By Elizabeth English (aka Elizabeth Minogue)
Read: June 2010
Rating: Sigh.
I have been waiting to read this book since I read The Prince (Jan ‘06). I loved that so much that I immediately set my sights on the only other book under this name.
Alas, The Linnet does not live up to The Prince’s standard.
Lady Maude is the [...]

By Kay McMahon
Not Read: April 2010
Rating: AUGH
Coming out of Beyond Heaving Bosoms, I naturally wanted to indulge in some of the best/worst of the genre. I swapped for this book a short while ago and figured it was as good a place to start as any. But the Smart Bitches have just given me a [...]

By Barbara G. Walker
Not Read: Feb 2010
Rating: *zones out*
I’m trying to be good, really I am. But 50 pages out of 170 isn’t such a bad run…
The book is awkward and boring and it reads like what it is–a work of fiction by a feminist scholar that has been described (by The Northwest Gay and [...]

By Jude Deveraux
Attempted to Read: January 2010
Rating: AUGH
Wot the shit is this?! Today, RB stands for RIDICULOUSLY BAD.
Hey Jude don’t make it bad
Take a sad song and make it better
Remember to let her under your skin
Then you’ll begin to make it better
Better, better, better, better, better, Yeah,Yeah,YeahNa Na Na Na Na Na Na
Na Na Na [...]

By Emily Bronte
Read: March 2009
Rating: Poison
I give up. I quit. I want nothing more to do with this torturous mess. I decided it was time to try Wuthering Heights because my TiVo had picked up a documentary on the Bronte sisters, which was of course full of people who think they’re the most brilliant [...]

By George W. M. Reynolds
Attempted Read: Feb 2009
Rating: Goddamn.
Just… goddamn.  I saw this at Strand Books and spent MONTHS hemming and hawing over whether or not I should put my money toward it.
Pro: It’s a book from the 1800s about a werewolf in the 1500s. HOT DAMN it’s historical fiction^2 with a shot of supernatural!
Con: [...]

By Jenyne M Raines
Read: May 2008
Rating: Appalling.
Somehow this book wound up in the teen section of the public library. Keep it away from your impressionable young women.
The advice is not black-specific, it’s very general and you could find most of it in a myriad of similar titles. The most ‘black’ thing about it is the [...]

By Indu Sundaresan
Read: August 2006
Rating: Lackluster.
I love historical fiction. I love romance. And I love Philippa Gregory, despite not always liking what her characters do. So I should be able to get through a book like this, right? I’m still barely a quarter of the way through, and I’m putting it down. I [...]

By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Rating: One big fat middle finger up Fitzgerald’s arsehole.
Read: Over the summer between my freshman and sophomore years, 2001.
Frankly, the most self-indulgent piece of tripe I’ve ever been forced to read. It was a summer reading assignment, and one of two terrible books I brought on a visit to my grandmother’s. I [...]