I’ll go with the low-hanging fruit: Mein Kampf. I’ve read it, cover to cover. As a piece of propaganda, it’s good. As an example of good writing? Absolutely not (though I will admit I have only read it in translation). Oh, and the whole fascist, racist, and generally shitty worldview of the author that he infuses into the text. And the fact that the author is literally Hitler. You 5-star that book? You’re a Nazi. Period. And as a Jewish person, I don’t look too kindly on them.
My immediate thought was Ready Player One. I don’t feel like most people mention on dates that they’ve read Mein Kampf or Atlas Shrugged, but they might mention Ready Player One.
I didn’t think it was an amazing book, but I find it interesting that listed here multiple times.
It just came off as general YA fiction with a weird 80s bent, meaning I couldn’t figure out the target market, to me.
Definitely not 5/5, but I wouldn’t have said red flag.
Nerd4nerd here too, and this is a book I used for screening too when I was in dating sights. It had incredibly weird attitudes about women (god the wade and the sex dolls chapter), super nostalgia for nostalgias sake/tell me every word in the script of ROTJ attitudes, etc… it was very useful in signposting the kind of nerd I didn’t want.
Definitely DO NOT read his Ernest Cline’s spoken word. It’s so cringe
I thought Spielberg and his writer for rpo did a fantastic job of mixing nostalgia with a new story. Whereas the book read like it was written by ai or something. And that’s coming from someone who absolutely hates nostalgia (like I hate the force awakens).
I loved Ready Player One, but I also found Wade Watts inherently problematic. Where he snoops Artemis’s file and then sends it to her (in fairness because she is in imminent danger) and tacks on “you’re even more beautiful in real life” is peak cringe and violation of boundaries.
I liked it for the adventure aspect. But I also don’t think he’s a great person.
If someone said their favorite book was Ready Player One, I’d ask them about Wade’s character and their answer would be very very telling for me.
Honestly, I don’t think he’s supposed to be a great person. He’s an abused and socially isolated teenager pursuing a prize for selfish reasons and only begins to realize how wrong he is near the end of the story. Actually, now that I think about it, I frequently see a story criticized on the basis that the main character is flawed and does the wrong thing sometimes, or hurts someone, as though no protagonist can suck sometimes.
Because most people have such poor reading comprehension that they can’t understand why an author would have a main character with flaws when you are supposed to identify with the main character.
Having said that, I think most women would have a problem with the guy who wrote Nerd Porn Auteur.
Here’s a quote from Ernest Cline’s poem, just for reference:
"In my kind of porno movies the girls wouldn’t even have to get naked.
They’d just take the guys down to the rec room and
beat them repeatedly at chess
and then talk to them for hours about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
or the underlying social metaphors in the Aliens movies."
woman here!
I have never heard of Nerd Porn Auteur ,and I think I would love this thing :-)
also, there’s a whole thing about sapiosexuals and sapiosexuality that I think is incredibly under counted and underrated – at least among the people I’ve known.
in case you don’t know what I’m talking about, this is the first link off of Google:
www.webmd.com/sex/sapiosexual-what-it-means
I included one of the funniest (and best) parts, but there are some darker parts where he essentially makes fun of women who have had cosmetic surgery or who star in “traditional” pornographic content. I don’t think many women would appreciate that part, as in general few women I’ve known appreciate making fun of sex workers, even those women who have a very low opinion of pornography.
He wrote the poem while he was in college, though, so I wouldn’t take it too seriously as being something representing his beliefs now, decades later. It could also be read as him being generally frustrated with the pornographic industry in general.
As for being attracted to people based on their intelligence, a lot of studies suggest that many women tend to find intelligence to be a very attractive trait.
I personally consider intelligence to be a very important factor in any person I’d date.
That’s a very specific fetish right there.
Yeah, and I don’t mind that he’s supposed to be a crummy person, but he never really acknowledges how he violated Artemis’s privacy and how it was self-seeking of him to do so, etc.
It’s probably the sort of thing that neither of them was able to adequately process until after the events of the novel. There are plenty of stories where someone does something dickish and the characters are all “Well that was rude, back to surviving the plot” and it doesn’t get addressed unless that’s what the story is about.
Damn I loved it haha.
Okay I read this book in a book club sophomore year of high school and ??? I don’t remember it being that bad. Now I’m really tempted to reread it because I keep seeing it mentioned as just terrible and awful.
I’ve never read this book - can you ELI5 the issue(s)?
It’s Nerd Trivia of the 1980s. If you were a nerd in that era it’ll echo all the cool (and stupid) shit of that era. The hero is a super nerd & is generally kind of a shitty person.
It’s popcorn but for some reason people take it seriously.
TL;DR: The inventor of VR created a megalithic company that pretty much owns the world which has since gone to shit. After the inventor passed away, he willed his shares of the company to someone who could solve his puzzles hidden in the VR world.
Protagonist is someone from r/niceguys whose only personality traits are that he’s fat and has an encyclopedic memory of any 80s trivia. He wins the competition, gets together with the gamer girl and turns off the VR for 2 days a week.
Whislt not an outright flag like Mein Kampf, it does show your taste in books if you think it’s a 5/5. It’s a poorly written book (the prose is horrible) that is a pure nostalgia wank-fest of the 80s with a self-insert protagonist who doesn’t grow during his journey.
Really? That feels like a really hard reaction to a mediocre book. I read it a few years ago (I guess before the hype? Definitely way before the movie. ) and I found it a good summer read. Nothing ground breaking, but nothing too bad either. Just easy to read and entertaining for a few hours.
I vaguely noticed that the book drew quite the opposition a few years later, but I really didn‘t care enough to look into it further. But now I‘m curious. What makes the book so hateable by so many?
The entire book is a nostalgia circle-jerk of “hey remember that thing that existed in the 80s?,” the main character is the most blatant Mary Sue I’ve ever come across, and the plot lacks any real conflict whatsoever (“To get the first key you had to beat a certain game. Fortunately, I’m the best in the world at it and win on the first try!” – rinse repeat for literally every “challenge”), and the majority of the book is just a series of "and then"s with basically zero cause and effect. The author is wildly misogynistic and weird about women , the main character is the epitome of someone who belongs on r/niceguys.
Also I suppose this could be a nitpick, but the author did absolutely zero research into how games are actually made, which as a game dev very much annoyed me. The most glaring example was the idea that one or even two people could create an entire expansive MMO, so widespread it basically becomes the entire internet, all on their own is ridiculous…those size games are made by teams of thousands of people, sometimes even upwards of ten thousand.
I don’t think it’s that the book is really so bad, it’s more that it was a mediocre book that was extremely popular. Same with all the Colleen Hoover stuff. I thought ready player one was ok, but if someone thinks it’s a 5/5 then I’m assuming they really don’t read much…