Ask Lemmy

I dropped a Wheel of Time hardcover on my chest, about knocked the breath out of me. Nice way to wake up

I am more of a naturalist and walked into a tree

My search engine must be bad too, so can you elaborate about these reverse gangbangs?

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.

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.

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."

Yep. I tried. Three times. Made it about 2/3 of the way through. Eventually just gave up. It is just sooooo bad.

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!"

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...

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 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.

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.

THIS. Had to read it at university. Holy moly was that a hard earned seminar.

Fighting through it at the moment, it just feels like I don't even get half of what is written.

Twins! But I hated the protagonist more than the book's quality.

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

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.

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.