Ask Lemmy

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)

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

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.

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.

I tripped up some stairs reading ASOIAF

When I realized there are a lot of dumb people out there, 1984 by George Orwell.

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.

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!!!

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.

Papercuts

Mein Kampf - it's borderline unreadable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.