Come on. Be honest. What horrid series of books did you read as a young adult? I read all of

[applegrove]

Kathleen E. Woodwise's bodice rippers. Usually a pirate was somehow involved. You?

[Flaxbee]

1. I read a lot of the "Sweet Valley High" books in grade school...

does that count? :shrug: :hi:

[applegrove]

2. Don't know that series. I take it it was American?

[siligut]

3. The Harrison High series, by John Farris

Not exactly fine literature and I remember some sexual torture was included.

[WCIL]

4. The early dreck of V C Andrews

Flowers in the Attic was published when I was 14, and I read the first three of her books. I also read lots of bodice rippers.

[soleiri]

8. Me too

Looking back....WTF was my mom thinking letting me read those books?

[mucifer]

27. oy vey me too. nt

[Rhiannon12866]

41. I think I read all of the VC Andrews series, back in the day.

I liked them so much, I gave them to my friend. Looking back, they were pretty disturbing. x(

[TuxedoKat]

5. The Gor Series by John Norman

Embarrassing to admit -- didn't read ALL of them, but did read too many of them! Read quite a few bodice rippers too, including Woodiwiss.

[petronius]

25. I read a fair number of those as well. Funny thing, a couple of weeks ago I saw

a Gor movie listed on Netflix, and one of the user comments was a scathing complaint that the movie wasn't faithful to the books. As if that was a bad thing... :rofl:

[pokerfan]

31. Gor...

The covers tended to be better than the books which were a bizarre attempt at crossing Edgar Rice Burroughs with The Story of O.

[MiddleFingerMom]

6. The "Gor" series, the "Conan" series, the "Mack Bolan - the Executioner" series...

.
.
.
... and the "Remo Williams" series. Pretty violent macho stuff. I got over it.
.
.
.

[OriginalGeek]

16. Except Conan was awesome!

The Robert E. Howard ones anyway. The numerous authors who continued after his death were hit and miss.

[XemaSab]

7. Clan of the Cave Bear

They started out good, then they got seriously trashy.

VC Andrews on the other hand was AWESOME. :D

[soleiri]

9. I read all of my mom's historical romances

by Jean Plaidy, Victoria Holt, and Philippa Carr (same person, btw).

Considering how much she wrote, I doubt if I read even 10% of her work.

[dimbear]

10. The Harvard Classics.

Oh, wait, missed that be honest part.

Doc Savage.

[struggle4progress]

11. Carlos Casteneda

[libodem]

17. me too

Why do you think they were horrid? Love them to this day. What about All Creatures Great and small. Did you hate that as well?

[Ineeda]

12. OMG, I read her too.

And loved them at the time! More historical/romance fiction that I devoured was the Angelique series, by Sergeanne Golon (a husband and wife writing team.)

[RadiationTherapy]

13. Xanth novels by the horrible wordhack and famed sexist, Piers Anthony.

[OriginalGeek]

22. Come to think of it

he did create a lot of worlds where everyone had to be naked.

I never liked Xanth but I liked his Incarnations of Immortality series.

[eppur_se_muova]

14. All of Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars, Venus and Pellucidar books.

Youthful innocence can never be recaptured; it can never even be comprehended later.

[hifiguy]

15. I remember reading a perfectly ghastly Tolkein knockoff

with a dwarf, an otter and a bear as the main characters. The author's name mercifully eludes my memory. Four books worth of utter dreck.

[MorningGlow]

18. I don't recall reading any horrid series as a young adult

Now, when I was in elementary school--Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, Encyclopedia Brown.... :blush: I know there were more, too.

One good thing is that when I was a teen/young adult, there wasn't much call for YA series--not like now, or even in the '90s--OMG in '92 I used to have to wrest the Goosebumps series (which had approximately, what, 9,472 titles?) from my students' hot little hands on a regular basis. "NO this is not appropriate for a book report!"
:rofl:

[Taverner]

19. I admit I read Richard Bach

Illusions, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Bridge Across Forever and all of that.

Besides being trite with a capital 'T' it was also repetitive.

But at the time, I thought "This is bloody BRILLIANT!!!"

[riderinthestorm]

35. Oh yeah, I LOVED those when I was in high school... I'm pretty sure I still h ave my copy of JLS....

Funnily enough I have tried to get BOTH of my girls to read at least JLS because of course I too thought they were bloody brilliant back in the day but neither of them could even get through the first few pages!

Course the older one (now 23) loved Clan of the Cave Bear and the younger one (now 14) fancies herself a Buddhist and is into the Way of the Peaceful Warrior - now THAT is a piece of dreck!

[Taverner]

43. Yes, "Way of the Peaceful Warrior" was dreck

And not only that, it was Dan Milman's way of sugarcoating his sex with a minor...

[Tom_Foolery]

20. Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective...

They weren't horrid, and I really enjoyed them...Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective.

[LeftishBrit]

21. I read more horrid series when I was a child than a YA...

Several by Enid Blyton: Famous Five, Five Find-Outers, etc., and when I was really young, all the Noddy books. I know they were dreadful, but I still feel a bit nostalgic about them.

And some really awful books called 'Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Stories'. All about either how if you lose something and you pray, God will instantly find it for you; or about the dreadful fates of naughty children.

[marzipanni]

23. Zap comic books by R. Crumb

I heard my brother LOL several times late one night and when I asked him what was so funny he loaned me one of the comics, and said to hide it on top of his closet when I had finished reading it.

[LiberalEsto]

24. Nancy Drew and the Dana Girls

and before those, the Bobbsey Twins,

[YankeyMCC]

26. The Well World Series by Jack L Chalker

- although I had to call them horrid in a sense because I have a soft spot in my heart for them, they were my gateway into science fiction. But I have to admit when I went back and re-read them as an adult...well when I put down the first book I had to really ask myself..."How did this lead to wanting to read more of this stuff?"

On Edit: Just to give Mr Chalker his props...he wrote a few other series that were pretty much the same level but there were also at least one stand along novel and a collection of short stories that were very good.

[Curmudgeoness]

28. All the Nancy Drew books. Ugh, I still have some.

I re-read one a few years ago---it was horrible. But as a young girl, I guess it was good to have a heroine and role model.

[grntuscarora]

29. Trixie Belden

Every single one of the series.

[riderinthestorm]

34. I readl all ot those too! Wealthy Honey in her mansion with the exellent horses (and pony!)

and Trixie in her small farm cottage down the hill.... The Bob-White club...

I just don't remember them as "horrid" (were they? Eek! I have fond memories of that series....) Trixie was painted much more realistically than Nancy Drew if you ask me. I never liked the Nancy Drew series.

[grntuscarora]

36. Oh, I loved them!

My favorite was Trixie Belden and the Mysterious Visitor, which i actually re-read last year for fun. I never read Nancy Drew, so can't compare them, but I always related to tomboy Trixie!

[BlueIris]

30. I did the first twenty three Babysitter's Club books. Bad.

Really, really bad. And apparently there are like, 100 of them, now?

[pokerfan]

32. Encyclopedia Brown

No, actually those were pretty good.

[Rhythm]

37. They were great tutorials for critical thinking...

My little brother collected them, and i swiped them to read.

[pokerfan]

38. warped my fragile little mind they did

turned me into an engineering geek.

[InvisibleTouch]

33. I don't think any of the books I read were horrid.

I was able to get enjoyment out of most anything, though I gravitated toward books with animal protagonists or animals as the major plot focus. If you enjoyed it, how was it horrid?

[Aristus]

39. The Hardy Boys.

I loved them as a kid. Didn't realize until I was older and more literarily discerning how poorly they were written. Whenever two characters spoke at the same time, they "chorused". Losing track of how many times Frank yelled: "Don't let him get away!"

The updated 1970's edition of "Hunting For Hidden Gold" was actually pretty good. I really got the feeling that Frank and Joe could get killed, or freeze to death, even though the title was only #5 in a very long series.

The 1990's updatings got very serious, I understand. I was working in a bookstore at the time, I read the first couple of pages of one of the new editions. Joe's girlfriend, Iola, got killed by a car bomb right at the beginning. That was upping the ante a little from the books I remembered as a kid.

[darkstar3]

40. The "Sword of Truth" series by Terry Goodkind.

I recognize now what I didn't then: It really is smut.

[mythology]

44. To be fair the first book wasn't half bad

The rest on the other hand kept descending more and more into objectivist randian tripe. And yes I'm such a sucker I read all the way through to the end hoping they'd get better again. At least I've been able to resist the new related books.

As for the original question, I'm not embarrassed by anything I've read. Not everything can be or needs to be world-altering. Some things are just good for a little mindless escapism or to revisit my youth.

[Kablooie]

42. Freddy the pig. Also I had a subscription to Jimmy Olsen comics.

[nolabear]

45. The Destroyer. Also made into one of the worst movies in the world.

[Oxy Contin]

46. The Bobbsy Twins

I was a late in life baby, my father was in his late 40s when I was born and he was the baby of his family. The childrens books at my grandmothers were mostly from the 1880s to the 1930s.

[Oxy Contin]

47. My older brother did get me to reading Doc Savage though

Once I was a little older.