Homo Deus by Yuval Harari…I enjoyed Sapiens but I realized pretty quickly that Homo Deus was not gonna be much more than conjecture presented as fact. Well, what was I expecting?

Gonna catch some hate for this, but…

“Who is John Galt?”

If it makes you feel better, I have had a college reading level from a very young age and I STILL learn a ton when looking up a text on the internet or sitting in on a lecture. Different people get different things out of a text (which isn’t to say that the author’s philosophical intention can’t be discerned by the educated, if it’s well-written.)

Of course, I am only a hobby reader nowadays (to be fair, I do have a degree in Russian, which did involve a lot of literary analysis) and have a lot to learn from professionals. It sounds like you’re on the right track.

I second the advice to study the Bible. It is the foundation of Western literature. I was raised profoundly religious, reading and dissecting the Bible and similar texts every evening from infancy (to say nothing of Sunday School and daily seminary courses as a teenager) and I always credited my sky-high standardized testing scores in reading/writing to that.

Ugh, I couldn’t even get through Ready Player One. Total loser (whose only talents are playing video games and looking down on people who are less chronically online) gets the girl…no thanks. Maybe the ending redeemed it somehow, idk, I stopped halfway through.

Ugh, I couldn’t even get through Ready Player One. Total loser (whose only talents are playing video games and looking down on people who are less chronically online) gets the girl…no thanks. Maybe the ending redeemed it somehow, idk, I stopped halfway through.

I felt the same about Red Queen. Intriguing idea, if you don’t mind just another superpower remix, but the romance was regurgitated and the MC was a total idiot. Didn’t get past the first book.

I felt the same about Red Queen. Intriguing idea, if you don’t mind just another superpower remix, but the romance was regurgitated and the MC was a total idiot. Didn’t get past the first book.

I read old short story anthologies so this happens to me a lot.