Sometimes I can’t sleep and something catches my eye in a moment of weakness. Sometimes things are on sale for less than a buck, and oh what the hell. Sometimes I just make bad decisions all on my own.
Don’t be like me. Or if you are, tell us about the awful drek that has made its way into your Kindle/Kobo/Google/Nook libraries.
I’ll start with the book that prompted this:
God Touched by John Conroe, book 1 (of course) of the Demon Accords series.
Allure: Urban fantasy, why can’t I quit you? Demons and shit? Sounds good! Also, brain, why are we not asleep at 3:30am? For goodness’ sake.
Premise: Obvious Author Insert is a freshly minted cop-bro in NYC, whose family was brutally murdered by a possessed dude when he was 12 or 10 or some shit. Luckily his grandpa is totally buddies with some ex-Rangers and assorted Special Forces and cops and shit, so OAI is a marksman/athlete/bro well before adulthood.
Cardinal Sin: The ‘Chapter One’ heading lacked any formatting whatsoever, so the acknowledgements bled right into the opening graf. Things went downhill from there.
OAI is so cut from all the lifting and shit he does, Sexy Vampire Girl can’t help but fall in love with him even though he totally already turned down the hotties living down the hall because his Tortured Life of Exorcism only hurts the ones he loves, bruh. Also he’s weirdly obsessed with the brands of the clothes and shoes and whatnot that he wears. I know I would have judged him harshly for wearing anything but genuine Under Armour ®. Bruh.
Redemption: Eh, it’s a pretty inoffensive adventure tale aside from Obvious Author Insert being so cut and awesome and having to turn down all the hotties that just throw themselves at him, bruh. I may even finish this one, since the Transmetropolitan trades I ordered won’t be here for a while.
You guys have any moments of weakness? Of course you do. And if anyone lists any Dresden Files up in here, know that I have sharp objects within reach.
My weakness was when Amazon ran a sale for James Parterson’s “book shots”. I bought a few for 99 cents each. They’re short, and they’re all fucking awful.
Those are pretty good starter fantasy books. I read them when I was 11 or so and reread them last year. While completely predictable, they’re also very accessible.
Even as a kid I could tell they were an order of magnitude below Tolkien or even Howard. I read them anyway because in those days I was desperate for fantasy, but now I’d say there’s no point in being so attached to a genre that you waste time reading all the lousy stuff.
I got suckered into a terrible book called Extinction Point. Obviously written by someone who had followed all the tricks to get rich self publishing. High quality commissioned cover art, popular genre, and tons of fake 4 and 5 star reviews to get your book into the top rated and best selling lists. It was a total nothing piece of crap, and it wasn’t until after I read it and looked further into the reviews that it became clear they were bogus. And of course, after I left my honest, negative review there were magically a round of new, short positive ones to push it off the front page…
All right, I’ll play along. Wizard’s First Rule by – I forget who, and I don’t really want to google him right now. I think it’s a whole series by now, but I read the first book a long time ago, maybe released in the early 90s, and when I was done just had to sit and think, really think about why that book seemed so wrong. I wasn’t familiar with the tenets of objectivism, but I could recognize bizarre sexual politics and, well, sex. Not to mention it seemed to pretty much ape the hero’s journey pretty much identically with Star Wars, with some added S&M. This book is not for human consumption. Maybe goat consumption, I don’t know.
Do not read the last Thomas Covenant series (possibly also the 1st and 2nd trilogies). I love Donaldson’s writing. . .as a teenager. It was my follow-up fantasy after reading Tolkien several times, with Brooks and Eddings and all the others getting published in the late 70s and early 80s. But I tried reading the first book in the last series and made it only halfway. I don’t know if my tastes changed or Donaldson’s writing went to shit, or some combo of the two, but it was garbage, the writing so purple it read like something by a college freshman.
Wizard’s First Rule is not for cucks.
Eddings started off somewhat enjoyable, ended up plagiarizing not only genre tropes but himself during a fairly short fantasy career.
The Iron Tower trilogy and its wee folk, not for anyone who has any respect for a certain British philologist.
Anything TSR published in the 80s, 90s or last decade.
So bad, and it only goes massively downhill from there. I also got griped at by GRR Martin for calling out Goodkind’s obvious sexism and weird sexuality in general during a Q&A on Sexuality in Fantasy GRRM was holding at Vericon like 10 years ago. Fuck’em both man.
Jonathan Franzen’s The 27th City. I kept plodding on, thinking there surely would be some sort of payoff, but no, it was just a book about miserable people being miserable to each other.
Once I finished it, I walked out to the dumpster for my apartment complex and tossed it in so that it could not afflict anyone else.
The Expanse series. I think they are horrible sci-fi (it’s more like a fantasy version of what contemporary American morals might look in spaaaaace) and the characters are laughable cardstock builds (and the whole ghost detective in space gig basically destroyed my suspension of disbelief and threw the remains off into the wind).
Yet I am a completionist (and a liiiiittle OCD) and I WILL read the latest book in the series, having read all the previous ones (and liking them less and less, specially Nemesis Games (when it became clear the author has no real plan to fill the next novels and has to make shit up on the fly).
The Laundry Files, by Charles Stross are a similar thing for me, with better writing (can get repetitive), better humor and more interesting stuff going on both character and plot wise. Still comfort reading, though.
I couldn’t get past the first book in the Expanse, because it seemed like the main character was a complete idiot who deliberately made every wrong decision possible at every turn and then was surprised when things turned out badly or he wound up getting people killed. I hear the series becomes much better after the first book, but I’m never going to find out.
Little Brother by Corey Doctorow. One of the few books I couldn’t be bothered to finish. Man I hated it and on the surface I should love it. Dystopian fiction like this is generally a favorite of mine, but this is just poorly written with a lot of Doctorow’s own personal technology evangelism mixed in. Expect a lot of Microsoft bashing. The book is also not internally consistent IIRC. If you want to read some more Dystopic fiction in the vein of 1984 go read We or Kallocain instead of this rubbish.
Well, that and the fact that it was made by Scientologists as a celebration of their founder as opposed to seeking to make a successful and enjoyable movie. It’s like you could probably make a semi-watchable Left Behind movie even though the books are absolutely awful, but no one ever will because the only people who want to make them are doing it to evangelize their own extreme vision of Christianity.
I think some of you maybe misread the title. It’s not “Dump on Great Books That Everyone Else Likes”. It’s “Do not read these books.” ;P
Terry Goodkind should definitely be avoided, though. Like the Left Behind books, he’s writing to educate you about his fucked up world view, not to tell a good story, write about nuanced characters, or any of the things one classically associates with novels that anyone should even open, much less read. He’s not even willing to admit his books are in the fantasy genre. It took me longer to figure that out as a teen than it should have. :(
I’m not sure this book fits the “don’t read” category but does anyone recall a series of fantasy books (probably YA as I read them as a kid) where some magical incident happens to cut off a backwater part of an empire. The hero is forced to take control of the most backward part of it and he slowly rebuilds it, while his neighbor’s territory slowly deteriorates. Eventually the empire is able to come back and tries to reabsorb both territories. It’s always bugged me I can’t recall the name.
