I read a lot. It's a simple fact, I'm a reader. I'm not
ashamed and I don't boast about how well-read I am. I honestly haven't even
read many of the classics, and really didn't enjoy the ones I did. I read for
fun, I read because I have a lot of downtime at work and it is something to do
on the commute. I read in the bath in the evening and I read in bed at night. I
go to cafes when I have a few hours to spare and I drink coffee. It's just part
of my life.
A few years back I got a Nook, it was a pretty decent
eReader, but something strange happened to it when it moved to Japan and the
customer service I received in trying to fix the issue treated me like an incompetent
monkey so I switched to a Kindle. Three years later, my Kindle is my best
friend. I rarely leave the house without it in my purse, it doesn't even have a
case. I've split coffee on it, dropped food on it, and one
time left it on a bus.
This year (so far) I've read 55 books, last year I
read 53. They aren't huge tomes of novels, I would say the average size of the
books are about 300 pages. A large portion have been young adult, and the
genres vary greatly from fantasy, to science fiction, to horror and mystery and
thriller and contemporary and you get my drift.
As an aspiring writer reading helps me, it gives me ideas
and it lets me see how words should flow and it shows me how to craft a story.
But, it also helps me know what I don't like. What sort of things in novels
make me roll my eyes, what kind of things make it difficult to turn the next
page (or tap it), and what just makes a book not very enjoyable. As a writer I
think it's really important to reflect on why you aren't really into what you're
reading. What makes this book annoying and rudimentary? Why don't I want to
finish this book?
That’s why I am giving you five books that I didn't enjoy
this year. There were more than five, believe me, but I've decided to limit my
list to books that were only released in 2014. I'll make another list of books
I really loved this year, as there were far more of those, but I want to wait
until the year is over.
1. The Infinite Sea (Fifth Wave #2) by Rick Yancey.
Goodreads rating of 4.10
Stopped reading at 58%
I loved The Fifth Wave. It was released last year and I
read it very quickly and I thought it was great and wonderful and such an
interesting book. I love a good dystopia and, honestly, it's really hard to
find a decent one following the release of The Hunger Games. The young adult
genre is loaded down with them and most of them are utter crap. They're
essentially romance novels under the guise of being a cook dystopian book. And I
hate romance novels.
The Fifth Wave definitely had romance in there, but it
was so much on the back burner that I didn't care that much at all. I couldn't
wait to read the second book and learn more about this story. It started out
decently enough, and that was great. There are a lot of point of views in this
book, which can get confusing and annoying. I know some people don’t enjoy too
many point of view changes, and I have read a few books where it’s just too much, but overall I like a few
points of view in a story.
But, then something happened. A character was brought
back who really shouldn't have been brought back and so began what I like to
call The Curse of Catching Fire. Catching Fire is the second book in the Hunger
Games trilogy and it started this annoying trend in these YA dystopian novels
of the second book being all about romance and… screw the actual story! Now,
thanks to the multiple POVs the Infinite Sea isn’t a perfect case of that, but
when this character came back and started this stupid love thing again I just
knew I wasn’t going to finish the book.
The main character is also unbearable. She’s just an
awful character. I cannot handle the sort of main characters that are just so
hard headed, dramatic, and all around annoying. The other characters in this
story are great, they have such potential and there is so many interesting back
stories that are hinted at, they just aren’t mentioned enough. If there was
less focus on this awful main character and more focus on these supporting
characters it would have been much more enjoyable.
Plus, the titular “fifth wave” is stupid. I don’t
understand why it is what it is and it doesn’t make sense. I’m sorry. It is.
Waves one through four were slightly understandable but I often felt myself
thinking “why?” whenever the fifth wave was mentioned and the reasoning behind
why it was chosen.
2. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire
North
Goodreads rating of 3.99
I stopped reading at about 30%
When I first read the premise of this book I was really
intrigued. A man who is reborn at the same point in time over and over and over
again, when sudden in his fifteenth life this woman comes and asks him to save
the world! He then has to work in all of his lives thereafter to keep
catastrophe from happening. It was interesting, it was unique and I wanted to
read it right away.
Thirty percent of the way in I couldn’t read anymore. I
had been scanning the book for maybe the last twenty pages just hoping for
something to happen. I understand the need of establishing a backstory, of
setting up a foundation for which the actual story has to happen, but a third
of the way into the book and they story hadn’t started yet. Where was the girl who was to come to Harry
on his deathbed and say how in his next life he needs to keep the world from
ending? It was just the same things over and over. The same life over and over
and nothing was happening.
Maybe, if I have nothing else to read, I will try to go
back and get through the rest of the book because I really, really wanted to
read it and even writing this again I am thinking how I should have finished it
and maybe it did get really interesting. But, I know that I don’t stop reading
books just because I get a little bored. I have pushed through books because I
got it in my head that I had to finish them many times. Usually, if I am giving
up on a book it’s because I’ve not touched it in a few days and I want to move
onto something else. I am the type of person who can only focus on one book at
a time, I don’t enjoy jumping from story to story, so if I stop reading a book
and change to another, I won’t pick the former up until I’ve finished what has
replaced it.
This was just one of those books I stopped reading and
never came back to. I didn’t feel like it, there was always something better to
read. Eventually, I just gave up on the notion of finishing it all together and
moved it to my dreaded “dropped” shelf on Goodreads. Sorry!
3. Death Sworn by Leah Cypress
Goodreads rating of 3.65 I finished this book!
Seeing as I finished this book it must not have been all
that bad, but it was definitely one of those books which I was just reading because
there was nothing better to tide me over. In my actual review of the book (I
rarely make reviews) I said how the book just went by really quickly, and it
did. This book required zero brain power to get through. It’s mainly dialogue
and there’s very little description. That’s because it mainly takes place in a
cave. It’s about a girl who used to be some great magician in training who
suddenly lost her power and has to live with assassins.
It’s a fantasy novel. That’s important. When you pick up
a fantasy novel to read you have very clear expectations with what you want.
You want a great world. You want to be transported somewhere else. You want to
leave your world and enter another. Maybe you want magic, maybe you want
adventure, maybe you want politics. Maybe you want all of it. But you want
something more than just talking and characters. Which is really all you get in
this book.
The lead character just seemed unnecessarily difficult.
The assassins and she had the same goals. They wanted the same things! Yet she
always complained about what they were doing because it wasn’t the way that she would do it. Okay, that’s great.
Thanks for sharing. I just couldn’t find myself any motivation to care for
either side. Why was the evil side evil? What made them so bad? Nothing was
given to me in that regard. No history or anything other than, “They did bag
things to me!” Well, maybe you’re unlucky? I don’t know.
It’s a decent book to read if you just want something
mindless to tide you over until the book you’re really wanting to read comes
out. I don’t think I’ll be reading the second, however.
4. The Shadow Throne (Ascendance Trilogy #3) by Jennifer
A. Nielson
Goodreads rating of 4.19
I got about halfway, maybe.
This one may be my fault. It’s a middle grade book so I
don’t expect great prose or conflict that are too deep. I expect fun characters
and an interesting story and action. I read the first two books a while back,
before I lived in Sapporo and was in rural Hokkaido and I loved them. They were
so witty and fun and the characters were great. The first book is about a boy
who fakes being this missing prince and his attempts at making people believe
that he is this prince. It’s a really great read and I enjoyed it so much. Even
for a middle grade book! It didn’t feel like one at all.
This one, however, does. I think it’s because in the
third book they are trying to face some more adult topics, and it’s just so
difficult to do at a middle grade level. It just felt really juvenile while the
other books didn’t. There was so much going on and there was so much skipping
around that I often felt confused. A preteens suspension of disbelief is
probably much more forgiving than mine,
even though mine is pretty great, but it just didn’t work for me.
The author was trying to do too much with too little. The
book is too short to allow all that she wanted. The audience is too young to
explain things as they should be. If this book had been produced in a way
similar to Harry Potter, where the writing grew with the intended audience
rather than stay at the same place over multiple years, it would have been more
successful (and is one of the reasons Harry Potter was so successful, I should know, I read the books from ages 10-18
as they came out!). Book one was great for middle grade, but book three should
have been bumped up to young adult.
5. The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith (aka. J.K.
Rowling)
Goodreads rating of 3.78
I read maybe 40% of the book.
Kaley! You just mentioned loving Harry Potter yet you
didn’t enjoy J.K.’s book?
Yes. I am one of those,
but not because I think this book is awful. I honestly think that as someone
who has such fond memories of Harry Potter, who holds those books on such a
high, infallible pedestal, that it will be virtually impossible for me to like
anything else J.K. Rowling writes. The standards of expectations are too high,
even if I like to tell myself they aren’t. My mind expects too much.
This is definitely not a bad book. My mother read it and
enjoyed it and she reads constantly. The characters are fantastic (J.K. Rowling
has a way with characters) and the writing is witty. I just don’t like
detective novels. Both of her adult literature attempts that I have read have
disappointed me, not because I didn’t like her writing but because I didn’t
like the genre. My mistake. I thought my love of her writing would convert me
over to a detective novel, but I was wrong.
Speaking of the writing, though, it seemed sort of
misplaced. J.K. Rowling has a very distinct way of writing. Her language use is
a little strange and her flow is very distinct. It worked really well for Harry
Potter, as the books are typically full of quirk and it’s fantasy so things are
going to be a little different. But in a book devoid of any magic at all, it
almost seems out of place. It feels like I should be reading something
fantastical but all that happens is the mundane.
I loved the characters and I didn’t intentionally not
finish. It was just another case of me setting the book down to read something
else and not picking it back up again, much the same as The First Fifteen Lives
of Harry August.
I’ll still try to read everything she releases. Something
else aside from Harry Potter that she writes will have to suit me, right?
I tried very hard to be as objective as possible in these
reviews. It has been a long time since I’ve read many of these books, so some
of the specific details are fuzzy in my mind, but my emotions are still there.
It isn’t often that I don’t finish a book and I’ll spend months keeping a book
on my “currently reading” list before shifting it to “dropped”. Some have even
been there for years.
The whole purpose of doing something like this is to get
this, why didn’t I like these books? What was it about these books that made me
not finish them and how can I use that to become a better writer? And I have
made this brief list:
1. Annoying Lead Character – People have to be
able to connect to your main character. Make them likable in some way, even if
they aren’t very likably (see Jorg in Prince of Thorns).
2. Juvenile feeling – Make sure the plot suits the
level at which you are trying to write at.
3. No plot progression for too long – There needs
to be some backstory given, but be sure to keep it at a minimum and try to work
it in throughout the book rather than all at once.
4. Inability to connect to the conflict – Try very
hard to make your readers care about what they need to care about. If the bad
guy is bad, make him bad!
5. Rushed with too much trying to be done – If
there seems to be too much going on, maybe you need to edit some of it out.
Make sure everything that is important to the story gets thoroughly explained.
6. Writing style – Your writing style is your own,
remember that not everyone will like it, but your tone has to fit what you’re
writing.
This blog post has been very long, but I hope it was
interesting. If you’d like to see more book reviews by me, I can think about
it. I think it’s difficult to be a literary critic as everyone has such
specific tastes for what books they like, but I can give it a shot. I will make
a similar list of books I really enjoyed this year in about a month, so look
out for that!
Author: Sabaa Tahir
Author: Paul Tremblay
