I have read far too many lackluster books simply for the experience of having read them lately:

Ender's Game, Stranger in a Strange Land and Dharma Bums to name them specifically. Looking back on them, it feels like I read more than that because I was painfully aware of the process while trudging through them.

It's ironic to me that I loved Starship Troopers so much so I decided to delve a bit deeper into Heinlein only to find I felt precisely the opposite about Stranger in a Strange Land.

I can't tell if it was the misogyny, the lack of action, or the fact that I felt I was being preached at that really made the story so tedious to me. Or perhaps because the author set himself up as a character in the story and made himself the Renaissance Man who was mentally and emotionally superior to his own Christ figure.

It’s great to be able to write books where you can create a universe you can out-think isn’t it? Good, now maybe we can move past the power fantasy/wish fulfillment stage of writing? Maybe you can resist actually writing yourself in as God this time?

Who knows? But the fact that I'm still thinking about the book after I've finished it is, too, odious to me.