| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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| By Jeffrey Scott Holland on Saturday, January 3, 1998 - 10:15 pm: |
The "worst" book I ever read was probably "Lincoln Vs.Kentucky" by G.W.Moody, a crotchety old man who lives about twenty minutes from me and has this book printed at great expense at a vanity publisher. It's an enormous, thick book with tiny 8-point type, and there is not one sentence in the entire book that makes complete grammatical sense. He rants a Twilight Zone perspective of history, with Abe being the one with mental illness, not his wife, and Harriet Beecher Stowe being a Voodoo Priestess, and he manages to paint every abolitionist as being a scoundrel in one way or another. Thing is, this book is so unintentionally hilarious and fascinating, I can't stop reading it. It's impossible to follow the narrative, so I just open it up like the Bible and jump in anywhere. So I can't really say the book is the worst, since it brings me so much chuckles. But it's easily the worst written, and the scary thing is, I've been told his relatives even proofread it for him before it was published! |
| By Cthulu on Wednesday, March 11, 1998 - 12:29 am: |
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| By Haberdasher on Wednesday, March 11, 1998 - 01:57 am: |
Alistair Crowley with a sense of the absurd! |
| By Venatrix Mirjen on Thursday, March 19, 1998 - 07:33 pm: |
We have one here where I am who writes biographies for children. I myself keep ending up with copies of them. They're all about obscure local people who no one cares about because they live in their houses (it's New England here) and the diaries are shoved up in the floorboards. And she tells me I can't write. The nerve. |
| By Mare on Thursday, April 2, 1998 - 01:25 am: |
"Venus Envy" by Rita Mae Brown. Ms. Brown, a formula writer and unfortunately an employed professor of English at a southern university, wrote what must be the single most cliched, self-interested novel ever to sit on the shelves of the dreaded B & N. If you're familiar with her, you'll know that her first autobiographically based fantasy, "Rubyfruit Jungle," won her praise in many literary circles. Since then, she has taken the template of that novel and worked it like a five-dollar whore through all her other novels, some of which she gives co-authorship to her cat Sneaky Pie. It's always the same; Girl is born into a po' white trash family. Girl discovers sex with a boy cousin or the neighborhood retard. Girl discovers she likes girls better. Girl meets Ms. Perfect, who needs to be drawn out of her hetero hell world. Girl makes fools out of all male characters, then lands Ms. Wonderful. The end. Bullshit. As a dyke, I should know. Ms. Brown also offers a tome for aspiring writers entitled "Starting From Scratch," which basically instructs the reader to stop writing entirely until he/she has mastered 1-3 classical languages and has had the opportunity to study with the author directly.(I'm serious; read it if you dare) "Venus Envy" is by far the worst book I've ever read, and the only book I've ever thrown across the room in sheer disgust. Happy reading. |
| By PetRock on Thursday, April 2, 1998 - 06:28 am: |
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| By HotRod on Thursday, May 14, 1998 - 01:20 pm: |
I'm drawing a blank for worstbook, although I've yet to get more than a quarter of the way through Middlemarch by George Eliot, but that doesn't necessarily make it "worst". |
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