Gianna:
I don't know that I am that embarrassed, but considering that I couldn't find the book on the author's website for a good bit I would say SHE IS. ....but Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle. What can I say? It's a lesbian right of passage and it's bad. It's bad. The main character "dates" a mother and daughter. It really makes you wonder about Rita Mae doesn't it? Oh and before you go judging me...there is more...I also read Sudden Death which is about...you got it, a closeted lesbian tennis star (which I believe was written around the time Ms. Brown was dating Martina Navratilova...yes she was once in the closet). So gossipy this blog, right?! Anyway, they are terrible and I may re-read them again. [For the record, Rubyfruit Jungle was included on the reading list for the comprehensive literature test I had to pass in order to graduate with an English degree. I never considered it embarrassing...but now I'm questioning whether my degree is embarrassing.]
Liz:
...I give up? I scoured my library and either I don't embarrass easily or my books aren't embarrassing. I don't read a lot of embarrassing = bad books, and usually I would agree that harshly reviewed books aren't any good. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I've read some bad (embarrassing) books, but I didn't like them. I guess we could approach this subject from the vantage of embarrassing = age inappropriate, in which case I choose Sarum by Edward Rutherfurd. There's nothing wrong with this book; it's sweeping historical fiction spanning prehistory to contemporary times in England. When I was in the sixth grade, my favorite teacher recognized how bored I was in the middle school library selections and loaned me some books. I think she forgot that their were some sexy times (about six pages out of six hundred) in there. My mother saw me reading this book, but she was never going to read it and I didn't worry about getting caught with a naughty book. I didn't know about how the spines on mass markets crack at the places where they are opened the most, though. In college my mother cleaned out my room to turn it into her sewing room and she found my never returned copy of Sarum...and the glorious scene of a large (wink) Flemish man visiting the town wench. That was an awkward conversation.
I read Are You There God, It's Me Margaret? at far too young an age (my mom figured, "Judy Blume is Judy Blume, right?") and it certainly embarrassed me at the time, but no longer does. I was far too enamored with the humor of Dave Barry Turns 40 when I was 12, so that's sort of embarrassing. I don't have any "I'll admit I like Twilight" confessions to make. People make me feel like I should be embarrassed for liking John Updike, but I don't.
ReplyDeleteI guess it would be Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane tales. They're a great bit of fun, but they were also written by a he-man in the 30s, so they're full of misogyny and racism, which I find genuinely embarrassing, but more for Howard than for myself.