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queserasera posted:I'd like to nominate everything Jonathan Safran Foer's ever written. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close especially. Twee author avatar insert narrators suck. I thought the stuff with the granddad was alright, particularly the whole Dresden bombing sequence. The stuff with the kid, not so much. I sometimes read historical fiction. Most of it is utter crap, but occasionally you find gold. Wideacre by Philippa Gregory was probably the worst book I've ever willingly subjected myself to. The "heroine" was horrible, and not at all in an interesting way. I basically hate-read the stupid doorstopper of a thing just because I wanted to see her die.
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Jul 2, 2015 05:38
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Pretty sure that's just the racism. Not to mention, the italics! So many goddamn italics!
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Jul 11, 2015 00:27
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Literally the only thing I remember from that Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell is that I liked the way the writer would repeatedly describe colors with things that have no color. "Her gown was the color of rainwater", " his eyes were the color of spiderwebs", and the like. I vaguely remember liking the book alright, but can't recall a thing about the plot or characters or anything.
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Nov 2, 2015 01:11
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queserasera posted:The footnotes prevented me from enjoying Dr Strange and Mr Norrell. Footnotes in fiction and creative nonfiction piss me right the gently caress off. It's like that one person you know who's always dropping asides only humorous to him or her. The only book I ever read that used them effectively was Love in a Dead Language by Lee Siegel, but he's really, really not for everyone.
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Nov 2, 2015 01:57
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Alaois posted:i found them really entertaining/effective in The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz That was just a really great book in general. Tbh, I forgot it had footnotes till you mentioned it.
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Nov 2, 2015 15:07
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spite house posted: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. Valley of the Dolls is amazing for the same reason. You can actually feel your brain cells dying as you read it, kind of like sniffing glue or something. Cheap, dirty high included.
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Mar 4, 2016 00:33
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Antivehicular posted:I kind of feel like stealing lurid, brain-rotting trash lit from adults as an early adolescent is a rite of passage, kind of like finding woods porn. For me, it was my grandmother's "True Stories" magazines, which I'd end up reading whenever I got bored during a family visit. Those things weren't Valley of the Dolls-caliber, but what they lacked in raw unvarnished sleaze they made up for by being the stupidest thing you could buy at a newsstand. My middle school friends and I passed around a copy of Anne Rice's Exit to Eden that someone had stolen from her mom. It's basically about a high society BDSM resort, from what I remember? We thought we were very mature for reading it, and I'm pretty sure it gave all of our hormonal little brains some very odd ideas about things. As a younger kid, I used to beg my mom to buy Weekly World News every time we went to the grocery store. I couldn't understand why a newspaper (which was surely 100% serious and truthful) was announcing that Bigfoot had been found on the moon, of all things, and she didn't seem to care at all. When I finally started earning an allowance, the first thing I bought was Weekly World News. I read that thing cover to cover so many freakin' times. Thankfully I started reading real books eventually, but I do love me some quality trash. Crow Jane has a new favorite as of 02:07 on Mar 4, 2016 |
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Mar 4, 2016 01:57
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spite house posted: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. Was one of your crew a girl with a pronounced lisp who couldn't stop talking about "whipth and chainth" for like a month after her turn with the book? If so, I had every class with her that semester, it got really hard not to laugh or accidentally slip and say it the same way. And yeah, we probably shouldn't have been reading that crap. I think my parents just figured that reading was better than my spending all day in a chatroom or getting pregnant, so as long as I had a book in my hands they were happy. I think they were kinda relieved when I started reading books that didn't have gold-embossed titles or heaving breasts on the cover art, though.
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Mar 4, 2016 03:29
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