Explanation - invariably I will read a fantastic book, beautifully written with a sweeping or moving story that is profoundly impactful…and some amateur reviewer will have written, “That book is so boring! Blah, blah, blah, nothing exciting ever happens!” 🙄
When I read these, I often pause to try to imagine what sort of book those reviewers WOULD like, lol. No doubt its probably an elitist, pompous exercise…but its fun imagining for a moment a book filled with non-stop, over the top action, gory or imaginative deaths by the dozens, torrid romantic liasons, CIA and KGB and SS agents around every corner, etc. Ive been tempted to write that book, tongue in cheek, just so those reviewers would have something to be happy about.
Then I thought…maybe someone has already done this? Intentionally written a book so egregiously over-the-top that even those action-aholics might be tempted to say, “too fast, and too much excitement…” in their reviews?
Battlefield Earth is incredibly boring and internally inconsistent.
Despite the space battles that, among other things, involve a bunch of scots flying what is essentially a salvage ship rigged with explosives into the hangar bay of an enemy capitial ship and blowing it up. Or bugging the room of a master spy and then watching as he sweeps for bugs. You’d think that it should be rather exciting. Somehow it fails at it spectacularly.
The only decent part of the book is the initial world building IMO, where the initial group of post-apocalypse survivors have forgotten how to read english but still speak it, and the aliens never bothered to learn, so when the protag learns to read english from finding/visiting a library it kicks off the plot.