I finished Battlefield Earth.
The thing is, I remember enjoying it. I mean, it wasn’t literature, but it was a lot of dumb fun.
Bill McKibben’s Enough is on my shelf purely so I can flip through it and get mad. A dense little paperback on how technology and progress should just stop. Not even return-with-a-v to some imagined utopia, like Ted Koweveritspelled. Straight-up ‘change might be bad, so let stop right here, the moment this book is published.’ Pushed with such flimsy arguments that my copy is about half post-it notes, by weight, from the month I read it for a philosophy class. They stop halfway. I just didn’t consider rebuttal necessary past a certain point. You don’t have to eat the whole turd to know it’s not a crabcake.
The Great Gatsby.
I’ve read a lot of books, but that one I literally remember nothing about. Not a quote, not a character, not the plot… All I remember is the cover was some weird abstract art piece with creepy eyes, my brain purged everything else about it book. Probably for my own sanity.
The book of a thousand nights and a night. Went in knowing it was the original inspiration for Aladdin. Was not prepared for a litany if short stories about sex and racism
The Rings Of Saturn
Was chosen by my Community College English professor and it was the most mind numbing thing I’ve ever had to read. It was translated from German, so there are multi-page, run-on sentences that haunt me till this day.
The bible. Set aside any religious connotations and just look at it as a piece of literature: it’s terrible.
Ayn Rand’s fountainhead, by a fat mile. I was young and didn’t know better
God, me too. I thought I was too dumb to “get it”.
The Tarot of the Bohemians.
Ready Player One
The cringe is massive with that one.
The entire thing is the author wanking himself silly over his knowledge of pop culture references from his childhood. Some of it reads like it was written by a 14 year old who isn’t all that into books.
The bit about the gaming suit that wanks the user off but also means you’re exercising so you get fit from wearing it was honestly one of the cringiest things I’ve ever read. If I thought the author was capable of the level of self reflection required, I’d have thought writing that part of the book was him acknowledging that the book is literally a work of literary masturbation.
It should have received the same response as The Room; a bad book only made into a cult classic by the people laughing at it.
Three Body Problem.
Same for me
I just had a friend tell me he loved the whole series (with caveats), why didn’t you like it?
The handwaving “science” part. And then in the end there’s this deus ex machina plot point that comes out that makes all the rest of the plot utterly pointless.
I’ve read a lot of SF, that was the worst because I had such high hope for it after reading what everyone had to say about it. And it turned me off reading anything that’s won a Hugo entirely. That and Redshirts…
That definitely makes sense. What’s a good SF book you’ve read recently?
I tried reading two different series from Stephen R. Donaldson, and it seemed to me he was somehow unable to write a book without a horrific rape. I just stopped reading the first book in each case because I felt like they were salacious and hateful.
‘How to write with style’
me, clueless thinking its going to be a good resource to help with my fiction writing
Author in the first 50 pages;
So heres why the USSR was evil
bro who asked
War and Peace. Heard so many good things about it. Despite everything, went in not having super high expectations.
The whole book turned out like a reality tv show. All the characters had some petty drama that they blew out of proportion. Hundreds of pages where nothing really happens, people just complain or bad mouth other characters.
I had to stop half way through.
I could only make a few pages in to the first chapter, it was hard to read, very, very detailed, which should be a good thing but I found myself losing track of where we even were or what the scene was about for all the detail. Once they started describing the buttons on the coat of one of the characters and how it had been the fashion some years prior at some point in the 19th century to wear them that way… I gave up. I’d like to try again some time but I can’t see myself experiencing it differently. Curious about the 7 years in the making Soviet film adaptation, but its also 7 hours long.
Mein Kampf. I read it when i was still a succdem, expecting some genius rant that converted people en masse to nazism. Instead it was barely coherent disgusting racist drivel. I guess this book didn’t make anyone into nazi, it just given nazis what they would like to read. This and the fact nazi state bought huge amounts of it to distribute, making Hitler richest writer in Germany.
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