Friday, September 9, 2011

Friday Forum: Lovably Bad Books

Last week, I tore through Ernest Cline's futurist 1980s nostalgia romp, Ready Player One. I knew from the first page that a) it wasn't a great book and b) that I was going to absolutely love it.

The experienced reader/critic part of my brain saw the flaws: wooden dialogue, unbelievable coincidence,  narrative cliche, and a variety of other narrative black-eyes.

But then another part of my brain took over: the remnant of my adolescent, Mario Brothers-playing, Darth Vader-loving, coin-op obsessing, X-Men reading, Middle Earth-daydreaming self took over. My hard-won critical eye was completely helpless.

And this has happened before (Harry Potter and the early Tom Clancy novels come to mind): for some reason, certain kinds of novels have the ability to short-circuit the taste and discernment I have been cultivating for the last couple of decades. And it feel sooooooo good.

Has this ever happened to you? With what books? And what was it that caught you? __________________

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11 comments:

  1. Um, yes. Most recently, I ripped through THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY, which is all Zesty Redheaded Narrator and Eccentric Locals and Precocious Children and I was all ANNE OF GREEN GABLES PART TWO, I LOVE YOU. Plus, I'm a sucker for all things World War II.

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  2. Harry Potter for sure. ya fantasy as a whole, pretty much - i will read and reread tamora pierce and bruce coville and the hunger games, just without letting my brain slow down enough to pick apart the dialogue. John Grisham. All literary equivalents to John Hughes films. Those "I did this thing for one year so I could write a book about it" books. I think I like these types of books because the whole time I'm reading I know things will work out - the characters will best the bad guys, get a good job, get the guy, whatever; I read them when I need to forget that I earn $200 a month and devote most of my "social" time to baking cookies with a six-year-old.

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  3. Oh, for sure! For me, it's the silly, overtly right-wing Vince Flynn (a poor man's Tom Clancy) series of Mitch Rapp novels. They're terribly written with laugh-out-loud dialogue and incredibly unbelievable plot twists - but then the part of my brain that laughs at political posturing, enjoys a good spy thriller, and sure likes plane rides to go by quickly takes over, and I can't stop reading 'em.

    I love that you pointed this out - it does feel goooood!

    That said, if anyone answers Twilight, you should have them removed....

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  4. I have to agree with the Vince Flynn spy novels. They are totally implausible, not well written, and hopelessly cliched and yet I enjoy the ride. I have to add Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. They are far too long on pointless detail and minutiae but at the heart the books are unforgivably addicted.When he gets down to the story, it flies. 

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  5. I had the exact same experience with Ready Player One. It suffers from a terrible "and then" narrative structure, shallow to non-existent characterization, and a whole host of other violations, and I almost couldn't put it down. It just sort of charmed me. Any book that uses Rush 2112 as a key story point is apparently going to charm me into submission.

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  6. Although it wasn't at all my usual thing, the recent blockbuster hit "A Discovery of Witches" by Deborah Harkness was like book crack to me. I could not put it down, and despite it being something like 700 pages, I tore through it in three days or something insane. It's never going to win the Pulitzer, but damn was it fun!

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  7. Early Tom Clancy, amen.  Anything by Tony Hillerman and Louis L'Amour. Books by Eloisa James in the romance genre, because her "duchesses" wear fancy dress while solving Everymoderntwentysomething problems and because she rips off bodices between obscure references to 18th-century English literature. Most recently, the George R.R. Martin Ice and Fire series, because by the end of the first book I couldn't tell the good guys from the bad and it didn't even matter - they were all equal parts awful and amusing. I don't care what the technical flaws may be in that series - I'm ready for Books Six and Seven!

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  8. It DOES feel so good! Harry Potter is definitely on my list, along with this horrific (and utterly fantastic) chick-lit nightmare: Summer Sisters, by Judy Blume. I swear to god I've read that book twenty times. The writing never gets better, and the story never loses it's magic. It's total girl porn. 

    I think anything that overrides your taste barometer like that has to feel personally self-indulgent; that is to say that it has to appeal to your particular fantasies. For instance owning a summer house on Martha's Vineyard (ahem). I don't secretly fantasize about being a crime scene investigator or a detective, so those kinds of narratives aren't indulgent for me. 

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  9. A variation on the question what book did you really like, but you are embarrassed to admit to it.  My answer is probably a relative unknown, "The Memoirs of Cleopatra" by Margaret George, absolute dreck, and I absolutely loved it.  Probably falls into the "girl porn" category - I was having serious thoughts as to how can I find out how to be reincarnated so that I could meet Julius Caesar in my next life.

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  10. You like what you like, and you don't what you don't.  That's it.  There aren't any rules.  Ditto for wine, art and 1980s hair bands.

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  11. Is it the story or the author's ability to engage interest that is responsible?

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