Much as with most novels, that's hardly the same thing. Many characters, including villains, have complex motivations and rich story lines developed over fifty or sixty years worth of exploration.
How many of the villains do you even remember apart from Thanos? And even Thanos the 'half the population must die' was a bit silly and they didn't go into enough depth with it. I understand you probably disagree and maybe in the comics it's expanded on more, but I thought it was very emo/teenage philosophy student and hardly psychologically compelling. Anyway, marvel was just one example. The main point I wanted to make is I don't think literature needs obvious villains to be great. In fact, I think stories where everyone and nobody is to blame are a lot more powerful.
Yeah but they're still 'villains.' They're still 'the bad guys' facing up against 'the good guys.' Especially in the marvel movies. The comics might be different and I probably shouldn't have said that considering I haven't read them.
Are you kidding me? Daisy and her husband are the villains. They go about having affairs, ruining people's lives, and getting away scot-free. They're monsters, and quite frankly I don't think even the author intended them to be defendable.
They are not traditional villains no, and the story is not heroes vs. villains. Though I would agree the author intended Tom and Daisy's world to be indefensible and Tom is probably the least likable character in the novel. The characters are all to blame to some extent. You may have more sympathy for Nick and Gatsby because you see the book from Nick's eyes and he is enamored with Gatsby, but don't let that deceive you into thinking that he and Gatsby are not culpable in their own ways for the tragic end of the novel.
Ah level with me! The lack of memorable villains has been a big problem with the MCU. Who was in Iron Man 2 and 3 again? Civil war? They were just poorly used in already cluttered movies. And in terms of simplicity, can you really make it more reductive than Captain America's 'nazis are evil!' red skull?
I don't know what the most terrible book is to be honest. Usually terrible books are kind of interesting in their badness, spectacular failures I guess you could say. The Tommyknockers by Stephen King comes to mind. Apparently he wrote the whole thing drunk and on coke, well I guess that was true for all his 80's output, but this one he remembered none of it. Then there are books which everyone loves that are famously difficult to read, Pynchon, DFW etc... But despite my inability to read these books, I wouldn't call them the most terrible books. I personally dislike the style, but I'm not convinced it isn't just me. That's an important question to ask yourself when considering the most terrible book - did the book achieve what the writer intended? Maybe the problem isn't the book - it's you. Pulpy stuff, utter dross, that can all be fun when you're in the mood. What criteria are we using to assess the most terrible book here? So far it seems to basically be stuff we did not like being forced to read in school. In my case, these were books that actually got me into literature. Of Mice and Men, the aforementioned Gatsby, Babe the sheep pig. And woah, 1984! Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth. These were the best damn lessons at the school and the ONLY classes where I was able to get out of my malaise and concentrate. I think these were quality works of art. A lot of them had heavy and intense endings, which I admired. It really felt like these writers were not patronising me. I was into it. So I can't get into all this school bashing and certainly these were not the most terrible books.
I edit as I read, so I need books that are competently written or it takes me ages to get through them. I could write a whole book discussing the failures of "Metro 2033." Almost every sentence needs to be corrected. I'm not kidding. That's the worst modern genre book I've read. The plot utterly fails. The MC is vapid. The setting should be utterly awe inspiring, but it's just repetitive nothing. Maybe it's the translator's fault. I don't know. I've seen translators ruin other authors who I know are for a fact really good (Koubou Abe comes to mind here). Anyway, Metro 2033 made me want to throw my Kindle off a cliff and then leap off after it. The worst classic was "The Turn of the Screw." What trash. It's about this governess and these precocious kids who are just so charming. (You'll be reminded of this every couple pages.) Do you like seeing a grown woman being outwitted by a small child? Well, get ready. There may be a ghost, or maybe two. Maybe? You decide. The End. For me the worst book with awards was "Tinkers." It was one of my Pulitzer reads. It just moves through a checklist of literary tropes. I've never seen anything so transparent. It's the literary equivalent of a television evangelist with slicked back hair and a ring on each finger. I don't understand how anyone can read it and not recognize how artificial it is, that it's all for show. There's no sentence flubs, of course, but it's painfully fake and I'm glad it was so short. It worries me that anyone disliked 1984. It was required reading for me too, but the whole class loved it. (We may all have been nerdy though.) I should read it again, I think. Especially now that I understand Orwell's history better. It's interesting looking at what he believed in his youth and then what he learned in war. It frames that book in a very particular way.
Oh god, I just remembered Paprika. It might have been better if it had been competently translated*, but probably not. Spoiler: Discussion of a sexual assualt in the book There's a rape scene in the book where the stalker assailant literally beats the woman bloody only to have her say something like "Well, if you're going to rape me, you should at least make sure I enjoy it" to which he responds in the affirmative and begins trying to pleasure her while he's having his way with her. *There's an interview with the translator in which he drops a broad hint about rushing the translation:
Haha. I can totally see you doing that. Delete this repeated word here. Make this adjective phrase the subject. Chop this sentence in half. You call that an apositive? Get out of here with that shit.
Exactly! lol I can edit pretty fast, but not fast enough for Metro 2033. What a mess. I can't tell you how happy I was to read Dan Simmon's "The Terror." (Because I saw some of the show.) 800 pages and I only stopped a couple times. That guy is something else. I bought a first print and when we crawl out of our Morlock bunkers again, I'm going to try to get him to sign it. He's another awesome author from my state.
Hyperion, right? Might have read that... cover looks familiar. Why wait? You should go over there now and pound on the door. Nothing can go wrong.
I've just remembered The Night Angel trilogy by Brent Weeks. It was just Assassins Creed in a fantasy world, and Ezio Alditore started out as an orphan. Being fair, the first ... 30 pages(?), when he was an orphan, and his life was tough, that was pretty good. It was decently well written and did not hold back on any kind of brutality. Ok, there was a 'bully' character who felt a little cliche, but that's ok - you know, I could forgive that. I actually wished it had continued like that, it was going so well! But as soon as Ezio ran into ... I forget that character's name too, call him Altair - as soon as Ezio runs into Altair and becomes an Assassin it becomes just insanely boring and cliche-riddled. I can't remember why I bothered finishing it to be honest.
Turns out that The Handbook For Mortals, is about on par with Empress Theresa. Then it goes one farther by having not only the MC in 1st POV, but also other characters at random fawning over her in 3rd POV Italicized. Also the MC is a witch or something, that is highly narcissistic. I didn't read it, but this poor sap is:
I remember reading that about 12 years ago. I survived the first, endured the second and... the less said about the third the better, but I have read worse. Despite it being a distinct 1/10 read. For example, the spectacular Wild Animus. There are very few words that can describe just how excreble it was. A cover testimonial (from a gallery owner - a gallery owner - rather than another author)* declared the writer to be a shaman of the written word. Presumably what he meant was he was a pretend wise man who enjoyed bonking goats in his spare time after imbibing various hallucinogenic substances, because that's what the plot boiled down to. Throw in the kind of purple prose one can only write after wringing out a thesaurus for all it's worth, and you've got a genuinely jaw-dropping book. The problem being that it's jaw-dropping in all the wrong ways. Special mention for anything written by Niall Ferguson, but that's more because he's an objectionable arse with borderline fascist opinions. I read about half of Empire and stopped when he began claiming that slavery wasn't actually that bad. He has most recently been spotted becoming more and more marginalised by the historical establishment having had a proven track record of being wrong about everything. * - I'm not against gallery owners giving their opinions on writing they like, I just don't like it when it's clearly the only person they could find who had anything good to say, and he's a bit weird in himself.
