Books That Are Fun To Ridicule

[Joey]

On the topic of hundreds of pages of nothing, I must bring up Robert Jordan. I really liked the Wheel of Time at first! I even plodded through the whole thing just to see how it'll end! Then I got to book 10 and I've been scarred for life. 1000 pages of "hey look over there, someone's channeling!"

[Spivsy]

for really bad books, and they're bad, just look for anything by David Almond. He wrote Skellig and The Fire-Eaters, and they're both the worst books I've ever read. The man's never heard of a comma.

[Aurinona]

I liked the first few Anita Blake books. Then it veered into "all weird violent kinky were-whatever sex, all the time" territory. Also, it became clear that Anita was going to solve EVERY apparently insolvable problem by developing a new superpower. I stopped reading them quite some time ago.

I also stopped reading them after Anita "fell off the chastity wagon" . The funny thing is that the person who had been lending me the books was very religious and seemed to spend a lot of time scowling at the "immorality" of everyone else in the dorms... I couldn't believe that the girl who was offended by her roommate's Abercrombie models on the wall was the one who was handing me books of wereleopard porn!!!

If you haven't already read them, I highly recommend Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series, which are in the same sort of supernatural detective genre (the author admits to being influenced by Laurell K. Hamilton) but don't have the boatloads of crazy that turned up in later Anita books. (Plus, one involves a zombie dinosaur. Does it get any cooler than that?)

Probably the worst book I ever read, which is definitely of the "So bad it's horrible" variety instead of the "so bad it's good", is Sour Puss by Rita Mae and "Sneaky Pie" Brown. Yes, the cat as a co-author should probably be a bad sign, but my father-in-law bought it for me because he'd heard that it involved a corgi, and I had it with me on a very very long drive and was out of other things to do. I honestly thought that the book had been written by the cat. Then I read the Amazon reviews, which said that the cat must have been on vacation because NO self-respecting feline would ever submit such a piece of dreck to the publisher. So now I'm not sure who actually wrote it, but stay far, far away. It has long, boring descriptions about growing grapes, the mystery is stupid, and there are several pages of conversation in which there are farmers thinking that their vineyards are under attack by terrorists. W. T. F.? Somebody finds an invasive insect species and it must mean that it is an act of TERRORISM and some sort of evil people are after their grapes? Puh-leaaaaaaase.

And a contribution to the "enjoyable but also fun to mock" book list- the works of David Eddings. The man has ONE story and keeps trying to rewrite it. The Belgariad/Malloreon and Elenium/Tamuli series are at least entertaining, if brainless and somewhat repetitive, but even if he finally ditched the obsession with magic blue rocks, he seems to have largely kept the same cast of characters under different names in his other books. I tried to read one of his newer works and it didn't even have the amusement thing going for it. The man clearly wasn't even trying. Maybe he's gone senile- this is the author who burned down his garage a few years back by throwing a lit piece of paper into a puddle of water and gasoline to "see if it was flammable", after all.

[Huggles]

I too loved Jordan. I bought the first book at a library sale for 50 cents, because it had a nice cover. I think I read the entire thing in about a day. The thought never crossed my mind until the 10th book, after a revisiting of the forums, that maybe it took me months to read the later ones because they were in fact boring and not simply because I was bored of reading in general. I'll still read whatever book whoever writes to finish the series, but when I have to write a novel to keep track of who and who isn't alive, it's time to stop. Honestly, if it weren't for the internet I wouldn't have had any idea that so-and-so was the one responsible for X, because I'd forgotten their life status. But the internet is a double sided blade and the majority of the forum had come up with some weird theory that they knew must be true, which only served to confuse me more since I'd never seen any signs of their claim, and then RJ confirmed that it was all a bunch of bull. The forum drama alone might have been worth the read. I'd recommend the first three or 4 books, and then the last one(not finished yet).

Now, there was one book I bought, again because it was pretty and cheap, that I threw away in disgust midway through. I couldn't tell you what it was about, some girl and her father who was a doctor, but I truly felt my time was unfairly wasted.

I found the early Harry Potter books to be entirely boring, and childish in the sense that I was simply to old to enjoy them. It got slightly entertaining when everybody started dying, but I think I would have been better off just watching the movies. The only reasons Snape, Lupin, and Sirius have any life for me as characters is because of the actors who played them. Throughout the books, I couldn't give a crap about whether Harry and the gang lived or died, dying might have been preferable just to make it interesting.

[Usul_Princess]

Actually, I do know a book that was so horrible that I tried to finish it because I wanted to know the point of it. It's a french book called La Cantatrice Chauve (The Baldheaded singing Diva) It's supposed to be a satire of an Englishman's life through a French person's overexaggerated eyes. It involves nonsensical stories which were so forgettable that I was questioning my comprehension of the language at the time. When something makes no sense in a book, you think you're missing something, but I honestly knew this was just a weak stab at stereotype that the English have very dull humor. That in itself can be a joke, but this is a play written into a short-story. This book isn't more than 110 pages, and I couldn't stand it because the same verbs were used about 800 times in the same setting of the book. I stopped somewhere around page 45.

[Rainbow Daydreamer]

Since some pretty well-known authors have been insulted in here, I'll throw in my hat: Anne McCaffrey. Handed to me by the local librarian as "books that girls who like fantasy like", it can't be said her books aren't pretty, but...

~ She is liable to turn fantasy into sci-fi in mid-book with no real overlap, just the equivalent of a "oh, the magic was technology all along, see?" And of course her technology is indistinguishable from magic. Dragons? Genetic-engineer them.
~ She has written the worst Mary-Sue I have ever seen. Seriously. And I'm a fanfictioneer. In the Pokémon and Neopets fandoms. And I have still never seen a bigger Mary-Sue than "Acorna, The Unicorn Girl". (Does this forum have spoiler tags? If so, I can go on.)
~ I'm afraid that, to continue the fanfictional flaws, she is a big believer in the "they stand next to each other sometimes" theory of shipping potential. There seems to be far more romance going on than you'd expect...

[daisybell]

Is it just the fantasy genre that's particularly prone to being really bad? I don't read very much fantasy, I guess, because I often find it hard to want to get into the universe. I think perhaps fantasy authors are so enveloped in their own universes that they can't see whether they're a) interesting and b) suitable for public consumption* so it's up to the publisher to decide.

* by this, I mean that inconsitencies and just plain stupid ideas (sparkly vampires?) and so on that don't bother the "owner" of the universe might well go beyond what an outsider will think makes sense

I remember at school we read more than one book which was crappy, in particular there seemed to be a theme of "kids getting naked". We read The Wind Eye by Robert Westall which was okay, but not one of his best, and then Walkabout by James Vance Marshall. And that was terrible. IIRC, there were so many verbs and colons and hardly any adjectives and commas. It went beyond stylistic to unreadably weird. I can't help but think that there was someone on the English department's staff who was getting off on the bits where the kids lost their underwear given that it happened in more than one book we read.

[Aurinona]

I think it's like Sturgeon's Law. "90% of science fiction is crap... 90% of EVERYTHING is crap." I'm sure that there are tons of really terrible non-fantasy/sci-fi books out there (harlequin romance, anyone?) and my "Worst Book Ever" award is going to a mystery novel.

The main issue with the fantasy genre seems to be that it tends to result in huge series of books- an author has a world, writes their story in it, then decides to do MORE stories in the same world, and after a while they run out of ideas/inspiration and are just handing junk in- and people will still read it because they loved the world/characters/etc and are holding out hope that the author can still recover that same spark of brilliance that the first books had... or they just want to know how the thing ends. If it was single books by an author who started sucking, I'd probably stop reading the bad ones and wait for reviews to see if things ever got better... or just move on to sometihng new. Instead, I ended up buying several Terry Goodkind books even after the man turned into a raving Randroid and started having his main character spout Objectivist slogans (instead of, maybe, fighting with his magic sword?) because I wanted to find out what happened. Eventually, it DID get bad enough that I gave up and I still haven't read the last two books to see how it all ended, but I should have stopped far sooner.

[Goldenchaos]

Ive always been curious about the Acorna book..so spoil away, Rainbow.

[bonecrivain]

I was going to bring up Anne McCaffrey! My oldest brother gave me the first three Dragonriders of Pern books when I turned...13, I think? Or maybe 11. I enjoyed them, particularly the first, but the Harpers of Pern series is pretty awful. Once I read a couple of those, I gave up on all her books. Another one of my brothers was curious about them, so I handed them off to him. I don't think he's read them yet, but he flipped through and immediately started making fun of the typically elaborate fantasy names, like "Mnementh." Really, how do you pronounce that?

The worst books I can think of are the ones from the Left Behind series. I usually try to block out the memory of having read any of them. I don't understand how such bad writing can be so popular. Everyone always talks about how difficult it is to get your books published, yet there's so much terrible stuff out there.

[AngharadTy]

"Neh-menth." Just a silent M. Not that she doesn't go overboard with dragon names--certainly--but she does have pronunciations for them. I forget where; at the end of a book? Somethin' official.

I was a huuuuge Pern fan. I prefer it that she doesn't actually write fantasy--I don't like the excuse "well, it's magic" when you can make a science out of it. There's that whole law by Clarke that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." It only looks like magic at first blush because you don't know the science behind it yet.

However, Pern books don't hold up very well once you start growing up some, or if you just have too analytical a mind. I never liked Acorna (spoiler tags do exist, by the way). The Rowan series is amusing and laughable and "wha-a-at!" She writes fluff. Fluff with dragons. Still. I wanted to Impress soooooo badly when I was in elementary school. She knows very, very well what her audience wants. Kinda admire that.

[Wingsrising]

I adored the earlier Pern books (including the Harper Hall) books when I was growing up. Still do, in fact. I like the Harper Hall books, the original trilogy books, and the two plague books. After that, the whole thing started to go downhill, and the most recent books have been a joke. She basically gave the planet this interesting social structure, developed in response to specific planetary conditions, then turned around and trashed the whole social structure. Uh... WTF? Did she think we were reading the books for the romances? ('Cause, if so, she should have made better romances.)

Personally, I preferred them as fantasy. It's not a question of science versus magic (there was never any magic on Pern except the teleporting and telepathy, and those are still magic after she went all scientific with the series). It's just... did the fact that there came to be a planet with people and giant dragons on it really need an elaborate background explanation relating them to everything else in her not-especially-interesting Sci-Fi universe? (The fact that the science is all BS doesn't really help.)

Personally, I was perfectly willing to go with her initial introduction: there were setters, there was Thread, they lost their modern technology in the struggle to survive, they bred the dragons to fight the thread. There. That's all I really needed to know.

Mind you, Pern has far too few animals to make up a reasonable ecology. There's no way they went that long without noticing fire-lizards, given that the things are apparently everywhere. And really, why IS everyone so afraid to be out during Threadfall? That's what dragons are supposed to be FOR.

**********************

I don't know that there's something special about the fantasy genre, or if it's just that that's what a lot of people on here read. If this were a mystery novel oriented community I'm sure we could come up with some real stinkers, too.

I think people think of fantasy (or SF more generally) as being a little niche market in the overall category of fiction, but I've been told that actually that's not true. SF, mystery, romance -- genre fiction -- are where it's at, fiction-wise. That's what people who read a lot, read. All those mainstream novels that get reviews in the New York Times about people having midlife crises and boring stuff like that -- you know, "literature" -- actually represents a smaller segment of the market than genre fiction. (Or so I've been told. I've not looked it up.)

In that case it's not surprising that we can think of more clunkers in the realm of genre fiction. One, there's a lot of it published. Two, people are actually reading them to notice they're bad.

[Silver Link]

I'm a fan of Sophie Kinsella's Shopaholic books (which I'm sure is weird to the people who know me since I'm mostly into fantasy) but she's also penned a few under her real name, which is Madeleine Wickham

She tends to follow the same storyline for most of her books but they're usually enjoyable once you get past the fact they're lighthearted fluff. Unfortunately, the books under her real name aren't as enjoyable and I don't think I can finish Cocktails for Three, which is kind of daunting since I usually finish every book I start. The problem is that the plot is too freaking predictable and you know how everything will end. Once you've read most of her books, you know what to expect and two chapters into Cocktails, I knew what would happen, how the protagonists would react and what would happen in the end. And it just doesn't seem to be written as well as the others

I don't think I've ever read a book that was a complete waste of time but I think I may have found one

[Wingsrising]

In other news, this weekend I did a marathon Twilight-reading session... After a month or so on the hold list at the library (and after having Eclipse and Breaking Dawn in my possession for about a week due to the vagaries of library request systems, I have read the Twilight saga. I read New Moon and Eclipse on Friday night and Breaking Dawn on Saturday. I found the books to be quite fast reads despite the length (clearly). I should note that this is fairly typical of the way I read fiction I've never read before (one reason I don't do it as often as I might) and doesn't reflect on the quality of the books (except that they weren't bad enough for me to stop mid-series when I had the books at hand.)

Thank you for posting Cleolinda's summary, EofS. Her take on it was pretty similar to mine, although I think she enjoyed it somewhat more than I did. I mean, I did find it entertaining, but it certainly doesn't bear re-reading (and I'm a big re-reader).

I will say, when all is said and done, that Bella is an example of one of my pet peeve characters: the character that everyone adores despite the fact that they have no real apparent good qualities and plenty of annoying ones.

Also, I find it ironic that the author frequently talks about how her stories are character-driven. (Wouldn't you have to have characters for that?)

Additional SPOILER comments for Breaking Dawn follow:

Spoiler: open/close

(1)Has there ever in the history of modern media been a supernatural pregnancy resulting in an unnaturally rapidly aging offspring that was a good idea?

(2)Dude, don't spend a protracted period of time building up to a big showdown with people who seriously need killing, then solve the whole thing with a conversation? If you don't want the book to have an unhappy ending, then don't start writing a plot that requires an unhappy ending.

(3)I have to admit, given that Bella has done nothing noteworthy in the entire series, I didn't see the "problem is solved when the heroine develops a new superpower" coming.

Really, there's only one character I found interesting enough that I would consider reading more about him. (That would be Carlisle, BTW.)

[roger9614462]

Actually, I do know a book that was so horrible that I tried to finish it because I wanted to know the point of it. It's a french book called La Cantatrice Chauve (The Baldheaded singing Diva) It's supposed to be a satire of an Englishman's life through a French person's overexaggerated eyes. It involves nonsensical stories which were so forgettable that I was questioning my comprehension of the language at the time. When something makes no sense in a book, you think you're missing something, but I honestly knew this was just a weak stab at stereotype that the English have very dull humor. That in itself can be a joke, but this is a play written into a short-story. This book isn't more than 110 pages, and I couldn't stand it because the same verbs were used about 800 times in the same setting of the book. I stopped somewhere around page 45.

You can't insult "La Cantatrice Chauve"! It's my favourite play ever! It's awesome when you get to see it! I couldn't stop laughing.

I just finished studying the genre of this play. In no way it's a stab at the English humor, and it's in no way a satire. This play is an absurd one. It just shows how the absence of communication in a couple can hurt the comprehension of each other. And the fact that they always repeat the same things just reinforces the feeling of communication problem ; if someone in a couple is not listening to the other one, they can't communicate and can't understand each other.