Books That Are Fun To Ridicule

[Slugawoo]

My question is...how bored does someone have to be to go through this book thoroughly enough to count the number of references to Edward's beauty?

A few of my friends said the only way they were able to get through it was, and I quote, "by pretending Bella was on drugs the entire time." Of course, they weren't counting anything. That's just insane.

[Joey]

Ok, so this book is pretty notorious between my expanded group of friends. There's one set that gets passed around between us all (since we refuse to pay her any more money then necessary) and just go through reading it and editing it :D Fixing grammar, making snide comments, and--since Bon brought it up--make tallies of the many repetitive things :D The first book has a count of the times Edward is referred to as marble, and the second has a tally of the word "chagrin" xD

I'll admit, I haven't actually read the series, yet. Most of what I've gotten is the dramatic reading and rants from everyone else complaining about the books. After I finish pumpkins on Halloween I think I'll start, so I can read it while giving out candy.

[Jessi]

They really make enough references to him being like marble to count it? That's scary.

I almost want to read the books now, just to laugh at them. A lot. Because I know I would. The snippets I've read from various websites read like really, really bad Mary Sue-Infused fanfiction.

[Seerow]

Marble and god-like are her favorite descriptive words I do believe. Honestly, almost every description of him is one of those two, at least in the halfish of the book I read. Maybe it got better in the second half, but I don't see how it could.

My sister is in love with this series and lent them to me so I could read it. Apparently its a guilty pleasure for a lot of people and she agrees that the writing is atrocious.

At least the movie looks like it could be kinda okay. I'll probably go with a group of friends once the hype dies down and at an odd time so we can have the theatre to ourselves and sit there and make fun of it. Best way to watch a movie

[Alicorn]

After reading this thread, I'm glad I didn't break down and buy the book. When I saw the movie preview to it, I thought I give it a read since the movie preview looked decent enough. Then if I liked the book, hope they didn't butcher it like they did Blood and Chocolate. **still peeved about that** But I held back on buying cause I was cheap and didn't want to pay 11 bucks for it. It didn't feel worth it. Now I want to see if I can get it from the library or borrow it from someone so I can get a good laugh. I mean really, vampires don't go out in daylight cause they sparkle. o.O I should have known!

[Wingsrising]

Like I said, I actually mostly enjoyed the first book, despite rolling my eyes at the sorts of things mentioned on the web page that Seerow posted. I haven't read the rest yet as I'm waiting on the second one from the library.

(I don't get it. I got to the top of the hold list for the 4th book, turned it back unread since I hadn't read the others yet, and then got to the top of the hold list for the 4th book AGAIN... all while waiting for the 2nd book. And the 2nd book had far fewer holds than the 4th book. Go figure.)

Come to think of it, I'm not sure why I enjoyed it. But, I did. Like the M&Ms I'm eating right now, I guess. No substance, but amusing.

Definitely a borrow, not a buy, though. And their apparent popularity mystifies me (though not as much as the popularity of Eragon...)

[Joey]

Ahaha, Eragon is another kettle of fish entirely! Another of my favorite bad books that are good because they're bad. The movie is classicly terrible! I've got to read the third one one of these days.

[Arviragus]

Aha, the Eragon books! I have them on my bookshelf because they're good for lulz when I'm in need of some brain candy.

How about Laurell K. Hamilton? I'm Anita Blake! I have a bazillion super powers and I sleep with every hot man in the series! Fear the awesome!

[AngharadTy]

Anita Blake didn't start out trashy. She sure as hell ended up that way (I heart them, they are ridiculous, and I want to tally every time she says someone "brought me screaming," good lord) but the first books--before the sex--were pretty good horror-ish fiction. The ardeur (I am so not good at French, I can't even consistently pronounce that correctly in my own head) was the most laughable addition to a series in... a long long time.

Two authors whose books I used to read until they went waaaaaay over the top crazy: Orson Scott Card and Piers Anthony. Hoooo boy. Card became a rabid Mormon, complete with racism and anti-gay sentiment. Anthony just got old. Very "get offa my lawn you whippersnappers" with a bucketful of "here is a list of my ailments" and a heaping serving of misogyny, too. The Mother Nature book (I think--maybe the God one?) of the Incarnations of Immortality has a doozy of a scene where two women are traveling together, one gets turned into a man, and promptly tries to rape his/her companion. Gets turned back and gasps, "oh me oh my! I had no idea men lived with such compulsions all the time! wowie!"

Another semi-bad author is Anne Bishop. I will happily say how much I looooove her Black Jewels Trilogy--and I think the society she created is well thought out, and the deliberate flipped dynamics (men subservient to women) are always interesting to read in any iteration. But Jaenelle is a Mary Sue, and characters named things like Saetan, Daemon, Lucivar...? Hell, it's incredibly fun to read. It's just not good literature.

I'd actually recommend Anne Bishop, though. I'd never recommend Eragon or Twilight--while such junk may be fun to read on an individual, case-by-case basis, it's not the sort of thing you should tell people to read. ;)

[Wingsrising]

I actually liked the Eragon movie better than the book. The movie wasn't fabulous, but the emotional reactions to events seemed more real and the characters spent less time aimlessly wandering from place to place. ("I don't know what to do next. I know, let's go to point B! Oh, it looks like there's nothing to do here at point B after all. Let's go back to point A!")

I didn't read the second two books, though I'll always be grateful to the first for leading me to the Earthsea books (which is where he swiped the "true name" magic thing from). I'd never read them before and they're very good.

That said, Paolini is clearly very talented and I suspect he has some excellent books in him. It's just that Eragon wasn't it. I will certainly read at least the first book of his next series, written after he's been seasoned a little and gets some ideas of his own.

I liked the first few Anita Blake books. Then it veered into "all weird violent kinky were-whatever sex, all the time" territory. Also, it became clear that Anita was going to solve EVERY apparently insolvable problem by developing a new superpower. I stopped reading them quite some time ago.

Mercedes Lackey is another of my guilty pleasure books. I read her stuff a LOT and generally enjoy it, but I admit... even at their best they're not great art (although at their best they're actually pretty good, IMHO) and many of her most recent offerings have been pretty poor. (Really, how many times can an author write the same damn book over and over again? Apparently, a lot.)

Although actually I think of Hamilton and Lackey as being in a different category than Eragon and the Twlight series. They have their flaws (not least of which is a writer pushing a series WAY past the time when they should have moved on to something else) but the beginnings of the series were genuinely inventive and the authors have solid writing skills (if not always solid plotting skills).

[EofS]

Don't remind me. I was in a class where we had to do dramatic readings from it in high school! *was someone named Carlisle*

All I remember was that it was painfully, painfully bad, I wanted Rocks Falls Everyone Dies, and no one knew how to pronounce my character's name.

CARlyl. Or carLYul. Both with a long i sound. I always pronounced it carLYul (like most of the country) until I moved here. I quite quickly learnt the error of my ways. CARlyl ;0) (Originally caer-luel, it's said to be the only entirely British placename in England. Although quite how they define British when they say that I'm not sure. But no Latin/Norman/Germanic/Scandinavian element to the name. So I guess they mean entirely Celtic? And it's also the only city in England to not appear in the Domesday book, as it was in Scotland at that point. Apparently the midges didn't get the memo about it having become part of England, since I've been bloody plagued by them recently.)

[Usul_Princess]

....How did I know 'Twilight' would be on here? XD

Heather, my best friend works in the bookstore, and even though she's not solely in charge of making "book parties" for the store (I.E., whatever the theme is you have to read the book, write trivia questions, etc.) She just finished a couple of vampire books, and she loves Twilight the best!~
We're both trying to read over 500 books before we turn 35, and she always taunts be because she's read more Stephen King books than me, and I refuse to read anything else until all of his are gone. (Because...I love him.)
But her tastes in nearly everything sucks:

Vampire books, Anne Rice, (Rowling I just couldn't get into. She's okay, but her stories had too many fictious things in it that needed explination, resulting in overexplination.) All Emeniem biographies, etc.

Don't even get me started on her taste in movies. If the lead character or a co-star has blue eyes and a penis, she'll try to convince me for weeks about how deep and meaningful some B-rated forgettable flick was.

[Seerow]

Aww Piers Anthony. I used to love the Xanth novels (Heck, even my stuffed dragon's name is Nimby) but boy they got bad fast. It was kinda amusing all the puns and strange magic tricks at first, but after a while the puns got really old and tedious to read and I just stopped caring.

Anne Bishop is one of my guilty pleasures, I love her Black Jewels and House of Gaia series. A lot of her characters are rather flat and there's just a lot of eye-rolling moments in both of them, but I love them nonetheless. My subeta pet Ishka's character is based off of Dianna the Hunters character in the books.

I tried to read Eragon after I heard how "amazing" it was, then got promptly terribly confused and just stopped reading it. I don't even remember what happened in the chunk of book I did read. I did enjoy the movie, though like Joey, its cause it just classicly terrible and great to make fun of.

Amelia Atwater Rhodes is another author who has sadly gotten worse over time. I greatly enjoyed her first novels, who while definitely written by a teenager (her first was written when she was 12) was a great quick read. Up until her Hawksong series. The first book I fell in love with the characters and world she'd created, but then she just kept adding more to the series and it went steeply downhill after the first. I think she's abandoning this series after this latest installment, so maybe she'll get back to writing good novels again.

[TCStarwind]

I agree with Seerow on Atwater-Rhodes. The first book I read of hers was Hawksong, and I loved it very much. Unfortunately, the rest of the series didn't have the same feel to it that the first did. I guess she's more of the avian type and can't get as in character with the rest of them. And then the series got into psycho dopplegangers, and the main characters' daughter turned out to be both the apocalypse and a lesbian (I want to clarify here. Being a lesbian certainly isn't bad, but it was just completely unexpected in this book and kinda made me turn my head with a "wat?"). I still haven't gotten around to reading Wyvernhail, yet. And the only other book from her I've read was entirely forgettable, too.

And Eragon is a series entirely about NOTHING. Hundreds of pages of nothing. I read somewhere that Paolini was complaining about the publisher cutting 12 pages out of the book (why couldn't they cut the rest of it, too?). Eldest could probably have been fit in a few chapters at max. I'm not even going to bother reading the rest of the series. I'll just get the plot from my friend who will.

[Usul_Princess]

And Eragon is a series entirely about NOTHING. Hundreds of pages of nothing.

lol, that's what Heather said, and told someone else to do to the Eragon book theme party. Well that's one thing I'll take her word for.