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.
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?
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…
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.