I was reading a book at home at age 7, and then my dad slapped me in the bsck of the head.
I was harassed at one job for reading a book during lunch
I was expecting more answers along these lines. Slightly disappointed with the tangent that people’s answers have taken.
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.
The Hyperion series in general was hard for me to read and it took me a few tries to get through the first duology, but it ended up being ok. I tried to read the second duology, but Endymion is just so boring I still haven’t tried again.
I’m with you. Hyperion was a struggle. I like Fall of Hyperion a lot. Couldn’t finnish Endymion.
I have the same problem with Snow Crash, It’s supposed to be this seminal sci-fi work but it’s just so boring. The first few pages go on about tires and how sticky they are and how much grip this car has as a result.
It’s funny, I didn’t mind snow crash, but I still haven’t finished it. Seems pretty interesting, and I like a lot of Stephenson’s work, but yeah, the writing isn’t very engaging.
A series, but The Wheel of Time becomes insufferable around book five. There’s like five chapters of lore/world building for every sentence that moves the plot forward. Also, the worst protagonist in the history of book writing. The side characters are the only reason I made it to book five.
I made it about this far as well. The thing that frustrated me the most was that early in the series they had to get from one place to another quickly, and they used that extra dimensional underground path or whatever, and they were like “oooooo, this is super dangerous, someone could definitely die!” and then later in the series it was just like, “yeah, we gotta take this route, nbd.” So the stakes just felt really low and overall things got repetitive.
Lol yeah that was a big issue with the books. He made this massive, detailed, multicultural world with all of this dimension, but then he wanted the same few characters to go everywhere and do everything in it. So getting them from place to place was super tedious. He started off trying to make them just walk, then take a boat, then the Ways, then alternate dimensions, then the dream world, then he straight up gave up and said “fuck it, they can teleport”.
I do like that the portal to alternate dimensions ended up being how the Seanchan acquired the weird monsters their army used. That was some quality world-building.
Don’t forget Skimming, which is plot relevant like twice after teleporting is introduced (and one of those times isn’t even for traveling, it’s to throw an invincible murder golem into the void between dimensions).
Is there even a protagonist? Yeah, I agree though.
It was seriously like 3 massive books of almost nothing happening.
Reading The Road as a new father. Fuck that. Made me cry.
Two separate and very distinct oof moments in that book.
Life of Pi.
2 of my kids had to read it for school, I was looking for something to read, picked it up, they both said “NO, it’s so bad.” I thought, whatever, it’s a slim volume, short read, how bad can it be?
I want that hour or two back. They were right and I wish I’d never read it.
It’s so weird, I’ve heard some people say this and I just don’t get it. It’s one of my favorite books.
Never read it, but the adaptation - a.k.a. “Cinematography: The Movie” is an amazing watch as long as you ignore the plot.
“The movie is good as long as you ignore the movie.”
They literally named the part of the movie that they appreciate.
And ignore the shitshow of a production
Mein Kampf - it’s borderline unreadable.
So you’re saying reading it is a struggle?
Haha, yes. And I gave up half way through. Early part about his past in Vienna was coherent, the rest was not
A bold statement…
Why?
I was joking. Because saying “ya know, I just didn’t care for that book that Adolf Hitler wrote” is just like, well yeah….
Saying Mein Kampf is borderline unreadable is bold?
Sarcasm doesn’t work well over the Internet, that’s my bad.
My point was that saying Mein Kampf is borderline unreadable, isn’t exactly stepping out on a limb or anything…
I’ll bet Satan’s Truth Social feed is pretty hard to read too.
But some fascists do manage to be pretty coherent. It’s just that clearly Hitler wasn’t one of them.
It’s such a terrible book, not just because of… you know, Nazis, but because it’s atrociously badly written. Rambling and fueled by completely blind hate, and it sets out a vision that’s completely detached from reality.
Really gave me similar vibes as listening to Trump talk, a sort of utter disbelief that people actually think he had something worthwhile to say
It’s such a terrible book, not just because of… you know, Nazis, but because it’s atrociously badly written
Exactly. No sane person would ever take it seriously. His logic is so broken that it’s painful to read
We read Macbeth in high school, but they dragged it out over a whole year. It was so painful!
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.
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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.
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.”
Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane: The most boring book I ever had to read. It is SO dull, nothing happens. All books we had to read in school were fine but that one sucks great.
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.
First thing that comes to mind is The Witcher (books), but my interpretation of worst is “its been the worst a book has left me feeling” and I don’t read a lot of books.
Tap for spoiler
The most recent was the final bit in the witcher series when Ciri is pushing the boat with her parents corpses out in to the water and being helped by the spirits of everyone who died helping them along the way. I held off crying while reading it on the train home but finally let loose talking about it later with a friend and fellow fan of the series.
I know there’s a lot of post book retconning and hand waving but it’s pretty obvious at the end of The Lady of the Lake that Geralt and Yennefer are not ever going back to the world their daughter lives in and that shit left me pretty emotionally exhausted.
I made it through the smug, insufferable foreword and one agonizingly shitty, self-important chapter of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers before I chucked it across the room. Eventually I decided that there’s probably SOME kind of value in the book so I picked it back up. I started using it as a cutting board for various arts and crafts.
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.
So I’m usually pretty careful with my “nonfiction”, but somehow I got suckered into opening an absolute shit heap of utter nonsense called Power vs Force. I had to make a separate goodreads category called trash just so it didn’t show up on my actual “read” list. Also, I finish damn near everything and couldn’t get through more than about a chapter before wanting to vomit.
It’s about on par with the South Park “this is what Scientologists actually believe” segment (no clue if that was faithful), except not funny.
The southpark scientologist thing is 100% what they believe. They did a lot of research and had some “very highly levelled” people who quit the cult helping them with the research.
They’re usually pretty good about having a firm handle on whatever they’re talking about, behind the absurdity. (I’m a particularly big fan of how they covered “freemium isn’t free”.)
I just can’t assume because of their love of utter bullshit lol.
Best staying up all night reading Frankenstein the first time in high school, or reading treasure Island in a tree stand in a forest during bow deer season.
Worst was probably the second time reading the Lord of the rings trilogy on smaller sized versions; really terrible size and binding or most Dickens I just have a hard time connecting.
