 I'm going to talk about people nobody likes and by nobody I mean some people because everybody don't like the same things or dislike the same things. Hello everybody! E here. Welcome back to Top 5 Friday. Today we are talking about a confusing topic. I want to do the Top 5 Unpopular Opinions About Unpopular Authors. So basically what I'm trying to say is I am going to talk about authors that I either like personally or like their work that other people don't seem to care too much for mainly because they're jerks. So this is a very close and personal subject to me topic to me. I have long been seen as a bully because of my honest reviews. Sometimes my reviews are not parody but they're satire so there's a lot of language. You know there's a lot of jokes in there and people take offense to that stuff and I can dig it. But I want to talk about Top 5 authors that get a bad rap just for being who they are. I will warn you that at least one of these authors I have not read. Well not in any of his novels but we'll get into it. And oddly enough I just realized they're all dudes. So maybe that has something to do with it also. First off we're going to talk about John Green. Anytime you reach a certain level of celebrity you're going to have a massive, you know, just people that want to see you fail. People that want to see you collapse. John Green was a YouTuber, is a YouTuber. He's also a terrific author. He's one of the only, there's probably a total of three YA authors that I will read. And he's one of them. I've loved everything I've read from him. I haven't read Turtles all the way down yet but I'm looking forward to that one. Every time I bring him up I get, oh I can't stand that guy. Well why can't you stand that guy? What's wrong with him? Oh he plays on people's emotions. Isn't that what we're supposed to do? I mean this books. Yes it's entertainment but some of the best creative works period play on your emotions. If you're crying you're supposed to be crying. Is it manipulative? Yeah that's what an author is supposed to do. Manipulate your feelings. At least that's how I feel. Next up is Charles Bukowski. Yeah this dude's something else. I read Hammond Rye well after I found out that he was a womanizer, a drunk, an addict, all that stuff. Other than the womanizing I relate pretty hard to this dude as far as what he put his body through while he was alive. He didn't give any shits whatsoever about what he said and what he did. He did have a really garbage opinion about women. But I enjoy his fiction. I enjoy his poetry. I have one of his collections. Something about love is a dog from hell. Which has some of the weirdest poetry I've ever read. Very dude poetry. Talking about dick, erections, semen, all that stuff. But this I loved this book. And I really don't have any idea why. It's kind of like Nelson DeMille. I had no idea why I enjoy his stuff. I would have put him on here but nobody ever talks about him. The issue that of course you get, especially from women, they get upset because seeing a man reading this, the man must think the same way as he does. Which is not the case. Sometimes we just like the fictional worlds these jackasses create. And that's where I will go as far as agreeing with people who like HP Lovecraft. You can enjoy the dude's mythos or whatever you want to call it. Even his writing. Love his writing all you want. Just don't celebrate the dude himself. That's all I'm saying. I don't like Charles Bukowski. But hell, he's a fantastic writer. I'm going to leave this one for last because we're going to talk very in-depth with that one. Alright, next up we have Jonathan Fransen. I'm giggling just saying this. So people hate Jonathan Fransen. I love him. I've never read him. This is the one that I have not read. I love the guy to death. Just the way that he carries himself, the way he talks. The way he gives absolutely no fucks. Especially like telling Oprah that, you know, it's like Michael Crichton is a shit writer. I'm a better writer than him. And from what I've read of his essays, he is. And he's got some really sound writing advice that people just completely ignore. I mean, like one of the things that I remember, his top 10 writing tips popped up again. Buzzfeed or some crap like that. Some writing website or something. It popped up again and everybody lost their nut again over it. Because one of them is nobody with an internet connection is writing good fiction. Yeah, because they're on the internet. It's pretty, it's that simple. Nobody who is surfing the internet is writing good fiction because they're not writing good fiction. It's literal. But there's a lot of stuff on that. There's a couple of things that he points out in there that's just funny just on a satire side. And some of his essays and short works that I have read definitely, you know, lean more toward the satirical side. He has a very dry humor, very British in that aspect from when I can gather. But of course, people don't like him mainly because, you know, when he was on tour for the corrections, which was a massive success, he had a lot of very, very, very poor opinions in people's eyes and he gets a bad rap. I plan on reading his novels at some point in time this year. But if you don't like Jonathan Franzen, I'd love to hear why you don't like him down there in the comments below. Same with all these characters. We're going to get into more of that at the end. Next up, we have another asshole, John Irving. Now, I'm trying to do a reread, not a reread, a read-through of his catalog. I'm currently stuck and stalled on Widow for one year. Sorry, Cody, my buddy Cody Tidwell keeps on trying to tell me that I need to finish it. I can't get past like the first 50 to 100 pages. I can't remember exactly how long. But I'll eventually get through all of his stuff, even if I have to audio book it through a Widow for one year. But this guy is full of himself. He's an utter jackass. You can just watch his interviews and you can tell how highly he thinks of himself. And he really thinks highly of the way he writes. He's always bragging about how he writes backwards, all these different things. He writes longhand. I'm talking he writes 800 page novels longhand. So the manuscript's got to be 2,000 pages long, longhand. But he's one of those affluent white men who just think that their shit don't stink. And it's amazing because for him to act the way he does and write the deep characters and tackle the deep social aspect and gender and all that stuff that he tackles, you wouldn't think a person that seems so narcissistic could have that deep idea of empathy, you know? So while he may act that way, that might just be a public persona that he is putting on because controversy does sell books. Finally, we're getting into an author that I just recently fell in love with last year. Me and my wife read Infinite Jest last year and we both enjoyed it. I think I might have enjoyed it more than she, but only because of the writing, because I'm a writer. But she did, I read this to her over the course of like, I think a year? Almost a year, something like that. At least nine months. I read this to her every night and we went back and forth. We did all the end notes. We did everything and we dug it. In fact, there's a video on the channel called The Smartening. I don't know if we'll ever do another episode, but if you want to watch that, it's based on this book. So yeah, David Foster Wallace. There's a running joke with David Foster Wallace that goes, he is the author that everyone has on their, that all straight white men have on their shelves that none of them have read. I think that's funny. That perception, now reading the book, I understand where that's coming from. It definitely has its dude bro moments. But the intelligence level of this book is well beyond a dude bro mentality. I had an absolutely amazing time with this. And every single time I stop and think about Infinite Jest, I want to go back and read the book all over again. And supposedly it was written to have to make an addict out of the audience, out of the reader. It makes you want to, as soon as you finish the book, it makes you want to start all over again. And I have an addictive personality, so it worked on me. Yay! But yeah, David Foster Wallace gets a lot of hate. And for a guy that killed himself, he's still getting a whole hell of a lot of hate. I mean, hell, do you blame the guy for what he did and all the shit that he got, the shit that he's still getting, and he ain't even here anymore. But the dust, sorry, I pulled that one off the bottom shelf and it's in there since last year. Do you have unpopular opinions about unpopular authors? Again, I know that's kind of confusing, but that means that you have good opinions about authors that people can't stand. They don't have to be authors that nobody's heard about, that kind of thing. But they can be popular authors as in they sell well. What I want to know is whether or not you constantly hear that they're crap people or whatever. Doesn't even necessarily have to be their writing life. It can be just that everybody says that they're a bad writer like Dan Brown or James Patterson or whatever. Do you have a positive opinion of those authors? Let me know down there in the comments below. I'm going to try and do a, I was going to put up tweets and everything in this video, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a viewer or commenters edition of this, and I'm going to put it all together and have your guys' another Top 5 with your opinions. So until next time, I have been E, you have been U, this has been another Top 5 Friday. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye! That was a lot of talking. Like my jaw hurts. I don't even know how long that is, that all folks.