Thread: Don't you hate authors?

There are good, honest authors. And there there are the suck-off leeching bad authors.

I walk through the bookstore and see so much

[I][

CRAP

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decking the aisles, especially in the self-help and religion sections. It's actually pretty sad that these books are on the shelves to begin with. "Purpose Driven Life" was a good book. "Why is that Idiot Rich and I'm Not?" is a bad book. (No joke, there is a book with that title) really, you have to do your research to try and sift through all the silt in the bookstore, and everyone is claiming to be right.

Sample Timeline:


-Al Gore publishes "An Inconvenient Truth" (Which I belive is inaccurate to begin with, but that is besides the point)

-Copiers publish garbage and book the bookstores with Global Warming books.

-People publish rebuttals with smart-sounding titles like (Another Inconvenient Truth: Al Gore Is Wrong)

-Rinse and repeat.



The point is, you really have to be careful what you belive, since there are so many point blank, shot-dead contradictions in the same isle you have to have a mission statement written before you start looking for the book.

I can write self-help books too. I can write crap that people will try to live their lives by. I can start by saying "With all the other books out there saying it's all about what you do, I believe it's about what you feel." See, that simple. I just wrote the topic sentence to a self-help book. Now I can continue: "Attitude is as important as what you do in your everyday life. There are many doors, but without a map you won't find your way. What you have to do is start by making your own map. Write down your morals, beliefs and philosophies down. Now start organizing them into a statement you can live your life by. Next, you need a compass. A compass is the direction you're headed with your career and life in general." etc...

When you read a self-help book, you are putting your current life philosophy in the shredder. You are trusting the author to know what he/she is talking about and trusting them to not lead you astray. Well, ever since the invention of the self-help book, there have been people who sit down and type keys for forty hours and publish their theory. It may tell you to buy new things, to refurnish your apartment, to make new friends and drop old ones, but either way it's making you feel like you are getting stuff done. But in the end, it leaves you with one book sitting on your shelves with the author's confident picture on the front.

And self-help books are just the beginning. Conspiracy theory books blowing thing way out of proportion, books on 9/11 that feed you false facts or speculation along with the truth, etc.

(By the way, I have my own theory about 9/11. I actually believe there were two planes that crashed into the twin towers. I have some video evidence to back it up, plus a couple thousand eyewitnesses, and some wreckage data and building collapse charts)




PS: I pretty much know what some of you have in mind to post: "You just have to pick the books you want. You don't have to buy any books that you don't want to. Some people have their own preferences, and that works for them."

That's not a rebuttal, I'm just being a genie and predicting that is what some of you will be saying. Refer to my post in philosophy on "Stepping out of the Pool: Human Thinking" to get what I am saying.