Unpopular opinions about books

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The Empirical Bogey said:
I could never get the appeal of Shakespeare.

I don't hate his work or think that old things are for nerds, and I can interpret Middle English quite well. I just think that his work has depreciated over time. Five centuries ago English was like modern Polish or Hungarian - an obscure regional language spoken by pig farmers in dirt hovels on the fringes of civilization. Luckily a genius came along and his masterpieces showed that English could be a creative and literate language.

Now English is the new Latin, with many, many masterpieces to its name and quadruple the amount of good stories. All of these can be traced back to Shakespeare and many take influence from his stories. So if I want a masterpiece or good story in English I'm no longer limited to Shakespeare. Also I never loved the "ruffles and tights" aesthetic but I can appreciate it. Seeing a great live rendition of one his plays might change my mind.
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Shakespeare should only be performed the way the bard intended:

By a bunch of dude bros from Southern California.

 
wtfNeedSignUp said:
Less of an unpopular opinion and more request for one, any spicy take on Murakami? I never read any one of his book and his fans seems to be universally faggots
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I have only read 1Q84 and its complete dogshit. I only ended up reading it because I somehow stupidly thought he was the same guy as Ryu Murakami, who wrote the insane but interesting book "Audition". I would love to hear a defense of his writing, because I can't imagine how someone could not only enjoy 18Q4, but also publicly praise it as great literature.

The girl protagonist is a virtuous assassin who tracks and kills rapists. I don't think she once questions whether or not these men are actually guilty or considers the possible moral dilemma of being a vigilante murderer. She does however muse constantly about the size of her "breasts". I wish I had a counter for that exact word. Breasts, breasts, breasts. Many men are able to write female characters as well or even better than most female writers. Murakami seems downright arrogant about his ability to do so, because the inner monologue of the female characters is a cringefest and he might as well have substituted every instance of "breast" with "bag of sand". anime-tier characterization.

Part of this could just be that the translator sucked. I guess isn't Murakami's fault, but its still outrageous considering how much praise he got for this book by American literary critics. But there was plenty of other shit that cannot be blamed on bad/lazy translation.

The dude main character is a math genius, writer and teacher, who jacked (but never works out), has no friends, and thinks he’s gonna get in trouble for ghostwriting some shitty novel that is being promoted by a publisher as being written by an illiterate teenager (who he later of course fucks). Weird Freudian mommy issues (breasts are mentioned again of course) and when he eventually fucks the 17 year old illiterate previously raped teenager who can’t read, his inner monologue is written as “she has no pubic hair, something something about trailblazing her young vagina”. His behavior is justified because she initiated it. And it happened in a parallel dimension. Seriously. So this whole book that is about men who rape little girls (not the main guy, he’s one of the good ones) and then the beautiful (breast pondering) girl who gets justice through murder. And then the time warp bullshit two moons ten year old hand touching blah blah.

ArthuriusMartyrius said:
It's not overrated but it loses a lot of the qualities that make it so good in translation. Half of the joy of reading, say, Dostoevsky or Gogol is the prose. You really need to read it in the original Russian language to get the full experience.

This applies to a fair few languages like Chinese, Greek and Arabic but it applies to Russian even more than most.
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All the Russians I have discussed lit with think Dostoyevsky is schmaltzy. I'm curious what you mean about prose, specifically for Dostoyevsky. I have only read the Brothers K, and Crime and Punishment. Both had lots of amazing scenes (the man could really build some tension) and the translations I read were at least good enough to capture a lot of the humor and horror of the dialogue. But between those scenes I found myself feeling bored with what seemed like a lot of boring bullshit that didn't add to the plot, characterization, or even the "vibe" of the book. Maybe thats the stuff that pops off when you read in Russian?
 
dirtydeanna96 said:
yeah, you think fifty cents for a paperback novel costs nothing, but it adds up over the years.

pirating books off the internet *actually* costs nothing
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Cheerlead-in-Chief said:
I'm glad I was shoved books into my face very early on. Stephen King is right, a physical book can handle being accidentally dropped into the toilet and you can still read it. Nothing beats physical books.
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Libraries are the best because you can find things you never would've heard of or considered when you go browsing through the stacks. you can grab a book on a whim, pull it out, flip through and see if it seems interesting or relevant to you at once, unlike seeing an amazon listing for a book that mostly consists of its metadata and random other people's reviews. internet searches tend to be highly focused and specific; algorithmic recommendations just tell you what's similar to what you've already searched for. a real bookshelf piques your curiosity in a way that can't be replicated.
 
Simony said:
H.P Lovecraft's autistic insistence upon unknowable and incomprehensible horror made his stories less frightening. Except for a few of his short stories. Namely the one about the painter.
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He did the unknowable horror thing best in The Music of Eric Zann.
 
Calzaghe said:
The Maltese Falcon is one of the most underrated novels ever written.
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That is, indeed, an unpopular opinion.
It's like saying you think JK Rowling is underrated.

The Maltese Falcon regularly tops "best of crime novel" lists.

Sure, noir is out of fashion, but Dasheel Hammet was the top of the genre.

No one (but you) thinks this book is underrated
 
Incandenzer said:
All the Russians I have discussed lit with think Dostoyevsky is schmaltzy.
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This is very true. I think it's because we perceive Dostoevsky and other classics differently. In the west, I feel like Dostoevsky prose is perceived as this kind of heute literature, while in post-Soviet countries is something that you read in high school and is super widespread. I remember reading Crime and Punishment in 9th grade and thought that this was the most boring shit ever. I returned to his books when I was older, and while I quite enjoyed them, I still thought that they were kinda over-sentimental. In ex-USSR, everyone who has even a thinnest interest in literature have read Russian classics. Whether they like em or not, it's another story. The fact that you need to read all shit in school also doesn't help, because Russian classics usually touch upon themes that are not very interesting to anyone who is in their teenage years. So, people dislike them because they hated reading them in school. I think same happens in USA, where teachers make you hate reading.

Also doesn't help that majority of Russian classics are very dated. Many authors just bashed the Tsarist state in their books, while throwing some navel gazing in the mix. Most books are just "boo hoo hoo, the Tsar is a meanie and all my peers are a bunch of retards who only consoom products". This shit is kinda emo, if you ask me. I'm not interested to know what the author thought about serfdom and the Orthodox church. Also it makes liberal authors feel kinda dishonest. They criticize the state in their books, while they are themselves are noblemen who profited from serfdom, and they did nothing about it except whinning about human suffering in their books. Some of their political stuff is mad funny tough, Dead Souls is a fun and timeless book.

Anyway, if you ask me, to get the best of the best of Russian literature, you should learn Russian and read poetry. Lermontov with his poetry can wipe the floor with Dostoevsky. That's just my opinion. Russian poetry>prose.

But of course nothing can be more awful then Soviet-era literature. This shit takes everything that is wrong with Russian literature, and throws a lot of leftism in the mix. Blargh. I piss and shit on Gorky. PISS AND SHIT.
 
Incandenzer said:
All the Russians I have discussed lit with think Dostoyevsky is schmaltzy. I'm curious what you mean about prose, specifically for Dostoyevsky. I have only read the Brothers K, and Crime and Punishment. Both had lots of amazing scenes (the man could really build some tension) and the translations I read were at least good enough to capture a lot of the humor and horror of the dialogue. But between those scenes I found myself feeling bored with what seemed like a lot of boring bullshit that didn't add to the plot, characterization, or even the "vibe" of the book. Maybe thats the stuff that pops off when you read in Russian?
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I'm genuinely curious if guys like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were paid by the word at any point in their lives.

Part of why Victorian literature is so memetically infamous for its purple prose is because most authors were paid by the word back then and milked that for all they could.
 
Flatline said:
Get a Kobo. A superior product in every way.
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Any Kobo in particular? I'm looking at the Elipsa, but I have zero experience with e-readers in general and I can't justify the price for what might very well be an unwieldy and unstable piece of shit (though I can justify it more than I could a corporate DRM-ridden piece of shit).
 
Blake Crouch books suck more times than not. His new book Upgrade is one of the most retarded and predictable books I ever read.
 
Lathe said:
I found Lord of the Rings one of the most disappointing and boring experiences of my life.
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I got mint edition hard copies of the Lord of the Rings a few months ago. They look good on my shelf but I'll look at the two inch spines and think "meh, I'll knock something shorter off of my reading list next". I will read them eventually tho.
 
The Empirical Bogey said:
I got mint edition hard copies of the Lord of the Rings a few months ago. They look good on my shelf but I'll look at the two inch spines and think "meh, I'll knock something shorter off of my reading list next". I will read them eventually tho.
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You're allowed to just skim over the boring parts. I promise where everyone fucking lives in the Shire or what hobbits eat for fucking breakfast are not important plot points that will come up later in the story. We're not exactly dealing with Chekhov's gun here.
 
eternal dog mongler said:
You're allowed to just skim over the boring parts. I promise where everyone fucking lives in the Shire or what hobbits eat for fucking breakfast are not important plot points that will come up later in the story. We're not exactly dealing with Chekhov's gun here.
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But you're absolutely, no-debate allowed, required to read all the Appendices.
 
Death's End by Cixin Liu is the worst science fiction book I've read. Cheng Xin and AA are disturbingly passive protagonists who make no attempt to rise above the fallen state of their society. When others act selfishly to keep humanity in this cycle of decadence, not only do these 'heroes' recognize the evils of that behavior, but they actively engage in it, too. AA murders people to keep them from fleeing Earth because she's concluded that if she can't escape, neither can anyone else. Cheng Xin literally dooms humanity because of her cowardice, and yet she's completely exempt from a redemption arc, and instead opts to let others do the heavy lifting for her, including the utterly inept, swollen-titty world government that brought humanity to its fallen state in the beginning. She is pathetic. This entire book is pathetic. Only a chinc could've come up with this authoritarian, unvirtuous nonsense, and yet it gets a Hugo award? Fucking hell. Nuke this planet and start over.
 
hellogoodmorning said:
Death's End by Cixin Liu is the worst science fiction book I've read. Cheng Xin and AA are disturbingly passive protagonists who make no attempt to rise above the fallen state of their society. When others act selfishly to keep humanity in this cycle of decadence, not only do these 'heroes' recognize the evils of that behavior, but they actively engage in it, too. AA murders people to keep them from fleeing Earth because she's concluded that if she can't escape, neither can anyone else. Cheng Xin literally dooms humanity because of her cowardice, and yet she's completely exempt from a redemption arc, and instead opts to let others do the heavy lifting for her, including the utterly inept, swollen-titty world government that brought humanity to its fallen state in the beginning. She is pathetic. This entire book is pathetic. Only a chinc could've come up with this authoritarian, unvirtuous nonsense, and yet it gets a Hugo award? Fucking hell. Nuke this planet and start over.
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What sucks is I thought Dark Forest had an almost perfect ending. That's one reason I was so hesitant to read Death's End. Cheng Xin never really gets a redemption. It's just more "lol in the end everything is meaningless in the vastness of space and time so her mistakes don't matter all that much." Bizarre fricking book and made the wonderful previous book entirely pointless.
 
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