The problem with shock value is that it only has value if its actually shocking.

Obviously whether or not a person finds something shocking, or just thinks its a worn out trope, is something that is going to depend on the individual and what they have read/watched, particularly recently. If you keep reading the same type of books where you can predict the general idea of what's going to happen easily, then you're not really going to be shocked by it after a certain point, and the books will becomes a lot less interesting.

Just don't force it, IMO. If you don't feel like reading for a week, just don't read that week. You don't need a reading goal if you don't want one, I know I don't have one.

Give it 10 years, and I bet PHM will be much less well regarded on this subreddit. You have to take time into account, Project Hail Mary is nearly at the peak of its popularity right now, while Hunger Games has obviously fallen quite a ways.

RPO is Ready Player One, which is another book that started off very popular and now mostly just gets hated on this subreddit.

Anything that gets too popular for it's own good will get a lot of hate. There's obviously a reason it got so popular in the first place, so now you get people who want to feel smart by hating on it.

And really I don't think Hunger Games gets that much hate compared to some other popular books, like Twilight or RPO. Even Project Hail Mary gets a post calling it horrible for every post there is praising it.

I think one of my favorite parts is Finrod's rap battle with Sauron.

If you put a link in your post reddit will find a picture from that link to put in the thumbnail. Occasionally this gets a useful picture, and occasionally it returns something completely unrelated

There's one quote by Terence, some Roman guy, that I like.

>I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me

Obviously him being an old Roman guy doesn't mean he is inherently correct, but that its still relatively known after all this time should at least signal that many people do agree with it.

I also generally dislike the idea that many people seem to have where they gain the ability to draw massive insights into someone's character simply by looking at what books that person likes. Ie, if you like X book, or X kind of books, or books by X author, then you must have this personality or trait. What you're talking about seems to be going the other way, that if you don't have a certain trait you won't be able to properly like a book, and I'd say its equally nonsense.

Of course I usually just see this online, the people who would be making these comments aren't really the people I'd be talking a lot with in real life. So I'm not really scared of any backlash because I don't care what anyone thinks of /u/atramikadelia, although I would probably be a bit hesitant in some circumstances. Especially if someone likes a book that I disliked, I might be a little more willing to praise a book they hated.

I have it on my shelf right now and my version definitely mentions WW2 quite a few times and the words 'Secret Annex' were on what felt like every other page.

Go to the entry for June 6, 1944, if that doesn't mention D-Day then you have something weird.

I see your Isekai light novels and raise you any number of the various ecchi manga I've read.

And yes partially I do read them for the obvious reasons, but honestly the best ecchi is always just so funny that you have to stop what you're doing because you're laughing too hard.

I don't want to say any names because this comment will already make me look degenerate enough, but if you've read Arifureta I'm sure you at least have some idea what I'm talking about.

The problem with things like this is you assume that people will read the same books as you on the given subject. Say you want to talk about the war and militarism and suggest reading 'The Things They Carried' and 'The Forever War', but I read 'Starship Troopers' and 'Storm of Steel'.

Yeah we both read books about the same problem but we're probably going to come away with different opinions. Or we could both read all four of those books, and then who knows if I'll agree with you or not?

If you love most of the other relatively recent books this subreddit likes, you'll probably like it.

I know I hated it, it's basically just a worse version of Shinsekai Yori as far as I'm concerned, but I hate most things this sub loves, especially the newer ones.

I mean, the books I am talking about are also published by relatively large publishers who do hire real translators. I've read other things that were translated unofficially by hobbyists, and with those you run into a much wider variety of shit. There's some stuff that's just as good as any translation I've read, and a lot of stuff that's marginally better than using Google Translate, and everything in between.

But even with the big publishers, there's still some books they don't spend as much money on, or expect to sell very well, and these are the books that will have errors and somewhat awkward language.

Still, just from reading a description of those two books and looking at them on goodreads I wouldn't see any giveaways that they are clearly a lower quality book, so I'd think you'd be fair to treat those with the same expectations as any other book.

Which books are you talking about? I guess I probably haven't heard of them anyway but there's different publishers that I'd have vastly different expectations from.

Like, a book published by a major publisher is not going to be in the same category as a relatively unpopular book being translated on the cheap. For the former I'd expect it to be written in a way that may not exactly be easy to read, but is at least intentional.

For the latter I'll be happy if there's no obvious translation errors, and if it happens to flow a little strangely that's just a natural consequence of a rushed translation. If a number is 99 but should obviously be 9, or 10,000 but should be 100,000, then I'm more happy that I could catch the error than I am annoyed that it exists.

Why do you guys pay for cars? You have to deal with things like registration and driver's licenses if you pay, and you're probably just supporting big companies and not the actual workers.

Using a lockpick and some knowledge of wiring, you can steal almost any car for free, and in different models that you may not be able to afford if you bought it.

The only problem with a scale of 7 is that its debatable if a perfect score is a 7/7 or a 5/7.

I mean, Japanese stuff in general is going to usually push past what would be allowed in the West. But that isn't unique to Isekai. For example, Spice and Wolf is a fairly normal fantasy romance series, except the male MC is 25 and the girl appears to be 15 (of course she's a wolf goddess so she isn't actually 15, but it's specifically stated that she looks 15)

Obviously something like that just wouldn't fly in the west, but Japan is Japan, so it's normal. I could give plenty of other examples if you really want, but my point is just that your complaint has everything to do with Japan and nothing to do with Isekai specifically.

The American stories you mention appear to be self published erotica, so I'm not sure why you are expecting much out of them. Like no shit the main character goes around having sex with a bunch of hot girls, that's literally the premise.

And I don't think people from the modern era using guns against people armed with medieval levels of technology is equivalent to Japan's invasion of China in 1937. Like China was outmatched in that war, but they weren't THAT outmatched

It is natural, but it isn't going to make anyone read the thing you are talking about. There's a few niche books I like to recommend but I rarely if ever preface them with 'these are so much better than XYZ popular book, which is garbage', even if I do think that.

Here is an article I found about them, since I didn't want to just speculate.

According to it:

>Legal disclaimers are like chicken soup when you have a cold. They can’t hurt and might help. While they are unlikely to stop a lawsuit, they may put an obstacle in the way.

So then why do things like Ready Player One also get hated on by the same groups of people? There's no gender bias to it, or at least not much of it, people just tend to hate on books that get too popular. And that really goes for everything, not just books.

> Lots of female readers enjoy her work, and people just fucking LOVE shitting all over ANYTHING women like or take pleasure in.

This doesn't make any sense, because the people hating on these books are also women. You'd be hard pressed to find many men who had an opinion on these books at all.

Grey Steel and Blue Water Navy

Supposedly a book looking at the creation of the American military-industrial complex by covering the creation of the modern military shipbuilding industry. By itself that seems like a relatively dry topic, but I really think there's interesting things to be looked at there.

Instead it just kept going into incredible detail on the specifics of various contracts, spending so much time on details that just seemed entirely irrelevant. Like, the overall process of selecting contractors for the Navy does interest me. But the book just kept going into absurdly specific levels of detail on certain contracts, contractors, and requirements. X contractor could only make steel plates of Y size, but that was too small for Z ships, so Congress put off expanding the Navy for a year, and then next year they set a deal up with contractor A who could make steel armor of B thickness in the correct size, etc.

I don't know, maybe it was just written for people who are more nerdy than I am, but regardless I found it incredibly boring.

I occasionally do that and don't see anything wrong with it, but obviously its still technically against the law. Not sure I'd let reddit decide your morality for you either.

That battle scene was just garbage, though. Straight up reformer nonsense.

I guess it's somewhat cool but it definitely plays into that whole narrative of the military wasting money on fancy gadgets that aren't good for anything. And I've heard too many people try to say the F-35 is inferior to the F-16 to not get annoyed by that.

Fellas, is it gay to like women?

There's some discussion of two characters who are friends, and one of them describes it as being similiar to being married. I forget the exact wording.

If you want to read into it, then it sounds like they are gay. If you don't, then it just sounds like they are good friends.