What books should we avoid, and why? I’ll post my current Worst Book of the Year candidate when this gets going.
I used to love Patricia Cornwell’s books about Kay Scarpetta. Thought I couldn’t get enough of 'em. Well, I was wrong. I have a backlog of Scarpetta novels sitting on my shelf, and now that I’ve read Blow Fly, I really don’t want to read any more of these. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems as if Patricia Cornwell has lost her magic. The icky autopsy stuff is no longer fascinating, just disgusting. The romantic entanglements are stiff and unbelievable. There is a cliffhanger ending on every damn book. I think I’m done.
I was underwhelmed by Sabriel, by Garth Nix. It just seemed like a retread of fantasy stuff I’d read before, with nothing new or refreshing offered. The use of tinkley bells as weapons was a nice idea, but not very convincing. OTOH, my wife loved it, and read the ensuing two books. Not offensive like the old Thomas Covenant stuff, but just sort of meh.
Realtime Interrupt, by James Hogan. It’s about this guy who makes a stunning break through in AI and virtual reality, but because of the machinations of the corporation he works for, he gets trapped in the virtual world he created without even realizing it. Not actually a bad idea… except the main character, who is supposed to be a genius scientist, is a fucking moron. He’s spent years working on this massive AI/Virtual reality system, with the stated purpose of “analyzing marketing trends.” And that’s not a dodge or a cover for some sinister covert use for the machine: no one in the book can think of a better use for a seamless VR system or a genuine artificial intelligence other than figuring out what’s going to be the next Harry Potter. And it’s never adequately explained how a VR/AI system will help do that.
Anyway, on the big launch day, he gets in the machine… and wakes up in a mental hospital eight months later, being told that he experienced a massive psychotic break when plugged into the machine. Okay, fine, he has no reason to doubt the “doctor” telling him this. I can buy that. He spends something like a decade living in this virtual world, with absolutely no suspicion that he’s still in the machine, despite minor details like no one else on the planet has a sense of humor any more! Which, hey, isn’t that exactly what the AI researcher told you they could never get their AI programs to understand? Also, any attempt he makes to leave the city where the VR system was invented (and which was scroupulously mapped out as part of the VR program) is squelched by his therapist, or otherwise thwarted by some random misfortune if he tries to ignore his doctor. He never makes that connection, either, until another real human (the love interest, natch) trapped in the simulation finds him and points it out to him. Finally, he figures out what’s going on, and starts trying to screw with the system… and then he suddenly wakes up in his bedroom, the morning before he first plugged himself into the machine. Why, it was all a dream! No it wasn’t, you moron! You’re still in the fucking machine!
Anyway, he figures out that he’s still in a VR world (at least it doesn’t take him another ten years this time) and manages to finally get out, where it’s revealed that he’s only been in the machine a little over a day, they just sped the simulation up so it seemed like ten years. And no one notices that that’s the biggest fucking breakthrough in the whole program. You can experience a subjective decade in a little over a day? Can you imagine the possibilities of that? You could graduate med school in an afternoon! You could master a musical instrument during your lunch break! Think of the military applications! You could take a recruit off the street, send him to boot camp for a day, and have him come out of it a hardened veteran with as much combat experience as you need! But the book just uses it as a plot device to explain why no one noticed the emaciated living corpse in the VR lab for ten years.
It did have one good scene, where he’s realized what’s going on for the second time, but has managed to tap into the “cheat codes” for the VR world just as the suits who trapped him in the machine have loaded themselves into it to stop him messing up their big press demo. He rotates the gravity plane ninety degrees and throws them all into a wall, turns off friction on all surfaces so they can’t stay on their feet, stuff like that. That part of the book was clever and funny. Everything else about it sucked.
Hannibal Rising- please Mr. Harris, please tell me you made enough money on this piece of dreck to finally bury the cannibal and we’re not going to have to see the release of Hannibal in the Summer of Love or Hannibal at Studio 54. He’s been trying to rehabilitate the character ever since he got so popular in Silence and with this one he almost gives him a medal of honor. (I did see the movie, though, and it’s actually a bit better for the parts that were cut [out of an already not thick book].)
The Taste of Innocence by Stephanie Laurens. Book 14 or so of her Cynster novels–the newest and least enjoyable.
I read romance novels because I enjoy the dialogue, I enjoy watching the characters (and their relationships) develop, and I like knowing that in the end, whatever crisis has been threatening the hero or heroine has been resolved. I especially like reading romance novels where I get to see characters previously introduced fall in love, or if they were the hero(ines) see their children, etc.
I did not find this book enjoyable, on the whole. Too much angst. I do not enjoy “Does he or does he not love me?” ad nauseum. A certain amount is allowable, this book exceeded that amount by a wide margin. I like seeing familiar characters, but the wedding scene and reception read like name-dropping. “Over here we see Devil, Duke of St. Ives, and his Duchess Honoraria, over there is the Dowager Duchess, etc.” (Few of these name-dropped characters got more than a sentence or two, and most could have been replaced with shorter paragraphs that didn’t call them all by name. Really, there is a reason that credits for movies often list a bunch of people as “extras” or “chorus” or “townfolk”, etc. not John Smith, John Jones, and John Nelson).
The hero and heroine spent far too much time separated–by the hero’s choice. And the final “crisis” was unsatisfactory as well.
Sherlock Homes and the Frankensteins Monster–it could have been good, if the author had postulated the Monster’s survival in the arctic. Instead, he put Dr. Frankenstein & Holmes as contemporaries. Frankenstein live in the very early part of the 19th Century, Holmes in the late, latter half. Separated by at least 50 years.
Tsk, :rolleyes:
My book club read 1,000 White Women which was the worst book I have come across in quite a while. Set in the 1870s, the premise is that the US Government has arranged for a number of white women, mainly women outcast from society for some reason (poverty, ethnicity, mental illness, having children out of wedlock, etc) to join a Native American tribe as brides for Indian men – with the endgame that their future children, being half white and half Native, will be well prepared to help the tribe navigate a multicultural world. I admit, there’s something interesting in that idea, but the whole book seemed to hinge on the fact that Indians do it doggy style. While reading, I kept picturing the author writing away, leering and cackling “DUDE, Indians do it DOGGY STYLE.” Various episodes in the book are based on actual historic events, events that are usually viewed as really low points in American public policy and true tragedies for the people involved, and yet, you know, Indians do it doggy style.
Recently? Damn, that means I can’t dump on The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova again (I [del]read[/del] suffered through it in 2005).
More recently, I dumped Lisey’s Story by Stephen King because of the uber-annoying special language shared by the dead husband and his wife, but I doubt that it’s a bad book.
I might not finish Joplin’s Ghost by Tananarive Due. I love Due, but here she has her heroine jumping into bed with a fan who knocks on her hotel room door. The young (19) groupie has a doctor’s note certifying he’s clean :dubious: as well as a generous supply of condoms.
For the first time in a really long time, I couldn’t finish a book. It was The War of the Flowers by Tad Williams. I enjoy Williams and particularly liked Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn but this one…uggh. I kept hoping that he was going to pull a George Martin on me and kill off the main character. Alas, no such luck.
My LiveJournal review:
Title: In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made
Author: Norman Cantor
Publisher: Perennial
Year: 2002
Genre: Medical history
245 pages
I really enjoy books about the rise and spread of diseases and their effects on politics and culture. I read Hans Zinsser’s *Rats, Lice, and History * at a young age; even as a child I recognized the skillfulness and clarity of his writing. Alas, Cantor’s In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made is disorganized, repetitive, tangential, and unskillful. If a student handed it in as a manuscript, I’d hand it back with the request that s/he outline her work first. I am not exaggerating when I say that putting each paragraph on an index card, throwing the cards in the air, stacking them and recompiling the book in that order without adding transitions might be an organizational improvement. Topics are touched upon and discarded; paragraphs only peripherally related to the topic festoon the chapters like cobwebs; assertions are not backed up with evidence; ideas and statements are repeated. Why this was a *New York Times * bestseller I don’t know, but I think less of us all that it was.
Cantor’s rambling and disjointed text is neither a good introduction to the plague nor, as the title promises, an examination of its aftermath. Theories of the plague’s constituents (Yersina pestis? Anthrax? Cosmic dust?) are raised and dropped at random. Some historical and economic information does address the purported topic, but is poorly written and appears in desultory fashion. It is internally contradictory. Some sentences make no sense. It reads like a rambling professor’s last lecture before retirement.
Odd ad hominem arguments and strange attributive statements mar the text further. Is it really that important to identify Richard II’s homosexuality multiple times? To apparently blame people who had not yet invented empiricism for not understanding about germs? To somehow hold the Jews accountable for the misperception that they caused the plague? To criticize women for choosing chastity and the cloister when their rate of death in childbirth was so high? (Male clergy are not criticized for their chastity at all.) Lucy (the early human discovered by the Leakeys) is referred to as “the black mother of us all,” a phrase in which the inclusion of “black” is superfluous and odd, and which occurs in the context of a several-page disquisition that has very little to do with the plague (and certainly nothing to do with its wake).
Do yourself a favor and avoid this like the… well, you know. Many books of much higher quality address the topic. As for this one, though I am a book packrat of problematic proportions, I’m tempted to throw it in my paper recycling bin it lest it fall into the hands of someone who can’t critically evaluate it.
Well, crap. I just picked this book up at the library.
Mine is Mrs. De Winter by Susan Hill. I knew it would suck, everyone said it sucked, I was prepared for it to suck…and it sucked. I just thought that since her other book, The Woman in Black, was so good that somehow they were all mistaken. They weren’t.
Little Children by Tom Perrotta. It’s the first thing I’ve read by him, and will probably be the last. Strangely, I had no idea that this was just released as a movie; I just stumbled upon it in the used bookstore.
The basic problem with the book is that Perrotta spends the first quarter establishing and developing two characters only to spend the rest of the book having them act completely, ridiculously, embarrassingly out of character. I mean, we’re talking high school comp class embarrassing. He then shoehorns in a few comically clumsy plot twists to try to make the reader feel better about rooting for two people doing something bad (an adulterous affair). Pretty awful throughout.
Night Fall by Nelson DeMille. Utter crap. I’m going to spoil this without using the spoiler box so you don’t have to waste time on this one.
It’s about the TWA Flight 800 that went down in July of 1996. Anyway the protagonist is chasing down the possibility that a couple may have video taped the explosion as they were screwing. Three fourths of the book is the detective trying to find the video all the while unearthing clues that the government is covering something up big time.
Good guy finally tracks down the tape and yep, looks like the plane was shot down. The government guys are ready to come clean and explain exactly what happened, why they had to cover things up etc. They set their meeting for…… the morning of Tuesday, September 11 North Tower of the World Trade Center. Well we all know what happened that day and pfft - end of story.
This was one of those books that brought up that uncontrollable urge to heave the book to the opposite wall across the room once that last sentence was read. Come on, you know we’ve all done it.
Only…only on the SDMB…
I read (or rather, skimmed) this book a few years ago. Am I misremembering, or were all the secondary characters really poorly illustrated ethnic stereotypes? Wasn’t there some sassy black girl, firey red-headed Irish lass, anachronistically feminist tough chick, etc.?
The worst book I read in recent memory is Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Prep.” I think I’ve ranted about that book at least twice on these boards, so I won’t drag it out again, but suffice it to say I read it nearly two years ago and nothing has yet replaced it as the book I will first throw on the fire the day bookburning becomes compulsory. Horrible, horrible stuff.
Anything by Brian Haig. Somebody handed me “Private Sector,” one of six novels he’s written; I was stuck in an airport, needed something to pass the time, made the mistake of reading it. I’m an English lit grad student and I could have done a better job than this joker. The narrative reads like a Sam Spade parody, the dialogue is god-awful, stereotypes substitute for character development and the plot is so predictable it’s not even fit for the movies. The only reason this guy gets his crapola published is because he’s Alexander Haig’s son. If I were Dad, I’d break his computer.
I recently tried to read We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, a novel written in the form of a woman whose son had been the killer in a school shooting writing to the boy’s estranged father.
I really wanted to enjoy this book, I admit to having a morbid fascination with the likes of Columbine and VTech, or at least with the lives affected by them. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get more than 30 pages in before throwing it across the room (a record low previously held by Wild Animus by Rich Shapiro) because the writing style was just awful. It wasn’t so much the annoyingly whiny tone, after all I can kind of understand why she may be like that, it was the fact that it seemed like Ms Shriver had written this once and then gone back with a thesaurus, replacing every word with the longest synonym she could find. No-one writes like that!* I can only assume the ex-husband never replied, because if I’d have received those letters, I’d have probably just rolled my eyes and thrown them in the trash rather than trying to figure out just what the hell she was going on about this time.
Oh yeah, avoid Wild Animus too. I don’t know of a single person that’s finished it.
*(Ok, maybe a few Dopers do, but no-one real writes like that) 
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. I know a bunch of people love his stuff but for the life of me I can’t figure out why. Awful. It’s a 100 page story shoehorned into 1,000 pages. He must have been getting paid by the pound.
Stephenson writes the way that “S. Morgenstern” wrote the “original” Princess Bride. 22 pages describing how to pack a suitcase? That’s nothing, how about chapter after chapter that are supposed to be oh so witty because they take place in Wales and “Dangffydre” is pronounced “Fanshaw”. Why how hi-larious! Ho ho ho.
Utter crap. I put it down after the first few thousand pages. I’ll burn it for heat next time it gets cold here.
Ack. I just picked this one up, and I know that’s going to bug me.
I generally don’t go mor ethan 20 pages if I dislike a book… sometimes less. I can’t remember plowing through something I didn’t enjoy since… (okay don’t kill me) Ulysses.