Admit your shameful reading history!

[inverarity]

I may joke about how much Twilight sucks. (And it does suck, with the suckiness of a thousand sucking suckers -- this is not open to dispute. Twilight is Bad. If you disagree, you are wrong, in the same way that someone who says the sun orbits the Earth is wrong.) But while a hundred million tween and teen girls may be making Stephanie Meyer rich for her sucky, creeptastic Mormon vampire epic, I'll bet all of you, like me, have skeletons hiding on the dusty top shelves of your own bookshelves. Books you thought were awesome when you were fourteen. Books that you would now not be caught dead reading.

Books like....



Yes, I totally read these books when I was fourteen.

In my defense, I was going through a serious pulp fiction phase. I loved Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, and the first few Gor novels actually were pretty standard swords & sorcery.

(Then, so the rumor goes, John Norman went through a nasty divorce, and everything he wrote after that became endless misogynistic BDSM fantasies.)

I also used to read a lot of Piers Anthony.



Yes, he's a shameless hack with an ego that affects the tides, but several of his series started out interesting.

Okay, your turn.

Comments

[hermoinejean7.livejournal.com]

>.> I read a lot of Enid Blyton when I was young. Along with a ton of comics - Asterix, Mickey Mouse and oh yeah, Archies, to name some. That, and a lot of regional language short story books.

First year of high school was spent reading Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys and Perry Mason. I don't think it's shameful or anything, but yeah, those pretty much dominated my life at that point. And then in the latter half of high school I mostly read Classics and Indian authors, because I got bored of the same plot being recycled in a dozen detective stories.

I think I should also mention that I was a fan of Agatha Christie at some point of time.

/Shar's reading history.

(Also, unrelated: Chapter 7 illustration has me itching to read AQATDR. Physics exam is needing more of my attention, however! >.<)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I am a cartoonist myself and regard comics as such as an artform, on the same level as music or literature or theatre or cinema. And the Asterix series is a masterpiece. I don't claim to interpret the mind of our esteemed host, but I think he meant things that are genuinely bad.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I am a fan of Agatha Christie myself.

[hermoinejean7.livejournal.com]

Comics are something I can say I have sort of grown out of- I definitely don't think they're bad(my sister would pretty much kill me if I said that - she lives on superhero comic books; addicted to them like a man to drugs), as such. But I definitely don't think I'd like very much to be caught with an Archies comic at this point of time. >.>

And Agatha Christie? Man in a Brown Suit was probably my favourite book of hers. :) However, my tastes changed after reading a lot of her books(the writing style got repetitive, I felt), and now I haven't touched one of her books in ages.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Archie comics, like Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew novels, are factory made and bland. Superhero comics (which are what I used to do) are far more variable, and contain some of the greatest masterpieces of the artform, beginning with King Jack Kirby.

As for Agatha Christie - a few suggestions:
Pale Horse
Hallowe'en Party
Endless Night
Five Little Pigs
the Harley Quinn stories

[lonewolf-eburg.livejournal.com]

"Five Little Pigs" is a serious contender for "Best Christie Book" title. I also think that the Suchet adaption of it is the best in Poirot TV series.

"Pale Horse" is good, through definitely not the best.

I don't really like your other recommendations much, though.

[lonewolf-eburg.livejournal.com]

"Brown Suit" is a Christie political thriller attempt, and such attempts of her were pretty naive. I have to admit that despite the improbable plot, I actually liked "They Came To Baghdad", but it's the only Christe thriller I like.

[lonewolf-eburg.livejournal.com]

Hey, I'm a fan of Dame Agatha, too! Mind you, I think that she wrote roughly one good book out of five, but the books I like I really like.