Anti-Recommendations

I am deeply rankled when multiple people recommend a book to me — even highly recommend it — and then I don't like it. Especially if I dislike it pretty intensely. 

This has happened to me twice in the past six months. The two books were This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone (2019) and Severance by Ling Ma (2018).  

For the first, even though I am a long-time science fiction reader who's able to catch on to the arcanities inherent in far-future world-building, I never felt any connection with the characters or interest in the story that the author was trying to create.

In the second (which I just finished today), while it's wrapped in a post-apocalyptic shell, it's really just a little pile of 20-something New York City navel-gazing with a literary sheen. I kept waiting for it to pay off, but it never did. (Most people on GoodReads liked it, but one commenter who did not said it well: "Who knew that a book about a fever outbreak crippling civilization could be SO dull?")

Thank goodness both of these books were short because I ended up feeling as though each was a waste of time.