Of the ones I tried to read, Atlas Shrugged, and it’s not even close.
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.
Fair play. Not many would do that.
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 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.
why do you hate it?
The Bible!
It did cause the world a lot of harm.
Rich dad poor dad. Rich dad never existed. It’s all made up grift and, consequentially, people fall for it and make expensive life investment decisions after it.
Vaguely remembering what that craze was about, the basic idea that if you have savings you should invest them was good. Not sure if he ever added the diversify and wait patiently bit. Generally all “rich guy books” belong in the trash.
Catcher In The Rye
What a miserable experience reading the whiney thoughts of that little shithead.
Maybe it would have been more relatable if I read it at 15, but I read it at like 28 and it was insufferable.
A close second is The Great Gatsby. I kept waiting for something interesting to happen and then just like that it was over.
Yuuuup. I enjoy Catcher, it’s one of my faves but it’s greatest asset is also it’s biggest flaw. Holden is a convincing mind and thought process of a spoiled teenager. It’s great as a character study, but the charcter is an naive and arrogant jerk so being in his mindset is just frustrating.
Honestly reminds me of Lolita, which is a horror story told from the point of view from the monster. You really gotta read in between the lines because the character is actively lying to you. Holden does the same.
I don’t fault anyone for not liking either, they are rough reads. But if you’re a fan of unreliable narrators then they are a lot of fun.
I actually am a fan of unreliable narrators, but they can’t also be insufferable assholes. I can’t stand that book and I did read it when I was 15!
That said, I understand it’s not really meant to be a cherished story…but if I’m gonna read about someone I would actively hate, I’ll stick to non-fiction for that.
Catcher In The Rye was assigned reading for me in school at 15. All I saw was a character impulsively making his own life harder and harder.
the scarlet letter. I found it extremely unrelatable, and generally boring. I think The Crucible play by
the same authorarthur miller* 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.
Foundations by Isaac Asimov. It’s a great story but it’s a tough read. Way better as an audiobook.
I like it but i noticed while reading it that Isaac Asimov has such an optimistic 1950s view, it can be challenging to keep reading with such limited conflict.
I really enjoyed the first three: they were pretty obviously just a bunch of short stories set in the same universe. The later books where he tried to write actual novels were not great though. He could do great short stories, but IMO wasn’t much of a novelist.
Bible.
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
“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.
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 can definitely go for that. I think the book in its own right is important for that, and is a great overview of that topic, and wouldve been a lot more impactful if I naturally found it, read it, discussed it with others.
Instead I got the whole overview of what it was trying to do first, had already discussed everything it covers in school, and then they made us read it and it resulted in my experience of “why am I reading this, we sort of went over this in three different ways already”
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.
Of books I’ve completed, Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. Read it at school, hated it (as well as Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the D’Urbervilles) - full of ridiculous coincidences. And also utterly miserable to boot.
I started reading The Da Vinci Code, but gave up after the very first page.
I have to agree on the DaVinci Code, it’s impossible to get pass the first chapter.
Exactly. And I’m not being a book snob here, I’ve read plenty of books that weren’t the height of intellectualism. But it’s so BAD… 😁
I… actually liked the Da Vinci Code 😶🌫️. I think I even read the sequel/ the author’s next book. I mean, I was a teenager at the time it came out, looking for some light holiday reading… I think my mum had read it and thought I would enjoy it…
Ah, fair enough, and each to their own - and to be fair, millions of others apparently liked it too, so maybe I should have kept going! 😁
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.
David Weber, Out of the Dark.
The book has an excellent premise: an alien invasion by technologically superior forces where not even asymmetrical warfare (guerrilla warfare) works. Humanity was getting it’s arrogant arse kicked all over the planet.
I guess David realized he bit off more than he could chew, because the premise was working itself into a multi-book series. So about halfway through that book he employed a Deus ex Machina by pulling the most perfect opponent to the alien invasion out of his arse: vampires.
Yes, vampires. a force that so perfectly neutralized all of the alien’s advantages that the second half of the book amounts to teenage revenge wish fulfilment as the vampires steamroll the aliens back into orbit - and then eliminate them in orbit - by riding on the outside of their escaping shuttles. Because vampires don’t need to breathe.
I got so disgusted at the lame-arse way of avoiding a truly great story that I nearly threw the book across the room. I forced myself to finish the book to see if it got any better. Spoiler alert: it didn’t.
And now, a decade-plus later, he’s released two sequel books.
smh facepalm bridgepinch sigh
A tossup between books 7-10 of the Wheel of Time series. I gave up half way through book 10 and resent the time that I wasted on the series. 20 years later I still recall the desperate hope that the next chapter/book would advance the storyline, only to be greeted with more subplots, stupid things happening because of characters inability/unwillingness to communicate, and overly verbose descriptions of every little thing.
I hear the final books, written by a different author, were much better.
Imo, it’s worth getting to the end at this point… You’re already past the worst. Brandon Sanderson finished the series and if he does anything well it’s building an avalanche of a climax.
