novels suck if Fred Vargas isn't the author.

Re: Books you read recently that you hated.

sarillia - 2016-01-30 22:08 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Books you read recently that you hated.

(Anonymous) - 2016-01-30 22:25 (UTC) - Expand

Norwegian Wood by Murakami Haruki. I'll never understand how that book is deemed one of the best the japanese literature has to offer. It's not, imho. But I'm so alone in thinking this that I'm probably wrong and I didn't really understand it. I just know that as a person who has a family history of mental illness and depression that book was one of the worst piece of junk I've ever read. For me it was like reading one long masturbation session where the protagonist got to fuck all the women he wanted because why not?! Their mental isssues were worth nothing in the end!
If I were a dictator I'd probably ban it and order to burn all the copies. That's how much I've hated it!

Re: Books you read recently that you hated.

(Anonymous) - 2016-01-31 02:30 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Books you read recently that you hated.

(Anonymous) - 2016-01-31 08:54 (UTC) - Expand

Dyke Ideas by Joyce Trebilcot.

Holy shit, what a terrible book. The author is exactly the sort of psycho lesbian-separatist radfem that anti-feminists think all feminists are like. She thinks being a lesbian is a choice, and that gay men find lesbians threatening because gay men have a secret agenda to uphold the patriarchy or something, and she says the claim that being gay is something you're born with is part of that secret patriarchal agenda.

Fuck you, lady. I didn't CHOOSE to become a lesbian to "rebel against the patriarchy" and offend the delicate sensibilities of men; I'm a lesbian because I think women are hot. YOU'RE A MORON.

I bet she hates bisexuals and trans people too.

(Oh, and she also hates the word "project" because according to her, it's a phallic word that implies a penis being projected at something. What the fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.)

okay so. I've mentioned it before anon but. probably nobody cares.

I've never returned library books unfinished before, until now. Guy Gavriel Kay's Under Heaven started out unique, but when it got to where he was shifting from past tense to present tense, I started to get angry, and then I realized the shift in tense (often mid-chapter) was solely to narrate from female POV. That was when I closed the book and took it back.

I tried Ken Liu. Got about five chapters in, hated every goddamn word in that book. The main character had absolutely no presence, I couldn't figure out why I should like him or want to read a whole series of books about him. The worldbuilding was handled fairly awkwardly, too.

Gave an urban fantasy a shot, went for the second book in Max Gladstone's series (because I read the synopsis and it sounded more interesting than the first book). Noped out as soon as the female love interest was introduced as a walking action movie cliche relationship setup. The worldbuilding was over-dense and though I probably missed some by skipping the first book, it was still not enough to grab me.

I'm like 1/4 in successful recs from FS, so I probably won't try the rest of my list.

Re: Books you read recently that you hated.

(Anonymous) - 2016-01-31 00:11 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Books you read recently that you hated.

socky_polkadotty - 2016-01-31 01:14 (UTC) - Expand

Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault.

One of the most fuck awful books I've ever read. Purple-prosey writing, "be kind! this is my first fic LOL!!!" level pacing and focus, and an ultra gary-sue for a main character. I'd been slogging it for AWHILE hoping it would get better (or at least for the story to actually *start* instead of endless prologue/background sections) to make it three quarters of the way through before I gave up in disgust.

I am so glad I read The Persian Boy first as that was decent, though flawed. Hell if I'm reading anything else by this author again though.

I forget the name, as it wasn't really recent, but man it was disappointing. Something like "we stood under the rainbow," or "a glimpse of a rainbow." It was by Fannie Flagg, and the story promised to be about a town as it evolves over the course of several decades. But it wasn't at all well-written. Characters fade in and out, a main character's death is mentioned in passing, and a lot of the conflict was sloppily resolved.

Girl Waits With Gun! I wish it had been a biography instead of fiction, because there's so much interesting history there, and instead it all got bogged down in inconsistent characterization, an awful 'twist', and no one evolving at all.

The Mist in the Mirror, by Susan Hill. It started off well, and kept my interest up until the most boring, anticlimactic ending I've ever encountered that hardly answered any of the questions I had during the book.

I didn't hate it, but after reading Maureen Johnson's 13 Little Blue Envelopes this summer, I realized that I couldn't tell you anything about the main character?

Granted, it's YA (which is 99% of what I read) and this was a book I'd been wanting to read since I was in the 7th grade, but wow. I probably should have read it then. The main character, Ginny, is just so nondescript. There's nothing unique or interesting about her. Rather than driving the plot, she just kind of drifts aimlessly, directed by other characters, events, and locations. Everything happens to her, not because of her, and that irritates me. Also, she has terrible taste in guys.

Given Maureen Johnson's fandom, I expected the book would be better than it was. In reality, it was just kind of meh. I still ended up buying the sequel for super cheap at a secondhand bookstore because I wanna know what that last damn letter says. Oh, and I also was totally rooting for her & the guy that turned out to be her uncle before that reveal. Disappointed.

One book I really, truly hated though was Ally Condie's Matched. Oh my God. That was horrific. I don't even want to get into it.

Re: Books you read recently that you hated.

(Anonymous) - 2016-01-31 00:55 (UTC) - Expand

SA

(Anonymous) - 2016-01-31 01:03 (UTC) - Expand

The only book that I've read lately and hated was the first of the Parasol Protectorate series. I still wanted to finish it because I'm the type who feels I have to finish what I've started, but I absolutely hated it. The main character grated on me for her constant sense of superiority and "not like other girls"-ness, while she spent every other scene going into painful detail about what she was wearing. Ugggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Despised that twee thing.

Re: Books you read recently that you hated.

(Anonymous) - 2016-01-31 04:45 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Books you read recently that you hated.

pinkherring - 2016-01-31 05:09 (UTC) - Expand

Crimson Shore, the latest Pendergast novel by Preston & Child. It's the last straw for me on that series. It used to be one of my trash favorites. But it's become so obvious that it's now a yearly to twice yearly ghostwritten puppy-mill of a series. There's no trashy joy anymore. This is the sticky muck below the mulch pile.

It used to have at least enough research behind each volume to prop up its faux-literary bullshit, from layouts of natural history museums to using fairly obscure full-character homages from the early years of pulp thrillers. But now? It's shitty shoe-horned references that they explain baldly and badly to the audience before then using them to 'surprise' the readers with a twist that's absolutely not, and no longer any research whatsoever. It's like someone gave Joss Whedon severe brain damage, and told him to still use pop culture references like jigsaw puzzles to piece together a salable plot.

The section in Salem, MA in this last novel was bad. So very, very, bad. "I didn't even bother to read wikipedia, lol," bad. Jesus Christ, almost nobody except 90's kids who saw The Craft buys the "witchcraft is actually 50,000 years old!" shit. Where the fuck did you even get this?

If it wasn't ghostwritten, it had to have been written as a plea to readers to help kill the series off, a la Arthur Conan Doyle. It's not working. It's fucking depressing.

Re: Books you read recently that you hated.

(Anonymous) - 2016-01-31 04:46 (UTC) - Expand

Skin by Ted Dekker. I'd read about 2/3 of the book, turns out it was a VR game the characters were caught in. They'd been hooked up to this machine cus they had epilepsy. Anyhow, I skipped to the end (I often do that) and instead of the main character and others coming out, they had to stay under for x amount of time longer....I actually threw the book across my bed, I was so disgusted and annoyed by the ending.

Sex Brood by Marie Crosswell. When a Tumblrina self-publishes, the universe weeps.

I actually listened to the audiobook, because that's what I do sometimes at work, but it was Yours to Keep by Shannon Stacey. It's part of a huge series set around a family of single 30-somethings and I guess each book one of the brothers meets his soulmate. This one had a "pretend to be engaged" plotline, which I've enjoyed in fanfic before, so I thought it would be fun. But I thought the reason for the pretend marriage was stupid, the female main character was childish, the male main character was a sexist dick (which the female main called him out on but at the same time it's like... you know she's going to fall in love with him anyway so why even make him such a dick?), and all the minor characters were too cutesy, forgettable, and weirdly old fashioned. And their reason for justifying the engagement lie was unbelievable. They're doing it out of love for the grandmother? Huh?

Maybe this just isn't my genre.

The Collector by John Fowles. Classic horror novel I guess, but I found it very boring.

I've never hated a book as much as I hated The Bachelorette Party by Karen McCulloh. The MC was a shitty, unlikeable person who looked down her nose at everybody and it seriously grossed me out how she rationalized sleeping with one of her high school students.

I just finished Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep. Utter shite.

Re: Books you read recently that you hated.

pinkherring - 2016-01-31 05:11 (UTC) - Expand

Nalini Signh's Archangel series.

It got recced to me as a GOOD example of the romance novel/paranormal genre, totally "not like those other books!"

Nope. It has all the tropes I hate, in spades. Faux-badass female main character. Abusive asshole male-main character whose behaviour is apparently okay because he's rich/powerful/sexy. Other bullshit I can't remember right now. I think I remember throwing the book across the room in disgust. That THIS shit is supposed to be romantic. Fuck you, author.

Just unlikeable characters, terrible cheesy writing. Do not want.

Whitney and Bobbi Kristina by Ian Halperin. What a piece of shit!

Hush, Hush. It's basically Twilight WITH ANGELS but somehow even WORSE. There's no plot, no good characters, no thought to the theological implications (The author clearly just needed the male love interest to be some supernatural being and angels hadn't been taken yet) and the relationship between the heroine and the male lead manages to be even more fucked up than FSoG and I do not say that lightly.