Fantasy books. Really bad ones. Books that use a lot of purple prose, Mary Sues, flat characters, the like. You can also mention books that you don't like [but aren't necessarily bad], and the reasons why. Besides the Inheritance Cycle. I read a bit once and ... well, it's not my thing to use a dictionary for every other word. You can also recommend non-fantasy if you want.
The Talisman by Stephen King...and someone else. I don't know if that is fantasy or horror, or what the heck it was supposed to be. I managed to get about half way through it and I still don't get it. It was boring. So incredibly boring. The pacing was so freaking slow. There 150 pages into it there still hadn't been much in the way of developing any excitement or mystery. I've had the book for 5 years now, tried about 4 times to read it, never made it much past about 250 pages. Has to be the worst book I have ever bought, and I only bought it because it was a King book. I bought that book after reading The Eyes of the Dragon. I thought Eyes was really good, as far as fantasy goes, and it was a little different than the normal King horror genre. I thought Talisman would be good to. I was wrong. Other than that, I don't normally buy books that don't grab me after the first few pages while I am in the book store.
Woah there :/ First of all, I didn't say Eragon, I said Inheritance Cycle. Which also contains books 2 and 3. They each progressively use "bigger" and "fancier" words. Second, I'm not a native speaker, though I do think my vocabulary is somewhat solid.
But... But... H.P. Lovecraft is purple in a totally cool way. It's all about insane poets, you know. He is to horror writing what Tim Burton is to horror films.
Atonement by Ian McEwan American Pastoral by Phillip Roth All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell Those are just a few.
Correct me if I misread, but why do you want us to recommend really bad fantasy books? It doesn't makes sense!
Anything Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett, though I must admit to bias here. They are favorites of mine. Also highly recommended are Tad Williams Memory Sorrow and Thorn trilogy, and the Otherland quartet (same author) and George RR Martins “A song of Ice and Fire” Series I’d also suggest trying out some of the non drawcard series work of some of the genre’s big names Raymond E Feist – Fairie Tale Terry Brooks – Magic Kingdom series Robert Jordan – His Conan stuff And of course you can’t overlook Robert Silverberg’s two Legends anthologies. Both are collections of short fiction from the big names in the genre (including all the authors mentioned above).
A lot of novels from the Victorian era use what we would now consider purple prose. Anyways, I'm not quite sure why you would want to read bad books when there are plenty of good books out there.
As far as bad fantasy goes, the Shannara books by Terry Brooks deserve some kind of award. Easily the worst fantasy I have ever read. I can't remember what was so bad about them, since I can't remember anything about them. They were just that bad. And that's actually why I kept reading them. It was kind of mesmerising to read something that bad and think, "This got published?. . . And it's popular?" I had to keep going just to see how bad a published book could be. Somehow, it got worse with every page I turned. My sister read them, too, and I think she hated them more than I did. (She had nothing else to read at the time) She won't even read Terry Goodkind now, because his name reminds her of Terry Brooks. It was so bad, she avoids all writers named Terry.
Not the worst, but I can see where you’re coming from. The series has a great concept (generic fantasy world is actually our world in the future!) but completely fails to capitalize on it. As for popular fantasy books I never really got into, I’d liked to throw Raymond E Feist’s Magican into the ring. The first half is ok but then, well, the impression I got was that the author got bored with the story and began skipping ahead to what in his mind were the best scenes, leaving out all those in between bits that make a story flow as a coherent whole
For motivation? Inheritance Cycle? Paolini is not the best writer, but people, don't you want to know what happens next? I must admit, a few chapters of foreign dwarfs and their politics was torture... p.s...is it dwarfs or dwarves? Elfs, or Elves?
Depends. The correct word was dwarfs until Tolkien popularized the term dwarves, and nowadays it is a matter of the writer's choice, really. And I agree with you in the foreign dwarves and their politics part--it was, indeed, torture.
THE EYES OF THE DRAGON by Stephen King. I started reading it yesterday and am about half way through it. Fantasy Girl xx
