Disappointment with long-anticipated read...

Just finished The Second Sleep by Robert Harris.

I'm sorry but it was total shite. Its like he dreamt up a good conceit and decided to run with it because it required no research and he could churn it out.

The story doesn't even get going until about 80% in. Before that it's mainly exposition. So then the finale is rushed and it ends apruptly and you're thinking "that was it?".

I have been disappointed by The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett. I was so excited to get another in the Kingsbridge series and it was a bit dull and rushed.
I'm reading The Mirror and the Light now. Not as zippy as the previous installments but we'll see.

A Little Life was good but depressing. I'd read it and y colleague was reading it and kept saying "it can't get worse" and I was "yes it can!"

The Testaments was a good story but not a groundbreaking work. I feel the TV series sort of constrained what she could do with the story a bit.

I was so excited to read the Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer cos I loved The Interestings but I found it really naf and predictable.

I found A Little Life pretty compelling I didn’t hate it but I did think aspects where really stupid. Like how one of them was a mega successful artist but all he painted was his 3 friends (one of which was a famous movie star)!

OP, life is too precious to waste like this!
Please, step away from the book!

I am reading The Mirror and the Light now. I am enjoying every moment of it but agree it doesn’t move forward the way the other two did. Also it is starting to get uncomfortable- I am not sure the last third will be very pleasant.

I read A Little Life for book club. We all hated it - misery on misery on misery. Just as you think it might get better, it gets worse.

The Testaments wasn't as good as The Handmaid's Tale but it kind of tied things up. I haven't read The Mirror and the Light yet.

A Little Life is awful. My belief has always been that the author watched a lot of episodes of Friends in her younger days and thought- I could write a book like that. Except the friends will have weird twisted lives and be mostly gay. But there won’t be any references to AIDS although much of the book is set in the 1980s because that would be too complicated. If you’re not enjoying don’t bother.

Not only does A Little Life not get better, it gets far worse, and turns into a total extravaganza of misery porn focusing on Jude. It's like Hana Yanagihara had a bet with herself as to how much misery she could pile on to one character while keeping people reading. If you've read the kind of gruesome teenage hurt/comfort fan fiction where Death Eaters capture, rape and torture Harry Potter and Snape has to participate so as not to blow his cover, and then they kiss in a dungeon and fall in love, and then Snape is discovered trying to break Harry out and gets the Dementor's Kiss for his pains and yadda yadda -- then you've pretty much read it, only with a lot more horrifying, rather prurient details of child abuse delivered late in the narrative.

I was also mildly disappointed in The Testaments, which felt like a competent novelisation of the TV series, but then I think Atwood went off the boil starting from Oryx and Crake -- I have to remind myself how good her earlier novels were.

I was also slightly disappointed in Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light -- she's a genius, but it was just not as good as the previous two novels in the trilogy. Partly the absence of an overarching narrative drama of Henry's (getting rid of Catherine of Aragon, replacing her with Anne Boleyn, getting rid of Anne Boleyn etc), partly I suppose because it's always a bit depressing watching someone start to fail, discover meetings are being held without him, realise he's falling out of favour etc.

Didn't like either of those books. Such an annoying feeling when you have to force yourself to finish reading a book isn't it.

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood was lightweight ill thought out crap. It didn’t deserve half a prize.