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InediblePenguin posted:World War Z was utter loving poo poo. The Survival Guide was stupid and poorly researched to start with, and don't loving try to write in a format where "multiple people are narrating" if you're loving poo poo and can't write in a different voice. Like a bad impressionist who can't change his voice and is like "now I'll be Batman: I am the night! now I'll be a soldier: semper fi herobravery!" in his normal voice but because his dad is a famous comedian everybody keeps going drat HAVE YOU HEARD HIS IMPRESSIONS I'm pretty sre that most of the "fans" of WWZ have never actually read the book and are just going off of the title and general "woo zombies  " sentiment before it got run into the loving ground.I am basing this assumption entirely on fans criticizing the movie version for being "unrealistic" unlike the book. Said book which never really explains the origin or spread of the zombie plague aside from a vague reference to organ black markets and illegal immigrants, skips over the part where zombies go from a thing that exists to a global pandemic because the author admitted he couldn't think of a way to do it with slow zombies, and has zombies that are effectively magic since they can be frozen solid in winter and them thaw in spring no worse for wear, walk across the bottom of the ocean in defiance of pressure that would destroy a human body, and have limbs that remain animated after being cut off as of they have minds of their own. Also all the goofy comic-book poo poo like Japan being kept safe by blind samurai and their otaku protégé. But it's presented as an oral history so it's totally grounded! The Vosgian Beast posted:Thank you for writing a criticism of World War Z that wasn't AMERICA'S BEST AND BRAVEST WOULDN'T GO DOWN LIKE THAT!!!! OOORAHOOORAHOORAH Him making the soldiers be so comically ineffective at Yonkers was just as masturbatory as any  right-wing military fiction since it was only there to continue his faux-populist narrative with the nerdy armchair generals know more than the real thing and are stuck shaking their heads and clicking their tongues when they're proven right. The whole book has this whole juvenile "NO YOU SHUT THE gently caress UP DAD" attitude where everybody in power is incompetent and stupid and nerds are all rad under-appreciated geniuses and since the zombie wasteland is a perfect meritocracy the cool nerds get to run things while the old guard ia relegated to (literal) poo poo-shovelers and the suburban dads die in the woods because they don't even know what kind of sleeping bag is the right one. Sleeveless has a new favorite as of 01:27 on Jul 10, 2015 |
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Jul 10, 2015 01:25
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The Vosgian Beast posted:I hate having to break this to you, but books and movies aren't real life. Tell that to all the people who hold WWZ up as some paragon of tactical realism.
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Jul 10, 2015 02:31
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InediblePenguin posted:You're really defensive, is it your favorite book or do you just have a beef with that poster? The Saddest Rhino sighed as he drew his blind Japanese master's anti-zombie katana...
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Jul 10, 2015 03:23
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Weatherman posted:Dan Brown is a bad writer. I've never read or watched any of his other works, but I'm comfortable making that generalisation. The characters were one-dimensional and each had a single purpose; upcoming plot points were telegraphed to the point of "I can skip the next chapter because he's already implied what's going to happen"; the entire book read more like a screenplay to a Michael Bay movie; and the descriptions of technology were excruciatingly, ball-twistingly awful. We're talking "hack the Gibson" levels of bullshittery. Dan Brown does not understand software, nor hardware, nor cryptography. Don't make fun of renowned Dan Brown is such a  takedown of his terrible writing that it almost retroactively justifies his entire career.
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Jul 10, 2015 17:06
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RC and Moon Pie posted:As addition to bad book reviews and romance novels, this one of Pregnesia has always stood out to me. Based on my exposure to bad romance novels via bookstores and mock websites pregnancy is like the second most common thing in romance after swarthy men that are foreign but not too foreign. I don't know if that means that a lot of women have pregnancy fetishes or if that's just one of Harlequin's things but it happens way too often to be a random quirk.
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Jul 12, 2015 23:34
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pentyne posted:It's been a while, and I can't remember the book, but it was the guy who was featured on Oprah's Book Club and was later found to have fabricated 95% of his life. The entire thing reeks of stdh.txt yet for some reason it was a big deal for a year or so. When it comes to stdh.txt "non-fiction" I don't think anything can top Michelle Remembers, the book single-handedly responsible for kicking off the satanic ritual abuse moral panic of the 80s that ruined countless lives, put many innocent people in jail, and put the field of psychology back 50 years by making everybody think that repressed memories were A Thing. It's a book about how, after 5 years of intense "therapy" by a creepy doctor whom the titular Michelle later left her husband to marry, she suddenly remembers that when she was 5 years old in the 1950s her parents locked her in a room for 3 months and a procession of hooded figures tempted her into renouncing Gosh and his son Jeepers and worshiping the Devil instead because Victoria, British Columbia is secretly the head of the Church of Satan. This includes things like making her poo poo in a bucket and then pulling a bucket away at the last minute and putting a Bible in its place so they trick her into making GBS threads on the Bible, or giving her a doll that turns out to be filled with maggots. Also at one point Satan himself makes an appearance trying to seduce her in person, and later Jesus and Mary show up and use their god powers to magically heal all the wounds and scars she got from three months of physical torture because something something faith and belief. There's also A Child Called It, which was a really popular piece of torture porn among the Chicken Soup for the Soul crowd in the 90s that turned out to be almost completely fabricated, complete with the author suddenly "remembering" enough material to make a sequel after the book became a bestseller.
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Jul 18, 2015 04:43
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U.T. Raptor posted:Michael Crichton...depicting a real-life critic as a small-dicked pedophile in one of his last books. Hogge Wild posted:was it crichton who made one of his critics a pedohile in his novel Did you even read the post you were replying to. When it comes to popular authors Crichton may have been a nutjob and King may have ended a book dedicated to his son with a preteen sewer gangbang, but nobody can touch Dean Koontz's creepy love affair with golden retrievers.
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Jul 19, 2015 21:18
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Hogge Wild posted:lol sorry, i've been 24 hours awake It's OK, it's so ridiculous that it's worth pointing out twice. SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Ahaha Koontz is great. I reread The Taking recently, and there's a huge amount of far-right subtext in there that I missed the first time. Characters are constantly going "it's the end of the world and it's not global warming at all! Bet those atheist scientists are feeling silly right about now." Pretty much every Dean Koontz novel is about a stoic manly-man solving problems with guns. Time-traveling Nazis? Genetically-engineered bioweapons? Satanists committing mass murder with the help of the spirit world? Just shoot them a whole bunch!
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Jul 19, 2015 21:34
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At the end of the day Ender's Game is a book about how in the future being good at video games and laser tag make you important and cool and better than everybody else and also all the people who make fun of you for doing those things are actually just jealous of how awesome you are. It's no surprise that it was so acclaimed by children and manchildren regardless of the novel's actual quality.
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Jul 20, 2015 19:43
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Theglavwen posted:The main character, a millenia old druid, at one point talks about squeeing, verbatim, upon meeting Neil Gaiman at a con. Is this better or worse than President Cory Doctorow and Vice President Wil Wheaton.
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Aug 29, 2015 06:14
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hackbunny posted:I'm reading Stephen King's Cell. I'm at the "we only use N% of our brain" speech which I of course skipped to save myself from a cringe-related death. Does it get much worse from that point? because I had just finished kicking and shoving myself through The Dark Half (I have to make a post about that some time) and Cell seemed to start alright and free from the usual King-isms. Cell is largely considered one of King's worst books, aside from the very beginning where all hell breaks loose there's absolutely nothing of value in it.
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Oct 14, 2015 01:00
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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is literally just the public domain text of Pride and Prejudice with a few chapters of zombie fanfiction (and also ~ninjas~ :iamafag:) awkwardly inserted into it, calling it a book is too generous. It's a novelty item, a manufactured product made by mashing up random internet memes and public domain texts in the name of making something with a title and cover that people on the internet would buy to show off how wacky they are.
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Oct 16, 2015 06:14
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The woman who wrote Eat Play Love randomly wound up as a guest on some completely unrelated comedy podcasts lile MBMBAM and she's actually really funny and chill.
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Nov 9, 2015 22:53
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People like Chuck Tingle and the rear end Goblins of Auschwitz guy are just as bad as the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies guy. Calling them authors and the things they create books is giving them way too much credit.
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Nov 12, 2015 16:58
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