"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 couldn't get through the DaVinci code, it had such a weird writing style and format if I remember right
Anything by David Foster Wallace. Smug, preachy stream of consciousness garbage that is then annotated to oblivion by more stream of consciousness smug preachiness.
The third Twilight book ended by dumping everything which was built up to in the previous book out.
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.
A fan translation of the Redo of Healer light novel.
If you know you know.
The bible. Set aside any religious connotations and just look at it as a piece of literature: it's terrible.
Alone with you in the ether. Both characters just bothered me with their weird ways of thinking. Could not relate to either of them
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.
Z for Zachariah. I read it when I was like 15 for school. Man I remeber feeling the book is like a farming manual when they tried to survive after the nuclear war. The older man trying to rape the other 16 year old girl survivor also made me super uncomfortable. Maybe it would be better if I read it now. I just remeber it being a drag.
I finished Battlefield Earth.
The thing is, I remember enjoying it. I mean, it wasn't literature, but it was a lot of dumb fun.
The author - whose searchable name will not appear here - was once good at writing absolute trash. And fiction too.
Irony: when we lost everything in house fire, I'd borrowed a hard-cover copy of that famous nonfiction work, and then couldn't return it. I paid SO much to have it replaced with a good hard-cover copy that I must be on some watchlist now.
Sirens of titan. Well, Vonnegut in general. His stories are fine, probably ground breaking for the time in the sense of exploration, but the characters have no depth. It's like reading a book about npcs. Then there's the misogyny. Women are simply livestock kept around for breeding in this one, worse than an afterthought.
I don't think it's valuable to read even from a historical standpoint. Wiki synopsis would be suggested.
Bill McKibben's Enough is on my shelf purely so I can flip through it and get mad. A dense little paperback on how technology and progress should just stop. Not even return-with-a-v to some imagined utopia, like Ted Koweveritspelled. Straight-up 'change might be bad, so let stop right here, the moment this book is published.' Pushed with such flimsy arguments that my copy is about half post-it notes, by weight, from the month I read it for a philosophy class. They stop halfway. I just didn't consider rebuttal necessary past a certain point. You don't have to eat the whole turd to know it's not a crabcake.
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".
The Rings Of Saturn
Was chosen by my Community College English professor and it was the most mind numbing thing I've ever had to read. It was translated from German, so there are multi-page, run-on sentences that haunt me till this day.
The book of a thousand nights and a night. Went in knowing it was the original inspiration for Aladdin. Was not prepared for a litany if short stories about sex and racism
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.
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