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.
Foundations by Isaac Asimov. It’s a great story but it’s a tough read. Way better as an audiobook.
I just noped out of a book called “Exquisite Corpse” by Poppy Z. Brite. It’s torture porn with necrophilia and sadism by the ton. It’s actually well written, but I just got sick of it.
Equus. Was forced to read it for highschool English literature class. Never again.
I saw it as a play, and it was amazing. Never understood why English teachers have students read plays. The whole point of a play is to have it performed. It’s like trying to teach swimming in an empty pool.
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.
Harry Potter. I tried to read first book but couldn’t, the cringyness was high and the naming convention was straight up from 90’s bad fantasy book parody. It’s like one of the few books i not finished after i started, and i read a lot. And while the others are just forgettable experiences, HP is constantly in my face in media, reminding me of it.
the scarlet letter. I found it extremely unrelatable, and generally boring. I think The Crucible play by the same author 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.
First school book I ever noped out of.
The Bible!
It did cause the world a lot of harm.
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 do you hate it?
Charles Dickens wasn’t fun, back when we covered it in school
Can’t remember the name but there’s a novel set in Ireland in the not-too-distant future
Synopsis implied it had become a surveillance state but didn’t gave up before confirming due to the literal writing style
I swear every sentence was written in the passive voice (poorly remembered examples):
“It was made known through the clothes he wore they were sent from the department of security”
“As she walked outside the smell made Spring’s arrival clear”
Totally fine normally but do it every single sentence and it becomes a mystery novel where the mystery is what the hell you just read!
… Or idk, Harry Potter 5 is pretty meandering
Are you sure it wasn’t set in Scotland? Charlie Stross wrote a novel a bit like you describe, its in the second person, which is very unusual and definitely rubs some people the wrong way. I think it was Halting State.
Doesn’t sound familiar but I understand there’s very little to go off here
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.
