Anythign by Agatha Christie or Enid Blyton is a flying start. I've read several and regretted.
I know that lots of Blyton is appallingly racist and sexist by today's standards, but she wrote exciting stories which kept children turning the pages. The Famous Five were way better than the Secret Seven though.
Just to give some people a flavour of the book, part of the story involves a bloke falling in love with an alien parasite who inhabits the brain of a woman who happens to have a really good pair.
That sounds intellectual.
Most disappointing books for me were the later vampire chronicles/mayfair witches stories by Anne Rice. The major mistake was putting the two threads together. Lestat should never have met Rowan! The first few were great. Blood Canticle and Taltos are dire.
I like a trashy novel. But it has to be good trashy.
Speaking of poor vampire books, the Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice turned into pretty bad books as the series progressed. It started with a very good read in Interview with a Vampire and gradually the characters progressively died on the page as more books were published.
Yes, I liked Interview with the Vampire and the first one of the Mayfair Witches set, the name of which escapes me, but the second in each set were worse, and by the third they were dreadful.
I quite like a trashy book too, but there's good trash and bad trash.
Lovely Bones
Just dreadful
I love The Lovely Bones, although there are a couple of scenes which make me cringe. I like her other stuff too - Lucky and The Almost Moon.
My aunt once bought me the trilogy for a Christmas present. I never even completed the first one.
I quite liked the Narnia books when I was very young, but I looked at them again a few years ago out of nostalgia and found them unreadable.
I only had The Magician's Nephew (the drawings of Uncle Andrew looked like Rod Hull) and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe when I was a kid. So I bought the rest of them as an adult. Like the Blyton books, they're a bit dodgy by today's standards, and the moralising is painful, but I think they work quite well as a set and as individual books. They have the things kids often want to read - adventure away from the parents, and good beating evil.
I find it very difficult to only read one or two from a full set. Even if I hate the books I want to know what happens, which is one of the reasons I finished the Twilight set and the only reason I bothered with the Dark Tower set after Wizard and Glass.
If you think LOTR was bad, try Catcher in the Rye, everyone raves about it, but I just don't get it.
I like LotR. Catcher in the Rye I never understood what the fuss was about. I thought the main character was a pretentious self-indulgent arsehole and I ran out of patience with him very quickly.
Similarly, although I didn't dislike The Secret History by Donna Tartt, in fact I liked it and re-read it every so often, there isn't a single likeable character in the book. They're all vile.
Probably posted this before, but never mind. Once, when utterly bored (I was, after all, dwelling in Luton at the time) I picked up, from my local library, the bookofdafilm of "Empire Strikes Back"
See Spot run.
I used to get that out of the library when I was a teenager just to look at the film stills in the middle. Just the Han Solo ones.
