Submitted by Ganesha811 t3_yt5rvn in books
I recently finished Solar by Ian McEwan. I plucked it off the shelves at random upon seeing McEwan's name on the spine. He's one of my favorite authors; beyond Atonement and The Innocent, I also loved On Chesil Beach and Saturday, which I know some people disliked.
So I slogged my way through Solar, suffering with every page. What a miserable book. It's about a physicist who used to be good and is now mediocre. The main character is an asshole, but he's also a whiner, and even with those two traits still manages to be a boring person to spend time with.
As the book goes on he gets worse and worse; the plot could have been interesting but is buried under layers of uncharacteristically sickly prose and half-formed ideas. There's a long scene in which our intrepid hero nearly pees his pants on a snowmobile in the Arctic, then gets his penis frozen stuck to his zipper, and is attacked by a polar bear. This scene, which is less amusing on the page than it sounds, would have been pivotal to his emotional journey if he'd had one, but he doesn't. I don't know what went wrong with McEwan's process here, but I strongly encourage you to never read this book.
Has this happened to you? What's a book you can't stand by an author you love?