It’s probably “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”. If you’re interested in any personal finance book, there is already nothing to learn.
The bible. Set aside any religious connotations and just look at it as a piece of literature: it’s terrible.
Ready Player One
The cringe is massive with that one.
The entire thing is the author wanking himself silly over his knowledge of pop culture references from his childhood. Some of it reads like it was written by a 14 year old who isn’t all that into books.
The bit about the gaming suit that wanks the user off but also means you’re exercising so you get fit from wearing it was honestly one of the cringiest things I’ve ever read. If I thought the author was capable of the level of self reflection required, I’d have thought writing that part of the book was him acknowledging that the book is literally a work of literary masturbation.
It should have received the same response as The Room; a bad book only made into a cult classic by the people laughing at it.
I enjoyed Ready Player One at the time even though some of it was just ridiculous. Re-enacting Ferris Buellers Day Off for example.
Armada, Cline’s next book was awful. So many references on every page, I stopped reading. I remember a line that was something like, “my mum wouldn’t let me past, like Gandelf in the mines of Moria.” Sheesh! Let it go!
I fully read Ready Player Two but the guy has no story telling abilities. Every time the main character encounters a problem, e.g. I need a level 49 sword to get past this problem, but there’s no way to get one, it was always solved with the same solution, “oh, I own the game and all Admins have level 1000 swords because we do!”
I think I reached my limit when he managed to shove in a Shaun of the Dead reference just because he mentioned a cricket bat!
Three Body Problem.
Same for me
Oh yeah this one was really bad.
I just had a friend tell me he loved the whole series (with caveats), why didn’t you like it?
It really puts your suspension of disbelief to the test, and all the characters are terrible. I actually thought the netflix show was better than the book because the characters were alot more relatable.
Yah, totally forgot to mention how horrendously bad the characters were. Like 50’s SF bad.
Yeah same here, I thought it was one of the few cases where the adaptation was better than the book. It cuts out a lot of the waffle from the books and patches up lots of holes, especially with characters like you said.
The handwaving “science” part. And then in the end there’s this deus ex machina plot point that comes out that makes all the rest of the plot utterly pointless.
I’ve read a lot of SF, that was the worst because I had such high hope for it after reading what everyone had to say about it. And it turned me off reading anything that’s won a Hugo entirely. That and Redshirts…
That definitely makes sense. What’s a good SF book you’ve read recently?
Mainly short story anthologies for the last year. Been bingeing Dozois’ Years Best series and moved into Strahan’s recently.
Oh nice, thanks for the recommendations
that’s an easy one, Atlas Shrugged
That is, still, to this day, the only book I could not finish.
Got about 2/3rds of the way through it and violently set it down. I love books too much to set it on fire, but I wanted to. It was the worst pile of shit I’ve ever read in my life. Completely divorced from reality.
And she died penniless and depending on the support of the same social services that she demonized in her book to convince people that capitalist leaders are paragons of humanity and the rest of us are just peons.
It’s the cliche answer for good reason. I think I appreciated it better than most people who hate it, and I still barely finished it for class. All the clumsy symbolism and retro-futuristic sci-fi schlock was right up my alley. The premise about rich terrorists absconding with all of the fucking money… not so much. The whole third act is just Ayn Rand’s vengeance fantasy about killing everyone who ever failed to agree with her hard enough. I was skimming through by that point, and still had to double-take and re-read where her derision toward “looters” included farmers.
My final paper roundly calling it a bloated screed by a mediocre author largely criticized it on its own terms and still turned vicious. John Galt is is among the worst monsters in literature because he wouldn’t feel satisfied having his name carved into the face of the moon in recognition of everything solved with his infinite energy glitch. Any mere worker acting as Rand insisted they should died in the apocalypse her tradwife-cosplaying nobility deliberately caused. It is a bad story about bad people told badly by a bad person, and the worst part is that it’s so fucking boring.
That said, we watched the black and white adaptation of The Fountainhead mid-semester, and it kinda works. Big surprise that the woman who hired an editor purely to check for typos had a more cogent opinion about authorship than she did about economics or human interaction. Probably helps that the movie’s over in two hours. Definitely helps that Gary Cooper can get it.
The Bible
When I was an undergraduate, a friend of mine wrote a book review of the bible for the student newspaper.
The opening sentence was: “Not since Naked Lunch has such a boring book been saved by the constant barrage of sadomasochistic homosexual pornography.”
I wonder how many just check out when they get to the list of begats
the begats ain’t so bad, it’s only a couple short bits in the first book, as i recall, which is otherwise one of the best books that i read, with lots of relatively interesting short stories. the worst part in the early first books that i read in their entirety would have to be in exodus, where god spends ages going on and on to moses about the precise details of his dream tent. it feels like it goes on for a hundred pages, and then, a few chapters later, he does it all again.
Best-selling work of fiction amirite
Yep. Bible. Pretentious, boring and way too much first - person stuff.
“Meteor” by Dan Brown (could be a different name in the original language). It was the first time I read something that was bad. Up until then book were cool and fun and interesting. It was a puzzling experience.
Edit: it’s called “Deception Point” in the original.
I don’t know if this counts, but when I was about 13I was very excited to find an enormous book in my favorite genre at the time, Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard.
It was the first book I ever put down in disgust without finishing. In the almost half-century since then, there are under a dozen that I haven’t finished. Shows you just how bad it is.
I read all of Mission Earth. All 12(?) volumes. I couldn’t possibly say why - I hated it.
I would love to hear more about this. Those books are SO long
Well, I think I figured out by book nine that it was never going to get any better, but by that point there were only three books to go and they weren’t exactly difficult reads. Maybe I was hate-reading. “Will you continue failing to meet my expectations L. Ron Hubbard, you miserable cunt? I bet you will.”
And I have a tendency to think that any satire is brilliant and biting and I’m just not worldly enough to get it.
I tried reading his “Mission Earth” series. I did not finish the series; I managed about two and a half books before I realized that I wasn’t obligated to finish it just because I’d started.
As a young teen scifi nerd I enjoyed the world, and tech he built in that book. I read the 600+ pages pretty quick. I think I was too young to critique it as a literary work.
The movie was absolute garbage.Oh man, I really enjoyed Battlefield Earth. And the movie. What turned you off?
Even as a 13-year-old, I could see gaping holes in the plot and inconsistencies. The aliens were hardly alien.
Even more so, I could see that the writing was clumsy and the dialogue was stilted. I could see how the writer was developing the story, and so I was not pulled into it at all. I was actually thinking to myself that I could write something like this. And I was 13!
I haven’t seen the movie, but from the sounds of it many of the problems with the book are also on screen.
An introduction to organic chemistry
I feel you. Sorry you had to go through that experience.
The Great Gatsby.
I’ve read a lot of books, but that one I literally remember nothing about. Not a quote, not a character, not the plot… All I remember is the cover was some weird abstract art piece with creepy eyes, my brain purged everything else about it book. Probably for my own sanity.
The third Twilight book ended by dumping everything which was built up to in the previous book out.
The bible. Inconsistent, unethical, and immoral.
Tried a few times and can never get past the first few chapters.
LOL. Try the Quran, it has the same characters and same stories but written in a way that makes much more natural reading
Thanks, but no thanks. :)
Ayn Rand’s fountainhead, by a fat mile. I was young and didn’t know better
I listened to Atlas Shrugged as an audio book and it was ok at best. One massive criticism of communism and how it doesn’t work but suggested anarchist society as the solution. Weird rape-y sex scene in the middle also. Should have stuck with the social criticism instead of anarco capitalism utopia stuff and it’d have been good.
God, me too. I thought I was too dumb to “get it”.
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. I am usually a huge SciFi fan, but I like the genre for it’s ability to reflect on humanity by extrapolating on current technologies/trends or comparing our culture to unique alien ones.
Revelation Space was technobabble and descriptions of weapons for pages upon pages, and it was totally devoid of any philosophy or reflection on humanity. I never DNF a book, but this one I almost gave up on.
