Name three books you hated that everyone else thought were terrific [View All]

1. Nickel and Dimed. I thought she sort of created a self-fulfilling prophecy by not staying longer in each place she moved to. Moving is expensive, and of course you're going to be ridiculously short on cash when you move to a new town, much less working minimum wage when you get there. Furthermore, all the people she worked with... how well can you get to know someone in a month? I think it would have been a MUCH more profound book if she had spent 6 months in each place, working each job. Doing it for a month makes her a tourist.

2. Collapse. I thought there were some flaky things in Guns, Germs, and Steel, but I also thought there were some good ideas. Collapse was just BAD. After the chapter on Easter Island I put the book back on the shelf and never finished it. The whole question "What was the islander who chopped down the last tree thinking?" would be much more profound if he didn't state that all the tree seeds found had been chewed by rats, and would be even more profound if palm "wood" was good for anything, which it isn't, because it isn't really wood. He just gets on a tangent and only presents stuff that supports his idea.

3. Cryptonomicon. The main (male) characters were one dimensional, the women were just there so the men could get laid (except for the ex wife and the two old women), there were HUGE numbers of typos, and he used the word "interstitial" 7 times. All that and there were whole 100 page sections that were boring as shit about random, nerdy, Aspie topics like Turing machines. :snore:

So what say ye, DU? :D