When did you feel the most let down or disappointed by a book? Spoiler alerts!

[indianroads]

I have The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War that I bought because my husband is really into historical books AND I am a fan of Pressfield's The War of Art and Do the Work...both very helpful. Husband liked the Lion's Gate, it's on my lengthy list of "I have it and will eventually read it"...most of which I didn't get to when the libraries were shut down. Nothing against Pressfield, though!

Of all Pressfield's books, I prefer Tides of War. It chronicles the 27 year Peloponnesian War from the eyes of a hoplite that is a friend to Alcibiades, a controversial general of the Athenian Army.

I made the mistake of recommending The Last of the Amazons to the wife of my best friend... she hated it. Well, to each their own. She got her revenge by recommending Game of Thrones.

[luckyscars]

Tolkien. Incredibly overrated and overall unimaginative.

I felt a little bit let down by Harry Potter but I don't fault the books for that as I think they're written just fine. I feel like almost any book hyped as much as Harry Potter is going to be a slight let down.

I have been disappointed by Stephen King more times than I can count and I'm actually quite a big fan of his. The man just drones for days. It's not the length of the books, mind, but the pacing of them I find horrible. That isn't all that new, either. The only thing I didn't like about 'Salems Lot was how long it took to get anywhere. It is another ass-numbingly long book that does not need to be. I will say, though, that when King isn't given free reign to bore you to death with twenty-nine chapters of set up that he is REALLY good. These days, I tend to only read King books if they are novellas. His novellas are much better than his novels overall.

Most disappointing of all? Probably Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman. What a waste.

[Pamelyn Casto]

What did your friend's wife hate about The Last of the Amazons? I've not read it but that time has always interested me. If the work about it is no good, though, I want to be spared the misery. Thanks. (Love her revenge on you.)

[indianroads]

What did your friend's wife hate about The Last of the Amazons? I've not read it but that time has always interested me. If the work about it is no good, though, I want to be spared the misery. Thanks. (Love her revenge on you.)

I think there was too much military subject matter.

[Taylor]

Cristina Algers, The Banker's Wife. She is a wonderful writer, and I had really enjoyed The Darlings. The basis for the story was the real life 2015 exposure of Swiss Bank accounts to the IRS by an insider. I was intrigued by a story about banking. And one of the characters was a wealthy entrepreneur turned politician. I thought it was a great premise for a story. She explores the motivation of the rich and unethical trying to avoid paying tax at all moral cost.

However, it is written from the POV of two FMCs, both of whom had someone close to them, a husband and a best friend get murdered early on. And then it just turned into a bit of a whodunit. Still a good read, but I would have enjoyed it more with less murder.

[thepancreas11]

Two books come to mind:

First is The Sun Also Rises. I'm a fan of very sparse prose. I would always rather read what's happening than the omniscient narrator's opinions on a character's thoughts and feelings. I almost like my books to be like the closed captions on a movie, really. Everyone said I would love Hemingway because that's his style too, apparently. He doesn't spend a lot of time on the frilly language. He just puts down the facts on paper and lets the reader infer what they will. Yeah, maybe, but he's also a dill-hole that annoys the crap out of me. I've said it before and I'll say it again: he reminds me of the beret-wearing boyfriend from "Uncle Buck", and he gets a big "No Thank You" from me.

Second is the Book of the New Sun. I read maybe seventy pages of that book. It took me like a month to do it. I don't necessarily mind a little work (see Lincoln in the Bardo) but I don't get my jollies from army-crawling through the mud or the literary equivalent of said practice. That book is just heavy. I kept finding reasons not to read it, and when I did, I would read the same sentence over and over again either because it was extremely dense or because my mind was wandering and I had missed something important. It's the first book I've ever stopped reading.

[ArrowInTheBowOfTheLord]

Harry Potter, definitely. It had been described to me as comparable to Narnia, but it was really only passable for a one-time read--and not even in the same vein, for that matter. At least the first is more school story than fairy tale.

That Hideous Strength. It's not an awful book. But it happens to be both written by one of my favorite authors, and the third book in an otherwise incredible trilogy. So I was expecting much better. Tedious segments, useless villains who seemed to be there just for the evils (I'm looking at you, Miss Hardcastle), and cloudy philosophic ideas (which are not, by the way, inherently cloudy, but somehow got tangled in their transfer into fiction).

The Return of Don Quixote. This was another book where I was disappointed mostly because I otherwise love G. K. Chesterton. Not to mention that the opening premise is hilarious--a librarian, by way of a ladder-stealing prank, gets trapped for three days in the Medieval shelf, and as a result becomes irreversibly obsessed with the Middle Ages. But the premise, unfortunately, kind of just dissipates instead of blossoms. And it's one of the only books that I'd describe as 'dated,'--there's a lot of things which I'm sure made sense to early 20th century British intelligentsia that were completely lost on me.

[Ralph Rotten]

I actually just had the inverse of this scenario.
I absolutely adored Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, but hated the movie (Alan Arkin as Yosarian? WTF???)
But then Hulu made a multi-episode version of Catch 22 and I thought "Finally, they'll make it a miniseries and do it right!"

No. I sat thru 2 DVDs and was disappointed every step of the way. It was supposed to be BASED on the book...but really it was INSPIRED by the book.
This thing was about as much Catch 22 as Taco Bell is Mexican food.
They ruined everything...changed the best parts, almost completely deleted Nately's whore, telegraphed Orr's escape, left out Doc Danika's conundrum, screwed up Major Major's promotion, and essentially made Yosarian a snivelling little coward right from the beginning (in the book he grew into it.)
Basically, every part that made you laugh in the book was changed to a less-funny version.
Idiots.

[Ralph Rotten]

Congo disappointed me.
The book was meh...the movie outright stunk.

[Matchu]

In the non-fic genre of 'man sails a 10 foot boat' to Antarctica/Norway/Nowhere/Iceland - there are classics - Wayfarer to Norway springs to mind, and Ice Bird (?) written by the Kiwi. Tho' the other, the famous Kiwi one is rather dull, the chap who collects a tree, makes a boat and sails the Pacific. Forgotten the title. A Kiwi will know. [South Sea Vagabonds]. Anything by Don Crowhurst, of course, is an inspiration.

- Jack de Crow
1. Firstly he's a prep school teacher.
2. He makes teacher jokes.
3. He sails a mirror dinghy along canals, moors up, knocks on rich people's doors, the people from his address book. And they all say, 'oh no, come in, have a meal, a bottle of wine and be off by morning, you boring d*ckhead.' And he always reflects, 'the Major and I discussed Heroditus, mysteries of Marco Polo, Finnish linguistics into wee small hours...hoh...I drank two gin and tonics, delicious guinea fowl occasion.'
4. It turns out he's actually Australian, so the teacher voice utilised up to page 200 is completely wrong, never mentioned on back cover.
5. He wears tweed.
6. Everybody on Amazon says 'this is the best book ever written.'
7. I don't like it.