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Fiction you warn people against?

V

Violanthe

New Member
Ever stumble into a book you didn't want to read? Ever rent a video that you wished you had passed over on the video shelf? A book or film you would warn others against? What is it? And why should reader/audience beware?
 
The first example that comes to mind was not my mistake, but my husband's. He rented Arachnaphobia thinking it was a comedy..it had John Goodman, so he figured it was supposed to be funny! Goodman's part was the only comic relief in that film:p
 
eyez0nme said:
lol abcde

must've been scary :eek:
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Oh yeah! But he got his payback a few weeks later when he had to crawl under the front porch deck..he came back out and was really pale..said he just found the cousins to those nasty spiders in that movie:D We still laugh about that..
 
Once during college, the wife(then girlfriend) and I rented Caligula thinking it would be a good history theme film. Boy were we surprised.:eek: :mad: :eek:
 
Simulacra and Simulation, by Jean Baudrillard.

I like philosophy and ideas in general, and was led to believe this was an interesting book to read. I wouldn't know, perhaps it is, I'll just never find out; Monsieur Baudrillard's prose is so obscure I just close the book after a couple of pages. I fear this thinker suffers from a problem that affects several other European thinkers: he does not like writing for laymen.

Honing his communicative skills surely couldn't hurt him. That's what made Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, Steven Pinker, Erich Fromm and other interesting thinkers popular.


I would also dissuade anyone from reading The French Lieutenant's Woman; the novel is dull, dull, dull! There are some amusing bits when the omniscient, self-conscious narrator (let's just assume it's John Fowles himself) steps in and starts talking to the reader, commenting on how he plots the book and writes the characters, telling anecdotes about Victorian times, making comparisons between the 19th century and our times. That's great! I love meta-fiction.

But when he disappears the novel turns into a predictable, banal love triangle about a well-to-do young man who loves a maid, only he's engaged to a well-to-do young woman, and he wants to help the maid, and he helps her run away, and he goes after he, and she rejects him, and he wants her, and he won't have her, and there's probably a suicide in the end, I'm not sure anymore (beats being sent to Australia, though), I just couldn't care less about following the plot after 400 pages of every imaginable cliche being thrown into that fricking book!

Ah, the prose is nothing worth writing home about either.
 
Heteronym said:
I would also dissuade anyone from reading The French Lieutenant's Woman; the novel is dull, dull, dull! There are some amusing bits when the omniscient, self-conscious narrator (let's just assume it's John Fowles himself) steps in and starts talking to the reader, commenting on how he plots the book and writes the characters, telling anecdotes about Victorian times, making comparisons between the 19th century and our times. That's great! I love meta-fiction.

But when he disappears the novel turns into a predictable, banal love triangle about a well-to-do young man who loves a maid, only he's engaged to a well-to-do young woman, and he wants to help the maid, and he helps her run away, and he goes after he, and she rejects him, and he wants her, and he won't have her, and there's probably a suicide in the end, I'm not sure anymore (beats being sent to Australia, though), I just couldn't care less about following the plot after 400 pages of every imaginable cliche being thrown into that fricking book!

Ah, the prose is nothing worth writing home about either.
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God, I had to read that last month for a Post Modern literature class. It was the most painful thing to read since Wuthering Heights when I was 16.
 
Angels in America was horrible. I knew that it would have Roy Cohn in it, unlike my mother who saw the word "angels", but it was still really bad to watch.

I know there have been books that I could list, but none are coming to mind just yet. They'll come to me later and then I shall post them.
 
I thought Angels in America was beautiful.

"in my church we don't believe in homosexuals"
"in my church we don't believe in mormons"

tehehe
 
When I write reviews, I usually try never to say: "Don't read this" but I'm always candid about why I don't like a particular book.
 
Wicked by Maguire. I try to be a little diplomatic about it, but really I hated the book
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What didn't you like about it? I'm not a diehard fan of Maguire's work, so you don't have to worry about being diplomatic ;).
 
Thickney said:
It was the most painful thing to read since Wuthering Heights when I was 16.
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Ditto. That book is a dissapointment. After Jane Eyre one assumes... but then gets it all wrong. It would be interesting to find anyone who acctually likes this book? Personally could not stand it!
 
Blindness by Jose Saramago is probably the most disappointing book I have read. Not the worst, but the most disappointing. From the rave reviews I had been reading, I expected something much, much better.

By all means read it, as I know that a lot of people love it - I'm just warning you that it may not live up to high expectations.
 
When my brother and I were just kids (me 8 and he 11 I think), my parents were told by my grandparents that it was OK for us to watch Deliverance (with Jon Voigt and Burt Reynolds), because it wasn't that scary. I guess my grandparents had it confused with some other movie, and my mother soon made us leave the room. I wish someone hade made me leave when I saw it later as an adult, because it haunted me for a long time and I still think it's really creepy, although jokes about banjo and pigs make more sense once you've seen it ;).
 
Violanthe said:
What were your expectations, exactly?
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From the posts I had read on it, I was expecting it to be an original masterpiece of a book which explored the dark sides of human nature. Pretty much it was being touted as one of the best books out there. I just didn't see that. I didn't take to the style, the lack of quotation marks annoyed me and I thought that the lack of names was necessary and confusing. The plot was alright, I mainly had a problem with the style of writing.
 
I agree with MonkeyCatcher on Blindness except for one point; I thought the lack of names was interesting, although like she said it was unnecessary. The lack of structure was annoying but I felt given the content it was acceptable. Then he uses this same structure in other books! Completely discredits the style choice in Blindness. I went into that book with high expectations as well. There was nothing groundbreaking or new about it. If this book revealed to you the nature of mankind you're an ostrich. I don't warn people away from this book as it's a decently interesting plot driven read which is what most people are looking for. The first thing that came to my mind after finishing this work was "This is Nobel calibre?"
 
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