Pride and Prejudice was the most unrelatable book I was forced to read in school. A rich, noble, Victorian family whose main problems are, while they are rich and noble, they are not as rich and noble as they’d like to be. They have no real skills or assets, so rather than pursue trade or business ventures, they put all their eggs in the basket of their daughters being able to swoon and marry the bachelors of richer, nobler, families.
As someone who does not live in Victorian England, grew up poor, and is generally bored when shallow romance is the main theme, that book was hell. It’s often praised for showing the differences between classes in that period, which makes zero sense to me because the only classes it compares are the Upper Class and the slightly less rich Upper Class. It would be like a modern book talking about the “struggles” of a family that only has a net worth of $100 million and how hard they have it compared to billionaire families. Boo-fucking-hoo.
I genuinely do not understand how that book is a classic. It’s basically Keeping Up with the Kardashians in Victorian times. It’s a trash story with trash characters and trash themes. It is the first, and only, book I felt compelled to burn once I was done with. I wouldn’t even wipe my ass with it.
It’s also not written ironically. It was genuinely written as the characters actually suffering due to their lack of obscene amounts of money.
I’ve gone back and forth on my opinion of pride and prejudice over the years, even held this opinion at one point. Like why the hell should I care about rich women who want to marry rich men?
Except taken in context, the book has a different meaning. Before Pride and Prejudice, there weren’t many stories about women in that time period. Since women in that class couldn’t really own property or run businesses, their lives depended on their family and ability to find a husband. Maybe what they experienced was banal by our standards, but it was life and death for some people, or the difference between a pleasant life and one of suffering. The stakes were high for something we treat as optional these days. It’s less or a morals story and more of an insight into social politics for women of the time, something that wasn’t widely written about until the book came out.
Is it good? That’s up to the reader. It’s unique and insightful literature, though.
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.
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.
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!
I’m surprised you got tired of the stupid decisions if I’m honest.
I wasn’t aware the characters were making any.
Same. Gave up after trying for a year and a half. Made it through half the series.
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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.!<
Thank you, I’ll read that chapter!
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.
Oh, sorry, I totally misread your post I thought you had seen the show but not read the books. My bad!
I was reading a book at home at age 7, and then my dad slapped me in the bsck of the head.
I was expecting more answers along these lines. Slightly disappointed with the tangent that people’s answers have taken.
I was harassed at one job for reading a book during lunch
I don’t remember what book it was but I walked into a metal pole reading it. I wasn’t seriously injured or anything but it was pretty embarrassing.
I am more of a naturalist and walked into a tree
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!
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.
Interesting. Loved that book!
I once dropped a book on my face. True story.
I dropped a Wheel of Time hardcover on my chest, about knocked the breath out of me. Nice way to wake up
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
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.
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.
Atlas Shrugged.
There are very few books that have left me with a “This is the face of evil” impression. I tried to give it a fair shake, but this one did, alongside the fact that it devolves into stimulant-addled ranting.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not inherently opposed to stimulant-addled ranting - I like On the Road, for instance - but it just left an awful taste in my mouth.
On the other hand, I enjoyed the Fountainhead, but I was young, usually stoned, and took away an ‘integrity of artistic vision’ interpretation that resonated. I do not know if this would survive a re-read.
I thought it was kind of interesting until the 50 page long rant that John Galt has where he explains why greed and selfishness is good, but all his arguments only work within the bubble of the made up, fantasy society that Rand created. I don’t know how anyone could read that and come away thinking “Boy, this sure is relative to modern society. I better base my whole ideology off of it!”
For anyone that didn’t know, Ayn Rand was a welfare queen 💅
Yep. I tried. Three times. Made it about 2/3 of the way through. Eventually just gave up. It is just sooooo bad.
I had the same experience with the Fountainhead. I read it when I was young going to an art school and saw the commitment to Roark’s artistic vision as heroic, despite hating brutalism and his general architecture style as described in the book haha. It was way too long but at the time I was ok with it enough to finish it. Then I found out more about the author…
It just now occurred to me: Anthem is a book about pronouns.
Dafuq is it with these people and pronouns?
The Scarlet Letter.
It’s like it’s designed to engender a lifelong hatred for the printed word.
Well, at least one letter
2071: the third oddesy.
I had heard good things about the first one and happened to just see this one in my high-school library. I had a book report due soon so I binged it.
This is the single most boring Sci fi novel I’ve ever read. It goes on and on and on about the various technologies of the various vehicles of the future. The most exciting part is a flashback to a previous book in which a character kicks a plant, second most is a relatively relaxed flight through a comet.
Normally I can plow through the couple hundred pages in a night, this one took me a bit longer because of how dry it was. There was a entire section on some kind of spinning windshield design used on boats to make sure visibility was always crystal clear.
2061? The plot looks odd and Clarke’s forecast for South Africa really was a swing and a miss. The plot for 3001 is really bad with the painful trope of “We just used a computer virus!”.
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.
And yet somehow the movie adaptation is even worse. How on Earth Spielberg made such a mess of it I do not know.
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.
The english original is awful but the person who translated it to french managed to almost completely fix the writing, and while it still isnt perfect its SO much better
Reading The Road as a new father. Fuck that. Made me cry.
Two separate and very distinct oof moments in that book.
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.
My search engine must be bad too, so can you elaborate about these reverse gangbangs?
“CFNM” ;)
