Interstellar_1What is the worst experience you've had reading a book?
NobodyI read 50 shades of grey and 50 shades darker. It wasn’t that awful, kinda hilarious actually especially the fact some women would believe that could happen Irl.
🇸🇵🇪🇨🇺🇱🇦🇹🇪🇷"A most uninteresting and normal looking hardware store employee is wooed by a billionaire. Also, please sign a contract so that we may have intercourse."
- Honest Book Reviews
Isn’t Anastasia above average looking though? Just dress bad and no, that simple premise could actually happen, but Christian grey would be a 65 year old Bezos/Trump/Epstein looking mf
LennyFunny story, usually when you go to delete a Kindle book it’s asks like “are u sure?” But for this book it was like my kindle couldn’t free itself quick enough. No warning, just like “oh thank god, I’ve been waiting for this”
steeznson120 Days of Sodom was a tough read. I don’t think it’s satire despite what the critics say. Marquis de Sade was literally a rapist but for some reason it is taken as being a meta-commentary on contemporary French society.
SnokenKeekaGuardHe was just a crazy sadist but he’s French so let’s call him a philosopher
MothraI didn’t know people take it as satire. It clearly isn’t. It does have some solid social criticism but Sade is in for all the dirty he writes first and foremost - any social commentary is just an afterthought.
I can’t remember details since it was in HS, but reading The Catcher in the Rye was a painfully slow and boring process. I didn’t get the story, the meaning, the struggle. It was a guy complaining about everything and being miserable and then I had to write a book report about it. Icky, icky, gross.
Maybe if I read it now it’ll be different but I dun wanna!
Interesting. Loved that book!
inb4_FoundTheVeganI enjoy reading unreliable narrators, and so while you’re totally correct. Holden is nothing more than an angsty privileged teenager who is angry at the world. That’s what made the book fun for me, at a certain point his self serving lies and his cringe attempts to act like an adult are just funny.
I’ve found it’s a good litnus test for people, just like Fight Club or Rick and Morty. You’re absolutely allowed to like these pieces, but if you think those charcters are admiral than it’s a super duper red flag.
Holden is nothing more than an angsty privileged teenager who is angry at the world While that is true, you do have to consider that he is
Tap for spoilerstill devastated from his brother Allie dying.
Seveneves. Halfway through when they don’t kill that monster on sight. A rare point when I’ve been nearly stopped a book midway and thrown it away. And it just kept getting worse, so maybe I should have.
It was an interesting read I did not repeat.
Well, I tried reading it. Then I tried again. I even made a bet with my father who could finish first. We both lost.
It’s just a terrible reading experience. Don’t know why critics love it, but I have the feeling nobody really understands that gibberish but pretends to do so just to look smart…
Fighting through it at the moment, it just feels like I don’t even get half of what is written.
Just stop reading. It should be a nice and relaxing experience, not some sort of accomplishment. I know, school teaches otherwise…
My wife is reading through some top 500 books or whatever list and she always struggles with this. If you give it 50-100 pages and get nowhere, just put it down and call it a loss.
Meanwhile, I’m just reading scifi and fantasy stuff that comes well recommended and rarely have to give up on a book.
Mostly_GristleUlysses is a rough one. There are some novels that are so dense that you have to have already read it through once before you can really read it for the first time. I think Ulysses might take three or four.
I started reading it after hearing Robert Anton Wilson talk at length about why he loved the book. He made it sound amazing. And having read it, and read about it, I get why the people who love it really love it. It’s a meticulously crafted, ultra dense, heavily embroidered, masterwork of English literature. You can spend years and years reading and re-reading the book, picking apart layer after layer, and still find new elements to explore, and new threads to pull, which still all end up being perfectly internally consistent. It’s really an amazing literary achievement.
But it fucking sucks to read for the first time.
You need like a companion reference book, the Internet, a French to English dictionary for one of the chapters, and a map of Dublin. It’s not entertainment; it’s a project. And honestly, I’ve found it a lot more interesting to listen to Ulysses experts explaining the book than it is to actually read the book itself.
Username checks out
THIS. Had to read it at university. Holy moly was that a hard earned seminar.
Well it’s a series, but Three body problem. It should have been right up my alley, but I got so tired of every decision by every character being stupid that I couldn’t be bothered to read the last fifty pages of the last book.
Even if I charitably assumed the point of the book was to show that people are weak and stupid, the series was such a ham-handed strawman as to undercut its own commentary. And even worse, it had just enough interesting ideas to lead me to believe it was going somewhere worthwhile, but it never did.
It’s been years and I’m still pissed off that I wasted a week on it.
Agreed- the series is massively overrated
Same. Gave up after trying for a year and a half. Made it through half the series.
It’s not just that characters make stupid decisions, the same characters keep making the same mistakes and nobody ever learns from those mistakes or grows as a character.
It’s so extremely frustrating.
Yeah, I recommend people don’t read that book, but do read the one chapter about the aliens, what is it, second to the last chapter of the book? That chapter is some of the best sci Fi I’ve ever encountered, the rest of the book… you can skip it.
Can you name the chapter specifically? I guess it will spoil a lot of the first book no?
It looks like that was chapter 33, Trisolaris: Sophon
Thank you, I’ll read that chapter!
I enjoyed those, but you’re not wrong. The author cited Foundation as his inspiration for the books, and it suffers from all the same problems. Interesting concepts told with cardboard cutout ridiculous one dimensional characters.
Well, two dimensional at the end
SanguineParNot read the book, but isn’t it meant to be quite dramatically different in some aspects? I’m sure I heard that all those annoying young adults characters were invented for the show? Someone who knows can correct me on that.
Agreed though that the show was a pile of crap. I enjoyed the first couple and quite enjoyed the last in the season, but the in between was pretty awful.
I couldn’t tell you, TBH. I have only read the series of books.
Oh, sorry, I totally misread your post I thought you had seen the show but not read the books. My bad!
I’m surprised you got tired of the stupid decisions if I’m honest.
I wasn’t aware the characters were making any.
I read the 3 books, boring, with 70 bad / 30 good ideas. You can pass trust me.
When I realized there are a lot of dumb people out there, 1984 by George Orwell.
… username checks out I guess? 1984 was also my first painful read. A true Mindfuck. It’s a good story though, but I felt like I needed a blanket and kitty therapy for like a month after finishing reading it. Maybe I was too young
Have you read Jack London’s The Iron Heel?
It is really the prequel to 1984, even Orwell said as much. 1984 stays with you but The Iron Heel will haunt you.
Never read it but I will thx for the info 👍👍
the main character has a couple speeches but I remember one in particular is so on spot for what capitalism is, that it was like OMFG THAT IS WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW!!! FUCK!!!
Like 1984, it does not have a happy ending.
1984, the go to citation by people misusing the word “fascism”.
We read Macbeth in high school, but they dragged it out over a whole year. It was so painful!
jordanlundLOL. I had read it before we were taught it in school.
One of the three spirits is described as “An armed head” and the teacher was like “Yeah, nobody really knows what that description means, is a head in a helmet or what it’s supposed to be…”
So I raised my hand… “I hope I’m not giving away the ending or anything, but Macbeth is beheaded at the end… it’s an arm holding up a severed head. Each spirit is foreshadowing what’s going to happen. Armed head, bloody child, king holding a tree.”
At my high school we had a teacher who had an advanced degree in Shakespeare studies, and she would teach a different play every quarter. They were great classes, but a single quarter was plenty of time for a very comprehensive look at each play. I can’t imagine stretching it out over an entire year and have it be anything but absolutely tedious.
Theatre should be seen instead of (or at least as well as) read IMO. I bet if you’d been taken to see a decent production first you’d have got a lot more out of reading it later.
Yeah absolutely.
We’ve all seen Lion King okay?
That sucks. Macbeth rules so hard. We did it over a couple weeks in school and it was awesome.
This was, oh, a decade ago or more. Was reading a book on polyamory and ethical non-monogamy. I can’t remember the title, but it was one of the early “big” books on the topic.
It actually made me angry. Not because of the topic, I’m fine with the topic or I wouldn’t have picked it up in the first place.
But the author said such STUPID shit like “There’s no such thing as a ‘reverse gangbang’.” And I’m like “Well, shit, man, your search engine must suck!”
It made me angry that he took an important topic and got it so thoroughly and completely wrong. And that people held it up as like this “Important” work on the topic.
Some books are not to be set aside lightly, they are to be thrown with great force.
JoeBigelowMy search engine must be bad too, so can you elaborate about these reverse gangbangs?
“CFNM” ;)
Call me Lenny/LeniThe majority of the books we read in school. They almost seem like the only reason they’re promoted in school reading class was as a deal by the authors and the schools to save the book from disinterest. However, I tend to get a lot of flak for it, especially when I bring up Of Mice and Men and A Christmas Carol. No matter how I read the first one (since everyone keeps telling me I’m reading it wrong), all that rings in my head is a plot demonstrating the struggle of two individuals in an old crochety version of rural America that leads up to a justification of euthanizing based on weaknesses that shouldn’t have been set up to show in the first place, and a Christmas Carol is just an old man being bullied by three ghosts who could be out solving some of the world’s biggest issues but somehow think some random old man who did the crime of refusing to give generosity to someone is the world’s biggest priority.
It’s a common meme to compare the aesthetics/style/ethics/accuracy of a book to the Twilight saga like the Harkness Test (e.g. “wow, the Quran has worse ethics than Twilight” or “this Harry Potter story might be misguided, but at least it’s not Twilight”), and I wouldn’t exalt the majority of the books I’ve had to read in high school above the Twilight books.
Of Mice and Men and The Old Man and the Sea are fucking amazing classics that resonate. While you read them, maybe they don’t have the impact but as life goes on you might find that they were a good foundation for how life is later into adulthood and the hard bad or worse decisions that life forces you to make.
I can understand the phenomenon of having one’s hand forced, but there were many times in Of Mice and Men when I thought “I know exactly what I would do in this situation, and it wouldn’t have been what they did”. From start to end, the book’s points seem based on assumptions on how their circumstances work which makes it not hold up.
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 🏆The Wheel of Time series.
Great story; bad books. Literally, the books fell apart while I was reading them. Cheap-ass paperbacks…
Twins! But I hated the protagonist more than the book’s quality.
There are over a thousand named characters in the Wheel of Time. I think I actually liked less than ten, and only one of them was part of the Emon’s Field crew (Matt, after he stops being whiny and becomes an actual competent person - due to magic, of course, because positive character development only happens via deus ex machina in this series).
Same! I loved Matt once he started becoming a master general and strategist. But the other 999 characters were not worth suffering through to get to his chapters.
Matt and his crew, Thom, Aviendha, Min, Verin… There are so few likeable characters, especially amongst the women (you could write an entire book about how WoT handles women). And due to the aforementioned thousand named characters, the good ones get almost no screen time.
But there’s always time for Egwene and Faile, the two worst “good” characters. Don’t you want to know what Salidar or the Shaido are(n’t) up to for the billionth time?