I was going through some of the older threads on discussion mansion and saw discussions around some specific books....

The one that caught my attention was 'The White Tiger' thread and completely agree with all there, that the book was extremely overhyped with many jarred facts, a minimal storyline and nothing that could catch the reader's attention.. The international reviews of the book talked about the awesome sarcasm weaved through an interesting storyline.. and I kept searching for the same throughout the book...

Let us share similar experiences with other books that we started with a lot of expectations and then kept wondering what it was all about.. We would have left some of these even midway after being completely dissapointed..

What were some of such book reading dissapointing experiences for you and why?

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Have renamed the thread subject since the discussion has taken a wider perspective that I initially thought

Hi...
Nice thread Jaya

Plenty of books in my case, but ones that come to mind are

1) The God Of Small Things - Arundhati Roy - couldn't get past page 30
2) The Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Man - James Joyce - Very popular book otherwise, and said to be a landmark in literature. But couldn't follow much and stopped after 20-odd pages
3) 3 Mistakes Of My life and One Night @ The Call Center - Chetan Bhagat - I did finish both because I had nothing else to do, But found them very juvenile. Haven't read his Five Point Someone, which is supposed to be good
4) On The Road - Jack Kerouac - A cult book which has influenced musicians like Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett (though it's not about music per se but about American counter culture). Maybe I didn't identify with it as I haven't travelled to the US
5) Autumn Of The Patriarch - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Marquez is one of my favourite authors. I read this book after One Hurdred Years Of Solitude and thought it was an overdose of 'magic realism' without much content. I love other Marquez books like Of Love And Other Demons, Love In The Time Of Cholera and Strange Pilgrims, his short stories collection
6) The Da Vince Code - Dan Brown - A rage in its time. I lived the first 50 pages where he describes the Louvre, but it later ends up as senseless masala
7) Shame - Salman Rushdie - Maybe because I loved Midnight's Children, and this didn't match up
8) The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - Had liked the movie starring Robert redford, but the book didn't do much to me
9) Sin City - Harold Robbins - I was a huge Robbins fan from age 15-16 to 20-21 and had read most of his books. I tried Sin City last year at the age of 45 and thought it was utter trash. I later discovered Robbins only wrote the beginning and someone else completed it after he died.
10) A White Tiger - Aravind Adiga - For reasons mentioned in earlier threads and also in jaya's comments

Oh wow.. I see quite a few books in your post that I would quote as well.... I will though take one at a time

Will start with '3 mistakes of my life' and here a I quote from a review that wrote for the book in another online discussion....

3 mistakes? Surely...

The 3 mistakes of my life - Clearly looks like the 2nd big mistake of Chetan Bhagat... The writer who had started on a very positive note with 'Five Point Someone' that did catch the fancy of a whole generation across the nation, started going down with 'One night...' . And now with '3 mistakes..' he has gone all wrong.... Too many issues crammed into 250 pages, too many cliched plots, the book just has tooo much of everything... Has Chetan got carried away with the fact that both his previous books are now getting adapted in 2 upcoming Bollywood flicks? So much so, that he writes his entire third book with a Bollywood script in mind? Playing to the galleries, Mr Bhagat, does not always fetch success... And I hope, success for a creative writer, doesnt always mean the number of copies of a potboiler getting sold!!

Kiran Desai's 'The inheritence of loss' dissapointed me big time... Another Booker prize winner, I felt the book never deserved the rave reviews it got and finally the award... Blame it on the extraordinary reviews that the book received, and that it was coming from the daughter of Anita Desai, I had way too many expectations from the book... This book suffers a similar syndrome as The White Tiger.. I think its written primarily with the western audience in mind, and tries to address way too many issues like globalization, fundametalism, terrorism and what not, and at the same time does not sketch the characters deep enough that you start relating to what they are going through in their roughest times... It tries to show the common theme of a sense of loss and humiliation across characters, but cant do it with the honesty that it should have... All in all, I felt - this could have stood out, but loses ground midway as it did not have its heart in the right place.... The very cliched end of the book added to the overall mediocrity of this novel...

Hi Jaya,
I haven't read The Inheritance Of Loss... Main reason was that I was very keen to read it after it won the Booker but heard mostly negative things about it.
One my my book-loving friends in fact had suggested a similar topic on Facebook, where he said something like - Unlike in the past, when Indian fiction boasted of real and consistent talent like Mulk Raj Anand, R K Narayan and Khushwant Singh, today's Indian fiction has two kinds of writers - those who write unreadable stuff (Chetan Bhagat, Aravind Adiga, Kiran Desai) and those who write unwritable stuff (Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy)...
I liked the statement - but wouldn't know whether to agree or not because I haven't read each writer's complete works... my judgement is based on one or two books I have read. Like inRushdie, I liked Midnight's Children and was disappointed by Shame. I never attempted Arundhati Roy beyond those first few pages. I haven't read Adiga's 'Between The Assassinations', which people say is better. As for Bhagat, I haven't read his 'Five Point Someone'...
Anyway, good to find another book lover on this forum...

You Too??? I thought I was the only one who found it boring.. That highly disappointed me as well.. I read first few chapters but then I really couldn't read through the rest.. It's still lying there in my rack..

Wow - thats an interesting statement.. but I would also not agree completely to it.... I read quite a bit of Indian Writing, and some of it has been very impresssionable...

I am completely with you on 'Midnight's Children' and 'Shame'... I will always gather enough feedback before attempting Rushdie.. he is quite unpredictable to my taste!

There are a few Indian writers (though I am not sure how much of roots they at all have in India) whom I have liked consistently so far... They being Jhumpa Lahiri and Amitava Ghosh... I have read all the books of Lahiri, and find her writing simple yet strong, and characters who are sketched very clearly, even in her short stories... 'The Namesake' stood out for me, and I have thoroughly enjoyed 'The Interpreter of Maladies' and 'Unaccustomed Earth' as well...
I have liked what I have read of Amitava Ghosh so far... he can be somewhat slow for some tastes.. but I loved his style of writing on 'Shadow Lines' and overall set-up and flow of 'The Hungry Tide'... I am looking forward to read 'The Calcutta Chromosome' now... I haven't heard many good things about 'The Sea of Poppies' though...

Some of the other authors from the sub-continent whom I have found consistently good are Khaled Hosseini and Bapsi Sidhwa...

Books that disappointed me ... quite a few ... All of paulo coelho's books that i dared to read post 'The Alchemist' have disappointed me ... since he has a topic dedicated to him will post more there!

Did anyone else find, 'A thousand splendid suns' by Khaled Hosseini disappointing or was it only me?
I loved 'The Kite Runner' and expected a lot from this book and probably that did me in! While the former gave a great description of Afghanistan prior and post the political upheavals, the latter was completely shrouded in pathos so much so that after a while i began to get depressed and wondered when the protagonist's ordeals would end!!! Thats not to say i disliked everything in the book, i quite liked some of the characters and the way the story built up but then it all suddenly went downhill for me! I guess i just expected too much from the book!

Abt Indian authors, while i loved 'The Namesake' by Jhumpa Lahiri, some of the stories in 'Unaccustomed Earth' were too boring for me. Some other books i loved were 'Sacred Games' and 'A Suitable Boy' by Vikram Chandra and Seth respectively! I also quite liked 'Five point someone' and was equally disappointed by the other two just like the others above! In any case I have never really been an avid reader of Indian fiction.