I quite liked this takedown of Ender’s Game which argues that it’s effectively pornography, except that instead of a relentless pursuit of orgasm, it’s of nerd one-upsmanship and self-pity.
There was a review in the Wall Street Journal circa 1978 of one of Robert Ludlum’s books (possibly The Holcroft Covenant) that was hilarious – the reviewer actually counted the number of exclamation points on several pages just to be able to report them. I haven’t been able to find the review or identify the reviewer, although I think he may have moved on to Spy magazine.
I knew this was going to appear early in the thread—it remains the gold standard.
One very extensive example is blogger Fred Clark’s vivisection of the Left Behind books. I myself have not read more than a few bits and pieces of it, because I’m just not that interested in the source material. A sample sentence:
Thanks! I’m glad to know that someone else liked Ender’s Game as little as I did. 
As much as Twain hated Cooper, he came to hate Sir Walter Scott even more. Oh, as a young man, Sam Clemens loved “Ivanhoe” and Robin Hood and Rob Roy as much as anyone. But over time, he came to believe that Scott’s idealized, romanticized version of war and chivalry left a heavy mark on the South. To some extent, Twain thought the Southerners who pushed for the Civil War did so because Scott had brainwashed them with tales saying that war is about glory and honor.
I remember going on a small rant about how awful Fenimore Cooper’s books were and some kind and wonderful doper introduced me to Twain’s essays about him. These had to be the best and most perfect take downs ever. I can’t find the thread in question.
I think Twain was too harsh on Scott. Scott unlike Cooper could write. Also the glory of war part sounds too much like the violence on TV arguments. Some merit, but not a lot of merit.
Well, keeping with the topic of the tread, the famous takedown of The Da Vinci Code is Geoffrey Pullum’s.
Damn, I opened the thread to post that myself! Well done!
Another Dorothy Parker (“Constant Reader”): “Tonstant Weadew fwowed up.” A review of A.A. Milne’s The House At Pooh Corner.
Ha - nice. She even refers to my earlier takedown of the same book (which is nice, since she uses a couple of my lines in her writeup). Still, this was pretty funny, and I hadn’t seen it before (I kinda follow the whole Stouffer/Muggles saga, and have for years).
This reminds me of the one about the poet trying to write a piece about the latest Conservative Government unemployment figures.
He eventually settled on:
Conservative Government.
Unemployment.
Figures.
From my favorite scathing review of Ebert’s: “Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for an equal length of time…It should be cut into free ukulele picks for the poor.”
Actually, my all-time favorite book take-down was unintended. I saw it in a book of those headline errors:
New Book out by Former Author
Ouch!
Ha–great takedown of what sounds like a very poorly written book.
Thanks. And yeah, saying The Legend of Rah™ and the Muggles™ is a poorly written book is kinda like saying the ocean is a little wet.
Wet, but soothing.
You might it think it odd that I am going to mention a mathematics book. I don’t recall the author or title, but the reviewer was Gian Carlo Rota and it appeared in the journal he founded and edited, Advances in Mathematics. His reviews were all one or two lines. This one in toto read: It must be late in the day when pygmies cast such long shadows.
Well, I haven’t read it–from the reviews I can say that it seems to be very poorly written. But to go further and to declare that it’s written abominably or utterly ineptly (as seems to be the case) I’d want to read an excerpt.
Here you go: this is the first chapter, from her own website (which is now down–this is courtesy of the Wayback Machine).
I’ll point out that this chapter is very much unlike the rest of the book (which I own)–the rest is written in a more children’s-book style, but is actually worse than this.
I’m continually disappointed by how many people miss the joke in Twain’s reviews of Cooper. The “literary sins” that he criticizes in Cooper are exactly the same ones that he commits in his own writing. He’s actually taking the piss at himself.
As for Battlefield Earth, I’ve long noted that there are only two places in that book where Hubbard got the science right: Herbal tea is in fact good for a stomachache, and horses do in fact operate on principles unrelated to teleporters.