Lol let’s make a kid fight real battles but we’ll tell him they’re all simulated games! Great idea! Def not gambling with lives or anything.

Good thing he never was like, oh fuck it I’m gonna go get some chicken nuggies and some Mountain Dew code red for a sec…and just left the “game”.

Ishmael.

We had to read this in a modern novels class in college. You can tell the professor, who was a total dbag, just loved it. He dressed like Clark Kent and thought he was a new Hemingway and like flirted with all the college girls despite his wife also working at the college…he would praise any male author but pm hated women writers. He insulted Toni Morrison’s writing.

The book is just so…pretentious? The pedagogue is insufferable. It teaches what I think are basic concepts far below a college level…oh, humans are selfish and have a narrow view point of the world? Duh. Fucking duh.

Like all these pseudo-intellectuals read it and just jerk off to how smart they think they are for agreeing with the gorilla. Have any of these people just taken a Philosophy 101 class? Read some sci-fi? The author presents sophomoric concepts as if they’re brand new jaw dropping, life changing, ideas.

Reminds me of those teeny hopper TikTok’s where they say something that people have been talking about for decades already but end with “But you all aren’t ready for that conversation.”

I really don’t understand why people like either of these books.

I guess for Go Ask Alice it’s a bunch of anti-drug parents and teachers who just love it because they think it will scare kids off drugs. I read it in middle school, never having done drugs, and thought it was crap and that it seemed incredibly unrealistic and heavy handed. Like a book version of Reefer Madness.

I read the Tattooist a couple years ago and thought it was non-fiction when I picked it up. Reading it I was like, no way is this real/sincere…the narrator is so contrived sounding. I googled it and ofc found it was fake. Shouldn’t such a somber book about something so tragic not come off as so…just tawdry and weird. I honestly think it’s a little offensive. The narrator’s comments on flirting with women and how he used to flirt with his mom for practice? Just bizarre. I hated that guy.

I think some people just feel bad critiquing anything to do with the Holocaust because they think it’s disrespectful. But it’s a fictional story and a bad one at that.