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Crap you read in high school


Darth Richard II

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So I'm sorting through my way too many books, and I can not, for the love of God, figure out why in God I liked Modesitt Jr so damn much in high school. I have like 16 hardcovers of this shit, and flipping through it..well..it's not Goodkind level bad, but it's close.

Also, the sound effects, man.

Actually Goodkind would be in the list of crap I liked in high school as well.

So I was wondering what else people read in HS then realized later in life was total shit.

(D&D tie ins don't count, I think we all read that crap)

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Somewhat similar here. As I came late to fantasy I have to admit that I read some D&D crap at college age in my early 20s. I do not remember anything noteworthily crappy from age 15-18. Besides some "serious" stuff I read a lot of classic crime/mystery novels like Agatha Christie and Edgar Wallace (sometimes crappy, of course) as a teenager.


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I'm with Happy Ent on this one.

Back when I was young, the future was still full of promise, and the sky was the limit, I read all kinds of serious literature, autobiographies, and books about history.

But now when I read the main thing I'm looking for is escape. Not that I'm willing to read books that aren't well-written, but they have to be entertaining as well. So I read almost exclusively SFF.

Lately I've been getting back into history a bit, but only because I was reading The Heroes and it made me think of the Civil War stuff I used to love as a kid.

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DR2 you are trying to rile me up here!



/RANT MODE ENGAGED



Well I have to shamefully say Sword of Truth.



When you are so young WIZARDS ARE COOL ROAR! Then as I grew older and kept reading the series, while reading other things, I realised what a pile of crap it was. Then after seeing some online stuff with TG I gave all of the books away. FotF was when I started to really suspect the series of being a sugar coated personal message on objectivity.



The other stuff of my youth I remember fondly, TG left a bitter taste in my mouth. Even the Dragonlance stuff - as simple and formulaic as it is, at least doesn't try to be something else. Disregarding important human themes of course!



What a self pretentious a$$!



/RANT MODE DISENGAGE


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DR2 you are trying to rile me up here!

/RANT MODE ENGAGED

Well I have to shamefully say Sword of Truth.

When you are so young WIZARDS ARE COOL ROAR! Then as I grew older and kept reading the series, while reading other things, I realised what a pile of crap it was. Then after seeing some online stuff with TG I gave all of the books away. FotF was when I started to really suspect the series of being a sugar coated personal message on objectivity.

The other stuff of my youth I remember fondly, TG left a bitter taste in my mouth. Even the Dragonlance stuff - as simple and formulaic as it is, at least doesn't try to be something else. Disregarding important human themes of course!

What a self pretentious a$$!

/RANT MODE DISENGAGE

Ahhh, dragonlance. Everything I hate about our genre wrapped up in one convenient package.

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Mostly I read a lot of books for AP English, so I didn't have a lot of time for "fun books". I did read the Shannara series on my own time, and while it wasn't really "good", it was a nice break from things like "Death Be Not Proud", "Alas Babylon" and "Cry, the Beloved Country".

Now I tend to read classic literature over any popular fiction when I read for fun, so it's not as likely to be crap. I did once attempt to read Goodkind, but it took me all of 50 pages to realize that a third grader could write better than him and I stopped.

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What didn't I read that was crap?



But, a special shoutout goes to the nineties wave of Australian fantasy authors such as Martin Middleton and Tony Shillitoe. I don't think they ever got outside the country, but I found some copies of their books a while back that I had. I remembered especially liking the Shillitoe. Go figure.

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I have read the first three books by Jean Auel probably too many times. I have no idea if it is good or bad that the next ones were not translated into my language then - on the one hand, I might have realised how bad they all were if I had read those (they are getting progressively worse through the series). On the other hand, I might have not realised that and spent even more time of my life on it. :leaving:



I also read one (or maybe two?) Twilight books because I was curious what it was that my schoolmates were so excited about. At least I can say I had the sense to not like them.


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Oh, confession time!



We shall start by confessing that we read Ayn Rand, and not just Atlas Shrugged, but also The Fountainhead (there, that feels better).



We shall continue by confessing to Mercedes Lackey. Talking white horses FTW.



We shall continue by confessing to too many Pern books. There was some real dross in there.



And I haven't even touched other genres (oh Rosalind Laker - how I read you from the library).


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Oh, confession time!

We shall start by confessing that we read Ayn Rand, and not just Atlas Shrugged, but also The Fountainhead (there, that feels better).

I too read Ayn Rand as a teenager. The Fountainhead at least wasn't as insane as Atlas Shrugged. As I've heard it described, The Fountainhead is a novel about an Objectivist, while Atlas Shrugged is a novel about Objectivism.

As a young teen I never got into the Dragonlance or Star Wars stuff, but I read most of the stuff Brooks and Eddings had published by that point. There's really no shame in that though, those books were perfect reading for a 12 or 13 year old, but after I discovered Donaldson there was no going back.

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Bakker :P



I'm pretty sure I read Pern books and Feist books in high school, and there were definitely some bad books in those series. I also shamefully admit to having read the first 3 books in the Flowers in the Attic series :ack:


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