In a few weeks, we’re going to be finished reading E L James’s Grey. I know, it’s like we just started. The time sure flies when you’re reading a romance where the characters go from having first met to madly in love in a few weeks.
So we have a very serious, very important decision ahead of us, and we need our readers’ help. Yes, you. You reading this sentence right now. You could make some serious changes around these parts, all you have to do is make a suggestion answering one very important question:
What book should we read next?
Ariel and I have noticed that we’ve gotten a lot of book recommendations while we’ve been drowning in Divergent and Jamie McGuire and – the closest thing we’ve ever had to a contractual obligation yet – Grey. A lot of them seemed really interesting. But it’s been a while, and perhaps interests have waned. So we really want to take a moment to get a sense of what the people want right now. What book should we read next?
So leave a comment! Is there a book you think we really need to read? Is there a book that you think nobody should ever read? Then it sounds perfect, and you should let us know what it is on this post! One of these mass “hey, do you have a book recommendation for us, literally everyone?” posts was how we started reading House of Night, so we know you guys know about some real shit that we gotta check out. Even if you have commented about a book before, please mention it again on this post. We cannot remember even suggestions we might have explicitly told you sounded awesome at the time, because we have to remember minor details about Christian Grey’s childhood. We don’t like it either.
All of that being said, there are a few things that we’re not especially interested in:
- Another Jamie McGuire novel about the Maddox brothers. We know there are like 8000. We’re pretty good right now.
- Something incredibly similar to something we’ve just read. Like, say, Maze Runner.
- We’ve also done a lot of romance. Not that we’re not game for another one, but there are a lot of genres we haven’t gotten a chance to explore yet.
- Boring-bad books, as opposed to hilarious-bad books. You guys know what kind of books do and don’t work well for the blog.
So what have you got for us?
For a change of pace, try the legendarily bad “The Sword of Shannara”. It’s the Ur-Tolkien ripoff.
Eragon. Literally written by a teenager and so inexplicably popular that it had to be made into a movie before people realized it was just a bad amalgam. I love how the author tries to use archaisms.
Ah, but “Sword of Shanarra” attempts to do what “Eragon” failed to do, except that it somehow managed to be even worse.
Seconding Eragon. That entire series is just… Vile. I couldn’t finish the first book, but my sister did. And even though she has a much stronger tolerance for terrible things than I do, she found it entertainingly bad.
And to add my own suggestion – The Selection. It’s another YA dystopia/romance, but I found it just awful enough to be entertaining. It might not be quite what you guys are looking for though, given that it focuses mostly on the incredibly badly done romance (instead of the also incredibly badly done world building).
Bluh. Eragon. I got like 50 pages into that book before I stopped. Terribly boring, as I remember those first 50 pages. I was pleased to find out I wasn’t missing much by stopping that early.
Think Like a Champion: An Informal Education in Business and Life by Donald Trump.
The chapter titles alone are amazing. “Learning is a New Beginning”, “Essays, Assets and Stephen King” and “Wisdom” are sure to be classics.
With Star Wars coming out, it might be fun to do Jedi Search by Kevin J. Anderson. I know it’s sacreligious not to like Kevin J. Anderson, but the book is ridiculous.
Wanna try some bad Christian propaganda fic? I’m thinking something like Left Behind or similar – I know I loved the Slacktivist’s reviews of it.
Haha I started reading the Left Behind series as a kid thinking it was like a supernatural thing and not realising it was religious propaganda. When I did I basically threw the book across the room and was like NOPE.
I read the “Left Behind: Kids” books. I actually read a bunch of them. I can’t remember anything about them, though. Just that they’re Left Behind, but aimed at and starring children.
Wait, weren’t all the children supposed to be raptured? How did that work?
(&nope, “different universe, different rules” doesn’t hold when the whole point of it is “Yeah, that’s totally gonna happen ’cause the Bible told me so”)
It might’ve been that they were teenagers. I don’t think teenagers are guaranteed a Rapture. It has to have been like 15 years since I read those books…
I’ll mention Apolonia again. Although it IS Jaime McGuire, it is a young adult romance triangle Sci-Fi book. Twilight with aliens, is the best way to describe it. Otherwise, I have to second Terry Brooks (as much as it hurts, because I loved his ‘Kingdom for Sale’ series when I was younger). I haven’t read the Shanarra series, but have been told that it is very over-hyped for what it is.
Ariel and I were definitely excited about Apolonia. We might not want to do it next since it’s still an author we’ve done a lot, but it’s super on our radar.
Jenny Trout is reviewing Grey AND Apollonia
“lucy in the sky” basically a Go Ask Alice remake written mostly in CAPS and ridicolous teen speak. its meant to be a cautionary tale about drug use but instead spends all book describing how drugs are OMG SO GREAT!
Also the “ttyl” series which is a trilogy written entirely in text and msn messages.
the “private” series by Kieran Scott, a book series about rich kids in boarding school and the new scholarship student who discovers all their dirty secrets, written so horribly itl make your eyes bleed
I will second the TTYL series. I was given the first book as a gift when it was published because I was a teen so obviously it was written in my language… I still cringe just thinking about it.
Well, there is some dismal One-direction fanfic in the darkest reaches of wattpad, but that’s just too depressing and, well, these authors are not exactly claiming that they can write.
I wish you lived in France, because I’d love to see you tackle our lovely production of pseudo-intellectual, adult-angst literature, that has (deservedly) yet to be translated. Some authors excel at thinking that it’s deep and bold to tell a story that has been told thousands of time, with zero formal innovation, but be smug about it. They deserve punishment. Sadly, I don’t know the anglophone scene as well in that category (since I loathe it with a passion, even more than YA angst).
Or how about bad self-help books? Like dating advice or PUA crap? That might give you a break from fiction although, sadly, I’m pretty sure you’d meet a LOT of the same depressing stuff as you do with Christian, Gideon, the Maddox bros and the rest of the douchebags.
I’m still hoping you might do Maze runner some day, because it’s much, much stupider than Divergent, it’s a textbook case of writing don’ts AND c’mon, books 2 and 3 actually have zombies!!! Where’s the zombie love, Ariel?
I never comment and I’m sorry because I’m an avid reader and love you very much. BBGT was one of my safety nets when I was finishing writing my PhD, and now it allows me to know my shit when my students ask me about 50 shades, even though I’ve never read it, so double thank you for that.
I REALLY want to do bad self-help books. I don’t even know where to start looking for them, though, like how do you pick? Aren’t most of them terrible?
And Maze Runner we’ve been so torn about. I started reading the first one and I definitely hate it already, but I’m worried it’ll be super boring to write about like Divergent. I ended up watching the Maze Runner movie on an airplane and thought it was OK until I got to the end and thought about everything I’d seen and been like…wait what…why the fuck did any of that have to happen? And then I read the plot summaries for all the book and was like THIS IS SO FUCKING DUMB. But I’m worried that it won’t be funny dumb, and that we’ll just have the same 3 things to mock like in Divergent. I don’t know, though, so I’ll keep slogging through the first book and making notes in the hope that I think we can wring some comedic gold from it.
The pseudo-intellectual, adult-angst literature sounds hysterical. Maybe someday someone will tackle a translation and then we can pounce.
I’m so glad you decided to comment today! I’m also glad we prevented you from having to actually read Fifty Shades but provided you with some very necessary academic tools.
How sad, I just checked and Christine Angot has only ever been translated in German and Italian (right now there are some hysterical articles about her because she was on a radio show where she went on and on about how the first sentence in her latest novel took her two months to write and it was so painful and hard. Said sentence is: “My father and mother met in Chateauroux.” No kidding. She’s insufferable and very pretentious and her fame came from writing about being a victim of incest, which is horribly sad, but doesn’t make her a decent writer nonetheless). Or there’s Emmanuelle Berhneim, who writes painfully boring sex scenes in the pizza place toilets, which is as sad as it sounds. All of it written in a style so bland, we used it for our French-220 students because there wasn’t a single word they didn’t know.
I hate fashionable French authors, they’re the worst 🙁
I have no recommandations for bad self-help books, as I’m a sensible adult who stays away from them.
And yeah, Maze runner IS mind-numbingly boring. Someone described it as an experience like listening to a teenager telling you how he beat a videogame level and I thought it was spot-on. But the three books are all appalling in a different way, so I guess there’s that…
Yep, seconding Ariel’s opinions here. We’ve been talking about Maze Runner, but it’s definitely not something we want to read right now. We might just do the first book so we avoid another Allegiant.
I promise I read your entire comment, even though I’m only responding to one small part of it: we’ve been trying to get my girlfriend to do some guest posts, and I was showing her the comments on this post and she has just expressed interest in the French suggestions. She speaks french. Whatcha got?
Christine Angot for the angsty pretentious autofiction; Marc Lévy and Guillaume Musso for the poorly-written, unoriginal, highly popular romance; Grégoire Delacourt for the cheap, feel-good lit that teaches you deep stuff like ‘love yourself’ and ‘money won’t make you happy’; Virginie Despentes and Catherine Millet for the voyeuristic stuff (Valérie Trierweiler for the voyeuristic stuff of the former first lady); Eric Zemmour for the reactionary, masculinist load of crap; Emanuelle Bernheim and Florian Zeller for the cliché, vaguely depressing short novels about middle-aged adultery that are so uninspired and banal, it makes you feel awesome because if they could find a publisher, so could you; and our fashionable TV-philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy, if you’re into white guys going to Serbia and Libya to make a statement, then leaving after 5 minutes and writing a shitty book about how shocking this all is while spending most of his time socializing with the parisian jet-set. Many of them are covered in “Le Jourde et Naulleau”, a mock literature manual that pastiches their style and ironically analyses their many shortcomings (you’d love it!).
And meanwhile, we have some absolutely fantastic SFF authors who never receive any publicity or praise from the mainstream media because c’mon, it’s fantasy, it’s not serious.
The City of Bones Series was so bad. At so many points it seemed like it could go somewhere good but then the author just noped out of taking her own writing seriously.
Matt and I were just discussing this series, and I read the plot summary for the first book. Some of it sounded like it could be interesting, and some of it just sounded kind of dull. Was it really poorly executed? I’m thinking I’ll read the book and take some notes to see if it would be fun for us to do in the future, because it’s been recommended a few times. I just couldn’t do another book that was just Divergent-dull.
I’ve got two suggestions!
First: City of Bones by Cassandra Clare. This might be too close to a taste / personal preference suggestion, because I think a lot of people actually genuinely enjoy these books, but honestly, it might be a nice change to read a book that’s bad, but not as laughably, objectively bad as what E.L. James or the Casts write. My favorite parts of BBGT are when you guys get into somewhat deeper discussions of “this is bad because it’s problematic in a specific but maybe not immediately noticeable way” or “this is bad because it completely contradicts these specific goals of the book.” I’d like to see the blog tackle something like YA urban fantasy that doesn’t fall into the realm of dystopian fiction or sci-fi.
Also, I feel no guilt about recommending that we sacrifice Clare on the altar of BBGT because she’s an absolutely fucking terrible person who got her start terrorizing / cyber-bullying people in the Harry Potter and LOTR fandoms of yore. There were a lot of plagiarism ~scandals back in the day, and the best lines of her Mortal Instruments series are ones she wrote back in the early ’00s, lifted from her Harry Potter fanfic, and dropped into modern manuscripts.
Second suggestion: Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews. My mom says it was the big “guilty pleasure” read of her generation, and the Lifetime Movie was surprisingly good, so I read the book, and sweet merciful Christ, it’s bad. Bad writing quality. Bad characters, in that they are bad people who are also written badly. Terrible plotlines that the author tries to justify in wildly convoluted ways. A family tree so complicated and incestuous that you can’t figure it out even if you try to work it out on pen and paper.
So I usually recommend Tiger’s Curse, a novel about an idiotic white girl destined to break an Indian curse while also falling in love with two tiger brothers. It’s a horrifically written and ridiculous novel with one of the stupidest protagonists I’ve ever seen (seriously), though admittedly there are probably sections that would are pretty darn dull, because it’s just like the author included every bit of information she found while Googling stuff for her novel, no matter how superfluous.
HOWEVER, I would totally be on board with a snarking of City of Bones. I don’t know, but I never get sick of reading people do chapter-by-chapter reviews of those books, probably because they do often lead to more interesting discussions about popular YA since, like you say, they aren’t as laughably bad as FSoG, but do hold many problematic, predictable (and oftentimes completely strange and nonsensical) plot points. And I don’t who I really dislike more—Jace what’s-his-face or Cassandra Clare. I hate judging authors I’ve never met automatically as “bad people” for small things they’ve done or said publicly, but Clare goes far, far beyond that. It’s sad how many resources you can find on this subject alone.
The Meredith Gentry series by Laurell K. Hamilton, about a mortal immortal kind of faerie princess turned private investigator (I think? She doesn’t spend much time actually doing her job and her attempt to…something. It has fairies, trolls, and a few interesting attempts at using tentacles during foreplay. Every other chapter is some sort of sex ritual though, I mean don’t you want to know if they ever find the cure for her favorite man fairy’s sabotaged crotch? The last couple books are the most ridiculous. The books themselves aren’t very long, and you can tell when the writer hit that Out Of Ideas moment yet kept writing under the premise of Ah, F*ck It.
Or, you could go with the bizzare short read The Haunted Vagina
by Carlton Mellick III.
I read way too many stupid books.
Or maybe Pretty Little Liars. Not sure who the author is.
Shit…I like all of your ideas. I think I tried reading the Pretty Little Liar books when I was younger and couldn’t get into them, and the show is still so hot that we’d probably pique the interest of some new readers potentially. But damn those weird faerie princess/private investigator ones sound right up our alley.
Also, I’m still holding out for “Chicken, Chicken” this October. Ah, one day.
Would you be up for blogging about it for us this Halloween?
Believe me, if I had my copy of it I would have already contacted you with the idea. Alas, it was lost to the aether a long time ago. That, or I threw it out. I don’t actually remember, but I don’t own it.
But seriously though, two people accidentally knock into a witch and as punishment she turns them into CHICKENS, because apparently they were rude and that means shape-shifting.
But the really disturbing thing is how everybody reacts. It’s disturbing for all of the wrong, wrong, WRONG reasons. And hilarious. THEY TURN INTO GIANT CHICKENS.
I like how you sort of imply there could be a right reason for turning someone into a giant chicken
I think there would be at a least one. Say this witch worked at a McDonalds and the kids were really fucking rude customers who played some sort of prank on her involving chicken. It would be just to turn the kids into giant chickens then.
I mean, let’s say you killed and raped somebody and never got caught. Turning into a giant chicken is stupid but you can’t say the murderer did nothing to deserve it.
Knocking into a witch by mistake and forgetting to say sorry when you ran away should carry consequences decidedly lighter than shape-shifting into giant farm animals.
I’ve come to realize that catching up at this point in my life is going to be impossible and I’m really missing this blog; so I’m going to be jumping back on board with this new book (whatever it may end up being).
I think I made a few suggestions on the goodreads page, but I’ll post them here again because even I forget what they were.
1) Their Virgin Captive by Shayla Black – I know you said nothing like what you’ve recently done, but I have to throw it out there because it’s basically what if Christian, Gideon, and Travis were brothers and liked the same girl but, instead of fighting over her, decided they could share.
2) Caller ID by Rachelle J. Christensen – It’s a thriller/mystery (though there weren’t many thrills nor much mystery). Anyway, I don’t understand the high reviews because I don’t think I’ve ever read anything so shallow (I finished the book and knew about as much about the characters as I did on page one).
3) This actually pains me, but they have a whole series where they’ve taken Shakespeare and turned it into texts… I just… The titles really say it all; YOLO Juliet; srsly Hamlet; A Midsummer Night #nofilter; Macbeth #killingit
That last suggestion may be too painful to do though. If schools ever start using those books instead of the actual plays, our education system has officially reached rock bottom.
As usual I’ve missed you so much! I may have had an excited outburst when I saw you returned.
Yeah, you’ve added some real gems to the goodreads page. I’m happy we have the issue now of drowning in so many good options. Those books you recommended where every single one by the author is like, “5 men are in love with her…how will they all make it work” are hysterical, and I am committed to eventually tackling at least (AT LEAST) one of them because they look hysterical.
I’m so excited you recommended a thriller/mystery because we definitely haven’t done something like that. I mean, obviously The Host was super thrilling what will all the cave tours but still.
The Shakespeare text series sounds amazingly terrible.
The cave tours definitely had me on the edge of my seat. I don’t think this one has any caves, but I’m pretty sure there might be a mountain or at least rocky trail at some point.
Also, the Shakespeare ones are horrifying. Equally horrified people have posted pictures of some of the pages. This one is from YOLO Juliet:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/06/12/19/2990925800000578-3121419-image-m-27_1434132704515.jpg
WHAT. WHAT IS THIS. WHAT.
This is something that destroys the whole point of Shakespeare and, with it, the last shred of hope I had for humanity.
http://www.amazon.ca/YOLO-Juliet-William-Shakespeare/dp/0553535390/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1441991714&sr=8-1&keywords=yolo+juliet
Maybe Scarlet by A C Gaughen. It’s about Will Scarlet from Robin Hood only she’s a lady in disguise running from her shitty family. I remember being excited by the premise of the book but then it all went horribly wrong. The love triangle, the douchebag Robin Hood, the helpless heroine.
Also The Selection. It’s a dystopian so I get you might be sick of those but I NEED SOMEONE TO SHARE MY PAIN.
What about ‘glow’ by Amy Kathleen Ryan (it’s the first book in a trilogy) or The Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare or ‘Fallen’ by Lauren Kate or the rest of the books after hush hush? (have you guys thought about doing the other 3 books after ‘Hush, Hush?’)
I second “Fallen” by Lauren Kate. That’s the angels one, right? Gads, that was awful.
I think that the combination of this blog and a Dan Brown book would be a very beautiful thing.
Please do a non-romance, high fantasy, as others have suggested! I think you haven’t done one before? Also, the two fantasy books I saw suggested are ones I haven’t read, which makes it much more fun to read through your posts, because every ridiculous new sentence about disintegrating clothing comes as a hilariously delightful surprise.
Also, this is unrelated, but I am an aspiring author, and it has become one of my biggest goals that once (if?) I get published, I never make it onto your blog. xD
But-but-but how could you ask this? #SaveThePearls! They’re in dire need of your help!
It’s a Romance, yes. The plot is solely romance. Buuuut, it tries to deal with racism, in that very racist way. And there’s furries! What’s not to love!? As I said before I think it would be a much easier read then FSoG because the majority of people actually hate this series, and most of the high-ratings on it, on sites like Amazon, are made by people who were paid to leave positive comments.
I did try to look for a book in the Horror genre. Everyone loves to poke fun at a bad Horror movie – why not a Horror book? That would be so fun! But I searched and searched and searched and all I can find are lists of “Best Horror Books” and “Stupid-funny horror books (that are INTENTIONALLY so)”. :'[
So I’m really trying to find something without Romance, but it so happens that a lot of the worst books to ever be made prioritize it. Go figure. You can find a lot with “worse books ever” searches though, and I stumbled upon this:
Moon People, by Dale M. Courtney, the book that will murder English majors such as yourself, because even I can see the grammatical catastrophe this thing is.
First couple lines:
_
This story begins on a Beautiful sunny day in Daytona Beach Florida With a man by the name of David Braymer. A 45-year-old Single man that works at the local High school as a science teacher and astrology in the 12-grade level.
_
So charming 😀
You can find it on Amazon here, where it’s very easy to tell that the majority of these reviews have been fabricated:
http://www.amazon.com/Moon-People-Dale-M-Courtney/dp/1436372135/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1441125548&sr=8-1&keywords=Moon+People&pebp=1441125550299&perid=1Y824S4ATY1WDEFWA5EB
There’s a little bit of romance involved, I believe. Sounds to me though that space travel and the Moon is what makes up most of the book 😀
There’s also this, by an author who’s an awful person:
http://www.amazon.com/Kingdoms-Reaches-Martins-Dragons-Fantasy-ebook/dp/B00N42RRYS/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1441129581&sr=8-5&keywords=Robert+Stanek
It’s fantasy. It has kids! It has magic! And some romance! It’s Harry Potter! Except not. There are some sources that even say he’s photoshopped himself next to the author Brian Jacques.
Wizard’s First Rule (or is it called Sword of Truth? I have no idea!) by Terry Godkind.
You can see it on Amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/Wizards-First-Rule-Sword-Truth/dp/0812548051/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1441138927&sr=8-1&keywords=Sword+of+Truth
This has romance, yeah… BUT, to my knowledge, you guys have not yet done Fantasy. You have Erotica, Romance, Dystopian, but not one that is mainly categorized as Fantasy. I also think it would be “unique” because the majority of the books you have poked fun at have female characters. In this oh-so-amazing book you get an oh-so-awesome Gary Stu. It’s also gruesome (I hear the guy rips someone’s spinal cord out with his bare hands), so that’s a new element for BadBooksGoodTimes, for sure, right? But it’s still dumb. So you get the familiarity everyone wants! =D
So I’ve spent about an hour on this, haha, I’m going to look more later the next time you ask for suggestions. xD
I hope the decision isn’t too hard to make! Everyone’s made some really good recommendations.
—When I said that the books you’ve read on here mainly have female characters, I meant they mainly have female characters as the protagonists. Whoops ^^
Long-time lurker. Thanks for doing recaps for Grey and Pamela 😀 although I think I’ll try to read Pamela a bit on my own. I’m not sure if my suggestions are going to be helpful, but years and years ago, I read Janelle Taylor’s Grey Eagle books, which are very cringe-worthy because they are very historically inaccurate, have an extremely alpha hero that broke a heroine’s hand and raped her numerous times.
For self-help books, maybe John Grey’s Men is from Mars Women from Venus series? Years and years ago, I discovered a horrible fan-fiction story about Harry Potter: My Immortal series, which kind of turned into a book 😀
Grey Eagle sounds dreadful, and so, so, so very madddening… @_____@
Whoa, whoa, wait! My Immortal got turned into a book? Or did you mean that as in it became a very long fan-fic with sequels?
So I looked it up and all I found was that some Youtubers made a webseries out of it. “(MY) IMMORTAL: THE WEBSERIES”. I started watching it, and it is perhaps the best thing in the world.
Thank you 😀
That’s how I felt when I read two and a half books…(three was very painful) Well, My Immortal isn’t a book exactly, someone decided to self publish it using lulu I think. Let me check. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11099295-my-immortal
Thanks for Webseries recommendation. Might check it out haha.
Gamer girl. It’s a pretty terrible book about a girl that discovers gaming (world of Warcraft style). It’s like… I read it aloud with my sister because of how absurd it was at times.
Also Ghostgirl. Equally absurd. Girl dies choking on a gummie bear and watches her crush have sex with his girlfriend. Weird example of an author who doesn’t understand tone. Also lots of outdated pop culture jokes. Although it might be too similar to house of night.
You HAVE to do an Anita Blake Vampire Hunter book (Laurel K Hamilton). This series went from revered to hated by her fans. There are over 20 or so now and Narcissus in Chains is considered to be the book that did the series in.
I second “Save the Pearls”. It’s racism disguised as (terrible) dystopian YA literature. The rasicm ist so blatant it would be funny if it weren’t so sad (especially since the author is saying stuff like “nonono this is not rasist, it is supposed to show you how bad rasism really is!” <– no it doesn’t. it’s just f**king racist).
But I would also enjoy you doing the Merry Gentry Series by Laurell K. Hamilton. It’s basically the “fuck or die”-trope stretched to a multi-book series.
Read “Save the Pearls”!! It’s a terrible YA dystopia that’s just completely racist. Or the Merry Gentry Series, which ist basically the “fuck or die”-trope streched to a multi-book-series!
“To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf. It’s not “bad,” per se, but the stream of consciousness format makes you feel like your on acid. And also horrible sex references.
Ooof. I tried reading that in college. Virginia Woolf and I do not get along.
I almost forgot: The worst book I have ever actually finished, by far, is “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I will go on the record as saying that the book has literally NO redeeming qualities.
Not even the super subtle demon child???
Not even the evil villain whose worst evil power is assisting the pastor who slept with his wife while simultaneously thinking evil thoughts about him.
That is seriously the villain’s evil plan: Thinking evil thoughts at the pastor, who apparently is so magically spiritually “in tune” that evil thoughts, devoid of any malicious action whatsoever, make him physically ill.
And his plan of assisting the pastor with his daily duties while thinking evil things WORKS, because the fuck if I know. Apparently Dimmsdale or whatever his name is is spiritual enough that evil thoughts can make him physically ill but not spiritual enough to realize that the person responsible for this might be the guy who is around him all the time and is the husband of the woman he slept with.
And then there’s said demon-child, with whom we spend an entire chapter all about her walking down a path. That’s literally it. During this walk, the main character reflects on how
her bad decisions ruined her lifehow everybody else has been really mean to her, and also angsts about how annoying it is to have a kid with your illegitimate lover. That’s a bummer, man.Hester never shows any remorse for her adultery, but instead blames everybody else for treating her badly because of it, and only improves her behavior when running off with her former lover becomes impossible.
Plus, the prose manages to make all of this dreadfully boring shit somehow seem EVEN MORE BORING.
Ugh. Just horrible. And yet, I liked Hawthorne’s short story “The Black Veil”. Go figure. Maybe because the focus wasn’t on how angsty the main character was but instead on the people trying to poke around in his business?
I was hoping to see you guys rip Twilight to shreds. It’s been done to death, but for good reason. Any Nick Sparks book would be great fun.
What about After by Anna Todd? This time it’s not Twilight fanfiction but One Direction fanfiction. Jaja
Just thought of another one; ‘As For Me and My House’ by Sinclair Ross. I read it for a Modern Canadian Fiction course that I took over the summer – in which ‘modern’ turned out to mean written in the last 100 years – and the utter disdain I felt for the main character (well, all the characters really) matches my feelings for most of the characters in the books you’re currently reading. Maybe I just didn’t appreciate the many themes the story was supposed to inspire, but I honestly hated reading every page of that book.
“Happy Family”, by David Safier or “The Never List”, by Koethi Zan. Both start out fine(ish), but, when they go downhill, they go downhill hard.
Also, I know you said that you’d rather not read another romance right now, but. when you’re ready for another one. I’d absolutely love to read your thoughts about Marc Lévy’s “If Only It Were True”.
Anything by Dan Brown? Please please please> you’d have a field day with the descriptions on the professor, whatever his name is and his lovely assistants in the Da Vinci code and the one after that (something about angels…)
A few of you guys have asked us to Dan Brown’s work. I’ve never actually read anything he’s written, but I was under the impression it was decently written? Would it actually be something we could mock chapter by chapter or is it one of those that would have a couple really golden moments but be kind of boring to write about (like Divergent became kind of one-note to make fun of, the same bad thing stretched out into 3 boring, awful books.)
Hahaha nope. It’s probably more on the side of boring-bad, but I haven’t touched his stuff in yeeeeeears
Hahahaha, decently written? It’s terrible. But the reasons it’s bad are indeed boring, as Matthew has pointed out.