Son of Awesomely Bad Books

[rachelmanija]

See post below for context, ie, if you guys don't entertain me, I can't guarantee I won't flee into the cold night in my jammies.

Last week lady_ganesh asked me to name and briefly describe the five worst books I'd ever read. I replied:

Oh God, SO MANY! How to choose?!

1. Robin Hobb's Forest Mage (The Soldier Son Trilogy, Book 2)

Comments

[mroctober]

Really, the Hobb's book the hero is constantly derided for being fat?!? And all that misogyny. Amazing.

[rachelmanija]

To be fair, Hobb herself clearly thinks it is mean to constantly torment the hero for being fat. And he is magically fat, so it really obviously isn't his fault, in case some readers might blame him. However, the reading experience is still 700 pages of "You're FAT!"

Oddly, the Chalker book also involves magical fatness. It's a theme!

[mroctober]

Magical fat? Is it like a curse. So fat = ugliness or doom. Sheesh, that's horrid.

[helen_keeble]

Again, to be fair, pretty much the entire point of the books is the clash between two cultures, one of which venerates the "Great Ones" (aka magically fat people) and the other of which despises the obese for being lazy and undisciplined. The protagonist is a member of the latter group who is (against his will, and boy does he angst about it) moved into the former culture.

Personally I didn't find it offensive in terms of portrayals of body issues; it was just an incredibly depressing trilogy!

[wyldemusick]

The five worst...hm. Not sure I could name the five worst...likely the worst plus a four-title sample of crap.

The all-time worst, at least that I'm willing to remember...oh, wait, this might not have been the all-time worst, because I think a John Norman Gor novel occupies that spot...

Anyway, before I get distracted, the one book I've felt like actually burning was Lin Carter's Thongor In The Valley Of Demons, which got thrown across te room while I yelled, "I can write better crap than that!" Up to that point I'd never believed anybody actually did that. I went off right afterwards and wrote a fantasy story and sold it first go.

Frank Herbert's Chapterhouse: Dune, which was so sludgy and awful i couldn't get halfway through it.

Kevin J. Anderson's The Last Days Of Krypton, which takes on such a hypertrophied pulp style that it results in near death by purple prose which beckoning blood-lit shadows.

Mark Millar's Civil War Scriptbook, which demonstrates that whatever quality Civil War had was the result of artist Steve

[rachelmanija]

I read portions of both Chapterhouse: Dune and Lucifer's Hammer. The latter was terrible, but the former was more unreadable.

[tmthomas]

I'm surprised how many of these on your list I've read. When I think back, I wonder what else I'm repressing.

[lady_ganesh]

My husband had heard good things about the Gor novels (God knows from where) and bought the whole trilogy (first trilogy?) when a local bookstore was going under. He got to the first sexual assault in the first book, came to me visibly upset, and I said, "you don't have to read this, you know." And he said, "Good point." I believe I sold most of them on half.com.

[daegaer]

The Average American Male by Chad Kultgen has a so-original unnamed narrator who spend the whole book thinking unsexily about sex, doing unsexy sex and being freaked out by women's propensity to be people. It also includes the phrase "rock-hard B-cups" far too many times

[mroctober]

Wow, wonder what G. Chaucer thought about middle initials. Or his son, G. C. Jr.

[nestra]

One of James Patterson's books where there are children who have wings.

Whichever of the Dune books where the emperor turns into a giant worm.

[wyldemusick]

Children Of Dune is where he starts the process, but God-Emperor Of Dune is the one you're thinking of. Which was pretty bad, but the subsequent books are orders of magnitude worse.

[nestra]

Fortunately, when he turned into a worm, I realized that the books were ridiculous and stopped reading.

Oh, Sheri S. Tepper's "Beauty". Clank, clank, clank from all the falling anvils.

[tekalynn]

I cannot read Beauty. It made me feel ill right from the start and only got worse.

[copperwise]

The infamous book...the one that my review of garnered so much hate male from pre-adolescent future furries...David Clement-Davies' The Sight. Anthropomorphic psychic wolves...a depressed wolf who gets Oprah style counseling from an eagle about letting go of her guilt over eating animals...sadly, this is one of the reviews that has disappeared from the GMR site. But my gods, it was bad

[telophase]

Oh, lord, I read The Magickers. *twitch* *twitch* *twitch*

[gnarlycranium]

I read a Gor book once. If I ever run into the author on the street I'm going to carve out his eyes. Although not before letting him watch me feed his balls to him on skewers.

[helen_keeble]

OMG, 'The Shelters of Stone'! The entirety of which can basically be summed up as: I HAS A POEM. LET ME SHOW YOU IT. (again and again and _again_)

My only consolation for wasting an hour of my life on that book is that I read it in a bookstore, and thus did not even pay Auel library rights for the experience.