Board Thread:Watercooler 2.0/@comment-6198648-20130228045108/@comment-6191693-20130926041218

I'm having a dilemma...My dad has written and published a few books. I haven't actually gotten around to reading any of them, for one reason or another, until now. I had high hopes for him -- I wanted him to be successful and to have written something he could be proud of. And he is very proud of his work. I was just apprehensive, worried (and half-expecting) that it would be crap. Nothing could have prepared me for how bad it is :(

He's published through a sort of "mom's basement" type of publisher, so there's hardly a team of editors carefully going over every publication with a fine-toothed comb and grammar and punctuation errors abound. Despite how much I may pretend to make a big deal out of these here on the internet, I can actually be very forgiving here. I have to be -- I'm an English teacher (or at least I plan to be). OK, so mild annoyance, but no big deal.

Then there's the fact that he never uses contractions. Everyone speaks with "I will" and "I did not." This just makes worse the fact that every character speaks almost exactly the same.

I tend to like books that are very character-driven (rather than primarily plot-driven like most contemporary books are) and that feature interesting or vivid scenery with a lot of visual details. His happens to be primarily plot-driven, but I can get past that, too. What's hard to get past is that his characters range from uninteresting to despicable (and not in the love-to-hate sort of way). They're all very flat and very static and most of them are more like charicatures than real people. Then the dialogue between them (and their inner monologues) is frought with mild chauvanism and homophobia. The settings are horrendously bland, too -- most of the time, they might as well be in a plain, white room with nothing in it. The character descriptions are very vague, too -- one of the main characters is a lesbian stripper who is tall, blonde, and has fake breasts, which is really all there is to know about her.

Then there's the stripper party. This scene was borderline pornographic and was especially uncomfortable because, except for the fact that all of the guests were lingirie-clad strippers, it was pretty much a play-by-play description of every New Year's Eve party we've ever had. I don't think I can ever go to one of my dad's New Year's parties ever again :(

I feel like I'm being really harsh. I feel really guilty because I love my dad and because he is so proud of this. I also worry that maybe Karma will come back to bite me or that my writing is this bad and I'm being hypocritical. I also feel obligated to finish it, no matter how painful it is (I'm about 90 pages, or 1/3 of the way in) because I know he's going to ask me what I thought and I could never tell him that it was so bad that I couldn't finish it (I want to stop so badly). I don't know what to tell him when I do finish it, or what to tell him if he asks me while I'm still reading it.