Sorry the above link should be:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=68ac394666208e
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever by Stepehn Donaldson. I had heard such good things about this series, so I bought the first three books. My bookmark is still sitting in the middle of book two where it has been for about 12 years. What a piece of crap.
There was another book I read at about the same time by A. A. Attanasio called Last Legends of Earth. Pure tripe. Why does most scif-fi have to be so terrible?
The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis.
Written by a 16 year old boy in about 1970, inspired by his love of Robert E. Howard’s “Conan” novels.
The game, which is played at various Sci-Fi cons, is to see who can read the most without laughing.
I got to page 3.
That awful David Eddings book was probably “The Redemption of Althalus” which was boring and awful, I can’t remember how it even ended. And I love his other stuff.
I actually really liked all of the Vampire Chronicles, but hated “Witching Hour”. I still haven’t finished it, keeps putting me to sleep!
And I’m sorry, beat me if you will, but I cannot get into Joyce’s “Ulysses”. I haven’t given up on it yet, but I’ve read the first two pages five times each. Ugh.
nefertari.
The Tenth Justice was a bunch of pointless liberal hogwash (spelling?)
Such garbage from a man who used to write Clinton’s speeches.
“The Winning Clue” by James Hay Jr.
This is actually a book I refused to read further. What a racist. I feel bad for Mr. Hay Sr.:mad:
I recently got a collection of hard-boiled 1930s and ’40s crime novels outta the library. I enjoyed “The Big Clock” (though the too-tidy ending indicated they’d already sold it to MGM). But “I Married a Dead Man”—yikes! Here’s a bit about a woman waiting for the elevator: “Her back was to the door now. The door that wouldn’t open. The door that was an epitaph, the door that was finality.” And that is where Baby went, “Oh, fer chrissakes” and slammed the book shut . . .
Holy Christ, we’re three pages into this thread and nobody’s mentioned William Shatner’s Tekwar series yet? Yet more proof that good ol’ Bill should have stuck to Star Trek.
Notable mentions:
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Any of Piers Anthony’s later stuff. His first six or eight Xanth novels, his Incarnations of Immortality series and the first Blue Adept series were actually pretty good stuff. But in later novels, he got both seriously boring as well as seriously pedantic.
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Anne Rice. I tried several books in this series but couldn’t get more than thirty pages into any of them before throwing them across the room in disgust.
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Later novels by Stephen Koontz (or is it Dean King)? Loved The Talisman, It, Lightning, Watchers, Strangers, Carrie, The Dead Zone and The Stand… but anything put out by either of these two in the last five years has just been tripe.
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Richard Marcenko’s Rogue Warrior series. Three hundred pages of Marcenko masturbating about how cool he is for being ex-Special Forces. I ain’t impressed, Richard. Next.
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Anything by John Grisham. The only series I’ve read which is worse at characterization is the above-referenced Tekwar series.
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Someone mentioned Melville before. I was forced to read Billy Budd in high school English class and still carry the scars. Pfaugh.
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And it’s been said before and I’ll say it again – fantasy fiction based on role-playing games can only be so good, but it can be SO bad. For example - the Avatar trilogy by ‘Richard Awlinson’ published by TSR. That was some of the worst RPG-related fiction I’ve ever read and almost turned me off the Forgotten Realms setting for life.
I had the misfortune to pick up Beauty’s Release and start to read it - urgh. What I can’t get over is there is a series of novels known as “The Beauty Books,” that Anne Rice did under the name A.N. Roquelaure. Not even good enough to wipe my bum on.
OMG - semi-funny story about this one (one of those “you had to be there” ones, probably). In 1990, I was an exchange student in England. My mom and her best friend came to visit. Mom’s friend was reading this (she said she had purchased it thinking the title was actually Greek Love. No, I don’t know why she would have bought a book with that title, either. But she bought it for travel reading and, once she was on the plane and started it, she was stuck with it. I think she continued out of morbid curiosity. But each morning, she would fill us in with the details of what had occurred in her reading the night before. What a bizarre tale!