Recommend me a bad book!

GabeZhul

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To explain the title: Me and my friends have been doing this thing where I give a loud reading to a bad book and we riff on it on the spot, pointing out funny connotations, bad writing and other comedic stuff.

However, lately we kind of ran dry of good material, and last time I tried a bad Harry Potter parody book one of my friends brought which pretty much psyched us out by the end of the second chapter to the point where we had to stop because it was impossible to make fun of its already horrible "comedy".

As such, now I am looking for bad books, books that are either terribly written or have an outrageously dumb plot or horrible characters (preferably all three at the same time) but relatively short (since I can only read up so much one night and it's not fun to get bogged down with just one book for months) and not parodies (since they are hard to make fun of). Could you please help me out with a few candidates?

Thanks in advance.

P.S.: No Twilight (since it's long and boring as hell) or 50 Shades of Grey (since I am not sure my neighbors would be happy to hear me act out the scenes...). :p
 

Terraniux

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Read Doom: Knee Deep in the Dead. It's a novelization of the first game but with actual characters and a plot. It's an entertaining kind of terrible, not a "this is so terrible I want to rip my eyes out" kind of terrible. Skip the other ones, though. The series goes from being a novel about Doom to a space opera with a few aliens/demons from Doom thrown into the mix.
 

Ihateregistering1

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Apparently there are two books that must be read if you absolutely love bad books.

1: "Atlanta Nights". Apparently this was written by a group of sci-fi authors who got together for a weekend with the express purpose of creating the worst book ever.

2: "The Eye of Argon". A book written by a teenager that is essentially him trying to create a "Conan the Barbarian" story and failing miserably.

Bear in mind I haven't read either one of these, so buyer beware.
 

agent_orange420

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any number of the star wars books. especially badly written by Aaron Allson, Troy Denning or Michael P.Kube-McDowell. The more recent, the generally worse they are.

good (terrible) examples-

Inferno
Vortex
Exile
Outcast
black fleet crisis : before the storm
black fleet crisis : shield of lies
 

Nepukadnezzar

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I would actually recommend The Dresden Files.
Maybe I will get murdered for this, since it has quite the fanbase (as far as I know), but the author has the mind-boggling habit of describing what a character is wearing, while another character is being torn to shreds by a werewolf.

It also has every urban fantasy cliche you can think of and a whole lot of angst....
Maybe you'll like it :)
 

Commissar Sae

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GRUNTS! by Mary Gentle. It is pitched as a satire of Fantasy tropes, but it just falls apart and makes no damn sense. Half the time you have no idea where or who the characters are and it is just pretty shabbily written.


Nepukadnezzar said:
I would actually recommend The Dresden Files.
Maybe I will get murdered for this, since it has quite the fanbase (as far as I know), but the author has the mind-boggling habit of describing what a character is wearing, while another character is being torn to shreds by a werewolf.

It also has every urban fantasy cliche you can think of and a whole lot of angst....
Maybe you'll like it :)
I actually enjoy the Dresden Files, depends which book you have read though, the first few were a tad simplistic compared to the later books, but they can make for a fun read. They are by no means as bad as a lot of the other urban fantasy I've read.
 

spartan231490

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GabeZhul said:
To explain the title: Me and my friends have been doing this thing where I give a loud reading to a bad book and we riff on it on the spot, pointing out funny connotations, bad writing and other comedic stuff.

However, lately we kind of ran dry of good material, and last time I tried a bad Harry Potter parody book one of my friends brought which pretty much psyched us out by the end of the second chapter to the point where we had to stop because it was impossible to make fun of its already horrible "comedy".

As such, now I am looking for bad books, books that are either terribly written or have an outrageously dumb plot or horrible characters (preferably all three at the same time) but relatively short (since I can only read up so much one night and it's not fun to get bogged down with just one book for months) and not parodies (since they are hard to make fun of). Could you please help me out with a few candidates?

Thanks in advance.

P.S.: No Twilight (since it's long and boring as hell) or 50 Shades of Grey (since I am not sure my neighbors would be happy to hear me act out the scenes...). :p
I have a recommendation, but you might want to save it for last because you will never find a worse book in all of literature. This book makes bad fan-fiction read like Poe. "The Last Night at The Lobster" I don't remember the author. It's reasonably short, so it should fit your purposes nicely, but it is awful in every way. Bad characters, practically no plot, and it's terribly written. There are absolutely no redeeming qualities.
 

GabeZhul

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Thanks for all the recommendations guys. I will have to look into most of these titles, but I already got good vibes from that "The Eye of Argon". Amateurishly written fantasy is a tremendous fun to riff on. :)

Nepukadnezzar said:
I would actually recommend The Dresden Files.
Maybe I will get murdered for this, since it has quite the fanbase (as far as I know), but the author has the mind-boggling habit of describing what a character is wearing, while another character is being torn to shreds by a werewolf.

It also has every urban fantasy cliche you can think of and a whole lot of angst....
Maybe you'll like it :)
I am actually reading the Dresden Files (I am at the middle of Summer Knight, though I haven't had much time for reading just for reading's sake lately so I am practically going at an one-chapter-a-day ratio), and I would say most of what you describe is actually an intentional tongue-in-cheek parody of the Noir genre, and a pretty good one at that.

You see, the first book was originally written by Butcher as a literary middle-finger at his literature teacher because he told him that his writing suffers from not adhering to a genre strictly enough, so he wrote the most over-the-top formulaic noir urban fantasy he could muster, and then it turned out to be pretty damn good and got published.
The guy has a habit of doing this, he actually wrote the Codex Alera books, a six piece epic fantasy series, each about 160k words, on a dare he accepted on an internet forum...

On topic, the first book might have still made good riffing material, but since I am already familiar with the series it would not work, since half the fun of our reading sessions is that no one read the books before and thus we all have genuine, on-the-spot reactions to it.

Again, thank you very much for all the recommendations, please keep them coming. :D
 

thehermit2

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Have you thought about looking at fan fiction? Lots cheaper than buying books, and while there is a lot of good fan fiction there is a lot that is not so much good as very, very not good.

Anyway, my selection is from a dark period when I was reading political fiction. Political fiction is almost always bad, but by far the worst one I read was a self-righteous "update" of George Orwell's 1984 called American 2014 by Dawn Blair.
 

GabeZhul

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thehermit2 said:
Have you thought about looking at fan fiction? Lots cheaper than buying books, and while there is a lot of good fan fiction there is a lot that is not so much good as very, very not good.

Anyway, my selection is from a dark period when I was reading political fiction. Political fiction is almost always bad, but by far the worst one I read was a self-righteous "update" of George Orwell's 1984 called American 2014 by Dawn Blair.
The problem with fan-fiction is that the really outrageously bad ones are usually written with the grammar proficiency of a blind monkey randomly beating at the keyboard, and such excessive grammar issues hinder the reading when I have to stop at every second word to figure out what the hell the author wanted to write and how the hell am I supposed to pronounce it.
We actually tried My Immortal, and it was fun for a while, but then the grammar began degrading even further and it just became too annoying. Still, I would say if you know some really crappy fanfic with reasonably pronouncable grammar, I'm all for it.
 

Yopaz

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Jun 3, 2009
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thehermit2 said:
Have you thought about looking at fan fiction? Lots cheaper than buying books, and while there is a lot of good fan fiction there is a lot that is not so much good as very, very not good.

Anyway, my selection is from a dark period when I was reading political fiction. Political fiction is almost always bad, but by far the worst one I read was a self-righteous "update" of George Orwell's 1984 called American 2014 by Dawn Blair.
I just glanced over your post and saw 1984... in a thread about bad books... that could have gotten ugly.

OT: Avalon is a fun one. I had a friend who almost got through that one. He hated it so much.

Also I thought Eragon was kinda bad. I have given that book a few honest tries and I just can't get past the fact that it bores me so much. I've read scientific papers more exciting than that.
 

ItouKaiji

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I'd toss in a book called The World on Blood by Johnathan Nasaw. It's a "vampire" story that's just an excuse to write weird porn. It's actually quite hilarious. There are full scale orgies and babies' blood is considered a delicacy...
 

GodzillaGuy92

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Three words: Twilight with Cthulhu [http://www.amazon.com/Awoken-ebook/dp/B00EV5P866/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1378939207&sr=8-1&keywords=awoken+kindle]. Trust me, it proves far more comedically fruitful than the thing it's knocking off.
 

E-Dogg

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"Silverfall: Stories of the Seven Sisters" by Ed Greenwood. It's set in the Forgotten Realms campaign-setting from D&D (which Greenwood created/co-created, or some such). I read it the first time when i was 16 or so, and kind of liked it. Read it again a few years (and tons of books)later, and threw it away in disgust. It reads like seven different Mary Sues crammed in to one horrid book. It seriously gave me nightmares.
 

kyuzo3567

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GabeZhul said:
Thanks for all the recommendations guys. I will have to look into most of these titles, but I already got good vibes from that "The Eye of Argon". Amateurishly written fantasy is a tremendous fun to riff on. :)

I am actually reading the Dresden Files (I am at the middle of Summer Knight)

You see, the first book was originally written by Butcher as a literary middle-finger at his literature teacher because he told him that his writing suffers from not adhering to a genre strictly enough, so he wrote the most over-the-top formulaic noir urban fantasy he could muster, and then it turned out to be pretty damn good and got published.
The guy has a habit of doing this, he actually wrote the Codex Alera books, a six piece epic fantasy series, each about 160k words, on a dare he accepted on an internet forum...
:D
Actually Codex Alera was the reworking of a story he wrote for an English class assignment that he then turned into a book series (as far as I know anyways, I remember him saying something along those lines in an interview).

In my opinion for it, Summer Knight was probably the most boring book in the series (Next to Ghost Story) but I still enjoyed them alot.

OT: for bad riffing books.... I honestly can't think of any, but will edit this post when/if I do
 

Ihateregistering1

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Also, and I may get some hate for this, but basically anything by James Rollins.

The books aren't really bad, and they certainly keep you entertained, but I'd basically say they are the literary equivalent of straight-to-DVD actions movies. The heroes all seem to be Navy SEALs who speak 14 languages and have 3 PhDs, they all have oddly ridiculous names (examples include "Painter Crowe", "Monk Kokkalis", and "Gray Pierce"), and Rollins' understanding of the Military is borderline hilarious.
 

mitchell271

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I found out about this from Questionable Content a few years back. It's a romance book about a [a href="http://www.amazon.com/Viking-Unchained-Time-Travel-Sandra-Hill/dp/0425222950"]time travelling viking that becomes a Navy SEAL[/a]. I read one, I mean, you can't pass up a description like that, and it was laughably bad. It's like Rocky Horror Picture Show or Army of Darkness. It's terrible, but it's hilariously terrible. To this day, I have no idea if it's meant to be taken seriously or not.
 

Falien

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"The Left Hand of God" by Paul Hoffman - a Hunger-Games-esque thing, but boring, with an unlikeable cast and an infuriating number of no-win situations solved by a hitherto-unmentioned "special talent" or some such. I put it down after about a third in.

"Halting State" by Charles Stross - now this is by no means a bad book; Charles Stross is hailed as one of the best SF writers of recent years. However, for your purposes, it might add an additional layer of fun, as it is written completely in the second person ("You enter the room and say 'Hello'. They eye you suspiciously.") from three different characters' viewpoints, as a sort of tribute to old text adventure games.

"And Then We Came To The End" by Joshua Ferris - another book that's not that bad, but is made interesting for your purposes by being narrated in the first plural person ("We eyed him suspiciously as he entered and said 'Hello'.) from the point of view of a nameless collective of office workers, gossiping about their colleagues.
 

DefunctTheory

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Nepukadnezzar said:
I would actually recommend The Dresden Files.
Maybe I will get murdered for this, since it has quite the fanbase (as far as I know), but the author has the mind-boggling habit of describing what a character is wearing, while another character is being torn to shreds by a werewolf.

It also has every urban fantasy cliche you can think of and a whole lot of angst....
Maybe you'll like it :)


I can't argue with you opinion on the books - In a way, your right. But 'not your cup of tea' does not translate into 'bad.'

And that has nothing to do with how many fans Dresden has.

EDIT: That sounds a lot more confrontational then I intended. No offense was intended.

kyuzo3567 said:
GabeZhul said:
Thanks for all the recommendations guys. I will have to look into most of these titles, but I already got good vibes from that "The Eye of Argon". Amateurishly written fantasy is a tremendous fun to riff on. :)

I am actually reading the Dresden Files (I am at the middle of Summer Knight)

You see, the first book was originally written by Butcher as a literary middle-finger at his literature teacher because he told him that his writing suffers from not adhering to a genre strictly enough, so he wrote the most over-the-top formulaic noir urban fantasy he could muster, and then it turned out to be pretty damn good and got published.
The guy has a habit of doing this, he actually wrote the Codex Alera books, a six piece epic fantasy series, each about 160k words, on a dare he accepted on an internet forum...
:D
Actually Codex Alera was the reworking of a story he wrote for an English class assignment that he then turned into a book series (as far as I know anyways, I remember him saying something along those lines in an interview).

In my opinion for it, Summer Knight was probably the most boring book in the series (Next to Ghost Story) but I still enjoyed them alot.

OT: for bad riffing books.... I honestly can't think of any, but will edit this post when/if I do
Wikipedia said:
The inspiration for the series came from a bet Jim was challenged to by a member of the Delray Online Writer?s Workshop. The challenger bet that Jim could not write a good story based on a lame idea, and Jim countered that he could do it using two lame ideas of the challenger?s choosing. The ?lame? ideas given were ?Lost Roman Legion", and ?Pokémon?.
Reference:
http://shortstorygeeks.com/2011/09/episode-eleven-jim-butcher-interview/

Personally, I liked Ghost Story. But that may just be because I enjoyed it when Mortimer goes from 'cowardly wimp' to 'Wizard who could probably give Chuthulu nightmares.'

As for OP... I can't think of anything off the top of my head. I have a lot of books I hate, but I've read few books where I could honestly say 'This is terrible and no sane person could ever love it.'