This is just a good place to drop this story.
I was digging deep for some scifi and I eneded up with "The Man Who Folded Himself" a critically acclaimed book about a guy that inherits a time travel belt from his uncle. Well turns out he very quickly grows bored of normal time travel stuff and folds himself in time to suck his own past/future dick and fuck himself in the ass (he also fucks a parallel version of himself who is female) 75% of the book is about this, and in case you didn't guess yes, his "uncle" is him in the future and he was both his own mother and own father. :bonk:
This sounds like a Chuck Tingle novel
"Fucked in the Ass By My Future Self who Folded Himself in Spacetime"
Heinlein wrote a short story with a similar premise except the protagonist is intersex
There was a movie that came out based on this a few years back called Predestination, which I thought it was pretty decent.
No shame in huffing your own farts. It's only when it becomes fuel for the most epic katana takes it turns problematic.
Enders Game
So incredibly dull. We get it, the protagonist is just so much smarter and better than everyone. It feels like the author just repeats the same cycle of playing a game, Ender dominates, other kids are jealous, play another game, Ender dominates, and so on. It's like a Cardassian novel. Just so repetitive and Ender is unlikeable. Not to mention in the span of like a paragraph Orson Scott Card just casually mentions that Ender's brother and sister manage to take over the world by pretending to be philosophers on a proto-internet or whatever.
Agreed, especially on how dumb it was that his siblings became the leaders of Earth by essentially being really popular on the internet. Pewdiepie is now the president of the world.
However, I do find myself going back very often to one thing that's central to the story, which is that violence is the ultimate form of power. No matter what, in the end everything boils down to who has the biggest stick, and I find that disturbingly applicable to real life.
Pewdiepie is now the president of the world.
:volcel-judge: Step away from the lathe and put your hands up, you're coming with me for future crimes.
I agree. Thought the first one was mediocre, but figured that I should give them a chance because people raved about them. Got about 150 pages into the second one and just gave up. Lazy writing, boring world, boring characters.
The third one is by far the best. It's all downhill from there, though.
Picked that one up on my flight back home from New York. Left the book in the plane.
Shakespeare. A lot of his plots are dull and read like a fever dream. Also I couldn't get over how blatantly irresponsible writing Macbeth was, he made a play about witches trying to kill a king to be performed in front of a king (read unstable warlord) who was genuinely worried about that. Making Macbeth given the environment of the witchhunts was murder in the same way Manson is a murderer and it's crazy that a man so blatantly unprincipled is talked up like this great dude
Brave New World is a way better, more imaginative book. 1984 is my definition of overrated.
DUNE 1000% Dune. I don't care about the intricacies of your fictional space nobility and their politics
es ends with the main character seeing the face of a mysterious horror creature, turning to look directly at the camera, and going ‘That monster was so scary it made me blind and insane and thats why I cant tell you what it look
HP lovecraft didnt even like Celts. Celts are about as white as you can get. Many of his stories are particularly racist against the irish.
He was an 'Anglo Saxon' supremacist.
Well, it's obviously no longer the case, but in 2015 I read Ready Player One because everyone was in love with it on Reddit, so...
I kinda enjoyed it at the time, but it was pure '80s gamer nostalgia pulp.
It's not surprising at all that the author used his newfound fortune to buy a DeLorean and fund a project to dig up the Atari ET games buried in a landfill.
I found Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist trite, spiritually soft, and kind of orientalist.
Paulo Coelho being a shitty writer is basically a meme in Brazil
Came here to say this. It's even worse when you realize the only reason it got popular was that Bill Clinton was photographed reading it :abby-exasperation:
Maybe it was my high school self being overly judgemental, but I was annoyed by the wiring style of that one a few pages in. Can't comment on the plot of it.
I remember people bugging out about the "The Sword of Truth" series by Terry Goodkind my senior year. I read the first two cover to cover, stopped on the third one about a third through. I just couldn't give a damn it. It felt so very "meh" all through out.
I avoided reading his books somehow. Isn't he the libertarian fantasy author?
Edit: yes
I didn't have the poltical understand at the time I read the books to see the libertarianism baked into the narrative. I just remember not caring at all for the main character guy (I think it was Rich or Richard), and thinking the whole time I had read better fantasy novels and this book wasn't bringing anything new to the table. Not until recently in adulthood had I learned of the negative stuff laced throughout the story, so I'm rather happy my past self wasn't digging this book when I was in peak book reading mode.
I kept reading it for some reason I no longer understand. It kept getting worse, Terry decided that he would be the "Ayn Rand of High Fantasy". And so in the later books, Richard would have many several page long rants, per book, about how charity and altruism was inherently bad.
Charity? I thought Libertarians loved charity as a solution to market failures.
How does """objectivism""" even work in a (I presume) non-capitalist society?
Sword of Truth is one of the greatest comedies of all time:
Richard, while captured by the enemy, manages to steal a sword by pretending to stretch, then kills several dozen soldiers before being captured again. The captain of the guard is so impressed that he asks Richard to be on his sports team.
On one occasion, [Kahlan] is attacked by a chicken that is not a chicken, but evil incarnate. It has an evil cackle.
Gratch is a gar, a type of furry dinosaur. Richard befriends the orphaned Gratch, but later has to drive him away to save his life. Gratch later returns with an army of gars to save Richard in the middle of a battle. Gratch says "Gratch luuuug Raaach Arrrrg" a lot; apparently this means "Gratch loves Richard."
When infiltrating the enemy camp, [Nicci] avoids recognition by taking her top off; the men are so distracted by her boobs that then never look at her face. She then wreaks bloody havoc and escapes. Shortly afterwards (?) she rips out someone's still-beating heart with her bare hands.
Someone called Nadine tries to seduce Richard; her plan is to have sex with his brother in front of him and invite him to join in. She is surprised when this doesn't work.
did you get to the second one? I had the same reaction when I listened to the first book, I only started liking it about 75% of the way through, but the second one was incredible pretty much from the beginning
Very much this. I read through five of the bloody things only to end up skipping like 85% of the sixth one, then I gave up. You could trim a lot of those pages and still get the same result I feel.
This was like 20 years ago, the writer was still alive and wrote like 12 more books or something, sheesh.
Red Mars
I thought it was boring and unrealistic, and most of the characters were assholes who I didn't care about (except Arkady).
iirc the first 3/4 is pretty dull along with most of the series. But the good parts are great. Worth reading just for the psudo-incestual shower scene towards the end of Green mars
I mean it wasn't. They just all grew up in the same tight knit commune
Tuesdays with Morrie. Might not be recommended by a lot of people in actual conversation, but it showed up in my GRE courses and it fucking sucked. Even the wikipedia page for it has nothing important to say.
