Recommend me a bad book!

[gewuerzgurke]

Yeah translating books is quite a good possibility to ruin them I think that goes for most language pairs.
But slightly more on topic: I do the exact same thing with my boyfriend (he's the one reading though) and we usually pick thosereally awful romance novels about some sort of knight in shining armour who rescues the oh so lovely peasant lady (in our times though, not with actual knights) or things like that. They're perfect, because they're dirt cheap, very badly written and the "stories" are just plain...weird. I actually did some research on that before answering, to see if they exist in America (apparantly I just assumed that's where you're from, funny...) and I think the keyword would be things like pulp magazine or dime novels.

 

[Something Amyss]

Caged by Amber Lynn Natusch. It's .99 cents on Amazon for the Kindle edition and was so bad it was the first product review I ever did that they wouldn't publish on there. Apparently, describing what's so bad about an Amazon-published product is a violation of the ToU or something.

It's actually got me tempted to read Twilight out of my belief that there's no way Twilight is THIS bad.

 

[ForumSafari]

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.

He also has a completely understandable tendency to want to include new readers in every book he writes, this turns into an utterly infuriating tendency for half of each book to explain previous events. Having the 'Mister is a cat, Bob is a skull' section in each book gets boring very fast.

 

[Thoughtful_Salt]

There was this freakin' unbelievably bad Tom Clancy novel that I owned briefly. It was called State Of War, it's part of his Net Force series. The heroes in this novel are ridiculously lucky, to the point of me wondering why everyone succeeds when they are clearly the biggest idiots in history. Read it, it's a gem

 

[Ace Morologist]

Ever heard of a publishing company called White Wolf? They're not really a thing anymore, but they put out some truly memorable original fiction in their day. Look into some of these series:

The Clan Novel Series (a series of vampire novels)
The Dark Ages Clan Novel Series (more vampires, but set during the Dark Ages)
The Tribe Novel Series (werewolf fiction)
Predator & Prey (a series about werewolves, vampires, wizards and the magical monster-hunter guys who hunt them)

Any one of the books in those four series (with a rare few exceptions) should more than suit your needs. A basic rule of thumb here is that the more often a writer's name appears in the series, the worse the book is likely to be.

--Morology!

PS: Having said the above, I did actually enjoy each of those series, though for wildly different reasons.

 

[Fat Hippo]

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.

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.

Oh god, I remember that GRUNTS! book. I had no idea what was going on most of the time. I remember being amused when it's described how a halfling has sex with an orc, but that's about the only bit of "plot" that has stuck with me.

As for the Dresden Files, I actually really enjoy them. Sure, you can just about breeze through one in an afternoon, but it's good fun, and the later books really have been getting me more invested in the characters.

Too be honest, it's hard to recommend much of anything myself, since I usually put a book down pretty quick if I'm bored, and it is fairly rare that anything pops out at me as just absurdly bad.

 

[GabeZhul]

All right, we actually just had our first dramatic reading session yesterday and it was a riot. I did My Immortal and it was so hilarious I actually had to stop after twenty chapters because it started hurting to laugh.

So, since getting most of the book recommendations mentioned here takes time and money, I decided to branch out to fanfics after all. Can anyone recommend me trainwrecks similar to My Immortal? The TV Tropes page gave some pointers, but I am curious if there are more diamonds in the rough out there...