Utterly ridiculous ones I’ve seen here:

Ready Player One

The Alchemist

The Midnight Library

Anything by Haruki Murukami

The DaVinci Code

I mean, these are all kind of silly choices. I liked all these books (ok, maybe not five stars, and no I haven’t read 100% of Murukami’s work yet).

DaVinci Code was a fun adventure if you didn’t take it too seriously. RPO was a nostalgia-fest for middle-aged white guys - it was just good fun. The Alchemist was just a fable - I never even considered the idea that it was a basis for a life philosophy or anything. The Windup Bird Chronicle was a well-written, bizarre epic written by the pantsiest pantser who ever pantsed.

Recursion was fucking bananas in the best way.

Some people create a mechanism and tiptoe it to an interesting story. Blake Crouch jumped on and gunned that sucker over a cliff and it was great all the way down.