Dawn ,'The Killer In Me'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
until the end, and then I was just crushed by the stupidity of the ending.
Word, Alicia. So. Incredibly. Stupid. When K gave it to me (back when I first met her, fall of 1999, pre-YV!), she said, "some people have issues with the ending."
And I so did. Argh.
Or Hannibal by Thomas Harris. I think that's the only book I ever threw across the room at the end.
me too. Along with screaming "The FUCK????" The movie wasn't _much_ better, but at least I wasn't angry at the end.
I remember really liking The Horse Whisperer, thinking how original and interesting it was -- until the ending. Which was a sad pathetic cop-out cliched ending.
Same with Bee Season, which is still worth reading -- REALLY -- despite the ending that left me asking "Buh?"
You are so right, Tep. The ending of THW totally wrecked that book.
Loved, loved, loved it ... until the end, and then I was just crushed by the stupidity of the ending.
Passage. I spent the last 100 pages intrigued because I thought she was going to pull out something brilliant at the last minute, but nope. It just. keeps. going.
I think Passage was a hard book to end - the actual end was okay, but the getting there was, as you say, tiring. I think the book needed a lot of editing that it didn't get. It could easily have been 2/3 as long, and better for it.
In Passage, I kept getting hung up on the timing. Because the one character is experiencing something that happened very fast, and the other characters were living through weeks or months, and yet the chapters were intertwined, and it confused me terribly.
I can't say that Passage wasn't ambitious, but I don't think it really worked all that well.
Was it in Natter that someone suggested numbering the conversations? Passage = #28
eta: Though I hasten to add, I agree.
Also, the ending of the movie of A Clockwork Orange is so perfect that I was disappointed to find the book didn't end the same way!
I don't know about the rest of the world, but in the US the ending of the book is the same as the movie - the last chapter was cut. Kubrick, who'd read it in the US, didn't find out about the other ending until later (not sure if it was prior to, during, or after filming) and hated it.
As for HANNIBAL, I must admit I really liked the ending because it was SO twisted and wrong. I spent the whole book going "this isn't going where I THINK it's going, is it?" Yep, that's where it went. But I was in a hugely misanthropic state of mind that year, which I'm sure was a contributing factor.
in the US the ending of the book is the same as the movie - the last chapter was cut
Not anymore -- I don't know when it was restored, but recent editions have the complete, original ending.