So I was searching on the webs (all of them) for images relating to the terms “slave coder” and ended up finding a book named Coding Slave, which is apparently a book bad enough to give you a brain tumor. The reviews, however, can be funny in of themselves and sometimes describe the “best” trainwreck portions of the book. By virtue of these reviews you can enjoy the aftermath of these poor readers.
Has anyone else enjoyed this sort of activity?
OK, I’ll sex up the thread or something:
He gives us the most unreasonable and unlikely sex scenes. Point in case – the COO of the company, the software engineer, the project manager, and the programmer are in a meeting. The programmer climbs under the desk and proceeds to … um … lick the software engineer’s lollipop. The project manager, hoping this will all go away, keeps reading the project plan aloud; the COO has no clue what to do about this. Then we get random violence and death that has nothing to do with anything.
I read 300 - 400 books a year, so when I say that this book is the worst book I’ve read in the past few years, that’s saying something. It’s literally in the bottom 1/10th of 1 percent.
The book is very short - it’s printed on small pages, with noticeable margins, and runs only a bit over 100 pages. It’s padded out with a laughable table of contents, an entirely unnecessary and bloated thesaurus, and a reprint of part of an Aristotelean dialogue.
…however, given how painfully bad the writing is, I suppose I shouldn’t be complaining about the brevity of the “novel”, but celebrating it.
That’s a lot of books.
I really like this section from that review:
This book fails in the following areas:
- characters
- plot
- writing style
- coherence / thematic unity.
Pretty straightforward.
I like the topic, too, if it’s also about movies and music and TV. It’s definitely more entertaining to read reviews of bad films/books/shows because the reviewer can get so gleeful about what sucks. And gleeful is always more entertaining than reverence (when someone loves a serious film).
The Onion is a good source for pop reviews: Over Her Dead Body.
Sure. Crap game reviews, write-ups at places like The Agony Booth, ZP, and of course, our old friend MST3K - after a fashion.
I had no idea that Amazon even sold books that were bound with plastic combs. That should have been a signal about quality right there.
“New from Kinkos!”
I think everyone loves the schadenfreude of reading really good takedowns of really bad work. Like this thread.
Troy
Although rather than mocking the books personally, he uses the insidious trick of merely reprinting the awful, awful contents.
H.
Kind of similar to the theme Mr. Cranky uses for film reviews. Seek out the awful, mock it.
Their review of “Excess Baggage” (since removed in favor of a book) almost make me fall out of my office chair.