Thursday, March 26, 2009

Treasure Trash: A Great BTT

This week's question:

Best Bad Book? March 26, 2009
Filed under: Wordpress — --Deb @ 1:36 am


Suggested by Janet:

The opposite of last week’s question: “What’s the best ‘worst’ book you’ve ever read — the one you like despite some negative reviews or features?”


I have a lot of best 'worst' books, both in my personal library and on my list of favorites. Probably the ultimate one is The Dirt by Motley Crue. I've written about this one several times as being the ulitmate sex, drugs, and rock n' roll memoir. I think it's because the people who generally write books on these topics are repentant to some degree. The memoirs of Tatum O'Neill and Danny Bonaduce cover how they got into drugs and alcohol and how it messed up their lives. But they don't cover the fun parts, at least not to the gory detail that the Crue does. I should probably be ashamed of liking this book. But I can't help it. I love it.

The works of V.C Andrews were a force in the young lives of many women my age. I remember when that travesty of a film came out, and how scary it looked (I rented it in high school and laughed at it). I felt really brave and mature reading the Flowers in the Attic series, although they weren't so much horror as "gothic" in a way. Flowers in the Attic is still my favorite series, although I read all the Heaven and Dawn books too. I got tired of the repetition, and the ones that weren't actually written by her look to be even worse, so I believe I stopped there. But the Flowers in the Attic books are definitely captivating reads. The one about Cathy's son flags a little, and the final book is almost all denouement. But the title book in the series, the book chronicling their attempts to fit back into society and put their past behind them, and the prequel book explaining why the grandmother was such an evil bitch are full of suspense and tension.

They're also not terribly well-written, I know that. Most of the characters are one-dimensional, the dialogue is bad, and many of the scenarios strain credulity. If I read them now for the first time, I'd probably hate them. But as it is, I think they provide hours of entertainment!

Incidentally, does anyone out there know how to change font size in html code? This is way too small throughout, I think.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Kate,

The new face to your blog looks great!

With respect to changing the font size of the text, I was able to do it on a copy of the page that I saved locally.

I modified one page directly, I would guess that you are working with a template of some sort. Basically you can change the font size through the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

You want to find the section of the file that looks like:

.post {
margin: 0 0 1.5em;
padding-bottom: 1.5em;
}

(I found it at line 119 in the file I saved.) Now add the following line:
font-size: 125%;

so it looks like this:

.post {
margin: 0 0 1.5em;
padding-bottom: 1.5em;
font-size: 125%;
}

You should be in business. You can tweak that value of 125% to whatever you like (currently your small text is 100%).

If you have any follow up questions feel free to email me.

-Jeff B.

Keetha said...

Flowers in the Attic. Ah, a classic bad good read.

My favorite in that category is "Scruples" by Jackie Collins. And novels like "The Other Side of Midnight" by Sidney Sheldon. I can just picture those paperback covers.

Jess said...

Really a Crew memoir? I will have to check that out.

http://barneysbookblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/booking-through-thursday_26.html

Library Diva said...

It worked! Thank you very much, Jeff, for taking the time to explain it to an HTML noob. I'm thinking I might check out an HTML for Dummies book or something the next time I'm at the library. The code actually looks understandable to me, the sort of thing I could actually learn how to do with a little help.

BTW, do I know you in real life? I have a friend Jeff B. who knows HTML who I haven't seen in a while...are you him? Good "seeing" you online, if so.