h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Chaos, by James Gliek (Gleik?) - I'd read Chaos theory books before, and this one was just annoying and dull. I have no idea how it got on the layman's bestseller list.

I think it was the pretty cover.


Mikey, who was given said Chaos book as a present, and who later sold it to a used book store for 50 cents.

Indeed, it could very well have been the cover! It certainly was much more attractive than most covers, both fiction and non.

I really enjoyed James Gleick's Chaos.

Apart from the terrible Satanic Verses, all the books I've tried to read but failed were other people's choices. Tutors mainly. I couldn't stay awake through Pride and Prejudice. A friend lent me the Sword of Shannara but the writing was so bad I couldn't get past the first few pages.

One book I would highly recommend is Len Deighton's 'Bomber'. Brilliant.

At the risk of seriously annoying people, does anyone else have trouble with some of the canonical SF writers like Vonnegut, Poul Anderson, Frederick Pohl etc? Even William Gibson's 'Sprawl' trilogy's a hard ask, especially the younger you are when you read it. I had terrible trouble with Neuromancer and Count Zero, but I did read them when I was 12. Upon rereading them, I was amazed just how much I hadn't taken on board, and really really enjoyed them.

my further £0.02

*whispers very quietly* The only one of all those writers like Clarke I ever actually enjoyed reading (oh, for goodness sake, just admit it: that you ever read full stop) was Robert A Heinlein. I read him a lot, though I think I prefered the ones where, in writing for teenagers, he didn't let his tedious sexual fantasies get away with him.

... well reading Heinlein entirely as a teenager, I quite enjoyed the tedious sexual fantasies...

sorry

agcB

I'm not down on sexual fantasies as such except his were always the same, book after book.

*well ..practise makes Prefect*

oo-oo I just remembered a (semi-)serious maths/philosophy book by the guy who wrote Alice in Wonderland: "Logic and the Game Logic"
Never got past the first ten pages. Heavy slogging unless you're a maths freak. And apparently it is the grandaddy of all books and thinking on 'entropy' - whatever that is, was or mighta-bin.

Now that was a book that Queen Victoria threw aside in boredom or disgust! She was so delighted with the Alice books that she issued a command that she should be given all other books by the same author...

agcB

After a quick scan of this thread I'd agree with what has been said about The Silmarillion. I enjoyed LOTR but Sil should never have seen the late of day nevermind being on display in WH Smiths (hmm..but then again!)
However, the book that I have been casting aside for the past 30 years is Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence. Never have I made it even close to halfway. I've tried locking myself away for a week with nothing but bread and water and that book to sustain me. Didn't work.
Anyone care to enlighten me as to its merits?

Well, I have never read it, but I do know that the first draft was lost, and TE had to re-right the entire thing from scratch.

He lost it while changing trains at Reading. I have fantasies about it turning up one day in a left luggage office at Crewe.

agcB

What wild fantasies you have!

Actually...

*remembers AGB's question in the vegetarianism forum*

... these are the simple ones ....!



agcB

Well, having been so ashamed to admit that I owned a book I had never managed to read straight through (namely, Pride and Prejudice), I finally picked it up and read it, yesterday. It's not nearly as bad as I remember - although I still find the excessive descriptions to be a little tedious, the plot was almost quite good.


Mikey

And Colin Firth was gorgeous - of course!



a girlie called Ben

What's Colin Firth got that the rest of us haven't?
~ sorry about the drift ~

I really couldn't get through Dr Zhivago. Which was a shame really because it was quite a large part of the English lit grade. I just thought the whole thing was a pretentious waste of time. Mind you, I thought the same about Azimov, Eddings, Clarke, The X-Wings saga, most popular newspapers and most other books that people like, so who am I to judge.

FABT

Hey, I´m trying to go through the Gleik Chaos book at the moment. Maybe I should reconsider.

About the big cannons in sci-fi, I have never really read any of them. So one day I decided I would and bought Cradle by Arthur C Clarke and a former NASA scientist. With authors like that you can´t go wrong. But it turned out to be a hurdling-book. He spent the first 3/4 of the book just descriping the characters history. And then never used it for anything at all.

Gulliver's Travels. the funky capitalization *really* got to me for some reason.(and this from someone who rarely capitalizes anything while typing)