Ironic Message Board

For me, it's all about Clive Cussler. Another friend and sometime LTer, Earthtopus, and I have frequently proposed implementing a Cussler plot generator -- mixing and matching from the limited set of race and gender stereotypes and aquatic, historically revisionist plotlines.

The really bad and cheesy end of the scifi/fantasy spectrum is my guilty pleasure. I read it, make fun of it, AND enjoy it. As far as books I can't stand.... There are a few classics I despise, that I own and keep rereading anyway because I'm supposed to like them. The first that come to mind are Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, and Jane Eyre.

I also tend to read political books that I vehemently disagree with--provided they're intelligent and not just screeds. Which is why I own both Paul Krugman and Francis Fukuyama. It drives my roommates utterly nuts when I get in loud arguments with inanimate objects, but I find it fun.

I do have a lot of cheese SF and fantasy. I should probably reconcile all of my Piers Anthony (most of which probably isn't listed on LT yet) to the "ironic" plane. But I'd feel dishonest about that, since I was quite sincere about my enjoyment of same when I was a diminutive nerd.

And my relationship with Hannah Arendt involves a lot of throwing books at walls very hard, although I actually like Hannah a lot -- an attitude I arrived at after much soul-searching.

I'd like to claim Danielle Steel as ironic, but actually I can't (I enjoy them. Don't tell my Englit. professors). My ownership of the unholy parenting triumvirate of Ferber, Ford, and Hogg is mostly because I can't in all conscience give them to someone else, and it's useful to have them handy to de-bunk from a position of strength in online arguments...

The most embarassing titles in my collection, and therefore the candidates for Ironic are three books by Rosemary Rogers, Sweet Savage Love and sequels. As the first bodice rippers I ever read, I enjoyed them, kept them for sentimental reasons and even reread them once. Not quite so much fun the second time around.

I'd made a tag to identify my Books of Shame. For instance, I've several books by Ivor Drummond. They're throughly trashy thrillers from the '70s with unlikely Bondesque villians and exploitive sex scenes plus an author bio that reads like a cut-rate Fleming ripoff, and why am I even admitting that I own these? For some reason I hang on to them, and even kinda sorta think fondly of them at times. Um.

(I joined this group and the "shared books" immediately transformed into the Ross Macdonald fanclub. Yay. :)

I've made fun of many a US poet-laureate in my mind, and sometimes out loud. Maya Angelou, for example, who writes well enough in prose, is a shame to the poetic genre. I could out-verse that woman with two hands tied behind my back, but I still list her among my favorite writers, as well she is.

Is it just me, or is the list of US poet laureates disproportionately named "Robert"?

::quick check of Wikipedia::

Yeah, seven Roberts, four Williams, and no other name appears more than twice, unless you count Josephine Jacobson with the Josephs and Louis Untermeyer with the Louises. I know Robert is a popular name, but is it really that much more popular than Michael or John or what have you?

Also, it doesn't appear Maya Angelou served as a poet laureate.

No, Maya Angelou was never poet laureate, but she did read at Clinton's inauguration, I believe.

I frequently mock the British poet laureates as well--Shadwell anyone?

My mistake (about Angelou). Thanks for the correction.

Eumenides- come, come. As a group, the English Poet Laureates are pretty strong.

Of course, Shadwell is pretty silly. To think he replaced Dryden, who was removed from the position for being Catholic following the (so-called) Glorious Revolution.

I do note that the weakest era of the English Poet Laureates is during the Whig Ascendancy. Coincidence? I think not!

Absolutely not a coincidence!

My university actually named the English building after Shadwell, as part of some sort of obscure insult to another dept. And we hold a wake for him every year. You know you go to a strange school when the best parties are thrown by the English professors...

Come come, ironists! Will no one speak up for the irony of Dan Brown: bazillionaire and yet one of the (if not THE) worst prose writers of the last 100 years. I LOVED reading the Da Vinci Code for the sheer joy it gave me in laughing at its stupidities. Truly dreadful book. I'll never weed it from my collection!

But, kukkurovaca -

The early ones were just so damn fun to read - bad grammer, no spell check, no reality check and all! Any check of my catalog will show you I own every book he's put out with his name on it. But I owe that to my obsessive personality flaw. Not any ode to Clive Cussler the writer.

The last ten are so interchangeable in plot & character that I couldn't answer to one distinguishable feature about them.

Yet this man has vast forums and websites devoted to him.

What's the name of this group? Oh yeah, irony. ;-)

Mendoza, is your username a Kage Baker reference? It was the first thing that leapt to my mind, and I notice you have a number of her books.

And your Cussler collection is, indeed, impressive. I've read more than I own, thanks to public and school libraries, and I own more than are in my catalog at the moment, thanks to my laziness and the fact that my library is scattered across the country and partly destroyed, but you are clearly the true completist.

I find it hard to fathom that someone can read the god-like genius of Dan Brown ironically. He's not just a writer, he's a teacher, a prophet. I hear his next book proves that God is working in a McDonalds in Anchorage.

Bingo! Baker's Mendoza is probably my favorite fictional character. Well, Dunnett's Francis Crawford is up there too. I can just identify more with Mendoza.

The public libraries in my area are truly horrendous. I have always been forced to purchase and with the advent of the web my collection has really taken off in the last 7-8 years. It's enabled me to get more sophisticated and discriminating - why settle for a paperback reprint when if I search long enough I can own a 1st edition hardcover? I think I enjoy the hunt as much as actually owning books.

The Gor books by John Norman.

Jargoneer: LOL! Along with Paul Coelho (God) Kalil Gibran (the Holy Ghost) and Dan Brown (the Son). The Holy Trinity of visionary literature.

Another person who's read and sort of enjoyed Cussler though I don't own that many fortunetly. Other authors. Eddings four series' using the same characters in twice and the same plot all four times! Hardly irony but they are best selling fantasy and simultainiously complete drivel. I re-read them occasionally to remind myself how bad they can get. The stunning highlights of this ploy was to release Belgarath a condensed version of the first 10 books for those who couldn't be bothered to read them. Yes I bought it, and Polgara A different way of condensing the same 10 books that had already been condensed in Belgarath.