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
Same. Gave up after trying for a year and a half. Made it through half the series.
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.
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'm surprised you got tired of the stupid decisions if I'm honest.
I wasn't aware the characters were making any.
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 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
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.
I've really wanted to get into Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and bought the first few books. I've never managed to make it through the first one, The Gunslinger, even though I've given it probably five or six attempts. I always make it to the same part in the book where Roland and the kid are using the hand-cart through the tunnels, and it just takes so. fucking. long. to get anywhere and for anything to happen, and my mind starts drifting as I'm reading and then I start missing things and have to go back... That section of the book is so frustratingly boring that I can't make it through.
I honestly despise King's longer novels. The Dark Tower series is the epitome of his inability to stay focused and well paced.
It's like he set a goal of some ridiculous book length, thought he needed a bunch of padding to get there, hit the mark and abruptly ends it.
Give me Salem's Lot, Carrie, Pet Semetary, etc all day but I can’t with Dark Tower.
The Dark Tower series is the epitome of his inability to stay focused and well paced
Probably in part because of the time span over which it was written.
Which is weird because the first book is just a collection of short stories, it's not even a single narrative and IIRC is under 300 pages?
(checks notes)
216 pages. 224 with the Afterword.
The entire first half of Salem's Lot is 95% just him going on random tangents about various townsfolk and it's excellent.
I heard from quinn's ideas is you have to be a pretty big reader of king's other works in order to read the dark tower.
That's pretty funny to me. I read the start of a King novel when I was probably too young for it (pretty sure it was It?), and just got bored with it. Never tried reading another for years. A decade or two later I tried the Dark Tower series and ended up binge-reading the first 5 books.
I really love those books, although I absolutely see their flaws and understand why people wouldn't like them.
Either way, I definitely don't think you need to be a Stephen King fan to enjoy them. I mean, I'm certainly not and I certainly did. Still haven't read any of his other works...
Man, that's one of the most intense parts of that book too! "Go then, there are other worlds than these..."
Took me about 3 attempts to finish the first book. Skip it if you can't finish it, that series is by far the best series I've ever read and nothing will top it
I've only attempted it once and can't remember much of it except for those fucking tunnels being the reason I gave up also
I hated book 7, ruined the whole series
When I finished reading that I audibly laughed and said “You stupid son of a bitch.” and I couldn’t tell if I was talking to myself or directing that at Steve.
I did really enjoy the series but I don’t think I’m going to be reading it again.
I hated book 7. Ruined the whole series for me. I read the last 3 books (excluding Wind through the Keyhole, I'm done) when they came out, book 6 was just a setup/tease for book 7 and I was so excited for it. But it was so dumb and disappointing. I've talked to people who liked the ending and I just don't get it. 6 books building up the existential evil that lived at the center of all existence, and when he gets to the tower to face the evil it's just an old guy on a balcony throwing Harry Potter hand grenades. You have to suspend so much disbelief to get there, trudge through thousands of pages, and it's just a sad, pathetic, uninspired, lazy ending.
6 books building up the existential evil that lived at the center of all existence, and when he gets to the tower to face the evil it’s just an old guy on a balcony throwing Harry Potter hand grenades.
Funny, I absolutely loved this. The banality of evil. And good, too. Everything. The world is falling apart. Even the great evil is not, in the end, that great. Two old (REALLY old) men at the ragged ends of their lives trying to do this one last thing.
through thousands of pages, and it's just a sad, pathetic, uninspired, lazy ending.
I mean, it does literally warn you to stop reading when the characters other than Roland get their happy ending, so if you kept going that's on you... /s
Also, it's thematic to the story at hand. It also ends hopefully, as Roland has the horn he did not have the first time through, which is implied to be incredibly important to his quest going well. We see the cycle right before victory, when he gets everyone else their happy endings and redeems his sins enough to earn the horn and, on the next cycle, likely end his quest. Which can be read as very hopeful, but your take isn't invalid or anything
We read Macbeth in high school, but they dragged it out over a whole year. It was so painful!
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."
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.
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.
That sucks. Macbeth rules so hard. We did it over a couple weeks in school and it was awesome.
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" ;)
The Stone Angel.
It's a miserable story about a dying old woman regretting all her life choices. It's also required reading in Canadian high schools because the author is Canadian.
And then, on top of all that, my teacher absolutely insisted that its only major theme was "hope" and docked marks for having any other interpretation.
Hagar was an OG, she would have argued with your teacher in class. The only major theme is 'I do what I want'.
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?
L. Ron Hubbard's "Mission Earth" series. I was young, and I'd read damn near all the sci fi that my local library had, I was acught up on the Wheel of Time that had been published to that point (I think it was still about five books before Jordan died), and gave it a try.
It was fucking awful.
Given that I was maybe 12 at the time, that's saying something; it was just trash.
Friends don't let friends read Hubbard.
I read Battlefield Earth and actually enjoyed it, but in the same I enjoyed eg. watching Plan 9 from Outer Space (or the Battlefield Earth movie for that matter.)
It's an abject piece of shit as a book, written late enough in Hubbard's life that nobody dared edit him so there's whole chapters that just sort of repeat, and many of its premises are so stupid it hurts, but its old-timey pulp scifi schlock feel was often very fun.
So yeah, not a good book by any definition, but it was sorta fun and also interesting to read knowing that Hubbard tried to inject his world view into it too. For example the reason why the Psychlo were so eeeeeevil was that they were ruled by the Catrists who'd eg. use psychosurgery or electric shocks to make Psychlos more compliant – knowing that Hubbard absolutely loathed psychiatrists, it's not hard to see that Psychlo Catrist = psychiatrist.
I tried to read the mission earth series but I just couldn't connect with it. There was too much in the universe that it just expected you to relate to but gave no explanation of what it actually was. That being said, I was also young when I tried to read it.
I read Dianetics and I’m still not “clear.” Must’ve done something wrong before birth.
Instructions unclear: thetans stuck in volcano
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
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
Well, I tried reading it. Then I tried again. I even made a bet with my father who could finish first. We both lost.
It's just a terrible reading experience. Don't know why critics love it, but I have the feeling nobody really understands that gibberish but pretends to do so just to look smart...
Ulysses is a rough one. There are some novels that are so dense that you have to have already read it through once before you can really read it for the first time. I think Ulysses might take three or four.
I started reading it after hearing Robert Anton Wilson talk at length about why he loved the book. He made it sound amazing. And having read it, and read about it, I get why the people who love it really love it. It's a meticulously crafted, ultra dense, heavily embroidered, masterwork of English literature. You can spend years and years reading and re-reading the book, picking apart layer after layer, and still find new elements to explore, and new threads to pull, which still all end up being perfectly internally consistent. It's really an amazing literary achievement.
But it fucking sucks to read for the first time.
You need like a companion reference book, the Internet, a French to English dictionary for one of the chapters, and a map of Dublin. It's not entertainment; it's a project. And honestly, I've found it a lot more interesting to listen to Ulysses experts explaining the book than it is to actually read the book itself.
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THIS. Had to read it at university. Holy moly was that a hard earned seminar.
These days I tend not to persevere with books that I'm having a bad experience with. There are just too many good books out there.
Poor writing sucks but even worse is when the author misjudges how much they can expect from the reader. Sometimes things can get 'bad' in a book for just long enough that the reader feels they have risen to a challenge and been rewarded at the next change. Some authors are aware of this and incorporate the dynamic but end up prolonging it too much or over-egging it. I actually feel abused as reader when that happens and end up rage quitting. Unfortunately, deleting an ebook doesn't come with the same satisfaction as burning a physical one in those cases.
The other thing that is a bad experience for me is overly long dialogue expositions, where a character does an infodump to provide background and context and justify the plot. It totally jangles me, bores me and breaks immersion in the story by making me cynical about the authors laziness. An example of this is all the Librarian's waffling about biblical stuff in Snow Crash. Rather than making me care more about the outcome of the plot it just yanked me away from what was a really enjoyable story and setting and destroyed the pace.
BTW, if anyone is interested; Bookwyrm is a fediverse platform for discussing and rating books. Much like a federated FOSS version of Goodreads.
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
I tripped over a cut-down street sign and smashed into the concrete, scraping my knuckles and brushing my nose and elbows.
When I saw the title I was seriously expecting a lot more replies like this.
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.
The Wheel of Time series.
Great story; bad books. Literally, the books fell apart while I was reading them. Cheap-ass paperbacks...
Twins! But I hated the protagonist more than the book's quality.
There are over a thousand named characters in the Wheel of Time. I think I actually liked less than ten, and only one of them was part of the Emon's Field crew (Matt, after he stops whining and becomes an actual competent person - due to magic, of course, because positive character development only happens via deus ex machina in this series).
I think they would be good books if he took the whole plot and compressed it into 3, maybe 5 books. It’s just too long, too many pointless tangents, too many random characters to remember who may or may not reappear at some point in the next 10 books… as soon as you get to an interesting part it switches perspectives to the most boring events imaginable.
I liked how there was a multi-book background subplot of some Aes Sedai investigating the Black Ajah in secret, only for them to get killed off between books (and their deaths only mentioned in passing during the next book's prologue) and the Black Ajah plot thread put on hold, then for the solution to the Black Ajah to be handed to Egwene with a wrapped bow a few books later.
I get Jordan was trying to cut out extraneous subplots and actually finish the series, but it sucks that so many pages were wasted on something that went nowhere, and the eventual resolution didn't even need them in the first place.
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.
Is there even a protagonist? Yeah, I agree though.
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".
It was seriously like 3 massive books of almost nothing happening.
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.
Xenocide, from the ender series. Enders game was good. Speaker was OK I guess. Ender was a whiny bitch the entire time but the descolada mystery was interesting. Now that's solved and he's still a whiny bitch and then he just solves basically every single problem with his super ai that can do magical space/time bullshit. The worst deus ex machina I have ever laid eyes on. I physically threw the book across the room at one point. I hate leaving books unfinished, so I slogged through the rest at like 5 pages per sitting, rolling my eyes out of my head the whole time.
I did not finish children of the mind.
I thought 'Children of the mind' was good, could have been merged with Xenocide.
Whatever you do, stay away from 'The Last Shadow'. What a terrible way to finish a series.
Only read Enders shadow and it was decent. Made me realize that ender was a little bitch all along and not when he left.
Anything with Ender after the first book is terrible. But the series that sticks with the happenings on earth after Enders Game is pretty good. I especially like the book that has Bean from a child through battle school.
I have to rank Children of the Mind as one of the just plain weirdest books I've ever read. Just when I thought it couldn't get weirder, Orson Scott Card manages to throw something else at you. After I finished Children of the Mind, I decided at that point I was going to move onto some other book series.
I'll still recommend Ender's Game as that's a classic, but I wouldn't bother with the sequels.
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.
the underage sex in Snowcrash
the character could have just as easily been made an 18 year old and it didn't need to be there for the story. it was like a record skipping at that moment and I understand wanting to make a crossover for the character to have a sympathetic link to the other character but it was gross and makes it really hard to recommend the book to someone
Snow Crash is one of those books that is both hugely influential and also impossible to recommend for so many reasons
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
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!".
Reading The Road as a new father. Fuck that. Made me cry.
Two separate and very distinct oof moments in that book.
I'll probably get downvoted for it, but The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. The protagonist of the novel, first in a series, is the best example of a Marty Stu I have ever encountered in a book; Kvothe is the dullest, most offensively boring protagonist it has ever been my misfortune to meet. There's absolutely zero narrative tension because the situation always boils down to "Kvothe wins immediately or Kvothe wins harder two chapters later."
I peaced out around two-thirds of the way through. Amusingly one of my complaints, that the book had an unnecessarily high amount of smut for something not advertised as, gets even worse in the second book. No thanks
This is exactly how I felt. There is always a response that "it's intentional. Unreliable narrator...blah blah blah." Which doesn't make it better. It's that "jokes on them I was only pretending" meme, but in literary form.
House of night when I was in highschool.
Straight up vampire porn that makes twilight look like lotr. Most memorable part was too many pages describing a blow job. No idea why it was in my highschool library.
Thankfully I can't remember the title or author of the book. I only got six pages into it before I put it in the "return to the library" pile.
I think it was supposed to be a fantasy novel set in a medieval European alternate world.
It was first person and the MCs train of thought was trope and cliché filled drivel, including a multi paragraph description of an alcoholic drink made from potatoes and turnips. The author called it "voka."
That was the final straw.
Been rereading all the books I can ever remember having read in school lately. For the most part they are actually more enjoyable as an adult.
The Scarlet Letter still doesn't hold up though. It's so dry, so boring, so archaic. I crawled through it a few pages a day for like three months because I didn't have the motivation to do any more than that. The movie was even worse.
The Great Gatsby was kind of a slog at first - I actually just gave up on it at some point. But when I eventually came back and started from the beginning again it was fine and reasonably enjoyable.
For those curious, the "books I can remember having ever read in school" are A Doll's House, A Modest Proposal, Animal Farm, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Ghost Cadet, Hatchet, Holes, I am the Cheese, Inherit the Wind, Lord of the Flies, Maniac Magee, Night, Number the Stars, Of Mice and Men, Pygmalion, The BFG, The Great Gatsby, The Kid Who Became President, The Man who was Poe, The Metamorphosis, The Most Dangerous Game, The Old Man and the Sea, The Pearl (?), The Scarlet Letter, Crash, To Kill a Mockingbird, Bud Not Buddy, The Lottery, Fahrenheit 451, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Crucible. Plus a lot of Shakespeare. So far I've reread all of those before Mockingbird, and none of them from Mockingbird. This only includes books we were made to read, or which our teacher read to us in earlier grades (BFG, Hatchet, Mixed-Up Files, etc)
The Great Gatsby was kind of a slog at first - I actually just gave up on it at some point. But when I eventually came back and started from the beginning again it was fine and reasonably enjoyable.
I always thought that by far the most interesting character in The Great Gatsby was the narrator.
Dune, I spent my time flipping to the glossary every 5 minutes. Ulysses by James Joyce was even worse, I had to keep a website open that explained the barrage of references to me for almost every page.
With Dune I had no problem. One of my favorite books, actually. But Ulysses... oh god. That was a hard book to read (and not finish).
You’re gonna love Gravity’s Rainbow!
When I was a kid I would read the sexy parts of the Illuminati and jerk off.
My brother caught me and ratted me out. Handing over the book was terrible.
I tried to read The Wheel of Time and discovered that some people really think men and women are different species, incapable of communication or cooperation. These people believe that pretty much everything about a person is a result of their sex and are incapable of relating to a person without their stereotypic lenses. It explains the trans panic.
When I realized there are a lot of dumb people out there, 1984 by George Orwell.
... username checks out I guess? 1984 was also my first painful read. A true Mindfuck. It's a good story though, but I felt like I needed a blanket and kitty therapy for like a month after finishing reading it. Maybe I was too young
1984, the go to citation by people misusing the word "fascism".
I guess that would be fucking Kierkegaard's Either/Or that used to give me what I believe was some sort of physical panic. I couldn't finish it, great book.
The Dutch education system forced us to read many Dutch works of literature every year in the last years of highschool. This completely ruined my joynin reading, since imo most Dutch literature is boring. Interesting books like the Lord of the Rings or Dune were not allowed since they weren't Dutch.
The worst memory of them all was the book called "De Grote Zaal". Basically the entire book was about a dying old lady in the last years of her life reflecting on her life. It wasn't a thick book, but it felt like it took ages because nothing happened and it had exactly nothing in common with the average life and interests of a highschooler.
Before the last years of highschool I'd always read books for fun, even when school started requiring it, because it was fun. Books like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter (fck J.K Rowling), Star Wars, and countless others that I'm missing were great fun. But Dutch literature is a lot about old people, WW2, etc. Dutch fantasy books were not considered literature because they were too much fun to read.
Same exact experience. Dutch literature is horrid. It's a lot of sad depression and drugs. There's a reason almost everyone read "het diner" or "het gouden ei" since those are doable. There seriously isn't anything exciting like a detective or the stuff you mentioned. Not even a 1984, which is a depressing book but at least there's some excitement. It really seems most Dutch literature is just pages of misery and nothing happening.
For English literature I read the lord of the rings. Way more pages, much more fun.
Yeah exactly. I always looked forward to reading English books. And in German classes I'd also look forward to reading, though that probably had to do more with how bad I was at German. Dutch literature is just boring and depressing for most highschoolers. I'm sure for some older people it was exciting, and those must've been the people deciding that forcing us to read this stuff was a good idea.
Dante's Inferno. It was full of footnotes explaining the context for all the references and allusions he made, which was important to have, but reading your way through a piece of literature and being stopped every few sentences for a lengthy explanation was so frustrating. I couldn't keep a good pace up and kept getting lost in the details. My interest gave out and I still haven't finished the last quarter of the book.
And there are two more volumes after that in the Divine Comedy!!!
That sounds like a problem with whatever edition you read. I had to read it a long time ago for school and the version we read was more like a short novel and I found it an interesting read.
I think it was called "the horror of remson high" or something like that, that we had to read in high-school. Imagine being a teen, already struggling with the changes of one's own body and then reading a book about tentacle aliens coming out of the pimples of the students, to wreak havoc in the town. It even started with one alien killing the family's dog and growing to its size.. Didn't even bother finishing it and gladly accepted a bad grade for doing so.
Just tried to read some of Anne Rice's books last week because I was enchanted by the AMC adaptation of Interview with the Vampire.
I can't even adequately express how much I dislike her writing and "story telling", if you can even call it that. Her vampire lore/rules for her vampires are cool, but that's pretty much all she has going for her.
Interview with a Vampire:
8/10
3/10 with RiceI enjoyed the books because I enjoyed thinking about the sort of author who would write something like that. Kind of getting into her head even though she didn't intend it. Especially Queen of the Damned.
And I love the idea that elder vampires are easily strong enough to reveal themselves and conquer the world, but they just don't because they're too lazy and decadent to rock the boat.
I prefer the White Wolf / World of Darkness setting though. "We don't reveal ourselves because humans would wipe the floor with us and then hunt us to extinction, like they've always done with everything that's ever threatened them. Despite our power, we can't beat their industry."
Id would have to say Lolita. The way humbert humbert is super manipulative and gaslight-y about the worse things a human can do is why I had to drop the book halfway.
I don't know if it's my worst ever reading experience but... Im trying to get through Narcissus and Goldmund right now. Holy shit do I hate this book so far, and I usually enjoy Hesse's work.
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
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
Beowulf. The version I was given in high school was kinda half-translated from ancient English to modern English, such that I had to struggle to figure out what the modern equivalent of a lot of the words were supposed to be in order to understand it.
Also every time a character is introduce it goes for like a whole page about their family tree and sword collection.
I never imagined a book about fighting monsters could be so boring.
Papercuts
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.
Dropped the book on my face scratching my eye
A 1200 page book on architecture too
On the opposite side of the spectrum a friend used my wood book shelf library for a nude model shoot... so book adjacent nudity
Worst book because of bad book was when I had to read and watch Tristan and Isolde for a school project. It was so bad with SO brain dead characters, but at least it was quick.
The worst book because of the experience however was the full version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. We know interrupt the story to spend 10 pages talking about the special meaning of a throw away line said by Frollo. 5 pages of story later, and we know interrupte the story to spend 20 pages detailing Parisian roof tops to the minutest of details.
Every time i read the water babies my grandfather had a stroke.
Oh shit, this made me remember my experience. As a kid, I had two books that were definitely cursed. Every time I cracked one open, something awful would happen to my family. Being renovicted from our apartment. A parent developing epilepsy. The other parent losing a job. And so on.
The books were sentimental so I held on to them for a long time. When I was an older teen, I even opened one of them to "test it out"... sure enough, parent had a seizure that same day.
I have since gotten rid of them and I steer clear of books on similar topics.
Goddamn
Jane Eyre: Every moment of this book was absolute torture. I could never get into this genre of book but this book took the cake. It was like the reading equivalent of trying to force down a terrible meal without gagging because it would be rude. I actually devoted my time to speed read it just so I could finish it faster.
Wicked: It was just a lot of, "Oh god, this isn't like the musical at all 😰."
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.
One Second After - W. R. Forstchen
Please everyone, read this book. It's sad, disgusting and heavy, but it's probably a documentary for events that may happen one day. It's very well researched and the plausibility and realism make it even scarier. It hasn't turned me into a prepper, but in part motivated me to make our house as self-sufficient as possible. Also it made me aware of small useful things in my surroundings that I used to be blind to.
Can I at least get a summary?
What would be the impact on everyday life if a nuclear EMP destroyed all electronics in our lives instantly? First there are a lot of dead from car / plane crashes, then most patients in hospitals, then many due to running out of water and food. And what's left of the society then collapses into barbarism, violence and fighting for resources.
It's possible something like this would happen should the nuclear weapons of today be used. The book is hard to stomach, but everyone should be aware of the possibility and be at least knowledgeable in survival without modern technology (if not outright stocked up in a doomsday vault).
Seveneves. Halfway through when they don't kill that monster on sight. A rare point when I've been nearly stopped a book midway and thrown it away. And it just kept getting worse, so maybe I should have.
It was an interesting read I did not repeat.
Perhaps a hot take, but East of Eden was an absolute trudge to get through. I think I made it almost halfway and gave up because I was not enjoying it at all. I wasn't sure what the main points were and there were too many details unrelated to the plot.
A less hot take, The Fountainhead was also a pain to read. It was just boring as hell and I stopped about halfway as well. I only read it because I loved Anthem and became disappointed to find out it's only related philosophically.
If you mean "which book did you like the least" I'm going with Wuthering Heights. It's a miserable story about awful characters that is for some reason a curriculum requirement.
Honorable mentions:
I was told A Confederacy Of Dunces was a tremendously funny book, "one big clockwork of a joke" couldn't bring myself to finish it, I just didn't want to spend any more time with these characters.
I've also managed to slide off of the Aubrey-Maturin series (Remember that Russel Crowe movie where he's a British sailing ship captain? The books that movie was based on)...I might have been able to slog through ye olde timey languagee if the author didn't have a habit of changing scenes and not telling us. At the end of one chapter we're sailing around having nautical adventures and then the next chapter begins 5 paragraphs into visiting with some old guy and his step-nurse. The tag line of these books is "Wait, what's going on?"
The Last of the Mohicans
Read it in high school because it's "classic American literature." If I remember right, a number of the main characters are killed off towards the end. It was a depressing story.
Omg that was a hard read. I also read it in high school and every bit of it was painful and boring.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson's Saga of the Seven Suns. I started reading it a long time ago, got about twenty pages in and gave up. Much later, I forgot I had tried, and tried again, and got even fewer pages in when I remembered how it is chock full of the most inane pandering exposition I have ever read. Just a torrent of trite, hackneyed, cliché. I can't understand how it got published, let alone warranted 7 books. Maybe it gets better. I will never find out. I haven't heard much good about the Dune books he co-authored, either.
I should add that I've read Battlefield Earth, and actually enjoyed it. I generally do not have super high standards. If something is entertaining, I'll give it a chance.
I haven’t heard much good about the Dune books he co-authored, either.
I've read the first prequel trilogy, and for the life of me I can't say why. I got no enjoyment from it.
I read the book Paper Towns by John Green as a teen, and out started out good, then just kept getting better and better and way more adrenaline inducing. The characters were going on this crazy exciting midnight excursion and I was up reading until like midnight.
At a certain point, the mood just dropped straight off of a cliff. It was so depressing and draining but I was in too deep at that point, so I kept reading. After like two chapters of emotional torture, I knew I had to stop so I stopped reading and fully deleted the book off of my kobo and went to sleep.
The next morning though, I woke up desperate to know what happened, so I booted up my computer, went through Adobe's proprietary mess of a program to redownload the book onto my kobo, skipped the entire middle section, and kept reading. In the end, the ending was okay, but definitely not worth that rollercoaster of emotions.
I read John Green's The Fault in Our Stars right after, and I enjoyed it!
Dies The Fire by S.M. Stirling.
I didn’t hate the plot of the book, but something about the writers treatment of the character interactions, physical descriptions, and sex scenes creeped me out. I just… I don’t know. It was gross. I got the feeling that the writer was fulfilling their own fantasies through the novel. I told this to someone about 10 years ago, and they also felt that way, so I feel slightly vindicated and not like a weirdo who reads too much into things.
I tried rereading both of those series recently (there were maybe 6 Change novels out when i read them, so it was many years ago) and I just couldn't.
Island in the Sea of Time is worse. Some credit for having some better developed female characters than most male authors at the time, I guess. But the SA scenes were fuckin awful.
Any book where the pages aren’t cut together. Fucking pain in the ass turning pages, and forget about flipping through the book.
I read 50 shades of grey and 50 shades darker. It wasn't that awful, kinda hilarious actually especially the fact some women would believe that could happen Irl.
"A most uninteresting and normal looking hardware store employee is wooed by a billionaire. Also, please sign a contract so that we may have intercourse."
- Honest Book Reviews
Isn't Anastasia above average looking though? Just badly dressed and no, that simple premise could actually happen, but Christian grey would be a 65 year old Bezos/Trump/Epstein looking mf
Funny story, usually when you go to delete a Kindle book it's asks like "are u sure?" But for this book it was like my kindle couldn't free itself quick enough. No warning, just like "oh thank god, I've been waiting for this"
I remember struggling so much to get into Inheritence that I gave up, not sure if it was because of the writing or I was still annoyed at the end of Brisingr.
Okay nobody said His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman. So that's my hated reading experience.
The first book was okay, seemed promising, the rest got worse and worse by the page. I've picked up lousy books and I can quickly tell if they would be a waste of time, so I drop them early. I have no beef with those books. But His Dark Materials? What a disappointment. I want my time and money back.
What didn't you like? I remember having a few issues here and there but otherwise being entertained.
How cliche/cringe the characters and stories turned, in particular Lyra's love subplot, Lyra's mother storyline, plus somehow getting God mixed in just to make some kind of "social commentary" which IMO felt cringe and broke my suspension of disbelief as I was reading ( and I'm an atheist btw ). All in all it was good starting concept, the world looked promising but the story was lame. And I didn't like those weird wheel aliens. Biologically their description made no sense, and their storyline was so boring.
The only cool character in the series was the bear.
Dickens - A Tale Of Two Cities.
In ninth grade my class was forced to read it. No lie I actually never got past the second page. I tried so hard but was bored to death and confused by that intro. I used cliff notes to get through the assignments. Worst reading experience ever.
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.
American Psycho would occasionally get so graphic about the torture shit that I'd have to read a couple of paragraphs and then pause and look out the window for a bit. Rinse, repeat. It would only be for a handful of pages here and there, but I've never had a similar experience with any other book. But I also rarely read fiction.
I tried to read The Reactionary Mind, but had to stop pretty early in. I consider myself to have a pretty decent vocabulary. Part of why is an OCD-like need to look up the meaning of any word I don't know when reading. However, this author was using so many words that I didn't know that I couldn't get into a flow. I kept having to pause and grab my phone for my dictionary app. Doing that many times per page just doesn't work. I really wanted to get the content from it but it was too distracting.
a short story i forgot the name of.
the writing style was poor in a way that instead of the narrator persona narrating (3rd person), it is conversing to you instead (2nd person).
I read a book like that once. Think it was called Faster Faster, Kill Kill or something like that.
EDIT - Wrong way round, it was Kill Kill Faster Faster:
loool, i'll try to give this a read. something about a mystery theme makes me feel the writing style here could be redeemable
I was about to finish the book (it was mine) when my teacher asked to borrow it. I never got it back.
The Winds of War. I enjoyed the Caine Mutiny so much, I plowed right through it and wanted more. Winds completely deflated that. I tried to read a couple other Woulk books and just couldn't get into any of them.
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.
Clear and present danger. Only book I’ve ever quit, and 600 pigs in to boot. Shit author, shit book, shit material. The people who enjoy this shit are the same people who jack off to guns and ammo. ‘What’s this author re*arded? Give me back my $15’.
Ive sat on my kindle pw3 on the plane, switch on to find its fucked. This just happened today 😥😥😥😥
Crossroads of Twilight
Is this the Britney/Kristen Stewart mashup I need?
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.
Couldn't get over the accent stuff in Huckleberry Finn. I gotta be able to flow state a book.
Agree, books written in dialect are just a pain in the ass. I've once tried to read something that was set in a Pacific island community, and the author had the brilliant idea to use some Creole-English-mashup. Completely unintelligible, droped it after 2 or 3 chapters.
The Darkroom of Damocles.
The big "twist" in the book basically gets pretty obviously announced in the first chapter "oh this person is exactly like me but better in every way I can conceive, how vexing. Gosh would I like to be him". It's almost spelled out.
Once the twist is known, the rest of the book makes little sense. Sure, the main character becomes an unreliable narrator, but he's not just twisting details; hugely important events can no longer happen if you assume the twist, because there's no physical way of it happening, unless the narrator is so extremely unreliable that you might as well be reading Jurassic Park only to reveal it was actually Terminator or something.
And then the book tries to end all clever by dangling the whole "was this the twist? Was it all real? Who knoooowws" making the book feel like a massive waste of time. Clearly the author wanted you to doubt the narrator at the end so you'd go back and think "oh was this/that a hint?", but with the twist being so painfully obvious it lands flat on its face.
I was hoping there'd be some clever ending that meta-played on the whole "the reader has been distrusting of the narrator"-ordeal, but there was nothing. Very unfulfilling reading experience.
States of matter by David L. Goodestein. Just read the first paragraph tbh
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley was good because it started off with a lot of stuff I can relate to, but in a kind of neat Time Travel storyline set in the near future which is also great because I really only like Time Travel stories. Stuff like Khmer Rouge and refugee child growing up in the west and all that kind of stuff, all wrapped up in a strong female lead character. And then halfway through, the dude unzips his pants and it turns into a shitty Oxford Study romance where the strong protagonist is completely undone and turns into a colonizer worshipping story. Bullshit. I stopped reading and I'm still angry about it two months later. Fuck that story.
Also, Stations of the Tide was dry and I never finished it. I've tried 2-3 times. Swanwick is my favorite sorta-contemporary author but I don't know how that won so many awards. Am I missing something? It seems like everyone wants to herald that novel as great because they don't want to look dumb, but it's just all over the place compared to his later novels, much like Killing is My Business has a bunch of good riffs but is all over the place with no structure and nothing ever repeats so therefore it isn't as refined and memorable as Rust in Peace.
The worst one I remember was having to read Great Expectations in high school. Maybe I might appreciate the book more today, but at the time I found it incredibly boring and it just seemed to drag on and on and on. It really felt like a written soap opera from the 1800's, which it kind of was as it was originally published a serial where the reader got a small part of it every week. Which probably accounted for how slowly the plot seemed to move.
Perhaps an honorable mention would go to "Triton", as that's the first book I remember where I started reading and actually got a decent way into it before putting it down as it was absolutely boring me out of my mind. Though I was a teen at the time, and one of my main sources of reading material was whatever I could find at garage sales for cheap. But nevertheless, almost always if I thought a book was interesting enough to buy it was also interesting enough for at least one read through, but that one stood out as an exception. Though I have to wonder if I tried reading it again today if I might manage to get through it this time.
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. I thought it would be all James Bond shit. It was the most boring thing I ever read.
I love audiobooks. There are some amazing books that are narrated by Wil Wheaton
He sounds like a fucking meme of someone reading a book and trying too hard to inject character. He also sounds like he's chewing marbles when he talks
Book - Warren the squirrel looked in the mirror
Wil - Woaaaarn thu squooooorl lucked in the meeeeeer
The only audio book that I know of that he reads is Ready Player One, Which yeah isn't a good book but I thought he did an okay job reading it. Be put off by him being the narrator of other books.
He's no Nathaniel Parker but I don't think he's as bad as you say.
I read the Bible once... Meh, didn't liked the ending.
The majority of the books we read in school. They almost seem like the only reason they're promoted in school reading class was as a deal by the authors and the schools to save the book from disinterest. However, I tend to get a lot of flak for it, especially when I bring up Of Mice and Men and A Christmas Carol. No matter how I read the first one (since everyone keeps telling me I'm reading it wrong), all that rings in my head is a plot demonstrating the struggle of two individuals in an old crochety version of rural America that leads up to a justification of euthanizing based on weaknesses that shouldn't have been set up to show in the first place, and a Christmas Carol is just an old man being bullied by three ghosts who could be out solving some of the world's biggest issues but somehow think some random old man who did the crime of refusing to give generosity to someone is the world's biggest priority.
It's a common meme to compare the aesthetics/style/ethics/accuracy of a book to the Twilight saga like the Harkness Test (e.g. "wow, the Quran has worse ethics than Twilight" or "this Harry Potter story might be misguided, but at least it's not Twilight"), and I wouldn't exalt the majority of the books I've had to read in high school above the Twilight books.
Of Mice and Men and The Old Man and the Sea are fucking amazing classics that resonate. While you read them, maybe they don't have the impact but as life goes on you might find that they were a good foundation for how life is later into adulthood and the hard bad or worse decisions that life forces you to make.
I can understand the phenomenon of having one's hand forced, but there were many times in Of Mice and Men when I thought "I know exactly what I would do in this situation, and it wouldn't have been what they did". From start to end, the book's points seem based on assumptions on how their circumstances work which makes it not hold up.
