There are perfectly legitimate reasons not to have read works widely regarded as science fiction and fantasy classics. Perhaps the most compelling is that the field is far too large for any one person to have read all of it, even if they were to limit themselves to works other readers enthusiastically recommend. However, there are other reasons, some quite silly, to have left promising books unread. Here are five of my stupidest reasons1 for not having read a widely-praised book cover to cover.
Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin (1985)
Always Coming Home is a fictional anthropologist’s account of the Kesh, a pacifistic, low-environmental impact society of a very distant future. Superficially primitive, they have a sophisticated toolkit which they to apply in ways very different from standard 20th century operating procedures.
This sort of thing is my delight, at least in the context of roleplaying games. I own shelves of Traveller books detailing futuristic societies. I own the massive two-volume set Glorantha source book. I have bookcases full of roleplaying settings. But…package this sort of speculation into a novel and for some reason I cannot connect. I’ve owned this book for thirty-six years and have never gotten past the first chapter. In fact, my memory is so resistant to the work that I own several copies; I kept forgetting that I already owned it and buying another one.
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Nightside the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe (1993)
First novel in the The Book of the Long Sun series, sequel to the award-winning Book of the New Sun, this book recounts the beginning of an epic quest set within a vast generation ship. It is full of sophisticated allusion and written in award-winning prose. Or so I gather, because I have never read it.
Wolfe was famously literarily ambitious in a way that few SF authors are. My sensibilities have been honed on, uh, considerably less ambitious works. I am painfully aware that were I to attempt any discussion of Long Sun, my attempts would likely resemble someone trying to discuss a famous painting, like Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838, by commenting on the painting’s frame. Developing the skills to read Wolfe would be taxing and success is not guaranteed; thus I avoid the work.
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Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner (1987)
The first novel in Ellen Kushner’s secondary-universe melodrama-of-manners Riverside series, Swordspoint details the efforts of the astonishingly short-sighted Lord Horn to force Richard St. Vier—arguably the deadliest duelist in Riverside—to accept a contract St. Vier rejected as beneath him. Other people might hesitate to infuriate a man whose primary skill is murder but not Lord Horn. Who, by the way, is unlikely to appear in sequels to Swordspoint.
Despite having owned a copy of the mass market paperback since it was released, I did not read this because I somehow convinced myself I’d already read it. It would be nice to say I’d somehow confused it with Melissa Scott’s 1995 Point of Hope but since I didn’t read Point of Hope until 2017, that’s impossible. I did at least discover my error and rectify my oversight.
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In Conquest Born by C. S. Friedman (1987)
The Azean Empire has the misfortune to border territory claimed by incessantly warlike Braxi. Azea and Braxi have signed a multitude of peace treaties, each one worthless as soon as the Braxi find an excuse to restart hostilities. In Anzha, Azea has a champion who might lead Azea to victory over Braxi. Pity that the Empire is steadfastly racist and Anzha manifests a forbidden phenotype.
It happens that my brain is really good at associating events that I experienced in the same timeframe, events that were otherwise completely unrelated. Thus, if I walk by a specific location near the corner of University Avenue and Seagram Drive, I think of Niven’s All the Myriad Ways; if I walk through the right section of the University Waterloo Bookstore, I think of the Pyramid edition of the Lensmen books. In the case of C. S. Friedman’s In Conquest Born, I attended a party a couple days after I destroyed my knee and then stubbornly walked around on it for a day. The party was crowded, and as I discussed In Conquest Born with an avid fan of the work, people kept jostling my injured leg. To this day, any mention of In Conquest Born makes my left leg ache from hip to foot. I did eventually manage to read it despite this distraction…in 2019.
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The Quiet War by Paul McAuley (2008)
This is the tale of a total war. On one side, the Outers who having developed the means to live in the outer Solar System, have created a flourishing community in that bleak realm. On the other, Greater Brazil, a corrupt ecostate whose self-serving oligarchs regard the Outers as an ideological affront and resolve to carry out a bold land-grab.
When this novel appeared, there were not many new SF books set in the Solar System. Certainly, there were not many whose authors tried as hard as McAuley to create a plausible hard SF setting without the usual shortcuts like implausibly efficient fusion drive. If you know me, you might guess that I fell hard for this book.
I didn’t. I had first read the sequel, Gardens of the Sun, which means I know how The Quiet War has to end. The sequence is a lot bleaker than anything I cared to read back in 2008. I own the whole series but my tolerance for unrelenting grimness is if anything even less than it was. I have no idea when or if my copies will get read.
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There are other ludicrous reasons not to have read books, reasons I didn’t have space to cover—reasons such as cover art too embarrassing to be revealed in public.2 Perhaps you too would like to tell us why you haven’t read something that you, as a sophisticated reader, should have read. If so, comments are below.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and the Aurora finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]I don’t consider my current inability to even contemplate reading books longer than four hundred pages (in one sitting) stupid. [Note: reading for more than seven hours straight leads to eyestrain. Personal experience.] It’s just that it’s incredibly annoying and limiting, particularly when I have the “Deepnight Revelation” box set and half dozen ancillary hardcovers to read and I cannot muster the will to pick up the first book.
[2]Bear in mind that SF fans of my vintage got very used to explaining to teachers that no, the book in hand was not pornographic. It was just that Disco-era publishers were convinced that gratuitous nudity was the key to sales. Thus, the Diadem edition I think of as “Aleytys’ Quest for Trousers.”
Is it fair to not read Always Coming Home because the music on that cassette that came with the original edition annoyed one? (Asking for a friend.) (He’ll get around to it someday! Also the cassette was lost during some bookshelf reshuffling …)
I have all the books in the Long Sun series (and the sequel Short Sun). I read them once, at least 15 years ago, and no matter how hard I try I cannot either pick them up to re-read, or get rid of them. They sit there, on my shelf, taunting me.
1: I don’t think any of my copies came with music.
(There’s another book I could mention that came with what I assume was the best sound track of which they were capable, whose virtues alas escaped me. No doubt someone enjoyed it, if only the performers)
I was astonished to discover while watching the movie of Battle Royale that despite decades of desensitization to movie violence I really, really do not want to watch kids getting brutally murdered. The sunk cost fallacy got me through Battle Royale but I’ve avoided as best I can the Hunger Games books.
Younger Sibling Syndrome: In order to avoid having my personality trampled by my extremely strong-willed older sibling, I developed a strong contrarian streak which led me to automatically rejecting anything anyone told me I HAD to try–regardless of whether it was intended as a command or simply an enthusiastic recommendation. Thus, any books that were presented to me as “must-reads” immediately became “must-not-reads” in my brain. It’s taken me many years to undo that impulse!
My excuse for not reading A. E. van Vogt’s Voyage of the Space Beagle is that I read his World of Null A, which I had difficulty reading. However, VotSB sparked in me an interest in general semantics that has long since waned.
James: The hardcover of always coming home came boxed with a cassette. The book club softcover, which I own, also came boxed with a cassette. In this day and age, no one owns cassette players any more, but it is possible to stream the music or even to be a 20th century primitive and pay money for a CD of the music. The album is called “Music and Poetry of the Kesh.” To see a boxed set of the book and its cassette, Google image search for “Always Coming Home Hardback Book and Cassette.”
Ah, I could have used eggplant as a metaphor. My first introduction to eggplant was a stewardess shaking me awake to shove a plate of eggplant at me during a long, slow airplane trip from Brazil to Canada. Consequently, I avoided eggplant for twenty or thirty years until an ex demonstrated to me that it wasn’t that I disliked eggplant. I just didn’t like being suddenly woken and presented with it.
I wonder how many of books assigned in high school that I didn’t care for I’d like better now that I can read them without worrying about the impact on my marks? Although it’s hard to imagine liking A Separate Peace, or any version of Tess of the D’Ubervilles that doesn’t involve Angel and Alec tied up in a sack and trampled by elephants. I do understand that the monumental injustice of Tess is the point.
5: I encountered Voyage of the Space Beagle first and then proceeded to bounce off a long sequence of VV books that were not Space Beagle. Damon Knight could have saved me a lot of time…
@@.-@ Louise: automatically rejecting anything anyone told me I HAD to try–regardless of whether it was intended as a command or simply an enthusiastic recommendation
No older siblings required. I was the eldest of 4, but I too developed a refusal to read anything that was being read by “everyone” else. I am staunchly resistant to anything that smacks of “fad.” Fortunately, I read LOTR a few years before this resistance developed (not telling how many years ago *that* was). But it did mean that I didn’t read the Vorkosigan saga until 2019.
I could get by the porny covers popular in the 1970s but high school life was unpleasant enough I didn’t care to give people easy shots at me by reading books by authors whose names were clearly penis jokes, so I avoided for some time the Elric books and The Man in the High Castle.
@8/JDN: I read a few other VV works in my adulthood. VV, IMO, had great ideas, but poor execution. I also read Knight’s critique of VV’s works, but only after I had already read VV. So, I was not spared.
Regarding embarrassing cover art: I have a copy of Doris Orgel’s <i>The Princess and the God</i>, which is very good, but I keep it hidden in a drawer due to the cover art. For a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche aimed at roughly 11- or 12-year-old readers, I’d be curious to know who approved, uh, this.
When The Eye of the World came out, my brain had a serious misfire and decided the cover art was chock full of anthropomorphic animals (I have no idea why), which led me to put it back on the shelves in revulsion. A few months later I looked again and bit.
@7: A few years after I escaped high school, I was given a free copy of The Great Gatsby at the opening of a bookstore, which a few weeks later I read rather than schlep out for new books and found to be not bad. On the other hand, nothing will ever induce me to read Dickens[1].
[1] I do not say ‘again’ because I found all the Dickens I was assigned to be so sloggish and boring that I never read past the first few chapters.
My reason for missing out on the Vorkosigan books is so petty I can’t even remember the details, but it had something to do with Cetaganda being serialized in Analog. I think teenage me was irritated they were doing a middle book with a name I didn’t understand in a series I hadn’t read and didn’t know where to start, and this general sense of irritation clung to the series for years. Thank goodness for Jo Walton’s glowing recommendation on here many years later, or I would have missed out on one of my all time favorite series.
Let’s see, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. Tried three times and never got past the first three chapters. I did finish Unfinished Tales with no problem. Maybe it’s because the Silmarillion was finished by his son and another author and didn’t do J.R.R.’s work justice.
I love Le Guin, more than life itself, but I have tried and failed several times to get into Always Coming Home.
I read and enjoyed all the Long Sun / New Sun novels, but I do have a beef to pick with Wolfe. Which is that, most of the time, the riddles he packs his books with are not exactly very consequential. In short form, like in his Cerberus novellas, it works better and it is more to the point (you’re trying to work out who is cloning whom, and which of the characters are, or are not, from Earth stock). But, in the novels, it’s just exhausting, and not particularly relevant. Diehard Wolfe fans will probably disagree, but there you have it.
And I do have a BIG beef with Swordspoint: it’s much too short! Too short! Do you hear me, Ellen Kushner? I want to read entire tomes about the adventures of Strong Silent Time St. Vier and Uber Moody Princeling Alec.
I’ve found timing to be an important factor for whether or not a certain book “clicks” with me. There are a few books in particular that I started when I was a teenager, but they didn’t hold my attention for whatever reason. RRestarting them as an adult with more perspective allowed me that connect quicker and enjoy them much more. Sometimes a book centered on loss or grief doesn’t seem appealing unless you’ve experienced similar struggles and see more of yourself in the text.
The same goes vice versa, too; some books I loved as a youngster have glaring flaws or problematic aspects that make them much harder to enjoy now.
I deliberately developed the habit of carrying books around with my hand covering the spine, the front cover facing inward to my hip, and the back cover mostly blocked by my arm. Some of these books were good enough that I didn’t want a gratuitously porny cover to stop me from reading them.
@14/PMM: I can sympathize with you regarding Dickens. He was required reading in my middle school English classes in the mid-1970s, to wit: A Christmas Carol; A Tale of Two Cities; and Oliver Twist.
I’ve known authors who lamented their publisher’s choice of blurb providers, because at least some readers will conclude that if the person recommending the book is, to pick a theoretical example, loudly opposed to gay marriage and other civil liberties, then the author of the book being recommended must be as well.
I resisted reading a series that was right up my alley because I resented it for not being the series I was a fan of. When I was in high school, there were two fantasy authors with similar names who were close in the alphabet, and when I went to the bookstore to see if there was a new book by my fave (what you had to do in the Dark Ages before the Internet), I’d glimpse a book in this other series and for a brief moment thought it was the book I was hoping for, then was crushed to realize it wasn’t. The other author wrote faster than my fave was writing at that time, so this happened a lot, and the resentment grew. I felt like that other author was deliberately taunting me. Only recently, many years later, did I actually try that other series, and learned I could have been having a lot of fun while waiting for new books in my preferred series.
I’ve also resisted reading books by an author I liked that weren’t about the characters I liked (either another series or a prequel/sequel/sidebar to a series I was reading). Almost without fail, when I finally give in and read those books, I end up liking them better than I liked the original series I was being faithful to.
For a long time I skipped reading A Song of Ice and Fire even though I had seen recommendations for it again and again, probably well into the third or fourth season of the Game of Thrones television show. First because the title of the saga just sounded really boring to me, and second because I didn’t see how it could be all that great, being written by “that Wildcards guy”.
Most of the other books I miss out on are because I just don’t have the energy to read older books when so many modern, and thus easier to read, books are on my to-be-read list. At the top of my neglected stories are Eddison’s The Worm Oroborous and Peake’s Gormenghast. Someone please tell me they aren’t all that so I can stop feeling vaguely guilty.
@12: One review there of “The Princess and the God” says, “I recommend it to everyone who is interested in the Greek mythology, romance and a bit of action.” It, uh, seems to live up to that. If it’s a school reading book, I expect someone didn’t notice what the clouds on the cover were getting up to.
My excuse for not starting the Vorkosigan series earlier was that I ‘didn’t do space opera’. I still don’t do much, but I do Bujold, any and every.
My dumbest reason: I often don’t read something if I really really want to read something. It’s because the hype in my mind often leads to disappointment, so I have to let myself calm down to read some books. Unfortunately, this has led to me forgetting to ever read the books because I have so many on my TBR pile.
I don’t know if it counts as ludicrous, but there are some series (Bujold’s Vorkosigan and Cherryh’s Foreigner in particular) that I haven’t started because I didn’t start reading them when the first books came out and now there are eleventy-billion books in the series and it’s just kind of overwhelming to contemplate.
There was a discussion on twitter, I think, about what I will call Lore Fatigue in RPGs, where the quality of background material available is enough to deter newbies under the impression that they need to know all of it before beginning.
I haven’t read anything by Sanderson because I hated his writing in TWOT so much, especially how he wrote Matt Cauthon. Friends tell me I would really enjoy The Stormlight Archive series but I can’t make myself pick one up.
@23: Don’t despair, many people bounce off Eddison and Peake. Of Eddison, Ursula Le Guin in her landmark essay ‘From Elfland to Poughkeepsie’ said that “He really did write Elizabethan prose in the nineteen-thirties”, but that “Many, with reason, find him somewhat crabbed and most damnably long” (quoting a line from ‘Worm’). If you like archaic language he’s the real deal, but you have to take a deep breath and plunge your whole head into that bucket of water. I read it once and appreciated it, glad I read it, but don’t have the fortitude for a re-read.
I got through ‘Titus Groan’ but decided not to continue. I understood what Peake was doing but had enough of his distinctive style and characterization. I’m sure I missed some good bits in the other two large books, but you know…world enough and time, as you point out.
I have failed to read Stranger in a Strange Land multiple times, mostly because after a few pages, I wanted to roll my eyes hard enough to give myself a concussion from the inside.
My college professors had a thing for the Divine Comedy. It was on the reading list for multiple English and history classes. Guess what I’ve never even opened? Also on that list: Paradise Lost. Well, I’ve read the first section. Painful.
Well, if the premise is ludicrous reasons, then I suppose I can’t think of any off the bat. But some sorting mechanism is necessary to account for a reader’s limited time, until it becomes possible to download books/texts directly to our brains.
One of my key ways to sort is whether an author is an a-hole or not. Despite the supposed Death of the Author touted by some French lit crits, some authors can’t shut up about their personal beliefs. For me, this ties into the celebrity syndrome where some famous people feel it’s perfectly fine to vent their mental noise on the public. Some examples of this, both celebrities and authors, are truly odious and obnoxious.
One counter example is Steven Erikson. Last year brought about a renaissance of interest in the Malazan world. After watching some videos of Erikson in discussions or interviews, I started reading the main series and am currently on volume 3, Memories of Ice. He appears to be a fine human being (self-deprecation goes a long way), which fits with a series featuring prominent themes of empathy and compassion.
Hypothetically, I’d have to abandon his works if it turned out he was a terrible human being. Thankfully, this seems highly unlikely.
@33: Thank you for including the positive example, here!
@ALL: I’m sure everyone can name authors they choose to avoid for one reason or another, but that feels like a different topic, beyond the scope of this article. So let’s stay on track and keep the focus on books/fiction going forward…
One enormously stupid sorting method I have used to good effect is due to learning to read by memorizing each word as its own symbol, which speeds recognition at the cost of spelling. Consequently, I’ve confused authors because their names begin and end with the same letters, and avoided someone’s work because I was thinking of someone else.
It would be funny if one example was Evelyn E. Smith and Edward E. Smith but sadly it’s not.
Perhaps a separate article on sorting methods would be interesting…
I could totally do five ludicrous reasons I’ve picked up books.
Looking forward to it.
I have a “problem” when what was promised as a “duology” or a “trilogy” turns into four or five books with no resolution in sight. That’s why I gave up on “Riverworld,” for instance. And while I can respect that an author may need time away from a series, I can find it very hard to pick up again after a hiatus of more than a couple of years (cf Card’s “Alvin Maker” novels), since I find that too often means carving out a chunk of time to go back and re-read the earlier books again.
@7 @14 @20 re Dickens. When I was in 8th grade, my father suggested I might enjoy A Tale of Two Cities. I read it, and he was right, I enjoyed it. In 9th grade, it was required reading in English and I hated it. Go figure.
I’ve done the reverse snobbery response a few times: if it’s that popular, it must be dreck. Occasionally true, more often not.
I didn’t get very far into Robinson’s Science in the Capital series – and I *like* his work – because early in the first book, some years ago, the main character was rushing off to a meeting via the DC metro. The scene was so well-written that I knew exactly where he was; it’s not my Metro stop but it’s not far. And then the character inserted a paper fare card to enter the station. At the time, paper fare cards were still available (they aren’t any more) but they were primarily used by tourists or people who used the system infrequently. A local who went downtown for meetings often would have had a reloadable fare card and slapped it against the card reader at the turnstile. And that ridiculous little point bounced me out of the book so hard I never got back.
Otherwise, most of the classics I haven’t read are things I’ve tried that just Aren’t My Cuppa, and there’s nothing ridiculous about that.
I’ll tell you a silly reason I didn’t finish a pretty good book. About ten years ago, there was word that Harrison Ford was going to play Wyatt Earp in an adaptation of Black Hats. So I quickly got a copy of the book, read it all the way up to the last chapter and stopped — so I could see the ending in the movie first, then compare it with the novel. (Don’t ask me why I did this.)
But they never made the movie. And now the book still sits on my shelf, unfinished. Maybe I’ll pick it up again some day, but I’ll probably need to read the whole thing again at this point. I should’ve just finished it then. Stupid Hollywood. Better yet, stupid me.
@36 Yes, please. I would enjoy ludicrous reasons for picking up books. I have a few of those myself.
I didn’t want to get involved in the Harry Potter pandemonium because I snobbishly thought, “Why does everyone care so much about children’s books?” Then the first movie came out and I rented it on DVD just to see what the big deal was. After watching it, I decided it might not be a bad idea to go read the book…and then I found myself at midnight release parties for books 5-7 and feverishly theorizing with other fans online…
I tend to avoid books with exceptionally prestigious awards. Just recently I was browsing the library app on my phone and was drawn to a cover and title. Then I looked closer at the little circle in the corner. “Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.” And I was like, “Oh. Oh no. Not right now.” Something about thinking a book is going to be heavy makes me reluctant to pick it up, even though I generally enjoy those reads. There’s just this mental starting barrier if I know ahead of time to expect it.
I have never read a word of The Wheel of Time, partly because there are so very many words and partly because I dislike the names of the characters. I cannot possibly warm up to someone named Rand al’Thor, I just can’t.
To be even more ludicrous. I have never read the “Malazan” books because, every single time, I have to stop and correct myself from seeing the word as “Mazalan,” and it annoys me.
And even as we speak, I am failing for the third time to read Like Water for Chocolate. I don’t usually have a problem with magical realism, but once again, I don’t think I’m going to get past the second chapter. Maybe it’s the thought of all those eggs.
Thank you, JDN, for a delightful post which set off one of the most fun set of comments ever. I can’t think of an original ludicrous reason for not having read a fine book. Like you, I have certainly at times falsely convinced myself that I have read a never-read book, due to the familiarity of the cover after its long languishing in my possession and the fact that I heard or read about its content in the distant past.
JDN: I hope you’ve read Le Guin’s Changing Planes? All world-sketching and “anthropological” fun, but in short-story-sized bites. A favorite of Jo Walton’s, so you needn’t take my word for it. But it’s one of my top-five favorite short story collections.
I look forward to the ludicrous reasons for choosing to read a book! I may have something original to contribute on that thread.
It’s definitely true, IMO, that being coerced into reading something for school, especially when one may be too young to fully appreciate it, can be a huge barrier to later enjoyment of that book or that author. I *so* wish more high school kids would be assigned to read, say, A Wizard of Earthsea or Enchantress from the Stars or Shadowshaper, rather than The Great Gatsby or Great Expectations or Great Whatever They Won’t Enjoy. Plenty to talk about in those three books, idea-wise as well as writing-wise.
@@@@@ 31: Stranger in a Stranger Land is one of the most overrated, overhyped, and overripe books in the history of literature in general and SFF in particular. A true headscratcher.
I do love Dante and Milton, though.
@0: I may have tried to read Wolfe’s “New Sun” books when I was too inexperienced, but the first two depressed me sufficiently I’ve never either restarted or finished the set. To me, his work was summarized by a panelist who observed that the basic unit of construction of a Gene Wolfe story is the trapdoor.
@17: The Privilege of the Sword is set a couple of decades later; the SFBC omnibus Swords of Riverside has both of these novels and some short pieces.
@43: I skipped our local book club the month they read a Doris Lessing book, based partly on reviews back when it was published (including a favorable review from someone who sounded as if they liked capital-L Literature and despised SF) and partly on my estimate of the tastes of the people who awarded recent Nobel Prizes in Literature.
With you on Always Coming Home, even though Le Guin herself hyped it as one of her best books. Swordspoint, however, is a quick light read, a couple hours of your life well spent, if you’re into sophisticated literate fantasy.
Haven’t read any of Martin’s “Game of Thrones” because it was recommended to me by a guy who swore it was the best fantasy novel ever. Unfortunately for Martin, this recommender promised to do something for me and didn’t do it. I gave him a second chance, and he failed to do it again. So I will never read “Game of Thrones.” The rest of the world can read and love “Game of Thrones,” and more power to them and it’s fine George R. R. Martin makes all that money, but I will never read that book because that would validate this person’s opinion.
I started reading “The Puppet Masters” and thought it was okay. Then I got to the point where the hero realizes that the Martians might have taken over the USSR but decides it doesn’t matter because America will defeat the Martians all alone. I was in 7th Grade, and I said to myself “Who the hell got to Berlin first? If we couldn’t defeat the Nazis without the USSR, how the hell can we defeat Mars without the USSR?” I stopped reading the book right then and I’ve never read any Heinlein since.
If you’re picking up the Malazan series, be aware that only 1 or 2 of the umpteen mysteries brought up in the books are resolved. You don’t get answers for a LOT of the issues from the first 8 or 9 books.
Also, Books 9 and 10 are pretty grim-dark, that is, a lot of good people die or wind up in horrible situations. There are not many good outcomes, there is no hope, all is despair and darkness. I really regret reading Books 9 and 10.
@44. Amaryllis: it’s worse than that! Even fans of the series pronounce it different ways: Muh-lah-zan versus Mal-ah-zan. At least it’s not Marzipan…
@49. MikeBSG: “Unfortunately for Martin, this recommender promised to do something for me and didn’t do it. I gave him a second chance, and he failed to do it again.”
That’s a bit confusing. You expected the guy to so something for you other than a recommendation?
@50. Ha Nguyen: I am not averse to spoilers in the least. So I’ve watched many Youtube discussions of the novels (some in detail and depth) and have some grasp of where they are going. I don’t mind mysteries either. There are still books being written in that world from both co-creators, planning to pick up various threads. I also dislike spoonfeeding and handholding by an author. So far, Malazan is working for me.
School made me wary of Dickens, but I found that I enjoyed reading “Bleak House”, for some reason other than the self-combusting character. YMMV, obviously.
I put off reading Lord of the Rings because it was so popular. I think it was just a couple of years, though.
I did not pick up Gene Wolfe books for years because I had him mixed up with Jack Chalker (don’t ask me how that happened, I have no idea) and Jack Chalker’s books were not the kind that made a good impression on a twelve year old girl happening across some copies at the used bookstore.
This conversation reminds me of browsing on Netflix/Amazon Prime. There are plenty of films which fit my tastes exactly and which I never watch because they’re exactly the sort of thing I would watch; there are films I won’t watch for no other reason that they’ve been nominated for an award and there are the films which I do end up watching and enjoy, maybe because I have no preconceptions about them – e.g. Boss Level, The Lego Batman movie. Classy, huh?
I read Tale of Two Cities last year, funnily enough. The big problem is that the mc – that lawyer – is dramatically inert as a character. There should be something that gives him second thoughts, some evidence of an interior struggle. What we get instead is a guy full of self-loathing who’s in a big hurry to die, which isn’t all that compelling (at least, it wasn’t for me) especially as he gets exactly what he wants.
@49 on The Puppet Masters — no Martians in that book? The slugs are from Titan. (However, the Russians still beat us to Berlin, and certainly did a huge amount of the grinding in WWII. And then wow did they make things awful for the countries that fell into their zone!)
Bruce McAllister’s HUMANITY PRIME has been in my TBR pile since 1972 when I bought it. The dumb reason for not reading it in all the years since is:
It was the first Ace Science Fiction Special to come out after Leo and Diane Dillon had been dropped as cover artists for the Specials. I’d read almost all the Specials that had come out before then, loved most of the actual contents, and definitely loved the Dillons’ covers. Plus I’d read and enjoyed some of McAllister’s earlier short stories and enjoyed them, so my not reading HP wasn’t his fault.
But HUMANITY PRIME didn’t have a Dillons cover. And every time I’ve picked the book up in the years since, I’ve felt such a wave of disappointment that I’m unable to open the pages and read the novel. The Davis Meltzer cover is perfectly fine, bright and colorful…but not the Dillons cover I wanted to see.
(I went on to read later books issued in the Ace Science Fiction Specials, but that first non-Dillon cover…just can’t get past it.)
Always Coming Home is hard to get into, but the struggle is worth it.
As to Dickens, my theory is that curricula are intended to vaccinate you against learning and literature, so you avoid both after schooling ends. After being forced to read Tale of Two Cities and Silas Marner, all I wanted to do was guillotine sweet Lucy Manette and Little Eppie. It took a LeGuin essay about Dombey and Son to bring me back to Dickens in my 20s, and Eliot is still a closed book to me.
Deepnight Revelation is amazing, and you don’t need to read all of it at once. The subsequent books just expand on the situations outlined in the main adventure book.
However, it appears to have been written for Referees who thought running Pirates of Drinax wasn’t enough of a challenge.
I’m a fan of Always Coming Home, but it’s not a book one has to start at the beginning and read every page of in order—if you’re getting stuck on one part, try flipping around until you find a page that looks interesting to you and read that.
@59: I didn’t have to read Silas Marner in class, and so I came to it much later. I liked it, and then I read Middlemarch, which is — beyond sublime, quite legitimately in the conversation for greatest novel of all time. (And there is only a “conversation”, there is no one “greatest”.) So I’d say open the closed Eliot books!
Oddly (or not), while I also didn’t have to read Dickens in high school (we had a very good HS English Lit class, with a good teacher who knew how to keep us interested), I have not really gotten into Dickens. I did read and like Nicholas Nickleby as a teen, on my own, and I have of course read A Christmas Carol, but nothing else. But I do plan to get to him soon (looks at TBR pile … hmmm, soon, but how soon???)
The one I am most ashamed of as a die hard sci-fi / fantasy fan has to be the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I set myself to read it as a teenager, got a few chapters in and found Frodo’s relationship to the ring creepy (yes, I know it’s supposed to be). I contemplated the three long books before me, knowing the ring would be there the whole way, and gave up. The long descriptions of the shire didn’t help either.
One of the silliest reasons I didn’t finish a book was that I thought I know what direction the author was going, didn’t like it, so didn’t finish. Mind you, I didn’t ACTUALLY know but apparently that was enough, which is sad because I really like the series. It awaits me on my TBR bookcase.
@44 — I will never, ever, ever read James Clemens’ Banned & the Banished series because the books all have the word Wit’ch in the title, and seeing that apostrophe is the visual equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.
@27, the Vorkosigan saga is so worth it, and once you’ve read them all you will deeply long for more.
@43: The Nobel Prize for Literature is awarded to an author, not to a particular book. And of course Bob Dylan got it, but is that good or bad…
@49, @51: I will pick up your suit at the dry cleaner but first I have to mow the grass okay? No connection, it’s just, you know. :-)
@66. rja: I thought it was something like that…
@ecbatan: agreed on Middlemarch (though I don’t think I actually finished it… guess I should). It draws the sublime out of domesticity and the mundane.
The mentions of A Game of Thrones reminded me that I got an advance copy of that book, months ahead of publication, and didn’t read beyond the first couple of chapters until after the first season of the series on HBO. This probably counts as a ludicrous reason.
I got that advance copy at a Romance Writers of America conference. The publishers hand out books like candy at those events, often advance copies, since writers are good for spreading buzz, but the books are generally pretty keyed to the target audience and demographic. This book was put on the seats at one of the luncheons. I figured that since it was handed out at a conference for romance writers, it was probably a fantasy with a solid romance subplot, possibly along the lines of something like Elfstones of Shannara, which has a couple getting together along the way. When I started reading it a few weeks after the conference, but still ahead of the publication date, I was in the mood for exactly the sort of thing I was expecting. And what I got was very much not that. I got to the point of Bran being thrown out the window after stumbling upon the twincest and put the book down. I did end up liking it when I read it after seeing the TV series and read the rest of the series, mostly because the TV series helped reset my expectations. If I’d been given the book at a SF/F event or bought it at a bookstore, I would have liked it. But I disliked my first attempt at it because I got it at a romance conference. I’m not sure what the publisher was thinking there.
This does mean I have a first edition of the original hardcover.
Another one here who dislikes Dickens. Not sure if it was from having to read him or not.
I read Dahlgren, I think that excuses me from having to read Ulysses.
I avoid grim-dark and as I’ve aged need to find books with happier endings. I’m sure this removes some great books from my TBR but who cares. I’m 71, my fantasy is stories with happy endings. Was it Donaldson who wrote “The real story”. That series broke me a little bit.
I can be put off by one reviewer really not liking a book even if others think it’s great.
I have not read Neil Stephenson’s books in the past… 15+ years (basically since Cryptonomicon) because they are too large and heavy and they hurt my wrists and fall on my face when I fall asleep and it hurts.
I have not bought them for my Kindle because I already own them.
@64, I think you made the right decision and saved yourself a lot of shuddering. It’s been a long time since I read the Banned and the Banished, but I seem to remember it wasn’t just the Wit’ches that got the apostrophe – there was stuff like Dw’arfs as well.
No Dickens for me. I don’t even have the excuse of having to read him in school. I just don’t like his stuff.
I got Always Coming Home with the music. I love Le Guin, but I couldn’t finish that.
I loved Edison, mostly for the language. Tried Gormenghast and gave up.
I had a high-school teacher who refused to read The Lord of the Rings because too many people had recommended it to him.
Thanks to the paperback revolution of the 50s I grew up reading reprints of most published SF. I could keep track of the whole field by reading magazines and watching for new books. (From spin-racks or SFF in bookstores. In the 60s, all SF and Fantasy were lucky to get one bookshelf section.)
By the 80s it was clear that nobody could keep up with the field. There were too many books coming out. You have to sort things somehow. I made an executive decision not to read novelizations of SFF movies or TV shows.
I’ve missed some good stuff. But that would be true of any selection system.
I’ve been reading the Iliad since 2007. After watching Troy I figured I’d read one of the Greek classics. It’s dull, and has more names of dead parents then actual story. But I’ve seen Troy at least 3 more times so I get the story behind the book.
My ridiculous reason for not reading some books is that I want to read them too much! I want the “perfect” reading experience for them. Peace and quiet and a few dedicated hours to really immerse myself. And of course, that time never arrives… so I read “lesser” books by the handful.
@Lane: you need… a Cone of Silence !
Any books scifi or otherwise that have anything to do with cooking or food I don’t want to read. I did try read a Hugo nominated story The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections I think was the name of it and I didn’t like it for those reasons. Like Water for chocolate sounds like something I would not read. I don’t care about cooking or the quality of food, it just doesn’t interest me and stories about it annoy me. Big Night, Julia and Julie and Eat Drink Man Woman are movies about cooking I do not like. Ok Ratatoulie Was good I’m stretching it but that’s an exception.
@77: How about the movie Babette’s Feast (or the wonderful Isak Dinesen story)”?
:)
Ah yes, embarrassing covers were the absolute bane of seventies and eighties SFF fans. I too habitually carried books cover inward.
I am an absolute sucker for anthropological and sociological SFF. If it’s got a complex, livable society in it I will almost certainly love it. But sometimes I avoid new series because I just don’t feel like stretching my brain to include a new culture.
78. Yes Babette’s Feast good one. Won the Oscar for foreign film. Thought about that one but still haven’t seen it, on my to do list.
I can’t remember specific names, but I sometimes put off reading author A because I want to see how A develops from their predecessor B, so I have to read B first. Except that I want to see how B develops from their predecessor C, so I have to read C first, and so on. And maybe it stops at D, but D actually looks kind of boring, so I’m not enthused about picking up on D. And thus I don’t get to C, or B or A.
Trying again. I don’t like bikes or bicyclists. Therefore I will avoid any books or movies with that as subject matter. A well-known horror writer wrote a story with that as a subject and I have avoided it despite liking the authors work.
I just rereead The Monkey Treatment by George RR Martin. I guess that is a good story that talks about food alot.