Negative Goodreads review thread?

Some watchmojo video

>Heavy hand of the author
>his sarcastic style of writing
That's...his trademark writing style though. This one wasn't as bad as the other one, but the reviewer still annoyingly misses the entire point of the book she just read. I'm not sure where this notion that everything in fiction needs to be completely believable came from. Sometimes it's more important for something that happens to aptly convey a certain message or theme than to be completely believable. If we wanted to read a completely believable story about an orphan, then it would probably be a rather boring book where the main character either stays in his orphanage or starves to death.

>patriarchal, Christianity biased interpretations of Arthurian myth

Is the implication that a feminist non-Christian interpretation of the Arthurian myth existed before Le Morte d'Arthur?

>Is the implication that a feminist non-Christian interpretation of the Arthurian myth existed before Le Morte d'Arthur?

Yes, how about you maybe use your brain and consider ACTUAL queen Arthur? slaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyy

LOL

Connor is our guy

I love when they write an entire paragraph about how smart they are and how many degrees they have. It can never be that they are just not intelligent enough to understand and appreciate what they read.

>I'm not sure where this notion that everything in fiction needs to be completely believable came from.
Escapism. If you somehow published a book about the events of 9/11 before that date, nobody would believe you.

Fiction has to make sense, whereas reality is free of such burden.

In other words, through fiction we can flee into worlds that make sense.

An escape from nonsense.

>I need an audio book to understand

>complaining about having to re-read a book to understand it

You would have thought that someone so educated would realize that books actually require study and you're not going to 'get' everything with one or even two readings.

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I love when people misuse the word 'pretentious'. I love it even more when brainlets can't parse a text, it keeps the divide clear and helps me avoid discussing things with people who, in a very literal sense, can't understand them.

>having to explain what he meant by the italics

That's a great review though

>ACTUAL queen Arthur?
go on...

>Christianity biased interpretations of Arthurian myth
Lolwut

Too long to post in an image, somebody who clearly considers himself king of science-fiction and fantasy spends 10 000 words complaining about how nothing happens in Book of the New Sun. And for bonus points he quite halfway through his first reading. This if the first review that comes up if you look for Shadow & Claw: goodreads.com/review/show/6736950?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1

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/outguy/

he didnt misuse it at all though, so maybe you're the brainlet

i agree with

>58 likes

At leasf hobbes got to see tiddies

Implying that there isn't any depth is misuse. I doubt you've read it. There's not a single concrete criticism in that entire review, which makes the use of the word pretentious a bit too ironic, even by postmodern standards.

i know for a fact you havent read it.

Okay, let's try this. What kind of bike is rented?

>he didnt misuse it at all
How can text possibly be pretentious? What does the text pretend to be?

Don't bother. There's like 3 people here that have actually read it, and he's not one of them. Mcelroy uses more styles than anyone I can think of that's not Joyce, so saying that the text is pretending to have depth or erudition is absolutely ridiculous.

anime bullshit, but its pretty decent.

>sound and the fury
>difficult
This meme needs to end.

>What the Dickens?!
I bet this reviewer finds The Big Bang Theory funny.

Jerusalem is great. Connor is a pleb

goodreads.com/review/show/1530857
>mfw the comments

go to bed alan

he's right

>finds arguments worthless
>instead of wishing they could give them their argument they want to assault and flash them

This makes me want to read Hobbes.

You can always spot someone out of their depth when they assign value to preferences. Everyone who isn't insecure in their intelligence understands context is key to appreciation, and what Oliver Twist meant to its immediate readers is why you read it.
I can't see anyone properly identifying with any book written before the 1920's, and people younger than myself perhaps the '50's are more apt.

True. I'll admit that there are certain works which many people consider to be canonical that I either find too difficult, or unenjoyable.

This could lead me to two different conclusions:
>Everyone who claims to enjoy the work is wrong, and/or lying, or
>Literature is diverse, and tastes are subjective, so what appeals to one reader may repel another.

It takes a deeply self-involved worldview to leap to the first conclusion. Of course, a decent chunk of Veeky Forums does so on a regular basis with posts declaring
>such and such work is a meme

I'd disagree with the point about identification though. While social values change over the years, it's still possible to identify with characters or situations in fiction from long ago.

For example, despite being over-the-top in terms of characterisation, and depicting an era very different from our own, 'Babbitt' by Sinclair Lewis (1922) is very relatable - it depicts conformity, lack of imagination, and the malaise of the middle classes better than any contemporary novel I've read.

>I think this is an argument
>huehue comics huehue

the start of was meant to be directed at you

I fucking loathe GoodReads. I've seen people give books a shit score... because the main character is unsympathetic.

HE'S SUPPOSED TO BE, YOU CUNT. He's the scion of a noble family in a feudal, slave-driven society. Of course he's a fucking bastard. Everyone around him are bastards. Even the slaves are bastards. The fact that people are bastards is kind of, you know, THE POINT.

I swear, the world is full of people who couldn't understand basic texts if you explained it slowly to them, with pictures.

Normalfags have stupid taste. They think in terms of : "would I like this person/this situation in reality" and not in terms of novel or characters.
And they have the attention span of a crack-consuming grasshoper too. I hear something like "I got bored reading Swan's way, lol he couldn't sleep, who cares xDDD" so often.

God, why are people allowed to embed pictures in their reviews? It is complete cancer every single time.

holy kek

>1. I don't know if I can respect the opinion of someone's book review when they don't even know that books are never put in quotes. 2. Google "The Hero's Journey." This will explain situations why the uneducated always think that authors rip off other authors by making "more versions of Gandalf," as you imagine. The "Gandalf character" is a pivotal part of all epic tales (not epic like "cool"--epic, as in a literary epic, such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, the Bible, most religious myths in general, the Odyssey, etc.). The "Gandalf character" is what is know as the "Father figure" and/or the "Magical Guide." It's a common pattern for epics, and it's why Harry Potter is so beloved. It follows a pattern in which humans have always been creating mythos, from the Epic of Gilgamesh and on. Study literature and the Monomyth and see how the phenomenon of Collective Consciousness is a major reason why some series/books rise to the top, and others are forgotten. #igotmydegreeinthislol

Because >le witty snarky gif reaction xDDD.
Don't you love the 2010s user?

F/SN is patrician.

Yes, your porn game is very high-brow.

>pretendtious

really?

The main problem with these reviews is that these people didn't like the books and so want to write a bad review. Justifications for their dislike are secondary to gving the book a bad review.

>attention span of a crack-consuming grasshopper
That's the part that really annoys me. I hate seeing stuff like: "Dubliners was so boring, omg! Nothing ever happened in any of the stories!! I found no reason to care about the characters because they never did anything. I now know that Joyce is just a bunch of pretentious garbage that old white male college professors assign to make themselves look smart and to torture us." This always seems to be the main reasoning behind every negative review on classics.

I also hate Oliver Twist because I came down with food poisoning while watching a play of it when I was little

>Tosaka's anus

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i bet these plebs don't even know conrad was russian. desu, i didn't know until nabokov mentioned it

>the very humanity of black people is called into question

when will this meme end? The point of HoD is exactly the opposite, the blacks are portrayed as far more human than the colonizers and they aren't referred to as inherently inferior (something that you would be hard pressed to find in any book of the time). Do these people even fucking read the books?

>you cant skim
>skim
>SKIM

Why is she complaining that she didn't know what was going on if she was skimming through the whole fucking thing?

People think reading faster makes them smart, or something? What the fuck?

>anti-colonial book is racist

How dense are these people?

>racist

Connor is from Veeky Forums kek

>they don't have a life expect for their story
>they don't do anything expect for what they do in their stories

It's like he didn't understand he was reading a collection of short stories.

Also, there's nothing wrong with the setting.
It's a sleepy, pastoral, generic town in Ohio, a microcosm from 100 years ago

There's just too many men in A Canticle for Leibowitz. All the other reviews seem to be atheists whining about how Christian the book is.

I don't know why this made me laugh as hard as it did. Not that you got food poisoning, but probably a combination of the fact that you bear a grudge on Oliver Twist for it and you felt comfortable sharing that fact here.

>Clearly you're just a hater. A hater with no life, no imagination, no childhood, and you should be ashamed of yourself that you are one of the only people in the whole gods damned world who is dumb enough to hate on Harry Potter. If you don't like Harry Potter, then what the hell do you like? Oh ya that's right, you're from the 17th centre so you're a big Shakespeare fan. Whoops, forgot to mention, it's the 21st centry by the way, and Hamlet has absolutely nothing to do with Harry Potter. One Harry Potter is at least a trillion times better than all of Shakespeare's plays combined.
>And I just though you should know, the world is round.

> I loved the first Harry Potter book. It's my second favorite book from the Harry Potter series (the third one is my first favorite) and I didn't really understood this review, but I have had understood some parts. I mean not everyone has to like Harry Potter, but that doesn't mean you should say bad things about right? Or insulting the author is really just plain rude. And 35 million people bought the book and it had been translated into so many different languages. I mean really, come on how can these readers have been wrong? And the rating for this book is really good.

>my review to your review:
the first sentence killed me lmao

Food poisoning is no joke, that shit will scar you for life. I got it from eating pork chops 15 years ago and to this day I still can't eat them.

Bonus Dean-posting
>35 million people clearly have deplorable taste, madam. Are you arguing that just because 35 million people bought the book then it merits our attention !? I imagine that more than 35 million pornographic novels have been sold although surely you must agree that by this fact alone the genre does not merit our reading. And it is such a pity that young ladies such as yourself don't read more meritorious novels such as those written by Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte .

Not a bad review tho. Seems fair enough.

you take back what u said about our boy anderson or god help me

You can oppose the contemporary form of exploitation and colonisation yet still have some racist views. Conrad wasn't as racist or shit as the Belgian corporations he criticises in the book but he wasn't perfect either.

Achebe went full retard on that essay, but everybody quotes it in modern """academia""" just because it's Achebe.

You can tell very quickly when a reviewer or commenter majored in English but was a total narrowminded pleb the whole way through, because they always quote the same entry-level texts as if they were the unshakeable word of God: this one, Said's Orientalism, Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Masks, Todorov's Intro to Fantastic Literature, and Eagleton's Intro to Literary Theory (to name a few).

I got food poisoning from fish sticks at 8.
I got over my fears at 20 to find I actually like fish.

>majored in english
>thinks that is an intellectual accomplishment

Glad to see another person here that likes
Anderson. He is very underappreciated on this board.

Why is Goodreads so full of "college educated" idiots?

This.
STEM graduates are far more humble on average, at least from what I've seen.

Why does Goodreads not allow you to find friends based on taste compatibility? Literally all of my Goodreads friends are from Veeky Forums threads and the only way I can find other people is if they reviewed something.

Because college educated folks love to showcase how intelligent they are because of being college educated. What better place than Goodreads where you can post pseudy reviews on books you didn't understand at all with like-minded individuals.

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>Mr. Lee is a highly educated person who only uses Chinese pidgin English because he isn't allowed to break racist societal norms

it really triggers me when SJWs don't appreciate SJW literature

howling

He was someone who lived in a different time with different social norms. Condemning a person who lived in the past for not cleaving to eminently modern social norms is smallminded, and frankly retarded. It smacks of totalitarianism. Especially when we consider that modern definitions of "racism" are less and less descriptive terms, and more and more political buzzwords.

So no, I'm not going to call people who fought against racism well before it was cool, and when there was actual risk attached to it, "racist" because they don't cleave to the left wing radical Tumblr definition of what it means to not be racist.

Honestly, I think a huge problem in modern society and modern politics is this emotional reasoning where people throw the baby out with the bathwater every single fucking time. Politics ought to be the art of compromise, but today it's the art of fucking the other side out of power long enough to enact policy they can't possibly reverse.

WHY CAN'T I JUST READ A BOOK SET IN THE PAST THAT SATISFIES MY SJW MINDSET

I'm honestly surprised there was no mention of Steinbeck being literally Hitler

>can't voice an opinion without somehow roping Trump into it
why are liberals like this?

>people try to convince me modern liberals aren't brainwashed

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>Conrad. Ruski.

Gr8 b8, m8.