The Worst Book You've Ever Read - Page 5

SMashing my head against the keyboard because of your dumb post.

2 for 2

Ah. K.

I'm sorry you don't like my post, but how is ";klkadsji asdjljka asjklajk" or whatever any better than "****eyeroll****"? Can't you just ignore my post or put me on ignore or something? Or, barring that, come up with some substantive criticism of what I had to say?

Anyway, judging by the clock we're both up late, so no hard feelings on my part.

Arg, now I'm psyching myself out when I type it haha

*gently pats Rath on the back*

I borrowed Ghost from the Library. I must stand strong before John Ringo.

I knew it. I knew she was gonna say Their Eyes Were Watching God.

The worst book I've read was The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield. A friend shoved it into my hands shortly after its initial release, promising me an excellent story and a profound new approach to philosophy. The story's "plot" revolved around the narrator thinking positive thoughts, which caused inanimate objects to reveal auras, which opened previously unused parts of his brain, revealing magical insights that made him happy and enlightened. He then talked to plants and bugs. Vague new age horseshit.

That may be somewhat inaccurate. I read it the mid 90's, so the specifics have thankfully grown hazy. Back then my literary diet consisted of Star Wars universe novels and the Stephen King library, and for something to upset my pedestrian sensibilities with sheer awfulness was a new and, let's face it, unlikely experience.

Hey Mutt, I was about to say that the Alex Cross novels are penned by Jonathan Kellerman, not James Patterson, but I checked, and you're right. Kellerman's returning character is Alex Delaware. I can't keep all these thriller series straight anymore.

Yeah, I remember hearing about this from a co-worker that I was extreeeemely romantically interested in. When she started talking about it and going into detail (much like your friend said about philosophy) about how fantastic it was and about how it changed a lot of things in her life and how I really needed to read it, I went home, did some research, and promptly kinda clammed up and hid away until she got re-assigned to a new location.

I'm going to second the late Richard Laymon. He's just the pits. Laymon's ideas were very limited, and when he got a good one, he killed it very quickly with cardboard characters, and pointless and directionless plot twists (ie. random events because he ran out of ideas). Plus there was the whole fixiation with rape, one of his rules seemed to be that his novels heroines had to somehow be sexually brutalized in every book, or there had to be a flock of chicks to get raped with her. I think Laymon was working out some...personal issues.
The only reason I sampled Laymon's work was because it was recommended to me by people I liked and respected who usually had good taste and others going on and on about how important to the horror field he was.

What boggled me most is the respect given to his "Beast House" series. I read the first book, The Cellar when I was younger, I suppose just after the 80's horror-lit boom had faded away and it stuck in my mind as one of the most idiotic novels, never mind horror novels, I'd ever read. Skip ahead to the early 00's...I raised the plot of the novel on a horror forum in a thread about "stupid horror books you've forgotten the title of", and several people got all upset with me for disparaging a "classic." The Cellar's actually on lists of the greatest horror novels of all time. And then I find out there were like four sequels. Ugh.


SPOILER for anybody who doesn't want to read these stupid books but wants to know why I find the "Beast House" novels ridiculous: you know what they're about? Ape-like creatures with big dicks that have mouths on the end, with which they make human women their sexual slaves. I shit you not--those are the monsters in these books, them and the odd sexually predatory human male so there can be some sex women -don't- like in the books. A lot of loving descriptions of these women's glorious response mixed with the usual Laymonesque rapes and atrocities. Really dreadful, pointless and ultimately idiotic.

Wait, didn't you start an entire thread mourning Laymon's passing as if Hemingway himself had just croaked?

EDIT: Oops, my bad, got you mixed up with that abrasive shithead cfMC. Too many letters!

Shouldn't Richard Laymon get some kind of award? I mean, if you're too rapey for CHUD...

Well he was a librarian at a Catholic school.

I'll go on the record as saying I enjoyed THE STAKE and RESURRECTION DREAMS. Fun grocery store paperbacks, miles more entertaining than... most of the garbage on those racks. Supposedly SAVAGE and THE TRAVELING VAMPIRE SHOW are good, though I haven't gotten around to reading either.

I figured getting a job at a bookstore was a really good way to meet other people who liked to read books that weren't written in ink made of diarrhea, right? WRONG. All of those sonsofbitches gave me shit for hating on Nora Roberts and Nicholas Sparks without ever reading any of their shit. So fter a year (seriously, it was a year) of constant nagging and bitching and people putting their shitty books on my shelf to try and get me to "just try it!!" I caved. HOLY FUCKING JESUS WHY? I tried for a month to get through that "Notebook" bullshit, and I couldn't. And it only ever takes me a day or two to tear through books but I just couldn't do more than a few pages at a time of that atrocity. Thankfully, I escaped Nora Roberts, but goddamn. You know you're not going to like how shit tastes without trying a bite of it, why must you be forced to read something if you're pretty sure you won't like it beforehand? UGH.

Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. WORST...FUCKING...BOOK...EVER.

I read the novelization of AFO, which was like Tom Clancy if written by a 9th grader.

Plus, in what universe is "Time to de-plane, asshole!" better than "GET-OFF-MY-PLANE!"?

Oh, DJ