What’s something that you feel like you should like, but for some reason can’t get into, no matter how many chances you give it?
For me, it’s The Three Body Problem. It should be right up my alley from everything I’ve heard about it (especially the second book, which looks at the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter!), but for the life of me, I can’t get past the first chapter at all. I even tried reading it in another language to see if it was the translation that kept me from getting into it, and nope.
The Expanse did it for me. I couldn’t read the books. I couldn’t watch the show past two episodes.
The oft-praised Honor Harrington books also fall into this camp. It seems I’m completely allergic to David Weber’s writing, because I can’t read any of his other series either.
Anything billed as “Young Adult”. I just find them off-putting in their formulaic structures and find the way they talk down to their readers a bit insulting. I read a lot of adult books as a child (pre-teen, not even “young adult”), though, so perhaps I’m not the target market.
edited to add
Neal Stephenson. I hate hate hate his writing. I think if he wrote essays I might find them readable, but his fiction is atrociously bad. (It doesn’t help that he spouts gibberish on topics he knows little to nothing about—e.g. Chinese culture—with dogmatic authority.)
P.S. I can understand completely why you didn’t like The Three Body Problem. It is, especially at the beginning, very Chinese and incorporates outlooks and ideas that are utterly alien to the western mindset.
The Expanse is a little slow for the first couple of episodes, it picks up after that.
And we all know the first thing writers are taught is “bore the audience to death in the beginning of your story because they’ll stick around for the possibility of things finally picking up”.
No, wait.
They’re taught the exact opposite. They’re taught to hook the audience early to induce the interest that keeps people going over the slow parts because they’re already invested.
A TV show has 3, sometimes 4, episodes to hook me. If I’m not hooked, I’m out. A book has 50 pages to hook me. If I’m not hooked, I’m out. Life’s too short to slog through boring crap on the off chance it gets better. Because it rarely does.
Yep. It was a disservice to the show. I have no idea why the first few episodes were designed to be so slow and dull. The rest are not like that. It makes me wonder if someone at the studio saw the dailies during S1 production and stepped in to make changes.
The recent Audiobooks versions are well done. The narrator does a great job of personifying the characters with the same traits as the TV actors.
Oddly enough, that’s not what got me. I studied Chinese (I’ve sadly forgotten so much I wouldn’t even try to read it in Chinese), have been to China, and love a lot of Chinese movies, web novels and dramas. Plus, I’ve lived in Asia for nearly half my life at this point (yeah, countries all have their own unique cultures, but there’s a lot of influence and overlap). It was something about the writing style that I couldn’t get into, which was why I tried reading it in Japanese, to see if it was just the translation I wasn’t vibing with. lol but trying to read it in Japanese threw me for an entire different reason, because my brain switched to the Chinese reading the Chinese names and then it was just a linguistic nightmare inside my head as my brain struggled to pick a single language to read in. I’ve had to give up watching Chinese movies if the subtitles are in Japanese because my brain can not handle both languages at once.
OK, so more like me and Neal Stephenson.
Uh
What, exactly, do you find completely alien about Chinese POV?
I somewhat understand, because I can’t read a lot of stuff written by South Koreans because, imo, they have this weird cultural heirarchy that often comes off as sycophantic to me, but that’s not “alien.”
That is … almost the very definition of “alien”. As in:
Adjectives matter, friend.