When to stop reading a bad book?

For me it’s a toss up between that one and Song of Susannah.

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Speaking of books that had promise but the ending wasted the entire thing for me, i can not recommend Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker. I believe i first read about it here at BB early 2010 because it was nominated for a Hugo Award. The setting was quite interesting and i was really into it, and the final 2 chapters i could tell that the author had no idea how to wrap everything up and it just devolved into lazy writing. A major pivotal character dies off the page without much ceremony.

Curious if anyone here read it and what their impressions of it were.

Some parts of it are OK but a very vocal section of the fandom are annoying, to put it mildly.

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Maybe it’s time to move back to serials? Oliver Twist for example came out over the course of 2 years or so. If it wasn’t good all the way through then people just wouldn’t buy the next episodes.

I think it has been tried. Have you heard of this ‘television’ thing? Joking aside, only King and Tom Wolfe have tried to pull this off in recent history.

Graphic novels & comic books for one are serialized stories of sorts. There’s quite a bit of mediocre stuff but there’s also plenty of good titles to invest one’s time and money in :slight_smile:

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Yes! The ‘throw the book across the room because you hate it so much’ rule applies to me and EM Forster’s A Passage to India. I had to read it for Eng Lit in high school and the teacher eventually got me through it but god, I loathed that the first time around.

Other despised books: Lolita because of the repulsive subject matter. That book about an obnoxious arsehole who drives cross-country while being an obnoxious arsehole (not Catcher in the Rye but from a similar time, I think). One by Tim Winton about horses or ghosts or something. Nothing happened.

Having trouble at the moment with The Choke by Sofie Laguna because it’s about an abused child and I just can’t face it right now.

My inner obsessive completionist is fuming.

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Sounds like Kerouac’s On the Road. I got through it, but I gotta say that Updike (or was it Capote?) was pretty much right: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

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Don’t ask.

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I’ve done this exactly once. But only once. Toplin by Michael McDowell. It is super creepy. It dives you into a mind that you really, really don’t want to be in. It’s…off. In almost sane yet highly disturbing ways. It has to be experienced. Or, best, not.

Reading it also helped me to understand allusions in other books.

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How, though?

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i think that is the best chapter of the novel, the whole series being one of the finest novels written by an american in the past 50 years.

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God knows, I could stand to hear the song of the Rose right now…

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Step one: Find a field of red roses

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…on the corner of Second Ave and Forty-Sixth St, in a vacant lot in NYC.

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Opened picture in new tab, saved picture.
Went back to bbs, clicked reply, clicked upload, selected saved picture.
(Which, I presume, is exactly what you did.)

Setup: Sammy Galaxy tablet, Brave.