The cemetery of good ideas

Most of the books I read these days are downloaded from the Internet, for free, and I’m not ashamed to say that. At this particular moment, I’d hate myself to spend $20 on a book only to discover it sucks!
Like the book I’ve just finished - @honeydue mentioned seeing it in a bookstore and it sounded interesting - the story of a dog and its master looking for each other over centuries. Intriguing enough to look it up. The book (Tomorrow, by Damien Dibbon) doesn’t dwell much on technicalities, that is the elixir that allowed the protagonists to live almost eternally, but rather on the pros and cons of a long life. That would have been a great topic, but… the book is poorly written and the author did a rather lousy job of describing the sadness of seeing the ones you love die one after the other. The book is big on ‘name-dropping’ - famous people of the Renaissance, Napoleon, kings and queens - in a clumsy effort to create an impressive background. I cannot help imagining how impressed the editors who picked this book must have been - ‘Wow, the battle of Waterloo… Fantastic!’
So, yes, I’m happy I did not pay for this crap.

_source

When you download books you’re under no obligation to read them… I just go over the first few pages - boring, boring, boring. If I don’t like the idea, why bother? No hard feelings…
But I do have strong feelings about good ideas writers manage to fuck up…
Not so long ago, I wrote about another author I was excited to read, Adrian Tchaikovsky. The first book in his new series ‘Children of Time’ was beautiful, captivating and it kept me wanting to know more about the civilization of uplifted spiders. The second book, ‘Children of Ruin’, starts well enough throwing into the mix another species, octopuses, and it was interesting for a while... until the author lost the plot and instead of exploring the possibilities of exciting unknown worlds ended the book with the crappy notion of creating a hivemind to encompass the knowledge of various individuals or species. I don’t know, Hivemind might work here on Steemit, but as far as I’m concerned I value the uniqueness of the human mind and the idea of everybody sharing the same knowledge and thoughts scares the daylights out of me…
Another good idea, totally lost. And I expect there’s gonna be a third book,too.
I read fantasy and sci-fi most of the time, so the next mention in the ‘you screwed up’ category goes to Margaret Atwood.Not the Handmaid, the MaddAddam Trilogy. The first book, ‘Oryx and Crake` presents a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by a race of genetically-engineered perfect people, called Crakers. Nice and lovable, makes you care about them - I would have loved to see how they evolve, if they lose their innocence, if human nature prevails etc. Unfortunately, Atwood pursued other themes, quite good actually, the other books were a nice read, but she abandoned the child-like creatures and focused on the few surviving authentic humans. Well, fuck them, there’s plenty of people around me, I know how they are, what about the Crakers?!
So frustrating to see a great idea abandoned!
And yes, I am aware I wouldn’t be able to write anything like the books I just mentioned so I have no right to judge, but this is not about talent and writing .. I’m the reader and I know I have rights, too!
By the way, I have nothing to read at the moment so I would appreciate any suggestion!

P.S. - The title of this post comes from ‘The Cemetery of Forgotten Books’by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, which is a great book, by the way!