What is the worst experience you've had reading a book?

Interstellar_1@lemmy.blahaj.zone to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 141 points –
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Well it's a series, but Three body problem. It should have been right up my alley, but I got so tired of every decision by every character being stupid that I couldn't be bothered to read the last fifty pages of the last book.

Even if I charitably assumed the point of the book was to show that people are weak and stupid, the series was such a ham-handed strawman as to undercut its own commentary. And even worse, it had just enough interesting ideas to lead me to believe it was going somewhere worthwhile, but it never did.

It's been years and I'm still pissed off that I wasted a week on it.

It's not just that characters make stupid decisions, the same characters keep making the same mistakes and nobody ever learns from those mistakes or grows as a character. It's so extremely frustrating.

I enjoyed those, but you're not wrong. The author cited Foundation as his inspiration for the books, and it suffers from all the same problems. Interesting concepts told with cardboard cutout ridiculous one dimensional characters.

Same. Gave up after trying for a year and a half. Made it through half the series.

Yeah, I recommend people don't read that book, but do read the one chapter about the aliens, what is it, second to the last chapter of the book? That chapter is some of the best sci Fi I've ever encountered, the rest of the book... you can skip it.

Can you name the chapter specifically? I guess it will spoil a lot of the first book no?

It looks like that was chapter 33, Trisolaris: Sophon

If you want to jump in and read that chapter, all you need to know is this:

!the aliens are on a planet in the alpha centuri/proxima centuri trinary star system, the closest stars to the sun. Also, apparently the three suns means it sucks there and they're desperately looking for a new star system.!<

Not read the book, but isn't it meant to be quite dramatically different in some aspects? I'm sure I heard that all those annoying young adults characters were invented for the show? Someone who knows can correct me on that.

Agreed though that the show was a pile of crap. I enjoyed the first couple and quite enjoyed the last in the season, but the in between was pretty awful.

I couldn't tell you, TBH. I have only read the series of books.

Oh, sorry, I totally misread your post I thought you had seen the show but not read the books. My bad!

I'm surprised you got tired of the stupid decisions if I'm honest.

I wasn't aware the characters were making any.

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