When Spider Robinson’s “Have You Heard The One About…?” came out in Analog, I threw the magazine across the room 4 times by my roommates count. The puns were sooo bad, and sooo good.
(shameful confession time)
I made the mistake of taking a gamble when I was in Taiwan and buying a number of dojinshi (Japanese fancomics, they tend to be rather adult in content) anthologies.
I read it.
:eek:
The slash pairings (and hell, even the male pregnancy :eek: ) I could have lived with. It was the borderline rape (because the submissive partner can’t like sex, that’d imply he/she is a slut or something :mad: ) and the pedophelia (one’s, like, 6 and other’s 30+ :mad: :mad: :mad: ) that made me go looking for brain bleach.
Two books I defaced by ripping out pages.
Another two I just tossed in the trash.
A book that got tossed but I would actually like to know what it was so I can give it another shot: fantasy-type trilogy. I recall a magic helmet that was stolen by dwarves, a magic sword and another magic item. At the end of the book the ‘hero’ turned out to be a god who was being tested. HATED it at the time as it frustrated me to no end but the masochist in me wants to read it again.
Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones almost kissed the I-5. I regret keeping it because I’m considering reading it again and I know it will torture me.
Can’t recall the title but one book I wanted to toss into the path of a flaming bus was about a world that was split into two. One half consisted of women in a feminist society and I recall that the women were all described as ugly and selfish. The other half consisted of men and their depiction wasn’t nearly so insulting. The only thing that saved this book was it being rescued at the last minute by a significant other who worshipped the book because it was written by his teacher. Ugh.
Sarum: The Novel of England by Edward Rutherford. Incredibly pretentious title and Rutherford employed a most annoying technique of telegraphing at the end of one chapter that something awful was going to happen to such-and-such character in the next chapter.
I can’t remember which Clive Cussler piece-O-shit I tried to read, but it was the first and last. For me, one character going on and on in a multi-page monologue does not pass for exposition.
I’ll 4th Hannibal. I felt completely ripped off and insulted by the end of it, almost as if Thomas Harris had purposely wrote such a tremendous piece of crap in the hopes that nobody would ever again bug him to do yet another Hannibal Lector sequel.
Heh. **Uncommon Vows ** by Mary Jo Putney. I recognize it instantly because, uh, it’s one of my favorites.
It’s certainly better, IMO, than the British chick-lit type romance I read not long ago. The heroine lives in a No Children apartment building. Her friend, who just had a baby, thinks that this is terrible because the heroine will never meet a marrying kind of man there, and to be single is a horrible disease. So the friend abandons her baby on the doorstep of the heroine and takes off on vacation. This will accomplish two goals: (1) friend will get a vacation without the kid; and (2) the heroine will be evicted from her apartment.
Because everyone wants one’s child’s caregiver to be evicted. Right?
So the heroine gets evicted and gets a new apartment where she meets a man, exactly according to the friend’s plans. And heroine is not even mad at her for abandoning her baby on her doorstep and getting her evicted, because it all turned out so well. Happy ending! 
Except for me, because I was steamed; and for the copy of the book, which went straight into the trash.
The Devil Wears Prada. Stupid, pretentious romance novel quality crap that was almost as good as Danielle Steel on a bad day. The whiny assed spoiled brat main character kept nattering on about wanting to write for The New Yorker. Yeah right, lady. By the end of the novel I was rooting for her boss.
Not a fan of Kurt Vonnegut, I take it?
That’s one hypothesis. My personal conjecture is this: after the enormous success of Silence of the Lambs, Harris got paid a huge advance to write the sequel, giving him five years to do so. He went to Italy, faffed about for a bit, and realized he had no freaking idea what to write about and less interest in doing so. So he continued touring Italy, taking notes, drinking wine, and sleeping with hot Italian women. Eventually St. Martin’s caught up with him and asked him for a manuscript, as his time was up. Unable to supply them with a manuscript he was happy with, he threw together Hannibal in one drunken weekend, absolutely certain that St. Martin’s would reject his manuscript as unpublishable and make him rewrite it.
He was aghast to hear them say, “We’ll take it! It’ll be in bookstores next Wednesday!” as we, his fans, were to read it.
Inexplicably, my brother recommended Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers. I forced my way through the last hundred pages out of sheer stubborness, hoping it would somehow pull out a decent ending. God, what a stupid book. I wasn’t surprised later when I found out that King wrote it with tissue stuck up his nose because he was doing so much blow.
I didn’t even try to finish a crappy historical-fantasy called The Blind Knight. So many things wrong. Just as an example: throughout the book (set in the late 1100’s), people who would actually be speaking Norman French are translated into a bad attempt at Elizabethan English. How bad? They keep saying “whyfore”, by which I believe the author meant “wherefore”.
Possibly the Winter of the World trilogy by Michael Scott Rohan. It starts with The Anvil of Ice
I’ll vote for Red Mars as well. I started that damn book three times over the space of a year and gave up each time after 4 or 5 chapters because it was so badly written.
Okay, I’d accuse of you of coming in this thread just to annoy me, but that would make me a paranoid, narcissitic :wally, so I won’t.
I feel your pain. Reading that sentence was almost enough to make me throw my monitor across the room.
I recently finished reading a Phillipa Gregory novel, The Virgin Earth, set mostly in colonial Virginia for a book review. The heroine was a feisty Powhatan maiden… named Suckahanna.
Sums it all up, really.
I’m glad to see that The Fountainhead has been tossed out at least twice.
Bridges of Madison County. I kept waiting for it to get good. Usually, if I don’t like a book, I’ll just set it down, and never go back, but after completing this book, I just wanted my two hours back.
Bottom line: Cheating on you spouse is not romantic, no matter with whom you cheat.
It seems to be so, if the cheater is female, but not if the cheater is male. Note Titanic where the “heroine” cheats on her Fiance, and as you brought up Bridges, where the wife cheats on her husband- a husband who is a good dutiful spouse too.
Oh, God, I just finished reading that book too.
I swear, if anything ever deserved to be thrown across the room. The book is about 200 or 300 pages of maybe-interesting plot–buried in 600 pages of text.
I didn’t think this was all that bad, but there was an odd reference in the beginning by whomever the chief Hoo Ha to a disease ( Reynaud’s, I beleive) that I am pretty sure had nothing to do with the situation the people were in at all. IIRC.
I’ll admit with some shame that I’ve never read any Vonnegut. He’s one I keep intending to check out but somehow never quite manage it. Anyway, there are ways for authors to insert themselves into text successfully and appropriately, and there are ways that simply make me want to track them down and punch them.
And while I am in here, I’ve got to second The Lovely Bones. Most of the book was well-written, gut-wrenching and heartbreaking. And then the STUPID STUPID STUPID ending came and I was filled with rage. Unforgivable.