Ditto to both of you- I can usually deal with an ending that doesn’t work for me but that was just a total gimmick. The first and last book I’ll read of hers.
Cycle, now. It’s expanded into an at least four-book series.
I bought it based on an NPR interview. Promptly lost it. Haven’t put any effort into finding it and, thanks to your description, I will continue that process.
He was an entertaining interview, which is more than I can say for the “Running With Scissors” guy.
Two bad books that I’ve read:
A) Woody Allen’s Everything that you’ve always wanted to know About Sex" As someone who’s never, ever liked Woody Allen to begin with, this book re-inforced my opinions of Woody Allen.
B) Irving Schulman’s novelization of West Side Story. Although it’s great to see people, including Irving Schulman, flatter a beautifully dynamic movie/musical classic such as West Side Story, even to the point of making a small novel out of it, West Side Story is something that should be left alone as is. As puerile as Irving Schulman’s novelization of West Side Story is, however, I admittedly enjoyed it in a somewhat perverse way.
Are you talking about the book or the movie? The 1972 movie Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) was written and directed by Woody Allen, but it takes its title from an actual 1969 sex manual by Dr. David Reuben. Woody Allen had nothing to do with writing the book.
That said, Reuben’s book is damned near evil and especially hated by gays who he pans in terms and stereotypes that would make Pat Robertson blush. Example:
Some leeway can be given for the fact he wrote this pre-Stonewall and when APA listed homosexuality as a mental illness and most “straight acting gays” were more likely to be in the closet than “out and proud”, but even then there was little to back up his hyperbole. (Ike and Tina were a love sonnet compared to Billy Haines and Jimmie Shields [to use an out gay couple at the time]? Really?)
The worst part is that when he reissued the book thirty years later he stood by his statements and left it substantively unchanged other than to add in an “and now they spread AIDS” addendum.
OMFG! Sampiro that is terrible. I’d forgotten how bad things were for gays back then. Things are nowhere near good enough now IMNSHO, but the bigotry in the quote is staggering. Where’s a barf smiley when I need one?
Anyone else read The Double Blind? Similar kind of cheap shot, yank-the-rug-out-from-under-you, WTF ending as the book you describe. I hated it.
Dang…I used to have a barf smiley. I got it from Doper jjimm. It disappeared when I got a new computer.
Maybe he could get it to you if he’s around. They really should have it here on the SD.
Oh, yeah. I was a Crisis Intervention/Gay Peer Counselor in the 80s, and we were always having to correct people of all the misinformation in that book.
And it was a huge bestseller that was for many Americans- not just in the flyover states either- was the first real “insight” they had into the gay lifestyle.
Anything by Jane Austen.
I know, I know. Massive popular reputation, huge critical adulation, talks to every new generation, a fixture on the syllabus and the long-term popularity charts, blah blah blah. I’ve got a piece of paper somewhere that says I have an honours degree in English Literature, so I get the supposed greatness. But in my own opinion, having failed to drink the Kool-Aid, I still maintain all her books are dreck. Dreary, boring, time-wasting, dead grey prose.
Her books are adequate testimony to the fact that Austen had never been anywhere, never done anything and had no life experience to speak of. She clearly couldn’t dream up a single plot except ‘young woman wants husband’, and her characters are inter-changeable clones of ‘simpleton maiden giggles over the fact that some soldiers ( = husband fodder ) may be moving in to the district’.
Her prose is slack and undiciplined, and it never occurs to her that maybe taking ten, dense pages to cover the amount of time between one person saying, ‘We must organise a ball!’ and someone else remarking that ‘Yes! Let us hold it at the Grange!’ is not necessarily a fair reward for the reader’s time and attention.
Some writers have something to write about. Austen shows us what a book ends up like if you do not have anything to write about. She was a sheltered simpleton with too much time on her hands and easy access to writing materials.
Although I love Austen, I can recognize most of your post as being simply a difference of opinion about the merits of her books. But your description of her characters here is not correct. If you’d said that Lydia and Kitty Bennet in Pride and Prejudice were “inter-changeable clones of ‘simpleton maiden giggles over the fact that some soldiers’” then that would have been fairly accurate, but this description does not apply to any of the heroines of any Jane Austen novel nor to most of the supporting characters. Austen herself had little patience for simpleton maidens giggling over soldiers (or other eligible bachelors), and in Pride and Prejudice it’s clear that Lydia is meant to be recognized by the reader as a silly, selfish, spoiled little brat.
Assef is not the antagonist of the Kite Runner- he is just the representation of the type of bullys who are part of the Taliban- a flat character and not really important to the book.
Amir is both protagonist and antagonist as the book is all about his internal struggles. For me it was an extremely difficult read in that the main character (Amir) engaged in such reprehensible behavior, but it was ultimately a very good, tough book.
“Catcher in the Rye” was only popular because it pushed the staid boundaries of what was acceptable and started the push towards adolescent literature. Really, it is boring and Holden laughably childish.
“Looking for Alaska” is in the same mold and has just about completed the race to the bottom for adolescent literature.
“Twilight” is abosolute dreck- I made it halfway through since many of my students have read (and loved) it.
Nicholas Sparks is beyond sacahrine.
But the absolute worst book I have ever read is “Five People you Meet in Heaven” by Mitch Albom. I don’t even know what to say about this trite, treacly collection of simple minded cliches.
I couldn’t agree with you more. I couldn’t get through the first third of the book. I can’t read books when I constantly feel an overwhelming desire to slap the narrator silly.
Well, **Twilight **is the worst I’ve read. I couldn’t believe it was popular. I mean, I get that people would read it, but why is it so popular?
Anyway, Eragon was horrible as well, but was better than Twilight.
Thanks! Yer awesome.
The Bible is an anthology linked only by the recurring appearance of one character (God). Aside from that, the individual books run the gamut of literary styles. For example, the first two books can be considered an extended fantasy epic, while the third is essentially a movie credits-style list of the founders of the Jewish civilization. Elsewhere, we see tax records, erotic poetry, personal correspondence between friends, drug-induced horror stories, a collection of songs, an instructional pamphlet, and an early version of “Poor Richard’s Almanac.” This is even further complicated by the abundance of translations and “interpretations”. Saying you don’t think the Bible was a good book is like saying the “Complete Works of Shakespeare” wasn’t a very good play. That being said, I hate “Numbers”.
The book I loathe the most, however, is “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”. Poorly paced, with irrational character behavior, plot twists that seem out of place in “serious” fiction, and long descriptions of how innocent Tess is. The author really tried to cloak the story in ambiguity, obtuseness, and unreadability. While I understand why he did it, it doesn’t make the book suck any less. It remains the only book I’ve bought that I’ve thrown away.
Let us not forget Love Story, both book and film–I am aghast that it actually won an Academy Award. For what? Whiny acting and soggy sentiment? The book is as shallow as the movie. Blech.
In defense of Jane Austen, she did write what she knew: in her time period, it was crucial that women marry well. Not much has changed, there. (well, it has a bit, but it’s still important for women to marry well, but that’s another thread).