Bad books, bad books...

[Napoleon the Clown]

A Separate Peace. John Knowles sucks donkey testicles, and I accurately predicted the fate of Phinneas during the first chapter or so. It's a dry, bland, boring book. Not even worth the paper its Spark Notes are on.

Moby Dick. I gave up on it completely once the whole "Yargh, whales be fish, says I" chapter came along. Seriously, what the fuck. Does anything much beyond "Call me Ishmael. I befriended a cannibal, went sailing with said cannibal under the employ of one Captain Ahab, and encountered a big fucking sperm whale (which is a fish, FYI) that bit off Ahab's leg when he tried to kill it previously. The whale killed Ahab and swam off, never to be seen again. I survived, obviously, but nobody else did." happen even? Gah.

[Xess]

Michael Z Williamson's The Weapon. Seriously creepy lolbertarian wank. See my review of it here.

I read the "training" scenes from that book. Freehold doesn't train soldiers, they train sociopaths.

I have to nominate Harry Turtledove for the bad book awards. All his books have the same few characters and all of them are unsympathetic. He badly needs an editor and is stuck with a juvenile need for sex scenes. I do however enjoy some of his books as they are quite entertaining in a mindless fluff way.

[Edi]

I'll second, third and fourth Goodkind, but I'll refrain from commenting further. His shit has been picked apart in the Fantasy forum numerous times.

I've read Richter 10 and it's every bit as stupid as Mayabird proclaims it to be. It was so over the top ludicrous that I managed to enjoy it. The Light of Other Days is better, but has its share of stupid as well.

Tad Williams and his Green Angel Tower series is just fucking atrocious. It's roughly 1500 pages longer than necessary and is guaranteed to put the reader to sleep. The characters are so fucking whiny I wanted them all to die horribly. Multiple times. Fortunately I remember little of the actual contents of the book, other than that vague sense of horror and disjointed bits and pieces from here and there. There was precisely one funny part, which was the occasion when one of the elves scared the piss out of some peasant girl, but that's the only worthwhile part.

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by whoever is also one that annoyed me no end. The world is interesting enough, but the main character is such a whiny, selfish bastard of an asshole that it makes the books painful to read.

Terry Brooks's Sword of Shannara was already mentioned. I lasted less than 30 pages into it, it was that shitty. And I did manage to fucking finish the Green Angel Tower stuff after all.

[Norseman]

Michael Z Williamson's The Weapon. Seriously creepy lolbertarian wank. See my review of it here.

I read the "training" scenes from that book. Freehold doesn't train soldiers, they train sociopaths.

Lord ain't it the truth!

Now for my candidate: Harry Harrison's Stars and Stripes forever. It is unspeakably awful, basically the Trent Affair makes the United Kingdom declare war on the United States, but unfortunately they sack and burn a confederate city instead. As a result the UK decides to invade and conquer BOTH the CSA and the USA, which allies, abolishes slavery, conquers Canada, and then (in the next book) launches an invasion of Ireland.

[aerius]

The recent Clive Cussler books. The Oregon Files, oh my god... Each piece of crap gets worse and worse. I think ghostwriting must be at work here.

The first couple Oregon Files books weren't that bad, but after that they got pretty wank-tastic. Seriously, Russian orbital bombardment systems? Yeah, ok, that's going too far.

Michael Z Williamson's The Weapon. Seriously creepy lolbertarian wank. See my review of it here.

It was so over the top that it was hilarious, then again I have rather low literary standards.

[Surlethe]

The Spellsong Cycle, by L.E. Modesitt Jr. It was just so poorly written that I put the third book down and stopped reading -- something I rarely do, since I can apparently suspend disbelief a lot more easily than most people.

[Samuel]

Michael Z Williamson's The Weapon. Seriously creepy lolbertarian wank. See my review of it here.

I read the "training" scenes from that book. Freehold doesn't train soldiers, they train sociopaths.

Lord ain't it the truth!

Now for my candidate: Harry Harrison's Stars and Stripes forever. It is unspeakably awful, basically the Trent Affair makes the United Kingdom declare war on the United States, but unfortunately they sack and burn a confederate city instead. As a result the UK decides to invade and conquer BOTH the CSA and the USA, which allies, abolishes slavery, conquers Canada, and then (in the next book) launches an invasion of Ireland.

It is a trilogy. In the last book they invade and conquer England. With gattling tanks and heavy mortar ships. And procede to abolish the monarchy.

[Guardsman Bass]

There was a hilariously bad novel called House Upon The Sand that I found once while browsing at the library. It's basically Armageddon from an LDS perspective in the United States. Where the US President seizes power using the expansions of executive power inherent in No Child Left Behind, then basically wages war with the LDS. What's particularly hilarious, if I recall correctly, is that the guy had a scene where the new LDS government being founded in the wilderness cuts out all the amendments back to the Bill of Rights except "for the one that freed the slaves", then adds an amendment that bans limiting discussion of Jesus Christ anywhere at anytime. Sucks to be a woman, black person, and so forth in that world, I guess.

Seriously, you have to read it to see how bad it is. The guy obviously is a strong, uber-wingnut level conservative living in Provo or one of its suburbs (he refers to Salt Lake City as being a den of sin, and his alter-ego in the story lives in Provo), and he has at best minimal knowledge about anything related to American history or government. He does, however, have the Chinese landing on the West Coast, the Russians on the East Coast, and the Muslims/Arab Horde on the Gulf Coast, then proceeding to ethnically cleanse the US until the remnants of America outside of the Mormon Land more or less are a rag-tag militia.

[J]

Empire by Orson Scott Card. I think I made it to 'secret mecha army goes on a rampage and takes over NYC' before giving up in disgust.

[The Spartan]

There was a book I had set during the Vietnam war that I cannot for the life of me remember the name of and which I got rid of years ago. Something like "Into the Fire" I think?

The evil American who murdered the love interest of one of the protagonists was gay (and black, but so was another protagonist so, not sure if it's necessarily racially motiviated), someone got chicken blood splattered on him when he came back to the states. Another had his wife leave him for anti-war intellectuals, one of whom, IIRC, asked him how many babies he killed. That same character was awkward around the brother of one of the men he lost until they prayed together.

You get the idea.

[Nephtys]

Stephen King's Cell, the 'realistic' story about... what if Cellphones turned people into KILLER ZOMBIES for no apparent reason? The characters were bland cardboard cutouts that talked like twelve year olds in adult bodies, who couldn't survive their way out of a light drizzle.

Seriously, Stephen King. I'll save you some time. Take words out of Bank A and put them in slot A, and words out of bank B and put them in slot B below.

In this new book, an unexpected source, ____A____ fiendishly transforms ordinary people into ____B____, much to the horror of society and the human psyche.

A: Candy, Alcohol, Automobiles, Phone Booths, Log Cabins, Fanfiction Writers, Left-handed Notebooks, Zinc, Batteries, Greetings Cards, Rice, The Left, Condensation

B: Cannibals, Vampires, Stone Statues, Evil Clowns, Dolls, Money, Soylent Green, Marxists, Crack-Addicts, Tentacle Monsters, Rednecks, Cartoon Characters, Republicans

[Kanastrous]

The DaVinci Code.

This was handed to me by a friend who was all totally blown away by the 'woman in the Last Supper' and 'number of panes in the Louvre pyramid,' etc etc etc; I wound up explaining to him that virtually all that stuff had been debunked years ago, and had never been much of a secret (and more of a fraud), anyway.

Couldn't get more than about two chapters in. Just painful, disgusting trash designed to exploit the ignorance of the reader.

[Mayabird]

Ah, crazy Mormon books and Orson Scott Card. I read the first book of his Homecoming series out of curiosity one time.

The Book of Mormon in spaaaaaaaaaaace!

It's especially terrible because the Book of Mormon (which I also read) is basically a bad Bible fanfiction. (As Darth Raptor put it, "Bible 2: Jesus goes West!") He's starting with terrible material and adds a veneer of science fiction to it and expects us to not see it. Because the giant ancient psychic computer in the sky is totally not standing in for God and the characters in the stories totally aren't characters in the Book of Mormon doing the exact same things that those characters did (the "sawing off the guy's head and wearing his clothes to trick his servants" scene was especially egregious). But look, floaty chair! They didn't have floaty chairs in ancient lost-tribe-of-Israel America, therefore it's totally different!

I didn't read the rest of the books. I don't want to read the rest. I didn't even particularly care to know what happened to the pack of idiots, and I'm the kind of person who reads to the end just to see how it happens even when I hate it.

[CmdrWilkens]

I'm going to my rant about the Ishmael series (A trilogy of Ishmael, The Story of B and My Ishmael).

One of the main characters is a intelligent gorilla. Who is telepathic. And is cooking up a method to save the world. And works with the anti-Christ. To destroy human civilization as we know it. And gets a 12 year old girl to go to the Congo in order to get let him slip into the country and meet up with wild gorillas.

I never read the first or the last but I did read Story of B. I had an ex-girlfriend, of the extreme variety as in she went to St John's College in Maryland which has a ciriculum composed almost entirely of reading the "great" works of literature from the last 3000 years, who insisted I read it. God was that amistake and a half.

Its the inanity of the Catholic Church sending some unknown minor altar boy figure out as a traveling compaion to a "heretic" preaching about the evils of modern society with the intent of discovering if there is enough heresey to have the guy killed off for it. Not to mention that in addition to short forming the sermons the guy was giving the author then goes back and includes as an appendix the full text of the speeches which read like really bad copies of the craziest far left rantings of the last 50 years brought together for a greatest hits album.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Michael Z Williamson's The Weapon. Seriously creepy lolbertarian wank. See my review of it here.

I read the "training" scenes from that book. Freehold doesn't train soldiers, they train sociopaths.

Lord ain't it the truth!

Yes, the lolbertarian wank in Williamson's work disgusted me, and I read all the way through one of the books of the series that's up on the Baen Free Library. In fact, the lolbertarian wanking was so bad that I felt motivated to write about what ought to happen when a lolbertarian world meets the forces of an actual government.

Now for my candidate: Harry Harrison's Stars and Stripes forever. It is unspeakably awful, basically the Trent Affair makes the United Kingdom declare war on the United States, but unfortunately they sack and burn a confederate city instead. As a result the UK decides to invade and conquer BOTH the CSA and the USA, which allies, abolishes slavery, conquers Canada, and then (in the next book) launches an invasion of Ireland.

I loved the whole Stars and Stripes Forever trilogy. It was so entirely over-the-top AMERICA, AMERICA, RAH, RAH, RAH! that I quickly abandoned any pretense of treating it as a serious alt-hist series, and read it for the lulz instead.

[Jade Falcon]

Anyone remember this series of novels?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivalist

Talk about way over the top. I'll admit I read the first few and didn't think them too bad....when I was about 12, but I rapidly saw how poorly they were written.

[Edi]

The DaVinci Code.

This was handed to me by a friend who was all totally blown away by the 'woman in the Last Supper' and 'number of panes in the Louvre pyramid,' etc etc etc; I wound up explaining to him that virtually all that stuff had been debunked years ago, and had never been much of a secret (and more of a fraud), anyway.

Couldn't get more than about two chapters in. Just painful, disgusting trash designed to exploit the ignorance of the reader.

Anything and everything written by him is the same book and same characters with just a different skin overlaid. He's a fucking disgrace.

[Samuel]

I'm going to my rant about the Ishmael series (A trilogy of Ishmael, The Story of B and My Ishmael).

One of the main characters is a intelligent gorilla. Who is telepathic. And is cooking up a method to save the world. And works with the anti-Christ. To destroy human civilization as we know it. And gets a 12 year old girl to go to the Congo in order to get let him slip into the country and meet up with wild gorillas.

I never read the first or the last but I did read Story of B. I had an ex-girlfriend, of the extreme variety as in she went to St John's College in Maryland which has a ciriculum composed almost entirely of reading the "great" works of literature from the last 3000 years, who insisted I read it. God was that amistake and a half.

Its the inanity of the Catholic Church sending some unknown minor altar boy figure out as a traveling compaion to a "heretic" preaching about the evils of modern society with the intent of discovering if there is enough heresey to have the guy killed off for it. Not to mention that in addition to short forming the sermons the guy was giving the author then goes back and includes as an appendix the full text of the speeches which read like really bad copies of the craziest far left rantings of the last 50 years brought together for a greatest hits album.

It is better than the original- having the sermons in the back makes room for actual plot. In the original, we have two characters- Ishmael, the telepathic mountain gorilla who was captured from the Congo, shown at a zoo than traveling show before being bought up by a man who had lost his family to the Holocaust and spending his time in a gazebo learning together. Of, and he helps raise the mans kid who graduates six years early for a PhD- telepathic teachers help. Than he decides to figure out how the world works and bestow his wisdom, meets the protagonist and fakes his death to get the clingy guy off him so he can move back to the Congo.

The protagonist is a 40ish guy who lives alone in an apartment, is disillusioned and looking for guidance, self employed... and that is it. We don't even learn his name!

The book flows easily enough, although most of it consists of a person sitting in a chair having a telepathic communication. The most annoying thing is the rave reviews and award the book won- Turner Tomorrow Fellowship.

I'll rip the book apart soon- right now I have finals and a desperate need to study.

Anything and everything written by him is the same book and same characters with just a different skin overlaid. He's a fucking disgrace.

Actually the Code and Angels and Demons had the same protagonist- you'd think a guy who saved the Catholic Church might have some more pull or visibility. Or might keep a girlfriend for more than one year.

Deception Point was slightly different, but he used similar tropes again. You can draw a map for where the lot is going and what the twist will be. It is bad when the twist is so predictable, it appears in every book!

I loved the whole Stars and Stripes Forever trilogy. It was so entirely over-the-top AMERICA, AMERICA, RAH, RAH, RAH! that I quickly abandoned any pretense of treating it as a serious alt-hist series, and read it for the lulz instead.

He likes Stuart Mill too much. Of course, Guns of the South is similar.

[Thanas]

Valerio M. Manfredi - The last legion.

The classic example of someone who was too lazy to even read one book about the subject but decided to go "Aw, who cares if this is unrealistic,i'll write it anyway and pass it off as historical fiction. Oh, and then I'll make a horrible movie as well".

Line by line, the whole book is just unrealistic. Consider the premise: A roman senator manages to finance a whole legion of 5000 men. Okay, he may be stretching his resources, but that's not unheard of. Now, what does he decide? He decides to equip them with weapons and train them in tactics that have been out of use for over 200 years. And then he decides to make a power play but forgets that he sent his legion far, far away so that it can't be of any use to him. Oops. Anyway, this last true roman (who in history was of partially german ancestry) is killed by Odoacer and his son exiled to Sicily.

But wait, it gets better. Turns out his son is Romulus Augustulus, who somehow discovers Caesar's sword in a villa in Sicilly (:roll:). Then, he is rescued by the lone survivor from the legion and an ancient Lara Croft (who in the movie fights with double Katars, which were not invented for another 1000 years). The two idiots and their stupid romance subplot somehow manage to outwit or overpower an entire garrison. Then, they, the boy and his teacher flee. The Eastern Roman empire decides to suddenly back Odoacer (HAHA) and decides to try to kill them and rid themselves of a possible bargaining chip, thereby sabotaging themselves. Yeah, smart thinking there by the author.

Haven't had enough? Okay. After being pursued through occupied gaul (strangely, though they are not exactly circumspect they are not once attacked by marauding barbarians or brigands), they try to flee towards great britain, where they eventually joing up with the survivors/decendants of the last legion of the Roman empire, who somehow still follow the old roman training programme (I believe he uses the Legio VI Victrix, which in history was long gone by then). Together, they manage to defeat a Saxon incursion using a particular blend of idiocy and bad tactics.

And just to top it off, guess what the inscription on "Caesar's" sword reads: CAI • IVL • CAES • ENSIS CALIBVRNVS, which eventually gets withered and then only reads E S CALIBVR. Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, turns out that the teacher of the boy was Merlin and that Romolus Augustulus will grow up to be Uther Pendragon (Pendragon - get it? From the Roman standard, the draco. Nevermind that if it was an old legion, they would only have the eagle as a standard ) And just to top it off: The inscription makes no sense. The CAI IUL CAES makes no sense, since if he used CAES as an abbreviation (which was not done in Caesars time), then he should also have used C instead of CAI for Caius. Also, if the sword has withered enough that corrosion has eliminated about 70% of the letters on it, how is it supposed to be such a legendary and sharp sword as Excalibur? Guess Mr. Manfredi didn't even think that through at all. Nevermind the fact that "ensis" is just plain wrong. If Caesar didn't own a gladius, he owned a spatha. Ensis doesn't belong here.

So here it is, Ladies and Gentlemen - the worst historical novel I have ever read. It reads like a bad ripoff of the works of Felix Dahn and Wallace Breem.

[Oscar Wilde]

The DaVinci Code.

This was handed to me by a friend who was all totally blown away by the 'woman in the Last Supper' and 'number of panes in the Louvre pyramid,' etc etc etc; I wound up explaining to him that virtually all that stuff had been debunked years ago, and had never been much of a secret (and more of a fraud), anyway.

Couldn't get more than about two chapters in. Just painful, disgusting trash designed to exploit the ignorance of the reader.

You need better friends.


Lord of the Flies anyone?

[Kanastrous]

You need better friends.

It's nice to have friends who make one feel smart, by comparison.

Piers' Anthony's Tarot series. I don't remember why I slogged through all three books; maybe I was punishing myself for something.

[SAMAS]

A Separate Peace. John Knowles sucks donkey testicles, and I accurately predicted the fate of Phinneas during the first chapter or so. It's a dry, bland, boring book. Not even worth the paper its Spark Notes are on.

Moby Dick. I gave up on it completely once the whole "Yargh, whales be fish, says I" chapter came along. Seriously, what the fuck. Does anything much beyond "Call me Ishmael. I befriended a cannibal, went sailing with said cannibal under the employ of one Captain Ahab, and encountered a big fucking sperm whale (which is a fish, FYI) that bit off Ahab's leg when he tried to kill it previously. The whale killed Ahab and swam off, never to be seen again. I survived, obviously, but nobody else did." happen even? Gah.

You learn pretty much all there is to know about the American whaling industry of that time period.

[Raxmei]

The worst book I've read recently was Hell's Gate by Dave Weber and Linda Evans. Presented as a thousand page epic of multiuniversal warfare where magic and high technology clash, the book is actually a thousand pages of introducing an uninspiring cast of characters, travelling, infodumps, and two skirmishes of company size or smaller. Dave Weber's pacing problems are the worst I've ever seen from him in this book - don't miss the scene where the princess takes a moment to glance at a mantelpiece for more than a page of text. This is also the worst job of characterization I've seen out of him. Marvel at the endlessly repeated descriptions of people responding to the telepathic recording of the protagonist's supposed death in the exact same way. Watch in amazement as the designated villains twirl their moustaches. I could go on, but then I'd have to dig out the book and review it.

[Guardsman Bass]

Kim Stanley Robinson's latest trilogy (Forty Signs of Rain, etc) was pretty terrible. There was the occasional interesting segment about climate change from two of the main characters, but it got tied up in this weird buddhist shit about these monks from an independent island who think that the main protagonist's little son is somehow a reincarnation of something, combined with possibly the most unappealing-to-read viewpoint of the character Frank.

I'm serious - reading about Frank is terrible. He basically goes around, putting all of his mishaps and crap into quasi-solipsistic thinking about its context in terms of anthropology (for example, when he goes to the same beach as his ex to surf, and she gets pissed off, you get to read him thinking about how his body/sex drive/whatever is pulling him towards his last, greatest chance to reproduce and so forth - it's incredibly uninteresting to read about). In the second book, Fifty Degrees Below, it actually gets much, much worse, since he gets involved in this weird conspiracy shit while you get to see even more of his meanderings both in person and in thought.

In fact, that was probably the greatest problem with the series. It was like Robinson wanted to write about naturalist living and so forth, but decided he'd just make you suffer through it in his novel - kind of like certain parts of Blue Mars.

[Sidewinder]

Michael Z Williamson's The Weapon. Seriously creepy lolbertarian wank.

Regarding the "No one is allowed to quit!" bullshit you mentioned in your review: I didn't read Williamson's novels, but I am a former US Army serviceman, and I can say it's a half-truth.

Basically, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment was expanding in 2003, forming a fourth battalion at Ft. Lewis, Washington. (The 1st and 2nd Battalions are in Ft. Campbell, Kentucky; I was assigned to 3rd Battalion in Hunter Army Airfield, Georgia.) Because of this, the instructors for the 160th's Basic Mission Qualification Training Course shoved "Night Stalkers Don't Quit," the unit motto, down every trainee's throat. If you said you wanted to quit, the instructors would stand you in front of the class and humiliate you before your peers, and say they refuse to accept your decision to quit.

I've no doubt they regretted such desparate measures; I later met several of my fellow graduates when they were no longer assigned to the 160th, i.e., transferred the fuck out of the unit, meaning the instructors wasted all that time and effort training them. (If you're curious, I was one of those who were transferred out, the reason being the 160th wanted me to service weapons on the MH-60L Direct Action Penetrator variant of the Black Hawk, which I was having problems with, because those were not the weapons I was taught to service in eight fucking months of training, and all that training was for the 0H-58D Kiowa Warrior!)