I tripped over a cut-down street sign and smashed into the concrete, scraping my knuckles and brushing my nose and elbows.
When I saw the title I was seriously expecting a lot more replies like this.
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
Papercuts
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!
I 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 spoiler
still 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.
Dropped the book on my face scratching my eye
A 1200 page book on architecture too
On the opposite side of the spectrum a friend used my wood book shelf library for a nude model shoot… so book adjacent nudity
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!”
I 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.
My search engine must be bad too, so can you elaborate about these reverse gangbangs?
“CFNM” ;)
120 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.
He was just a crazy sadist but he’s French so let’s call him a philosopher
I 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.
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 👍👍
1984, the go to citation by people misusing the word “fascism”.
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.
I’m surprised you got tired of the stupid decisions if I’m honest.
I wasn’t aware the characters were making any.
Agreed- the series is massively overrated
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
Heyo!
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
If you want to jump in and read that chapter, all you need to know is this:
!the aliens are on a planet in the alpha centuri/proxima centuri trinary star system, the closest stars to the sun. Also, apparently the three suns means it sucks there and they’re desperately looking for a new star system.!<
I read the 3 books, boring, with 70 bad / 30 good ideas. You can pass trust me.
Not 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.
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.
We read Macbeth in high school, but they dragged it out over a whole year. It was so painful!
LOL. 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.
That sucks. Macbeth rules so hard. We did it over a couple weeks in school and it was awesome.
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.
I’ve really wanted to get into Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and bought the first few books. I’ve never managed to make it through the first one, The Gunslinger, even though I’ve given it probably five or six attempts. I always make it to the same part in the book where Roland and the kid are using the hand-cart through the tunnels, and it just takes so. fucking. long. to get anywhere and for anything to happen, and my mind starts drifting as I’m reading and then I start missing things and have to go back… That section of the book is so frustratingly boring that I can’t make it through.
Man, that’s one of the most intense parts of that book too! “Go then, there are other worlds than these…”
I’ve only attempted it once and can’t remember much of it except for those fucking tunnels being the reason I gave up also
Took me about 3 attempts to finish the first book. Skip it if you can’t finish it, that series is by far the best series I’ve ever read and nothing will top it
I heard from quinn’s ideas is you have to be a pretty big reader of king’s other works in order to read the dark tower.
That’s pretty funny to me. I read the start of a King novel when I was probably too young for it (pretty sure it was It?), and just got bored with it. Never tried reading another for years. A decade or two later I tried the Dark Tower series and ended up binge-reading the first 5 books.
I really love those books, although I absolutely see their flaws and understand why people wouldn’t like them.
Either way, I definitely don’t think you need to be a Stephen King fan to enjoy them. I mean, I’m certainly not and I certainly did. Still haven’t read any of his other works…
I honestly despise King’s longer novels. The Dark Tower series is the epitome of his inability to stay focused and well paced.
It’s like he set a goal of some ridiculous book length, thought he needed a bunch of padding to get there, hit the mark and abruptly ends it.
Give me Salem’s Lot, Carrie, Pet Semetary, etc all day but I can’t with Dark Tower.
Which is weird because the first book is just a collection of short stories, it’s not even a single narrative and IIRC is under 300 pages?
(checks notes)
216 pages. 224 with the Afterword.
The Dark Tower series is the epitome of his inability to stay focused and well paced
Probably in part because of the time span over which it was written.
Try listening to it as an audio book. It’s really great if someone else pushes you through the dry parts.
Be warned. There’s some real…racist choices made in the audiobook reading.
Are you referring to how he reads Odetta/Detta’s voices?
Definitely. I know it’s kinda written that way but I was not ready for that old man to fully lean into it. I was perplexed and wanted to turn it off.
I listened through that over a decade ago and that’s still what I remember most from that audiobook.
I agree that it’s uncomfortable, but I do think it was true to how it was written. I’m not sure I’d call it racist in the overt sense of the word, but as I white person, I’m not sure I’m qualified to make that judgement.
Some people just think everything is racist.
When I finished reading that I audibly laughed and said “You stupid son of a bitch.” and I couldn’t tell if I was talking to myself or directing that at Steve.
I did really enjoy the series but I don’t think I’m going to be reading it again.
I hated book 7, ruined the whole series
I guess that would be fucking Kierkegaard’s Either/Or that used to give me what I believe was some sort of physical panic. I couldn’t finish it, great book.
I think it was called “the horror of remson high” or something like that, that we had to read in high-school. Imagine being a teen, already struggling with the changes of one’s own body and then reading a book about tentacle aliens coming out of the pimples of the students, to wreak havoc in the town. It even started with one alien killing the family’s dog and growing to its size… Didn’t even bother finishing it and gladly accepted a bad grade for doing so.
The 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.
