books you truly regret reading

TL;DR: The author shares tactics for persuading people. Only problem is that most of the tactics, pending implementation, seem to lead to disingenuous untrustworthy behavior.

2026-02-20

TL;DR: It should be a 2 paragraph blog post. It's repetitive.

2026-02-23

TL;DR: This is a book about boring/pompous/uninteresting people doing mostly uninteresting things. Any interesting bits the book does have are dwarfed by pages of vague, shallow philosophizing. The book also seems to have launched the "dark academia" aesthetic, another point off for it.

2026-02-25

TL;DR: It is bewildering to me that a book this poorly-written on the sentence level has a 4.49 out of 5 on Goodreads. The story is quite YA and quite predictable (it doesn't really fit into adult fantasy, imo) but the prose and dialogue are unreadable if you care about that stuff. Read his newer work!

2026-02-25

TL;DR: your consultant friend's favourite book found in every airport bookstore. broad, sweeping generalizations, the 'world' is mostly the western world, and oveconfident tone throughout.

2026-03-05

TL;DR: Some idiot loser describes how good he is at sex for half the book. The other half is tepid world building from someone's improvised D&D campaign. It killed a trilogy that was already lame to begin with

2026-03-16

TL;DR: the title is pretty good. Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less. there you go. you've gained 80% of the benefit of reading the book.

2026-02-19

TL;DR: Everything I achieved is because I'm great. Everything you failed to achieve is because you didn't try hard enough. I do not understand survivorship bias.

2026-03-17

TL;DR: The main character is being bullied (because she's Asian) and she's a bully too. There, you've read Yellowface.

2026-03-02

TL;DR: Clumsy sentences, hackneyed plot, self-important prose, and ultimately soporific. This is one of those books which evades criticism simply because of the author's DEI credentials which is ultimately damaging to authors of color. Ocean Vuong isn't the worst thing Oprah has given us--after all, she did start Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil's careers--but it's up there.

2026-02-24

TL;DR: some classics are great. with others you have to wonder: maybe they just didn't have much good stuff to read? this is a book with a rather boring love triangle; it ends with the couple in love trying to kill themselves by sledding into a tree. we have invented better love stories and better tragedies since Ethan Frome, i promise.

2026-02-19

TL;DR: you're never going to get everything done. stop trying to optimize so much. there will always be more to do. stop cramming tasks. focus on what's most important and just relax. you do not need a full book to learn this, imo.

2026-02-19

TL;DR: "dark academia" fantasy diasporoid slop. stinky lunchbox transformed into a mediocre fantasy novel that somehow manages to dodge the one interesting point about translation the novel could have conceivably brought up

2026-03-16

TL;DR: Jack Black and Jason Segel made this seem like a fun story with peeing giants, but you need a PhD in 1700's English pop-culture for any of the jokes to make any sense.

2026-03-22

TL;DR: Summary: Turns out, militarized BS isnt always good at actual decision making and leadership, or writing a "classic" military history book. Critique: A sincere history of military failures of all kinds, all MUST ONLY be, because the men weren't good enough. Ignore politics, and all other factors, of course. The problem is that anyone can be a "revisionist" 100 years later and call it however they like, for example the author pegs the Boer War as sheer incompetence, when it was likely effective defeatism.

2026-03-16