Which book do you think is badly written- and prove it!

[kelby_lake]

It's pretty hard to work out whether to read a book or not when the review is one-line long.
So, to get your opinion noted, explain why you think the book was bad (quotes would be useful).

[JBI]

Lord of the Rings:
Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow,
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.
None has ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the master:
His songs are stronger songs, and his feet are faster.

That's just a taste of some of the worst verse ever written. The rhymes are boring, cliché and predictable, the images unexciting.

Let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy! For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this, we shall put him out of reckoning.

Another dreadful passage, which makes one want to cringe. This guy writes in a style made old-fashion even before his pen hits the paper.

If we go by Plato, and say the poet/writer holds a mirror to the world, then Tolkien holds a mirror, to a mirror, to a mirror, to a shadow over a river of the world. His prose captures nothing of speech, style, or rhetoric that imbues any people's of any age. Keep in mind also, that these are supposed to be farmer Hobbits, hobbit being slang for country bumpkin.

I think I don't need more examples; if someone wants to rebut, bring it on.

[Dark Muse]

Lord of the Rings:
Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow,
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.
None has ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the master:
His songs are stronger songs, and his feet are faster.

I have to agree with you about that. As I am actually a fan of fantasy and read it quite avidly, I am always afraid fantasy fans will crucify me for saying I do not care for Tolkien. But honestly, I could not complete the Lord of the Rings Books, I tried to read them, and I could not get through them. In my opinion, his characters are flat.

This is one case where I thought the movie was better than the books.

[stlukesguild]

This guy writes in a style made old-fashion even before his pen hits the paper.

Not to dispute your opinion of LotRs... but I might point out that other writers of real merit have certainly employed an archaic style... I think of Melville immediately... but surely many others.

[JBI]

Melville's style I wouldn't call archaic in the sense, because it is consciously archaic, and for a reason (though he seems to have transcended his archaism to some degree, by providing what I would deem a novel of prose-poetry). Lord of the Rings had no purpose in being written in that style, other to imitate books that most people didn't read (I personally have read about half of the books considered to be source material for Tolkien, and still don't agree that his prose is drawing from there).

The style, in truth, is Tolkien's elitist idea of what "the legendary kings of old" sounded like, in a sort of long-winded allusion to an imagination, deeply rooted in archaic language (and by this I mean dead language) literature, which he believes stemming from an "original sound" which doesn't exist in English. As a result, we get this thick, boring prose, which seems to echo nothing of English prose, and yet is written in English, and therefore is archaic, yet not English, not German, and not of a dead language; it is problematic because it just doesn't work.

The purpose of archaic language, is a) to create a direct reference to something, or b) to create a trace to many things, which allow an interpretation of the work, and a connection on multiple levels. I feel that Tolkien's style doesn't appease either structuralist criteria, as a structural construct bringing us back to our central mythos, or post-structuralist criteria, bringing us to a moment of indecisive enlightenment, or any form of real connection.

Of course, one can argue that the style brings us to a unique place, being that the style is out of Tolkien's imagination. But such arguments seem futile to me. Creativity is not destroying that which is convention, but looking deeper into convention, and into ourselves, our mythos, and our understanding of the world around us, and acting on some level in relation to that. The definition may seem problematic to fantasy readers, but in truth fantasy satisfies those requirements, it satisfies the need in ourselves for a "golden world" in a world where Eden is not thought of as a lost identity that we cannot return to.

We have come to the point, I find, in Western society, where neither pastoral nor Edenic elements satisfy our imagination. If we go by Sidney, we can see that literature is meant to present the sublime - but unfortunately for us, most of us do not have any notion of the sublime, and aren't convinced of a pastoral sublime - such as the simple Shepperd and the nymph as Marlowe shows us, or its Christian equivalent of desiring a return to Paradise (which for us, even if it did exist as it is presented in the Bible, would be a downgrade, I think). Fantasy tries to satisfy our desire for this, by creating an artificial link to the sublime, which we know is fake, but we cannot resist, thereby we become transported into the world of what isn't, the world of desire, and the world of creativity.

Tolkien's prose doesn't work for this cause - it works against it. It forms a place where language itself doesn't function, and style isn't cultivated, but abandoned. We are transported to an archaic unfreshness on a fresh language. Our language was not formed the way we see it now until recently. We cannot use these words to try and convey barbaric scrypt of 4000 years ago, or further back. It doesn't work. And it is for that reason, that I feel archaic in the Tolkinien sense cannot be compared to the Melvillian sense, because Melville talks directly to our inner mythology, whereas Tolkien merely distorts, and offers no valid reason for his distortion, other than the fancy of some bored academic, delving in between forgotten texts of a time now lost to uninterested. Not to say that all the literature he draws on doesn't have merit, but as a language, the things he draw upon only exist to allow access to the true form of those in its original, not to be spoken, or written in.