Five Books Nobody Should Read

[Red-Headed]

Don’t you just love getting these threads off topic, veering off course, taking the road less traveled, departing the paved surface, bouncing into the rough, wandering aimlessly through cyberspace, and then waiting for the jackbooted authorities to step in and slap us back into line? I do.

I can hear the jackboots now...

They grow great coffee beans in Latin America and in Hawaii and ever since Sam Adams and his pals pitched a bunch of East-India-Company tea into Boston Harbor, it’s been considered somewhat un-American to drink the stuff.

I think it may be considered un-English not to drink tea. Although I believe most of my fellow countrymen drink the aforementioned chemical warfare.

[Sancho]

Ah yes, clearly national pride is at stake in the coffee-or-tea decision. Oh crap, I live in Atlanta, so I’d better make it a coffee-tea-or-Coca-Cola decision.

I’ll worry about that tomorrow. Tonight it’s champagne, and the decision is: whether to go down to midtown and watch the peach drop, or to stay in and watch The Three Stooges marathon on AMC.

Woob-woob-woob-nyuk-nyuk-nyuk…I think I’m leaning towards the Stooges. I watched the Stooges down in Quito, Ecuador last year (Los Tres Idiotos) and, I’ve gotta tell ya, those guys are just as funny in Spanish as they are in English.

[ashley_bergman]

I though Dan Browns books were well thought out and incredibly well planned. I just finished The Lost Symbol, it was one of the best books I've ever read, he managed to make it fun but at the same time, everything was layed out in a way that it wasn't so easy it was boring but it was also a challenge at times for even an avid reader like myself to follow.

[Dinkleberry2010]

xxxxx

[Red-Headed]

This is a request: Please--I'm actually begging you--to get this thread back to where it belongs and to what it is about: Books that you think shouldn't be read because they are so badly written.

Ermm... OK, sorry. I read the first 20 or 30 pages of the Da Vinci Code & thought it was God-awfully terrible. Does that count?

[Sancho]

This is a request: Please--I'm actually begging you--to get this thread back to where it belongs and to what it is about: Books that you think shouldn't be read because they are so badly written.

Oh alright, but I think a list like this ought to be divided into genres. I mean, fans of The Hardy Boys mysteries would probably find Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason unreadable and vice versa.

[Dinkleberry2010]

I don't think this thread needs to be divided into genres. It goes without saying that Kant's work is not badly written, but neither is The Hardy Boys books. I read every one of the Hardy Boys books and not one of them is badly written.

[Sancho]

Well, that begs the question: What is good writing? Is it writing that follows grammatical rules? Perhaps it’s writing that follows the rules of logic. Maybe it’s writing that incorporates realistic dialog (Dan Brown gets a C-minus here). Is it writing that tackles a difficult or interesting or perplexing subject?

And who gets to decide? Maybe it’s the critics or the reading public or professors of literature or Strunk and White or Kate Turbian.

I don’t know but I think different kinds of writing may be akin to different kinds of intelligence: there’s diplomatic intelligence, mechanical intelligence, emotional intelligence, and more. There are people who can conceptualize abstract ideas and people who can not but I don’t that necessarily means one is smart and the other is not; they just have different types of intelligence. My family doctor could no more rebuild my car’s transmission than my mechanic could diagnose a difficult disease, but they’re both smart guys.

By the way, just in case there’s any question about my intelligence, I went with the Stooges marathon last night.

[Lynne50]

This may seem like a dumb question, but how can we concur on anyone's choices, if we don't read them first? That may be the appeal to some readers, to read and be able to pull apart the language. Now that I'm thinking about it, maybe English grammar teachers will enjoy a badly written story, to give them material for lesson plans.
Of course, that now brings up the question...Who ARE the literary gods that dictate good writing and bad writing? Isn't that what editors do? Someone reading a first draft of a story must think it's worth publishing, or why bother killing trees.

[stlukesguild]

Who ARE the literary gods that dictate good writing and bad writing? Isn't that what editors do? Someone reading a first draft of a story must think it's worth publishing...

Editors are far from being arbiters of good and bad writing. There are endless examples of rejection letters from editors to the greatest of writers and there's that recent experiment in which one of Jane Austen's novels (with title and names changed) was hawked around to editors who all rejected the book and only one of which actually recognized what the book was. Editors merely decide whether they think they can make money on a given work.

[englishstudent9]

teh bible

[Red-Headed]

De gustibus non est disputandum!

there's that recent experiment in which one of Jane Austen's novels (with title and names changed) was hawked around to editors who all rejected the book and only one of which actually recognized what the book was.

A/ I will bet good money that was in America.

B/ I don't blame them.

[Veho]

You would have thought that if they can't even recognise a Jane Austen novel, that they shouldn't be in the industry. Of course, not having read a Austen novel doesn't mean that they're incapable of recognising a publishable book when they read one, but surely if they're in the publishing/book field they would have come across one of the most popular authors of the 19th century.

[mortalterror]

A/ I will bet good money that was in America.

Great Britain.

B/ I don't blame them.

Neither do I. I hate Jane Austen with a passion her novels do not possess.

J.E. Luebering raised an excellent point in his article about the incident:

Should we be outraged that Austen suffered the indignity of rejection?

No. What these rejections show is that readers today don’t share the literary tastes of readers of the 1810s.

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2007...sten-rejected/

[sixsmith]

.

J.E. Luebering raised an excellent point in his article about the incident:

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2007...sten-rejected/

A similar hoax was perpetrated in Australia. The Australian newspaper sent the third chapter of Patrick White's 'The Eye of the Storm' (under the pseudonym Wraith Picket ) to several publishers and agents. The novel was largely responsible for White receiving the 1973 Nobel. Anyhow, no one wanted a bar of it and The Australian's literary editor spent a good deal of time and print bemoaning the deplorable state of Australian publishing. The fact is, however, that White is a difficult writer, a slow burning modernist whose psychological narratives can test even the most seasoned reader. It would simply be a poor business decision for publishers in a commercial market to take him on in the 21st century.