Rebecca’s Comments (group member since Jul 13, 2008)

Rebecca’s comments from the What's the Worst Book You've Ever Read? group.

It was hard enough for me to get through the first Dune, actually, so I can't imagine what the fanfic must be like. Are the earlier sequels pretty good, then?

My guilty fantasy pleasure is Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, and now that her son has taken it over I can't even read it as a guilty pleasure. Very sad.

Title: The Triumph of Katie Byrne
Author: Barbara Taylor Bradford

Why I finished it: I was in Costa Rica and didn't have a lot of English reading material. I was desperate to have something to read, so I kept going till the end.

Why it's the worst book I've ever read: Where do I start? The title character is beautiful, nice, talented, and basically perfect, and thus completely uninteresting. Her whole family borrow tiresomely from good-ol'-American, firefighter-dad-housewife-mom stereotypes. The writing is terrible. The worst part is the "plot", which basically consists of setting up a crime, then spends a while on how awesome and successful Katie is. It finally solves the crime in the last 10 pages by revealing that the killer is...a man never mentioned until he's revealed as the killer! I spent the whole time reading it feeling kind of dirty for reading such a terribly written book, and the end only capped off my disgust.

The only good thing I can say about this book is that it's not very long. It could also serve as a "good" bad book if you want something really trashy and awful; it's certainly quick.

I am not the world's most amazing writer, but I could write a book that is way, way, way better than this. How about someone gives me a book deal?