 Alright, it's no secret by now that my opinions do not always match up with the mainstream. You know, sometimes I really like things that other people hate, sometimes I hate things that other people love. Whatever the case is, I'm just being honest. You know, I'm just telling people what my thoughts are, like that's the whole reason I made this channel in the first place and that's also part of the reason why I didn't really want this to be my career forever and why I got an actual job now. Like I just did not want to be dishonest. I didn't want to go along with the crowd. I just want to say how I feel about things and sometimes people get upset with me for that. So, uh, yeah, I think the title is pretty self-explanatory for this one. These are the top ten books that I hate that everyone else loves. And keep in mind when I say top ten books that I hate, I don't necessarily mean that I despise these with all my being. I just mean that, yeah, they have some pretty serious issues but I never really see other people bring them up and they just seem really popular and I don't know why. And I don't know if this does well, I might do a mirror where it's like top ten books I love that everyone else hates or something like that. But anyways, top ten list, there will be spoilers ahead so just be aware of that and that's all. Let's get started. This is the introduction song. It's not very good but it's not too long. Starting off at number ten, we have Fahrenheit 451. This is a really old, really famous dystopian novel written by Ray Bradbury. And I want to say real quick that I like Ray Bradbury. Reading a bunch of his sci-fi short stories, they were really good. He's certainly struck me as a very intelligent man. But Fahrenheit 451 is not his strongest work but it's also his most popular for some reason. Basically, it is just a world where all books are banned. People just watch TV all the time and the main character is a fireman. But in this world, firemen don't put out fires. They just burn books and the houses that contain those books. Like Fahrenheit 451, the title comes from the temperature at which paper spontaneously combusts, which is actually not true, I believe, but that's not an issue. And as is the case with many classic dystopian novels, this one features a main character who one day decides that he's better than everybody else and that he's going to start doing the thing he's not supposed to. So in this one, the main character just starts reading and then he realizes his society is stupid and he tries telling other people about it but nobody else wants to listen and then he leaves and then society is destroyed at the end. And it's a fine little story. I really don't hate it. Like I said in the intro, I don't necessarily hate all these books but this one really does not deserve all the praise it gets and that annoys me. People put it up there with classic dystopias like 1984 and Brave New World and the Handmaid's Tale and things like that. But the thing is, people say it's about censorship and all that but Ray Bradbury himself said it wasn't. He himself just said, no, I'm annoyed that people are reading less and that they just watch TV too much and he fought with people on this a lot up until he died. He fought with people a lot about this and no one ever seems to respect him on that. I get it, you can have different interpretations on things even if the author themselves felt differently but this one seems pretty clear. Like if you want to compare this to real life events then the Nazi book burnings are a very good example. You know, they very famously just got these big bonfires going, publicized it a lot, took pictures and just burned all the books they didn't like but the key there being they didn't just burn all books. Like in Fahrenheit 451, they didn't just burn all of them because they hated reading on a fundamental level. They didn't hate that people were able to read. They just were trying to get rid of and suppress information that they didn't like so they weren't burning all books. They were burning books about socialism, books about Judaism. They burned a whole bunch of research about gay and trans people because those were things they hated and things that they felt the population should also hate or at the very least not know much about. Of course it's easier to hate something when you don't know much about it but you know it's not like there's any parallels with that in the modern day world or anything. So if this was a story about censorship it did a pretty shit job of it and yeah I don't have a whole lot else to go into about that. Fahrenheit 451 as a book is fine but it really does not deserve to be put up next to all those other classics which are actually much more intelligent and are actually a lot deeper and do comment on things like censorship and depression and tyranny. And because Fahrenheit 451 doesn't comment on any of those it's just an old man ranting about how he doesn't like people watch TV too much. You know it's it or he doesn't like when people watch TV too much. Sorry let's whatever we're not doing another take. It's fine it's fine it's fine. But Ray Bradbury generally an intelligent guy generally a good writer but he wasn't at his best when he wrote this. So you know check out some of his other stuff if you're curious but Fahrenheit 451 no. Numero 9 is going to be the Night Angel trilogy. Now this is a fantasy trilogy which I see occasionally get mentioned here on YouTube but people just kind of mention it as yeah this is a good fantasy series I enjoyed it and then they move on. I've never really seen people go into a lot of depth on it or anything and I'm not sure why. I mean it's written by Brent Weeks the same guy who wrote the Lightbringer series and I reviewed that last year and very similar to the Lightbringer series the Night Angel trilogy starts off pretty strong. Like the first couple books are good even if they have some serious issues and then by the end it just completely falls apart and it is weird to me how people can recommend the Night Angel trilogy and talk about how it's good and fun without going into detail about how it just collapses by the end. The setup for this series is deceptively simple because it sounds basic enough but it gets much more complex as time goes on. Basically there's this little orphan kid who lives out on the streets in the slums by the name of Azoth and then he tries really hard to get himself apprenticed to an assassin whose name is Durzo and the first really big chunk of the first book is just Azoth trying to go through all these hoops and try and prove himself as being a worthy apprentice to Durzo and it goes on much longer than it really needs to quite frankly considering that the story is really about him as an adult but whatever, not important and then he becomes an assassin and then stuff happens. When he's an adult, his name is Kylar by the way. I just feel the need to mention that, like Azoth becomes Kylar partway through. See the bulk of the first book, even after Kylar becomes an adult like there was a time skip and suddenly he's a much better trained assassin the bulk of it doesn't really have a story until near the end when like a foreign country invades and takes over and then that becomes like the big inciting incident for the rest of the series or so I thought at the time because once you get into the second book that's mostly fighting against the evil god king and then at the end of the second book the evil god king is killed and then the third book is just really scrambling for a villain so that's what I mean when I say this series falls apart by the end is like the author clearly had no idea what he was doing in the third book and so it just goes off in several different directions and it can't really commit until near the end and then there's just a big battle but the big battle doesn't really mean anything because it's against people that we don't know that much about for reasons that aren't totally clear and don't make all that much sense. I have read this entire series all the way through twice. I read it once when I was like 15 and then another time when I was 18 or 19 and let me tell you the second time through it really hammered home just how obnoxiously edgy this series is especially at the beginning. Now what I mean by edgy is not that it's dark I don't mean that oh there's a bunch of murder and rape therefore it's annoying because when something is dark then that means having a bunch of murder and rape and other unpleasant stuff in there that is done for a purpose you know like it actually ties into the story and the characters and stuff and it informs the world whereas when it's edgy it's just there for shock value or just because the writer thinks that that's what they're supposed to put there and especially the beginning segment with as-of-as-a-child is just stupid edgy like okay there's this bigger kid that runs their little gang and really really hates them but he's also a pedophile and like why was that necessary to put in there I don't know it doesn't really lead anywhere it just shows you oh man he's so evil look at him he's so evil and then later that same villain is like a cannibal because again it's just oh look at him he's so evil he's so evil and it does calm down a bit in the second and third books but it is still really obnoxiously edgy throughout and in the final book like maybe halfway through we hear that Kylar's love interest is going to die at the end there's nothing he can do to stop it and this doesn't really go anywhere until again at the end like she just dies and it's super sad I guess and I think it would have been sadder if we didn't see it coming or like I mean again I just put out a video on Prophecies not that long ago and how I really hate them because they make it easy to see what's coming and you can use that in certain ways like you can use it to make things more suspenseful rather than surprising or you can do it in an ironic way where characters' actions lead to their own demise or something but they usually don't and in this series again they didn't do anything with it and it wasn't really a prophecy so much just like the Kylar gets to come back from the dead but every time he does it one of his loved ones dies and it's just I don't know it doesn't make a lot of sense it comes in way too late to really mean that much which I mean again it could have been neat if again we had to follow this immortal character who he couldn't die but every time he died other people that he loved died so he was putting others at risk whenever he went to fight like that would have been a lot cooler if it was introduced earlier but it just wasn't and then that's another thing about this like the third book introduces a whole bunch of stuff which comes kinda out of nowhere it comes in way too late to mean anything and it doesn't really do anything with them like for example Kylar can apparently see into people's souls and see the crimes they've committed and that's what the Night Angel is supposed to do or what it's a reference to is he can punish sinners but they don't really do much with that after the first chunk of the last book which okay that's dumb or the fact that he gets this magical artifact which gives him his powers in the first book and then in the third one it starts talking to him I don't know man like Night Angel Trilogy far from the worst thing I've ever read like I did again I did enjoy it enough to go through it two whole times the ending of the second book is genuinely an amazing cliffhanger but there's just too much here that makes it fall apart by the end and I really don't understand why more people don't bring that up when they talk about this Numa 8 The Air Chronicles now this one I haven't heard anyone talk about this in years so maybe saying everyone else loves it is not the most accurate but I don't care it's my video I'm putting this out there anyway so The Air Chronicles came out a long time ago they were written by Cindy Williams Chima there's the Warrior Air, the Wizard Air and the Dragon Air is the original trilogy they may have made more spin-offs since then but I don't know I haven't read them and this came out when I was a kid the Harry Potter craze was still going on and so just based on that you can kind of tell the general direction this story starts off in or the general direction it goes in like there is a kid who thinks he's normal for a long long time and then when he's a teenager he learns that he's part of this hidden magical world and that he has these crazy powers and that he has to play a big role in this hidden magical world and then there's like fights between the forces of good and evil and so on the only really interesting bits from this series are the way that they decide who is in charge of this world like it's the wizards are in charge of everything but they can't fight each other so they have to find champions to fight for them which I think is kind of neat and it's also neat how there are five different types of magical beings in this world as opposed to just okay there's people who have magic like there's wizards sorcerers, enchanters, warriors and soothsayers and granted wizards and warriors are pretty much the only two that are all that important to the story but the others are at least there and the fact that they play any role is just kind of neat it does make complicate things and makes them a little more interesting this is another trilogy which starts off fine enough in the first two books even if it has issues but then those issues really pile up and it completely collapses in the third book to put it simply by the end of the second book a huge war starts and then the third book is mostly a magical siege of this town in Ohio and there's not a whole lot of battling there even though it seems like it would be like this is supposed to be the final confrontation between the forces of light and darkness but they really don't do anything with that I don't know why and then they introduce this new magical dragon stone which one of the main characters is kind of sort of the chosen one designed to use but also not really and it's just not explained well it falls apart by the end in a very confusing way but even more than that it's just not told in a very interesting way because we have characters who are far away from the battling far away from the conflict and just like literally hundreds of miles away just kind of dealing with their own interpersonal family drama and then other characters who we don't like that much and who we don't know that well are also kind of dealing with them to become help with the real battle and like that's the majority of the book like I read this in an era where I could go through an entire novel in one day just because I had nothing else to do and I was bored and I would just sit there and read for a couple hours and be done with it it took me months to get through the dragon air which was the final book in this series like it's just a mess you know I can't go into a whole lot of specifics because we would be here a long time and a lot of it is again just technical problems where it's like not focusing on the interesting stuff even though there is plenty of interesting stuff going on or how the climax is weirdly subdued or how one of the defenses they use to protect the town is a minefield which was created by a 17 year old boy like he's just a normal teenager in the United States he apparently knows how to make landmines I don't know if it's a weird thing or how the rules of magic are not always super clear and they're not always consistent in this series there's a lot of things here but again no one else has heard about this so I don't feel like going into it in much more detail than I already have the air chronicles start off fine enough but they really just completely collapse by the end number seven we have into the wild this one is unique in this list because it's the only one here that's a nonfiction book it's actually I want to call it a biography but it's a bit more than that of this real life person whose name was Christopher McAndless or he also kind of changed his name and went by Alexander Supertramp for a while that's the stupidest fucking name I've heard in a long time but okay and basically he was this dude who lived a pretty normal life for most of his life but then after he finished high school rather than getting a job or going to college or anything he just became a drifter and wandered all over the country and eventually he made his way up to Alaska and he tried to live by himself in the wilderness and then he died and this book is there to try and tell us about his life even though his life wasn't really that interesting like this book was huge when it came out and it's continued to be relevant for years afterwards like they even made a movie adaptation of it at some point and for the life of me I can't understand why it is really just this guy who by most accounts was pretty intelligent at least in terms of doing well at school but he wasn't very good at making friends and he just seemed kind of lost in life he wasn't sure what he wanted to do with himself and then he went drifting and then he decided to go on this dipshit right of passage or whatever and live in the wilderness and he didn't know anything about it he didn't have the proper equipment so he died what's really the story there I don't understand why people found this fascinating I just I just don't like that it's just a story of a guy who made stupid decisions and got himself killed and other people look at it as wow that's inspirational I love Alexander supertramp so much I hate that it's such a stupid name like if you can name yourself why would you go with that but yes people see it as inspirational they see it as life affirming they see as what I seriously could not for the life of me understand why people liked this I read it in school when I was like 17 and that was my impression then like he that was around the time I was starting to get out of my edgy teenager phase like I was still in it somewhat but I was starting to see the light and realize okay the world is a bit different you know I'm not going around saying everybody sucks except me I'm so much smarter and better than everybody and society man we live in a society like you know what I'm saying like a lot of us are like that when we're teenagers and there's nothing wrong with that because you eventually grow out of it but Alexander slash Christopher just seems to be a guy who never really grew out of that and never really stopped viewing himself as being above other people and as being above society as a whole and so maybe you could look at this as like a cautionary tale but the fact that he fucking starved to death by himself in an abandoned bus in Alaska says enough on its own I think and I just I don't know I for the life of me do not know what people see in this like most of the others in this list I can see why people would enjoy at least parts of it but with this one it's just a dipshit who got himself killed number six might be the most controversial one on this list it is the black company now again I've talked about this a little bit in the past like I did read the first black company book years ago and I wasn't super into it I didn't hate it I just wasn't super into it basically it is this group of mercenaries who are called the black company and it's written in an unusual way it's basically written by the chronicler of the black company and it's first person but it's also just him cataloging all of the events surrounding the black company and all of the jobs they take and all of the things they do and eventually they work for like the dark lord you know in a traditional fantasy story there's always like this dark lord who tries to take over the world and tries to kill everybody and it's just evil for the sake of it and the black company work for them and that is one of the few parts of this book where I was like oh that's kind of interesting because you realize they're working for the wrong side and pretty quickly after that you realize okay it's not even like the black company are decent people they're just working for the bad side but the black company are the bad guys like it specifically mentions at one point the chronicler is writing saying like that a bunch of other members of the black company were like taking off peasant women after destroying a village and raping them and he said yeah I know it's bad but like they're still my brothers please I don't think too harshly of me for not being too harsh on them and yeah I kind of liked that bit because yeah I think we've all been there sometimes our loved ones do terrible things but they are still our loved ones and that's like the only real moment of true emotion I remember from this book because the way it's written is just so simplistic and so straightforward and so to the point that it does make the story go by quicker because it's very fast paced it's just kind of like we got a battle today we killed 50 of them we lost 5 of our own and then it just moves on past that so that's good when you're trying to make the story go fast but I was not attached to a single one of the characters by the end of it and because of that I just could not care much about what happened to any of them and you know this is one of those things where people say like oh well you see you gotta keep reading past the first book you gotta get to like book 32 and it starts getting good and that may be true but like I already read Wheel of Time once I don't want to have to go through a whole bunch of shit just to get to the good bits again like I've spent enough of my life going through that and I really do think that if the black company had been written in more of a traditional way where it just first person or third person past tense and just follows these characters while they're doing stuff I think that would be fine I think it would be a thing to get into and I may have read the rest of the series but just the way that is written here is really off-putting and I didn't like it and it just prevented me from getting into this world it prevented me from getting into the characters and so there's just not much else here to talk about and I mean this one's not on the list but I may as well mention the Malazan series as well like again I read the first book felt very similarly to the way the black company was it's just written in kind of a confusing way where it's hard to follow what's going on and even if the events themselves are kind of neat and interesting they just are passed over so quickly that I wasn't super into them and people also like to yell at me for not really liking Malazan because again you have to wait until book 32 before it gets good and like well if it takes that long to get good it's probably not a very good series overall and yeah don't have a lot in the way of specifics for this one just didn't like the way it was written wasn't super into it everyone keeps telling me to read it I'm not going to number five is Salem's Lot by Stephen King so this one I feel almost bad picking on this one because while Stephen King is overrated I do feel I still think he's good you know I do still think he's a pretty good writer he's still put out some good stories over the years and I do like most of what I've read from him it's just that Salem's lot is one that came out decades ago and people still bring it up it was actually his second published novel I believe I think Carrie was his first and then Salem's Lot was his second and this one has still stuck around and people still talk about it and there's been multiple on-screen adaptations of it so I just have to wonder why exactly like the premise for it is pretty cool basically vampires come to a small town in Maine and then we just follow a whole bunch of different people who all have like they're all unique they're all different from one another all give them that like Stephen King is extremely good at that I was about to call him the king of writing large cast of characters that all feel distinct but no he's very good at writing cast of characters that are very large and all still feel distinct like there's all these different denizens of this town and all the ways in which they're weird and then when the vampires start coming and they start slowly attacking and then all at once take over and kill most everybody there we see most of these characters some of whom we've gotten to like die and it sucks and then at the end only a couple of them escape and then there's an epilogue where two of the survivors decide to go back and take out the remaining vampires and so one of them just starts a big fire and he's like I'm just gonna destroy the whole town and hopefully kill all the vampires who are there and that's the end of it first of all the cast for this was just too big you know even if they all felt distinct and they all felt somewhat memorable it just made the pacing way too slow like we had to hear about this person's life and their whole backstory and their whole inner world and their whole personality and all their turmoil and then they would start to hint at like something with vampires going on and then we cut to another person we'd also have to learn about their whole life their inner story their inner world their backstory and everything else and we just had to repeat that several times and got really really really obnoxious and the only times I was really interested by like the halfway point of the book were when the vampires came up which is not a good thing when the vampires are in relatively little of the book and yeah once the attack begins in earnest the back part of the book like the last quarter or third of it is really really good and really intense because we're just seeing everything get destroyed and we know from the beginning that this whole town's gonna get destroyed by these vampires but we still want to see if some of these characters that we like will get out so excuse me it still works really really well in some ways but the ending just kinda killed it for me and not in a traditional Stephen King ending sort of way just in a this is a horror story it should be more of a bummer I think like pet cemetery is a good example or at least the film adaptation of pet cemetery I believe it's different than the book but the one that came out a couple years ago that has a really bummer ending like all the good guys die and the demonic possession or whatever it is that brought the corpses back to life get to go on and do whatever evil plans they have or the film adaptation of the mist is another good one like oh turns out that we should have just waited a bit and someone would have rescued us but I don't know the point is in Salem's lot yeah everyone dies and the town is gone but then they come back and they start a fire and it feels almost triumphant it's like yes I'm going to get revenge I'm going to kill all of you bastards so it doesn't really work as a horror ending it's not really a downer ending or a bummer ending it doesn't dawn on you how much worse things are going to get or how bad they could be I think a better ending would have been like they're realizing okay the vampires are starting to spread out and attack more and more towns now and no one knows what's going on like I think that would be a much better ending it would be kind of reminiscent of Shadow over Innsmouth which if you've never read it is an HP Lovecraft story one of his better ones in my opinion but that one also features supernatural creatures taking over and destroying all the humans in a small town but at the end of that one it's implied that like the supernatural creatures are still there and they're going to come back and destroy more towns one day whereas in Salem's lot it seems like okay he's about to kill all the vampires so it just doesn't work well as a horror ending and you know out of all Stephen King's stories I would say this is far from his worst but it's stuck around for decades and I don't know why number four is the Fault in Our Stars you know that John Green book that got super big and then they made a movie adaptation of it which was also super big and it was just like part of a wave of a bunch of young adult novels about people with cancer and stuff but it was also like it helped inspire the wave I guess I really don't know how else to go into that this is another thing I did a video on a while ago not specifically on the Fault in Our Stars but on this whole genre and how it annoys me because I've read the Fault in Our Stars and it's fine it's just about a couple of teenagers who have cancer and they like fall in love while also having cancer and then at the end one of them dies of cancer but also you're not supposed to look at them as just people who have cancer because they're more than just people who have cancer even though the whole book is about how they have cancer it's just I don't know like I think that message is fine like the idea that people who are terminally ill or disabled or anything like that are still people at the end of it they aren't completely defined by their illness or their disability I think that's fine but it really doesn't work in this book because the entire story and most of the characters are still defined by their illness like at the end of this book the love interest whose name is August if I remember I really don't care enough they all kind of blend together after a while so I'm not looking it up I refuse I absolutely refuse if it's not August fuck you I don't care like you can correct me all you want I'm not I'm not changing it but anyways at the end August dies and it's actually a surprise because he had been in remission for a while and then his cancer comes back and then it very quickly progresses and he dies and it sucks and the main character girl is super sad about it but I mean that again goes against this message they're trying to send where they are more than their illness because this is still a story that is trying to be cry porn about how oh it's so sad these kids had their lives ahead of them and now they have cancer and like again did a whole video about it so I'm not going too deep into that right now but it is just stupid it's just stupid like you can't say that they're defined by more than just their illness and then have the whole story still be about their illness and have the climax still be that ok August died and now his girlfriend is still alive but she's sad about it but she doesn't regret anything you know it just it doesn't really work like an ending where they had still been alive and it's like yep we'll enjoy however many years we have left together we will just enjoy those together and again that would have been fine but it's not what happened I want to say again that I don't hate this book I think it's fine but it does irk me a bit that this got popular out of all of John Green's books like I'm not the biggest fan of his but like he has other stuff that he's written which is much more intelligent and much more on message I guess then this one like paper towns or looking for Alaska like those are much better books which are again not perfect but they do at least hammer home their message a little better and they are much more straightforward about how yeah real life is a bit more complicated than a lot of books and movies which have you believe so maybe just take a step back and think about things before you jump in without thinking that was that was weird that was redundant again no takes we're going ahead and the title of the book is also kind of contradictory because the the title the faults in our stars comes from a quote from Shakespeare it's actually the faults lies not in our stars but within ourselves and basically what it means is that hey we weren't destined to wind up this way it we wound up in this bad position because we made poor choices which is not the case in this book like they have cancer just because of shitty luck which is often how cancer works like you don't some people just get it and it sucks but that's how it happens and I don't know again it seems contradictory and it doesn't make a lot of sense and it really is just peak tumblr 2013 era I'm 14 and this is deep type shit and out of all of John Green's stuff that I've read or watched it is definitely the weakest so I don't know why it became so popular and I kind of just hate that it became the most popular thing he made numero 3 is going to be the lovely bones I've talked about this at length I hate the lovely bones I hate everything about it it's about a girl who gets raped and murdered and then she's a ghost in heaven watching her family while they kind of get over her death and the marketing especially for the marketing for the movie kind of makes it seem like she's trying to help solve her murder but that's not at all what happens it's basically just about how her family decides to get over her death and how she decides to move on from everything she's experienced and it does a shit job of all that ok it does shitty job of everything I did two separate top 10 worst books ever lists with this at the top and it has now been supplanted by the way of the shadow wolves so you know that's nice I guess but this is an awful awful book and I just really really hate that so many people mostly middle aged white women for for some reason like I'm not trying to attack that demographic really but mostly middle aged white women just seem to see this book as like something deep and profound and it's really saying something about it's about healing it's about love it's not about death and blah blah blah blah blah this is another one I had to read for school and it sucked it is really contradictory and self-defeating in terms of it's messaging because like obviously rape is bad and it seems to be doing that at the beginning but then at the end the main character kind of sort of rapes somebody as well and they just gloss on past that the family never finds out exactly what happened to her but we the audience know it and so it doesn't really feel as dramatic I think maybe if it just been told from her family's perspective and we also didn't know what happened to her it might have worked a little better I don't know and then we also get flashbacks about the main villain the guy who killed her and his life and it's like oh it's super sad because his his mom left his family and he was raised by his dad and it sucked and I don't know man it just was not put together well in any way in any way I've talked enough about it I really don't feel like going into more of it but the main thing that I hate so much about it is that so many people still go on about it about how deep it is and how it changed their lives and how it's still really popular presumably more people are still reading it these days and it was popular enough to get a movie adaptation and not one with like a small budget either it had big name actors in it had a lot of special effects it had a big marketing budget and a lot of marketing push behind it it just annoys me how there are so many other books out there that are better and that would translate to screen better but for some reason they just get left by the wayside while Lovely Bones gets to be known all throughout the world just annoys me not a fan number two did a video on this not long ago it is The Giver look this is another dystopian one which fails to send its message very well like Fahrenheit 451 in fact this whole back half of the list is mostly just books where they're trying to send a message and people keep telling me like oh this message is super deep but it either the message isn't deep or it does a shitty job of sending that message so yeah The Giver basically it's a dystopian world where there's a young boy named Jonas who just lives in this town it's just called the community and nobody can see color and everybody is the same everyone is also really happy because everyone is like given jobs that they like and yada fucking yada and Jonas has chosen to be The Giver or excuse me the receiver of memories whatever you want to call him and basically he is the one person that receives memories of like the time before so he knows about things like war and pain and starvation and loneliness and all that like things people don't have to put up with and he is supposed to be like a what's the word an advisor to the people who run the community because he knows all this stuff they don't the message is very straight forward stripping people up their individuality is bad and I don't disagree with that but also this doesn't do a great job of showing that because people still get jobs that they they love everyone is happy in this world it they just don't get like music or art or anything and they don't feel super strong emotions like love or hate or anything and it just it doesn't seem like that much of a dystopia up until like near the end when it's like oh okay they actually they kill babies and small children that don't fit into the standards of this world which obviously that's horrible but it also doesn't come up until the very end and it feels more like the author realized oh shit this society I created isn't actually that dystopian let's just throw something there ha see now you can't criticize me anymore it's just it's dumb it is really dumb and then at the end main character escapes and there is apparently a sequel where we see that he survived and he went to a different community and in that other community he also like gets assigned jobs everyone is assigned a role in life but it's apparently better because they have music and art and stuff and it's just man come on like I compare this to Anthem which is an Ein Rand book and Anthem does a better job of sending this message because at least then we see that this world where everyone has been stripped of their individuality people die really young because they have nothing left to live for and they have no real human connections no real relationships they have no fulfilling work that they can do just things like that which are obviously horrible and we can see how this negatively affects not only society as a whole but everyone in that society whereas in The Giver it just doesn't seem that bad and we have this one guy who doesn't like it and decides to run away and it's implied that by running away he released all these memories into the community and so everyone else knows about pain and stuff now and again this one got a movie adaptation really doesn't deserve it it gets taught to school children all the time really shouldn't and finally at number one on this list we have The Road by Cormac McCarthy you know every time I read a line in this book that was clearly meant to be profound and was clearly written so that Cormac McCarthy could feel smug and be like yeah whoever reads this is gonna close the book and stare out the window for a couple of seconds after they read it for the first time and every time I got to one of those lines that was very clearly designed to be like super profound and shocking my only reaction was a slow sarcastic clap yes yes great job Mr. Cormac McCarthy I'm glad you're here to tell us that parents love their children that's not something I ever would have realized if you hadn't told me The Road is yet another book that I think most people know from its film adaptation rather than the actual book itself and so a lot of people are probably thinking why does he hate The Road and I mean I haven't seen the movie in its entirety I've seen bits of it and it's not great but it is better than the book it's based on the main reason for that being that the book is just written in a really obnoxious way and Cormac McCarthy is just known for that like there's very little punctuation there's no quotation marks none of the characters get names it's just the man said blah blah blah and there's no quotes around it or anything so we don't know if that's actually what he said or if that's just the gist of what he said and the descriptions of the environments are vague let's say I could be generous and call them minimalistic but they're really not and that's not always a bad thing but in this case it is there isn't much of a story to this story really like it's just years after some sort of apocalypse which is not very well defined it's implied to be supernatural in nature but we never find out exactly what happened and it's not important either but there's a man and his son and they're just traveling looking for a safe place where they can stay and at the end the man dies but the son finds a family to stay with who can take care of him but it's also really heavily implied that he's gonna die quick anyways because the world is ended like there's no way to grow food or anything like he's just he's gone like this is not going to last much longer and it's kind of hopeful but again this world is destroyed and the son's gonna die soon anyways so there is really no hope it's hopeful and hopeless at the same time and so as a result those two contradict each other and neither of them really sinks in now the movie is a visual medium obviously so you don't have to deal with that obnoxious narration and the obnoxious way that it's written so yeah the movie's probably better and if that's how you experienced it and you thought it was a decent story of just a man and his son going through this horrible world and we feel bad about how much he loves his son because he won't be able to see him grow up and yeah all that like if that's how you experienced it and how you feel about it then great but again just that impenetrable wall of purple prose is horrible and because of that I hated this book but I hate it more than that because of what it represents you know again like a lot of books on this list it is trying to send a message which is either not as deep as they say or is kind of contradictory and in this case it's just hey parents really love their children like okay that's not super deep I'm not saying it has to be super deep but clearly this author thinks it's super deep and a lot of people clearly like it because they also think it's super deep so that's one strike against it but on top of that it feels like it's written in such obnoxious impenetrable prose because it's not really meant for regular people to read and to enjoy it's not really meant for anyone really this feels like something that was not written because the author wanted to write a story that would entertain himself it doesn't feel like it was written for something that would entertain other people it doesn't feel like there was a message you wanted to get out there and it doesn't feel like it was written just for a paycheck either because he thought it would sell it feels like it was written so that he could feel smarter than everybody else like you know what I mean it feels like it was written so that he could point at it and say look I wrote this this is super deep I like it that's just because you're dumb which is like the worst most obnoxious side of literature and of any sort of art really like there's a lot of you know artsy films and stuff that feel similarly you know it's not actually that deep and it's not actually sending any sort of complex message it's just supposed to look like it's deep and it's supposed to look like it's sending a message so it adopts the aesthetics of intellectualism I guess one way of putting it and the road by Cormac McCarthy is a pretty good example of something adopting the aesthetics of intellectualism without really being all that intelligent and without having much to say like it seriously is just really really dense impenetrable prose which are not impenetrable like you can still figure out what's going on and I shouldn't really call it dense either it would be more accurate to call it semi dense and infusing prose which does not follow grammatical rules and there's no real point to it not following grammatical rules other than him being able to point at it and say look I'm different I'm smart if you don't get it that's just because you're dumb and no I have absolutely nothing against you know trying to send deeper messages trying to be unique with your writing or anything like that but this one doesn't feel like it had an actual message or even that had an actual story or anything it feels like it was written solely so that the author could say he's an intellectual and solely so that he could say that he's smart and if anyone disagreed with him he could just point at it and say no look look it's literary and there would be a whole community of other people who would agree with that and there's a lot of stuff like that that is made in the style of the road you know other stuff that's terrible but because it's confusing or artsy or whatever it is supposed to be smart and we're just supposed to accept it and you know even if you don't like it most people just go yeah it's not my thing but like it's whatever it's you know artsy and intellectual and it really isn't it's faux intellectualism and so for that reason I don't like the road I don't like anything else Cormac McCarthy has made I don't like anything of that style really and yeah that's about it so that's why even if it's not the worst book I've ever read it is the book I hate the most that everyone else really seems to love and I just truly do not understand why people love it so much and I don't want to understand because I think a lot of them don't quite understand either but yeah that's about it so let me know in the comments down below what books you hate that other people love or vice versa and if you want this to get a sequel where I talk about books I love that other people hate make sure it gets shared around like the video, comment, subscribe all that and I will see you next time for a different thing yeah goodbye and of course all the other names you see here these people they're all great and if you watch this far maybe consider becoming a patron so you can get your name here and also get early access to videos and other stuff if you don't feel like doing that you can also become a youtube channel member which is like the same thing except worse and you could also rate the video and comment on it and subscribe to help share it around if you don't feel like doing any of that or if you're unable to that's cool too I guess you're all cool people I'll see you later goodbye