ISLE OF DOGS - horrendously bad.
THE RED TENT - good, if you’re female.
the Red Tent didn’t do much for me.
I just waded through Jacquelyn Mitchard’s Theory of Relativity.
What a mess! I ended up not caring who the hell got the baby. Both lots of people were unlikeable. The ending just sucked. There were plotlines that went nowhere and it was a mess of a book.
Patricia Cornwell has lost it bigtime too.
Diana Gabaldon needs to think about actually advancing the plot as opposed to blathering on for hundreds of pages in an entertaining fashion which gets the reader nowhere.
But I don’t think I’ve recently read any bestsellers which I have liked.
I opened this thread so I could vomit up the Isle of the DOgs as worst book I"ve read in years. GOd it was acutely awful. That ‘trooper truth’ whole concept- blah, but hell, it was only part of a truely awful book.
Best? Baldacci’s Last Man Standing
This may sound weird, but I’m going to recommend THE PLAGUE YEAR. It’s about the Black Death but it’s a good read.
I don’t know if this was a best-seller or not, but Tara Road by Maeve Binchy left me wondering why anyone would bother to write it. Four hundred pages of dreck. Bleah. I finished it, basically hoping that SOMETHING was going to happen at some point. It never did.
I’m also the only one I know who didn’t find Angela’s Ashes hysterically funny.
Good ones: I’ll second Bridget Jones - both of 'em.
Doesn’t it seem like Cornwell was just reading every People magazine and putting in something new from it each week just so she could seem on top?
“Oooooo-look, a helper miniature pony for the blind! Betcha no one else has one of those in their book yet!”
“I know - I’ll put an official ‘blog’ and message board up for the police-I’ll call it ‘Trooper Truth!’ That’ll show I’m hip to the net!”
“Hmmm-politician’s wife has secret EBay addiction. I can work that in”
Gad, this was just embarrassing.
And why does every black character have that “yazzah, I be flyin’ dis bitch here, wooooo-eee!” dialect?
Augh-gotta stop, I could bitch forever about this piece of crap. Glad to see my disgust validated, tho.
Yeah, The Cider House Rules doesn’t really pick up until halfway through, or later.
Irving’s books really make me think. He spends a lot time developing his characters - he doesn’t use a cookie cutter to carve the good guys out of white construction paper and the bad ones out of black paper. You don’t find the stereotypical suburban WASP’s in his books. The characters are as unique as the people you meet in real life and continually evolve throughout the book.
His storylines are outrageous. I suppose this can a plus or a minus, depending on your tastes. I love 'em. The World According to Garp is both morbid and comical at the same time. (that one is slightly faster paced, IMO) Life is stranger than fiction, except for John Irving’s books.
Between the dynamic characters and the bizarre plots, his novels make for mediocre-to-bad movies. They just don’t translate well to Hollywood’s movie recipes. I understand Irving wrote the screenplay for The Cider House Rules, and it was okaaay… but it was a different story than the book. [Standard warning about not watching the movies until you’ve read the books, if you can help it.]
When I read The Cider House Rules, I was on the fence over the abortion issue (I was about 14). Afterward, I made up my mind. Kind of ridiculous to let a novel influence me like that, but hey, it got me to think.
Best: “Lonesome Dove”
Worst: God there are so many . . . I’ll pick the most recent Tom Clancy. (No more, I promise, I’m done with him. Really. I promise.)
[aside] I read Me talk pretty one day on an airplane, and I had tears running down my face, and was shuddering from trying so hard not to laugh out loud. The lady across the aisle asked if I was ok.
Seemed she forgot the ‘genre’ she was writing - ie a murder mystery. all of that dreck about Trooper Truth, the oddities of the Governor’s family, the oddities of the Islands inhabitants, etc. didn’t have a frigging thing to do w/the basic story. There was so much left unsaid about the actual ‘bad guy’, she felt like a cameo character.
I’m just finishing up the House of Sand and Fog, and I really recommend it. I have not seen the movie, btw.
I may be somewhat plebian in my tastes, as I like a story to move right along, and I don’t like a lot of metaphysical, poetical mumbo jumbo.
Usually I prefer a book to have characters I can like, and this book’s characters are not very likeable (some more than others), but it’s very well-written and you know what the characters are thinking and you see the progression from one step to the next.
Unfortunately, terrible things happen in it. So be warned. But it’s so good!
Best:
Life of Pi by Yann Martel- Not the life-altering experience the cover proclaimed, but still a good book with a fantastic ending.
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson- the true story of the incredible building projects for the Chicago World’s Fair (technically the Columbian Exposition) in 1893 and of H. H. Holmes, one of the earliest and probably the most prolific serial killer in American history.
Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs- a memoir of an absolutely insane youth lived by the author after his egomaniacal and occasionally lesbian mother gave him to her psychiatrist to raise. (The names have all been changed for understandable reasons.)
The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things - another pseudonymous gay memoir, this one truly disturbing. Leroy’s mother was a “lot lizard” (i.e. a truck stop prostitute) and he joined her in her work when still a child. Well written, especially for a teenaged author. (His Sarah is less enjoyable as it’s a bit too contrived.)
Worst:
Da Vinci Code (not even worth a link)
King of Torts by John Grisham- so formulaic it’s pitiful
The Last Juror by John Grisham- builds towards a twist ending that Stevie Wonder could see coming and has major plotholes (among other things Grisham seems to forget that it’s set in the early 1970s).
Another vote for…Isle of Dogs! I read this at the beach and it was still intolerable. I was tempted to fill my bathing suit with rocks and walk into the lake rather than finish the thing.
Also, I know it’s really old, but I recently read Patriot Games by Tom Clancy. IMHO, Clancy generally has a tin ear for dialogue, but – Ye gods! The dialogue between Jack Ryan and the Prince of Wales and Queen of England is inane, idiotic, and painful!
Good recent bestsellers? Hmmm…Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players by Stefan Fatsis was pretty interesting.
Another vote for House of Sand and Fog and Life of Pi. Both great books.
I found both A Heartbreaking Work… and Me Talk Pretty One Day so annoying that I never finished them. And I picked up the Sedaris book after seeing a version of his one-man play about being a department store elf, which was totally hilarious.
There’s also a serious book by a major woman writer that was her first book in twenty years. It got glowing reviews and won prizes. Utterly unreadable. I can’t even think of its name now I’ve so blocked it from my mind.
On the good side, a couple of the best popular novels of recent years are Neil Stephenson’s unbelievably brilliant Cryptonomicon and Michael Chabon’s previously mentioned Amazing Adventures…, which was truly special.
And if Lissla Lissar is going to mention Tolkien, then I have to chime in and say that while LotR is not awful by any means, it is the single most overrated novel of all time.
Who Moved My Cheese? Dumb, dumb, dumb.
I found two stories in Me Talk Pretty One day absolutely hilarious.
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The one where tourists on the train don’t know David is American and think he is a French pickpocket.
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The one where David attemtps to explain the Easter Bunny in his French class.
I think I love the second story so much because I heard the author read it on This Amercan Life.
Recent Bestsellers I read and Loved:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Little Children - Tom Perrotta
The Amateur Marriage - Anne Tyler
Wow. I loved Angela’s Ashes, but I sure didn’t see much funny about it. Hahahaha! Abject poverty, disease, malnutrition and abandonment by my father! Wotta a laugh riot!
Seriously, people thought that book was funny?
Yep. I heard so much talk about Heartbreaking Work… and David Sedaris here on this board that wanted to find out what all the fuss was about, and ended up finding Heartbreaking Work…, Me Talk Pretty … and Naked at the used bookstore. I had to force myself to finish *Heartbreaking Work… [i/]. The beginning was pretty good, but it just dropped off about a third of the way in. I wouldn’t recommend it at all.
The David Sedaris books were okay. Funny in parts, but not quite the hysterical laugh riots I was expecting.
Best: Wolves of the Calla, by Stephen King
Worst: Well, TigoleBitties, Hannibal is definitely in the running for worst book I have ever read, but then so is Dreamcatcher. I have to admit I usually avoid the bestseller list like the plague, anyway. Call me crazy, but stories about lawyers, bankers, and politicians tend to bore the crap out of me. And add me to the list of people who don’t care for Sedaris, John Irving, and Dave Eggers.
I recently listened to Steve Martin’s reading of Shopgirl, and I tell ya, if I didn’t like Steve so much as an actor I wouldn’t have finished it. I thought both of the main characters were shallow and annoying and I couldn’t have cared less if they had a creepy relationship or not.
Gee, I sound negative today. 
Worst: The Bible. Unrealistic, contradictory and the author spends seemingly entire chapters obsessing over who begat whom! Although I do like all the weird shit at the end.