Anything Self-Help. They’re usually just a vehicle to sell more shit.
“If you’re looking for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else? Also, if you’re reading it in a book, folks, it ain’t self-help. It’s help.”
St. George Carlin
The Art of the Deal
The subtle art of not giving a fuck
Never split the difference
Rich dad poor dad
7 habits
These books exist just to sell seminars.
Disagree on subtle art, as someone with 3 kids, the core message of choosing what to care about is super important. There is so much in life you don’t need to concentrate on.
I’ve read rich dad poor dad, somewhat interesting but ultimately not that helpful.
I’ve heard of 7 habits, not read it though.
Not heard of the other one.
Read rich dad poor dad. Nothing but leveraging yourself into oblivion and doing your best to make the most sketchy writeoffs or deductions you can. Heck, the author is allegedly a billion in debt and has filed for bankruptcy at least once. Not exactly a resounding example of his own financial advice.
The way the book was explained to me, if your dad is a working stiff he’ll just tell you to work hard at whatever high paying job you can get. If your dad is a high finance type of guy, he’ll show you that the real money is in managing money.
Good concept, and true I guess. The book is useless though!
Kinda disagree on Never Split the Difference! Listened to the audiobook of it and found it to be a good primer on the basics of negotiation, something I profoundly lacked, was never taught, and had that used against me on more than one occasion.
Nothing mind-blowing, but for the price of free from my local library, I feel like the techniques gave me a little confidence in the process.
I do agree that a lot of these books could have easily been WAY shorter but try to sell you on value by page count lol.
Catcher in the Rye
My exact thought as well. It was mandatory in HS, and i just never got the hype. Holden Caufield is a whiny phony.
So you don’t remember being a teenager?
Nope. Came out of the womb at 37.
Is your mom okay?
A little bowlegged, but otherwise fit as a fiddle.
I don’t know what I expected. Still hilarious, though.
Huh, she said the same thing…
The JD Vance hillbilly elegy thing. Please don’t hate me, I read this in 2017/18. It was a Christmas present and in my country was hyped at the time as the book you HAVE to read to understand why Americans from the flyover states like Trump and why they would vote for him.
I read the book. Not very interesting. Still didn’t understand why…
the book you HAVE to read to understand why Americans from the flyover states like Trump and why they would vote for him.
It sorta does that, but indirectly, I guess? To me, it was all about what’s not in the book. It was marketed as being written from the perspective of “omniscient narrator explaining why those people are the way they are”, but really it’s more “unreliable narrator explains his worldview”.
I read it probably around the same time as you, and it really just made me angry more than anything because basically the whole thesis is “poor people are poor because they are dumb”.
The fact that Purdue pharma made a pill that they claimed would last for 12 hours, when it was more like half that, so people had to either take them way more frequently (or take way bigger doses at 12 hours), and then proceeded to sell them to towns in Appalachia by the hundreds per capita is never mentioned.
There’s a whole bunch of structural problems that he just breezes by that he probably should recognize (cause I do think he’s probably intelligent), but your average person from the region may not. Basically, it’s just propaganda.
The fact that it was made into a movie as well…
Any Isaac Asimov story.
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.
Ready player one.
Do you like lists of pop culture references? Because that’s all it is.
If, instead, you like lists of designer clothes, sound systems and skincare regimes, then I highly recommend American Psycho. Genuinely, I loved it.
