The Worst Writer Ever?

[Emil Miller]

For people who aren't avid readers, are we supposed to scare them off with critically acclaimed, worthy fiction, when it's an achievement to get them to read something?
The knock-on effect of these programmes is on the whole positive. They get people interested and we can see the results in bookshops and libraries which are inundated with shoppers for the books. Who knows, get people in and they may progress onto more "quality" literature, but if they don't, so what? If they enjoy the books they've tried, who are we to sneer?

Wessex, I know that you set great store by George Orwell so I thought you might like to read an extract from his essay 'Bookshop Memories'. His indignation is nothing short of hilarious and it might be instructive to read the whole essay. I think it would provide a great laugh for anyone who contributes to this site.



Our shop stood exactly on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town, and we were frequented by all types from baronets to bus-conductors. Probably our library subscribers were a fair cross-section of London's reading public. It is therefore worth noting that of all the authors in our library the one who 'went out' the best was – Priestley? Hemingway? Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell's novels, of course, are read solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists. It is not true that men don't read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the average novel – the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel – seems to exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories. But their consumption of detective stories is terrific. One of our subscribers to my knowledge read four or five detective stories every week for over a year, besides others which he got from another library. What chiefly surprised me was that he never read the same book twice. Apparently the whole of that frightful torrent of trash (the pages read every year would, I calculated, cover nearly three quarters of an acre) was stored for ever in his memory. He took no notice of titles or author's names, but he could tell by merely glancing into a book whether he had 'had it already'.

[Lokasenna]

Well I was using chicklit in its broadest sense but I won't argue that there may be different degrees of competence within the genre. However, I think you will enjoy the Mills and Boon cover designs on the link below.
They are absolutely hilarious but No.3 must take the cake for both title and picture,have you ever seen a guy wearing a leopardskin with a haircut like that?



http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/gall...nd-boon-covers

Sometimes, you really should judge a book by its cover...

[Seraphina]

Anne McAffrey. The woman's horrific. Melodrama on every page, half her stuff, even down to character names, pilfered from better writers (case in point, half the names in Dragons Dawn are more or less copy-pasted from Dune), and it just came across...cheap. Best way I can describe it.

[emily00]

1 Jeffrey Archer
2 Stephen King
3 Racine (Yes, yes, I know, I'll get shot down in flames - but the guy was responsible for a lot of pain. He wasn't nicknamed 'Rancid' for nothing).

[kelby_lake]

Racine sounds nice in translation. Phedre is a great play.

[Red-Headed]

Don't forget Jeffrey Archer.

[Andrea Beaumont]

kamila shamsie.

so pretentious.

[Emil Miller]

1 Jeffrey Archer
2 Stephen King
3 Racine (Yes, yes, I know, I'll get shot down in flames - but the guy was responsible for a lot of pain. He wasn't nicknamed 'Rancid' for nothing).

This must be the only time in history that Racine has been linked with Jeffrey Archer and Stephen king.

[kelby_lake]

Poor Racine I think Phedre is a wonderful piece of theatre.

[Taliesin]

I think that the worst writer is someone whom everybody has forgotten since the author is just so worthless.
Another possibility is that there is no worst writer since you can always find a worse one.

[Stargazer86]

Once again, I am going to repeat my surprise at some people's plain refusal to buy or read a book because it has appeared on, say, Oprah.

Wihtout going into why and how Oprah or similar shows are watched by millions of people (because that is irrelevant at the moment), we have to accept that that they are popular. When something appears on a show like that, it is bound to reach millions of people and hence the increase in demand and sales.

It is not because it is Oprah but because it is a widely watched show. I would not consider depriving myself of a good book just because this or that celebrity endorses it... What's more, I would still go and read a book that interests me even if I happen to hear about it on Oprah first.

I simply do not understand this attitude.

Would you stop eating Godiva chocolates if they were endorsed by Britney Spears? Or refuse eating Cheerios if Madonna's picture was on the box?

I wouldn't refuse to read a book just because Oprah endorsed it. Traditionally though, what she endorses is dime a dozen crap. She's had some okay and good ones, but that's not often the case.
If I hear someone fawn over how wonderful a book is or how wonderful it looked just because they saw something about it on Oprah, that would never inspire me to gravitate towards the book. Perhaps it's the majority of the overzealous Oprah followers who tend to kill it for me. Many of them (at least at the bookstore where I worked) bought and read these books ONLY because Oprah endorsed it and wouldn't endorse anything else. If she promoted a favorite author of mine and I heard about it, I'll still read it. But, for example, Marly and Me and The Secret, I avoided after hearing about them from about 102308709 different people on almost a daily basis.

That's a big difference from just eating something that has a wrapper or commerical with a certain celebrity and sitting and reading a book. But no, I probably wouldn't eat a Godiva with Britney Spears on the wrapper. Cheerios with 80's Madonna though, I probably would

[TurquoiseSunset]

It's the funniest thing! I just bought a magazine, and it had a free Mills & Boons book in the plastic bag. So I opened the book and the dedication says, "For the unknown man I soaked while driving through a puddle."

Ahahahahaha!!!! Who writes stuff like that??

The title is Blind-Date Marriage... oi, you can just tell it'll be a winner

[Vitruvius]

A really bad writer? Hm... Could be very difficult. I read somewhere that you can learn more from a bad book, than from a good one, but still you can't learn how to do good from a bad book. I haven't read that many poorlywritten books. I remember one cheesy novel, its action set in texas, written by a grand anonymous lady, can't really remember the name of the author, but i remember the main character's name was Zane - that annoyed me so much!!! I ended up ripping the book apart. I also think John Saul is a bad writer, not the worst though. Who else? Hm... I found Gabriele d'Annunzio bloody awful, yet still not the worst. I keep thinking of cheesy lovenovels and just can't say the classic authors are worse than those rubbishbooks.

[amarna]

I found Gabriele d'Annunzio bloody awful, yet still not the worst.

I absolutely agree. I read "Fire" and found it confused and pompous gibberish. I'll never understand why people made such a fuzz about d'Annunzio.

[kelby_lake]

But he was who Mussolini got his style off.