Cryptonomicon. Neal Stephenson has written interesting, compelling books - Snow Crash is fun and breezy; Anathem is among my favorite novels - but Cryptonomicon just doesn't hold my attention. Lots of smart people love it, so I always have this nagging feeling that I'm the one in the wrong here.
Fiction Books
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Completely agree. I didn’t like Snow Crash either, but Anathem is also among my favorites ever.
Hitchhikers.
Harry Potter. Very shallow surface level magic where nothing made sense if you thought about it.
To add to this:
Hogwarts was well thought out and imaginative. The setting was practically a character in its own right.
But Harry Potter himself was unbelievably bland. He was nothing special, but was treated as if he were because of who he was related to or otherwise connected to.
Hyperion Cantos. The beginning was incredibly promising but then it all went to hell with the magic Mary Sue type girl that deflated any stakes to zero and one of the most insufferable baffoons for the main character. Ah yes and the romance between those two was an actual joke, one-dimensional, unjustified and kinda creepy. By the end of the series I was seriously pissed off at the author for squandering all of the potential.