anything by Ellen Hopkins
It’s all about teens with horrible lives and horrible parents, told in the most emo-drama fashion possible.
Also, if you’re a dog person, Letters From Wolfie by Patti Sherlock may not be for you. It’s well-written, it’s harshly honest, but it will make you miserable.
The Dome by Stephen King. That was a crapfest. Its the last book I’ll ever read by King. I’ve been burned too many times in a row and there are much better places to spend my money.
The entire output of Ayn Rand.
Oh, my, YES! I have not only that, but also the sequel in my library and can’t seem to throw them out because they were gifts from an old friend, but great, steaming piles of excrement they are!!!
Must add anything by Patricia Cornwell/Cornwall? - as well as any other book to be found in an airport store on a revolving rack. Such books are now referred to as “airport trash” which my husband regularly picks up on his travels, reads, then leaves on the plane for the next sad traveller. Horrid, horrid, stuff.
Next on the list would be “Atlas Shrugged” which is best described by Dorothy Parker: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” Although I’ve read some debate about just what book Parker was describing in this quote, most sources attribute it to AS and I am happy to go with it. Vile.
Great book title/thread title.
I tried **A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius **a few weeks ago and mentioned here what a pretentious load of self-indulgent drivel I felt it was. A few weeks have passed, and I now think it is a pretentious load of self-indulgent drivel, and I don’t think my opinion is going to get any better.
And yet, I really enjoyed Zeitoun by the same author, Dave Eggers. Go figure.
I give Cooper a pass here due to the period in which he wrote. Few authors from that period are very readable today. Twain is one of them.
Gods of Green Mountain. by Virginia Andrews.
I liked her books when I was young. They were trash, I will not argue, but they were something I could read in a day, and interesting (even if they were rehashing the same thing over and over.)
I got nostalgic and decided to read another of her book.
I saw that she had a Sci-Fi book.
Yeah, it’s no good.
The start of the book seemed good, so I brought it (I sample books on amazon.)
A hard people live a hard life, and there is a odd kid, who doesn’t take things seriously, and he ends up discovering a odd plant.
but that’s basically only setting up the story.
Turns out the plant can do everything, they go from hunter/gather lifestyle to being similar to our technological advancement (A bit further in some areas, a bit behind in others.) within a life-span.
angsty romance ala V.C andrews (no incest, though!)
accident happened in a town, so to get to the bottom of it, they decide to trek to green mountain, where they think their god lives.
On the way, the girl gets tied up and nearly raped. She tries to cut her bindings, and the man falls of the knife, and dies.
blahblahblah, turns out the god is actually a human, blahblahblah, and the people are VERY, VERY, VERY small, too small for the human to see.
Then in about 15 years, they grow to half the size of humans, (WITHOUT THEM NOTICING?!!) travel earth, deliver the plant that made this all possible, and humans destroy this plant.
the end.
it’s very bizarre, and not even a good bizarre, like ‘john dies at the end.’ just horrible.
I recently read the Marvel graphic novel adaptation, and one of the bits that stood out for me in a bad way was the suggestion that it was an act of mercy to murder a woman in cold blood if it prevented her from cursing the man who just murdered her infant child.
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. A pretentious piece of crap.
Dunno the book, but I do distinctly rmember my first experience like this. I just didn’t believe that a publisher would publish a book that bad. (I was only 15).
Naturally, the book’s got to get better, doesn’t it? Otherwise how can it have been published?
I don’t think the target audience is adults of average intelligence. These books are terrific when you’re 10 years old. There are a lot of authors in this category. David Eddings and Piers Anthony come to mind (although I remember getting pedo vibes from PA’s books, so maybe not the best thing to hand your 10-year-old.) Their work may be crap to most discerning readers, but writing books that are accessible to children is laudable.
I came here to poke fun at Terry Goodkind. I don’t need to write anything. Let’s let the man speak for himself!
[QUOTE=Terry Goodkind oh please make it stop]
Standing there, erect, masculine, masterful in his black war wizard outfit, he looked as if he could be posing for a statue of who he was: the Seeker of Truth, rightfully named by [spoiler redacted]. It had nearly broken [red’d] heart to do so, because Seekers so often died young and violently.
While he lived, a Seeker was a law unto himself. Backed by the awesome power of his sword, a Seeker could bring down kingdoms. That was one reason it was so important to name the right person - a moral person - to the post.
[/QUOTE]
[/guffaw]
Agreed.
Other books by Woodrell are worthwhile. I think he’s at his best with short stories. I just finished Outlaw Album, which I highly recommend. His novella The Death of
Sweet Mister is good. I appreciate him because he understands well people living on the economic margins in rural areas.
Oh, it’s well written, it is simply not to my taste. As I said, my daughter, Princess Pepperwinkle, enjoyed it very much. To me it was just a long, long slog.
And speaking of long, long treks through literature, the longest I’ve ever plodded was through Mervin Peake’s Gormenghast. I made it almost halfway through the first book. “And he lifted up his foot, which was adorned by a boot (six pages on how the boot was made, on the leathermakers’ guild, and on the curious placement of the tongue of the boot), and set it down on the floor (seven pages of discussion of the type of wood , the lumberjack camps, the market in wood, and the spiritual implications of the nails).”
Lord of the Flies. Blech. Unreadable. I really enjoyed pretty much all the classic literature I had to read in high school… but Lord of the Flies is completely unsalvageable.
Journey to Ixtlan, or anything by Carlos Castaneda.
I second this. Plus all the religious maundering irritated me far more than it probably should have. I felt like Martel was beating me over the head with a “Coexist” bumper sticker.
I actually have one of those stickers on my car, but I don’t rip my bumper off and hit people over the head with it to prove my point. I am not Yann Martel.
…so there was a lot of cooing, then? 
I liked Pygmy. I like Palahniuk. But for me, his “steaming pile of crap” moment came with Snuff. I could barely finish that, it was so bad. Rant wasn’t much better.
Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story wasn’t so much awful as boring. I love King, and I’ll even slog through his not-so-great stuff to get to the good stuff, but Lisey was a loooong sit.
Graham Masterton is my favorite horror author. I love pretty much everything he writes. But Unspeakable was the closest I ever came to flinging a book across the room at high velocity. Most of it isn’t bad, but the ending is so awful and betrays the reader so much that it literally made me angry.
