A community for lovers of terrible books, but you can also discuss airports if you like.
Lose some, win some
I had to give up on my reading journal of The Isis Covenant because the book was actually okay.
There were things I disliked, chiefly that every woman who appeared in it had to be assessed on her fuckability by a POV character, even if she was a corpse, but other than its obnoxious treatment of female characters the story and the writing held up enough to disappoint me by their lack of hilarious badness.
But! After that I picked up The Lucifer Code by Charles Brokaw and wow, wowww this one delivers! There's a crime against writing committed on every page! This -- this is what I live for.
The main guy, Professor Thomas Lourds (whose name is given three times in quick succession on the first page so we'd remember) is the world's foremost expert on languages (all of them, obviously, living or dead) but he's really famous because he translated some ancient sex manual and then published it as an audiobook where he reads it over the music of Kenny G. Oh yeah, he's Harvard's bad boy. This is not the extent of his accomplishments, of course; in the previous book in this series -- because The Lucifer Code is apparently not Brokaw's debut -- Professor Thomas Lourds discovered Atlantis.
You learn all this right away as Professor Thomas Lourds tries to get inside some girl's pants at an airport. She's all agog over his Kenny G-enhanced audiobook until he displays a minute measure of using his brain rather than his dick to get around, at which point she kidnaps him. He remains aroused throughout the ensuing chaos that leaves plenty dead and this is clearly meant to endear him to the reader.
I personally wanted him to die twenty pages in, but the CIA is after him as well, action pausing for informative paragraphs on how to log in to your work laptop, so regrettably he'll hang around. The woman who kidnapped him is starting to get attracted already, because what's sexier than a complete lech? (Everyone who's after him is familiar with his thing for very young women, and his sexual appetite is brought up again and again and again regardless of the situation.)
Aw yes, we have a winner. I'll tell how it goes in the comments, but in the meantime have some goodreads reviews.




I think I read another book in that series and it was JUST AS BAD.
I just hit a racist depiction of a taxi driver; this book is really going for it. Was the one you read "The Atlantis Code"?
In other news I really dislike Imzy's post redesign and I absolutely loathe the Pinterest-style lockdown where you get to see a page before you have to log in. This has dimmed my interest in Imzy but I'll stay positive for as long as there are shitty books to talk about.