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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9380871" data-attributes="member: 18">High five brother! Very similar experience.Shannara is the dubious honour of being the first book that I ever just straight-up physically abandoned. I'd stopped reading books before, but never left one to its fate.I was also in my early-mid teens, at airport in the US, and I was just like "Nah, I've had enough of this rubbish" - I dunno if I'd just finished it, or if I was just quite late on in the first book, but I put the book down on a bench in the airport, and I just walked away. And I didn't even think about it again until after I'd got back to the UK, weeks later.It wasn't the first book I physically hurled away though - that'd be Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind, which is a reprehensible book on a wide variety of levels, but particularly offended me by it's grotesque and almost worse clumsy and obvious sexualization and fetishization of torture and even murder, in a way I felt, even as a teenager with limited familiarity with such subjects, was insulting to people actually into BDSM, and just insulting to humanity in general. This was together with stuff like using the abuse of children (in exactly the way you think) as like a truly unnecessary plot point to try and make a bad guy seem more bad, and just a whole lot of just bad writing of the most basic "male power fantasy" kind. I had, I must admit, bought it purely because it had a great cover and high production values, and back in 1994, that usually meant a fantasy was successful and well-regarded at least. Or so I thought! Hah! Idiot!I finished it, because I wanted to see if this was all going to be rescued at the last minute. It was not. Indeed Goodkind managed to make it worse. It was summer or warm autumn. I was on the third floor our house, with the back window open, and from my bed, I just absolutely hurled it. Luckily it hit the wall right by the window, because it was quite hefty and someone might have been out there! Anyway I then just put it in the bin.So now I don't buy fantasy novels from anyone called Terry.</blockquote>

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