Tedious, Dense, Boring, Redundant
937534
Horrible... it's just the worst. Sucks all the fun and life out of my soul. A few sentences are enough to make your eyes glaze over. Waste of a semester's worth of reading.
2778089
Tedious, overly detailed, and lack of flow. I'm sure there are story plots in here somewhere, but the author's writing style put me off after only four pages; since it was too late to return the book, I tossed it.
3702426
Chinese water torture? Sounds like a welcome diversion from this boring  redundant work of "art" to me. I feel for the trees that were  wasted in the process of creating this horrendously boring soap opera in  paperback. It is possible that I missed something while reading this work  because I spent most of the time trying to stay awake. However, in the  future if I want to read something of this caliber I would write NBC and  ask for the script of their least watched daytime "soap". In  conclusion, not only do I NOT recommend this novel, but I pledge to do my  best to begin an anti-Persuasion League, to prevent the widespread  development of narcolepsy in high school students who are forced to read  worthlessly painful novels.
160710
Boring, formulaic, repetitive, tedious, unrealistic dialogue, plodding.

UNREADABLE DRIVEL!

Stick to writing the blogs and tacitly espousing religion-based homophobia.

ABSOLUTE DRIVEL.  INDIGESTIBLE CRAP!!
417420
and I've read quite a few. At least the authors of "HTML for dummies" or whatever don't imagine that they are genuises setting the world on fire.
This book is pretentious, repetitious, phenomenally boring, and completely useless. It consists of little but vacuous management-speak sentences. For example what is one to make of
"A process is something that someone wants to accomplish, including the flow of actions from start to completion"? In the world of normal people, a process is a means to an end, not an end in itself. But the book is riddled with this sort of meaningless juxtaposition of jargon.
There is no point so trivial that this book doesn't feel it's worth repeating at least ten times. There is no technical detail about XML so trivial that this book feels it should include. If you feel that saying that XML uses a tree structure is well illustrated with a picture of what looks like an actual christmas tree (as opposed to something with nodes and edges) then this is probably the book for you. But if you have the slightest interest in the technicalities of XML (even if your interest is limited to ecommerce and management level issues), don't waste your time. Typing XML into google and reading ten random hits will teach you more.
1977664
After making it to the end of book 5, I refuse to waste another dollar or minute of my time on this meandering miasma of meaninglessness.

Book 1 was of course a pretty good read. By books 2 and 3, I started reading just one sentence per page in some chapters to get through the endless and excessive descriptions. By books 4 and 5, in many chapters I was reading perhaps one sentence every five or ten pages because the story literally moves that slowly.

I really don't know what GRRM hoped to accomplish with the awful books 4 and 5. As countless other reviewers have pointed out, despite their 1,700 pages of text, pretty much nothing happens except that a character or two that might have been developed in some meaningful way was killed off.

There is so much that could have been done but wasn't. Sansa and Tyrion could actually have learned something from each other, and their marriage might have developed with a little time. Arya was on a roll for the first three books then hit the tar pits of books 4 and 5. And Jon ... what a waste.

My biggest gripe is GRRM's proclivity for doing lengthy character developments, then abruptly killing the character. I found almost as bad his undeviating use of cliffhanger chapter endings. Obviously, it is a pretty standard practice in popular entertainment novels, but he manages to make the trite device excruciatingly painful time after time by waiting five or ten chapters, or even an entire book, to again pick up the story for that character.

In short, GRRM has squandered in countless ways what could have been an exciting three or four books.  Instead, he supersized it, filled it with bloat, and destroyed nearly all forward momentum with hundreds and hundreds of pages of meaningless writing.

So I'm done. I refuse to read any more.
3530519
I so wanted to enjoy this book, and I did for the first half or so....and then......the tediousness sets in.  Ms. Gilbert sets up enjoyable characters only to make them irrelevant history for the most boring protagonist this year.....I was pleasantly surprised and hopeful with the introduction of Retta (who resembles a much more richly detailed Anne of Green Gables), however this character devolves into a frustrating side note.  What a waste of a talented author to have such a result.  If I had ordered the hard copy of this book it would have been flung across the room at least 3 times.  As it was, my kindle remains undamaged, but slightly battered. Boring, predictable, and, did I mention, tedious (my first clue should have been the elevation of moss-studying to such exalted heights).  The shoe-horned evolution thesis came across as a last ditch attempt to validate such a boring worthless life.
4412889
In these postings I have occasionally stated that I want my money back for a bad book, but this is the first time I want triple the cost of this formless glob of warmed-over mush to compensate me for my wasted time.  Punitive damages should also be imposed on the publisher for printing this, this -- misshapen thing? -- too kind a description. Pastiches can be fascinating but this one is just lazy.  There is not an original thought -- not one -- in this entire waste of trees, and what is contained therein is poorly expressed.  The author would not dare disagree with any position taken by the New York Times or NPR and can make even potentially interesting subjects suicide-inducingly tedious.  This is a poor fifth-rate imitation of Alain de Botton, whose books you should buy instead.  Avoid like the plague.
2811859
Should anyone ask why this book is so revered, I would be at a loss to even being rationalizing others' adulation. The Booker Prize? One of the 100 best works of fiction of the 20th century?
This book was one of the toughest slogs I have ever undertaken voluntarily. I pushed forward hoping that the end would justify and reward the senselessness of that which preceded the end. Had I not invested so much in a vain quest to find that which others described (allegory, metaphor, mysticism, creativity, use of language), I would have put it down much sooner.
The language and flow of the work are distinctive, imaginative, and complex, but these are the few positive characteristics I can ascribe to the work. The remainder I found to be uninteresting and dense. In parts, I felt as if Rushdie had lost energy and focus, inserting filler until he could again jumpstart the storyline by again stretching the life of the central chracter across a historic event.
Read instead Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Jorge Luis Borges. You'll find what others have promised within this work and come away with a far more rewarding experience.
1264343
This book may have the word "I" more than any book I've purchased. If you are not a fan of authors telling their extended life stories, then I suggest you stay away from this offering.

The ideas in this book are long and drawn out because of his inability to concisely author his thoughts. Mr. Sterner's writing style is tedious to read with basic vocabulary and a convoluted message. I had no "aha" moments that urged me to access the highlighter option.

An exercise that may suit you better is to take a look at this line. How can it be applied to your life?

"The process is better than the end result."

With all successes, this is a belief in action. How you manage to apply this to your life is up to you.
2755684
After 500 pages of pretty corny disaster fiction, Stephenson breaks into a series of TED talks to end all TED talks. If there wasn't an illustration at the beginning of Part 3 (and the illustrations on the endpapers), I would have been totally and completely lost. Who cares how the people mover system of the year 7000 A.C.E. works? Stephenson does. And he does in absolutely excruciating detail. Somewhere along the line, Stephenson evidently became fascinated by the physics/mechanical engineering of a looping or whip-cracking chain. And he expects his reader to become fascinated as well.  I didn't.  Stephenson learned a new word and a new sub-science, epigenetics and he wants the reader to know all about it (and I mean ALL about it).
This is not a good book. Its first two thirds are just a passable disaster story. Stephenson saves time and effort by using familiar "types" instead of actually creating characters, for example: the overachieving Asian-American female who lacks self-confidence, the megalomaniacal politician who desires power for its own sake, and the Machiavellian presidential advisor. One of the main characters could just be described as Neil deGrasse Tyson with a different name.  Whether this is intended as homage or parody is hard to figure out, but it sure is easier than creating an original character. Dr. Tyson should be entitled to a piece of the royalties. The last third of the book is boring, boring, boring and fails as a novel and as a pop science book.
I'm really sorry that I bought this book and wasted precious time reading it.
4959842
This is one of those tedious self-published books that, fortunately, will never reach an audience much beyond the author's close friends and acquaintances.

It isn't any good.  It's too long and it's over-written.  It reads like Kraft's Amazon review of his own book (posted here at the time I write this): confusing, pointless, and not at all funny.  There is throughout a sort of painful striving after humor that drives the reader to a lot of cringing.  There is also throughout a great deal of pointless obfuscatory language, which was perhaps meant to substitute for plot.  It's not clever but you have the sense Kraft really, really wanted it to be.
4693174
Intensely boring, pathologically boring, stultifyingly boring...This book is like reading the daily Facebook comments of someone you're sorry you friended who has to describe every mundane activity of her life. Maybe it's meant to be that way for those who love to read about a fantasy world where everyone gets along, romance has no sparkle and there is almnost no action. This doesn't ressemble any family or relationship dynamics I've ever experienced. Spoiler alert: actually I can't call it that because there are no spoilers in this book. But anyway, even the supposed drama of the estranged mother returrning to hit up her daughter for cash carries no major call for mayhem or even therapy. Everyone is so nice to the character involved that ruffled feathers are quickly smoothed. Give me a break! So why did I select this book and even more pertinently, why did I finish it? I moved near the author where she is a local celeb. To fit in to my new surroundings, I read the first book in this series which was only marginally less boring than the second. Then I went to her store for a book signing and had to present one of her gems for a signature. Logically, I picked the next in line, figuring maybe the trilogy improved as it moved along. I finished the book with the cognitive dissonance that such a famous author could write something so amazingly bad. I am not even tempted to read the final book.
71375
Middle-aged women are generally content with life, and more confident, worldly, and sexually adventurous.

Duh.

This is the big insight.  If  you're looking for erotic material, there's far better (and better written) material out there  (even about middle-aged women!)  Dime-store psychological "insights" worthy of an article in Cosmopolitan,  plodding, unimaginative  technique,  and a self-indulgent and self-important  narrative make the book tedious and tiresome to read.

If you've read this review, you've spent all the time you need to on this supposedly revolutionary book.
21006
I was excited about this book and invested (wasted) quite a bit of time trying to read it.  Unfortunately, it is way too tedious.  The author may be knowledgeable and I am fully supportive of skeptics but I will never again buy any book written by her due to her writing style.  I like to read books by Sam Harris and I enjoy reading Susan Jacoby but I just cannot handle the tedious, never-ending babbling of Jennifer Michael Hecht.
471971
Hyperbole and football metaphors detract from this book.  The beginning chapters were devoted to who has the bigger d--k.  Tedious and boring.  Perhaps lawyers like this book, but I found it convoluted and repetitive.  Won't be reading more by this author.
4417747
I had picked up this book too many times to count. Each time placing it back down and going with another choice. So when I had the opportunity to read it via a friend's copy, I went for it. Why not: bestseller, a friend loved it, the lady at the bank said this was her "favorite book of all time." I should have followed my instincts. I truly want to rate this book with one star, however, I give it two for the author's hard work in producing a work of almost one thousand pages (paperback).

Upon starting, I quickly came to the realization that this is yet another mass market trade book in the lines of the Davinci Code (though much more well written). I cringed at the dialog. Did people of that era speak with such vocabulary?? I think not. The author should have incorporated more authentic speech to enrich the text (editor, where were you?). The first sex scene is absolutely ridiculous, not plausible, and not necessary (editor, where were you?). The architectural diatribe is exhausting, and really, who cares?

I just couldn't go on after page 139.