Mein Kampf - it’s borderline unreadable.
A bold statement…
Saying Mein Kampf is borderline unreadable is bold?
Sarcasm doesn’t work well over the Internet, that’s my bad.
My point was that saying Mein Kampf is borderline unreadable, isn’t exactly stepping out on a limb or anything…
I’ll bet Satan’s Truth Social feed is pretty hard to read too.
Why?
I was joking. Because saying “ya know, I just didn’t care for that book that Adolf Hitler wrote” is just like, well yeah….
So you’re saying reading it is a struggle?
Haha, yes. And I gave up half way through. Early part about his past in Vienna was coherent, the rest was not
It’s such a terrible book, not just because of… you know, Nazis, but because it’s atrociously badly written. Rambling and fueled by completely blind hate, and it sets out a vision that’s completely detached from reality.
Really gave me similar vibes as listening to Trump talk, a sort of utter disbelief that people actually think he had something worthwhile to say
It’s such a terrible book, not just because of… you know, Nazis, but because it’s atrociously badly written
Exactly. No sane person would ever take it seriously. His logic is so broken that it’s painful to read
The german version of Ready Player One. Just the most disrespectful drivel about nerdom i have ever read. Absolutely embarassing and god damn was it a slog. I think that was the only book i ever hated and regretted reading. And after reading a bit of the english original i was even more disgusted as it was even worse…
It’s not just the German translation, it’s not really much better in English. What I managed to get through felt just like a “hey look at these references” and wasn’t entertaining at all to me.
I have no clue as to how that book got so famous. Ernest Cline writes like a redditor…
The premise is interesting, has potential as a work of fiction but yeah the writing is awful. I kind of like how there isn’t really any stakes. The characters think there are big important stakes but basically nothing really bad would happen if they failed. I wish it had stayed like that and the main villain hadn’t basically decided to kill a bunch of kids, and an entire city block of innocent people, over what he’s essentially a hostile business takeover.
Not one book, but almost all of Asimov’s Foundation series. The first one is one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time because I love seeing how each group has to use game theory to solve their own unique issue in order to survive and flourish as a society built on science and reason. While I admit that it’s not always written well, I love the mindset that Asimov wanted to emphasize: violence should be the last resort for solving conflict between nations. When the factions outside of Foundation threaten them with war, they respond with soft power like economic pressure, religious sway, and focusing on making better advancements to science and engineering to defend themselves by being too valuable to destroy.
The fatal problem with the series arises in Book 2 though. Book 2 (Foundation & Empire) introduces the interesting concept of “what happens when a massive wrench is thrown into the meticulously calculated 1000-year plan?” Unfortunately, you can tell that at this point is when the concepts of the story become too smart for Asimov to handle, and he instead begins his trend of doubling and tripling down on deus ex machina characters with mind control powers for the rest of the series. All of the interesting methods of sociopolitical problem solving are thrown out the window to become sub-par adventure stories.
Books 4 and 5 (Foundation’s Edge and Foundation & Earth) were written particularly poorly, and was probably the point where I should have cut my losses. The books follow not-Han-Solo adventure man, contain a sexist female sidekick that only serves to be a hot piece of ass for Asimov’s self-insert character to have sex with, and then has an extremely uncomfortable “happy ending” where a traumatized child is left to be groomed by a robotic parental figure so that the robot can one day mind-wipe the child and insert it’s own consciousness into their body. What’s more is that they completely ditch the core premise of the 1000-year plan, and the ending undercuts any direction that the story could have gone from there.
The prequel books 6 and 7 (Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation) aren’t nearly as bad as 4 or 5, but they completely undermine the importance and intelligence of the character Hari Seldon from the first book. Instead of him being a great man and brilliant mathematician on his own, he’s essentially led around by his nose by undercover robots that are the secret architects of everything just because Asimov wanted to tie-in elements from his books about robots.
Rereading the series for the second time, i just finished book 4 and i agree that having everything be about mind control is tiresome and honestly makes the galaxy feel very small. Also the stupid “lightning rod” idea for the character pisses me off, h’es just a plot device
Worst book because of bad book was when I had to read and watch Tristan and Isolde for a school project. It was so bad with SO brain dead characters, but at least it was quick.
The worst book because of the experience however was the full version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. We know interrupt the story to spend 10 pages talking about the special meaning of a throw away line said by Frollo. 5 pages of story later, and we know interrupte the story to spend 20 pages detailing Parisian roof tops to the minutest of details.
I 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 badly dressed and no, that simple premise could actually happen, but Christian grey would be a 65 year old Bezos/Trump/Epstein looking mf
Ive sat on my kindle pw3 on the plane, switch on to find its fucked. This just happened today 😥😥😥😥
The Winds of War. I enjoyed the Caine Mutiny so much, I plowed right through it and wanted more. Winds completely deflated that. I tried to read a couple other Woulk books and just couldn’t get into any of them.
Almost every book I read back when I was a school student.
Each month we had to read a boring book chosen by the school, and at the end of each month we had a annoying test with questions like: “When the protagonist discovered the truth, what was the emotion he felt?” Or “How did the author felt when writing this?” So I had to read 300 pages of a boring book and pay attention to each detail each month.
I don’t dislike reading, actually I enjoy good books, but reading something against my will is sickening.
The goddamn Grapes of Wrath.
“What did the dust on the plain signify?”
Who the fuck caaaares, this book is boring and depressing.
I’ve always been a bookworm but fuck a lot of the shit they made us read in high school.
Crossroads of Twilight
Is this the Britney/Kristen Stewart mashup I need?
a short story i forgot the name of.
the writing style was poor in a way that instead of the narrator persona narrating (3rd person), it is conversing to you instead (2nd person).
I read a book like that once. Think it was called Faster Faster, Kill Kill or something like that.
EDIT - Wrong way round, it was Kill Kill Faster Faster:
loool, i’ll try to give this a read. something about a mystery theme makes me feel the writing style here could be redeemable
I’ll probably get downvoted for it, but The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. The protagonist of the novel, first in a series, is the best example of a Marty Stu I have ever encountered in a book; Kvothe is the dullest, most offensively boring protagonist it has ever been my misfortune to meet. There’s absolutely zero narrative tension because the situation always boils down to “Kvothe wins immediately or Kvothe wins harder two chapters later.”
I peaced out around two-thirds of the way through. Amusingly one of my complaints, that the book had an unnecessarily high amount of smut for something not advertised as, gets even worse in the second book. No thanks
This is exactly how I felt. There is always a response that “it’s intentional. Unreliable narrator…blah blah blah.” Which doesn’t make it better. It’s that “jokes on them I was only pretending” meme, but in literary form.
Dune, I spent my time flipping to the glossary every 5 minutes. Ulysses by James Joyce was even worse, I had to keep a website open that explained the barrage of references to me for almost every page.
With Dune I had no problem. One of my favorite books, actually. But Ulysses… oh god. That was a hard book to read (and not finish).
You’re gonna love Gravity’s Rainbow!
I love audiobooks. There are some amazing books that are narrated by Wil Wheaton
He sounds like a fucking meme of someone reading a book and trying too hard to inject character. He also sounds like he’s chewing marbles when he talks
Book - Warren the squirrel looked in the mirror
Wil - Woaaaarn thu squooooorl lucked in the meeeeeer
The only audio book that I know of that he reads is Ready Player One, Which yeah isn’t a good book but I thought he did an okay job reading it. Be put off by him being the narrator of other books.
He’s no Nathaniel Parker but I don’t think he’s as bad as you say.
The first edition of the audiobook for The Martian was done by Podium Publishing and read by R. C. Bray. If you’ve previously purchased it you can still download it but it is no longer available for purchase or distribution, instead they’ve replaced it with one read by Wil Wheaton.
House of night when I was in highschool.
Straight up vampire porn that makes twilight look like lotr. Most memorable part was too many pages describing a blow job. No idea why it was in my highschool library.
The red/blue/green mars trilogy. The first book was pretty great and the themes were good throughout but the main characters devolve into this weird privaliged manifest destiny hippy cult that doesn’t give a shit about the rest of humanity and acts like they got to mars all by themselves and not on the backs of the billions supporting the economies that made the journey possible.
Its the only serie series I’ve read where I ended up rooting for the oligarchic corporate overlords because even a mars owned by megacorps works out better for humanity than the mars envisioned by the protagonists at this point who are basically turning into a kind of proto-version of the spacers from asimov.