Sunday, May 06, 2007

So Bad It's Good

Joe Queenan at the NY Times defends the pleasure in reading incredibly bad books:

Bad books have an important place in our lives, because they keep the brain active. We spend so much time wondering what incredibly dumb thing the author will say a few pages down the road. One caveat: As with bad movies, a book that is merely bad but not exquisitely bad is a waste of time, while a genuinely terrible book is a sheer delight. This is what made the late, great Mickey Spillane so memorable: he never tried to write poor man’s Raymond Chandler books like Robert Parker; he wrote pure trash. I feel the same way about those “Loins of Telemachus” or “Cuirass of the Myrmidons” books that retell famous stories from the point of view of a marginal character. The dumber, the merrier.
Speaking of wonderfully bad movies, anyone remember "Snakes on a Plane?"...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I missed "Snakes on a Plane," mostly because I fed up with all the hype. I can't say I want to see it, either, unless I happened to be channel-surfing at 2 AM. But, as a voracious reader, TV doesn't have much of a pull on me.

J.S. Peyton said...

It's probably best that you catch it while channel surfing at 2 AM anyway. Trust me, you don't want to be lucid and wide-awake for something so incredibly bad. But you will laugh...