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I read white noise recently and liked it. It's very much an 80s white dude book, and it's certainly no Vonnegut, but some bits were clever, like the barn famous for being the most famous barn in America. Generally I think it works, and it's at least well written, so I don't think it quite deserves to be in the same thread with such winners as rpo
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Jul 15, 2016 10:52
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Kumaton posted:I haven't read RPO either, but from pure Internet osmosis, I know that it starts out by being "oh man this guy's life sucks" but then subverts it and pretty much says that it's totally cool to obsess over 80's pop culture and generally be a Goon because the world is going to need it someday. If it existed in a vacuum you could make an argument that RPO was just presenting a world without endorsing it but then you look at how the author acts in the real world and how his second novel was pretty much exactly the same goddamn thing.
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Jul 15, 2016 11:43
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Tiggum posted:I liked Going Postal a lot and Making Money was decent, but Raising Steam was pretty much garbage. Nothing much happened and it wasn't funny. I felt like several of his later Discworld books seemed like they were written out of obligation or something, like he was out of decent Discworld ideas but just kept adding to the series anyway. Nation and Dodger were way better than any of the Discworld books that came out after about 2005. I think his last few novels (Snuff, Raising Steam, The Shepard's Crown) were written at the point where he knew that his time was nearly up; and he wanted to make sure his thoughts on current events and messages were clear and present, rather then being softly delivered. You could see the same messages in Thud! but not delivered as plainly. Very clear on his views of racism, fanaticism, prejudice in Snuff and Raising Steam. Shepard's Crown was basically his goodbye note in book form.
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Jul 15, 2016 12:23
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I once had a Piers Anthony omnibus that I never read. To my knowledge he's like Pratchett if Pratchett were less of a beloved author and more of a demented paedophile.
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Jul 15, 2016 12:40
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Gridlocked posted:I think his last few novels (Snuff, Raising Steam, The Shepherd's Crown) were written at the point where he knew that his time was nearly up; and he wanted to make sure his thoughts on current events and messages were clear and present, rather then being softly delivered. You could see the same messages in Thud! but not delivered as plainly. in 'Raising Steam', you can see the parts where he started writing 'Making Money' and 'Scouting for Trolls' and a few other books, and hit the wall, and then just threw them in. and in 'Shepherd's Crown'.... once you know that the ending was supposed to be the revelation that Granny Weatherwax had hidden her consciousness in You the Cat, and then Death comes for her and she says "I am leaving on my own terms now", you can really see where that was foreshadowed. And it's so intensely symbolic of what Pratchett was always saying about himself, and the right to die. Unkempt posted:I made a thread about this book about 10 years ago and I've still got the images, so here you go.  Are we sure that's not a parody? It seems maybe a bit too self-aware?
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Jul 15, 2016 15:00
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Parahexavoctal posted:in 'Raising Steam', you can see the parts where he started writing 'Making Money' and 'Scouting for Trolls' and a few other books, and hit the wall, and then just threw them in. There's six hundred pages of that poo poo, that's a lot of effort to go to. Re. Pratchett, I haven't been able to finish Raising Steam. There was such a sharp decline in his writing towards the end that I'd rather leave it unfinished and go back and read, oh, let's say 'Mort' for the sixth time.
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Jul 15, 2016 16:27
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Unkempt posted:There's six hundred pages of that poo poo, that's a lot of effort to go to. Honestly I never thought raising steam was a bad book, just a bad Pratchett book. And when the guy is so wracked from Alzheimer that he has to dictate the book because he cannot process text anymore, I'm willing to give him a pass for writing a merely okay book.
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Jul 15, 2016 16:44
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Inspector Gesicht posted:I once had a Piers Anthony omnibus that I never read. To my knowledge he's like Pratchett if Pratchett were less of a beloved author and more of a demented paedophile. A story about how people are kept like cows and the dimension jumping hero screws a mentally retarded cow girl that looks like some girl he knew in his home dimension. His penis was too small to satisfy her though. A story about a 6 inch woman that had to screw a full sized man to save her world of single cell beings. A story about a guy that voluntarily allows himself to be tortured by aliens to figure out why they're torturing people. Turns out they do this because people that are tortured are harder to bribe or something. They only tell him this after they've reduced him to 'living potato' status. He joins their government. Then there's seemingly 'normal' stories like a guy that gets scammed with a buy land on Mars deal. I didn't learn my lesson and actually read Firefly years later that has a judge crying that they have to put a pedophile in jail. He wasn't the bad guy the girl's family was.
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Jul 15, 2016 17:09
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Deki posted:Honestly I never thought raising steam was a bad book, just a bad Pratchett book. Oh yeah, I'm not saying it was unreadably bad, just too depressing under the circumstances. The lovely, lovely circumstances.
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Jul 15, 2016 17:21
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You know if you have to keep saying that you have to give a good author slowly dying from Alzheimers leeway on this, the terrible books thread, you should probably just stop half-heartedly punching down and talk about actually horrible books instead of repeatedly bringing the later works of said author up.
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Jul 15, 2016 17:29
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"Big black maggot-infested balls" is literary genius.
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Jul 15, 2016 18:15
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Darkhold posted:Probably not available anymore but I remember young me finding Anthonology (a collection of Piers Anthony short stories) and thinking 'huh it's that guy that writes those funny Xanth novels'. I had quite the surprise in store for me. Highlights from what I remember: Yeah, I mentioned suffering that earlier upthread. Welcome to Piers' Anthony's personal enchanted piss forest. Dare you enter my magical realm???
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Jul 15, 2016 19:46
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Deki posted:Honestly I never thought raising steam was a bad book, just a bad Pratchett book. To me Raising Steam was too... goody good - everybody was getting the good ending, the main mechanic (I can't remember his name) always had a response for the press, and of course was going to end up with the Golden King daughter, the rail was going to be built without a problem, nobody from the main cast was going to die. It was a fairy tale - of course, being a Pratchett book this doesn't mean that much. It was still plenty enjoyable, even if it felt like it was meant for younger audience, (likewise to his Tiffany Achings books), it still upheld the quality of Pratchett's workmanship. Regarding Xanth though - I must confess that during my youth I've read all of the books, up till Golem in the Gears, and enjoyed it. I don't remember pedophilia - I remember the bestiality though, albeit in the degree that if you didn't think about it, you wouldn't have noticed it (as, description of how Pool of Love works). I might be looking at it with nostalgia or naivete, but I'm still impressed that the translator managed to make readable a book based solely on english puns, with computer games fantasy thrown in the mix - as, a story where main hero was given a quest in the beginning of the book, he was doing these sidequests, and everything was predictable, with adventure game like solutions. I also remember that he put one of the fans of the book, a girl that's been a victim of a car accident, as a heroine in one of his books, although I think that was later on in the series. Certainly the books were... pulp I had a look however at my home bookshelf and was reminded of a gift I've given my brother for Christmas - horror stories by Graham Masterton. My brother liked horror stories, and I didn't really know of any, and bought it upon the recommendation of the seller. Well - after my brother finished it I found that it foremost had descriptions of graphic sex: like for example a story about a master chef that is to serve this girl as a dish - so there are pages of descriptions of, as he's loving her, dishes that he can make of her vagina. The story wasn't even horrific - but it was certainly uncomfortable. Moreso, that I think was 14 at that point, and that I've given my (older) brother a raunchy book. Also gently caress Brian Lumley - he's taken a book with great premise: a man talks to the dead, but he's not a necromancer (and dead revile them as it hurts them to be back in flesh), he can't command them, he's just a normal human that thinks he's going insane. The dead (as - ghosts) help him track down serial killers, get their things in order etc. Then he talks to MC Escher and learns how to travel through dimensions. Then loving vampires happen that introduce insane body horror - for example a human turned into toilet by a vampire. Instead of having any sort of technology everything is made of people - stretched and metamorphosed. If I remember correctly there were even horses and balloons made of people, because why not. gently caress these books. canis minor has a new favorite as of 19:55 on Jul 15, 2016 |
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Jul 15, 2016 19:52
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I recently (for lack of anything better to read) read through a book I found called Foreign Affairs by Stuart Woods. It's a typical shlocky mystery novel (the main character is named Stone Barrington, a man with former lovers in the CIA and at the head of MI6), but it included an amazing bit where Stone Barrington is yelling at his kidnapped girlfriend to shove her phone in her crotch, and "witty, flirty" banter about Reaganomics.
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Jul 15, 2016 21:33
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canis minor posted:Then loving vampires happen that introduce insane body horror - for example a human turned into toilet by a vampire. Instead of having any sort of technology everything is made of people - stretched and metamorphosed. If I remember correctly there were even horses and balloons made of people, because why not. gently caress these books. The 90's World of Darkness RPG had a group of vampires that did exactly this as their signature superpower. They'd make war monsters out of two dozen bodies, or a tailored suit that was actually a spy, or a whole chapel out of thousands of innocent people. Oh, and a sample NPC that may or may not have been Himmler.
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Jul 15, 2016 23:58
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The worst book I ever read was a collection of short stories called Acetone Enema. It's been so long that I don't remember the individual plot lines but they were all kind of the same thing, anyway--super ~*eDgY*~ first-person perspective bullshit written from the POV of craaaaazy serial killers: headless corpse loving, baby-killing, that kind of thing. The last story was a collaboration with some other writer and wasn't in first-person and it stood out a little more: these two characters kidnapped a handicapped little girl, stripped her naked and buried her in a mound in the back yard. It was extremely uncomfortable to read, but then--twist!--the mound was actually magic and completely healed the girl and it was a wonderful miracle! Then--edgy twist!--one guy smashed her head in with a shovel and raped her corpse! Yeah that was definitely the worst.
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Jul 16, 2016 03:07
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We should go back to talking about terrible books again? Then it's time for the Black Jewels Trilogy. Alternate universe me probably got their teenage edgelord romance fix from Anne Rice instead, but I got hooked into this poo poo for a while. The world is an absolute matriarchy, with a complex hierarchy based on your class, your power as a magician, and your gender-witches vs. warlords. At the top of the heap are queens who form courts around them starting with three warlords. At some point some not-queen decides she wants to rule which means taking out the actual queens, and she accomplishes that by altering the culture in such as to sew dissent between males and females, disrupting the natural hierarchy and basically letting society do the dirty work of limiting the queen's power and slowly killing them off. And I think that's what I really liked about these books. I like society viewed as a system of social contracts, and any speculative fiction about how/why people build or break them is right up my alley. The situation in Dark Jewels is that the system is warped in such a way as to be actively harmful, but at the same time it's so rigid that people can't discard it even as they mourn how terrible things are now. (Fun fact: I picked these up in between GRRM releases) So what goes wrong with this premise? You could make the argument that a poo poo ton of violence, especially sexual violence, is a logical outcome, but it's still pretty loving gross. Daughter of the Blood: Sadist/prostitute/perfect man Dameon is enslaved to Head Bitch and she pimps him out a lot. He gets sent to this one house where he meets the magic Witch Messiah who is his destined love, but she is still a girl so they become friends. Meanwhile Messiah is teleporting around meeting other friends, like Dameon's dad, Satan, who is the undead king of hell but a classy guy and he teaches her magic. She also meets his brother, Lucifer who is a tough-guy enslaved in some mines somewhere. When not in other realms, Messiah is considered "difficult" and always in and out of clinic that is really a front for a pedophile ring. Eventually Dameon finds out and resolves to burn the loving place down and kill everyone; Messiah gets hurt badly and whisked away by Satan. Dameon goes to spring his brother but through some contrived bullshit is driven mad and wanders off. Heir to the Shadows: Messiah is in coma, eventually wakes up, Satan moves out of hell and into a castle in the shadow-realm (this world has three dimensions, poo poo one, shadow one, and hell with portals in between) to raise her. A wolf who also turns out to be magic shows up and everyone learns that there are magic animals, some of which have been living along side humans as pets/work animals for years and just never said anything because reasons. Eventually there are fairies, satyrs, white tigers, and unicorns because this is now a Lisa Frank trapper keeper. There are also more witches and warlords who are all precocious as gently caress. There's also a ruling council of evil busy-buddies who don't like Messiah being raised by the lord of hell and launch constant schemes to separate them. Eventually Lucifer has a prison break and shows up to counter all the sweetness with his grouchy, macho-man attitude. The council tries some scheme that ends up with Messiah jacked up on a super-aphrodisiac/cocaine and she runs around the forest eventually falling into a trap involving a town of non-magic people (those exist?) under siege by a might army of pygmy troll things; one half-blood (magic people are Of The Blood) character dies and she gets so mad she blows the pygmies up with her mind. Then she runs around in astral projection form to find Dameon and repair his sanity. Then the island of the unicorns gets invaded and Messiah and the rest of the gang all run off to help. Afterwords all her friends, who now rule everything in the shadow realm but the one evil city, all succeed their thrones to her and she assumes her rightful place as Queen. Queen of the Darkness: Newly sane Dameon works his way over to the shadow realm. Messiah is not a girl but not yet a woman so they awkwardly dance around each other for a couple chapters until a friendly hooker and giant tiger conspire to get them to bone. Then Messiah's family comes to visit in order to kidnap her sister who showed up at some prior point. The plan fails, grandma is lovely, and Messiah rips her power from her and sends her packing. poo poo realm, still headed by Head Bitch who started this mess literally millennia ago, declares war on shadow realm. Villages get sacked. Dameon help Messiah think of a way to kill all the bad people without hurting all the good ones, and in order to buy her time goes to Head Bitch's camp to gently caress with her head for a few days in successively gross ways. Plan succeeds but it kills Messiah in the process. Or Does It?! After moping around for a good while Dameon is brought to a cave where Messiah is being slowly nursed back to health by her animal friends because they loved her so purely and strongly they held her back from death. She really should have stayed in that The shorter the summery, the more hosed up poo poo I was leaving out. Notice how Head Bitch doesn't get much mention. This series will probably always have a special place in my heart as a total wtf. I loaned my copies out to someone in the hopes of having someone to talk about them with, but they ran off never to be heard from again. Probably for the best.
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Jul 16, 2016 11:00
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artsy fartsy posted:The worst book I ever read was a collection of short stories called Acetone Enema. It's been so long that I don't remember the individual plot lines but they were all kind of the same thing, anyway--super ~*eDgY*~ first-person perspective bullshit written from the POV of craaaaazy serial killers: headless corpse loving, baby-killing, that kind of thing. http://www.muscularfiction.com/acetone-enema.html lol the url
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Jul 16, 2016 11:29
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canis minor posted:
Oh, it's bad. The body horror does start with the necromancer, even opens with one at work - which is basically just the power to make dead spirits what happens to their body, and going all out on the corpse desecration. But that's pretty fitting for horror, and when the story does stick with psychics it's mostly just skeevy British erotica at worst (Like how dudes supposed to be attractive are always in their 50's and greying/with receding hailines; guess what Brian Lumley's age was at the time). Then the vampires, which are basically The Thing with an equal-partnership human host, get introduced in the following novels and they're basically a case for simultaneous invention of tentacle rape as a genre. The stories just love their gruesome alien rape from there on out, and making it explicit that the whole vampire creation process is basically alien insemination. there wolf posted:Eventually Dameon finds out and resolves to burn the loving place down and kill everyone; Messiah gets hurt badly and whisked away by Satan. Dameon goes to spring his brother but through some contrived bullshit is driven mad and wanders off. This really sells it short. I only read the first book, which escalated the grossness up incrementally, but 'hurt badly' means 'raped with the strap-on from Seven,' because the whole becoming a witch thing is explicitly tied in with defloration and surviving the process. Yep! A whole big building block to the world is raping people to death so they won't become witches, or accidentally raping them until they're crazy witches. The books I thought were terrible that I read recently were mysteries, though. One was a 'Murder She Wrote' book centered around a murder at Thanksgiving which was primarily offensive because one of the recurring characters, Seth the Doctor, is such an unlikeable rear end in a top hat. Just constantly smug, rude, and dismissive but always written with the intention of being some earthy no-nonsense type. The other one was Agatha Christie's Harley Quin short stories, which contain a lot less cheesecake clown and more smug omniscient rear end in a top hat. The stories are just the usual english mystery stuff, but the primary detective character is some sort of enigmatic supernatural character. So they know the solution right away and just wait until the story is two pages from ending before springing into action, rather than having any sense of investigation or deduction at work. An annoying motif to that is that they're supposed to appear as just a normal person, but when it comes time to reveal the mystery there's always some trick of the lighting or shadow that gives them the appearance of wearing a clown suit. I don't know a lot about what English decor was like back in the old days, but I doubt it featured colored glass everywhere.
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Jul 16, 2016 12:00
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in Michael Crichtons State of Fear the main antagonist is eaten by black people because they can't resist their cannabilstic nature.
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Jul 16, 2016 14:41
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Is that the same character he based off a book critic he disliked?
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Jul 16, 2016 14:56
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there wolf posted:We should go back to talking about terrible books again? Then it's time for the Black Jewels Trilogy. I had a girlfriend who loved these books so I tried the first one out but it was so bad I can't understand how it could even be a guilty pleasure. The actual plot etc. like you say is full of rape and torture but some people like those kinds of dark fantasies, the worst things about these books are that they are extremely badly written and incredibly stupid. It's not shocking, it's not interesting, it's actually really, really boring. The tone is bizarre. Almost every character sounds exactly the same. Exposition is laid out in the flattest possible manner. The villains are evil because they are evil, end of story. It reads like it was written by someone who was brought up on terrible Vampire Chronicles fan fiction or something like that.
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Jul 16, 2016 14:56
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an overdue owl posted:I had a girlfriend who loved these books so I tried the first one out but it was so bad I can't understand how it could even be a guilty pleasure. The actual plot etc. like you say is full of rape and torture but some people like those kinds of dark fantasies, the worst things about these books are that they are extremely badly written and incredibly stupid. It's not shocking, it's not interesting, it's actually really, really boring. The tone is bizarre. Almost every character sounds exactly the same. Exposition is laid out in the flattest possible manner. The villains are evil because they are evil, end of story. It reads like it was written by someone who was brought up on terrible Vampire Chronicles fan fiction or something like that. I can't take any book seriously whose main characters have dumb-rear end names like Dameon or Messiah and if there's a Lucifer or Satan in them when flipping through them in the bookstore it's pretty much a dealbreaker. Names are important in my mind (  ) and a terrible/dumb/overly obvious name drives me nuts. Pratchett got away with it because he's Pratchett, JK Rowling got away with it because Harry Potter was actually good but trashy romance and genre fantasy are chock-full of these idiots and I want to track them down and throw things at them.
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Jul 16, 2016 15:16
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BJT has Daemon, Saetan, Lucivar, Mephis, and then the messiah girl's family name is Angelline. I mentioned this earlier in the thread but it's worth repeating that when Daemon meets his destined messiah love, it's because he's contracted out to her grandmother as a pleasure slave. Except he literally never gets aroused by diddling all the ladies he gets contracted out to, and doesn't even lose his virginity until book 3, to his destined messiah love. But what really irritates me about the writing is that it often says "so and so made an obscene but fitting remark" and leave it at that. I understand that sometimes you just describe the remark and let the reader come up with something but this happens over and over and leads me to conclude the author isn't clever enough to actually write witty dialogue
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Jul 16, 2016 15:40
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there wolf posted:sew dissent
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Jul 16, 2016 15:59
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TheKennedys posted:I can't take any book seriously whose main characters have dumb-rear end names like Dameon or Messiah and if there's a Lucifer or Satan in them when flipping through them in the bookstore it's pretty much a dealbreaker. Names are important in my mind ( I honestly thought before I started reading the book that her choice of names MUST be because she was going to do something clever or interesting with it and surely it couldn't be taken on face value because on face value it gives me intense second hand embarrassment, it's so obviously awful that I was sure there must be some commentary or deconstruction or creative take here! But no.
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Jul 16, 2016 16:07
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Rangpur posted:Is that the same character he based off a book critic he disliked? That is indeed the same book where he based a tiny-dicked child molester off of a book critic he liked.
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Jul 16, 2016 16:18
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Rangpur posted:Is that the same character he based off a book critic he disliked? nah he made his critics child molesters
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Jul 16, 2016 17:05
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Pratchett chat, i remember hearing somewhere that the last few discworld novels were written by his daughter? After reading them i kinda thought the "voice" of the author was way off from standard pratchett.
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Jul 16, 2016 22:24
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Biplane posted:Pratchett chat, i remember hearing somewhere that the last few discworld novels were written by his daughter? After reading them i kinda thought the "voice" of the author was way off from standard pratchett. Uhhh. You know he had alzheimer's, right? That is why the voice sounded different.
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Jul 16, 2016 23:02
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He was fairly open about the fact that he had to dictate the last few discworld novels. I get the impression that he would write/read/rewrite previous books to an extent that he just couldnt from about Unseen Academicals onwards. They were never bad, but from there onwards (with the possible exception of Snuff) they felt unpolished/almost unfinished to me at least. The subplots didnt come together as neatly as they usually would, there are minor story hooks left hanging, things like that. Alzheimers is a loving bastard.
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Jul 16, 2016 23:20
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The Vosgian Beast posted:You know if you have to keep saying that you have to give a good author slowly dying from Alzheimers leeway on this, the terrible books thread, you should probably just stop half-heartedly punching down and talk about actually horrible books instead of repeatedly bringing the later works of said author up. Just ignore this, there is nothing more engaging than weakly kicking at dying old men
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Jul 17, 2016 00:09
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Just ignore this, there is nothing more engaging than weakly kicking at dying old men you can probably chill out, i really don't think Pratchett is looking down from heaven frowning that some people are discussing the fact that his last few books weren't that good
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Jul 17, 2016 00:43
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Just ignore this, there is nothing more engaging than weakly kicking at dying old men I think that watching one of my favourite authors slowly losing his mind through the progress of a hideous disease to be intensely depressing, but hey, gently caress you you piece of poo poo.
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Jul 17, 2016 00:57
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Unkempt posted:I think that watching one of my favourite authors slowly losing his mind through the progress of a hideous disease to be intensely depressing, but hey, gently caress you you piece of poo poo. I was being sarcastic, I actually think it's sad and I wish this thread for mocking bad books would stop circling a tragedy.
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Jul 17, 2016 01:06
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an overdue owl posted:you can probably chill out, i really don't think Pratchett is looking down from heaven frowning that some people are discussing the fact that his last few books weren't that good Oh man, Pratchett got the bad end. 
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Jul 17, 2016 01:09
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artsy fartsy posted:Acetone Enema Found a name for my sludgecore band, thank you
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Jul 17, 2016 01:23
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WendyO posted:This really sells it short. I only read the first book, which escalated the grossness up incrementally, but 'hurt badly' means 'raped with the strap-on from Seven,' because the whole becoming a witch thing is explicitly tied in with defloration and surviving the process. Yep! A whole big building block to the world is raping people to death so they won't become witches, or accidentally raping them until they're crazy witches. I wrote out the plot significant rapes and mutilations, and then took them all out because I wasn't sure what was too much. So since we're talking about it, that thing I was saying about destabilizing the world through breaking how society functions is the above building block. You're supposed to wait till women are grown and then deflower them nicely, and when they become more powerful than you they'll treat you well. Head Bitch changes things so that brutalizing men is the norm, mostly through magic cock rings that you can shoot pain into, and men respond by raping women and eventually girls so they can never become witches. There's also a scene in the second book where Jaenelle (actual name of the messiah figure) gives a non-torture cock ring to Lucifer, her adoptive brother, as a sign that he serves her and it's still magical and lets him feel her emotional state. The sexual politics in this series are very strange.
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Jul 17, 2016 01:35
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Piers Anthony claimed this chapter was a joke.
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Jul 17, 2016 08:20
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WendyO posted:The other one was Agatha Christie's Harley Quin short stories, which contain a lot less cheesecake clown and more smug omniscient rear end in a top hat. The stories are just the usual english mystery stuff, but the primary detective character is some sort of enigmatic supernatural character. So they know the solution right away and just wait until the story is two pages from ending before springing into action, rather than having any sense of investigation or deduction at work. An annoying motif to that is that they're supposed to appear as just a normal person, but when it comes time to reveal the mystery there's always some trick of the lighting or shadow that gives them the appearance of wearing a clown suit. I don't know a lot about what English decor was like back in the old days, but I doubt it featured colored glass everywhere. I've been on a Christie kick recently and bought a copy of Mysterious Mr. Quin at the used bookstore today to get on the Magic Clown Mystery Train. I'm hoping for an entertaining trainwreck, at least. On the subject of Christie: it's pretty obvious that a lot of her work hasn't aged well, especially the older stuff, but The Man in the Brown Suit is a complete cringe these days. The actual mystery plot is fine, if a little in the "plucky young person sort of floats through an intrigue" trope she seemed fond of in her early writing, but like half the book is a love letter to Rhodesia/general British imperialism in Africa, and it's just so much worse than even the baseline "everyone has servants and is kind of gross about class and foreign cultures" vintage Englishness of Christie.
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Jul 17, 2016 08:37
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