from Booking Through Thursday, the flip side of last week\’s question:
What’s the best ‘worst’ book you’ve ever read — the one you like despite some negative reviews or features?
I can\’t really think of any books I\’ve liked that got lots of bad reviews. I have plenty of favorites that seem to be kind of obscure or unpopular- like Call It Sleep, The Bone People, The Lute Player…. Oh, and I do still like The Clan of the Cave Bear (read it at least four or five times) even though it\’s sexist, the protagonist is practically a Neanderthal superwoman and a lot of the historical details are totally inaccurate. (The rest of the series was junk, though. I struggled through The Valley of Horses and quit a few chapters into The Mammoth Hunters. Too much sex, flat characters, pointless plots).
As for a book I really liked in spite of negative features, I still have admiration for Richard Monaco\’s books Parsival and The Grail War, even though I found a lot of the details distasteful, nothing admirable in the characters, and the storyline wandering to the point of confusion, there was just something about the descriptions and the writing that enthralled me. I continue to puzzle over those books and wonder what to do with them- I can\’t imagine reading them again, yet I can\’t quite bring myself to pull them off my shelf for good, either.