I made the mistake of reading a few bestsellers in a row a few years ago and I'm now convinced the book industry depends on people buying books on bestseller lists and not reading them.
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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Maybe Iβm not smart enough but House of Leaves was a lot of words. And I donβt even know what they said.
I would never use that phrase.
Grapes of Wrath is a slight stretch, but it's shear length relative to it's message makes it a very empty book.
Anti fragile...... Could have been a 2 page essay, with a page of examples.... This concept did not need a whole book.
War and Peace is made up of 42 or something full length novels.
It starts off with two lovers meeting at the man's house, he joins the army as an officer, they have children, the man rises to become a captain or soemthing, then the Napoleonic War starts, then it follows Napoleans journey from France, through Italy, Austria, eastern Europe and then to his seige of Moscow. The youngest son has now joined the army, and he his keen to join in. The French army are retreating from Moscow, fed up, starving, tired and exhausted, the boy comes up to a band of French stragglers, the French lieutenant, slumped over on his horse, tiredly grabs his sword and slashes blindly behind him, decapitating the boy, his head held on by skin, his horse runs back to the rest of the Russians, where his father is leading.
Then there are 15 more novels after that !
Any Isaac Asimov story.
I wouldn't say nothing burger, but they've definitely aged poorly.
I actually want to hear more about this. What're your supporting arguments?
I like a lot of what ive read from him, and he had a lot of views that were ahead of his time (on social issues as well as scientific), but he absolutely could not write women. You could read full length books of his without a single named female character.
Yeah, that's not great, but honestly, I feel like it's better than a lot of alternatives. It feels even worse when the women in the book don't pass the Bechdel test, or worse, end up in r/menwritingwomen posts.
Yeah, I think he actually admitted that he didn't really know any women when he first started writing until he met and then married his wife, so he avoided writing them. It is weird though cause his writing style (from what ive read) is not very character focused, anyway, so a lot of his male characters could easily just be declared female and no one would spot the difference.
I wonder if he just assumed that his own bias would affect the gender of the characters or if that just wasn't a consideration. It would have been pretty cool if he had used gender-neutral names to the point where it was never clear, but also didn't matter anyway.
he had used gender-neutral names to the point where it was never clear, but also didn't matter anyway.
He almost does that. He uses a lot of made-up scifi names that aren't obviously gendered, but then point out that the character is male.
He does get a lot better over time, though.
I'll have to go back and read. The gender dynamics of competitive sci-fi literature would be a wild class.
Edit: I meant "comparative sci-fi literature," but I'm leaving the mistake because I think it's funnier, not unlike the grammar mistakes that I try to pass off as erudite subversion of trite conventions, not unlike this meandering, run-on sentence, and I stand by it.
I read two of his popular stories and they both ended with some nonsense about infinite recursion.
Asimov is a Thesaurus writer.
How do you feel about Hemingway and Faulker?
I have not read both of them. Most of my reading these days is Lemmy comments or news
Sorry you're getting downvoted. I appreciate you taking the time to share your opinion.
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