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  • Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell. After that book I gave myself permission to DNF though, so it was a maturing experience for me. I mostly wanted to know what happened to Stephen and that's what drove me, along with the "No mere book shall defeat me" attitude.

    I really enjoyed all of the Fae short stories actually. I'm not really a horror fan, but I found Fae, and mortals interaction with it, particularly gripping and memorable. I never put the book down when I was in Fae, trapping me along with the victims, perhaps that's why I wanted Stephen to just be ok.

    It was just everything else in the book I couldn't enjoy. The titular characters I found uninteresting. The setting, fae excluded, I was apathetic about. The structure, the footnotes, dear god the footnotes.

    But the Fae stuff? I'll take 10 more of them in an anthology please.

    • I agree with you about Strange and Norrell. The pacing was poor and it was over-long.

      But!

      Susanna Clarke's next book, Piranesi, is actually really good. Like, really, incredibly good. I recommend it to everyone and so far no one has said anything but positive things about it. I rarely re-read books but this is one that I've come back to.

      As it happens, I read Piranesi first, so I found JS&MN a bit disappointing, but I'm glad I read them that way around otherwise I might have skipped Piranesi, and that would have been a mistake!

  • Fucking “IT” by Stephen King. That book started so good, but it’s about 400 pages longer than it needed to be and the child orgy at the end really didn’t help me cross the finish line. That book became a chore to get through.

  • Fahrenheit 451 but I wanted to put it down because of the bad translation. I switched to reading it in English and everything went smoothly after that.

  • Malazan: Book of the Fallen.

    Having no idea what's going on and not really even being able to comprehend what I'm reading should not be a 'feature' of a fiction book.

    • I know exactly what you mean. It suffers from the very worst fantasy tropes of meaningless words. I did not finish.

  • Moby dick ( complete unabridged edition).

    The parts where they go into detail about whale hunting was like reading a manual, I did not know there where other editions and just got the frost one I saw. Maybe it was my part for not investigating before.

  • Les Misérables. I love Hugo's way of writing, and his descriptions of Jean grappling with his conflicting feelings or breaking down when he was finally shown love were breath taking. There were certain parts of the book in which I couldn't put it down. But the chapters that described the battle of Waterloo and the layout of the Paris sewer system bored me to tears.

  • Solar Bones by Mike McCormack was really bad. It was meant to be 'experimental' but it was literally just a very boring story with, get this, no punctuation (an 'experiment' first conducted about a hundred years ago). There were literally pages and pages where the narrator complained about a building with poorly poured concrete foundations at one point (yes, really). It was quite short, so I got through it, but it was just totally pointless!

26 comments