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Disagree with ending?

The few i read of stephen King were frustrating,not that the end is bad but more like they did not really finish.I don't like open ending very much.I want to know what happened,not guess.

The reverse is often true,Book that were bad until they end.I'm always glad to be finished with a book i didn't like,it's the best part of it,the end.
 
What makes an ending dissatisfying? I read Edgar Sawtelle and found it dissatisfying, perhaps because it didn't have a happy ending.

How about Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee? No happy ending there, nothing resolved. Did anybody find that dissatisfying? How about The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison?
 
Personally, I would rather an author leave a book open ended rather than go overboard trying to wrap things up. One book that I can recall that caught a lot of flack for its ending was Michael Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, but I thought the ending fit in perfectly with the rest of the book and would have taken issue with Faber if he'd felt the need to explain everything away.
 
I suppose it depends too on the type of book you're reading. Would we expect to read a mystery that doesn't wrap things up nice and neat?

I remember reading The Ruins by Scott Smith. In my opinion it was a mediocre book with a awful ending. I just don't know why anybody would write a horror and leave it without resolution.
 
Robert said:
What makes an ending dissatisfying? I read Edgar Sawtelle and found it dissatisfying, perhaps because it didn't have a happy ending.
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I knew the second I saw the title of this thread that someone was going to talk about this book :) I know I'm definitely the minority here, and I don't think I've found anyone else who didn't mind the ending, but I have to say that I appreciated it. I think it would have been sooooo easy to tie it all together and make it a happy ending, and I liked that the author didn't take the easy way out (though some people might think he did, after all). And have you noticed how similar the story is to Hamlet?
Trudy/ Gertrude, Claude/ Claudius, the ghost of the father, etc
. There's a lot about this floating around in cyberspace. I think a book that parallels a Shakespeare tragedy so closely, but then has a happy ending, would have been strange. But that's just me, and I wouldn't expect many people to agree :p
 
My only Patricia Cornwell novel was Blowfly, which I chose for the fabby title word. Imagine my dismay when the horribly portentous villain
isn't shown to do one damn mean thing in the end! He's just caught or something dumb. Oh and the blowflies. Mentioned slightly in passing.
They titled it for suckers like me. :mad:
 
I have to say that one book I was really disappointed with the ending was ¨My Sister´s Keeper¨ by Jodi Picoult. I really enjoyed the book until the ending :(
 
crawford said:
I have to say that one book I was really disappointed with the ending was ¨My Sister´s Keeper¨ by Jodi Picoult. I really enjoyed the book until the ending :(
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I liked that ending because it was so unexpected that I was completely shocked. But you're definitely not the first person that I've heard of to dislike that ending.
 
Robert,

We briefly talked about Disgrace in another thread, if you can remember. I was thinking about it when everyone was sharing their dislike of open endings, and then you mentioned it. Certainly in this novel, I embraced the seemingly abrupt ending. But I don't know if I would appreciate it in other books. I guess it depends on the story.
 
Baz said:
Robert,

We briefly talked about Disgrace in another thread, if you can remember. I was thinking about it when everyone was sharing their dislike of open endings, and then you mentioned it. Certainly in this novel, I embraced the seemingly abrupt ending. But I don't know if I would appreciate it in other books. I guess it depends on the story.
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I do remember and I can't imagine a better ending for that book. I guess I'm still trying to understand what constitutes a bad ending.
 
The only one I could really think of was Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Maybe not that it was bad, but the ending happened so quickly and finished up so bluntly. It depressed me...
 
crawford said:
I have to say that one book I was really disappointed with the ending was ¨My Sister´s Keeper¨ by Jodi Picoult. I really enjoyed the book until the ending :(
Click to expand...
I was thinking the same thing: My Sister's Keeper. What an ending! It turned a deeply serious side of the story to a hilariously funny joke of an ending.

The second book (although I did not read the book but saw both the 50's version and the latest movie) is the War of the Worlds - the space invaders all dying due to our own surrounding environment? What kind of beings would invade into a territory that's unfit to exist in??? Well, other than Napoleon Bonaparte, these were aliens with spacecrafts!
 
I would add Michael Ondaatje's "Divisadero" to the list. I just finished it and was terribly disappointed. His writing style and prose are wonderful. Loved what he was doing with the story, on all fronts, with all the characters. It ultimately felt unfinished though. I'm not one that needs a "happy-all-threads-tied-up" ending, but this was just too short of what should have been the end.

And I'm glad to see complaints about "My Sister's Keeper". I had a copy destroyed by some flooding, but now I know it might not be worth replacing it.
 
The Book of Lost Things - John Connolly - I hated the way it was quickly 'wrapped up'...but then again I didn't like the last three-quarters of hte book anyway! As soon as it went 'fairy-taley' it turned me off.

The Secret Scripture - Sebastian Barry - just far too obvious an ending.

A Quiet Belief in Angels - RJ Ellory - big anticlimax.
 
Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer. Twilight fans know it was so completely anti-climatic. I liked it until the end, but the ending ruined the whole book.
 
Daughter Of God -Lewis Perdue

I enjoyed most the book, seemed fast paced with a lot of interesting text. Till the end when it slowed considerably and the last short sequence seemed to take up 50 pages of pure nothingness....Really they didn't do much but some how they managed to make it last forever trying to escape and run and fight a few people.
 
I didn't much like the ending of Mostly Harmless, the last book in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. I wasn't entirely surprised, because I've found bleakness lurking under absurd humor before. But I would have preferred something else.
 
The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd
Vanished by Mary McGarry Morris
Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen (this one wasn't bad, but I will never read it again)
 
Bringing back Meyer's into the discussion, Twilight's transition into a thriller was pretty lamely done. But the actual ending was decent.

I agree, Gilgamesh, War of the Worlds was also an iconic display of a head-scratching "huh?"
 
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