Ditto; I adore these books and have recommended them to several friends, who are now reading them. I don’t consider it a guilty pleasure. Eagerly awaiting November’s release!
I confess to still, yes, still keeping up with Anne McCaffery’s Pern series. Even though they’re stupid. Even though they invariably end with an exclamation (…as the dragons filled the skies of Pern!). I even read The Masterharper of Pern, despite the fact that I have always disliked his character. I have the newest one on request at the library.
I did give up Piers Anthony at about age 20, though. Well, except for the Mode series (and it’s one of the worst, I know…). I’ll read a rant on him, Fenris.
And I read every Left Behind book (for research! really!) as it comes out, but I only bought one, and only 'cause my husband wanted it so much, and it was his birthday, and, and, I have no excuse, do I?
Anne McCaffrey is one of my guilty pleasures. Piers Anthony, too. I get the same feeling every time I read one of their books, like I need to go scrub my mind clean. Sex in practically every book. And it’s not even decently done, just tossed in. The worst part is that I keep reading the darn books over and over. I like them, even though they’re utterly horrible.
The same friend recommended both to me. We have such horrible taste in books sometimes. 
[sub]At least I haven’t resorted to printing off trashy fanfiction to read…just high-quality fanfiction…[/sub]
jessica
As a former book editor at a South Carolina newspaper, I only know through Jordan’s publisher that he does exist under that name. I believe he lives somewhere on the SC coast, possibly Charleston.
They sent me one of his books for a possible review. Since I had grown up on the Conan’s, the Elrics, the LOTRs and the various knock-offs – I haven’t heard a vote for Brak the Barbarian yet, did I? – I had had quite enough of fantasy novels, so I didn’t bite.
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My problem with Spenser is not Spenser, it’s Susan Silverman. Susan needs to be riddled with bullets. In the last one I read, the plot went like this: Spenser is looking for a missing woman. He has never met this woman. He relays a lot of second- and third-hand information from unreliable sources about the missing woman to Susan. Susan says, “Of course since I haven’t met her it wouldn’t be appropriate to come to any psychological conclusions about her, but …” and she proceeds to psychoanalyze the missing woman. Spenser finds the missing woman. Everything Susan said about her was not only exactly true but instrumental in finding her. Someone kill her, please. (That said I do like the earlier ones. “Searching for Rachel Wallace” is my fave.)
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Georgette Heyer. When she was bad she was really bad, but when she was good she was divine. I recommend “The Grand Sophy.” It’s sort of like “Emma,” except that Sophy is far more shamelessly manipulative than Emma could ever imagine being, and never gets any comeuppance at all.
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I love the Outlander novels, especially the first one. Also, who mentioned Barbara Hambly? Her mysteries set in antebellum New Orleans are brilliant. (I love the way, when she wrote her first mystery, her publisher kept refering to it as a “premiere.” The fact that she’d written, like, 30 fantasy and sf books doesn’t count in the ever-so-superior mystery world.)
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I loved, loved, loved the Dragon books by Anne McCaffrey when I was a kid. (“Dragonquest,” with its romance between Brekke and F’nor was my favorite.) I re-read them a few years ago. They were so bad.
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I gulped down Mercedes Lackey’s “The Last Adept-Mage” (or whatever) trilogy in one weekend, even though I didn’t think it was really all that good. The hero’s constant agonizing over his homosexuality got old. And what is with the mystical telepathic horses? In that trilogy, as far as I could tell, the telepathic horses were sort of a hold-over from the author’s original (and rather juvenile) conception of the world, and could have been deleted entirely without damage to the plot. Should have been. Still, I read it eagerly.
Ok, I was trying to control my vitriol for Susan, but Jekeira’s post and a conversation I had with Pixcellent at the last NYC Dopers gathering have encouraged me to come out as a Susan hater. She clearly is the worst judge of character ever, because everyone she has ever met comes back into her life as some sort of criminal that Spenser has to chase down including her ex-husband. She goes on and on about how she hates violence, yet continually gets herself into situations where Spenser has to rough someone up in order to rescue her, after which she acts mighty magnaminous when she tells Spenser that she forgives him for his violent acts which would have been totally unnecessary had Susan fired up even two brain cells and avoided the situation. Also, the sheer creepiness of Spenser perpetually crowing about how other men are lusting after Susan. Oh, and let us not forget the thousand mentions per book of Susan claiming to be famished, and then eating half a grape.
Yet you notice, I still read all the Spenser books.
All first person narrators are inherently unreliable. We see Susan not as she actually is, but how Spenser sees her, so to get a true picture of her you have to filter out Spenser’s interpretations.
The “friend in trouble” is a convention of detective stories. It isn’t just Susan who seems to attract problems (although I seem to recall only three books in which Susan was the friend-in-trouble); Spenser has had to clean up personal problems for Hawk, Paul, Quirk, and Belson.
This isn’t to say that relying on the “friend in trouble” story isn’t a flaw, it is, it’s just a flaw inherent to the genre. Parker’s Spenser stories are conventional detective novels, true, but they’re well written.
And then she gives Spenser a wide-eyed smile and offers him sex when they get home.
The Spenser books are not poorly written, and as I mentioned I think the early, oh, seven or eight of them were really good. Somewhere along the line they just got really repetetive and annoying. I’ll still pick the new ones up (from the library) and read them, but the joy is gone.
(I do the same with the formerly wonderful Dick Francis, who I also think has jumped the shark … but you know, he’s surely in his 80s by now, so he has a good excuse.)
ICK!
Okay now, I think any desire to catch up on the series has now completely and utterly ceased. Maybe I’ll read something by H. G. Wells or whatever, I think this guy has now completely and utterly been pillaged in my eyes. I’d enjoy reading such a rant though, now that I have “seen the light” or whatever.
I read and collect Erle Stanley Gardner books, which I don’t necessarily feel guilty about, but I do often feel like I should stick up for him. There are a lot of good reasons to reject Gardner’s work. It’s not of any great literary quality. However, I do think there’s something intellectually very interesting going on in his novels – quite often he builds an entire story out of a legal technicality or a notion about the value of eyewitness testimony as evidence. This is a guy who thought a lot about the law and the courts, and wrote stories illustrating his conclusions.
Nononono! You can’t delete the sissy, yet magic horsies: they give unconditional Luuuuuv to the characters, regardless of what happens, so none of the characters ever has to make a tough choice or deal with any sort of lasting consequences of a choice: whatever they do the magic horsie will still Luuuuuv them. And Vanyel is one of the most snivelly characters I’ve ever read. And in addtion, why are all of Lackey’s gay characters, sensitive, snivelly (OR Danny-Kaye-esqe happy-go-lucky?) thin, dainty wisps? I applaud her for using gay characters. I just wish she’d give us some variety. BTW: If you don’t like Vanyel, you’ll hate…um…some kid who shows up in the later books: he’s possessed by an EEEeeeEeee-vil wizard, but when he gets (eventually) unpossessed, he’s MORE of a sniveller than Vanyel (IIRC)
Fenris (who just bought another Lackey Valdemar book, so what the hell do I know? :rolleyes: )
Lackey also tends to overuse phrases; anytime anyone is shocked, s/he “looks like (s)he was hit over the head with a board.” Gaah. It was noticable in the first few books, it’s downright distracting now. The problem I see with Lackey’s work is she gives you exactly what you want, but never more. The best writers make you want things you never knew you wanted before. Lackey appeals to my lazy schmaltzy side with her impossibly long-suffering, misunderstood martyrs. But still, for God’s sake, Vanyel, quit snivelling and attempting suicide and tell the rest of the world to go fuck off once in a while. Lackey is the cheese puffs of fantasy, but geez will I suck down her books. ::hangs head:: (The herald/psychic horse dragonrider/dragon setup is very similar, but overall I think McCaffery’s writing is better; besides, she did it first. Where these autors succeed is they make worlds we want to go to. I would so go to Pern.)
actually earle stanley gardner the creator of perry mason also wrote detective books under the pen name of a.a milne or something close to that
they were the normal dective stuff but since they delt with issues like drugs ect he didnt feel his name should be on them
one I have is called the grass is greener there not bad for that genere
also im a sucker for legal thrillers phillip friedman scot turow john grisham … although ithought the film version had a better ending to it than the book
cop books ed mc bain and hundreds of others
nightshadea wrote:
It was A.A. Fair, actually. And I don’t recall anything like drugs coming up in any of the books I’ve read, and they certainly didn’t deal with sex any more than the Perry Mason books. There was more cussing, but that was about it. In any case, it seems that everybody knew who wrote the Bertha Cool/Donald Lam mysteries, and by 1952 they were already advertising the fact.
Yeah, the thing that (at first) really appealed to me about the books was that Vanyel was basically a wizardly bad-ass, who could more or less do anything, not to mention was an amazing swordsman, and was gorgeous to boot; and yet he was openly gay. But if every gay character is going to be exceptionally wonderful, it kind of stops being interesting and starts feeling sort of manipulative.
(Spoiler)
Was anyone grossed out when in the third book Vanyel’s cute 17-year-old boyfriend turned out to be the reincarnation of his old dead love? I thought that was kind of ill-making. Why couldn’t he just have a nice satisfying sexual relationship with another man without the author making sure I understood that they were Soul Mates?
Because if it’s not his soul-mate, it’s a risk. Can’t have characters take emotional risks, they’re far too fragile. :rolleyes: And yeah, I thought that was gross-and-creepy too.
Some stuff I want from Mercedes Lackey:
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A viewpoint character from a happy & healthy family who has good relationships with his/her parents/siblings. In addition, I never, EVER want to see the “My parents were baaaaaad to me back when and here I am now, powerful, confident and famous, and aren’t THEY sorry they treated me bad!” theme. She’s done this in just about every Valdemar story and, frankly, it’s wearing way thin.
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Enough with the lovey-dovey crap with the horsies. Yes. When heralds and horsies meet, they fall in love. Enough with the page-after-page “Their eyes met across the room. Longingly he stroked her mane and he knew he would get unconditional love from now on” crap. And Merc? If you have to give the characters an “unconditional love” safety net so that they have no real emotional risks, at least deal with the consequences of it…Imagine a husband who got picked by a Companion… imagine how much having someone that you’re more emotionally intimate with than your spouse could screw up a marriage. Or a kid who wants to go into the family business who doesn’t want to be a Herald. Or a coward who gets chosen against his will. A draft is never a happy as you make it.
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Gay people are diverse. IE: There can be gay people who aren’t tall, thin, delicate, sensitive, light-haired, artistic, and (usually) snivelly. I want the next gay hero you write to be a short, hairy, overweight, surly, tone-deaf, uncultured, self-confident, dark-haired bar-room brawler.
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While we’re at it, how 'bout a villian who’s wrong, not Eeee-vil? It’s possible to honestly believe that you have a better method/system/etc without being the type that applies red-hot-pincers to nipples.
Fenris, about half-way through Burning Brightly which is, again, more of the same old thing.
Dijon Warlock - thanks for the synopsis. Where you see “clever and insightful point about child sexual abuse” I see “Anthony’s excuse to write lots of detailed child porn scenes for thrills.” The guy is creepy.
Sounds like a great drinking game (if there could be a book-based drinking game…): every time Sir Denis “exclaims”, make a whisky and soda.
Jack Chalker
Very imaginative novels, some of the best aliens ever, and Chalker des write really well when he starts talking about history. But most of his stuff is wish-fulfillment fantasy with a heavy dose of sex.
He’s James Oliver Rigney, Jr. Other pseudonyms are listed in the same section (it’s under “Who is Robert Jordan”).
In case you’re wondering, one Salvatore Lombino has him beat on the sheer volume of pseudonyms, if only barely.