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.
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.
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.
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."
That’s a very specific fetish right there.
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.