I'm not talking about books you just disliked or even REALLY disliked. I want to hear about books that you've read with such bad character development, such horrible plot, bad English, absolutely nothing redeemable, that it made you lose faith in humanity just a little.
Maybe I'm being dramatic, but I'm going through a dry phase and one of my mentors suggested going out and reading the WORST books I can find. He said knowing when a story is garbage helps us appriciate a story that's good. He said, even better, read a book that is actually somewhat well-known. No slumming it in the Harlequins. It may even anger you enough to write something truly great to restore the proper order of balance to the literary world.
Yes, my mentor can be a touch dramatic too, but he's shown he knows what he's talking about so far.
I have one book I'd like to share before I start being, though.
Finding Alice, by Melody Carlson
I always found this author to be one of the more mediocre Christian writers, following the mentality: teenagers and bored housewives will read anything. But when she wrote this story about a young woman with schizophrenia, I honestly feel the world would have been better off in terms of it's perseption of the mentally ill if the idea had never come into her head.
Maybe as a mental health professional, this is why the book angered me so much. It was horribly researched, nothing matched with what I have studied in books and learned from first-hand experience, and I would be shocked if she spoke to one psychiatrist while writing this book. All through it I was screaming, "You know nothing of schizophrenia! They don't name their voices, and the voices don't become imaginery friends that follow them around like Harvey the Rabbit!"
I also feel like it was such a wasted oppurtunity. She could have done so much for teaching people about a frightening disorder, but she also could have done so much with it stylistically. She could have delved deep into the hallucinations and created a real, original type of Wonderland instead of just attaching Lewis Carroll's names to everything.
That's mine. What are yours?
Maybe I'm being dramatic, but I'm going through a dry phase and one of my mentors suggested going out and reading the WORST books I can find. He said knowing when a story is garbage helps us appriciate a story that's good. He said, even better, read a book that is actually somewhat well-known. No slumming it in the Harlequins. It may even anger you enough to write something truly great to restore the proper order of balance to the literary world.
Yes, my mentor can be a touch dramatic too, but he's shown he knows what he's talking about so far.
I have one book I'd like to share before I start being, though.
Finding Alice, by Melody Carlson
I always found this author to be one of the more mediocre Christian writers, following the mentality: teenagers and bored housewives will read anything. But when she wrote this story about a young woman with schizophrenia, I honestly feel the world would have been better off in terms of it's perseption of the mentally ill if the idea had never come into her head.
Maybe as a mental health professional, this is why the book angered me so much. It was horribly researched, nothing matched with what I have studied in books and learned from first-hand experience, and I would be shocked if she spoke to one psychiatrist while writing this book. All through it I was screaming, "You know nothing of schizophrenia! They don't name their voices, and the voices don't become imaginery friends that follow them around like Harvey the Rabbit!"
I also feel like it was such a wasted oppurtunity. She could have done so much for teaching people about a frightening disorder, but she also could have done so much with it stylistically. She could have delved deep into the hallucinations and created a real, original type of Wonderland instead of just attaching Lewis Carroll's names to everything.
That's mine. What are yours?
