# When did you feel the most let down or disappointed by a book?   Spoiler alerts!



## Llyralen (Feb 22, 2021)

For me, _The Hunger Games _series.

SPOILER ALERT!

1.  For the second book, the way it was set up, Katniss and Peta would have to play the part of Hamish-- the mentor part-- and watch while either Gail or Prim (or someone) would be in the 2nd games.  And to me that would have been more interesting psychologically and just different.   I felt like I was reading round 2 on book 2 and I felt robbed.... but that wasn't as bad as when...

2.  Prim was killed and I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach.  The author was able to make characters I really cared about... and after all Katniss went through it just felt like "Why?"  We got through so much and didn't get to enjoy victory for a second.  After the battle, why do we have to deal with so much pain?  I bet soldiers feel like this.  Abandoned and betrayed after they come home and start dealing with PTSD, find their spouse had an affair? Start to deal with addiction, but I really didn't want to deal with it.  Especially in a young adult book.  And getting together with Peta in that way didn't make up for it at ALL.


The "happily ever after" ending of the Harry Potter series felt a bit thrown on as well-- as if J. K. Rowlings was running to be free.   I'm sure those last books were a lot of pressure, but it really wasn't satisfying.


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## JBF (Feb 22, 2021)

Usually when the subject is interesting to me and I realize I know more about it than the author.


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## druid12000 (Feb 22, 2021)

'The Iron Dragon's Daughter' by Michael Swanwick. I got it through a book club. I wish they had just sent me a club instead. It was a tough read to begin with, confusing, with no apparent point. Then the last chapter dropped the 'oh, none of that was real, ha, ha, got you good didn't I'. I threw it across the room. It deserved no less.


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## Foxee (Feb 22, 2021)

I'm not a Stephen King fan (I'll give you a second to recover after that statement)...however, much like giving oysters a chance, I occasionally have a look and see if I can't live without what he's offering. 

I have tried oysters three times. Three times running they've had the texture of bitter snot with sand in it.

My latest "no thank you helping" of King was when I was struggling to find an audiobook from my library and they had _Under the Dome_. Sounded a bit more out there in SF territory so I figured why not, the opening sample was interesting. However, as I got into the opening chapters with King remorselessly (and pretty boringly) showing one disaster after another in graphic detail where the dome came down I started to wonder when the story was going to start. It was hard to connect with any of the characters even in their horrible circumstances as they were flung at me one after the next. 

When a character was dragging herself down the road on her elbows I couldn't do it anymore and returned the audiobook.

I hate oysters.


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## epimetheus (Feb 22, 2021)

My disappointment in any book is proportional to how hyped up/strongly recommended it was. I thought The Great Gatsby was OK, but such is its prodigious status it was a let down. 

The converse is also true - i read 50 shades of grey expecting the worst thing i'd ever read. It's less than OK, but compared to what i was expecting i was pleasantly surprised - i've certainly read worse.


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## Matchu (Feb 22, 2021)

I read Stephen King at school, and then 'Dome' came out hundreds of years later on, and I bought it for my wife because maybe it was Christmas Eve.  The cover fell off the book, that's not his fault but it was pretty basic stuff inside that cover, and we are quite elevated intellectually, it's not really for us [types].  Maybe the little people? She said it 





> , not me.
> 
> Alan Ginsberg?  I found his poems - like reading writingforum.org poetry challenge.
> 
> ...


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## indianroads (Feb 22, 2021)

Foxee said:


> I'm not a Stephen King fan (I'll give you a second to recover after that statement)...however, much like giving oysters a chance, I occasionally have a look and see if I can't live without what he's offering.
> 
> I have tried oysters three times. Three times running they've had the texture of bitter snot with sand in it.
> 
> ...



Oysters: snot with an extra helping of buggers served on a shell. Yeah, no thank you. Never tried them, I couldn't get beyond the appearance.

I read a lot of Stephen King in the 80's. Carrie was ok, Cujo was depressing, Salem's Lot was ok. He's a pantster - and it seems at times that he gets near the end and doesn't know how to conclude the story and just sort of winged it (badly). IT was his best IMO, The Stand was the worst.

Stephen Pressfield is an author I like - but it's been my experience that women don't like his books. Gates of Fire and Tides of War were especially good.

In my generation, everyone read Kerouac's On the Road, but I thought it was tiresome.

Pierce Brown wrote a pretty good SciFi series: Red Rising, Golden Son, Morning Star - but all the books had identical plot lines so I lost interest.

Occasionally the first 10% of a book (the free sample size Amazon lets you download for free) is good - but falls off the cliff later.


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## escorial (Feb 22, 2021)

[video=youtube_share;GpimsgfNj7c]https://youtu.be/GpimsgfNj7c[/video]


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## Foxee (Feb 22, 2021)

I have _The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War_ that I bought because my husband is really into historical books AND I am a fan of Pressfield's _The War of Art_ and _Do the Work_...both very helpful. Husband liked the Lion's Gate, it's on my lengthy list of "I have it and will eventually read it"...most of which I didn't get to when the libraries were shut down. Nothing against Pressfield, though!


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## Matchu (Feb 22, 2021)

Oysters are very wonderful things to eat.  Seaside, maybe red onion, maybe vinegar dressing, seagulls overhead, chew, and slurp your expensive wine.  It's good stuff.  First course - obviously means you miss your lobster bisque alternative - and straight to Dover sole and chips, but so be.  Essential element to all fish fantasy.


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## indianroads (Feb 22, 2021)

Foxee said:


> I have _The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War_ that I bought because my husband is really into historical books AND I am a fan of Pressfield's _The War of Art_ and _Do the Work_...both very helpful. Husband liked the Lion's Gate, it's on my lengthy list of "I have it and will eventually read it"...most of which I didn't get to when the libraries were shut down. Nothing against Pressfield, though!



Of all Pressfield's books, I prefer Tides of War. It chronicles the 27 year Peloponnesian War from the eyes of a hoplite that is a friend to Alcibiades, a controversial general of the Athenian Army.

I made the mistake of recommending The Last of the Amazons to the wife of my best friend... she hated it. Well, to each their own. She got her revenge by recommending Game of Thrones.


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## luckyscars (Feb 22, 2021)

Tolkien. Incredibly overrated and overall unimaginative.

I felt a little bit let down by Harry Potter but I don't fault the books for that as I think they're written just fine. I feel like almost any book hyped as much as Harry Potter is going to be a slight let down.

I have been disappointed by Stephen King more times than I can count and I'm actually quite a big fan of his. The man just drones for days. It's not the length of the books, mind, but the pacing of them I find horrible. That isn't all that new, either. The only thing I didn't like about 'Salems Lot was how long it took to get anywhere. It is another ass-numbingly long book that does not need to be. I will say, though, that when King isn't given free reign to bore you to death with twenty-nine chapters of set up that he is REALLY good. These days, I tend to only read King books if they are novellas. His novellas are much better than his novels overall.

Most disappointing of all? Probably Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman. What a waste.


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## Pamelyn Casto (Feb 22, 2021)

What did your friend's wife hate about The Last of the Amazons? I've not read it but that time has always interested me. If the work about it is no good, though, I want to be spared the misery. Thanks. (Love her revenge on you.:-D)


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## indianroads (Feb 22, 2021)

Pamelyn Casto said:


> What did your friend's wife hate about The Last of the Amazons? I've not read it but that time has always interested me. If the work about it is no good, though, I want to be spared the misery. Thanks. (Love her revenge on you.:-D)


I think there was too much military subject matter.


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## Taylor (Feb 23, 2021)

Cristina Algers, _The Banker's Wife._ She is a wonderful writer, and I had really enjoyed _The Darlings._ The basis for the story was the real life 2015 exposure of Swiss Bank accounts to the IRS by an insider.  I was intrigued by a story about banking.  And one of the characters was a wealthy entrepreneur turned politician. I thought it was a great premise for a story. She explores the motivation of the rich and unethical trying to avoid paying tax at all moral cost.

However, it is written from the POV of two FMCs, both of whom had someone close to them, a husband and a best friend get murdered early on.  And then it just turned into a bit of a whodunit. Still a good read, but I would have enjoyed it more with less murder.


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## thepancreas11 (Feb 23, 2021)

Two books come to mind:

First is _The Sun Also Rises_. I'm a fan of very sparse prose. I would always rather read what's happening than the omniscient narrator's opinions on a character's thoughts and feelings. I almost like my books to be like the closed captions on a movie, really. Everyone said I would love Hemingway because that's his style too, apparently. He doesn't spend a lot of time on the frilly language. He just puts down the facts on paper and lets the reader infer what they will. Yeah, maybe, but he's also a dill-hole that annoys the crap out of me. I've said it before and I'll say it again: he reminds me of the beret-wearing boyfriend from "Uncle Buck", and he gets a big "No Thank You" from me.

Second is the _Book of the New Sun_. I read maybe seventy pages of that book. It took me like a month to do it. I don't necessarily mind a little work (see _Lincoln in the Bardo_) but I don't get my jollies from army-crawling through the mud or the literary equivalent of said practice. That book is just heavy. I kept finding reasons not to read it, and when I did, I would read the same sentence over and over again either because it was extremely dense or because my mind was wandering and I had missed something important. It's the first book I've ever stopped reading.


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## ArrowInTheBowOfTheLord (Feb 23, 2021)

_Harry Potter_, definitely. It had been described to me as comparable to Narnia, but it was really only passable for a one-time read--and not even in the same vein, for that matter. At least the first is more school story than fairy tale.
_
That Hideous Strength. _It's not an awful book. But it happens to be both written by one of my favorite authors, and the third book in an otherwise incredible trilogy. So I was expecting much better. Tedious segments, useless villains who seemed to be there just for the evils (I'm looking at you, Miss Hardcastle), and cloudy philosophic ideas (which are not, by the way, inherently cloudy, but somehow got tangled in their transfer into fiction). 
_
The Return of Don Quixote. _This was another book where I was disappointed mostly because I otherwise love G. K. Chesterton. Not to mention that the opening premise is hilarious--a librarian, by way of a ladder-stealing prank, gets trapped for three days in the Medieval shelf, and as a result becomes irreversibly obsessed with the Middle Ages. But the premise, unfortunately, kind of just dissipates instead of blossoms. And it's one of the only books that I'd describe as 'dated,'--there's a lot of things which I'm sure made sense to early 20th century British intelligentsia that were completely lost on me.


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## Ralph Rotten (Feb 23, 2021)

I actually just had the inverse of this scenario.
I absolutely adored Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, but hated the movie (Alan Arkin as Yosarian? WTF???)
But then Hulu made a multi-episode version of Catch 22 and I thought "Finally, they'll make it a miniseries and do it right!"

*No*. I sat thru 2 DVDs and was disappointed every step of the way. It was supposed to be *BASED *on the book...but really it was *INSPIRED *by the book.
This thing was about as much Catch 22 as Taco Bell is Mexican food.
They ruined everything...changed the best parts, almost completely deleted Nately's whore, telegraphed Orr's escape, left out Doc Danika's conundrum, screwed up Major Major's promotion, and essentially made Yosarian a snivelling little coward right from the beginning (in the book he grew into it.)
Basically, every part that made you laugh in the book was changed to a less-funny version.
Idiots.


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## Ralph Rotten (Feb 23, 2021)

Congo disappointed me.
The book was _*meh*_...the movie outright stunk.


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## Matchu (Feb 27, 2021)

In the non-fic genre of 'man sails a 10 foot boat' to Antarctica/Norway/Nowhere/Iceland - there are classics - Wayfarer to Norway springs to mind, and Ice Bird (?) written by the Kiwi.  Tho' the other, the famous Kiwi one is rather dull, the chap who collects a tree, makes a boat and sails the Pacific.  Forgotten the title.  A Kiwi will know. [_South Sea Vagabonds_]. Anything by Don Crowhurst, of course, is an inspiration.

- Jack de Crow
1.  Firstly he's a prep school teacher.
2.  He makes teacher jokes.
3. He sails a mirror dinghy along canals, moors up, knocks on rich people's doors, the people from his address book.  And they all say, 'oh no, come in, have a meal, a bottle of wine and be off by morning, you boring d*ckhead.'  And he always reflects, 'the Major and I discussed Heroditus, mysteries of Marco Polo, Finnish linguistics into wee small hours...hoh...I drank two gin and tonics, delicious guinea fowl occasion.'
4.  It turns out he's actually Australian, so the teacher voice utilised up to page 200 is completely wrong, never mentioned on back cover.
5.  He wears tweed.  
6.  Everybody on Amazon says 'this is the best book ever written.'
7. I don't like it.


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## Taylor (Feb 28, 2021)

Ralph Rotten said:


> I actually just had the inverse of this scenario.
> I absolutely adored Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, but hated the movie (Alan Arkin as Yosarian? WTF???)
> But then Hulu made a multi-episode version of Catch 22 and I thought "Finally, they'll make it a miniseries and do it right!"
> 
> ...



A good reason to always read the book first!


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## thepancreas11 (Mar 21, 2021)

Actually just had this experience with the "Band of Brothers" book--the one that inspired the series. The individual people are awesome, and I love reading the letters and the notes. I just don't love the author. He spent the whole book trying really hard to be like, "SEE? THEY'RE LIKE BROTHERS! LIKE A WHOLE BAND OF THEM!"


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## Matchu (Mar 30, 2021)

CATCH-22 is holy book territory.  The 70s film is often slated...but it’s okaaay.  I’d watch it rather than celebrities on ice semi-final.  The trailers for the new series were very provocative as regards smashing the television with house brick.  Other places, I read, they said it wasn’t too bad.

Kind of related wormhole to the endlessly never made ‘Forgotten Soldier’ in terms of film-makers struggling to translate the material. 

Latter era William Boyd?  Felt like a chump as he effortlessly repeated formula - holiday book.


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## Deleted member 64995 (Mar 30, 2021)

American Gods by Neil Gaiman


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## Matchu (Mar 31, 2021)

Yeah, he’s annoying.  I once spent an entire afternoon googling ‘Neil Gaiman’s first ever short story’ so I could find and criticise it - which I did.  Immense joy in the process.


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## Turnbull (Apr 4, 2021)

I really disliked The Things they Carried.  I was recommended it on another writing forums when I asked them what books I could read to understand more about the military and military fiction.  It sucked.  The narrative was this sort of hyper-emotional, exaggerated trite that any high schooler with an emo temperament could pull out of their butt.  Learned nothing about the military, or how to write clear, effective fiction of military professionals working together.


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