I read all those romance books with Fabio on the cover. The thing is, I know it’s not going to be good when I pick it up, but…but…
I can’t believe it’s not better.
oh come on! At least give me an “E” for effort.
Obfusciatrist, I was going to mention the Destroyer series. Oh well.
There was another fantasy series I started reading, I can’t remember right now. It was about wizards with birds fighting some technological advanced country. I read two or three books, then started the new one thinking “Ok, this will answer all my questions”. I got a couple chapters in and thought “This sucks, I don’t really want any questions answered anyway.”
Eaglemage might have been that last book.
GES
ALL the Dune books, including the prequels. at least it’s got a plot…
“Jitterbug Perfume” by Tom Robbins. sorry. i. love. it.
Johnathan and Faye Kellerman.
what can i say. i need help. help me. please.
Sherri S Tepper. some book about a fungus that is actually god, or something.
i loved it at the time. read the damn book about 5 times. can’t remeber the title. the shame is making my memory fail.
i’m sad, and i have appalling taste in trashy novels. but sometimes you need to relax and live a little.
Darn. I hoped to be the first to bring up the Anita Blake series. I will, however, be the first to note the irony that the initial book in the series is actually titled Guilty Pleasures. Obviously Laurell knew what she was writing about.
Fenris is quite right about the Bimbo to Monsters criticism. Here we’ve got a fierce, sadistic master vampire, who’d gladly kill you just to make a point, who has repeatedly threatened to murder any of Anita’s boyfriends who are not him–and she loves him! That’s not what I want in my heroines.
And then there’s the book where she totals her car in one chapter, only to be seen driving it again two chapters later. Or the one where the bad guys put a contract on her head to get her out of the way so they can carry out their master plan. Except that their master plan will only work if she’s alive. Or the one…
Oh, never mind. They just don’t make sense. And yet, I’ve read them all.
Actually, I know you’re kidding and all, but no less of a personage than Lois McMaster Bujold herself recommended romance writer Georgette Heyer to me. I was doing book reviews and made a snotty comment about how I like whatever book it was but I hated the “romance-novel” cover.
She very nicely pointed out that the sort of snobbery I was engaging in was exactly the same sort as the “Sci-Fi? You like reading about robots and brain-eaters?!” type of cretin. She also pointed out that her newest Miles book A Civil Campaign was (IIRC) nominated for both the Hugo and the Sapphire (romance) awards, so there can be some cross-influence. She claimed Heyer was complex and very, very funny.
I’ve just recently gotten a couple of the romance novels she’s recommended (Heyer is impossible to find used), so we’ll see.
That said, unless Heinlein came back from the dead and told me personally to do so, I wouldn’t caught dead reading a novel with Fabio on the cover. 
Fenris
Betty and Veronica Double Digest
Yes, I’m serious.
[sub]I know I should just shut up but I feel I must explain[/sub]
I don’t like the new stories, but I love the B&V stories from the '70s and the '60s, especially those drawn by Dan DeCarlo. Betty and Veronica with their tiny little waists and pointy boobs, never a hair out of place, going to the malt shop and the sock hop and fighting over Archie. They’re like . . . I dunno . . . Rockwellian, I guess. Happy American Youth as it never was. I buy B&VDD when I’m feeling blue or when I need something mindless to read. Lord knows there’s nothing more mindless than an Archie comic book.
Well, I’ve got a weakness for Robert Jordan’s stuff, as I admitted in another thread. But I’m swearing off it. One day.
The more embarrassing ones are Dean Koontz, and Clive Cussler. I’m seeking therapy.
I wouldn’t put Sheri S. Tepper into the trashy books category. Most of her stuff is very well written. There are a couple of bad ones, but I wouldn’t call any of them trashy.
My post should sound suspiciously like Interrobang!?'s post, except about Star Trek. I had a bunch of books that required thinking, and while I was a student, I just didn’t want to think in my offtime. Terrible, I know. So I have a nearly complete collection of DS9 novels in my bedroom. My sister calls them the Harlequinn of the sci-fi world.
And what’s worse? I just bought a Buffy book too. I should be shot. I spent my teen years reading the classics, and my adult years reading teen books.
Well, nice to see I’m not the only one who can’t rip myself away from the bad authors. In addition to the aforementioned Hamilton books (‘bimbo to monsters,’ I like that), Terry “it’s time for a lecture to my once wise, but suddenly clueless supporting characters” Goodkind, I also read the crappiest of fantasy books, namely the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance books.
Say what you will about Eddings and his books, but FR is horrible. I mean talk about never, ever, being in danger of losing a fight (Drizzt and, of course, Elminster)! But I just can’t keep myself away…
I attribute it to starting this stuff in elementary school, personally…
Okay, Jordan’s stuff (which, admittedly, I read ravenously) isn’t exactly Great Literature, but it’s not horrible. The triouble comes from believing people ( the really rabid fans, say, or his publishers) who say that he’s the Modern Tolkien- he’s far, far, away from that league. On the other hand, comparing him to David “omnipotent blue stone” Eddings is perilously close to libel- it takes a whloe lot of mediocrity to write stuff that limp. I should point out that I’ve read all of Eddings’ stuff, too ;).
Heh. Robert Parker is my one painful weakness. I know most of his stuff has exactly the same plot, the same characters, and even the same repeated dialogue (“My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.”), but I absolutely cannot resist reading (and rereading) everything he’s ever written. The scary thing is, he’s been writing Spenser stuff since 1974, which means that the man must be in his mid-sixties by now. Some how or another, even though every other character in the entire series ages, Spenser and Susan just … don’t. How’s that for good writing?
Given that I used to work in a bookstore, I could probably give a illion examples of authors that must be someone’s guilty pleasure (Nora Roberts is J. D. Robb!) - but I think I’ll refrain for the moment. Maybe later…
Well, my favorite guilty pleasure is <drops voice to a shamed whisper> Judith Krantz. She’s just awful. But, dammit, her books are sexy! And her plots keep the pages turning. I can’t help it, I just like her books.
Some of the others mentioned here:
The Left Behind series – Well, I started reading this series for research purposes only, but I’ll probably read the rest just for the train-wreckish quality. Also, because I’d like to see how it’s all gonna turn out. Will we actually see Jesus? In person? Talk about guilty pleasures, though. I borrowed these from the library, and sheesh… I always felt like justifying my choice to the librarian. “Uh, I don’t really read these, you know. I’m, uh… borrowing them for an elderly fundamentalist shut-in. Yeah!”
The Pern series – I’ve loved these books forever (well, OK, – since 1977.) Ask me sometime how McCaffrey helped make me an atheist… I think the early books still hold up pretty well, although, even at its best, the quality was never much above hack-level. Stylish, fun and addictive hack-work, of course. The last few books have been terrible, though, and the very last one (Skies of Pern) was so intensely crappy that I didn’t even buy it, just read it from the library.
The Anita Blake books – I love these books! Like McCaffrey and Krantz, Hamilton is a hack – but a fun and interesting hack who doesn’t take herself too seriously. I absolutely lost myself in Hamilton’s fascinating and creepy world, literally doing nothing but working and reading until I had finished them. My husband kept asking, “Haven’t you finished those zombie books yet?” Gory, violent and so damn kinky that I sometimes felt I needed a bath after finishing one (a bath instead of a shower, because I couldn’t take the next Anita Blake into the shower with me) – I will definately be lining up for the next one, even at hardback prices. I didn’t like the Merry Gentry book as well, BTW.
My guilty pleasure author is Jean Auel; I’ve read all four novels in the Earth’s Children series. For all the fanatical devotion she inspires in her cultic fans, I can’t see what raises her work above the level of any other romance novel potboiler; what interested me however was the look into prehistoric society. Looking forward to her next installment in the series coming up soon after a hiatus of, what, 10 years? But maybe I don’t qualify for this thread because I’d never actually buy one of her books; I borrow 'em from the library.
Could someone jog my memory on what Terry Goodkind writes? I know I’ve read books by him, but cannot for the life of me remember what they WERE.
Oh, and I’d have to say Christopher Stasheff, master of recycling plots and churning out books over and over and over again, and nigh-omnipotent protaganists.
Ease into it, Fenris, and try a few of Heyer’s murder mysteries to start. She couldn’t plot worth beans but her characterizations and dialogue are stellar. Envious Casca is a hoot. It’s an acidic riff on a classic 20’s country house murder over a Christmas holiday. It would have made a great movie, with some of magnificent character actors so beloved by Eve.
I’m pretty sure it’s been reprinted in paperback but some libraries still have copies lurking on the shelves as well.
Serendipity…I just discovered the Anita Blake series last week. I’m trying to read them in order but they have a smarmy, car-wreck fascination so far. FWIW I’m on a vampire kick after reading Charlaine Harris’s offbeat Dead Until Dark. The difference is, Harris can write but I’m still glommed into Anita anyway.
Reading junkie,
Veb
He writes the Sword of Truth series. The first book, Wizard’s First Rule was one of the best fantasy books I’ve ever read. His sixth book Faith of the Fallen was one of the suckiest suckfest that ever did suck. Sigh…I’ll still read the seventh though.
Heh. Bujold said exactly the opposite! She said to ease into it and start with the Regency books and her mysteries were a good follow-up. 
I’ve got my hands on four (as I said, they’re impossible to find used): Fredricka, A Civil Contract, Sylvester and A Convienient Marriage. Of those four, do you have any recommendations?
(Envious Casca is now on my used-book list, btw: thanks for the recommendation!)
**
The more monsters she boinks, the worse the books get. I gave up at Blue Moon. I would’ve given up earlier, but I’d already bought the damned thing. As a matter of fact, the original reason I’d gotten into the series was I was nauseated by the whole grotesquely idiotic “cold, clammy, undead, human-predator vampires are sssssssexy” trend and Anita (early on) was a welcome relief. Little did I know…
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Excuse me, we don’t appreciate the term “junkie” as it has negative connotations. Let’s use the terms “Bibliofiend” or “Bookaholic”, shall we?.
Fenris
Terry Pratchet’s Discworld novels - I just can’t get enough of this really wierd series…
Ah, but this thread concerns bad books we love; Terry Pratchett is a brilliant writer who, in the guise of comic fantasy, has written some of the wittiest and most perceptive satire to come down the pike in many a moon.
Gobear to Fenris: Bimbo to Monsters, eh? I wish I’d said that!
Fenris to Gobear: You will, Oscar, you will.
The ineffable Lois is right in that Heyer hit her stride with the Regencies. I’m a hardcore mystery fan and discovered those first, so maybe it’s sentimentality. The mysteries are very brittle, mannered, 20’s period pieces. Picture Agatha Christie with a sex-drive, sophistication and a wicked sense of humor.
Another recommendation is The Unfinished Clue; country house murder again but the exotic Mexican temptress confronting the rigid pukha-sahib host is priceless.
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I had to dig up some reviews to recall–it’s been a few million years since I read any of 'em–but I’d recommend Sylvester of the four. Of the full list of titles the only one that rang a clear bell was The Talisman Ring. IIRC it’s witty, self-parodying costume froth elevated by a genuinely original heroine.
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Hmmmm. “Bookaholic” strikes addiction notes too and I’m pretty well in fiend-overdose, thanks to Anita…
Book-addled?
Veb