Kopijeger posted:

As for worst book, possibly "The Bear and the Dragon" by Tom Clancy. Aside from the infamous "Japanese sausage" euphemism, it seemed ridiculous how easily Russia allied with the US, how absurdly effective the high-tech cluster bombs were, how Ryan put himself at risk on the cruiser rather than allow himself to be evacuated and how the Chinese government was toppled in a bloodless coup just because they put a camera feed from drones on the internet.

Lemniscate Blue posted:

Don't forget the repeated characterization of Chinese people as "Klingons" who "don't value life the way we do".

loquacius posted:

Also I just wrote a post in another PYF thread about Ready Player One yesterday so I'll just paste that post here

Vanderdeath posted:

I posted in this thread that I didn't mind Ready Player One after I immediately finished it but as the weeks went on, I kept thinking about the book and getting annoyed about it. I recently went back and re-read it, along with Armada and god-loving-drat.

Armada doubles the gently caress down on the nostalgia wank and the 1980s as viewed through a Middle Class White Man's Lens. The main character is an rear end in a top hat whose dad dies and leaves behind a bunch of dumb 80s poo poo that no kid in the middle 21st century should care about. Of course his mother is totally okay with the idea of her son trying to recreate his father's life by living an unhealthy simulacrum of it. Oh, and turns out, being good at video games - specifically one that was designed by every major video game developer (ranging from the likes of Gabe Newell to Shigeru Miyamoto and Hidetaka Miyazaki) will help save the world! Oh, and he gets enlisted into the world-saving army corps because he's so good at video games and is made a captain or some poo poo and there's an even more generic female stand-in that wants to make out with him immediately because he's so loving good at video games.

Then they fight the bad guy alien invasion, his dad shows up and had something to do with the video game (SURPRISE) and literally all of the cities along the Atlantic get hosed up by the aliens' weapons but because we win, the aliens give us cool technology to make up for it but ZACK loving LIGHTMAN, hero of the video game wars, doesn't trust 'em...perhaps they did this for nefarious purposes??? THE ? END. Also the afterword mentions that this poo poo is getting made into a loving movie so gently caress everything.

Basically, gently caress Ernest Cline's books. You can watch a middle-age white man masturbate on the internet elsewhere.

The Killing Jelq posted:

To indulge in my own nostalgia, teenage me read To Sail Beyond The Sunset because it was mentioned in a fan theory about the Wheel of Time from somewhere on the internet. I don't remember noticing heinlein's politics, just that it was like this endless line of wife-swapping and incest set in the 1910s. I don't think there was a plot and don't remember any scifi elements (time travel?). It was my first exposure to heinlein, too. There's probably a lot of awful poo poo in there but I doubt it's worth dredging 600+ pages to find

The Vosgian Beast posted:

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Post Your Favorite (or Request) > PYF terrible book as long as it was written by Ernest Cline

John Big Booty posted:

Yep. It's Heinlein's second meandering novel about travelling back in time to have sex with a parent.

The Saddest Rhino posted:

i do remember one thing though: there was a hot supermodel. this super hot supermodel was on tv and he's like "imma go and teleport to where she is, kidnap her and then when she's stuck alone with me with nowhere out, i'll seduce her with my charms and make her LOVE ME" which is of loving course exactly what he did.

anyway that was how jumper had a story involving a young man who threatened a beautiful lady with his powers and made her a sexual victim

Zamboni_Rodeo posted:

Ah, Heinlein. The only book of his I ever attempted was Stranger In A Strange Land. The setup was interesting and I actually hung with it until. Until.

There's a scene where he's having sex with... whoever, and in the throes of passion she cries out, "Thou art God!"

Aaaaannnd that's where I gave up in disgust. According to a friend of mine who read the whole thing, I picked a good place to stop.

Zamboni_Rodeo posted:

Ah, Heinlein. The only book of his I ever attempted was Stranger In A Strange Land. The setup was interesting and I actually hung with it until. Until.

There's a scene where he's having sex with... whoever, and in the throes of passion she cries out, "Thou art God!"

Aaaaannnd that's where I gave up in disgust. According to a friend of mine who read the whole thing, I picked a good place to stop.

Tiggum posted:

And that might be one of his better ones. I think it's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in which the protagonist concludes that having sex with your teenage cousin is totally fine and it's just cultural hangups about incest and paedophilia that made him think it was bad.

The Killing Jelq posted:

To indulge in my own nostalgia, teenage me read To Sail Beyond The Sunset because it was mentioned in a fan theory about the Wheel of Time from somewhere on the internet. I don't remember noticing heinlein's politics, just that it was like this endless line of wife-swapping and incest set in the 1910s. I don't think there was a plot and don't remember any scifi elements (time travel?). It was my first exposure to heinlein, too. There's probably a lot of awful poo poo in there but I doubt it's worth dredging 600+ pages to find

Zamboni_Rodeo posted:

Ah, Heinlein. The only book of his I ever attempted was Stranger In A Strange Land. The setup was interesting and I actually hung with it until. Until.

The Saddest Rhino posted:

ignoring the tribute to the 80s (it was acceptable in the 80s; it was acceptable at the time) of Cline's novels, reading the summaries of RP1 and Armada really reminded me of the books by Stephen Gould.
thats all

Zamboni_Rodeo posted:

Ah, Heinlein. The only book of his I ever attempted was Stranger In A Strange Land. The setup was interesting and I actually hung with it until. Until.

There's a scene where he's having sex with... whoever, and in the throes of passion she cries out, "Thou art God!"

Aaaaannnd that's where I gave up in disgust. According to a friend of mine who read the whole thing, I picked a good place to stop.

pentyne posted:

I only read the first third of the book, but the MC's wife/gf is part of a social of elite liberal arts/sociology/"enlightened" group and the figurehead, some free thinking professor gets smug and starts talking about how the US governemnt is going to destroy ghettos and bulldoze parks to build the "information superhighway" and the MC just starts yelling at him.

Zamboni_Rodeo posted:

Ah, Heinlein. The only book of his I ever attempted was Stranger In A Strange Land. The setup was interesting and I actually hung with it until. Until.

There's a scene where he's having sex with... whoever, and in the throes of passion she cries out, "Thou art God!"

Aaaaannnd that's where I gave up in disgust. According to a friend of mine who read the whole thing, I picked a good place to stop.

Irene Iddesleigh posted:

At the commencement of Irene’s answer of lavishing praises and flimsy apologies, her affianced moved to the opposite corner of the rustic building to scan the features of her he wholly worshipped and reluctantly doubted. Every sentence the able and beautiful girl uttered caused Sir John to shift his apparently uncomfortable person nearer and nearer, watching at the same time minutely the divine picture of innocence, until at last, when her reply was ended, he found himself, altogether unconsciously, clasping her to his bosom, whilst the ruby rims which so recently proclaimed accusations and innocence met with unearthly sweetness, chasing every fault over the hills of doubt, until hidden in the hollow of immediate hate.

The opening sentence of Delina Delaney posted:

Have you ever visited that portion of Erin's plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?

Visiting Westminister Abbey posted:

Holy Moses! Have a look!
Flesh decayed in every nook!
Some rare bits of brain lie here,
Mortal loads of beef and beer,
Some of whom are turned to dust,
Every one bids lost to lust;
Royal flesh so tinged with 'blue'
Undergoes the same as you.
...
Famous some were--yet they died;
Poets--Statesmen--Rogues beside,
Kings--Queens, all of them do rot,
What about them? Now--they're not!

Visiting Westminister Abbey posted:

Holy Moses! Have a look!
Flesh decayed in every nook!
Some rare bits of brain lie here,
Mortal loads of beef and beer,
Some of whom are turned to dust,
Every one bids lost to lust;
Royal flesh so tinged with 'blue'
Undergoes the same as you.
...
Famous some were--yet they died;
Poets--Statesmen--Rogues beside,
Kings--Queens, all of them do rot,
What about them? Now--they're not!

Parody, But Barely Worse Than The Original posted:

When he killed the Mudjokivis,
Of the skin he made him mittens,
Made them with the fur side inside,
Made them with the skin side outside.
He, to get the warm side inside,
Put the inside skin side outside;
He, to get the cold side outside,
Put the warm side fur side inside.
That ’s why he put the fur side inside,
Why he put the skin side outside,
Why he turned them inside outside.

Ambitious Spider posted:

I recently was recommended rpo by someone who usually just reads David McCullough books. I told her I had heard mixed things, and she assured me that no it was awesome.

The Saddest Rhino posted:

The Saddest Rhino posted:

Tiggum posted:

How does one manage to get paid to write this sort of garbage? There are millions of these books written by people you've never heard of, all containing basically the same, mostly useless content mixed with terrible jokes. Do publishing companies just pay some random employee a nominal fee to put an updated version together every few years or what?

GOTTA STAY FAI posted:

Authors like Brian Herbert gotta start somewhere

divabot posted:

Authors like Brian Herbert, Christopher Tolkein et al got started by (a) picking the right genes (b) calling Kevin J. Anderson (c) calling for MORE COKE! AND HOOKERS!

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Doesn't Christopher Tolkien just publish his father's library of old notes?

John Big Booty posted:

That's where he started to let his libertarianism shine, if I recall correctly.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Someone should do one of those readthroughs of the Brian Herbert dunebooks, because they are super-dumb in ways that are kind of interesting.

muscles like this? posted:

I like how in the first prequel book he wrote he gave the Harkonnens no-ship technology, which wouldn't exist in universe for thousands of years. Also the Baron was fat because Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam hypnotized him to overeat.

Goldskull posted:

Julian May's The Many Coloured Land/Golden Torc. Someone recommended it in another thread on the premise of 'future people can travel back to post-dinosaur age to get away from everything but there's aliens already there'. Premise sounds good, starts well, and then everyone's a loving Mary Sue over-powered telepath/shape shifter vs Medieval Space Elves/mutant underdog trolls, it's complete shite.