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What book do you feel is/was kinda overhyped?
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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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Fiction Books
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Anything by Dan Brown but especially The Da Vinci Code
I picked this one up "to see what all the fuss was about", and put it down after about 50 pages.
Enders Game
I will possibly upset a lot of people with this one but the twist in the end was obvious really early and the main character was terrible. Really shallow writing. I was honestly shocked when I realised just how popular it was.
There is so much better SF out there I still don't understand it.
Enders Game was one of my favorite books... until I turned 17 or 18.
If you didn't read it before you were eligible to learn to drive a car I'm not surprised you didn't like it.
Its a great book for middle school aged kids, for adults it's just OK.
You hit the nail in the head with that, I read it as a first year university student. The Heinlein juvenile novels are high art by comparison.
That was my surprise when talking about it online years later, the number of adults who loved it. The ones who read it at school and were in nostalgia mode I could understand but those that read it in their 20s I could not.
I’m one of them, read it when I was 25 or older. I liked the “chosen one” rhetoric being used to exploit Ender. I liked the bleakness of it all. While it was clear what the plot twist was going to be, he didn’t know, and this hit a tragic note for me. The book conveys all sides (Ender’s, the government’s, the alien’s) letting the reader getting stuck between opposing ethics, and not solving the contraposition at any point. The acceptance of the final, horrible result just adds to the bleakness created by all the violence leading up to that point.
I think I had just read to much SF before reading it. Everything it did I had read it done better before in other works.
Can you point to them? I’d be interested. Even if I read a lot of sci-fi, Enders Game is in my mind still unique in its themes.
Not sure if this will help.
I read enders game in 1987...It has been a long time so I can't give exact titles but here is some of the things I had read by then.
Everything written by Clarke and Heinlein, up to that point and all works of Olaf Stapleton, Verne and Wells.
Most of Asimov's SF works.
Some Ray Bradbury.
Other works and authors that stood out to me:
1984
The Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe
Neuromancer - Gibson had only done one by this time.
Consider Phlebas Iain M Banks
Solaris and a few others by Lem.
The Master and Margarita
All 6 Dune books.
Saga of the Exiles.
Plus a lot more that I can't remember
I'm guessing the people who liked it as adults didn't grow up reading lots of scifi so it seems more original and fresh to them. I've been a big scifi guy since I was in grade school. The book is full of tropes and they felt stale to me by the time I was graduating high school.
I haven't read Enders Game since about 1991. I still read through most of the Heinlein juveniles every few years although some have aged worse than others.
Oh no, not Enders Game! I loved it… but I understand the criticism. I felt that the main character not being very likable added to the story, but that’s personal opinion.
On the Da Vinci Code, it’s a lightweight page turner, I still thought it was enjoyable, but totally forgettable.
I should have worded that better, the characterisation of the main characters in the novel was terrible.