Ask Lemmy

Ready Player One.

I laughed my ass off starting on like page five. It was such a hate read, total hail corporate nostalgia bait slop. Never took the coworker who recommended it serious again.

I was in a horrible spot mourning for a close relative who had just hanged himself. I made the mistake of posting on Facebook and a friend from high school recommended "12 Rules for Life, an antidote to chaos".

I was not in a good space and didn't even look at the author before ordering it. When it arrived a few days later I only had to read the first page before realizing I'd been had. Jordan fucking Peterson. What a pile of shit that guy is.

The Da Vinci Code. It was laughably awful. This includes the premise as well as the writing. Dan Brown is probably sleeping on top of a pile of money with many beautiful ladies, though.

Anything and everything written by Ayn Rand.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. It was a while back, so I can't remember exactly, but I do remember my friend not doing it any favours by really praising that book. Perhaps I was expecting too much, but by contrast, I found it to be a rather naïve, consensual, and superficial self-help book trying to masquerade as something more profound with a thin veneer of new-age spirituality.

Hope I don't offend someone who loves it. I don't feel strongly about it now, it was a while back, so maybe I missed something then. If someone disagrees with me I won't die on that hill.

The Book of Mormon. Someone literally paid me to read it. It is so glaringly obvious that it's tall tales by Joseph Smith it hurt to read from the cringe. And it was so dark, too! Most memorably the section titled "Doctrine & Covenants." In chapter 132, verse 54, Joseph says Emma Smith, his ninth wife, would be destroyed by god, and her entire family destroyed for good measure, if she refused to sleep with him.

I don't understand how Mormons can be so gullible, and in believing all of it, how they can believe a deity that threatens women for refusing to sleep with a sexual predator can be a deity they want to worship. It makes me sad to think about.

I worked at a book store back a while now so people would ask and recommend books

The Secret was big at the time The Secret sucks ass I disliked any customer that recommended it to me after that I wouldn't say that though, I'd thank them politely.

I usually recommended Neuromancer, but it depended on topic.

Harry Potter back when I was a child and the first book was released. After reading a few pages I was already fed up with that horsecrap and continued reading The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

Easily The Fountainhead.

There's a reason that

Twelve publishers rejected the manuscript before an editor at the Bobbs-Merrill Company risked his job to get it published.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad. The author is over a billion in debt. Just constantly leveraging assets in a never-ending chain of debt.

Reading Dune books ATM and the original is one of my all-time favorites. But fuck me, Dune Messiah is incomprehensible. It's 80% about Paul navel gazing. I'd read a paragraph and think, "I have no idea what that is supposed to mean." 80% of the words in the book hit me like that.

The Art of the Deal, by some Putz. I don't know whatever happened to him.

The Turner Diaries

It depicts a violent revolution in the United States which leads to the overthrow of the federal government, a nuclear war, and, ultimately, a race war which leads to the systematic extermination of non-whites.

This book was recomeded to me by a fellow activist. It's a disgusting and baddly written book, however it does give one insight into the mind of far right militants/terrorists. It also outlines the playbook that neo-nazis and various other bigoted assholes use to gain power while distancing themselfs from direct action and blaming minorities.

It holds up as something a leftist should read to know your enemy.

To that end, I also recomend every American read project 2025.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Unrelenting mawkish sentimental slop with a big old dollop of new-age spirituality. Repulsive.

I know this is an unpopular opinion, but several people heavily and repeatedly recommended me the Dark Tower series by Stephen King.

I had read a few books by King before and really enjoyed some of them. Even the first book in the series (written well before the others) was interesting but the whole series is just unbearable. It's long and disjointed and while there are some interesting moments, there are three times the amount of adding grotesquerie for no narrative reason, literal self-inserts, or worse, grabbing references to other IPs that get shoehorned into the story.

I know there are a lot of people that liked the series and I am happy it exists for those people, and I realize not everything is made for my tastes, but the ending was just so irredeemably bad. It makes the ending of GoT look like Breaking Bad.

Any self improvement or "gain x skill" book

Chicken soup for the teenage soul.

Because apparently reading about other people's problems while grounded was somehow supposed to automagically fix my behavior.

I mean I enjoyed them at the time, but looking back, the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind had some questionable stuff in it. Pro death penalty, heavy objectivisation of women...

My father recommended The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson and I fucking hated it. The main character is an awful person. I was waiting for someone to kill him the whole book

i don't really know if it counts as a "book" but harry potter and the methods of rationality.

the premise is interesting, but the writing is ass. the politics more so.

Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land

Eat Pray Love.

My god it was so self-important and out of touch.

This is probably divisive here, but I just...do not care for Brandon Sanderson. As someone who has read a lot of fantasy before getting into him, he's always praised for having a coherent magic system, but that isn't really enough to make it an enjoyable fantasy story. There's just a lack of.... something in his writing (and I've tried to read Mistborn and his shorts) that I have a hard time quantifying to others.

Also I was really surprised that I found his writing weirdly bland in the same way I found Stephanie Meyer's writing bland, considering that they write completely different genres. Then I found out they were both had Mormon upbringings, and I can kind of see why I found the blandness similar.

You guys have never experienced JOHN RINGO.

The first book opens with Osama Bin Laden and the leader of Iran hatching a plot to kidnap sexy American coeds to rape and torture.

It then switches to the POV of our hero, a former SEAL who left the army due to his arthritis and has now enrolled in college. He is stalking a female student from his class whom he is thinking about raping, he lets the readers know that he is 100% a rapist and also that all these left-wing female students secretly desire to be raped by a strong conservative man.

But unfortunately for our hero, a white van pulls up and kidnaps the girl he was stalking right in front of him. Thinking quickly he follows the van and then ends up stowing away in the wheel well on an airplane that's on it's eay to Iran.

Long story short, he single-handedly rescues dozens of sexy coeds from the combined forces of al-queda and iran - killing Osama Bin Laden himself.

In the sequels, for which there are many, he travels to Georgia (the country not the state) and finds an isolated community descended from the Varangian Guard. These people recognize him as an alpha male and make him their leader The Kildar whoms job it is to lead them into battle and impregnate their daughters, most of whom are 14-18 year olds.

The Qur'an. It seems to assume the Bible is true and a real revelation and that it is a biblical commentary, despite clearly contradicting it in numerous places. It makes sense in the context that it came from an illiterate Bedouin paedophile from the 600s