We are all victims of Jehova Witnesses, Evangelists, and other religions that take preaching/ contagion as a core value/ sacred activity for their members...
Any of the Reacher books. God, they're terrible. They're just about a guy who jumps to outrageous conclusions and is always right nlbecause he's just so special. He's also big and tough and the best sniper in Army history.
In the first one, a guy skips town because he's a witness, and Reacher finds him in a hotel instantly because of the following logic:
Clearly he would have changed cities every night going in clockwise order or whatever - except for the one night after the place he was in was closer to the city he was fleeing - he'd rest 2 nights in the next city because sleeping thay close was so exhausting.
Because Reacher saw a Beatles album in the guy's house, he just knew he'd be using the last names of the Beatles, but keeping his own first name (which was Paul iirc), cycling them at each hotel.
So he walks into a random hotel near a bus stop in a random city and asks for the room of Paul Lennon and finds him because Reacher is just so smart!
And in the second book, he comes upon a woman being raped, kills the rapist, and the woman has sex with Reacher instead because he's a big, tough hero. And nothing like attempted rape puts you in the mood to fuck a stranger.
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, kiddo.
Sounds kinda like this great rant about the show ‘Sherlock’:
So apart from tumblr fanbase, why doesn't /tv/ like this show?
Because it has smart characters written stupidly.
Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men is a smartly written smart character. When Chigurh kills a hotel room full of three people he books to room next door so he can examine it, finding which walls he can shoot through, where the light switch is, what sort of cover is there etc. This is a smart thing to do because Chigurh is a smart person who is written by another smart person who understands how smart people think.
Were Sherlock Holmes to kill a hotel room full of three people. He'd enter using a secret door in the hotel that he read about in a book ten years ago. He'd throw peanuts at one guy causing him to go into anaphylactic shock, as he had deduced from a dartboard with a picture of George Washington carver on it pinned to the wall that the man had a severe peanut allergy. The second man would then kill himself just according to plan as Sherlock had earlier deduced that him and the first man were homosexual lovers who couldn't live without eachother due to a faint scent of penis on each man's breath and a slight dilation of their pupils whenever they looked at each other. As for the third man, why Sherlock doesn't kill him at all. The third man removes his sunglasses and wig to reveal he actually WAS Sherlock the entire time. But Sherlock just entered through the Secret door and killed two people, how can there be two of him? The first Sherlock removes his mask to reveal he's actually Moriarty attempting to frame Sherlock for two murders. Sherlock however anticipated this, the two dead men stand up, they're undercover police officers, it was all a ruse. "But Sherlock!" Moriarty cries "That police officer blew his own head off, look at it, there's skull fragments on the wall, how is he fine now? How did you fake that?". Sherlock just winks at the screen, the end.
This is retarded because Sherlock is a smart person written by a stupid person to whom smart people are indistinguishable from wizards.
And I blame shit like sherlock for making idiots online think they can deduce shit based on random shit like this. Even if Sherlock is smartly written, he's still written to be right and bases deductions on random tiny details. Not to mention, there's tropes to writing that makes outcomes more easily predictable, and someone picking up on foreshadowing might think they can do what Sherlock can do and apply it to stupid shit on the internet, like if a story is real or if someone is telling an accurate version of the story for AITA type judgements.
In the first book Reacher carries a Desert Eagle, and anyone who knows anything about guns knows the Desert Eagle is a range queen. They're unreliable, eject shells into your face, not terribly accurate, have a tiny ammo capacity and don't make a person any more dead than a 9mm.
Then in the second book he shits on Glocks for being unreliable, and describes the Barrett 50 cal as a sniper's weapon of choice. The Barrett isn't a sniper rifle - it's an anri-materiel rifle made to break shit. The only reason it even exists is because the Army wanted foot soldiers to be able to use the 50 BMG round to take out enemy equipment without having to carry a 130-pound gun that had to be assembled to use.
Basically, he gets his gun knowledge from video games.
Yeah, but those are shots that happened to hit. They could've missed by a ton just as easily. It does have a longer range than a typical precision rifle, but that's just because it's a really big projectile with a fuckton of powder behind it.
It's a 1-2 MOA rifle, whereas a precision rifle might be 1/4 MOA.
It's definitely incel erotica. Saw a video once demonstrating that Reacher never actually needs to initiate anything with a woman, show any interest whatsoever, flirt, etc. He just sorta exists in proximity to women and they just sort of "give" him the sex that they apparently owe him for being the main character.
I think I read the first three? Such a tropey train wreck i actually had fun for the first couple.
But I was well and done after two, I was like well this is just unhealthy now by the second book you can tell childs isn't paying any attention to plot or character development or anything that would make a story interesting, he was actively shutting my brain down.
it felt like that episode of The boondocks where Huey exclusively watches UPN as a social cognitive experiment.
Travis McGee is what Reacher and Dirk Pitt dream of being. He lives on a houseboat he won in a poker game, and solves crimes when he finds himself low on cash.
The author died in 1986 and the books are still being published.
That's mostly the first chapter, genesis, the begat this stuff.
R crumb, the comics artist, has a fantastic graphic novel of Genesis where he communicates the emotions through his drawings of what the words are trying to communicate. This made genesis, the most boring and pedantic part of the Bible, more interesting.
The Bible has undoubtedly led to incalculable suffering as a cult, but just as a book, it's nowhere near the worst piece of literature I've ever read.
That's mostly the first chapter, genesis, the begat this stuff.
But then, don't discount the chapter where the twelve Jewish tribes send their gifts to Moses (iirc), and the full account of the lavish gifts is given, per each tribe. I've read through the whole thing to confirm the madness that the list is identical for each tribe, and is repeated twelve times.
I'd like someone in a US church choose that chapter for their Sunday reading of the Bible, and then see the faces of the congregation sitting through it.
Whoever wrote those books, didn't have much consideration for the reader.
graphic novel of Genesis where he communicates the emotions through his drawings of what the words are trying to communicate
I have a long-standing dream of someone just adapting the Bible to the screen exactly as it's written — at least the first parts up to and including Moses' wanderings. I have a feeling that a direct retelling would cause more than a few butts to be hurt.
Pasolini, an atheist and communist, came close in the approach with ‘The Gospel According to St. Matthew’, but the result is a rather romantic vision of the life of Jesus, perhaps dictated by both the chosen source material and Pasolini's ‘nostalgia for belief’.
A direct retelling wouldn't be allowed to air. Murdering your wife in Christ's name for not cooking you dinner, divinely owning slaves as an entitled Christian, lobster sending you to christian hell; the production wouldn't get very far.
Love that you're like "we all know shrimp sends you to christian hell, but wife discipline? Seems farfetched!"
Corinthians, ephesians, most books of the Bible reiterate that women must submit to their husbands:
"Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands."
And to not submit to their husbands is to go against God.
"But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God."
And guess what happens if your husband asks you for dinner and you say no?
“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate.”
Eve’s decision to prioritize her own desires over God’s instructions led to disastrous consequence including physical death and eternal obeisance.
"Your desire shall be for your husband, And he shall rule over you."
"Genesis 2:18-24 “And the lord god said, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him"
Christian women are servants to men, and if they defy men, they defy god. Through all of every version of the bible, the Christian punishment for defiance is death.
Whoever wrote those books, didn’t have much consideration for the reader.
Sizable chunks of the Old Testament were documentation, rather than formatted with the intent of being engaging. It's like how a family bible often has genealogy hand-written inside it, except it's the contents of the book itself.
I'd like someone in a US church choose that chapter for their Sunday reading of the Bible, and then see the faces of the congregation sitting through it.
Not in the USA, but I've heard some pretty interesting sermons on the topic. Generally about prophecies and how the ancient Israelites viewed certain numbers
Pasolini, an atheist and communist, came close in the approach with ‘The Gospel According to St. Matthew’, but the result is a rather romantic vision of the life of Jesus, perhaps dictated by both the chosen source material and Pasolini's ‘nostalgia for belief’.
As a former Christian and current socialist, it makes sense for socialists/communists to have a romantic view of the life of Jesus. It's the one part of my old beliefs that I can't let go of, since it shaped the values that I have now. The values that Jesus preached are often the same values that lead people to socialism/communism.
The begat stuff is Matthew, it's the genealogy of Jesus. This was important within Judaism and also for the prophecy that Jesus was in the line of David, so He was an eligible Messiah.
Honestly it’s probably just a poor translation/carry-down from what would now be understood as “months”. That makes it 72 years which is entirely reasonable.
When I was around 20 and looking for purpose in life, I actually really tried to get into Christianity.
I mean, they seemed to have a light guiding them through life, something that takes away the feeling of senselessness and chaos in the world. I especially loved the idea that "you can never fall deeper than into god's hand".
So I prayed to god to show me the way to him, went to the local church every Sunday, and started reading the bible.
All of it. Cause I obviously wanted to know what I was supposed to believe in. And it completely killed my desire to become a Christian.
The only way to make sense of it, for me, was to interprete the old testament as a collection of the stories that goat herders told each other to make sense of world history, followed by a heavily propagandized history of the Israelite people, legitimizing their claim to Israel after displacing and genociding the people who had lived there before.
The new testament is the story of a wandering preacher who tried to establish an early version of peaceful communism.
But when that became too popular, the Roman state embraced and co-opted the message and turned it into the basis of a hierarchical state church, which later turned into Christianity as we know it today.
Since I read God's book while praying to God and that was the interpretation I was left with, I have to assume, it's the one God agrees with ;)
...and promptly disappeared to heaven, but he'll be back soon, promise! (according to the people who wrote down the story to popularize his teachings and gather followers about 100 years later)
It's not 100 years later. The first mention of Jesus' resurrection that we still have was written 20 years latest after the fact. Which is shockingly close compared to other records from that time that are typically written decades if not centuries after.
1 Thessalonians 1:9-10
For they themselves shew of us what manner of entering in we had unto you, and how ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.
For comparison, the earliest written records we have of the 79AD eruption of Mt Vesuvius - something that killed a lot of higher ranking Romans and was possibly witnessed by a quarter of a million people was written by Pliny the Younger in a letter to tacitus at 107AD earliest. Being generous, that's 25 years after the fact (mathematically speaking though it's 28)
Ok, you just told on yourself. There is no standard by which Leviticus 20:13 is not really horrible. It was really horrible when it was conceptualized, it was really horrible when King James edited it, it was really horrible when Gutenberg printed it, and it's really horrible now. I attend a UCC church and my pastors do not defend what the Bible says about homosexuality the way you just did. God is still speaking, I encourage you to listen.
Also, it's universally accepted that Leviticus 20:13 is not a command for today. It was a law for Israel to show that even earthly means and men cannot keep Israel's purity. Christ set us free from the law. We don't need to kill each other for sinning. Because we cannot be pure. So Christ died to make us pure.
I attend a UCC church and my pastors do not defend what the Bible says about homosexuality the way you just did.
UCC has been known to be rapidly spiralling down into heresy. They say vague things like "God is still speaking" and that god for whatever reason always affirms what the white cultures believe is right. Convenient that your god changes his mind just to placate the culture about what white people living in the west think, huh. Once again like Israel of old, man thinks he stands in judgement over God.
for whatever reason always affirms what the white cultures believe is right.
I assume that by this you're trying to paint homosexuality and the acceptance of it as exclusive to white cultures. This is complete and total bullshit.
There's plenty of history of non-white cultures that were fully accepting of homosexuality. Japan is a clear example. Samurai wrote so many gay love poems to each other that they had established literary conventions about it.
What happened, around the world, is that colonizers and missionaries went around the world destroying indigenous traditions and customs and instilling bigotry regarding homosexuality. At the same time, suffering under the yoke of colonialism stifled social progress and the potential for the sort of organic social movements that happened in the West.
Even then, we are seeing in the US a rollback of LGBT rights that we only recently managed to achieve. I don't think it's fair to generalize "white cultures" as believing LGBT people have rights, just as it's not fair to generalize non-white cultures as not believing that.
If you can get hold if it, look out for Thomas Jefferson's The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. It's the New Testament with all the spirituality, supernatural, etc edited out. Instead you've just got a book about morals and ethics as taught by some guy.
And this fucking thing is partly responsible for why numerous things are going wrong with humans today and humans of history.
That's like blaming a doctor's diagnosis of cancer for someone's death. The Bible is just a diagnosis of humanity's problems with a crapton of examples, as well as the solution/hope (although it also makes it clear that people will never try and solve it because of the aforementioned problems)
The treatment plan is "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved". It's more like being killed by misunderstanding or misinterpreting the treatment plan. Which can be deadly
Yeah, I was a third of the way through and realized it kinda sucked. I did stick it out to the end though.
One of the plot points has the main character literally act out scenes from classic movies. It's never a good idea to remind the reader that there's better entertainment that they could be enjoying right now.
I forced myself to finish foolishly hoping the ending would blow my mind. Now people keep telling me the movie is even better but I'm like that's such a low bar I'll just go read Annihilation again or something
This is exactly what happened to me. I was reading it for a while like okay, I guess this is kind of fun, and then a third of the way through I thought "oh wait, this is just kind of boring".
I like the part where they figured out the previously undiscovered secret in the race was to drive backwards. I tried that shit in Mario Kart when I was 8, you're telling me NOBODY had tried it in that game before?
The book's first puzzle is solved by Wade playing the arcade game Joust against a bot. Then when he wins, he's dropped into the movie WarGames, replacing Matthew Broderick's character, and he has to act out every scene to progress.
Mein Kampf. Apart from being a bad person, Hitler was a terrible writer. Low quality thoughts articulated badly. I only read it so I could nail neonazis when they came at me with their stupid arguments.
Adolf Hitler was a modern-day edgelord and an incel. He didn't have any original thoughts, he stole the ideas from the magazines he read while he was poor and unemployed
It is extremely babble-minded and not at all worth reading or deconstructing.
I read it in the mindset of your first question.
Turns out, any argument you can think up in 2 seconds against bigotry is going to be more insightful and well-founded than a rebuttal against nascent nazi scribblings.
If nothing else, it's worth it just to see how brain-dead nazism really is. They're not Machiavellian masterminds, they're thugs with an ideology built on brainfarts. Also quoting from the book (in the original German) is a good way to kill a conversation with one of the modern spawn.
Many years ago, I posted about how horribly written it was, and right on cue, a neo-Nazi pipes in asking which translation it was, because apparently all the faithful translations are a Jewish trick, or something...
No reply when I posted the introduction in original German, of course.
A Friend of mine with similar political inclination keeps telling me I should read it, for the same "know thy enemy" kind of argument.
I just can't bring myself to it, we all get bombarded enough with that shitty ideology, and have to push it back irl constantly, so I'd love to escape it, a bit, in my downtime.
It does in fact help a little bit, when you see how Rand portrayed the libertarian paradise for which she advocated: where everyone is a genius at the top of their game, and a few dozen of these geniuses build the shiny libertarian utopia. It's juvenile, just like her other literary attempts. The ‘utopia’ wouldn't stand against just a few real-life problems. It's also notable that Rand herself was on social security and Medicaid in her late years.
Furthermore, it's fun to read some of Aleister Crowley, e.g. ‘The Diary of a Drug Fiend’, compare it to Rand's ‘objectivism’, and ponder as to how Crowley was called ‘the most wicked man’ while Rand became the torchbearer of USian unabashed corporatism. At least, Crowley actually could write, had a soul, and was generally a fun man — but he didn't have a Red Scare to ride on.
I'm always a little bit scared that what I'm listening to will start blasting out of my phone speaker because I forgot to turn on my headset or something.
By the way, one big takeaway of ‘Triumph of the Will’ is that the Nazi rally was extremely fucking boring after the first ten minutes or so. But apparently seven hundred thousand people had nothing better to do than stand and listen to Nazis shout at them for hours.
The main point of the book could have been summarised up in an email. I listened to it as an audio book just to know what it's about and it's just "communism bad" mixed with everything Margaret Thatcher could masturbate to.
I read it and then the other three that were out at the time (Digital Fortress, Angels and Demons I think and something else I can't remember) because I was morbidly curious. Four physical books. Apart from the general awfulness Brown tried to cover up with frenetic pacing, the biggest thing I noticed was that even though there were four books, there were effectively only two stories, just repeated with different character names.
I bought the illustrated version in high school because I was taking an art history class and liked looking at the pretty paintings. The story itself did not leave any impression on me lol
The wheel Of time series. I got through the first 2 books before realising that I disliked every character. Also every female character was written so poorly it made me want to "Tug on my braid and stamp my foot"
The first book I really enjoyed. The second was good. It started sliding downhill quickly from there...
So much stuff needed to be either cut or at least re-written! His wife was his editor. She was a professional, but I feel like she didn't have the heart to be tough on him. Or possibly he felt he didn't have listen to her like he would an editor he wasnt married to...
Could have been a great series with another draft or two. One of the rare instances of the movie versions being better than the books.
I loved Wheel of Time for the world building and the background mythology. I did trudge though till Jordan's last book and I have not returned to it. The only character I liked at all was Mat. It just seemed like a long D&D game that got a little out of hand.
Haha that trilogy might be my favorite of all time but I also TOTALLY get that take. I'm just a big fucking sucker for the second and third books as they get increasingly ridiculous.
I didn't even make it through the first few chapters, Chinese writing style is just terribly convoluted and full of unnecessary pathos. Reminded me of some early 1700s literature from Britain, like Robinson Crusoe.
But ‘Robinson Crusoe’ is good. For a solid couple months after finishing it, I was still daydreaming about some kinda survival shelter-building game set on a tropical island — only a mobile one, because I didn't want to be perched at the desktop more than necessary.
Have you read the original? It's half book, half bible study. There are modern copies with most of the religious context removed or shortened which are great.
I need to recheck exactly how 'unabridged' my audiobook was (I typically search for a while to make sure I'm getting the whole package). At least, I'm vaguely certain it wasn't modernized regarding the language, since I would hope English from 1719 is fairly understandable — but yeah, it's quite ornate. I might've blacked out the religious parts for their small relevance to the adventure part.
I can see that. I definitely gave it a huge benefit of the doubt, as it was the first post-revolution Chinese fiction-cum-political commentary I ever read. In retrospect I feel like the point of the book was the commentary and the story was just some kind of allegory that didn't resonate as an American.
Yeah agree. I was living in China when it was recommended to me since it was super popular with the locals, but really couldn't get through.
I did enjoy the Western series though despite the mixed reviews, they reduced all the political clutter to the bare minimum to provide historical context, so maybe that's something to check out instead.
100% agree, just listened to it recently and wow was it boring. That and Foundation, thought since liked the show that I'd like the books, wrong. Those are the only 2 books so far that I just couldn't get into. But I suffered through to the end with both. Even started the second Foundation book and then asked myself why I was torturing myself.
You just don’t get 11 dimensional particle physics. I was actually into it up until that point. As soon as they pulled that shit, I would have quit but wanted to finish for our book club discussion.
LOL until they tried to explain to me that humanoid people just randomly rolled up like parchment and got carried around until things cooled down a bit, I was like, "OK I'll keep an open mind to this weird political story." And then when they figured out logic gates but only with 5th century hoards with flags, I just mentally noped out. I did finish the first book but I had regrets.
I was in a horrible spot mourning for a close relative who had just hanged himself. I made the mistake of posting on Facebook and a friend from high school recommended "12 Rules for Life, an antidote to chaos".
I was not in a good space and didn't even look at the author before ordering it. When it arrived a few days later I only had to read the first page before realizing I'd been had. Jordan fucking Peterson. What a pile of shit that guy is.
I laughed my ass off starting on like page five. It was such a hate read, total hail corporate nostalgia bait slop. Never took the coworker who recommended it serious again.
The Book of Mormon. Someone literally paid me to read it. It is so glaringly obvious that it's tall tales by Joseph Smith it hurt to read from the cringe. And it was so dark, too! Most memorably the section titled "Doctrine & Covenants." In chapter 132, verse 54, Joseph says Emma Smith, his ninth wife, would be destroyed by god, and her entire family destroyed for good measure, if she refused to sleep with him.
I don't understand how Mormons can be so gullible, and in believing all of it, how they can believe a deity that threatens women for refusing to sleep with a sexual predator can be a deity they want to worship. It makes me sad to think about.
The Da Vinci Code. It was laughably awful. This includes the premise as well as the writing. Dan Brown is probably sleeping on top of a pile of money with many beautiful ladies, though.
What, exactly, do you find unbelievable about the best linguists of the last 400 years being unable to solve a 10-letter anagram? Anagrams are really hard.
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. It was a while back, so I can't remember exactly, but I do remember my friend not doing it any favours by really praising that book. Perhaps I was expecting too much, but by contrast, I found it to be a rather naïve, consensual, and superficial self-help book trying to masquerade as something more profound with a thin veneer of new-age spirituality.
Hope I don't offend someone who loves it. I don't feel strongly about it now, it was a while back, so maybe I missed something then. If someone disagrees with me I won't die on that hill.
I canceled reading it after 50 or 60 pages. It felt dusty and predictable. I also remember the language to be kind of prophetic, like it has something important to say, while failing at doing so.
The book might have proven me wrong, if I finished it. Who knows.
Don't think you have. If memory serves me right, it's about being mindful and focusing on what matters, but wraps it in a ridiculously artificial "spiritual" setting.
This book is to literature what Instagram inspiration quotes are to poetry.
That's so funny. I was in somebody's house and they picked up the alchemist and told me I should read it, and I asked them the same question.
"Is that about the boy who collects pebbles?"
And they told me
"Yea- well, no. I'm not really sure, i can't remember the specifics, but it was really really good".
And I was nice about it, but obviously if you cannot remember the main character or the point of the book at all it couldn't have been a very significant experience for you.
Yeah I mean, it's utterly forgettable. I've just not had that many book recommendations from friends, but I did really enjoy most of them, so I had to really scratch my head a bit. Best I could find to fit the bill was that.
I've read my fair share of shit books all on my own though, like a big boi.
I literally have that book at home because of how much I agree with this. A friend highly recommended it and borrowed it to me when I was ~15. I never gave it back purely to avoid having to tell them how eye roll inducingly fake deep I found it. To be fair though, I don't remember much of it either.
Honestly I read it when I was a preteen-teen so right in the intended age range and I liked it quite a bit, not my favorite by any means but it was good. Not going to reread it now for obvious reasons, at least not legally.
The first two books are definitely geared towards kids/preteens. I was obsessed with the first book when I was young, getting an owl and being whisked off to fairytale land, so much fun. By the time the series is rounding out azkaban going into goblet of fire, it begins to present more mature and relatable themes that resonated more re-reading as a late teen.
I read this when I was in my mid 20s, so I wasn't the target audience. It might have been nostalgia, but I compared it against similar things I'd read as a child and it came out poorly. Derivative and twee. I understand that as the series went on it got less twee but I didn't bother reading any more.
I will say that at the time when it got really popular I thought it was great that so many kids were getting into reading books, so for that it deserves some credit, I guess.
I worked at a book store back a while now so people would ask and recommend books
The Secret was big at the time
The Secret sucks ass
I disliked any customer that recommended it to me after that
I wouldn't say that though, I'd thank them politely.
I usually recommended Neuromancer, but it depended on topic.
Reading Dune books ATM and the original is one of my all-time favorites. But fuck me, Dune Messiah is incomprehensible. It's 80% about Paul navel gazing. I'd read a paragraph and think, "I have no idea what that is supposed to mean." 80% of the words in the book hit me like that.
I read Dune in a book club, and honestly for the majority in the club even the first book was near incomprehensible. The group absolutely hated not understanding any of the nomenclature it throws at you from the start, and there's was a lot of discussion that started "stick with it you'll get used to it."
I fucking love dune but took a few attempts to buy in and get through it. Glad I did though.
Sometimes, a piece of fiction does not want you to understand every part of the fictional world from the get go. It's part of the art. For Dune in particular, it's a hard vs. soft world building distinction. Some fiction, harry potter comes to mind, builds up the world slowly and eases you into it, explaining every little thing that makes it different from our own. Some just dumps you into it and lets you experience it as an outsider slowly gaining understanding.
From what I gather, most people nowadays are much more used to the first method, to the point of expecting it and thinking they're missing something when the second method is used. I think stuff like that, including Dune, would be more enjoyable to many if they realised they aren't, in fact, missing anything and that's how the experience of consuming that piece of media was intended to be like.
I'm like a third of the way through it right now, and either the french translation clarifies it or I haven't gotten to the confusing part yet. It's very different from the first book but I don't hate it, it's a good "what would happen after the big heroic tale" that the first book sets up well.
It depicts a violent revolution in the United States which leads to the overthrow of the federal government, a nuclear war, and, ultimately, a race war which leads to the systematic extermination of non-whites.
This book was recomeded to me by a fellow activist. It's a disgusting and baddly written book, however it does give one insight into the mind of far right militants/terrorists. It also outlines the playbook that neo-nazis and various other bigoted assholes use to gain power while distancing themselfs from direct action and blaming minorities.
It holds up as something a leftist should read to know your enemy.
To that end, I also recomend every American read project 2025.
The first book opens with Osama Bin Laden and the leader of Iran hatching a plot to kidnap sexy American coeds to rape and torture.
It then switches to the POV of our hero, a former SEAL who left the army due to his arthritis and has now enrolled in college. He is stalking a female student from his class whom he is thinking about raping, he lets the readers know that he is 100% a rapist and also that all these left-wing female students secretly desire to be raped by a strong conservative man.
But unfortunately for our hero, a white van pulls up and kidnaps the girl he was stalking right in front of him. Thinking quickly he follows the van and then ends up stowing away in the wheel well on an airplane that's on it's eay to Iran.
Long story short, he single-handedly rescues dozens of sexy coeds from the combined forces of al-queda and iran - killing Osama Bin Laden himself.
In the sequels, for which there are many, he travels to Georgia (the country not the state) and finds an isolated community descended from the Varangian Guard. These people recognize him as an alpha male and make him their leader The Kildar whoms job it is to lead them into battle and impregnate their daughters, most of whom are 14-18 year olds.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but several people heavily and repeatedly recommended me the Dark Tower series by Stephen King.
I had read a few books by King before and really enjoyed some of them. Even the first book in the series (written well before the others) was interesting but the whole series is just unbearable. It's long and disjointed and while there are some interesting moments, there are three times the amount of adding grotesquerie for no narrative reason, literal self-inserts, or worse, grabbing references to other IPs that get shoehorned into the story.
I know there are a lot of people that liked the series and I am happy it exists for those people, and I realize not everything is made for my tastes, but the ending was just so irredeemably bad. It makes the ending of GoT look like Breaking Bad.
The worst part was that there were references to cool things that he'd find in the tower once he got there, such as music that was enjoyed by people on a particular floor, and then
::: spoiler spoiler (but please do read this so that it robs you of any desire to read the series)
Stephen King had the last book end with a time loop going back to the first book like a coward.
:::
I dragged myself through the last couple of books to find out what was in that stupid tower and was so incredibly disappointed...
(I will say, though, that, the city of people who used their psychic powers to destroy the Universe because someone was going to destroy it anyway so it might as well be them because the job paid really well was pretty apt, though!)
This is probably divisive here, but I just...do not care for Brandon Sanderson. As someone who has read a lot of fantasy before getting into him, he's always praised for having a coherent magic system, but that isn't really enough to make it an enjoyable fantasy story. There's just a lack of.... something in his writing (and I've tried to read Mistborn and his shorts) that I have a hard time quantifying to others.
Also I was really surprised that I found his writing weirdly bland in the same way I found Stephanie Meyer's writing bland, considering that they write completely different genres. Then I found out they were both had Mormon upbringings, and I can kind of see why I found the blandness similar.
You will not be surprised to learn that the author, Eliezer Yudkowsky, started a cult called LessWrong, which had members that would spin off into ANOTHER (more murder-y) cult, the Zizians.
the only thing that will make you sound more like a conspiracy nut than listing things the cia has actually done, is to describe the philosophy of the e/acc movement.
I mean I enjoyed them at the time, but looking back, the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind had some questionable stuff in it. Pro death penalty, heavy objectivisation of women...
God I tried SO HARD to like that book. Liked the show growing up because Legend of The Seeker is campy and weirdly ABC channel sexy (blond leather ladies touching you with Pain Dildos, essentially) but it was just trash.
The main character, by all means, should be the least knowledgeable and probably the least 'wise' character, but in comes Richard educating the Men of Mud on proper government structures and how their primitive tribal society was stupid and the way they made decisions was dumb.
And you're right, don't get me started on the confessors and how anyone with eyes wants to get bent over the table by the protagonist within minutes of meeting him.
The Qur'an. It seems to assume the Bible is true and a real revelation and that it is a biblical commentary, despite clearly contradicting it in numerous places. It makes sense in the context that it came from an illiterate Bedouin paedophile from the 600s
My father recommended The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson and I fucking hated it. The main character is an awful person. I was waiting for someone to kill him the whole book
I don't know, I think it offer the incredibly valuable life lesson that the secret to being happy is to convince a publisher to give you a $200,000 advance to spend on "spiritual and personal exploration" so that you don't have to get a real job.
tbh a bunch of Heinlein is like this. Number of the Beast is ok in parts, but mostly awful. Glory Road is terrible, too. He did write some good things, mostly the YA stuff, but even that had a lot of problems with the author lecturing about irrelevant stuff.
50 shades of grey. The writing was so cringe that I just couldn't get further than one chapter or so. And I've read some bad writing on AO3 before, so it's not like I'm especially sensitive.
The Farseer trilogy by Robin Hobb. It was my first experience with what could be considered a "grimdark" or where things consistently go wrong no matter how well the protagonists achieve their goals.
It was just a constant stream of the main character getting shit on and failing the people around him (despite doing his very best not to) without any successes. I think I got through two books before I finally had enough.
I'm sure people enjoy it, and it's well written... it just did not fit me at all.
The Three Body Problem. I hated it, but I think I'm in the minority. I found the Cultural Revolution parts interesting, and the tech /cultural infiltration neat, but most of the book I hated. Could not care less about these beef jerky bastards.
This is How You Lose the Time War. It is my friend's favourite book and it didn't feel great to have to tell them I pretty much hated it. I think it's the lowest rating I've given a book so far.
Our library did a "big book club" thing where they made infinite e-reader copies available, and I thought hmm, I'll give it a try and wow I did like it. Later my penultimate kid read it, not knowing I had, and recommended it as one of the best books she'd ever read.
It was fantastical and strange, I can imagine not liking it but wow I sure did, and so did my kid.
Life of Pi is the one people seem to like that I hate. I want my 2 hours back, feel it was wasted.
My great great aunt made me read the Bible so I'd be a good little Christian. Read it got the privileges for it, sucked right ass. My only conclusion is that I liked Samson and that most Christians are hypocritical asshats. But what was I expecting my great great aunt thought Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia were evil because they had magic.
Also if anyone is curious how well the good Christian aspect faired now that I'm 26 and not 8. Well hark to the ancestors, the spirits, and the gods, I'll burn every last mega church to the ground and send them to their god to face a second judgement not my own.
The Silo series. First one was okay though the protagonist could be a bit of an idiot at times (I'm freezing, I should light these small tires on fire. That'll keep me warm for 2 minutes while I choke on the smoke), but as a hard scifi, the series never answered enough critical questions (how do they get clean air?, is there really an oil deposit under Atlanta?). Also, the entire premise of how "wool" enters the story is so contrived, I failed to catch why it was necessary both in-universe and from a storytelling standpoint.
The second book was a prequel and the back stories of one of the characters was so fucking boring and predictable I just started skipping his chapters.
Interesting. I haven’t read Dust yet, but I thought the first two were fantastic reads. I also really like the TV adaptation so far. I agree it doesn’t fit well into the hard science fiction subgenre. I would categorize the books as soft sci-fi— focusing more on the social aspects of an isolated society with limited resources where technological advancement is restricted. I’m more of a soft-sciences nerd though, so I get it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.
I’m not sure what you mean about the premise of “wool” in the story though? Are you wondering why it is important enough to be the book title? To my knowledge, the name of the first book is not solely derived from the wool pads used by the cleaners… this first book is actually a compilation of shorter novellas “woven” together (haha)(the author’s titles allude to this: Proper Gauge, Casting Off, etc). I particularly like the author’s juxtaposition between these textile-related terms/concepts and the alternate definitions that lend themselves to the dystopian setting of Mechanical and the Silo in general.
I’m not sure what you mean about the premise of “wool” in the story though?
I just didn't buy the impact of the cleaners. Like it's supposed to be a mystery why they choose to go through with it, but we find out they go through with it because a VR helmet convinces them that what they saw through the cameras was a lie when really the VR helmet is a lie. So like...what's the point? If you can make VR helmets, why not build a robot to clean the cameras? If you still need a scary death sentence, just kick people out of the silo and watch them die due to exposure as they clamor to get back inside. The result is the same: outside scary, don't do anything that gets you forced to go outside.
Making a lie to cover up another lie seems like a very roundabout way to solve a lens cleaning issue.
As for the rest of the wool references, puns do not metaphors make.
Stranger in a Strange Land. I was told I'd like it because it was critical of religion, but it turns out it was only critical of organized religion. Too specific for my tastes.
I can't remember the name of the book nor do I care to. Some knob slobberer wrote a biography about Elon Musk before most people figured out he fucking sucks. I picked it up and was so disgusted by the half way mark that I became an early hater.
I forgot the name of the book, but it starts out with some alien overlord dying, and a whole bunch of people commit ritualistic sewer slide over the death of the alien, and i just couldn't force myself to care.
I even started writing down names and details on the characters, just to try and make it stick. But I don't remember anything happening, to the point I just forgot to finish it.
Edit: Recommended by my brother, but I just didn't get what he got out of it.
Hubbard trash is fun with friends. We used to do shitty movie night before the plague, and one of the last events before lockdown was "Drinking and Dianetics"... It was a choice, really eye opening and deeply stupid. Plus the story of how the nerd herd aquired the DVD was hillarious.
It started off normal enough, a self-help video with a bunch of sunny California people and a higher than expected budget. Tons of power imagery and hints that you would get if you watched south parks "Scientologists believe this" bit.
After that it starts getting weird, bad psychology, incorrect biology and theories that were clearly written by a sci-fi author. The worst was their search for "the original trauma" thing, absolute hog-wash.
People were already out of it by the time we got to the DvD extras, but we all remember the skit with the panther and the actor putting up his dukes like Popeye the sailor man.
The showing was all in good fun, but there was a thing in the back of peoples heads, this is a cult that ruins lives and people fall for this crap.
If you see that book or film, help that person and be excellent to each other.
The Conch Bearer. Oh dear god, what a boring attempt at young adult literature. Also, The Catcher in the Rye, but that one was required by the school curriculum for reasons beyond my comprehension.
Seriously I want you to read the Scholastic excerpt and tell me with a straight face the writing wasn't a bet to see if the publisher would pass anything if you slapped a fasade of a poop joke title onto a book.
I cannot emphasize this enough. This doesn't read like a children's humor book, it's literally just a drunken action packed story that the author did a word substitute to see how far this could go lmao.
I'm going to say "The prince" by Machiavelli. The modern title would be "How to play power games and hold onto power" or something. The content is nice and solid but it's clear he should have hired an editor. His sentences are longer than most paragraphs.
A friend recommended it to me. A little less than half way I had to stop and remind my friend that I am very gay and this book is basically just a harem anime.
Not recommended for me but I started looking at books that won the Nobel for literature. I tried reading Gunter Grass' "The Tin Drum". I'd seen a tv adaption of it previously and didn't follow what was going on. When I tried reading it the entire first chapter was about a woman with her son roasting a potato in a field. Then the 2nd chapter went on about his uncle's job. I couldn't keep going. Maybe I'll give it a 2nd chance.
I have a hard time following books that go on about huge family structures with endless aunts, uncles, siblings, etc. I feel like I need a chart next to me.
I recommended The Painted Man, which I had just read and thought was pretty good. A friend of mine read it (and liked it) and, contrary to my fate, proceeded to continue the series. Next time I saw him he was fairly mad at me, stating the the series took a sharp downturn in quality after the first one. After this I haven't been able to get him to read any other books, despite the one I actually recommended being fairly good. So in a way, this was me recommending a really bad book. Which just happened to be good.
People raved about A Heartbreakimg Work of Staggering Genius for a while. 100% boring meh. Some guy has normal feelings and I have to pay like $17 to find out?
Anything by Dostoevsky, that shit is just too dense, stop describing every god damned item, piece of furniture, wallpaper, and hair follicle and get on with the fucking story already. The Idiot had three full pages of tiny text describing a train cabin and the one guy in it, absolutely not for me.
Forest Gump. When the movie came out one of the people who was there was going on and on about the book. I picked up a copy and wish I hadn't. Its terrible. The movie is great but its based on pure garbage.
Well, what do you expect from a compilation of letters from a half frozen scientific explorer telling the tale of how he found an almost dead guy who tells him the story of when a monster told him how a family taught a foreigner to speak and read. Of course the writing would suffer, at one point you're so many layers deep that you have to wonder if Inception took inspiration from it.
I didn't expect you to justify it, I'm just saying the book is old and took an unconventional approach to storytelling, it is to be expected that that writing style would not go well with everyone.
I literally couldn't care less whether you like the book or not, I'm expressing my reasoning for not liking the writing, you're not forced to agree, nor am I saying that's the reason you didn't liked it. Chill out man.
A whole lot of the discussion occuring here is the justification of opinions, obviously nobody can force you to participate but if you don't want to then it seems kinda pointless to have commented at all in the first place
Silas Marner was so hated by my English class our teacher cried. It turns out it was what she wrote her master’s thesis on and no one agreed with her about it being good.
My MIL raved about Lessons in Chemistry and was excited to share it with me. I was shocked by how poorly written it was— perhaps it’s a decent story (enough people were enamored with it that it made it onto several best seller lists), but the execution was so bad I couldn’t even finish the first chapter. When asked, I ended up just telling my MIL it wasn’t my cup of tea and crossed my fingers she didn’t want to discuss plot points or anything that would make it obvious I hardly cracked the spine.
I hated every minute, and hated all of my classmates for kissing the teacher’s ass about how great it was when I know all they read were the Cliff Notes
I agree that it's amazing, but it's fine for them not to like it IMO. I loved it but it's quite challenging and the style wouldn't be to everyone's taste :-)
I mean, I liked it, but it is a weird book, I don't think everyone will like it, but part of it's appeal is how nonchalant it is about its weirdness. Not sure if the translations capture it, for example I don't think the beginning of the book has the same impact in English: "Many years later, in front of the firing squad", in Spanish that phrase is very weird, it's the continuation of another phrase, it's similar to opening a book and the first page starting with something like "of those, the one of his father taking him to see ice was the most cherished", it makes you pause and look at the previous empty page thinking you've missed the actual first page.
But if anyone is thinking on reading it, do so with a pencil and start a family tree, the book covers 100 years of a family where everyone has the same names over and over.
The Bridge, by someone I don't care to remember. Recommended by a hackaday post. I can't believe I was dumb enough to get a copy based on what was essentially an advert disguised as a tech post.
Anyway, it's a rip off of Aldis' Non-Stop / Starship only written really badly and with utter nonsense plot holes. I'm saying this fully aware that Non-Stop had telepathic rats for one of its chapters.
Friend and I were joking about 120 Days of Sodom so I decided I should pick it up to see what the fuss was about... Huge mistake! It is more deviant than I possibly imagined a book that old being (and I was aware the first draft was written on toilet paper lol)
We read The Room by Jonas Karlsson for my works book club. I'm so glad it was only a 3-hour audiobook. I was done after the first hour. It was labeled as "magical realism" and a " dark comedy" but it was just some guy with mental issues trying to adjust and fail in an office setting. The main character is just an asshole so it makes it hard to relate to them, because of that you can't take their side when people start to question his Room. It just ends with a whole lot of nothing and I thought it was a total waste of time.
Red Rising. The whole series, really. They're probably fun for a 10 year old but... I am not a kid anymore. As much as I sometimes wish I were.
I don't know, maybe I'm missing something. But it seems like the author couldn't focus on his own story. Just "and then this happened, and then this, and then this" with no details or reasoning.
I read three books by each author and was shocked at how boring/bad/repetitive they were. I will never understand why people are so obsessed with these authors. I guess they just like the simplistic/repetitive stuff they do. I probably would have liked them when I was 16, but I read them as a 30 year old adult.
Bible.
We are all victims of Jehova Witnesses, Evangelists, and other religions that take preaching/ contagion as a core value/ sacred activity for their members...
Any of the Reacher books. God, they're terrible. They're just about a guy who jumps to outrageous conclusions and is always right nlbecause he's just so special. He's also big and tough and the best sniper in Army history.
In the first one, a guy skips town because he's a witness, and Reacher finds him in a hotel instantly because of the following logic:
Clearly he would have changed cities every night going in clockwise order or whatever - except for the one night after the place he was in was closer to the city he was fleeing - he'd rest 2 nights in the next city because sleeping thay close was so exhausting.
Because Reacher saw a Beatles album in the guy's house, he just knew he'd be using the last names of the Beatles, but keeping his own first name (which was Paul iirc), cycling them at each hotel.
So he walks into a random hotel near a bus stop in a random city and asks for the room of Paul Lennon and finds him because Reacher is just so smart!
And in the second book, he comes upon a woman being raped, kills the rapist, and the woman has sex with Reacher instead because he's a big, tough hero. And nothing like attempted rape puts you in the mood to fuck a stranger.
Here's a condensed version of all the books ...
10/10 copypasta 🤌
Served al dente
And the acoustic guitar version for the uninitiated.
Wow haven't seen that meme in so long I forgot about it, thanks!
Sounds kinda like this great rant about the show ‘Sherlock’:
And I blame shit like sherlock for making idiots online think they can deduce shit based on random shit like this. Even if Sherlock is smartly written, he's still written to be right and bases deductions on random tiny details. Not to mention, there's tropes to writing that makes outcomes more easily predictable, and someone picking up on foreshadowing might think they can do what Sherlock can do and apply it to stupid shit on the internet, like if a story is real or if someone is telling an accurate version of the story for AITA type judgements.
Except Childs also doesn't know shit about guns.
In the first book Reacher carries a Desert Eagle, and anyone who knows anything about guns knows the Desert Eagle is a range queen. They're unreliable, eject shells into your face, not terribly accurate, have a tiny ammo capacity and don't make a person any more dead than a 9mm.
Then in the second book he shits on Glocks for being unreliable, and describes the Barrett 50 cal as a sniper's weapon of choice. The Barrett isn't a sniper rifle - it's an anri-materiel rifle made to break shit. The only reason it even exists is because the Army wanted foot soldiers to be able to use the 50 BMG round to take out enemy equipment without having to carry a 130-pound gun that had to be assembled to use.
Basically, he gets his gun knowledge from video games.
To be fair here, the sniping distance record was made with a Barrett M82 multiple times. A Browning M2 also held the record for nearly 20 years.
Yeah, but those are shots that happened to hit. They could've missed by a ton just as easily. It does have a longer range than a typical precision rifle, but that's just because it's a really big projectile with a fuckton of powder behind it.
It's a 1-2 MOA rifle, whereas a precision rifle might be 1/4 MOA.
Sounds like Republican erotica basically.
It's definitely incel erotica. Saw a video once demonstrating that Reacher never actually needs to initiate anything with a woman, show any interest whatsoever, flirt, etc. He just sorta exists in proximity to women and they just sort of "give" him the sex that they apparently owe him for being the main character.
Haha, jeez i forgot about these.
I think I read the first three? Such a tropey train wreck i actually had fun for the first couple.
But I was well and done after two, I was like well this is just unhealthy now by the second book you can tell childs isn't paying any attention to plot or character development or anything that would make a story interesting, he was actively shutting my brain down.
it felt like that episode of The boondocks where Huey exclusively watches UPN as a social cognitive experiment.
https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=travis+mcgee
Travis McGee is what Reacher and Dirk Pitt dream of being. He lives on a houseboat he won in a poker game, and solves crimes when he finds himself low on cash.
The author died in 1986 and the books are still being published.
Wait, is this real? Fuck sake that's bad.
That's mostly the first chapter, genesis, the begat this stuff.
R crumb, the comics artist, has a fantastic graphic novel of Genesis where he communicates the emotions through his drawings of what the words are trying to communicate. This made genesis, the most boring and pedantic part of the Bible, more interesting.
The Bible has undoubtedly led to incalculable suffering as a cult, but just as a book, it's nowhere near the worst piece of literature I've ever read.
But then, don't discount the chapter where the twelve Jewish tribes send their gifts to Moses (iirc), and the full account of the lavish gifts is given, per each tribe. I've read through the whole thing to confirm the madness that the list is identical for each tribe, and is repeated twelve times.
I'd like someone in a US church choose that chapter for their Sunday reading of the Bible, and then see the faces of the congregation sitting through it.
Whoever wrote those books, didn't have much consideration for the reader.
I have a long-standing dream of someone just adapting the Bible to the screen exactly as it's written — at least the first parts up to and including Moses' wanderings. I have a feeling that a direct retelling would cause more than a few butts to be hurt.
Pasolini, an atheist and communist, came close in the approach with ‘The Gospel According to St. Matthew’, but the result is a rather romantic vision of the life of Jesus, perhaps dictated by both the chosen source material and Pasolini's ‘nostalgia for belief’.
A direct retelling wouldn't be allowed to air. Murdering your wife in Christ's name for not cooking you dinner, divinely owning slaves as an entitled Christian, lobster sending you to christian hell; the production wouldn't get very far.
What are you on about?
Whats that?
When did someone murder their wife in Christ's name for not cooking you dinner
Love that you're like "we all know shrimp sends you to christian hell, but wife discipline? Seems farfetched!"
Corinthians, ephesians, most books of the Bible reiterate that women must submit to their husbands:
"Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands."
And to not submit to their husbands is to go against God.
"But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God."
And guess what happens if your husband asks you for dinner and you say no?
“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate.”
Eve’s decision to prioritize her own desires over God’s instructions led to disastrous consequence including physical death and eternal obeisance.
"Your desire shall be for your husband, And he shall rule over you."
"Genesis 2:18-24 “And the lord god said, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him"
Christian women are servants to men, and if they defy men, they defy god. Through all of every version of the bible, the Christian punishment for defiance is death.
Why?
"For the wages of sin is death".
Sizable chunks of the Old Testament were documentation, rather than formatted with the intent of being engaging. It's like how a family bible often has genealogy hand-written inside it, except it's the contents of the book itself.
That's cool and dandy, but I still think that writing “every tribe brought exact same shit” would work swimmingly.
Not in the USA, but I've heard some pretty interesting sermons on the topic. Generally about prophecies and how the ancient Israelites viewed certain numbers
As a former Christian and current socialist, it makes sense for socialists/communists to have a romantic view of the life of Jesus. It's the one part of my old beliefs that I can't let go of, since it shaped the values that I have now. The values that Jesus preached are often the same values that lead people to socialism/communism.
The begat stuff is Matthew, it's the genealogy of Jesus. This was important within Judaism and also for the prophecy that Jesus was in the line of David, so He was an eligible Messiah.
It's definitely not just the first chapter of Genesis. Like the entirety of First Chronicle is genealogy.
what's wild to me is the people who swear by it as the answer to all lifes questions and yet...they've never read it.
if i thought and all knowing all powerful being put answers to all lifes questions into a book i'd be reading the shit out of it
HE LIVED FOR 942
DAYSYEARS AND THEN HE DIED.Edit how incredibly stupid I am saying "days".
Honestly it’s probably just a poor translation/carry-down from what would now be understood as “months”. That makes it 72 years which is entirely reasonable.
Good video
942 days is nothing though... 2 and a half years?
Cancer
When I was around 20 and looking for purpose in life, I actually really tried to get into Christianity.
I mean, they seemed to have a light guiding them through life, something that takes away the feeling of senselessness and chaos in the world. I especially loved the idea that "you can never fall deeper than into god's hand".
So I prayed to god to show me the way to him, went to the local church every Sunday, and started reading the bible.
All of it. Cause I obviously wanted to know what I was supposed to believe in. And it completely killed my desire to become a Christian.
The only way to make sense of it, for me, was to interprete the old testament as a collection of the stories that goat herders told each other to make sense of world history, followed by a heavily propagandized history of the Israelite people, legitimizing their claim to Israel after displacing and genociding the people who had lived there before.
The new testament is the story of a wandering preacher who tried to establish an early version of peaceful communism.
But when that became too popular, the Roman state embraced and co-opted the message and turned it into the basis of a hierarchical state church, which later turned into Christianity as we know it today.
Since I read God's book while praying to God and that was the interpretation I was left with, I have to assume, it's the one God agrees with ;)
It sounds like you missed the part where He rose from the dead....
...and promptly disappeared to heaven, but he'll be back soon, promise! (according to the people who wrote down the story to popularize his teachings and gather followers about 100 years later)
It's not 100 years later. The first mention of Jesus' resurrection that we still have was written 20 years latest after the fact. Which is shockingly close compared to other records from that time that are typically written decades if not centuries after.
1 Thessalonians 1:9-10
For comparison, the earliest written records we have of the 79AD eruption of Mt Vesuvius - something that killed a lot of higher ranking Romans and was possibly witnessed by a quarter of a million people was written by Pliny the Younger in a letter to tacitus at 107AD earliest. Being generous, that's 25 years after the fact (mathematically speaking though it's 28)
No no no no. It’s the gays that are responsible. THE GAYS!!!!
That's not even what it says. The Bible doesn't really mention homosexuality too much.
But what it says about it is really horrible.
By what standard?
Ok, you just told on yourself. There is no standard by which Leviticus 20:13 is not really horrible. It was really horrible when it was conceptualized, it was really horrible when King James edited it, it was really horrible when Gutenberg printed it, and it's really horrible now. I attend a UCC church and my pastors do not defend what the Bible says about homosexuality the way you just did. God is still speaking, I encourage you to listen.
How do you define "really horrible"?
Also, it's universally accepted that Leviticus 20:13 is not a command for today. It was a law for Israel to show that even earthly means and men cannot keep Israel's purity. Christ set us free from the law. We don't need to kill each other for sinning. Because we cannot be pure. So Christ died to make us pure.
UCC has been known to be rapidly spiralling down into heresy. They say vague things like "God is still speaking" and that god for whatever reason always affirms what the white cultures believe is right. Convenient that your god changes his mind just to placate the culture about what white people living in the west think, huh. Once again like Israel of old, man thinks he stands in judgement over God.
Once again, telling on yourself. What's not horrible about saying people should be put to death for their private consensual bedroom behavior?
Oh give me a break. "No true Christian" much?
I assume that by this you're trying to paint homosexuality and the acceptance of it as exclusive to white cultures. This is complete and total bullshit.
There's plenty of history of non-white cultures that were fully accepting of homosexuality. Japan is a clear example. Samurai wrote so many gay love poems to each other that they had established literary conventions about it.
What happened, around the world, is that colonizers and missionaries went around the world destroying indigenous traditions and customs and instilling bigotry regarding homosexuality. At the same time, suffering under the yoke of colonialism stifled social progress and the potential for the sort of organic social movements that happened in the West.
Even then, we are seeing in the US a rollback of LGBT rights that we only recently managed to achieve. I don't think it's fair to generalize "white cultures" as believing LGBT people have rights, just as it's not fair to generalize non-white cultures as not believing that.
If you can get hold if it, look out for Thomas Jefferson's The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. It's the New Testament with all the spirituality, supernatural, etc edited out. Instead you've just got a book about morals and ethics as taught by some guy.
"but Jesus never actually talked about slaves
Yeah, and that's a major fucking problem
That's like blaming a doctor's diagnosis of cancer for someone's death. The Bible is just a diagnosis of humanity's problems with a crapton of examples, as well as the solution/hope (although it also makes it clear that people will never try and solve it because of the aforementioned problems)
Except the Bible is less a diagnosis and more a treatment plan. And people definitely have been killed by bad treatment plans before.
The treatment plan is "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved". It's more like being killed by misunderstanding or misinterpreting the treatment plan. Which can be deadly
Okay then. What's the cure?
Ready player one. If I wanted to read about a guy masturbating over memorizing 1980s Wikipedia I'd just go to forums.
It was the most boring Mary Sue-esque trash and I have no idea why it was so popular
Yeah, I was a third of the way through and realized it kinda sucked. I did stick it out to the end though.
One of the plot points has the main character literally act out scenes from classic movies. It's never a good idea to remind the reader that there's better entertainment that they could be enjoying right now.
I forced myself to finish foolishly hoping the ending would blow my mind. Now people keep telling me the movie is even better but I'm like that's such a low bar I'll just go read Annihilation again or something
I've perused both. The film is the same wank-fest over 80s references.
Same. I like Spielberg, but after reading the book I can't imagine I'd like the movie!
There's mind-blowingly bad stuff in the world building.
This is exactly what happened to me. I was reading it for a while like okay, I guess this is kind of fun, and then a third of the way through I thought "oh wait, this is just kind of boring".
I like the part where they figured out the previously undiscovered secret in the race was to drive backwards. I tried that shit in Mario Kart when I was 8, you're telling me NOBODY had tried it in that game before?
I still remember exactly how the announcer enunced "You're Going The Wrong Way!"
I haven't read the book, but yeah that really broke immersion for me in the movie.
The book's first puzzle is solved by Wade playing the arcade game Joust against a bot. Then when he wins, he's dropped into the movie WarGames, replacing Matthew Broderick's character, and he has to act out every scene to progress.
Seriously, that's it.
Eh, to each their own. I liked it. I also liked the different pacing than the movie. It made more sense.
The only Kindle book I've ever returned.
I thought the movie was kinda fun. Never read the book though.
I liked the book a lot, but the movie looked bad. They made the MC white for some reason?
Yeah, if that's the case I'm even more inclined to walk away.
Ready Player One isn't event the worst book Ernest Cline has written. lol
I enjoyed it as a fun YA adventure but Armada is so much worse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMBylNJQEbg&list=RDVMBylNJQEbg&start_radio=1
I opened the comments to mention Ready Player One, and I was delighted to see you've beat me to it 😅 What a dumb piece of trash.
Mein Kampf. Apart from being a bad person, Hitler was a terrible writer. Low quality thoughts articulated badly. I only read it so I could nail neonazis when they came at me with their stupid arguments.
Adolf Hitler was a modern-day edgelord and an incel. He didn't have any original thoughts, he stole the ideas from the magazines he read while he was poor and unemployed
It's a good thing people don't act like that any more /s
And when he finally did get laid he got syphilis. Loser.
Modern-day edgelords and incels are...edgelords and incels. Maybe "premodern" would be more accurate? Probably not, I'm not sure.
That was the modern era, we live in the postmodern era.
Was that helpful or necessary in the end? Or was is such trite that you could have done without?
It is extremely babble-minded and not at all worth reading or deconstructing.
I read it in the mindset of your first question.
Turns out, any argument you can think up in 2 seconds against bigotry is going to be more insightful and well-founded than a rebuttal against nascent nazi scribblings.
Well I'll save myself the trouble of being put on some sort of list for reading it then, thanks.
You got it.
I finished it and was like omigod at least nobody I ever come across with the same morbid curiosity has to read this now.
Only way I can look at reading that book not being a complete waste of time.
If nothing else, it's worth it just to see how brain-dead nazism really is. They're not Machiavellian masterminds, they're thugs with an ideology built on brainfarts. Also quoting from the book (in the original German) is a good way to kill a conversation with one of the modern spawn.
Many years ago, I posted about how horribly written it was, and right on cue, a neo-Nazi pipes in asking which translation it was, because apparently all the faithful translations are a Jewish trick, or something...
No reply when I posted the introduction in original German, of course.
Yeah, that's probably the one thing that makes the book almost (ALMOST) worth reading. Using their own tripe against them.
I'm guessing it's the same kinda situation as one having to actually read ‘Atlas Shrugged’ to see for themselves that it's a complete turd of a book.
A Friend of mine with similar political inclination keeps telling me I should read it, for the same "know thy enemy" kind of argument.
I just can't bring myself to it, we all get bombarded enough with that shitty ideology, and have to push it back irl constantly, so I'd love to escape it, a bit, in my downtime.
It does in fact help a little bit, when you see how Rand portrayed the libertarian paradise for which she advocated: where everyone is a genius at the top of their game, and a few dozen of these geniuses build the shiny libertarian utopia. It's juvenile, just like her other literary attempts. The ‘utopia’ wouldn't stand against just a few real-life problems. It's also notable that Rand herself was on social security and Medicaid in her late years.
Furthermore, it's fun to read some of Aleister Crowley, e.g. ‘The Diary of a Drug Fiend’, compare it to Rand's ‘objectivism’, and ponder as to how Crowley was called ‘the most wicked man’ while Rand became the torchbearer of USian unabashed corporatism. At least, Crowley actually could write, had a soul, and was generally a fun man — but he didn't have a Red Scare to ride on.
I listened to parts of it as an audiobook. I felt like I was going insane. Helped me pass the time at work though.
I think it's even worse in German. It comes across as a toddler trying to sound grown up.
I'm always a little bit scared that what I'm listening to will start blasting out of my phone speaker because I forgot to turn on my headset or something.
By the way, one big takeaway of ‘Triumph of the Will’ is that the Nazi rally was extremely fucking boring after the first ten minutes or so. But apparently seven hundred thousand people had nothing better to do than stand and listen to Nazis shout at them for hours.
I'm terrified of that personally
I couldn't get through the first chapter. Utter babbling nonsense. It's not that I disagreed with it, I had no idea what it was supposed to be saying!
It doesn't get better after chapter one haha.
Who recommended it to you?
A friend of mine years ago. He was a history buff so he always tried to help me understand historical things better.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand hands down. it's like normal economics except they stripped away the mask that makes it look human.
The main point of the book could have been summarised up in an email. I listened to it as an audio book just to know what it's about and it's just "communism bad" mixed with everything Margaret Thatcher could masturbate to.
But isn't it better writing to summarize it in the climax radio speech that takes three hours to read aloud?
Good book to take with you to jury duty if you want to avoid being picked for jury duty. 😉
I found a use for Atlas Shrugged, to kill wasps.
But who is John Galt???
The DaVinci Code
I noped out about page 3 where the author wrote 'world famous symbologist.'
I knew there was no such word,
This is in my discarded drafts; I thought I was the only one
It's far from the worst book I've read, but it's the worst that's been recommended to me by someone I'd listen to.
I managed one page and gave up. Dreadful stuff.
I read it and then the other three that were out at the time (Digital Fortress, Angels and Demons I think and something else I can't remember) because I was morbidly curious. Four physical books. Apart from the general awfulness Brown tried to cover up with frenetic pacing, the biggest thing I noticed was that even though there were four books, there were effectively only two stories, just repeated with different character names.
Ha ha, amazing! I salute your fortitude in getting through them all 😁
Have you read this? https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/dont-make-fun-of-renowned-dan-brown/
I have now!
I threw it across the room after 5 pages. Utter crap.
I bought the illustrated version in high school because I was taking an art history class and liked looking at the pretty paintings. The story itself did not leave any impression on me lol
The wheel Of time series. I got through the first 2 books before realising that I disliked every character. Also every female character was written so poorly it made me want to "Tug on my braid and stamp my foot"
Did you at least lament tugging your braids wistfully? :)
Don't make me box your ear!
The first book I really enjoyed. The second was good. It started sliding downhill quickly from there... So much stuff needed to be either cut or at least re-written! His wife was his editor. She was a professional, but I feel like she didn't have the heart to be tough on him. Or possibly he felt he didn't have listen to her like he would an editor he wasnt married to... Could have been a great series with another draft or two. One of the rare instances of the movie versions being better than the books.
I loved Wheel of Time for the world building and the background mythology. I did trudge though till Jordan's last book and I have not returned to it. The only character I liked at all was Mat. It just seemed like a long D&D game that got a little out of hand.
The 3 Body Problem. It's trash and I'll die on that hill.
Haha that trilogy might be my favorite of all time but I also TOTALLY get that take. I'm just a big fucking sucker for the second and third books as they get increasingly ridiculous.
I didn't even make it through the first few chapters, Chinese writing style is just terribly convoluted and full of unnecessary pathos. Reminded me of some early 1700s literature from Britain, like Robinson Crusoe.
Related:
The tencent tv adaptation was boring as hell lol, couldn't get past like episode 8/30 as a native Mandarin speaker.
The netflix adaptation was far more enjoyable.
Also tencent cut out the cultural revolution scene from the book... boo... governments really stifles creativity.
Yeah the Netflix show was a good watch, agree. Didn't even try the tencent one, I saw it coming...
But ‘Robinson Crusoe’ is good. For a solid couple months after finishing it, I was still daydreaming about some kinda survival shelter-building game set on a tropical island — only a mobile one, because I didn't want to be perched at the desktop more than necessary.
Have you read the original? It's half book, half bible study. There are modern copies with most of the religious context removed or shortened which are great.
I need to recheck exactly how 'unabridged' my audiobook was (I typically search for a while to make sure I'm getting the whole package). At least, I'm vaguely certain it wasn't modernized regarding the language, since I would hope English from 1719 is fairly understandable — but yeah, it's quite ornate. I might've blacked out the religious parts for their small relevance to the adventure part.
I can see that. I definitely gave it a huge benefit of the doubt, as it was the first post-revolution Chinese fiction-cum-political commentary I ever read. In retrospect I feel like the point of the book was the commentary and the story was just some kind of allegory that didn't resonate as an American.
Yeah agree. I was living in China when it was recommended to me since it was super popular with the locals, but really couldn't get through.
I did enjoy the Western series though despite the mixed reviews, they reduced all the political clutter to the bare minimum to provide historical context, so maybe that's something to check out instead.
100% agree, just listened to it recently and wow was it boring. That and Foundation, thought since liked the show that I'd like the books, wrong. Those are the only 2 books so far that I just couldn't get into. But I suffered through to the end with both. Even started the second Foundation book and then asked myself why I was torturing myself.
You just don’t get 11 dimensional particle physics. I was actually into it up until that point. As soon as they pulled that shit, I would have quit but wanted to finish for our book club discussion.
LOL until they tried to explain to me that humanoid people just randomly rolled up like parchment and got carried around until things cooled down a bit, I was like, "OK I'll keep an open mind to this weird political story." And then when they figured out logic gates but only with 5th century hoards with flags, I just mentally noped out. I did finish the first book but I had regrets.
I was in a horrible spot mourning for a close relative who had just hanged himself. I made the mistake of posting on Facebook and a friend from high school recommended "12 Rules for Life, an antidote to chaos".
I was not in a good space and didn't even look at the author before ordering it. When it arrived a few days later I only had to read the first page before realizing I'd been had. Jordan fucking Peterson. What a pile of shit that guy is.
Ready Player One.
I laughed my ass off starting on like page five. It was such a hate read, total hail corporate nostalgia bait slop. Never took the coworker who recommended it serious again.
Anything and everything written by Ayn Rand.
The Book of Mormon. Someone literally paid me to read it. It is so glaringly obvious that it's tall tales by Joseph Smith it hurt to read from the cringe. And it was so dark, too! Most memorably the section titled "Doctrine & Covenants." In chapter 132, verse 54, Joseph says Emma Smith, his ninth wife, would be destroyed by god, and her entire family destroyed for good measure, if she refused to sleep with him.
I don't understand how Mormons can be so gullible, and in believing all of it, how they can believe a deity that threatens women for refusing to sleep with a sexual predator can be a deity they want to worship. It makes me sad to think about.
The Da Vinci Code. It was laughably awful. This includes the premise as well as the writing. Dan Brown is probably sleeping on top of a pile of money with many beautiful ladies, though.
DON’T MAKE FUN OF RENOWNED DAN BROWN
What, exactly, do you find unbelievable about the best linguists of the last 400 years being unable to solve a 10-letter anagram? Anagrams are really hard.
The funny thing about the premise is, it's not even that original:
Holy Blood and the Holy Grail - 1982
Preacher (comic book) - 1995-2000
The Da Vinci Code - 2003
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. It was a while back, so I can't remember exactly, but I do remember my friend not doing it any favours by really praising that book. Perhaps I was expecting too much, but by contrast, I found it to be a rather naïve, consensual, and superficial self-help book trying to masquerade as something more profound with a thin veneer of new-age spirituality.
Hope I don't offend someone who loves it. I don't feel strongly about it now, it was a while back, so maybe I missed something then. If someone disagrees with me I won't die on that hill.
interesting take. I don't remember much of the detail but I do remember it helping me to take big next steps more confidently when I read it at 16.
Totally fair.
We all seem to agree that we kind of don't really remember it though. It's at least reassuring that that's a shared experience.
I canceled reading it after 50 or 60 pages. It felt dusty and predictable. I also remember the language to be kind of prophetic, like it has something important to say, while failing at doing so.
The book might have proven me wrong, if I finished it. Who knows.
Don't think you have. If memory serves me right, it's about being mindful and focusing on what matters, but wraps it in a ridiculously artificial "spiritual" setting.
This book is to literature what Instagram inspiration quotes are to poetry.
Had to read that for summer reading in high school. All I remember about it was how utterly forgettable it was.
So many Brazilian books and you get the one I can't imagine any school in Brazil recommending.
Is that the one where the boy has a bag of pebbles?
Paper factory or something?
I honestly couldn't remember any specifics beyond the fact I eyerolled many more times than one should when reading a book.
Something about a boy in a desert, meeting a wise old man who helps him find himself by telling him a few mystical stories...
That's so funny. I was in somebody's house and they picked up the alchemist and told me I should read it, and I asked them the same question.
"Is that about the boy who collects pebbles?"
And they told me
"Yea- well, no. I'm not really sure, i can't remember the specifics, but it was really really good".
And I was nice about it, but obviously if you cannot remember the main character or the point of the book at all it couldn't have been a very significant experience for you.
Yeah I mean, it's utterly forgettable. I've just not had that many book recommendations from friends, but I did really enjoy most of them, so I had to really scratch my head a bit. Best I could find to fit the bill was that.
I've read my fair share of shit books all on my own though, like a big boi.
The alchemist is a good shout out for being so uniquely forgettable.
So far, other commenters have a pretty clear reason they didn't like their book.
With the alchemist, we're all just shrugging into the void left behind by something we're sure was a disappoiintment.
It felt like one of those sappy motivational posters, but dragged out over 200 pages.
I literally have that book at home because of how much I agree with this. A friend highly recommended it and borrowed it to me when I was ~15. I never gave it back purely to avoid having to tell them how eye roll inducingly fake deep I found it. To be fair though, I don't remember much of it either.
Easily The Fountainhead.
There's a reason that
Honestly I read it when I was a preteen-teen so right in the intended age range and I liked it quite a bit, not my favorite by any means but it was good. Not going to reread it now for obvious reasons, at least not legally.
The Harry Potter books don't start getting good until he finally ditches the Dursleys full time. I think starting with the 3rd book?
The first two books are definitely geared towards kids/preteens. I was obsessed with the first book when I was young, getting an owl and being whisked off to fairytale land, so much fun. By the time the series is rounding out azkaban going into goblet of fire, it begins to present more mature and relatable themes that resonated more re-reading as a late teen.
I read this when I was in my mid 20s, so I wasn't the target audience. It might have been nostalgia, but I compared it against similar things I'd read as a child and it came out poorly. Derivative and twee. I understand that as the series went on it got less twee but I didn't bother reading any more.
I will say that at the time when it got really popular I thought it was great that so many kids were getting into reading books, so for that it deserves some credit, I guess.
I worked at a book store back a while now so people would ask and recommend books
The Secret was big at the time The Secret sucks ass I disliked any customer that recommended it to me after that I wouldn't say that though, I'd thank them politely.
I usually recommended Neuromancer, but it depended on topic.
Reading Dune books ATM and the original is one of my all-time favorites. But fuck me, Dune Messiah is incomprehensible. It's 80% about Paul navel gazing. I'd read a paragraph and think, "I have no idea what that is supposed to mean." 80% of the words in the book hit me like that.
I read Dune in a book club, and honestly for the majority in the club even the first book was near incomprehensible. The group absolutely hated not understanding any of the nomenclature it throws at you from the start, and there's was a lot of discussion that started "stick with it you'll get used to it."
I fucking love dune but took a few attempts to buy in and get through it. Glad I did though.
Sometimes, a piece of fiction does not want you to understand every part of the fictional world from the get go. It's part of the art. For Dune in particular, it's a hard vs. soft world building distinction. Some fiction, harry potter comes to mind, builds up the world slowly and eases you into it, explaining every little thing that makes it different from our own. Some just dumps you into it and lets you experience it as an outsider slowly gaining understanding.
From what I gather, most people nowadays are much more used to the first method, to the point of expecting it and thinking they're missing something when the second method is used. I think stuff like that, including Dune, would be more enjoyable to many if they realised they aren't, in fact, missing anything and that's how the experience of consuming that piece of media was intended to be like.
i forced myself through dune. i never got used to it. it all felt like a waste of time right through the end.
Reading Dune without Messiah is like reading half a book. They're two acts of the same story.
I'm like a third of the way through it right now, and either the french translation clarifies it or I haven't gotten to the confusing part yet. It's very different from the first book but I don't hate it, it's a good "what would happen after the big heroic tale" that the first book sets up well.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad. The author is over a billion in debt. Just constantly leveraging assets in a never-ending chain of debt.
The Art of the Deal, by some Putz. I don't know whatever happened to him.
The Turner Diaries
This book was recomeded to me by a fellow activist. It's a disgusting and baddly written book, however it does give one insight into the mind of far right militants/terrorists. It also outlines the playbook that neo-nazis and various other bigoted assholes use to gain power while distancing themselfs from direct action and blaming minorities.
It holds up as something a leftist should read to know your enemy.
To that end, I also recomend every American read project 2025.
You guys have never experienced JOHN RINGO.
The first book opens with Osama Bin Laden and the leader of Iran hatching a plot to kidnap sexy American coeds to rape and torture.
It then switches to the POV of our hero, a former SEAL who left the army due to his arthritis and has now enrolled in college. He is stalking a female student from his class whom he is thinking about raping, he lets the readers know that he is 100% a rapist and also that all these left-wing female students secretly desire to be raped by a strong conservative man.
But unfortunately for our hero, a white van pulls up and kidnaps the girl he was stalking right in front of him. Thinking quickly he follows the van and then ends up stowing away in the wheel well on an airplane that's on it's eay to Iran.
Long story short, he single-handedly rescues dozens of sexy coeds from the combined forces of al-queda and iran - killing Osama Bin Laden himself.
In the sequels, for which there are many, he travels to Georgia (the country not the state) and finds an isolated community descended from the Varangian Guard. These people recognize him as an alpha male and make him their leader The Kildar whoms job it is to lead them into battle and impregnate their daughters, most of whom are 14-18 year olds.
The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Unrelenting mawkish sentimental slop with a big old dollop of new-age spirituality. Repulsive.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but several people heavily and repeatedly recommended me the Dark Tower series by Stephen King.
I had read a few books by King before and really enjoyed some of them. Even the first book in the series (written well before the others) was interesting but the whole series is just unbearable. It's long and disjointed and while there are some interesting moments, there are three times the amount of adding grotesquerie for no narrative reason, literal self-inserts, or worse, grabbing references to other IPs that get shoehorned into the story.
I know there are a lot of people that liked the series and I am happy it exists for those people, and I realize not everything is made for my tastes, but the ending was just so irredeemably bad. It makes the ending of GoT look like Breaking Bad.
Yeah, the Dark Tower series was a big ol' DNF for me. I just wasn't really able to get invested in anything. I stopped at the part with the train.
dnf?
also the next one "Wizard and Glass" is just a big retrospection and might be one of his best books imk
DNF is short for Did Not Finish.
I couldn't make it past the endless beach with the lobstrocities
The first three were good. When I got to the fourth, where it explains how he became the most feared man on the planet I noped out.
you disliked Wizard amd Glass?
Yes.
The worst part was that there were references to cool things that he'd find in the tower once he got there, such as music that was enjoyed by people on a particular floor, and then
::: spoiler spoiler (but please do read this so that it robs you of any desire to read the series) Stephen King had the last book end with a time loop going back to the first book like a coward. :::
I dragged myself through the last couple of books to find out what was in that stupid tower and was so incredibly disappointed...
(I will say, though, that, the city of people who used their psychic powers to destroy the Universe because someone was going to destroy it anyway so it might as well be them because the job paid really well was pretty apt, though!)
This is probably divisive here, but I just...do not care for Brandon Sanderson. As someone who has read a lot of fantasy before getting into him, he's always praised for having a coherent magic system, but that isn't really enough to make it an enjoyable fantasy story. There's just a lack of.... something in his writing (and I've tried to read Mistborn and his shorts) that I have a hard time quantifying to others.
Also I was really surprised that I found his writing weirdly bland in the same way I found Stephanie Meyer's writing bland, considering that they write completely different genres. Then I found out they were both had Mormon upbringings, and I can kind of see why I found the blandness similar.
i don't really know if it counts as a "book" but harry potter and the methods of rationality.
the premise is interesting, but the writing is ass. the politics more so.
I've gotten sucked into just about everything Wildbow. Currently working on Pale, but taking a break
You will not be surprised to learn that the author, Eliezer Yudkowsky, started a cult called LessWrong, which had members that would spin off into ANOTHER (more murder-y) cult, the Zizians.
oh i'm all too well aware of roko's basilisk and its knock-on effects on the current ai bubble, thank you x_x
Oh good! I just want everyone to know this fact because I want more people to commiserate with about how we got to where we are in 2025 :')
the only thing that will make you sound more like a conspiracy nut than listing things the cia has actually done, is to describe the philosophy of the e/acc movement.
(Hagrid voice) “You’re irrational, Harry!”
Chicken soup for the teenage soul.
Because apparently reading about other people's problems while grounded was somehow supposed to automagically fix my behavior.
I mean I enjoyed them at the time, but looking back, the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind had some questionable stuff in it. Pro death penalty, heavy objectivisation of women...
I had a friend recommend me Sword of Truth, which was, and is still, his second favorite book.
He just had a kid and named it Atlas after the Ayn Rand novel which is his first. I almost spit out my coffee when he told me that.
I think your friend might suck
Agreed.
God I tried SO HARD to like that book. Liked the show growing up because Legend of The Seeker is campy and weirdly ABC channel sexy (blond leather ladies touching you with Pain Dildos, essentially) but it was just trash.
The main character, by all means, should be the least knowledgeable and probably the least 'wise' character, but in comes Richard educating the Men of Mud on proper government structures and how their primitive tribal society was stupid and the way they made decisions was dumb.
And you're right, don't get me started on the confessors and how anyone with eyes wants to get bent over the table by the protagonist within minutes of meeting him.
...still like the shitty CW show though.
I didn't even know there was a show! I'll look up the trailer.. But that's as far as I'm willing to go, really 😅
The Qur'an. It seems to assume the Bible is true and a real revelation and that it is a biblical commentary, despite clearly contradicting it in numerous places. It makes sense in the context that it came from an illiterate Bedouin paedophile from the 600s
My father recommended The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson and I fucking hated it. The main character is an awful person. I was waiting for someone to kill him the whole book
Any self improvement or "gain x skill" book
Eat Pray Love.
My god it was so self-important and out of touch.
I don't know, I think it offer the incredibly valuable life lesson that the secret to being happy is to convince a publisher to give you a $200,000 advance to spend on "spiritual and personal exploration" so that you don't have to get a real job.
Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land
Yeah starts cool but then wtf
Yeah, I came for the sci fi, got bored because of the cult/religion derailment.
That's not a derailment, that's the point of the book!
tbh a bunch of Heinlein is like this. Number of the Beast is ok in parts, but mostly awful. Glory Road is terrible, too. He did write some good things, mostly the YA stuff, but even that had a lot of problems with the author lecturing about irrelevant stuff.
50 shades of grey. The writing was so cringe that I just couldn't get further than one chapter or so. And I've read some bad writing on AO3 before, so it's not like I'm especially sensitive.
Nearly anything thrown at me in school. If I hadn't loved books already, I would have given up on reading after the shit they forced on us.
Gone Girl. I didn't get very far because right off the hop I didn't like her, so I certainly didn't care why or how she went missing.
People feel that way in the cinema adaptation too. Just sheer anger.
The Farseer trilogy by Robin Hobb. It was my first experience with what could be considered a "grimdark" or where things consistently go wrong no matter how well the protagonists achieve their goals.
It was just a constant stream of the main character getting shit on and failing the people around him (despite doing his very best not to) without any successes. I think I got through two books before I finally had enough.
I'm sure people enjoy it, and it's well written... it just did not fit me at all.
The Three Body Problem. I hated it, but I think I'm in the minority. I found the Cultural Revolution parts interesting, and the tech /cultural infiltration neat, but most of the book I hated. Could not care less about these beef jerky bastards.
I will say the second book, The Dark Forest, is much better, but I'd read it several years ago and I haven't come back to it recently.
Whenever I recommend it to people, I just give them a quick synopsis of the first book and that's seemed to be sufficient for them.
Watching the series on netflix I had the same reaction.
Sword of Truth, not sure how terry goodkind got 11 something books published
The Bible. Never read it.
This is How You Lose the Time War. It is my friend's favourite book and it didn't feel great to have to tell them I pretty much hated it. I think it's the lowest rating I've given a book so far.
I loved it. It was short, brisk, and gay.
Our library did a "big book club" thing where they made infinite e-reader copies available, and I thought hmm, I'll give it a try and wow I did like it. Later my penultimate kid read it, not knowing I had, and recommended it as one of the best books she'd ever read.
It was fantastical and strange, I can imagine not liking it but wow I sure did, and so did my kid.
Life of Pi is the one people seem to like that I hate. I want my 2 hours back, feel it was wasted.
Tried to read that twice, gave up twice.
The concept is something that I would think I'd love. But the execution was not for me, to say the least.
My great great aunt made me read the Bible so I'd be a good little Christian. Read it got the privileges for it, sucked right ass. My only conclusion is that I liked Samson and that most Christians are hypocritical asshats. But what was I expecting my great great aunt thought Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia were evil because they had magic.
Also if anyone is curious how well the good Christian aspect faired now that I'm 26 and not 8. Well hark to the ancestors, the spirits, and the gods, I'll burn every last mega church to the ground and send them to their god to face a second judgement not my own.
The Silo series. First one was okay though the protagonist could be a bit of an idiot at times (I'm freezing, I should light these small tires on fire. That'll keep me warm for 2 minutes while I choke on the smoke), but as a hard scifi, the series never answered enough critical questions (how do they get clean air?, is there really an oil deposit under Atlanta?). Also, the entire premise of how "wool" enters the story is so contrived, I failed to catch why it was necessary both in-universe and from a storytelling standpoint.
The second book was a prequel and the back stories of one of the characters was so fucking boring and predictable I just started skipping his chapters.
I read Wikipedia for the third book.
I never read the books, but I liked the series 'Silo' on Apple TV. Tim Robbins as the Mayor and Common as the Sheriff.
Interesting. I haven’t read Dust yet, but I thought the first two were fantastic reads. I also really like the TV adaptation so far. I agree it doesn’t fit well into the hard science fiction subgenre. I would categorize the books as soft sci-fi— focusing more on the social aspects of an isolated society with limited resources where technological advancement is restricted. I’m more of a soft-sciences nerd though, so I get it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.
I’m not sure what you mean about the premise of “wool” in the story though? Are you wondering why it is important enough to be the book title? To my knowledge, the name of the first book is not solely derived from the wool pads used by the cleaners… this first book is actually a compilation of shorter novellas “woven” together (haha)(the author’s titles allude to this: Proper Gauge, Casting Off, etc). I particularly like the author’s juxtaposition between these textile-related terms/concepts and the alternate definitions that lend themselves to the dystopian setting of Mechanical and the Silo in general.
I just didn't buy the impact of the cleaners. Like it's supposed to be a mystery why they choose to go through with it, but we find out they go through with it because a VR helmet convinces them that what they saw through the cameras was a lie when really the VR helmet is a lie. So like...what's the point? If you can make VR helmets, why not build a robot to clean the cameras? If you still need a scary death sentence, just kick people out of the silo and watch them die due to exposure as they clamor to get back inside. The result is the same: outside scary, don't do anything that gets you forced to go outside.
Making a lie to cover up another lie seems like a very roundabout way to solve a lens cleaning issue.
As for the rest of the wool references, puns do not metaphors make.
Stranger in a Strange Land. I was told I'd like it because it was critical of religion, but it turns out it was only critical of organized religion. Too specific for my tastes.
I can't remember the name of the book nor do I care to. Some knob slobberer wrote a biography about Elon Musk before most people figured out he fucking sucks. I picked it up and was so disgusted by the half way mark that I became an early hater.
I forgot the name of the book, but it starts out with some alien overlord dying, and a whole bunch of people commit ritualistic sewer slide over the death of the alien, and i just couldn't force myself to care.
I even started writing down names and details on the characters, just to try and make it stick. But I don't remember anything happening, to the point I just forgot to finish it.
Edit: Recommended by my brother, but I just didn't get what he got out of it.
Edit 2: The Praxis
You can say "suicide", it's fucking fine to use dirty words on the internet.
I hope you just coined "ritualistic sewer slide," because that's great.
Alas, I can't take credit, heard it in a Red Letter Media review of The Home.
Could it be The Praxis by Walter Jon Williams? If so, I didn't enjoy it either.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner!
The Praxis: Don't bother remembering the title, you won't remember the story.
Sounds like one of the L. Ron Hubbard trash... Battlefield Earth?
Hubbard trash is fun with friends. We used to do shitty movie night before the plague, and one of the last events before lockdown was "Drinking and Dianetics"... It was a choice, really eye opening and deeply stupid. Plus the story of how the nerd herd aquired the DVD was hillarious.
It started off normal enough, a self-help video with a bunch of sunny California people and a higher than expected budget. Tons of power imagery and hints that you would get if you watched south parks "Scientologists believe this" bit.
After that it starts getting weird, bad psychology, incorrect biology and theories that were clearly written by a sci-fi author. The worst was their search for "the original trauma" thing, absolute hog-wash.
People were already out of it by the time we got to the DvD extras, but we all remember the skit with the panther and the actor putting up his dukes like Popeye the sailor man.
The showing was all in good fun, but there was a thing in the back of peoples heads, this is a cult that ruins lives and people fall for this crap.
If you see that book or film, help that person and be excellent to each other.
I tried listening to this one on an audiobook. 2 hours into it and I never detected a plot.
The Conch Bearer. Oh dear god, what a boring attempt at young adult literature. Also, The Catcher in the Rye, but that one was required by the school curriculum for reasons beyond my comprehension.
The problem is I can actually name quite a few books I regret reading, but none of those were recommendations lol.
Most recommendations I've gotten are average, maybe a handful of mediocre, but nothing like "why did I waste my life on this?"
Regardless, here is a book (series) I think had to be a prank written as a joke submission that somehow got approved and somehow made enough money to make a complete series: https://www.scholastic.com/andygriffiths/chapter_butt_wars.htm
Seriously I want you to read the Scholastic excerpt and tell me with a straight face the writing wasn't a bet to see if the publisher would pass anything if you slapped a fasade of a poop joke title onto a book.
I cannot emphasize this enough. This doesn't read like a children's humor book, it's literally just a drunken action packed story that the author did a word substitute to see how far this could go lmao.
Jehova's Bible. No, I'm being serious.
I read the whole thing. I can't remember shit from it. At that time my life was more boring than reading that book, though.
I'm going to say "The prince" by Machiavelli. The modern title would be "How to play power games and hold onto power" or something. The content is nice and solid but it's clear he should have hired an editor. His sentences are longer than most paragraphs.
The Sword of Truth series.
I read the first book as a teenager. I was rather skeezed out by the roughly one-third of the book that was a poorly-disguised authorial kink fantasy.
Then the second book had a lovingly detailed description of a witch gaining demonic power by getting railed by a demon.
Three Body Problem
Super Sales for Super Heroes
A friend recommended it to me. A little less than half way I had to stop and remind my friend that I am very gay and this book is basically just a harem anime.
Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems
Not recommended for me but I started looking at books that won the Nobel for literature. I tried reading Gunter Grass' "The Tin Drum". I'd seen a tv adaption of it previously and didn't follow what was going on. When I tried reading it the entire first chapter was about a woman with her son roasting a potato in a field. Then the 2nd chapter went on about his uncle's job. I couldn't keep going. Maybe I'll give it a 2nd chance.
I have a hard time following books that go on about huge family structures with endless aunts, uncles, siblings, etc. I feel like I need a chart next to me.
I recommended The Painted Man, which I had just read and thought was pretty good. A friend of mine read it (and liked it) and, contrary to my fate, proceeded to continue the series. Next time I saw him he was fairly mad at me, stating the the series took a sharp downturn in quality after the first one. After this I haven't been able to get him to read any other books, despite the one I actually recommended being fairly good. So in a way, this was me recommending a really bad book. Which just happened to be good.
People raved about A Heartbreakimg Work of Staggering Genius for a while. 100% boring meh. Some guy has normal feelings and I have to pay like $17 to find out?
The Case for Christ.
Anything by Dostoevsky, that shit is just too dense, stop describing every god damned item, piece of furniture, wallpaper, and hair follicle and get on with the fucking story already. The Idiot had three full pages of tiny text describing a train cabin and the one guy in it, absolutely not for me.
Forest Gump. When the movie came out one of the people who was there was going on and on about the book. I picked up a copy and wish I hadn't. Its terrible. The movie is great but its based on pure garbage.
Shadow Moon, the sequel to the movie Willow, written by Chris Claremont and George Lucas was hot shit. I couldn't finish the 2nd book in the trilogy.
Starship Troopers. Military wankfest
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
I'm not talking about the story, I'm talking about the writing style. I could not tolerate it.
Well, what do you expect from a compilation of letters from a half frozen scientific explorer telling the tale of how he found an almost dead guy who tells him the story of when a monster told him how a family taught a foreigner to speak and read. Of course the writing would suffer, at one point you're so many layers deep that you have to wonder if Inception took inspiration from it.
I don't have to justify it, I didn't like it 🤷
I didn't expect you to justify it, I'm just saying the book is old and took an unconventional approach to storytelling, it is to be expected that that writing style would not go well with everyone.
Jesus Christ you're so obnoxious. I don't like the book, deal with it.
I literally couldn't care less whether you like the book or not, I'm expressing my reasoning for not liking the writing, you're not forced to agree, nor am I saying that's the reason you didn't liked it. Chill out man.
I loved it!it is hard reading old shit tho
A whole lot of the discussion occuring here is the justification of opinions, obviously nobody can force you to participate but if you don't want to then it seems kinda pointless to have commented at all in the first place
Who else's Frankenstein could it have been?
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
Silas Marner was so hated by my English class our teacher cried. It turns out it was what she wrote her master’s thesis on and no one agreed with her about it being good.
Sex at Dawn. Proposed as a ethno-biographic history of monogamy / non-monogamy which is an important topic, but good god so stupidly written.
My MIL raved about Lessons in Chemistry and was excited to share it with me. I was shocked by how poorly written it was— perhaps it’s a decent story (enough people were enamored with it that it made it onto several best seller lists), but the execution was so bad I couldn’t even finish the first chapter. When asked, I ended up just telling my MIL it wasn’t my cup of tea and crossed my fingers she didn’t want to discuss plot points or anything that would make it obvious I hardly cracked the spine.
Beast by Benchley. I'm still mad at the time I wasted.
Every book used in education book studies
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
I hated every minute, and hated all of my classmates for kissing the teacher’s ass about how great it was when I know all they read were the Cliff Notes
I don’t bring this opinion up in polite company for this reason.
But I hate that book.
I agree that it's amazing, but it's fine for them not to like it IMO. I loved it but it's quite challenging and the style wouldn't be to everyone's taste :-)
I mean, I liked it, but it is a weird book, I don't think everyone will like it, but part of it's appeal is how nonchalant it is about its weirdness. Not sure if the translations capture it, for example I don't think the beginning of the book has the same impact in English: "Many years later, in front of the firing squad", in Spanish that phrase is very weird, it's the continuation of another phrase, it's similar to opening a book and the first page starting with something like "of those, the one of his father taking him to see ice was the most cherished", it makes you pause and look at the previous empty page thinking you've missed the actual first page.
But if anyone is thinking on reading it, do so with a pencil and start a family tree, the book covers 100 years of a family where everyone has the same names over and over.
The Martian
Liar Liar by Stephen Fry
The Bridge, by someone I don't care to remember. Recommended by a hackaday post. I can't believe I was dumb enough to get a copy based on what was essentially an advert disguised as a tech post.
Anyway, it's a rip off of Aldis' Non-Stop / Starship only written really badly and with utter nonsense plot holes. I'm saying this fully aware that Non-Stop had telepathic rats for one of its chapters.
Friend and I were joking about 120 Days of Sodom so I decided I should pick it up to see what the fuss was about... Huge mistake! It is more deviant than I possibly imagined a book that old being (and I was aware the first draft was written on toilet paper lol)
We read The Room by Jonas Karlsson for my works book club. I'm so glad it was only a 3-hour audiobook. I was done after the first hour. It was labeled as "magical realism" and a " dark comedy" but it was just some guy with mental issues trying to adjust and fail in an office setting. The main character is just an asshole so it makes it hard to relate to them, because of that you can't take their side when people start to question his Room. It just ends with a whole lot of nothing and I thought it was a total waste of time.
Red Rising. The whole series, really. They're probably fun for a 10 year old but... I am not a kid anymore. As much as I sometimes wish I were.
I don't know, maybe I'm missing something. But it seems like the author couldn't focus on his own story. Just "and then this happened, and then this, and then this" with no details or reasoning.
Gormenghast. I got about 100 pages in, bored off my ass, saw that I still had like 1000 more pages to go, and was just like "...nah, I'm good."
The Redemption of Althalus by David and Leigh Eddings. It was like a 5-year old had written an epic fantasy novel spanning several millenia.
The Fountainhead. Full stop. Purple prose by a Soviet hack writer with a serious r*pe kink, in praise of dog-eat-dog social Darwinism.
Ready Player One and Three Body Problem stick out to me as regularly recommended scifi slop.
Endymion was bad. And then came Rise of Endymion which made Endymion feel like masterpiece.
Macos
Vonnegut and Haruki Murakami.
I read three books by each author and was shocked at how boring/bad/repetitive they were. I will never understand why people are so obsessed with these authors. I guess they just like the simplistic/repetitive stuff they do. I probably would have liked them when I was 16, but I read them as a 30 year old adult.
Probably some lightnovel
Worst book....
Bartleby, the Scrivener.
Written by Herman Melville, famously known as the author of "Moby Dick".
Which is of course second worst book.
Lord of the Rings. What incredibly boring, pompous blather.
Anything that glorifies “isms”.