The Windup Girl — Paolo Bacigalupi

18 November 202131 October 2023 By 5t4n5

The Windup Girl -- Paolo Bacigalupi This book is awful.

Well, at least the first 12% of it was. It was so awful that i really just couldn’t be bothered to wade through any more of the trudging, depressing, miserable writing. I feel i gave it a fair go because if a writer can’t sort his mess out in the first 12% of a book then the book can be deleted as far as i’m concerned.

All we get are depressing characters that you really have no inclination for any level of empathy towards, you just wish they’d all go away and someone interesting turn up, but no one does. Just miserable, depressing people who drink alcohol and smoke and live in a kind of steampunk dystopia which hasn’t been explained as to how all this mess came about. In fact, it all just feels totally messy, disjointed and made up by someone who really hasn’t made any attempt at understanding whatever genre this is supposed to be.

So, at the end of 12%, NO THANK YOU!

Deleted!

Paolo’s Page

#paolobacigalupi #whataloadofcrap

The Courage to be Disliked — Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga

21 May 2021 By 5t4n5

I couldn’t finish it. Bless me, i tried to, i really did, but i really couldn’t take any more of this tedious mediocrity.

I could barely manage a chapter before i had to put it aside and go off and read something else, but i kept on coming back to it with good intentions, but each time i would just end up putting it down again and go off once more to read something else. After 4 months of this, toing and froing, i just had to give up: it really wasn’t doing my happiness any good whatsoever.

To sum it up: there’s someone who claims to be a philosopher who is having a discussion with a young man, but the young man is asking all the wrong questions and failing miserably to point out the flaws in the supposed philosopher’s babble: the ridiculousness of this conversation just makes one feel like banging ones head against the wall.

Seriously people, you could just keep picking random books off library bookshelves for the rest of your life and not read anything as tedious and pointless as this book.

As such, this book has received my website’s great honour of being placed on “The Bookshelf of Infamy”, i’ve also deleted it from my Kindle and Amazon account: yes, it really is that bad.

I certainly won’t be bothering to read the sequel.

Ichiro’s Page Fumitake’s Page

#japan #ichirokishimi #fumitakekoga #whataloadofcrap

Alice — Julia Crane

5 July 2020 By 5t4n5

Another tale from the anthology Once Upon A Curse.

I’ve quite enjoyed the previous tales from this anthology, and was quite looking forward to one that was “Alice and Wonderland” inspired. Oh my, how utterly disappointed i was.

To begin, you’ll realise when you get to the apparent end of this tale that this is simply the beginning of one of Julia’s books and you’re supposed to be so impressed with this that you go running off to Amazon to buy it. Julia, and/or the editor of the anthology, should — in the very least — have had the decency to warn the reader of this fact at the beginning of the tale.

It wouldn’t be so bad if this were any good and one was left wanting to go and buy the full story, but it’s an utterly childish love story and one soon finds oneself just wishing it over and done with. So yes, there’s a part of me that’s very pleased that this is just an excerpt and i was therefore relieved of having to wade through the whole tedious story.

Furthermore, it doesn’t have anything to do with “Alice and Wonderland” other than the protagonist is called Alice and her adoptive mother is referred to as the Red Queen. It’s an insult to your readers to take a half finished story you had lying around and rename the characters and try and pass it off as a “Alice and Wonderland” tale.

I’m putting this in “The Deleted” even though i can’t delete this as it’s part of an anthology that so far i’ve been enjoying. But seriously, all “Alice and Wonderland” fans, just avoid this tale if you come across it.

Julia’s Page

#fantasy #aliceinwonderland #juliacrane #whataloadofcrap

The Vegetarian — Han Kang

28 May 2020 By 5t4n5

The Vegetarian, written by Han Kang. To put it bluntly, this is vile.

It’s not long into this book before we are treated to graphic descriptions of a disgusting excuse for a human being raping his wife and then later, just sits and watches while his father in law beats her extremely in front of the whole family, including the young children, and then her father has her siblings restrain her in a chair while he violently smashes the dead rotting filth these people consider food into her face forcing it into her mouth.

The attitudes in this book, not only to vegetarians, vegans and their respective diets, but also to how a human being can be treated by their own family, are, quite frankly, appallingly backward and extremely vile and sickening.

I didn’t even get to a quarter of the way into this book and i was utterly sickened by it. How anyone can think that this is what people wish to read for entertainment is quite beyond my comprehension — they, and those that are entertained by this vile filth, should be ashamed of themselves.

Is this what people are really like in South Korea? I have no idea, but this really doesn’t do South Korean’s any favours whatsoever.

How this won a Man Booker prize i have no idea. That people actually carried on reading this after the rapes and the extreme domestic abuse is quite beyond me. Some people obviously have no empathy, because if you have any empathy at all, you would be sickened to the core and throw this book away, not give it an award.

This should also have a warning label very clearly portrayed on the cover — THIS BOOK CONTAINS GRAPHIC ACCOUNTS OF RAPE AND EXTREME DOMESTIC ABUSE.

The only award this book deserves: Deleted.

Kang’s Page

#vegan #hankang #whataloadofcrap

Walden — Henry David Thoreau

26 April 2020 By 5t4n5

After reading Into the Wild, where this book gets a fair bit of mentioning, one just had to see what all the fuss was about.

It certainly starts off incredibly well with the first 25% of the book — being mostly one chapter titled, “Economy” — explaining the ins and outs of what leads Thoreau to Walden Pond and away from a normal life and the cost of doing so. And it is very clear in this first quarter that Thoreau is a very capable writer who can get straight to the heart of the matter and keep the reader’s attention.

But then we begin the second chapter, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For”, and thus the tedium begins: word after word of pointless, boring tedium. Was it so utterly dull for him sitting by the pond, day after day after day with no one to talk to, that he just sat and wrote words for hour upon hour and simply spewed them forth upon pages enough to make up a reasonable amount to call it a book in order to sell it so he didn’t have to get a real job?

I just found myself reading paragraph after paragraph with a totally numbed out mind, noticing only a few words of interest here and there but mostly it’s just babble: babble, babble, babble, babble, blah, blah, blah. I tried, i really did, but i just cannot see why people so rave about this book.

Maybe chapter 3 onwards is back to the standard of chapter 1, but i simply could not get through chapter 2.

So, inevitably, it got …

… Deleted.

Henry’s Page

#philosophy #henrydavidthoreau #whataloadofcrap

I Am Legend — Richard Matheson

4 March 2020 By 5t4n5

So i got 23% into this book and i simply cannot take another page of this.

Stupid, alcoholic, smoking, crap eating, sad, miserable idiot getting chased by lots of vampires. Woohoo! Yes folks, another dull and boring vampire story, only difference from the norm is that this one is post-apocalyptic as the vampires have wiped out all humans apart from this one pathetic, sad alcoholic.

Seriously, if you had the daylight hours of every day to do whatever you want, go wherever you want, you have the whole world and its contents at your disposal before the vampires came out at night to hunt and all you could think to do was live like this sad twat because you’re a pathetic, miserable alcoholic, then you may as well just throw yourself into the vampire’s grasp and get it over with. Stop torturing yourself, and most of all, stop torturing us poor readers who have large “To Read” piles to get through.

I have no idea about the rest of the book, but the first quarter of it has no sci-fi whatsoever in it. How this has managed to get itself into “SF Masterworks” is quite beyond me. I suppose there always has to be the bottom of pile, hopefully this is it because i’m going to despair if there are any worse books than this in the series.

Deleted.

Richard’s Page

#sfmasterworks #vampires #postapocalypse #richardmatheson #whataloadofcrap

Finale — Stephanie Garber

13 February 2020 By 5t4n5

This book is utterly intolerable. I managed to get to 41% before i simply couldn’t take it any more.

After Legendary lead me to believe that there was hope for these two sisters, that they have grown up a bit and learned something from their previous experiences, in Finale it’s like we’ve gone back to the childish romantic stupidity of the first book, but this time it’s both sisters who are just being utterly ridiculous.

While i can accept that there are plenty of people in the world who act like these two sisters do, continuously allowing their immature, undeveloped emotions to get the better of them, they wouldn’t be able to survive in an environment like the one in these books. No one who makes such ridiculous, pathetic, nonsensical decisions in such an environment would survive for more than 10 minutes. So the idea that the immortal greats of the universe would fall in love with such pathetic creatures is as utterly ridiculous as these sisters are, as utterly ridiculous as Stephanie’s writing has become.

I’m not sure what audience this trilogy is aimed at, certainly not anyone who has had any life experience, certainly not anyone who enjoys good fantasy and certainly not anyone who thinks Night Circus is good. If you enjoyed Night Circus, if you like good fantasy, or if you’ve had any life experience at all, stay away from the Caraval trilogy, it’s woeful.

I’m certainly glad i only paid 99p for each book in Kindle deals: i’d be rather grumpy if i’d paid the full asking price for these.

It’s so bad i simply don’t care how this all ends as i simply can’t read any more of this rubbish. I’ll be deleting all three books from my Kindle and my Amazon account as i certainly won’t be finishing this one or reading the other two ever again.

Deleted

Stephanie’s Page

#fantasy #stephaniegarber #whataloadofcrap

Legendary — Stephanie Garber

7 February 2020 By 5t4n5

Well this book is definitely much better than Caraval, mostly due to the fact that Scarlett gets a back seat in this book while her sister, Tella, gets to play the game.

But is it a game, or is it real this time. The line between fact and fiction begin to blur until Tella isn’t sure what’s real or who to trust any more. And the reader experiences this through Tella’s mind, leaving the reader guessing as well.

Even now the book’s ended i still wouldn’t like to say what’s really going on or who or what is real or not.

And so i shall dive straight into book 3, Finale, to hopefully find out what the true ending is — or maybe not.

Please see my review for Finale as i have now moved all three books to “The Deleted” and removed them all from my Amazon account.

Stephanie’s Page

#fantasy #stephaniegarber #whataloadofcrap

Caraval — Stephanie Garber

28 January 2020 By 5t4n5

This book has to have one of the most annoying protagonists that i’ve ever come across: Scarlett comes across as a totally spoiled brat in so many ways. All her life she’s wanted to go to Caraval and when she gets the chance she doesn’t want to, instead, she’d rather marry a complete stranger that she’s never met and force her sister to go with her to wherever it is she doesn’t know she’ll be going when she eventually weds this complete stranger.

And so we have to put up with Scarlett’s whining for most of the book as she’s kidnapped and forced to play Caraval in order to get her sister back who’s also been kidnapped. One would think that if she cared so much about her sister she’d stop all the moaning and complaining and get on with the game in order to get her sister back, but no, not Scarlett, let’s have never ending tantrums instead.

But one shouldn’t allow one character to define a whole book, even if she is the main protagonist. Plenty of books have the most cringeworthy of characters yet are still brilliant. At the end of the story, other than Scarlett’s incessant whining, complaining and spoiled brat tantrums, this is a very good book and a great story that one can’t help but continue reading through to the very end — which i won’t spoil.

I’d probably put this book on a shelf between The Night Circus and Ready Player One, as the game Scarlett is forced to play is quite similar to the game in Ready Player One but instead of the virtual on-line thing it’s more like the environment in The Night Circus with the travelling magical carnival style thing.

Undoubtedly, Stephanie is a very good writer and keeps the story moving along at an enjoyably good pace all the way through, and when you get to the end you’ll be left wanting to dive straight into Legendary for more: at least i was. Although i do admit, i’m hoping that Scarlett has learned to stop all the whining and complaining.

So yeah, i would have given it 5/5 but because Scarlett was so bloody annoying i’m left giving it 4/5 just because of her. The rest of the story is very enjoyable.

Please see my review for Finale as i have now moved all three books to “The Deleted” and removed them all from my Amazon account.

Stephanie’s Page

#fantasy #stephaniegarber #whataloadofcrap

Enchanted Britain — Marc Alexander

20 January 2020 By 5t4n5

I thought this would be interesting, and the first chapter was certainly promising. Then we get onto chapter 2 and it just bangs on and on and on and on and on and on and on about some fictional characters called Jesus and Joseph and the claims of the christians and about churches and abbots and abbeys and all this holy grail nonsense.

I could go on a rant here but i have no wish to read about the beliefs and nonsense of christianity. The Pagan people of Britain have had the beliefs and nonsense of the christians forced down our throats for nearly 2000 years and i don’t buy books to read more of it.

Needless to say, i didn’t get to the end of the second chapter and i have no wish to read any more of this book.

Deleted!

Marc’s Page

#marcalexander #whataloadofcrap

That Is That — Nirmala

30 October 2019 By 5t4n5

It was free and i thought that there may have been something in it worth reading.

I felt that the first half of the book was quite good and gives the reader some interesting points to consider, but then, about half way through the book, he started babbling on that the universe is governed by some divine omnipotent being that knows what its doing — like WTF!!!

And then the book just goes downhill from there as i will always just switch off once someone starts creating gods to support their spiritual point of view — and attempting to disguise this god in spiritual mumbo jumbo speak just made it worse for me.

It’s like the first half is there to draw you in before springing his divine-being trap upon you, and then spends the last half of the book running around in circles, repeating himself, trying to justify something or other.

Like i say, it was free and you may find something worth while in it, but i certainly wouldn’t suggest paying for it and i won’t be reading anything else by Nirmala as i don’t do god grovelling.

Deleted

Nirmala’s Page

#nirmala #whataloadofcrap

The Little Mermaid — Hans Christian Anderson

3 June 2019 By 5t4n5

I decided i’d read this just to get my mermaid thing going before reading The Mermaid by Christina Henry.

I have to say, i’m very disappointed.

Silly little girl falls in love with handsome prince who she can’t have because she’s just not good enough and he loves another, blah, blah, blah. So she has to die, like dead forever, because mermaids don’t have immortal souls like human beings do because they’re obviously just animals and Anderson obviously believes that animals don’t have souls and probably agrees with Descartes that you can even nail them to doors and dissect them without anaesthetic because they’re just soulless things unworthy of our consideration.

But wait, Hans gives this disgusting, soulless animal a chance, she can have legs to go on land and woo the handsome prince but she has to lose her voice by having her tongue cut out and suffer the pain of walking on knives for her whole life to do so. So desperate is this soulless creature that she agrees to this obscene torture. If she gets the prince to own her through marriage thus becoming a responsible pet owner for this soulless animal then god will bestow a soul upon this creature and it can live happily ever after as the sex slave of the prince. Otherwise she’s just going to be a bit of nothing floating on the wind for all eternity.

And then we’re told that if children are good then the little mermaid may still get a soul and go to heaven but if children are bad then she won’t. So if you you’re ever a naughty child, even for a moment, then you’re obviously a fucking evil little shit who hates mermaids. WTF!!! But mermaids are soulless animals who don’t get to go to heaven so its a bit confused as to whether a child should be worried about being good when its not actually the child’s fault in the first place that mermaids are soulless animals who god obviously hates and doesn’t want in heaven anyway.

Children should not have a sense of right and wrong built upon fairy tales, imaginary beings and/or other such nonsense. Because what do you think is going to happen when the child finds out that everything it believed you told it was true is a complete lie that you conjured up in order to hoodwink and con the child into behaving to your unreasonable demands?

I seriously would not read this to any child i had in my care. It’s disgusting, backward, patriarchal, god-grovelling drivel. Some books really should be burned and/or deleted.

Deleted!

Han’s Page

#viclit #fantasy #mermaids #hanschristiananderson #whataloadofcrap

The Bookshop Of Yesterdays — Amy Meyerson

24 May 2019 By 5t4n5

WTF!!!

I was hoping for another good book about a bookshop, but what i got was someone who thinks that completely rewriting the rules of punctuation is somehow a good thing.

Speech is defined, in prose, by quotation marks, not just simply put into italics. Italics means something completely different. I’m not sure what Amy is trying to achieve with this stupid use of italics to define speech but it’s utterly lost on me.

It was utterly ridiculous trying to read this; there’s no hope of simply relaxing and just enjoying the story, you have to spend most of your attention deciphering the absolute lack of quotation marks and shambolic misuse of italics. Add to this that most of the start of the book is people saying things and one simply has no choice but to quickly delete the book from ones Kindle.

Total waste of money. Thanks Amy. Go back to school and learn how to write before publishing books and taking people’s money.

Deleted!

Amy’s Page

#amymeyerson #whataloadofcrap

Of Mutability — Jo Shapcott

7 April 2019 By 5t4n5

When i set up this website i added my whole Kindle collection from Amazon. Amongst many books that i didn’t know i had was this one, and i’ve still no idea how it appeared on my account.

Although i don’t normally read poetry, i usually enjoy it when i do, and i was actually looking forward to reading through this collection.

But i have to say, i’m seriously disappointed. I made it 10% in, which i admit is not very far, but i really couldn’t take any more.

I have no idea when random babble written as bad prose that then gets chopped up randomly into lines that have no cadence, meter, rhythm, rhyme, structure or style got defined as poetry, but it seems that some people now claim it is.

I suppose its the same type that class Sewing Machine in Hessian Sack as modern art — utter bollox!

Here’s some modern poetry (apparently):

It may please the Sunday Times
cryptic crossword
crowd while drinking
Costa
coffee from a disposable cup
(see front cover), but
i very much doubt it
will please anyone
else.

Deleted!

Jo’s Page

#poetry #joshapcott #whataloadofcrap

One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

1 February 20199 April 2024 By 5t4n5

One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez I’ve started to read this book 3 times before and never made it through the first 20 pages. This time i got over 1/3 of the way through it, and that was more than enough to call it a day. So read this review with that in mind.

This book is the literary equivalent of a crap TV soap opera. The characters are mostly inbred and somewhat retarded. There are too many characters, most of which either have the same name or very similar names. And just when you thought there was more than enough of one name, a whole bunch of illegitimate children would turn up and Gabriel would give them all the same name of the father. It’s like grandson named after son named after father named after great uncle named after grandfather. And this goes on and on until you aren’t quite sure who you’re reading about. Adding to the too many characters with the same name, there are also too many characters with similar names. Then you get time shifts, where suddenly you’re reading something that happened to a name in the past (i say name here because half the time you can never be sure which actual character that name belongs to), and then it’s back to present then off to the future and then it’s the present again, still haven’t worked out which character this name is yet, and you don’t get any structure to it, and it’s just utter chaos.

On top of all that chaos, they’re all related somehow because incest seems to be a perfectly normal thing amongst these backward, inbred people. And every few pages a new child is thrown into the mix named after someone already in the story who is then adopted and raised by someone other than its parents. And the incest and adoption is so confusing that you’re never quite sure who is related to who in what way, thus leading to more incest, adoption and confusion.

Oh, sure, i could have done due diligence and made a big effort to work out who exactly is who when a name appears, but i shouldn’t have to. I don’t read books to make tedious and pointless work for myself: i read books to enjoy the escape from tedium, i read for fun and recreation, to enjoy the experience of losing myself. But you can never lose yourself in this book because you’re always having to work at understanding who is who, how they’re related to each other, in what generation, etc., etc..

Then there’s the liberal use of Deus Ex Machina. Create a problem, that of everyone losing their memories, and then solve it when someone turns up with a magical potion and everything’s suddenly ok again. And what was the point of it all and where have we got with the actual story?

And that’s the question: what is the actual story here? All i get is a never ending cacophony of incest, illegitimate children, adoption of each other’s illegitimate children, giving them names of already existing characters into the maelstrom of same and similar named characters that already exist, and stupid behaviour with ever more and more characters from other places being thrown in, even when completely unnecessary.

How this book is classed as a paragon of Spanish literature is beyond me. I suppose it’s the same crowd that think Shakespeare and Dickens are paragons of English literature. And guess what? You won’t ever find any Shakespeare or Dickens on this website.

It’s not that i can’t handle lots of characters: i’ve read the Riftwar saga by Raymond E. Feist and similar great sagas of fantasy and sci-fi, and i’ve never been confused. Why? Because they give them all distinctive names.

It’s not that i have a problem with non English names: i’ve read lots of fantasy, sci-fi and also translated books by lots of non English writers and its never been a problem. Why? Because they give them all distinctive names.

I can only think that this was done on purpose to make some literary point, but this literary point is completely lost on me. Why create utter chaos within your character structure, add too many characters even when completely unnecessary to the story, give the characters same or similar names to add more confusion, throw never ending incest and inbreeding into the mix and then get them to adopt each other’s children and then don’t tell the children who their parents are so you can look forward to more incest? The point certainly isn’t made in the first 1/3rd of the book and if a writer can’t be bothered to hook me into a story in that time then the book goes in the delete bin.

The other issue with all this character chaos is that you never can bond with any of the characters.

I like a book that gives me some central characters who i can bond with, root for and believe in. Characters that i can identify, who stand out and make sense of the story for me. I like a book that simply loses me in the story. When i read a book the only part of me that has to do anything is my thumb, turning the pages on my Kindle: i don’t want to be having to stop and think about what’s happening, the story should flow and make sense of itself without my having to make a load of effort to make it make sense. And i don’t like soap operas and those kind of pathetic characters, repeating the same stupid mistakes over and over again and never learning anything. If i want a soap opera i could watch television. I don’t watch television! I read books!

My final pronouncement on this book is that it is written for voyeurs with a niche fetish of viewing incest, who also enjoy crappy TV soap operas and who are happy with Deus Ex Machina being deployed to solve problems that serve no literary purpose , whatsoever, than to deploy the Deus Ex Machina in the first place.

Utterly ridiculous!

Deleted!

Gabriel’s Page

#gabrielgarciamarquez #whataloadofcrap

The Unwanted – Steam Punk

8 December 201820 March 2024 By 5t4n5

The Unwanted - Steam Punk My first negative review on the website — what a place of honour!

For a give away short story one maybe shouldn’t complain, but it takes time to read stories and i feel this was a waste of it.

We are given characters who were raised and trained from childhood to fulfil their adult roles, who are apparently the best at what they do, but who then come across as incredibly flawed and weak.

Then there’s the editing, seriously, did someone just type this down and run it through a spell checker before publishing it?

I do feel there’s a good story hiding behind the faults, which kind of adds to the annoyance.

But most annoying of all is that it utterly made a mockery out of my “judging a book by its cover” philosophy. Yes, occasionally, in order to facilitate the foisting of a crap book onto unfortunate readers, a crap writer will find a rather beautiful woman and dress her up in some delightfully arousing, Steampunk costume (i can’t help it, the Steampunk thing just does it for me) and put her on the cover — even though what’s inside the book doesn’t resemble anything like what’s on the cover. And no, i’m not giving up on my philosophy just because a few cunts have decided to take advantage of it.

That all said, don’t ever say i don’t do negative reviews, because now i have.

Deleted!