There is another thing worse than an awful book: an awful book that comes at the end of an otherwise amazing series.
Looking at you, Jean M. Auel.
How about an awful shambling corpse of a book that's trying to extend the story from a satisfying ending because the publisher wants more books.
This was the True Blood series for me. The writer had a lot of good ideas, but the way they put the ideas into words (kind of boring writing) and glazed over a ton of characters was so disappointing. Yet I still read the whole series. I appreciate what the show tried to do more now lol.
Yes, omg! And the world building idiocy drove me absolutely insane.
Like, this one part where the were-something (might have been a werewolf?) was like, "only the first born of any pair of weres will also be a were" or something, and the immediate reaction... was to wonder why the were population wasn't taking over the whole country or whatever. And the were took that seriously, saying the only reason their population wasn't huge was a large number of stillbirths and such.
They try to backtrack that a few books later, and deal with the actual consequences of the fact that they literally can't increase their population without polyamory - clearly someone informed the author of how stupid that was - but still, that initial response was some of the most obviously not-thought-out world building I've seen.
... okay, maybe that's not true, but some of the worst I've ever seen in a book I continued to read, anyway.
Agree, that part made no sense! If only the first born can be a Were, it wouldn't matter if they swapped partners because the man/woman each could only have one. Trying to backtrack that made it unnecessarily confusing.
The books also made me appreciate the show so much more. I love how they fleshed out Jason's personality and others that were just glossed over in the books, and Jess's addition. I also understand why the show kind of went off the rails near the end, because the books did too lol.
Good books utterly ruined by shitty narration as audiobooks fucking destroy me.
The Stormlight Archive series is even worse, as they split time between Michael Kramer (amazing) and his wife Kate Reading (fucking abominable).
I’m pretty fond of both narrators (though I do wish they had decided on pronunciations ahead of time), but I can’t stand the switching. Either have a dedicated reader for each character, or stick to one narrator for the whole thing, imo.
Kate Reading has done a fine job on other novels in the past.
For the Stormlight books, she puts on this ridiculous tone like she's trying to emulate Judge Judy lecturing an idiot in her courtroom, and it's not just that she pronounces names differently than Kramer, but that she can't even keep her own pronunciations consistent even within the same sentence.
I had to give up listening and get print versions because I could not stand how awful she is.
That was what Three Body Problem was for me, cool idea but the writing wasn't very good.
But I don't really like Chinese TV either, they have some weird story conventions that I just don't get. Characters suddenly behave like best friends even though they just met, others are suddenly introduced without context, no one is a stranger so everyone knows everyone and randomly meet each other in the streets (how likely is that in Beijing...), people kinda teleport to other locations instead of showing the journey, things like that.
Same book for me.
I'm almost finished with the Netflix TV adaptation and feeling weird about it. It's better than the books because it has characters with emotions and character words. So it's better than the book. But then they went ahead and game of thrones it and it isn't good either. But I'm some how still watching it.
And every day I wonder, why!
What actually is the premise of Three Body Problem? I hear it's good, but the synopsis and ads don't really tell me what the hell it's about. I'm afraid if I look harder I'll end up spoiling shit.
This is mainly from my general recollection, so hopefully I didn't get the details wrong.
The story follows two timelines. One just after the cultural revolution in China and the either in present day China. In the first timeline, through the zealousness of the cultural revolution a young woman is swept away to work for the communists at the edge of the country. A mixture of unfortunate and fortutious events quietly places her at an important crossroads for humanity.
In the present timeline, a number of prestigious scientists have committed suicide. This has raised the interest of an international body. They invite one particular scientist who unwraps the mystery of the scientists and the plot behind them. As he unravels more of the mystery, the story splices in relevant information from the first timeline showing how the seeds of the present day events were start forty years before.
Hopefully I didn't reveal too much. Anymore would have.
This is one of the reasons I think remakes shouldn't be of good movies everyone already loved; it should be done to movies that had a good idea but were otherwise garbo. Like Downsized. Great idea! Terrible movie that focused on a dumb love story instead of the actually cool idea of being shrunk down to escape crippling inflation and outrageous rent prices.
I had this happen to me when I watched aldnoa zero interesting mechs and intriguing combat scenarios but man are the characters boring and the politics and motives of the world are just dumb but it has just enough good concepts to make me genuinely pissed about liking the show because it boring by all means but it's interesting enough for you to not forget about it
The Matrix. Trying to ignore the weird bdsm fetish shit to enjoy the concept of its digital world is a slog.
