Day 4: A book you hate.
This is actually one of the easiest questions of this meme because I don't have to choose from a huge pool of books. When someone asks me, "Is there a book you really hate?", I always answer without missing a beat, "The Wave by Morton Rhue".
We once read this book in school and every single person in my class was incredibly enthusiastic about it. I hated it. Don't get me wrong, I actually think that the idea is quite good, but it has just been horribly executed. The characters are painfully flat, and the plot consists of predictable actions/reactions. It's really annoying, and tons of moralizations have been dumped into this book by the author. I think that pretty much all of us know that, guys, we totally cannot let this happen again, but as a German, I'm on a slight guilt trip overload. I have known about this incredible wrong that happened during the 3rd Reich for a long time, I have been shocked and disgusted by it, I have felt guilty about it; I just think that it doesn't really help to write some crap about brainwashing experiments where everybody goes from zero to Nazi in just a few days. Some depth, some contemplation would really do this book some good, not only to improve it, but also to make people take the threat of a brainwashed society (even one as small as a class full of people) more seriously and also to make them see that a lot more plays into building up something like the 3rd Reich than brainwashing, namely a whole lot of other crap.
We once read this book in school and every single person in my class was incredibly enthusiastic about it. I hated it. Don't get me wrong, I actually think that the idea is quite good, but it has just been horribly executed. The characters are painfully flat, and the plot consists of predictable actions/reactions. It's really annoying, and tons of moralizations have been dumped into this book by the author. I think that pretty much all of us know that, guys, we totally cannot let this happen again, but as a German, I'm on a slight guilt trip overload. I have known about this incredible wrong that happened during the 3rd Reich for a long time, I have been shocked and disgusted by it, I have felt guilty about it; I just think that it doesn't really help to write some crap about brainwashing experiments where everybody goes from zero to Nazi in just a few days. Some depth, some contemplation would really do this book some good, not only to improve it, but also to make people take the threat of a brainwashed society (even one as small as a class full of people) more seriously and also to make them see that a lot more plays into building up something like the 3rd Reich than brainwashing, namely a whole lot of other crap.