Tom, good idea! I need you to craft all my excuses to weasel out of things!

But how do you tell someone who loved a book that you couldn't read it because it was written so badly that it made your eyes bleed?

"Just not my cup of tea." Especially if you can find something positive to say about it.

Curse you all. You're now making me perversely interested in at least attempting that book, just to see how painful it is. Bridges of Madison County has been my bad-book gold standard for ages upon ages; I read it at the behest of a relative who was just swoony over it, and actually finished the whole thing because it was so painfully astounding. At the end of every chapter I'd think Well, that's got to be as bad as bad could possibly get, and then the very next chapter would prove me wrong. Around midbook it started getting visibly worse paragraph by paragraph. Then the epilogue broke me, every sentence exponentially worse than the one preceding it.

And now I feel the need to check out DaVinci Code to see how it measures up.

Curse you all.

I finally saw Napoleon Dynamite last night on DVD and... it was charming. I suspect my opinion of it will grow in my memory as I recall various bits over time.

Has anyone linked to this? - [link]

My favorite:

WHEREAS, any members of the House of Representatives or the Senate of the Legislature of the State of Idaho who choose to vote "Nay" on this concurrent resolution are "FREAKIN' IDIOTS!" and run the risk of having the "Worst Day of Their Lives!"

JZ, let me save you some pain. (I found a post I wrote a few months ago about Angels and Demons.)

Four pages in, and he's already using paragraphs to describe Our Hero, rather than letting the reader figure it out by how Our Hero acts.

I've made it to page 6 so far, where I found this sentence, and I quote (Our Fair Hero has received a Fax with Shocking News): "Instantly the breath went out of him. It was like he had been hit by a truck."

I swear to you I'm not making that up.

How does crap writing like that make the bloody best-seller list? HOW?!?

Photos of the publisher with that goat in Tijuana. JZ is me, in re "Bridges"

I loathe Bridges of Madison County for its content rather than its form, because not only does it glorify and romanticize adultery and lying, it makes it seem like PINING AWAY for 40 YEARS is a good thing, a romantic thing, a desirable state.

Feh. Either leave your husband and go be with the other dude, or Get. Over. It.

Wrod. Totally. (And he probably wouldn't have looked so great if she wasn't ABSOLUTELY FUCKING MISERABLE in the first place.) Answer to AFM should never be a man, right? Uh, I guess I'm not over it yet...maybe I need the lecture about the pining, huh?

I don't think I'm going to be able to resist seeing a movie that stars both Ian McKellen and Audrey Tautou no matter how awful a book it's based on. Maybe I can concentrate on their performances like I did on Morgan Freeman's in that crappy Stephen King movie.

edited to specify Dreamcatcher, as "crappy Stephen King movie" really doesn't narrow the field down much.

I loathe Bridges of Madison County for its content rather than its form,

I have just the opposite reaction to The DaVinci Code. The ideas were interesting, and in the hands of a competent prose wrassler I think it could have been a terrific book. Alas.