The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[Karellen]

Don't you hate when an ongoing series is taken over by another author, and it is nothing like the original authors writing.

Lee Childs and the Jack Reacher series is my disappointment. The last book I read was The Secret and Reacher comes across as a secondary character. Not written in usual first person. There is no internal dialogue. Reacher does not make any meaningful appearance until 70 pages in. It was all pretty dry.

[graycyn]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Don't you hate it when you finish the newest book in a series, only to have it end on a cliff hanger and the next book isn't due until 2025!

This was reading Louise Penny's newest book in the Inspector Gamache series, The Grey Wolf.

Sent from my Pixel 7a using Tapatalk

Heck yeah! I detest that particular ploy!

Actually, today, I was cataloging a few Amazon freebies into Calibre, and I went to fetch a description for one, which had the note that every book in the series ended on a cliffhanger. Um, NOPE! I hit delete, and went and removed it from my Amazon library.

You want my money, you write a good story that has an actual ending, then let me decide if I want to read further of your stories. But try to force it with the cliffhanger ploy, I'm outta there.

I do like the Inspector Gamache series, but I usually get them from my library, and she doesn't do it often, so I'll give Louise Penny a pass if it's a once off. Now that I realize she's got a new one out, I need to go visit Libby, pronto!

[PeterT]

Yeah. I was lucky in that I'd requested to be notified when my library got copies, then place a hold as soon as I could and got a skip-the-wait 7 day loan!

Sent from my Pixel 7a using Tapatalk

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by graycyn

Actually, today, I was cataloging a few Amazon freebies into Calibre, and I went to fetch a description for one, which had the note that every book in the series ended on a cliffhanger. Um, NOPE! I hit delete, and went and removed it from my Amazon library.

You want my money, you write a good story that has an actual ending, then let me decide if I want to read further of your stories. But try to force it with the cliffhanger ploy, I'm outta there.

Even worse is paying money for what turns out to be a cliffhanger. I've blacklisted a few authors after that happened.

[issybird]

Titles of British books that are dumbed down or ramped up for the American market.

I just finished one, the excellent Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson. Except that the original title was The Mighty Dead, so much more evocative and taken from a Keats' sonnet when Keats is a hook for Nicolson's exegesis. Obviously the brains thought that Keats would be lost on the dumb Yanks.

And I've just started one, Mary Beard's The Fires of Vesuvius. About the destruction of Pompeii in AD 79 when Vesuvius erupted, amirite? Except that it's about Pompeii before Vesuvius erupted, as the original title, Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town indicates. But clearly they felt they had to make it more exciting for the yokels over here even if by doing so they misrepresented what the book was about.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Vent and rant: The completely unreasonable aversion to abandoning a book I paid money for.

How about this one...

Not being able to get your money back when the book you've paid for is rubbish and you DNF.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Karellen

Don't you hate when an ongoing series is taken over by another author, and it is nothing like the original authors writing.

Lee Childs and the Jack Reacher series is my disappointment. The last book I read was The Secret and Reacher comes across as a secondary character. Not written in usual first person. There is no internal dialogue. Reacher does not make any meaningful appearance until 70 pages in. It was all pretty dry.

That book was written by both Lee Child and Andrew Child. Eventually, Andrew is going to take over the series,

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by issybird

Titles of British books that are dumbed down or ramped up for the American market.

I just finished one, the excellent Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson. Except that the original title was The Mighty Dead, so much more evocative and taken from a Keats' sonnet when Keats is a hook for Nicolson's exegesis. Obviously the brains thought that Keats would be lost on the dumb Yanks.

And I've just started one, Mary Beard's The Fires of Vesuvius. About the destruction of Pompeii in AD 79 when Vesuvius erupted, amirite? Except that it's about Pompeii before Vesuvius erupted, as the original title, Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town indicates. But clearly they felt they had to make it more exciting for the yokels over here even if by doing so they misrepresented what the book was about.

I think in the UK they are more into history then we are in the US. They have a lot more historians who do TV programs then we have.

One UK historian I like watching on TV when I can is Dan Jones. The last documentary of his I watched was about The Terracotta Warriors.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

How about this one...

Not being able to get your money back when the book you've paid for is rubbish and you DNF.

I prefer not to refund books just because I didn't like them. I mostly refund for technical issues such as extremely poor formatting.