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veen  ·  2637 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Books you just couldn't fucking get into?

goes to Gmail, searches 'Audible refund'

Most of them were when I tried to buy with money but accidentally used a credit instead. But here are some I couldn't get into:

Traffic, by Tom Vanderbilt. Behavioural popsci with no depth whatsoever. I was already vaguely or directly familiar with all of the ideas in the book so I just stopped reading.

The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks: I stopped about halfway through. Here too I stopped reading because the ideas presented were boring me (not a big surprise since it's 28 years old). Much better written though.

Beyond Good and Evil. Didn't like his writing style and felt like I wasn't smart enough to understand Nietzsche.

Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon. Someone on here is a big fan of this book (flag?) but I didn't get the references and didn't really care for the narrator or the people he meets. I went on to read The Big Short instead.

Being Mortal, Atul Gawande. His supposedly groundbreaking ideas sounded to my Dutch ears like common sense, so this book too bored me enough to return it. Even his ideas on a pain-free, respectable end to life were nothing new to me, having experienced what that looks like for a family member.

Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy. Recommended by a friend, popsci/marketing book with not much news for me.

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, or, as it should be called, The 48 Anecdotes about How Power Worked Out for Some People In History. It wasn't really a book, more a string of small history stories with a common theme. Is his book Mastery the same? It's on my reading list but if that one is also just a collection of small stories I'm not gonna put a dozen plus hours into it.

Oh, and I'm about 10 hours into Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. It's not bad written considering it's a business / autobiographical book. He even starts out in a similar place where I am today: 25, no idea what to do next, finding his place in the world, etcetera... so I could definitely relate. Each chapter is a year of his life since starting his company and I'm now at the stage where Nike is getting bigger and thus boringer, by definition.

So instead of ending the book at eight hours and calling it a day, each of the last few chapters has been the same And Then We Almost Went Bankrupt Again story arc. On the one hand I really don't feel like listening to another 3 hours of that, on the other hand I really want to finish books I am this far in.