So i am find my self unable to read books nowadays, i am having this problem where the books books i pick out and buy seem to not have a subtle lead up to the awesomeness. the book I'm reading is The Eyes of God by John Marco and i must say its painful trying to read it. im not even half way through and i have had to put it down for weeks at a time just to get the courage to pick it up again. now my problem is that two of the main characters are having an affair(?) between the mainist characters back, and you can see the whole thing happening from page 10 or something.

Anyways i was just wondering if any of you guys or gals have read this book and does it get better. Also i am reading forest Mage by Robin Hobb, and its just like this one.

P.S. sorry for the bad grammar and stuff.

Never read it.

A painful book for me is any of the Twilight ones. I'm sorry, that kind of plot is horribly cliche and I am tired of people saying OMFG YOU DIDN'T READ IT, because a friend of mine TOLD ME ALL OF IT. -__-; Which might as well be reading it.

I also had difficulties with Season of Passage by Christopher Pike; I read his kid series (can't remember the name right at this second) in middle school and read another book by him involving soul switching and shamanism. But Season of Passage was just... what? It started out with this chick having a nightmare on Mars where she was about to be done by a skeleton, then she wakes up and she's on Earth and was just reading about going to Mars. She goes to Mars, blah blah blah, I got bored and skipped some pages. Read something about a zombie, thought 'yeah, probably some Mars virus' then I skipped to the end and WTFTHERE'SVAMPIRES. W.T.F., how do you go from traveling to Mars to being back on Earth WITH VAMPIRES?! And then the one chick's sister is actually the Queen of the Earth reincarnated and somehow she's aware of who she is from the start of the book. And she was supposed to have died at the midpoint in a fire... Again, WHAT?! Reincarnation!? Faking death!?

Seriously. I like crazy books, but that was over the top. I think he was grabbing at straws in that one...

i have to agree with both of you. I read one of john marco's books, something to do with jackals, and it was horrid. i almost threw it away but i love books to much to do that. And robin hobb has always been a pet peave of mine. his books sound so cool but end up being so lame. i mean apprentice assassin sounds awesome right?? wrong, all it is is a bunch of moaning about the main characters feelings. and the twilight series just plain sucks, and yet all of my female friends say i need to read it cause it has such an awesome story to it, gag. to end your bad reading woo's, i suggest you go pick up Jim Butchers Dresdan Files if you haven't already. a truly enjoyable series in my opinion. the first two are ok, but they get really good after the third. and its only after you read the third and beyond that you realize that the first two weren't his best work. cheers =)

Usually I like the books I read. The only ones I haven't liked were assinged to me for a report or something.

I haven't really read much of anything over the past few years, I've only recently started reading again. And, when I do read, I'm pretty easily entertained... I mean, if it's bad enough that I can complain about it (for reasons other than just being mind-numbingly boring or something), then it's probably bad enough to read just to be able to laugh at how bad it is. :/

If I'm willing to start reading it in the first place, anyway, since I tend to not do that.

Heh, I read both of those you mention in the first post. The two series were pretty painful and a really predictable. I recomend to you Steven Erikson's "Malazan Book of the Fallen" starting with "Gardens of the Moon."

A bit confusing at first, but you get into it pretty quickly.

As far as painful books go, let me direct you to one Great Expectations. It made me want to greatly expectorate my lunch all over the room when I was only a quarter of the way into it. I coudl not finish.

on of the most painful books for me was "The Road of the Dead" MAN was it depressing! it made you want to cut yourself for the main character (fortunatly for my wrists I resisted) I never finished it by the time the library wanted it back

I've had some bad books, (Timescape: I only kept reading it to find out what would happen. The book reads like a physics textbook.) but most of the time my strategy of picking a book based on what catches my eye works out for me (Or I just eenie meenie miney moe it through Pratchett).

But two of the best books I've ever read are Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained. They're a two-part series (Duology?), and while Pandora's star is a bit of a slow read, it's entertaining and just being able to read through Judas Unchained and see it all come together (In a suitably epic fashion) is all worth it.

Grym not to sound like something but the whole reason i picked out The eyes of god was because its cover and just the name of the book was awesome.
cover

Whats your guys/gals favorite book? Mines has got to be the greatest titled book ever, The Doom brigade by Margaret Weis and Don Perrin.

Less like a train wreck and more like a British train in December, I found Eragon thoroughly boring, and put it down most firmly halfway in. Seriously, Paolini, when the knock-off movie they make of your book is more enthralling than the book itself (and that's only because Jeremy Irons was in it), you've got problems.

Ben Bova. Mars. His tendency to contantly, constantly awaken great expectations in the reader to deliver boring ass results can only be explained be sheer malevolence. You read through this long, big book hoping that something big or at least something at all happens at the end... needless to say you get disappointed. And that made me want to personally beat Bova up the time I got throgh with it...

Heh, yeah, I've run into some trouble with that tactic too before.

Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice. It read like they force-fed the author and possibly the main character acid, and transcribed the hallucinations. I forced myself to finish it, just so I could bash the book. Usually, I take my discards to the book exchange, but I still have this one. I just can't bring myself to leave it for some other poor, unsuspecting bastard to find.

I used that tactic once, and I ended up with The Black Company, I'd say I hit that one out of the park.

I am suffering from physical pain just trying to read The Secret Life of Bees. It's not a bad book, but me being, you know, not female really makes it a pain. Unofrtunately, it's madatory summer reading.

I had to read that one too, it is kind of hard to get through the not quite so subtle sexist undertones and not feel slight resentment towards your penis. Then I went and watched some baseball, ate some potato chips, took a nap on the couch, and felt better.

'Kay, so I thought of one. It's not really painful... at least, I though it was rather interesting and amusing at parts, like how it manages to take about 30 pages to explain how a (self-heating) cheese sandwich quite nearly causes the collapse of civilization... But overall, the book is disappointing. It's called Codgerspace, can't remember who it was by. Takes this group of old people on a nifty adventure, brings everything to the brink of interstellar war, and then... nothing. It seems like the author didn't know how and/or want to navigate through everything, and so used a cheap cop out.

Also, the book The Red Badge of Courage? I think I made it as far as page 2, maybe 3, when it was required reading one summer. Most of my classmates didn't manage to do much with it either.

And I suppose I should admit that I hated Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles. Fahrenheit 451 was interesting, I actually managed to read it twice (first time by option, second it was required and partly in-class). But Martian Chronicles, I dunno, I just got sick of it. Maybe it was all the strange metaphorical description. I did finish it, though.

I love to read, but I can never seem to get into old novels.

BUT.

The most painful books I've ever been forced to read for "education purposes", would be To Kill a Mockingbird, and good lord Fahrenheit 451. I never want to see those books ever again. Ever.
Ever.



Ever.

By similar logic, I DO NOT want to read Bless Me Ultima or the Diary of Anne Frank ever again.

. . . yeah, for me it is a lot of the so-called "classics" that came out of the post-WWI and Depression era that I simply cannot stand.

After having fallen behind a bit already, I finally got booted from Honors English my senior year due to my refusal to read a particular book. I can't remember what it was called or anything, but it's a true story about a guy who was, like, upper-middle class and on his way to becoming a lawyer or something, when he goes a bit nuts, disappears, and is found dead a couple years later in Alaska in the middle of nowhere. The author basically did his best to follow the guy's footsteps and talk to all the same people to get the story for what happened between those events.

It wasn't necessarily a bad book. I just couldn't read it, it bothered me on a personal level, and not because the guy died. More, it was putting bad ideas in my head. Or rather, clarifying them and proving things possible. :/

So I ended up back in regular English, with the same teacher anyway. ^^; I still got to go on one of the play trips, though, since there was a spot where someone else hadn't shown up.

okay, no one else but guys or girls from the Netherlands will know these books:

Spijt! - Carrie Slee (Title roughly means "sorry" or "regrets")
De Aanslag - Harrie Mulisch (Title means "the attack", like a terrorist attack)

Okay, the first one is painful, but not because it's so bad. It's because it's so good.
It's about a boy who gets bullied, Jochem, because he's fat and a loner. Nobody listens to him and in the end, he drowns himself. It's a book for teenagers, but still it grasps me, even now. It's not written with a huge morality code or whatever; it's a book every bullied kid could find himself in.

The second one is painful, because it's so confusing, boring and tedious as hell. It's about a Dutch family during World War II, when the Germans where in the Netherlands. An important German officer gets killed by their neightbours, but the body lies in front of their house. Now, they drag away the body, but shit happens and so. This sounds exciting, and the story is: the way it's written, not. He's constantly flashing forward to the period the little boy is an adult and he visits the place he once lived. It's long, boring and unnecessary. At the half of the book, I started to watch the movie; also boring, but it was over quicker

Ugh, I just remembered a Dean Koontz book I couldn't get halfway into. >_<; False Memories; chick has paranoid friend who thinks her ex hubby is breaking into her house to do stuff with her in her sleep, something about a therapist planting ideas with drugged teas, just a bunch of crazy random shit. I am now totally afraid of therapists as a result... O_o

The so called "inspirational" fables really get on my nerves. I found both the Alchemist and Jonathan Livingston Seagull thoroughly boring.

Heh. That's Into the Wild. Namely, the other book I'm going to have to read this summer for Hnrs. CA II