PYF terrible book: Freud molesting a thesaurus.

The Something Awful Forums > Main > Post Your Favorite: Carefully Curated > PYF terrible book: Freud molesting a thesaurus.

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

Emma Donoghue's Frog Music is outlandishly bad, a horrible unpleasant slog full of characters who aren't even unlikeable in an amusing way and a plot that reads like the dullest-ever CYOA. A shame since Room was loving brilliant. What happened?

# ¿ Jul 3, 2015 00:56

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 07:10

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

HMS Beagle posted:

On the topic of authors who should definitely do better, Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer is ridiculously awful.

Is that the one with the boring middle-aged white people who do it in the woods? I completely forgot I ever read that. What a fuckin dog.

I think terrible books by authors who could do better are more offensive than terrible books whose terribleness is inevitable, but they're also less fun to poo poo on. Except for Bret Easton Ellis' bad books, those are a scream. Glamorama is exhibit A. Best if read aloud "Eye of Argon" style with a bunch of drunk friends.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2015 05:48

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

Affe mk2 posted:

Valley of the Horses was loving amazing when I was 13.

Valley of Horses is the best one because it has the most cool Cro-Magnon survivalist stuff. If you're a kid who fantasizes obsessively about running away to live in Nature, it's a worthy heir to "My Side of the Mountain" and all that poo poo. Plus: horsies! And nonthreatening porn! It's pretty much the perfect 13-year-old-girl book. Caveman Ken is a serious drip though. Even at 13 I saw right through his dudebro schtick and was bummed out when his vastly-more-interesting brother got eaten by Ayla's pet lion

The rest of them are hot garbage and get worse as they go along, largely due to Ayla's Mary Sueness reaching critical mass. I kept waiting for that bitch to invent the internal combustion engine.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2015 17:38

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

FactsAreUseless posted:

A Million Little Pieces, the story of a man who got drug high on crack weeds.

Yep. The Exile's takedown is a classic.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2015 17:32

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

HMS Beagle posted:

Frey makes his living now churning out young adult fiction. He does the "I Am Number Four" series.

He's responsible for it, but doesn't actually write it. Instead he pressgangs desperate up-and-comers into writing it for very little pay. Also it is terrible.

James Frey is just a breathtaking example of human worthlessness.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2015 19:37

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

Stick Insect posted:

Little Brother, also by Cory Doctorow.

It's an instruction guide that is presented in the form of a story, told from a first-person perspective. About maintaining privacy, subverting surveillance and using technology to your advantage. Even contains instructions on how to make your own pepper spray device, and it's suggested rather bluntly that it can be used for more than just making food evenly spiced.

Cory knows what he's writing about when it comes to these topics. This is the good part. The bad part is how he writes about it. Like the scaremongering style in his articles on Boingboing, his fiction style is pretty bad too.

The book reads like his personal fantasy, where his worst nightmare (country turning into a police state) happens to a younger version of himself, who then starts to fight back. The main character comes across as a total self-insert who would agree 100% on everything with the author.

His YA writing is also relentlessly condescending to his audience. His use of "teen" argot is Dad-clueless and It's so apparent that he's trying to Educate the kiddies about The Issues Of Our Time (as understood by a forty-something tech nerd) that I nearly died of mortification reading it and I'm a grown-rear end adult.

Hipster-liberal teachers and parents love that poo poo. The kids themselves seem to want to have nothing to do with it, and good for them.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2015 01:03

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

bringmyfishback posted:

I Don't Even Own a Television just did Scruples by Judith Krantz, which was one of the most simultaneously revolting and enthralling pieces of "literature" I've ever read. Has anyone else here picked up that turdburger?

Scruples is loving incredible and I can't recommend it enough. It is just total garbage and takes itself completely seriously and is full of characters with names like "Harriet Toppingham". It helps to steal it from your mom and read it when you're 15 though.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2016 23:59

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

Crow Jane posted:

My middle school friends and I passed around a copy of Anne Rice's Exit to Eden that someone had stolen from her mom.

Did we go to the same middle school? My crew put some mileage on that sucker (which actually isn't terrible as these things go, certainly has it over Fifty Shades like a tent. I remember the double-dildo scene with fondness.) The girl who swiped the book from her mom was quite the celebrity for a short while, until I usurped her position with my own mom's Anais Nin who does not belong in this thread.

A bunch of seventh-graders proooobably shouldn't have been reading about 80% of what we were reading.

spite house has a new favorite as of 02:32 on Mar 4, 2016

# ¿ Mar 4, 2016 02:29

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

I revisited Scruples for the first time since high school, inspired by this thread and the I Don't Even Own A Television podcast. I wondered if it was really as crashingly, awe-inspiringly, psychedelically terrible as I remember it being.

Oh no.

It's worse. It's so much worse. It is just sublimely bad. It would be high camp if it had even a little self-awareness, but it doesn't. Judith Krantz really, really cares a LOT, and what she cares about is the following:

Describing every stick of furniture and scrap of clothing in the characters' immediate vicinity, in flabbergasting detail
Raunchy and vaguely queasy-making sex (lots)
Occasionally embarking on surprisingly sober and informative digressions about the inner workings of various industries, mostly publishing, fashion and film
More sex
The trivial existential crises of very, very rich people

What she does not care about :

Plot
Meaningful character development
Really anything except clothes, loving and interior decor

It's spellbinding. If you enjoy bad books you're shortchanging yourself if you don't find it and read it immediately. (This shouldn't be difficult, the local Goodwill probably has six or seven copies for a quarter apiece.)

Sample passage:

Scruples posted:

The entire world was available to her she observed, as she flipped over the pages of Architectural Digest. For three hundred thousand dollars she could own an air-conditioned pavilion in Bali, built in a coconut grove next to the ocean, with a swimming pool of course. In Eleuthera there was a house for sale that had twelve hundred feet of pink sand beach and a private overseas telephone system�all for less than three million dollars, furnished. (Did the list of private phone numbers come with the furniture?) Or, if she preferred something less tropical, she could live in England at Number 7, Royal Crescent, Bath, for no more than seventyfive thousand pounds, owning a house that had been built in 1770 as part of the most splendid example of Georgian architecture in the world, and which now possessed a sauna and a five-car garage. If she chose, she could adopt the life-style of someone like Bunny Mellon with four fabulous homes, two full-time interior decorators, everything from her tennis hats to her ball gowns to her servants� uniforms designed especially for her by Givenchy. They said she kept apples boiling at all times on the stoves of her one hundred thousand-acre Virginia estate to perfume the air with an authentic farm aroma. Such precious attention to detail made Billy�s teeth hurt. Too much!

YOU DON'T SAY.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2016 19:17

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

Darthemed posted:

Mythology 101, by Jody Lynn Nye.

I want to smack this author in the teeth with a printout of the Turkey City Lexicon.

things not to do, according to the TCL posted:

�Said� Bookism

An artificial verb used to avoid the word �said.� �Said� is one of the few invisible words in the English language and is almost impossible to overuse. It is much less distracting than �he retorted,� �she inquired,� �he ejaculated,� and other oddities. The term �said-book� comes from certain pamphlets, containing hundreds of purple-prose synonyms for the word �said,� which were sold to aspiring authors from tiny ads in American magazines of the pre-WWII era.

I mean, the whole thing sounds comprehensively dreadful, but that tic is just the worst.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2016 22:32

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

quote:

A hummingbird's heart beats more than three hundred times per minute and they live briefly, gloriously, for one year.

1.4 seconds on Wikipedia reveals that this isn't even sort of true. Jesus.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2016 05:31

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

Ryoshi posted:

Over the past two pages I kept thinking you guys were talking about Mieville's King Rat and was a little confused.

Me too. Kept thinking "wtf China would never." Crush remains intact thank heaven.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

King Rat is a reaaallly rough first novel, but to Mieville's credit he got better pretty quick

He was about 24 when he wrote it, so roughness is to be expected, but it remains the only book of his that I haven't been able to get through. The writing is just so mannered, even for him. Sorry honey.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2016 21:20

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

It keeps coming up in the PYF Dark Enlightenment Thinker thread that the loathsome turbonerds of the neoreactionary internet never know what quite to make of Mi�ville, because he is also a turbonerd (good) and a sci-fi/fantasy author (good) but a Marxist (bad?) and a total ubermensch of the variety that they all desperately wish they were (oh Daddy please beat me some more), so they just quietly defer beta-ishly. It's pretty drat amusing.

But his books are not terrible (except for "King Rat" which is only kinda terrible) so he doesn't really belong here. Thank you for not writing icky sex scenes with 14-year-olds, China.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2016 02:15

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

SurreptitiousMuffin posted:

We're allowed to discuss terrible authors, right? Because this nobody hack is suddenly getting so much attention that it crashed his blog. He's become one of the most reviled people in fiction basically overnight.

https://intheinbox.wordpress.com/2016/07/27/how-to-get-yourself-blacklisted/

If nothing else -- and there's a lot of else here -- this goober revealed that he knows nothing about the publishing industry. It's a very small world and publishing folks love two things above all else: gossip in general, and gossip about terrible books/authors in particular. This must have felt like Christmas morning.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2016 17:18

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

Anyone have a link to the LF Cory Doctorow mock thread? IIRC it was pretty brilliant.

e: found it. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2843583&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

spite house has a new favorite as of 02:19 on Aug 14, 2016

# ¿ Aug 14, 2016 02:16

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

Domus posted:

People thought that poo poo was good?

Nobody thought it was good except Neil Gaiman, whose track record re fawning endorsements is... uneven, to put it charitably.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2016 02:36

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

Stuporstar posted:

But despite it being an incredibly hard book to describe because it veered all over the place, it wasn't a complete piece of poo poo.

This could describe all of Bruce Sterling's novels really.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2016 22:02

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

divabot posted:

Best discovery: that the guy who did all those paperback covers for Panther in the '70s has a name, he's Chris Foss, and you can buy prints of the book covers.

Unrelated to terrible books, but if anyone generally interested in noteworthy beautiful disasters hasn't seen "Jodorowsky's Dune", do. It's an amazing documentary about the eponymous crazy genius' quixotic attempt to bring "Dune" to the screen years before Lynch, and Chris Foss figures in it prominently. Jodorowsky talked him onto the production team on the strength of a pulp cover he found in a used bookstore and just kinda liked. ("I found this thing you made and just kinda liked it" seems to be how Jodo recruits most of his people, bless him.) Is how Foss ended up working with Giger on "Alien".

# ¿ Sep 5, 2016 21:19

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

Can we talk about A Little Life for a second?

Because that poo poo barks at the moon. I only read it because it looked like the least awful thing at an airport bookstore, and the reviews were good, ish. "Frank." "Affecting." Etc etc etc.

God it's poo poo. I want to know what the Man Booker people were on, man. There is a grand total of one interesting character in the whole thing (JB, who just up and vanishes about halfway through), the writing is crude and awkward and ugly, and the author takes a frankly lascivious interest in torturing her protagonist literally to death. The kind of book that says terrible things about the people who enjoyed it. Made me want to take the longest shower in the world. Ew.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2016 00:42

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

SERIOUSLY.

I haven't read a book that made me actively angry with its badness in a real long time. And this is what passes for Acclaimed Literature these days. We're all doomed.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2016 01:03

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

p sure this piece got namechecked in this thread before

oh well I sure do like critical hatchet jobs that land on fellas named Jonathan

# ¿ Sep 24, 2016 11:11

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

Re terrible books and Mormonism, everyone knows Twilight is completely irredeemable, but did you know it's also Mormon as gently caress? Another exegesis on this subject, which I'm not linking to because it's 2008 Livejournal to an embarrassing degree, points out that Edward Cullen is described as looking exactly like Joseph Smith did according to Mormon doctrine. Maybe a little sparklier.

I don't think Stephenie Meyer did it on purpose, quite, but she doesn't strike me as a woman overburdened with self-awareness.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2016 05:57

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

food court bailiff posted:

I just finished The Girl on the Train and while it certainly wasn't the worst thing I've ever read, I'm gobsmacked that it was apparently the fastest-selling hardcover adult novel of all time when it was released. How...does that even happen?

People are starved for original, engaging, middlebrow stories that aren't genre and also aren't "literary fiction" ginned out by MFA creative-writing grads who seem incapable of writing about anything but having illicit affairs with senior faculty at Midwestern universities.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2017 07:58

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

uli2000 posted:

I'm a huge Bill Bryson fan and will buy pretty much anything that has his name on it. In the early 90's, after 20 years as a newspaper reporter in the UK, he was leaving to return to America and took a walking trip, writing about it in Notes From a Small Island. As an American expat living in the UK at the time, I loved the book and the view of life in the UK from a perspective I could really relate to. Twenty plus years (and several best sellers later), he sets out to write basically a sequel to Notes From A Small Island called The Road to Little Dribbling. All the second book is is an old man bitching about change and how he hates it. It's supposed to encompass a journey from the south end of England all the way up thru Scotland, but 3/4 of the book is London and the home counties, barely touching on the the rest of the country. Quite the waste of 600 pages, but of course, it being Bill Bryson, every book reviewer was lining up to stroke his dick.

That's disappointing but not surprising. Notes From A Small Island was great, but an awful lot of it was given over to grousing about how icky any form of modernization is, and misty-eyed pastoral chauvinism that reminded me of Michael Moorcock's criticisms of Tolkien. Think I'll be giving this one a miss. (Though his observation that it's a shame England never tried communism, not because of its viability as an economic system but because the English, with their penchant for mediocre food, lowered expectations and waiting in line, would be terrific at it, remains a classic.)

# ¿ Sep 23, 2017 03:57

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

Don Gato posted:

Personally I thought the beginning of Diamond Age was a better parody of the typical cyberpunk protagonist. I also thought that in general, The Diamond Age was better but I havent met anyone that agrees with me there.

Now you have. It's more original and much less insufferably selfconscious.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2017 20:54

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

Chuck Buried Treasure posted:

Although now that I�ve said all that, the Chapo Trap House segments on him are all really good, especially the episode where they all tore into his book for the whole runtime.

I was gonna say, that ep is pretty fuckin great, and also features ten minutes of James Adomian's Elon Musk impersonation which is the funniest thing I've heard in a minute.

# ¿ May 1, 2018 20:38

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

Jerry Cotton posted:

I really wish John Connolly's Charlie Parker novels weren't all 450 or so pages because there's not 450 pages worth of story in any of them

I got him confused with Michael Connolly for the longest time, which is a drat shame because Michael Connolly owns if you like utility-grade but engaging mysteries with lots of story, and he has you covered for road trips basically indefinitely.

# ¿ May 5, 2018 01:16

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

Not in keeping with the spirit of the thread I suppose but the best sex scenes I've read recently were in Matthew Klam's "Who is Rich?", and they were great because they managed to capture a lot about the characters' personalities and relationships and also accurately convey how sex can be awkward, hilarious, serious and really hot all at the same time.

It is very hard to do, Klam is a very good writer, and the vast majority of authors should really just pan to the curtains blowing in the breeze and then fade to black.

# ¿ May 5, 2018 22:29

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

RoboRodent posted:

"I need to work on my people skills."
Two seconds later: "Shut the gently caress up, frightened pathetic girls who don't want to die!"

Seriously, the way he describes the women makes my skin crawl.

I suspect that the author is actually a woman taking the piss. That prose reads like the "describe yourself as if you were a male author" Twitter thing from a couple months back.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2018 21:33

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

Antivehicular posted:

The only positive thing I can remember about Harlan Ellison at the moment is his brief feud with the Penny Arcade guys, whom he described as "superannuated teen-age golems," which is a valuable phrase to describe so many kinds of Internet People

He championed Octavia Butler ferociously and was always really, really kind to her, and she wasn't the easiest person herself.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2019 08:25

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

I remember the novelization of "Terminator 2" being surprisingly engaging, and it included the deleted scene with the learning-chip switch, without which the entire third act of the movie makes very little sense.

# ¿ Apr 5, 2021 18:45

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 07:10

spite house: Apr 28, 2009

Ugly In The Morning posted:

Harlan Ellison, too. Even if the man himself was a piece of work, his stories are excellent and often very progressive.

Ellison was no doubt the prototypical raging rear end in a top hat in many, many ways but he has a star in heaven for being Octavia Butler's ferocious and loyal champion.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2021 20:58

The Something Awful Forums > Main > Post Your Favorite: Carefully Curated > PYF terrible book: Freud molesting a thesaurus.