Absolutely Ridiculous Things in Books

[SmidgenofaPigeon]

I’m reading (it’s painful and I will use it for kindling when I’m finished) Just My Luck by Adele Parks. I actually used to enjoy her books back in the day for a bit of mindless escapism and the characters were well-written but they’ve slid into lunacy over the last few years. Think twins pretending to be the same person and getting married to one guy (or something like that) and a mum’s glamorous 45 year old mate shagging her 17 year old son and getting pregnant while they all live under the same roof.

The latest one they win the lottery and calamity ensues in the most implausible ways possible.

The daughter in this one is musing over the fact that her boyfriend has turned into a bit of cad and she’s moping about, and musing over missing ‘the musty smell of his balls’

THE MUSTY SMELL OF HIS BALLS.

The character in question is FIFTEEN. She was ONLY FIFTEEN YEARS OLD (in the voice of Micheal Caine)

Please add, there must be loads, and we can have a laugh on this horrible wet January afternoon.

@CounsellorTroi

I remember when staying in a holiday cottage I found a book in the bookcase called Meet Me in Manhattan by Claudia Carroll. The heroine is Irish and lives in Dublin. She meets a guy on line, a dishy American airline pilot apparently. They strike up a friendship, to the point that they arrange to meet in a pub in Dublin next time he flies there. But when she goes to the pub he’s not there. Later he says he was. Anyway after getting increasingly suspicious she tracks his ISP to a New York address, like you would, and flies there to check him out, like you would, and it turns out her attractive pilot is a 14 year old boy. BUT he has an attractive older brother and you can guess the rest.

Almost refreshing to have a WOMAN get rewarded for acting like a psycho loony stalker.

I'd like to add The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I love it and have reread it so many times, but I'm always 🤨 at the epistolary style of the book, and the fact that Gilbert sends off Helen's diary covering some really traumatic stuff to be read by his mate! I hope he got her permission first...

I don't think anyone has mentioned Woman of Substance yet have they? I re-read it last year and goodness what a load of rubbish it turns out to be. Emma doesn't just work hard, she magically produces pies and cakes and all manner of delectable foods to stack an entire shop in the time it takes me to trash the kitchen make a dozen mince pies. A strong, independent hard working woman who yet makes incredibly stupid decisions - twice! - on who to marry. I mean truly head smacking, completely obviously stupid choices of men. And treats her kids like shit.

If as an author your heroine is your fantasy version of yourself, then I really don't like Barbara Taylor Bradford.

@PhilODox

Wasn't it just arsenic, Collidascope? On their daily doughnuts?

And that was one of the less odd bits of the novel, which also featured brother-sister incest, uncle-niece incest, four children who are the product of the uncle-niece incest, lots of sadistic whippings of adults and children by parents and grandparents, having your hair tarred as a punishment, some really dubious ideas about consent, and a lot of really hammily-described ballet practice.

And the sequel was a whole lot weirder, with the now adult heroine an international ballet star getting pregnant by her evil mother's dishy second husband as revenge, then appearing at a grand ball dressed as her mother and exposing the whole 'poison the children to get the inheritance' scheme and causing her mother to have a nervous breakdown and burn down the house killing the evil granny and anyone who is now extraneous to the plot.

Isn't that the one where he throws her to break her feet? [shudder]
How can I remember the details of utter tripe I read 35 years ago, but not glorious prose I read last month?

I think I read a couple of Louise Bagshawe novels, one of which came free with a magazine in the days when that sort of thing used to happen. I thought they were bloody awful. All the sex scenes involved a huge-cocked man making a woman beg for his peen before he would put it in, resulting in instantaneous orgasm for her, of course. Sometimes she would scream with pleasure, which I really don't think is a thing outside of porn. There were also a lot of mentions of pre-cum, so presumably nobody bothered with condoms. The whole book just felt like a prolonged discussion of the author's sexual preferences.

I also seem to remember that she had a sex advice column in FHM or Loaded, and she invariably used to advise men to be dominant, i.e. pinning the woman's wrists above her head, interrupting her when she's talking by tongue-kissing her, making her beg, etc. It was all quite disturbing really, what with the suggestion that all women like that sort of thing and men should just do it without asking.

@PhilODox

Isn't that the one where he throws her to break her feet? [shudder] How can I remember the details of utter tripe I read 35 years ago, but not glorious prose I read last month?

I think the tempestuous ballet husband she randomly marries (despite being in love with the older doctor with the supposedly dead wife who turns out to just be in a vegetative state , having an ongoing thing with her irresistible brother, AND also conducting an affair with her mother's husband) stamps on her toes so she can't dance.

I figure it was because Virginia Andrews, despite not being exactly addicted to the plausible, figured that there was no way Cathy could physically manage all that shagging AND wreaking revenge on her mother and grandmother, and still maintain any semblance of a ballet career, so she decided to give her an enforced 'holiday'.

After Virginia Andrews died, they turned her into a brand and kept writing novels that now have her name as a trademark.

Couldn't remotely get into James Bond books. Utterly tedious. Things like 'Bond lit his 80th cigarette of the day'. Worra catch.

This thread is like a trip down memory lane. I love it.

I can’t remember the specifics but I do recall reading an Inspector Morse and it being terrible. Plot holes everywhere and nowhere near as nuanced as the tv programme.

@JimmyJabs

I think I read a couple of Louise Bagshawe novels, one of which came free with a magazine in the days when that sort of thing used to happen. I thought they were bloody awful. All the sex scenes involved a huge-cocked man making a woman beg for his peen before he would put it in, resulting in instantaneous orgasm for her, of course. Sometimes she would scream with pleasure, which I really don't think is a thing outside of porn. There were also a lot of mentions of pre-cum, so presumably nobody bothered with condoms. The whole book just felt like a prolonged discussion of the author's sexual preferences.

I also seem to remember that she had a sex advice column in FHM or Loaded, and she invariably used to advise men to be dominant, i.e. pinning the woman's wrists above her head, interrupting her when she's talking by tongue-kissing her, making her beg, etc. It was all quite disturbing really, what with the suggestion that all women like that sort of thing and men should just do it without asking.

Wait a minute...Louise Mensch was THAT person???

Virginia Andrews books were just weird anyway ,the woman was obsessed with incest ,and the later ghost writer ones are just drivel

Did anyone read Belladonna? A truly horrific story of a girl being auctioned off to a ‘gentleman’ who then keeps her as a sex slave, including installing her into some kind of box to enable her to be penetrated by his friends all at the same time. This goes on for years until she eventually escapes and meets and falls in love with someone else and seeks her revenge.

The cover, the blurb on the back, everything about it led you to believe it was a love story with a bit of sexiness thrown in. My mother bought it for me! It was torture porn.

@funnelfanjo Loved Barbara Taylor Bradford in my teens. Another in the line of 'son of the local gentry gets young girl pregnant' line of books. But yes her ability to go from nothing to head of a global empire based on baking some cakes of an evening was quite something. Also the way to denote one character was Irish by having him break into Danny Boy every now and then.

The sequels were progressively sillier, not helped by the fact that the main character was increasingly unlikeable and everyone was either a conniving schemer or a wide eyed innocent. Including one granddaughter described as cooky and massively ahead of the curve in fashion, which we knew because she turned up for one scene in a Robin Hood outfit complete with a feather in a green cap. God I loved those books. 800 pages of madness

Did try a Jackie Collins twenty years back and expected a bonkbuster but seem to remember they ended up crash landed in a jungle and digging weevils out of their arms. Which wasn't sexy. Also had a character described as having enormous nipples which in my head grew to the size of saucers.

I STILL rage at Jemima J (Jane Green I think). The plot is as follows:
Fat chick can't get a bloke - photoshops herself thin and starts chatting up a fitness instructor in America. They decide to meet up and she realised she must lose weight. So starves herself/over exercises and becomes thin. Meets fitness guy in America. They fall for each other - then she discovers he's cheating on her with another 'fat' chick - he can't go public with said fatty because of his image. Our heroine is distraught.

In the meantime she bumps into a male friend she had a crush on when she was 'fat'. He doesn't recognise slim her but falls head over heels in love despite never giving her a second look before.

I forget how everything ties up but obviously she ends up with the friend. She apparently is 'no longer thin' but a 'curvy size 10' (FFS).

And it has an annoying habit of switching between first and third person narrative.

Ahhhh that feels better.

Aw @Scarby9 I love this story!

I was a Louise Bagshawe fan, sh always went on about what designers her character were wearing too.

@GeordieGreigsButtButtZoom, yes Louise Bagshawe changed her name to Mensch on marriage, and has had an extremely varied career including chick lit writing, being an MP and various stripes of journalism. I knew her slightly years ago at university and thought she was a bit odd in a glinty, Alice-banded, jolly-hockey-sticks kind of way.

Plus I seem to remember, in the only one of her books I ever read, that every female character's outfit was described in detail every time we met them, and a weirdly graphic sex scene in Christ Church meadow (which is very public, very boggy and full of longhorn cattle, and frankly the last place you'd head for a romp...)

I was stunned by the end of Gold Fame Citrus, another dystopian book which was beautifully written but a bit bonkers. I don't want to give it away, but the event felt like she needed something to end it. Quick.

Also, like an earlier posted, that book about the chimpanzee who was the girl's 'sister'. Was nuts dressed up as being really profound.

@SlatternIsMyMiddleName

I can’t remember the specifics but I do recall reading an Inspector Morse and it being terrible. Plot holes everywhere and nowhere near as nuanced as the tv programme.

Like the television series, the books go on for ever. Far too long-winded.

I haven’t read a James Bond but I know one of them is famous for Bond thinking longingly to himself of how ‘the sweet tang of rape’ improved sex. Hence I never want to read one!

JustNotFunAnymore I read Going Green out of sheer boredom. It gets more far fetched as it goes on, but has the standard happy ending. I wish I'd gave up on it.

I read the BA Paris one, whoever mentioned it!! That one was awful but awful in such a way that I couldn’t put it down like the movies on Netflix that are so horrendous they’re enjoyable.
spolier
Was so drawn out with shocking things like being chained to the bed and shut on balconies and then it turned out the horrible man really wanted to get to the younger sister who had Down’s syndrome and abuse her as well/instead. Having previously lobbed said sister down the stairs on the wedding day so she couldn’t he a bridesmaid. Then he kills a puppy.

One of Dan Brown's, could be Deception Point. They were stranded on top of an iceberg so banged on it in morse code and a passing submarine heard it and rescued them.....yeah right🤣