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.
Aside from the obvious answers, The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss would be the biggest “swipe left” book for me. Legitimately one of the worst books I’ve ever read. Obnoxious narrator, cardboard secondary characters, meandering whocare of a plot, prose that gives off a vibe I could only describe as “an attempt at poetic writing by someone who has literally never read a single poem,” adolescent attitudes towards sex, neckbeard misogyny… this book has it all (pejorative). I just can’t see myself liking someone who thinks it’s a 5 star book enough to date them.
man, I really liked Name of the Wind. The MC was kind of obnoxious, but he was also a talented teenage boy, so that tracked. Then Wise Man’s Fear happened and Rothfuss just leaned into the incel vibes so hard that it killed all my interest in the series.
I’m gonna be honest I don’t get the hype behind the king killer chronicles in general. The name of the wind kept getting less and less interesting as it went on and by the end I was just skimming everything because I didn’t give a shit.
“But his prose is lovely!” Yes, the writing itself is pretty good. The issue is literally everything else comprising the story. Qvoth is a boring character, all his friends are cardboard cutouts, and I’m sorry I get that the whole point is he is dirt poor but the main conflict is trying to just get money and it just got so fucking repetitive.
And to top it all off the book didn’t end so much as it just stopped. The ending was so abrupt and it felt like rothfuss just shrugged and didn’t resolve literally anything.
“But it’s supposed to be part of a trilogy!” Yeah i get that, but it’s not like lotr the two towers ended an hour before the battle of helms deep. It ended when the immediate conflict that tied into the over arching story ended.
I got fifty pages in to wise man’s fear (I had bought it before I read the first book, stupidly) and gave up. I’m shocked so many people have the patience for this series