Oh, yes, the clickbait: "You WON'T believe what happens if you put a piece of metal and a string in a lake".
Anything by the Strugatsky brothers.
I have a probably too large and pedantic collection of cardboard bookmarks, some bought in remote cities, some given to me as gifts, some that went included inside other books. I even have a real chinese Yuan/Rembimbi bill that I got from a friend, long dead.
Sometimes I even use napkins and buy receipts and pieces of torn newspaper.
If your boss gave you this book with the honest intention to hear you opinion and share ideas, just be sincere and say what you said here: "It presents no arguments, is severely lacking in any sort of citations..." and the rest. You say that it's garbage without explicitly saying it. It may even give birth to a real interchange of ideas. Mentioning the books you liked instead may even prove positive for everybody involved.
If, on the contrary, it's the usual material from crappy bosses that only want to reaffirm themselves in their bossy bullshit, just tell them that it was "very remarkable and with very enlightening ideas" and move on.
Not his best book (in my opinion), but a great one. It's a remarkable example of the "whole is much better than the parts": the start is a bit boring, the pseudo-dialogs with the fish are a bit silly and the climax is a bit disappointing, but when you close it you get the feeling that you experienced something great.
What is always superb in his work is the language economy, the to-the-point sentences, the lack of useless words and meaningless descriptions. Hemingway invented the modern prose and all of us readers and writers owe him a drink.
No (never heard of it). I'm answering to the question "What do you do when a great book has an absolutely uninteresting storyline?", not about this specific book.
If a book has an "absolutely uninteresting storyline", then it's not that "great" to me, so I drop it and get another one.
Drop it. There are other 1 trillion books out there waiting for you that are worth your time, not like this one.
angel
joined 5 years ago
"Supervillain has a non-aggression pact with a country with winters hard as fuck and then decides to invade the frozen-balls-country in winter anyway"
Do you screenwriters want us to believe this shit? Are you even trying?