• sevan@lemmy.ca
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    10 hours ago

    Worst book I’ve quit is Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. What a horrible book!

    Worst I’ve finished is Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, immediately followed by Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I’ll throw in a special mention for The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby. All terrible books that I finished only because they were required reading in school.

    • kubok@fedia.io
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      5 hours ago

      As much as I loved many of Stephensen’s books, I could not get into Anathem.

      • Vanth@reddthat.com
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        7 hours ago

        Same. Loved the world building over millenia. I was hoping to see another book each on the miner people, the Navy men, and the spacefarers who went out into the wilds after water.

        My older sister hated it, she wants stories about characters and not the world-building. She compares the pages on moving through 3D space with small jet thrusts to the pages of whale info in Moby Dick.

        It’s a book I recommend with caveats. Not everyone is going to like it. Lesson learned, as much as I liked Snow Crash and Anathem too, I won’t recommend them to her. And moving beyond Stephenson, I’m confident she would immolate Canticle for Leibowitz halfway through.