Fri 14 Mar 2008
Lousy novel? Awful non-fiction? Horrific columnist? What’s the worst piece of writing you’ve spent time on in the last year or two?
Posted by Josh Millard6 answers so far!
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“Politics: An Introduction” by Kenneth Minogue.
I absolutely detested reading it, and 100-odd pages took me an entire freaking week to get through.
1. He was absolutely in love with his own prose and delights in not only using obscure words that often barely make sense in context, but also makes some of the most awful syntax choices I’ve ever run across - and this includes all the High School papers I proofread. Is probably more concerned with getting a 23 on the MS Word readability checker thing than actually, y’know, communicating his points.
2. This is probably not ENTIRELY his fault, but because he jumps across so many topics, he stays on each topic for all of a paragraph before flitting off somewhere else and then coming back to it four chapters later. There is absolutely no methodology to the way things are organized - he doesn’t necessarily do History-development-present, but rather “have an example from history, this is why it’s NOT politics, let’s jump forward 2000 years now only to go back another 1500 years a few pages later!” … And then at one point in time he spent three chapters waxing poetic about the SAME metaphor regarding freedom. So those are the chapters I did my essay on, because I couldn’t… yeah. no.
Ummm. I also really couldn’t get into “Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures” by Vincent Lam, but it obviously won a huge award so it must have some redeeming features. The first few chapters were good, but I don’t think Mr. Lam is necessarily cut out for writing the ’slice-of-life-of-med-student’. The later chapters reminded me a lot of Grey’s Anatomy, which is NEVER good in a novel.
But yeah, other than that it’s been a good run of reading. If I had more time to read maybe I’d have more to complain about.
(Also, never read Tathea. What starts out as a promising adventure novel with assassination, intrigue, and an awesome female protagonist who actually takes care of herself turns into a blatant and unashamed proselytizing novel, complete with “leading to the holy land” and “reclaiming what was promised to us” and AUGH. … I read it five or six years ago and I still get annoyed thinking about it. I hate it when you mislead people. And I mean, I’ve read all of Left Behind at the behest of a religious friend, and Tathea was so much worse in terms of the “CONVERT NAOH YEAH!” themes, and hat’s saying something. Don’t remember who it’s by, don’t really care.)
Sorry for the length. TLDR etc.
I took a Business Ethics class last quarter, and the entire text book was a giant, “ZOMG, IF YOU DO ANYTHING UNETHICAL, YOUR COMPANY WILL SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUST AND YOU WILL BE HUNG AND QUARTERED.” I’m all for ethical business classes, and that includes classes about the subject, but I disagreed with most of the text books and found a lot of their arguments incredibly flawed, particularly when you all have to do is look around at best buy, wal-mart, Microsoftm etc, and their unethical practices are well documented and yet they succeed. If anything, I’d argue that a lot of times its using unethical practices that allow a business to get ahead (speaking for a purely financial standpoint).
Granted, their are companies that do implode from unethical practices, but those seem to be more for straight-up financial illegalities.
Had to be Keeper of the Heart, by Johanna Lindsey. I like to read fluffy romance novels to take my mind off things, but I like really good fluffy romance novels. This one was a sequel to one I’d read (and groaned about) previously.
I don’t really pay much attention when I’m grabbing books off the paperback rack at the library. I mix it up with non-fiction stuff and more erudite reading from the hardcover shelves. Sometimes I win the book lottery, sometimes I lose.
More power to Ms. Lindsey, she’s a bestselling author, but it wasn’t my cup of tea. Right now I’m reading Flash House by Aimee Liu, which is a lot more interesting.
I’m sorry, I know Executioner’s Song is supposed to be a masterpiece, but it gets so bogged down in detail. The story doesn’t have to move along at Da Vinci Code pace, but please, the first 100 pages could have been condensed to about five.
Star Wars. Not a Star Wars novel, mind you, But Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, by George Lucas (actually ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster, according to Wikipedia), © 1976. The writing is fantastically bad:
I thought of Atlanta Nights several times while reading it.
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