Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yaos. I was expecting a nice fantasy story with dragons and shit. But the romance part of it was just so annoying. “Oh look that dude is so hot…” at every. single. occasion. I could’ve known beforehand that this book is more targeted towards female readers, but sometimes I just like to go to the book store and buy a book based on the blurb. Since then I made the new rule to keep my distance to books that mention TikTok or #BookTok on the cover.
I had the same experience! It HAD to have been astroturfing. The reviews were simply glowing but it’s honestly one of the worst books I’ve ever read. It’s not even so bad it’s good, it’s just page upon page of cringe cliche.
“Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer. I read it in high school so maybe I wouldn’t hate it as much as I do if I wasn’t forced to read it, but the plot is basically about a booksmart kid who decides to leave his rich parents and society behind to live in remote Alaska. The book follows Chris McCandless along his journey from the Eastern part of the country, through the South, and finally up the West coast and to Alaska (hitchhiking mostly). When he gets to Alaska, instead of actually being prepared and realizing the risk, he goes into “Into the Wild” incredibly unprepared - he ends up having to stay at his remote camp well into the spring because he didn’t consider all the snow melting would render the river blocking his path back to society completely uncrossable. He ends up dying because he ruins most of a moose by failing to properly smoke the meat, and eats a poisionous plant out of desperation. Obviously this could have been avoided by just doing the proper research or bringing extra food (he only brought a few pounds of rice, and the guy who drove him to his final stop literally told him it was a bad idea to do this with so few supplies and only a .22 rifle). Basically his horrible death could have been easily avoided if he wasn’t such an idiot.
The author clearly had a ton of respect for the guy, because he spent a year or two peicing all this together. He spoke about Chris (the unprepared trancendentalist wannabe) with a great deal of reverence, acting like he was a martyr for a cause unclear to me. Why you would want to spend years of your life in an attempt to immortalize an idiot, I am not sure. The author also decided to randomly interrupt the main story with a few chapters about his own moronic adventures, which made an already bad book worse.
When I was a kid I absolutely loved The Chronicles of Narnia and I hated The Last Battle. I thought King Tirian was an unpleasant asshole and I thought killing the Pevensies sucked because they all go to Narnia Heaven forever while Susan has to bury them.
It probably wasn’t a bad book but it felt like it ended my childhood.
The grapes of wrath. I hate read that in about 5 days in HSchool and still cannot stand it. The other books we were assigned I enjoyed…but this motherfucker, nope.
I thought reading The Grapes of Wrath was like watching Requiem for a Dream - I’m glad I did it once, and I will never do it again
The Bible!
It did cause the world a lot of harm.
Can’t remember the name but there’s a novel set in Ireland in the not-too-distant future
Synopsis implied it had become a surveillance state but didn’t gave up before confirming due to the literal writing style
I swear every sentence was written in the passive voice (poorly remembered examples):
“It was made known through the clothes he wore they were sent from the department of security”
“As she walked outside the smell made Spring’s arrival clear”
Totally fine normally but do it every single sentence and it becomes a mystery novel where the mystery is what the hell you just read!
… Or idk, Harry Potter 5 is pretty meandering
Are you sure it wasn’t set in Scotland? Charlie Stross wrote a novel a bit like you describe, its in the second person, which is very unusual and definitely rubs some people the wrong way. I think it was Halting State.
Halting State was great. It actually took me a couple of chapters to realize it was all 2nd person. That’s the book that got me into Stross.
I recently hate-read Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. I had started reading it twice and stopped after a few chapters. I am aware that the book is meant to be satire, but the point of satire is to be to the point instead of having to slog through 600+ pages of drivel.
the scarlet letter. I found it extremely unrelatable, and generally boring. I think The Crucible play by the same author conveys the same overarching principles about religious hypocrisy and herd mentality in a much more interesting way.
Possibly showing my ignorance here, but The Crucible is by Arthur Miller, and The Scarlet Letter is by Nathaniel Hawthorne - did either of them write a work with the other title as well? I can’t find anything to suggest they did, but I might be missing something.
Oh, no. you’re correct. my mistake. it’s been a while.
No worries, easily done. I meant to say before, I also really like the Crucible - something we studied at school, and yet I still liked it! 😁
First school book I ever noped out of.
Had to read Animal Farm for school. Haven’t read it since then, so this could be a now incorrect edgy high school opinion, but I felt that its allegory was so obvious and direct that it had no need to be written and was a waste of time to read when we could’ve just directly discussed communism instead.
I think what is important about Animal Farm is that it’s simple and direct enough to allow discussion of the political system of all out communism. The discussion is what’s important.
Wouldn’t surprise me if that’s lost when it’s placed on a school curriculum though.
i recommend reading 1984 to get a more refined look at the author’s views. A lot of people read animal farm first and think the premise purely amounts to ‘communism bad’ and stop there. Whereas i suspect most people that started with 1984 eventually still read animal farm and come away with a more nuanced take for both.
Charles Dickens wasn’t fun, back when we covered it in school
Harry Potter. I tried to read first book but couldn’t, the cringyness was high and the naming convention was straight up from 90’s bad fantasy book parody. It’s like one of the few books i not finished after i started, and i read a lot. And while the others are just forgettable experiences, HP is constantly in my face in media, reminding me of it.
The first book was a Roald Dahl ripoff, and I enjoyed it for that. Everything was downhill from there.
TBH it’s meant for children, and essentially plays to their sense of humour and simple imaginations. Honestly, I found the first movie - with all of its hand-holding exposé and slavish devotion to the book - to be far more cringe. The original readers - and what person, really, went to see the movie without having read the book first? - could have benefitted from a more subtle and better-presented script.
I’ve read some utter wank in my day, but the one that first springs to mind is Fault in their Stars by John Green.
Of the ones I tried to read, Atlas Shrugged, and it’s not even close.
It’s not the worst book I’ve read, but Anthem is close. I never had the urge to read Atlas Shrugged after that. The details of the evil, collectivist society are just so over-the-top, and the plot is just such obvious author-wish-fulfillment jack-off-ery. In my head canon, there’s an epilogue to the story which picks up a year later: Gaea has died in childbirth due to a breech baby, and Prometheus is crippled from a broken leg that healed badly. Hey, maybe there are benefits to society after all, y’know?
I’ve read it twice, and I agree. The plot amounts to spoiled, rich children take their ball and go home because they’re mad the poors won’t let them strip the world of resources for personal gain. The author makes it clear throughout the text that Dagny, Hank, and Galt are the heros for fucking off to larp as robber barons in the 1880’s.
As a philosophic text objectivism is naive at best and a cynical justification for authoritarianism at its worst.
Why did you read it a second time?
Because the first time I read it I was a poor and stupid teenager slowly being pulled into an alt-right pipeline. After I figured that out I reread it with a more critical lens for closure.
I tried with it, I really fucking did. But GAWD was it so insufferable to hear how amazing and brilliant all these titans of business were so vastly more intelligent than the rest of the world. I got like a third of the way through before realizing I hated all of the charcters and didn’t care abiut what they were doing. So I decided to spend my time elsewhere.
Equus. Was forced to read it for highschool English literature class. Never again.
I saw it as a play, and it was amazing. Never understood why English teachers have students read plays. The whole point of a play is to have it performed. It’s like trying to teach swimming in an empty pool.
The fucking bible, ugh
isnt it called kama sutra
