Somebody already commented on this.
And who cares how a whining, alcoholic, chain-smoking harpy-maven of selfishness & inhumanity spells her name?
:dubious:
Well done, sir!
I’d toss in The Known World. It sucked. Oh how it sucked. Also Silas Marner for being overly Moralistic and Preachy.
Just curious, what do you hate about this book?
I’d toss all the books on the Pilgrims. They weren’t first. They weren’t typical. They weren’t best. Reading about them distorts the true history of the country and the continent.
They got enough air time already. Give that story a rest and give the others some exposure.
Just the way Zinn made a school textbook out of his own personal political beliefs.
Surely that was a gift makes it all the better to nominate it for burning, given that it wouldn’t be your money you’d be throwing away.
Go on, stick it on the pile - we won’t tell them. Honest.
Good point. On it goes.
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. That’s what you get for stealing three hours of my time, boring me, and making me stupider all at once!
Really? But Starship Troopers was a great novel with some very challenging takes on modern liberal society and the role/necessity of violence and force within it. Was Stranger in a Strange Land an inferior earlier attempt or a resting-on-his-laurels antecedent?
Stranger is the only Heinlein I ever read. Obviously, not the best choice to start.
And Starship Troopers is my only one so I have no way of comparing - if you can get a hold of it (it’s out of print) then I recommend trying it. The movie anally raped it with no lube, so ignore that if you’ve seen it.
So the book isn’t just Archie Comics in Spaaaaaaace? I’ll have to give the book a look-over then.
The biggest regret I had about MST being cancelled is that they never got the chance to really “do” Starship Troopers. Maybe Mike Nelson will make a Rifftrax for it. One can hope.
The film and the book have the following in common:
[ul]
[li]They use some of the same names[/li][li]they both are set in a quasi-fascist world[/li][/ul]
That’s where it ends. The film decides to have a completely different protaganist and main story, it sets the start of the story in a version of Argentina where everyone is American (why no-one there speaks Portugese and looks very white is never actaully explained - one can assume it’s because in the future the whole world will be like that…), the military in the film is run by idiots, the mobile infantry is protected in battle by t-shirts that show off their pecs (as opposed to functional armour), you get promoted in the mobile infantry for punching other soldiers in the face and acting like you own the joint (just like in real life militaries I’m sure :rolleyes: ) and the society described in each are actually quite different.
The book is (as I said) effectively a political essay embedded in a sci-fi story. The film is a live-action version of “Team America: World Police” replacing the terroists with giant alien insects. I’m not saying that the film was bad, I actaully like it (strictly as a parody of itself and for Casper van Dien naked), but as a translation of a book to film I think I’d rather chuck my copy of the DVD on our little bonfire here than say it is faithful to the original in any way that is significant.
Don’t know what Friar Ted’s beef is with it – and paring it with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is downright puzzling – but I didn’t love the book, either. I generally do like Margaret Atwood. The Robber Bride is an interesting book and Alias, Grace is marvelous, but Handmaid’s Tale seemed to me like one long, shrill, humorless, polemic.
I didn’t hate it enough to chuck it in the flames with Your Best Life Now , but I found it hard to connect with the characters and lose myself in the story over the whir of relentless grinding.
I don’t think the Handmaid’s tale was supposed to be a feel good romp through a magical land of elves and pixies. I’m not trying to be patronising, but it was supposed to be a bleak and joyless society, especially for those who weren’t in charge. I studied it as an A-level text and my exam question was “Do you agree that Gilead could be described as a monstrous society?”. My response was essentially “The hell yeah!” backed up with about 20 different quotes and examples.
I got an A, naturally 
If you want to get rid of it, I have a ready home for it. I want to read it (you should know what you hate), but I’m damned if I’m going to contribute even a microscopic amount of money to that evil fucker’s evil successors.
So ship it here; I might even find a halfway decent book to send back. Win-win.
The complete Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. 10,000 pages of nothing happening should burn for quite a while.
Hijack: hmmm, I guess in a sci/fi and fantasy genre I’d expect different definitions of “monstrous” :), since the most common reason given for not liking the book is that it implies too strongly that it could happen, and that it isn’t that hard to evolve such a society out of simple human nature. Is simple human nature “monstrous”? I’m not saying it’s not, it depends on what definition you’re using.
You mean Spanish? 
I’d also like to add Stephen R. Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane to fuel our incendiary glee. Failing that, rip out the rape scene and use it as a firestarter. Most worthless fantasy novel ever.
Let’s burn every book by Sue Grafton. Alphabetically.