Criticise books you like, and praise books you hate!

Gonna give myself a second shot at this, just because I can.

A book I like would be Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, which I enjoyed for how all the aliens were shown to be distinctly alien, but still relatable.

Things I didn't like about it:

• Ender, who is supposed to be very good at empathizing with things that are different from him, somehow has trouble seeing the fathertrees as people, and bringing a pequinino to the third life. He killed a dude when he was like six and an entire race of aliens when he was twelve! Come on! Basic squeamishness will not get you out of this one. Nor will a lack of acceptance of their alien biology. Biology and shape are the easiest thing to accept about aliens. Basic anthropomorphization*
  See the page quote rather than the article or laconic.
  is something that everyone does. He makes all these enormous mental leaps to connect with them on their own level. He doesn't project himself onto them, but them onto himself, which is a much much harder thing to do. And yet he can't fully see a talking tree as a person? I call shenanigans.
• I wasn't too fond of him pairing up with Novinha at the end. idk, I'm not a shipper or anything, and it didn't feel forced. Something about it just didn't click for me.

A book I didn't like would be... Well, it's hard to pinpoint any single book when it's best viewed as a series, but A Series Of Unfortunate Events. It's not that I actively dislike or hate it, rather than I'm kind of indifferent and would not be able to recommend the series to anyone else. I found the plot somewhat repetitive and I could not care about any of the characters because they all seemed so unrealistic. Things I did like:

• Even though I was already acquainted with a number of them, I enjoyed how the Lemony Narrator took the time to explain obscure words or narrative concepts. I'm a big fan of books that educate as well as entertain.
• I loved the puns and references in Sunny's dialogue!

edited 10th Apr '12 2:14:12 PM by Sessalisk

Very interesting topic idea. Let's see...

Book I liked: That Hideous Strength

Liked for: Possibly the best blend of fiction and personal philosophy I've ever seen. Literally awe-inspiring descriptions (the "Procession of the Planets" is the single most beautiful passage in English to me). The Arthur mythology was well handled. The N.I.C.E was deliciously dastardly and complex.

Flaws: The female protagonist, while developed, is restricted by obvious, 1950s Anglican stereotypes. The philosophy makes the good guys come of as unwilling to actually stop the bad guys themselves. The finale is a HUGE Deux Ex Machina.

Book that I hated: Cold Mountain.

Disliked because: Says it is about the "South" but represents little more than a faded stereotype of the "South." Sort of like saying Westerns really described the "West." Prose is heavy, plodding, and dull. Harsh romantic feel that doesn't match with the tone it tries to set.

Accomplishments: Does maintain a lovely air of the Carolinas in its scenery. Has a male and female protagonist that are well rounded enough to provide a wide perspective on the time and setting. Is epic in scope, allowing it to explore multiple topics and characters.

edited 16th Apr '12 11:45:11 PM by greatdivorce

Criticise a book you love: I will do The Culture series, because these apply to every book in them.

The names! The worst case of sci-fi naming I have come across. They are unnecessarily long and are usually a random mash of syllables. Even the droids of the series get hit with these bizarre names, only the ships avoid it with their names being hilarious and filled with double meanings.

Characters between books are generally interchangeable: you've got the sexy female special circumstances agent, her snarky psychopathic droid protector and the troubled male roguish outsider. Combining the above complaint with this one makes it difficult for me to remember who starred in which book as they all blend together and feel more like character types than real characters.

Praise book you disliked: Catch-22. Hard to say why i found this book so tedious, but i did. Still it had some good features:

The ending. The final few chapters had emotional resonance that the rest of the book lacked, and made many actions that just seemed "wacky" earlier on seem a bit less of a waste of print in retrospect.

Catch-22 introduced what is now a useful phrase into the English language.

edited 19th Apr '12 2:59:00 PM by MrShine

The Star Wars series Legacy Of The Force is one series that I feel ambivalent towards. So, I going to have to both criticize and praise it!

Criticism:

1. Jacen Solo not only Would Hit a Girl, but would actually kill her dead! He did this at least 4 times, and Karen Traviss wrote 3 of the deaths. I understand that it's supposed to show how much of a Complete Monster he had become, but using a Double Standard is a cheap way to show it!
2. What Happened to the Mouse? was a bit of a problem, especially with Aurra Sing and Niathal...not to mention that whole thing with Corellia.
3. K.T. made a Mandalorians a Plot Tumor in the series, and had Jaina actually go to them to learn techniques on how to kill her twin brother. None of the techniques she supposedly learned from them were put to good use against Jacen.
4. Tahiri suffered Character Derailment when she became a Sith Apprentice wearing shoes for a while. She was obviously not right in the head at the time!
5. Natasi "I Satan" Daala becomes Chief of State of the Galactic Alliance. Big "WHAT?!"!
6. A number of characters seemed to be acting Too Dumb to Live to not only fail to notice that something is wrong with Jacen, but then sit back and not actually do something about it!
7. I thought that whole thing with The Force being broader than just Light Side and Dark Side was an interesting concept. I feel that the Retcon of that concept being just Sith nonsense was an example of They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot!

Praise:

1. While Mara Jade's death was upsetting for me and a lot of people, I feel that it was well-done. She went out like the Badass and Mama Bear she is, and beat the shinola out of Jacen in the process!
2. Luke Skywalker showed his Badassness, and pulled an impressive display of Papa Wolf when he saw Jacen torturing Ben.
3. Ben Skywalker did get a good amount of Character Development, and proves to be badass himself.
4. The last book Invincible made good use of Flash Backs from Young Jedi Knights, resulting in a Tear Jerker when you realize that Jacen used to be so good at being The Hero...before he pulled a Face–Heel Turn.
5. Centerpoint Station finally gets destroyed. About damn time!
6. While the story seems to be ripping off the Prequel Trilogy, I would say that LOTF shows what the PT should have been. It shows a Tragic Hero is not such a whiny b!+c# become a Well-Intentioned Extremist and Slowly Slipping Into Evil as he tries protect his girlfriend and their daughter.
7. The whole idea of Jacen not being bothered by pain, and gaining strength from it was given an impressive Deconstruction. It showed that someone with that kind of reaction to pain would have to be a freak!

Books I like:

Percy Jackson And The Olympians

• Annabeth is incredibly stereotypical at points. In the first book, she was essentially Hermione Granger painted over with a tsundere attitude. After they established her character in the second book, she was still text book tsundere when it came to the romance story line.
• Some awesome background characters were strait up forgotten about. Apollo's son Will, Athena's son Malcolm, Hephaestus's son Charles Beckendorf, and Hermes's sons Conor and Travis all faded in and out of the series inconsistently when they could have been used so much more.
• Even though I'm a Percabeth shipper, the Lukabeth and Thaluke ships were handled rather poorly. I almost felt that the brother/sister relationship note they ended up was almost a cop out the way they built it up for both Annabeth and Thalia. There was also very little input to Luke's past from Thalia, who would be the one to give the most character depth to Luke, as Annabeth was only seven when they traveled around together.
• Not really a huge deal, but in the original myths and in-universe, Athena is dark haired. Yet it was stated in the first book that all of her children are blonde. That doesn't add up, as even if Athena did have a thing for blondes, there would still be a chance that many of them would be dark haired.

Harry Potter

• The romance was handled rather sloppy at times. It was either a Romantic Plot Tumor, or nonexistent.
• Ginny was written in and out, and so inconsistently categorized from girly-girl, slut, nice girl, prude, and back again and again that when she finally got together with Harry, it was just weird.
• As a child of gay parents, I even felt like Dumbledor being gay was from left field.

Books I disliked:

Beastly

• It was a fresh take on the original story of beauty and the beast. I liked that the author tried to put it into a modern setting.
• The characters had potential to be great. It was just unfortunate that their personalities were over shadowed by the romance story.

Twilight

• The werewolf characters were all really interesting, with a well thought out back story and mythos. Too bad Meyers strait up abandoned all of their stories and side plots, including the really intriguing "who's the half brother" plot in favor of the vampires. I would have loved to see more in terms of the pack than the bland as cardboard Cullens.
• In fact, a lot of the back stories were awesome. Rosalie, Alice, Emmet. It was just a shame that they were all forgotten in the pursuit of the romance story.
• As bad as the writing, character development, and personal relationships were, the books actually were compelling.
• Alice is an awesome character. Even people who hate Twilight but have read it will agree that Alice is awesome. She ALMOST made up for every other vampire sucking.

edited 27th Jun '12 10:51:28 PM by ithinkabouttrees

Books I Like:

• The Silmarillion, while my favorite work, is still a ridiculously dense read. There are dozens upon dozens of names and places in the book, and the gloassary is entirely justified and must be consulted all the time. So a book the length of The Hobbit takes five times as long to read...
• World War Z has plenty of blatantly unscientific premises like the zombies being unhindered underwater that make it hard to continue to suspend your disbelief. For that matter, the premise behind the fall of civilization to a slow-acting virus that results in slow moving zombies is also a bit hard to swallow.
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, due to the non-standardization of spelling and grammar at the time, is full of ridiculously long run-on sentences and multiple spellings for the same words. And no matter how important his accomplishments may have actually been, at times it just feels like he's boasting.
• The Man In The High Castle has an extremely disjointed plot with shallow characters. If it weren't for the fantastic way he pulled off the main premise of the book it would have never remotely merited a Hugo Award.

Books I Dislike:

• Michael Crichton's The Terminal Man had some genuinely thrilling moments, and the pains the he took to make the science seem believable showed.
• Casino Royale was quite suspenseful during the Baccarat scene, and the scene where Bond was kidnapped was gruesome to read, but also quite a page-turner at that point. Indeed, during the initial reading, it's rather a page-turner.

edited 13th Jun '12 1:53:01 AM by MrZAP

Book(s) I liked: The Mistborn Series by Brandon Sanderson. Interesting world with an original blend of wuxia fighting, heist movies and epic fantasy. Flaws: Sanderson's dialog is just very flat. I can't remember a single quote from the books. And as much as I liked the characters, they were never very compelling, with the exception of Kelsier.

Book(s) I dislike: The Dragonmaster Trilogy by Chris Bunch. No characterisation to speak of, as generic as they come, awful writing style abrupt nonsensical chapters. Good Stuff: Erm... there were Dragons? Dragons are always cool. Seriously, I couldn't even finish these they were so bad.

By liking the characters despite having no growth, do you mean that you liked their personalities and such, but they had no depth? Like the way one might like a cartoon character despite it having no story depth?

Book I liked: The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury (Okay, I'm kinda cheating)

• The native martians are radically different in each story that includes them (Not including the one with the Catholic Priest, since those were different martians), to the point where it's difficult to pin down their physical appearance, let alone culture. This is due to the format of the short stories (They weren't originally meant as one narrative).
• "Usher II" is darkly humorous, but it's very preachy, and it doesn't fit the tone of the other stories around it at all.
• The ending of the story where that one guy stays behind during the exodus of Mars and meets an obnoxious woman breeds a lot of Fridge Horror.

Book I hated: The Hunger Games, by... By... I'm just too lazy to look it up on Wikkipedia, okay?

• Katniss is an adequate female character. She's boring as cardboard, but at least she has a character that doesn't relate to her vagina.
• Maybe it's just the apiphobe in me, but the tracker jacker scene is pretty messed up, and I like that.

edited 20th Jun '12 2:44:38 AM by Scardoll

Finally, a chance to share my analysis of the Twilight Saga!

The main character makes many decisions that don't make a lot of sense, and/or are outright dangerous. However, if you think about what a person's subconscious desires are, those desires aren't very safe either. Twilight is able to offer an emotional Catharsis Factor for the female audience it was written for. It offers a senario in which an Audience Surrogate makes choices that have positive results, even though if any REAL person were to act in a similar manner, they would have to face harsh consequences.

TL;DR, I don't like the Twilight stories, but I respect Stephenie Meyer's ability to make it feel good to read.

You didn't say anything you liked about it, though. Only what you thought other people might like about it.

But since you didn't, I'll do it instead! I didn't like Twilight as an overall series (far too much romance kerfuffle for my taste), BUT!

I really loved Rosalie's backstory, mainly the part where she puts on her wedding dress and kills all her rapists Kill Bill-style. That was so fucking badass there are no words. If I had to criticise that, it would be because there was only a paragraph of summary of this, rather than a whole chapter going into all the gory details*

Also, Alice was pretty cool. Putting sexy lingerie into Bella's honeymoon gear? lol. She wins at life. Or er... undeath.

edited 26th Jun '12 10:11:16 AM by Sessalisk

Books I liked: Malazan Book Of The Fallen

• The timeline makes my head hurt, and the numbers simply don't make sense. I get the feeling Erikson added on a few extra zeros at the end of every date just to make it more epic (one character is 250,000 years old, for god's sake!), and if I were to discuss the continuity issues in Toll the Hounds, we'd be here all day.
• Erikson tries his best to give every character a unique personality, but he doesn't quite pull it off. Don't get me wrong, when he's on, he's really on - Quick Ben, Toc the Younger, Karsa Orlong and Anomander Rake are all amazingly developed, complex characters. But for every one of those, there's 400 generic tough-talking, wisecracking soldiers. That's a character type I happen to like, but enough is enough, eh? (Could be worse. You could get 400 generic clones of Nimander Golit.)
• Erikson is pushing for epic with his high-magic world and World of Badass. Fantastic, but this is where its gaming-fiction roots begin to show themselves. You can actually see characters "levelling up" and gaining new spells in between books, and as the series goes on, Erikson begins to get obsessed with massive clashes of Badasses fighting each other and showing off their power, ending up in a Deus ex Machina. Remember, if everyone's a badass, no-one is. It begins to get numbing after a while.

Books I didn't like: Inheritance Cycle

• Paolini got more original and matured in his style as he went on, and tried to do some more original things with the world and his plot. It does result in sloppy retcons of the earlier books, but props for trying, at least.
• Uh... the cover art is nice?

A recent conversation with a friend put me in mind of Adventurers Wanted, that ridiculous fantasy novel I liveblogged last year. My friend asked me if there was anything at all I'd liked about it. And it made me think of this topic!

Things I liked about Adventurers Wanted:

• The character of King Osrik, leader of the Dwarves. He's an easygoing guy who welcomes everyone with open arms and is a pretty good host. He also demonstrates his character by actually acting it out, instead of having his traits simply told to the reader.
• Some of the jokes are funny. Like the dwarf desperately attempting to pantomime "one third!" and the bit about fire blinking on and off all night.
• The world's take on Narnia Time is actually fairly unique, in that, when you travel between worlds, you get to pick what age you appear as when you get there. So if you start at age 15 and spend five years in a world before going home to be 15 again, you could be anywhere from 15-20 if you go back to the other world.

So, for contrast, here's a series I do like and am currently reading part of: Dragons/The Last Dragon Chronicles.

• The first three books form such an obvious complete trilogy, the rest of the series is more or less unnecessary. I can only assume it exists to make up for the Bittersweet Ending of Book 3. Especially considering that the already-weird series became so much weirder from Book 4 onwards, with Book 5 being only dubiously child-friendly and Book 6 reading like a completely separate series.
• David's relationship with Zanna feels forced. It was good of the author to attempt to address topics like infidelity in relationships and other struggles (such as from Book 4 onward), but everything is resolved far too easily and without enough real commitment from the characters. It always left a sort of bad taste in my mouth.
• It took a good long while for the very British author to learn to write Americans with a convincing "voice." In the first book, everyone reads like a posh British person, though later books do greatly improve.

Lemme try:

A book I liked:

Snow Crash, Neil Stephenson

While brainy, at times hilarious with the quirky narration and erriely predictive of the future (this was published in 1992? I first read it recently.) I seem to remember thinking that some of the action scenes "tried a little too hard." Over the top wasn't enough, so those scenes tried harder and so counterbalanced the "brains" of the book that they may have taken away from that just a little.

The hated:

Left Behind Series, Tim Le Haye and Jerry Jenkins

- There is only one good thing I can now, in hindsight, say about these books and it's highly personal. I was in a certain place when I was reading them and members of my church at the time gaspsed and got the smelling salts whenever they encountered something in the media that was "too violent." This caused me, in my own budding teenage creative endeavors to tone down the dark stuff that I really wanted to write and some aptitude for. The Left Behind books taught me, definitely, that Christians *can* write violent stuff. They gave me ticket saying "Here are 'faitful' people who aren't afraid to write as nasty as heck!" No one at my old church seemed offended when they read these things and were given scenes of people getting cut in half crushed by walls in earthquakes and such. (They were offended, instead, by the bad writing). While I'm not entirely sure where I am spiritually right now, if I hadn't been reading these very bad, but very violent books at a critical time in my life, I may have nerfed some of my own abilities and raw-ness with my writing work.

edited 5th Mar '14 12:27:39 PM by Shadsie

Classics vs classics...

Book I like: Othello

- Due to being written way back when, it needs proper historical commentary to understand what's actually going on. Too bad that few (if any) sources PROVIDE proper historical commentary.

- Shakespeare uses so much now-archaic language that I have to read him in Russian translations (which, unlike, say, The Iliad, are generally quite good)

I know these are mostly my own problems and not the book's, but when a translation is more accessible than the original, there's a problem.

Book I hate: War And Peace

- OK, I have to admit that Tolstoy's ability to juggle a huge amount of simultaneous plot threads IS impressive, undeniably so. It all appears so natural, which is an achievement when you realize there's so much material that you can't even properly sum up the book without skipping something.

- The phonetics (in Russian) are some of the best you'll ever see/hear.

Also it made for GREAT source material for Sergey Bondarchuk's film adaptation. But that's not really the book's virtue, but the film's.

edited 9th Mar '14 4:15:20 AM by Muzozavr

I don't read books that I hate.

Oh well, here I go...

Harry Potter books do not have enough people of colour. How dare Rowling write seven titles with three protagonists all being white? That's racist!

Let's see how many people miss the joke.

What's the joke?

Well, I expected at least a few to take my post extremely seriously.

Oh, this is interesting. Let me give it a shot.

His Dark Materials (dislike):

• It had a very well-realized world. Consistent and interesting.
• Some of the varied species were fairly interesting.
  
  Words Of Radiance (like):
• It didn't really know what to do with Sadeas. Once he'd fulfilled his narrative purpose in TWOK, he was pretty much there, acting as a hindrance but never really a threat.
• Although it's pretty obvious future books are set to change that, Renarin did very little. Or rather, he was just Out of Focus, he did have an impact with the wall prophecies.

Klark Kent: Well, you could argue the lack of racial diversity as a whole is an issue, but technically, Harry's skin color is never mentioned, and the headcanons where Harry Potter is black is greatly enjoyable ^_^

LUL

He's mixed-race. James was black, and part of the reason the Dursley's hate him is English middle-class closet racism.

I was thinking that when AHR brought that up! It's a surprisingly clever idea. It would coincidentally also make Vernon Dursley an even more unpleasant (and believable) version of the archetypal nouveau riche Thatcherite prat.

I don't read much Fiction books nowadays, but here's my own two cents:

Books I like:

Harry Potter

• I really dislike how the Houses in Hogwarts was handled. Although the books trumpets how choices are more important than houses, the Aesop rarely manifests in the books itself, and the stereotypes persists throughout most of the story. Dumbledore is the Big Good, which is why he is in Gryffindor despite lacking any Gryffindor qualities. The Slytherins were the ones who tried to hand Harry over to Voldemort and were quarantined during the final battle. The only reason the Sorting Hat sees Harry as a potential Slytherin is because he had Voldie's soul fragment in him, etc. Most of the evidence of subversions are not present in the books, but rather from interviews and/or the wiki pages.

Books I dislike:

Inheritance Cycle

• The florid writing style is distracting enough to hide the worse aspects of the books, i.e. poor characterization and contrived plots.
• Despite its questionable heroes, the book does have some interesting character, although they are mostly treated by the narrative as villains, scums or morally ambiguous at best - Elva, Murtagh, and Sloan.

edited 14th Apr '14 1:03:12 AM by theAdeptrogue

Book I liked: The House of Hades

• The romance scenes were boring, yes this includes the Percabeth scenes, and the Jason/Piper scenes.
• Piper was still unlikable, her entire battle with Khione felt like a Deus ex Machina especially when she managed to stab Khione with her dagger and fix Festus the broken dragon with charmspeak. The Power of Love doesn't excuse an Ass Pull, especially when Piper's voice brings the robot dragon back to life, even when it was established before that he was broken beyond repair (even Leo couldn't fix him with his kickass mechanical skills), and I still find it hard to believe that Piper the Faux Action Girl managed to beat Khione the kickass snow goddess.
• Iapetus/Bob and Damasen's sacrifice seems like a cop out to me, so that both Percy and Annabeth can escape Tartarus. I used to think that one hero had to be left behind so they can close the Doors of Death, but no. Rick did another Ass Pull and they both live. I guess he forgot that part about Greek myths being tragic.
• Leo/Calypso No...just no. I liked Leo/Piper better, and why does everyone here have to be in a relationship? Why can't Leo be single and happy? Why can't he realise that he doesn't need a love interest to feel true happiness? The fact that all of our heroes (aside from Nico who's often depressed) is in a relationship implies that one must be involved in a romantic relationship to be truly happy, friendship and hobbies don't count.
• Percy wanting to move to Camp Jupiter with Annabeth and Jason wanting to move to Camp Half-Blood with Piper. Never mind that all their friends would be left behind, who cares about them? Because once you get a boyfriend/girlfriend they're all that matters.

Books I disliked: Twilight

• Leah Clearwater was the best character in the series.
• Tons of room for Alternate Character Interpretation.

edited 9th Apr '14 10:42:14 PM by Bobthetroper