 If you've been watching this channel for a while you know it's no secret I am a pretty big fan of terrible books. And there's a couple reasons for that. Part of it is just I find them fascinating and whenever I read something where I'm like oh man I could have done better than that it does make me imagine something better in my head. But probably a bigger reason for it is that sometimes books are just bad in a way which makes them hilarious. You know the same way that movies like The Room are really really funny even if they're horribly put together and have you know bad acting and all that. Dude you're just a chicken chip, chip, chip, chip, chip, chip. What a story Mark. They're still really enjoyable to watch well there's a lot of books that are the same way and if you've been watching me for a while you know I cover some of those like a lot of my super long in-depth book reviews are over series that are really really bad but I still find them enjoyable to read because they're just so bad that they become funny you know they're just so crazy in specific ways or just so odd that I can't help it they're really fun and it's been a really really long time since I did any sort of recommendation video so I figured why not let's uh let's just talk about and recommend some really bad books that are just so bad they become funny again you know they're so bad they become enjoyable uh now keep in mind on this I'm not including books that are funny on purpose I'm including ones that are 100 sincere in what they're doing and they are trying with all their heart to make you take this seriously and to make you think okay like I'm I'm invested in these characters in this situation but they just fail at it and it becomes really funny again and I've I talked about most of these before but you know I figured why not let's bring them up again all in one place so people know where to find them the first book series I want to talk about is elixir by Hilary Duff and yes that is the girl from the Lizzie McGuire show she wrote a series of young adult novels if you want to check out my thoughts on it uh you can but basically the plot of this is that the main character girl whose name is like Clea Clea I don't know whatever whatever however you say that um she is a reincarnation like her boyfriend 500 years ago drank the elixir of life and so he's immortal and every 100 years she is reborn and then her and him meet and they fall in love and then she dies horribly before they have a chance to be together and believe me we'll we'll get to how that's been done before but you know and Clorox is like really upset about this and she's like oh my gosh we need to break the curse and she's also like wait we need to find my dad because my dad went missing while looking for the elixir of life and there's just so much crazy stuff in here I can't cover it in just a couple of minutes but it is a beautiful pile of shit let me tell you for starters the story just makes no sense and is riddled with holes but they're holes that are funny in a weird way like for example like I said uh Cleveland is looking for her dad at the beginning of the series because he disappeared but then later on they get evidence that he's still alive and they're like and you think as a reader okay the next book is going to be them following this lead and trying to find him but then the next time they even mentioned Clalus's dad is when she's at his grave and she's like I miss you dad I'm so upset and I'm like clamshell you're an idiot okay why are you I don't know I don't get it but it's just stupid there's another group of characters who basically get psychic powers by thinking really hard because this is like an anime now all of a sudden uh none of the magic is explored or explained in any real way the characters are dumb I guess is a polite way of putting it uh like they just have very little to them in most cases and when some little bits of personality shine through it's mostly them being dumb and making dumb decisions and going off on wild tangents it's it's really fun the villains are absolutely pathetic but again pathetic in a fun way like there's a villain who literally just writes in his journal I am evil here is my evil plan and then another character finds it and that's how they learn he's evil like it's it's a beautiful mess like that they're not particularly long books and they are obnoxious at a few points but overall they are very much worth it the next one I have is Jesus Christ zombie killer or the full title is actually Jesus Christ colon zombie killer colon book of John but you know either way I have like a physical copy now and um this one is about Jesus and his friend John the Baptist fighting a necromancer who's trying to raise an army and take over the world and look man I tell you that and you think that sounds really stupid but it's stupid in a fun way and that's pretty much it yeah and I will say this book is not terrible in terms of execution like in terms of like the actual execution the author clearly is competent she knows what she's doing like there is an actual story here like there are events that lead into one another and the pacing is pretty decent the characters mostly have actual personalities uh and they interact with one another have interesting relationships the action scenes are halfway decent it's like it's a well written story it's just the overall concept is so silly that even when it wants me to take it seriously I just can't I cannot do it it's Jesus fighting a necromancer man and if that sounds like any sort of fun do you check it out and and I know you may be thinking well okay this was funny on purpose I really don't think it was I think this was meant to be taken 100% seriously because it if it is meant to be a parody it plays it totally strange let me tell you like it stares at you and it does not blink so if it's a parody it's a very well disguised one so elixir by Hilary Duff really started my love story let's say with celebrity books because they're always just so bad and so self-indulgent and there's a really good look into the minds of these people and a lot of them are completely disconnected from reality so that brings me to our next so bad that it's funny book which is Zabiba and the king and that one was written by a fellow named Saddam Hussein that's not a joke by the way if you have not seen my video on this Saddam Hussein really did write this thing and it's not actually that crazy in terms of the events of the story it's basically just a trashy romance novel it's like this king meets a peasant woman who lives nearby apparently like right outside his palace it's like a 10 minute walk it's I don't know it's not described well and then they start talking to each other and they fall in love and there aren't a lot of crazy events like I said and the characters themselves are definitely really cringy self inserts like Saddam Hussein has two separate self inserts in here you'll have to read for yourself if you want to know what I mean by that but the events in the characters aren't that nuts but there are moments like that you know because a lot of the story is just Zabiba and the king and the king gets a name but it's not put you don't learn it until like a third of the way through you know it's not a stylistic choice Saddam just is a shitty writer and um anyways it's mostly Zabiba and the king having really long philosophical discussions and really long discussions about how politics should work and the best way to run a country and things like that which is boring but then the narration will come in with some like absolutely wild out of nowhere shit like there'll be more than a page where Saddam is just fantasizing about how beautiful Zabiba's mouth is in a way which is clearly not intended to be sexual but very much winds up seeming sexual or there's another point where he uh takes a moment to talk about how bears would have sex with a human man it's it's very strange man as funny as all that is though like it's not a very good book okay let's be clear on that but it is a fascinating insight into the mind of Saddam Hussein and it does really make you sit there and wonder wow this this exists like you know that that's where a lot of the comedy comes from is just the fact that it exists next up we have doppelgangster and I mean just look at the cover man like look at this thing it it's hilarious and it also has nothing to do with the events of the story it's a about a girl named Esther Diamond who has uh this is actually the second book in a series but they're all pretty standalone you don't really need to read the first to understand what's going on here but she has gotten involved in a hidden magical underworld that exists uh in our real world you know like pretty typical urban fantasy stuff uh and she's just helping to solve a variety of mysterious murders you know it's mostly murders of mobsters but Esther is still really into the solving of it and feels bad for them for some reason which she probably shouldn't this one is a little weird as well because at times it's clearly intending to be funny and it succeeds at a lot of those points like there are points in here where I was laughing along with the book rather than add it but then there's also a lot of points which are clearly meant to be taken seriously and I was like in stitches those are twice as funny as all the parts that are intended to be funny like there's just so many weird bits of magic in here and characters reacting in such weird ways to all the situations around them that I don't I don't even know how to explain it but I can give an example basically there is a very serious moment near the end of the book where Esther is like attacking one of the villains and she's just beating him with a dead chicken and like that's what like she's just holding a dead chicken and beating him and we're supposed to be taking this seriously but I just couldn't I was laughing way too hard and I don't know I don't have a whole lot else to go into like you can see it's not a not a very thick book not a very long one it's a pretty quick read if I remember correctly so check it out it there's some there's some entertaining stuff in there then we have the left behind books these are infamous let's say and I've only read a few of them but I mean again the storyline in these is not important at all it's basically about how uh the antichrist has come to earth and so the rapture comes and all the good christians get taken away to heaven and then everyone else has to like fight the forces of the antichrist and you know yada freaking yada you you probably know about left behind at least tangentially and tangentially is that is that even the word I'm looking for here is that is that how that works obviously there's a lot of stuff to criticize here about like the way it treats christians and the way it treats people who are not christian and the way it treats scripture and how the whole thing just has kind of a mean spirited feel to it if I'm being honest but I'll be honest if you set that aside it's really really funny like especially if uh as you're reading you just imagine the actors from all the various film adaptations they've tried to get off the ground that have all failed uh if you just imagine like Kirk Cameron and Nicholas Cage and Kevin Sorbo and whoever else who has been in these that isn't famous like just imagine all of them going on these adventures it becomes a lot funnier and honestly like after the rapture happens things just get so crazy like the united nations takes over the whole world and then they decide to like build a city in the middle of the desert because Babylon has to be there in order to fulfill the prophecy or something and then you get like swarms of locusts and then Jesus comes back and that's by far my favorite bit because he barely talks and when he does talk it smites his enemies just just just by speaking he kills all his enemies which doesn't feel like the sort of thing Jesus would do but okay and when he talks it's specifically only in bible quotes like an action figure it's just oh god it's beautiful like the later books just are nuts man they just go so off the wall and so off the rails like it's it's amazing just check them out like if you are able to set aside the fact that okay yeah there's people that take this seriously and if you're able to set aside the fact that it is bonkers insulting to large chunks of the population then i think you'll have a good time with left behind coming in hot is maximum ride after the original trilogy now i've talked about this series several times before the basic gist of it is that the original trilogy is really solid and if it had ended there i would think much more highly of the series as a whole but after that it just goes really far downhill and decides to start focusing on like environmentalism and stuff but if i set aside my disappointment from when i was a child and tried reading these and tried taking them seriously and was just kind of upset that they became bad if i set that aside they're really funny like there there's a book where they go to Antarctica and the villain who i don't think is even given a name is just like a dude who's like a head on a stick and all his organs are in little boxes that are separate and he somehow kept alive through all that and then his henchmen is like a frankenstein's monster and then there's multiple apocalypses that the heroes have to try and stop and they mostly fail but then they the apocalypse that comes and actually wipes out most of the earth that is never explained like it might be an asteroid or a nuclear war or something but i have no idea what it is uh there's characters that are just switching allegiances back and forth and it doesn't make any sense uh there's characters knowing things they shouldn't know and retconning and contradicting stuff that we learned before like how in the first three books uh jeb was supposed to be the voice in max's head who was just feeding her advice which made sense because he actually jeb would actually know all that stuff but then in the later books they decide that it was actually angel who's max's younger sister who can read minds that was feeding her all that information but that doesn't make sense because angel's a six-year-old girl and she wouldn't have known most of the stuff that the voice tells her you know just there's so many things like that which get really weird and one of my personal favorites is actually in maximum ride forever which is basically the last book okay like i know there's more that they've written since then but it they're about max's daughter they're not really about her so i'm considering that more of a sequel series than a continuation but whatever anyways there's just a character who is like dead or comatose or something and in order to bring him back another character has to like attach electrodes to his chest and then shock him alive but by doing so he kills himself that doesn't it's not explained it doesn't make any sense but it's it's i just there's so many moments like that which are great i mean hell they get a talking dog in the original trilogy which is already weird but then in the later books their talking dog starts growing wings and then he gets married to a regular dog who can't talk it's just i don't know that that feels like getting married to a mentally disabled person when you think about it but i don't know there's just so many things in here that if i set aside the fact that i was disappointed that the series went downhill in quality it becomes really really funny so yeah um if you read the original maximum ride trilogy and you just heard that it got bad after that it does but i would still recommend at least checking it out a little bit because it's just so so stupid next up we have save the pearls and i did a long long video on this several months ago which like and in that video i also uh said where you can find some pdf scans of this book if you just want to read them without having to pay for it which i wouldn't blame you because the first book isn't too hard to find but the second book is a pain in the ass so uh you're welcome internet here's the thing save the pearls is horrible yes it is extremely racist yes it is badly put together it is boring at times and it is frustrating to read at the very least but it's also really really funny like i can't pretend it's not i mean it's to put it uh short if you haven't seen that video um basically it's about a world where the ozone layer got depleted and so everyone got skin cancer and this resulted in black people taking over the earth and so now we have like the white main character is forced to walk around wearing blackface all the time because it's blackface but like it's also sunscreen and then it just it just gets stupider from there and i'll say right now like the opening act of the first book is where most of the racism is and that's the most unpleasant part of the series it's still funny at points don't get me wrong but yeah that that bit is kind of unpleasant but once you get past that that's when the story really goes off the rails and that's when it becomes 10 times more enjoyable because i mean you have characters getting turned into furries you have the revelation that the main character tried to become a terrorist when she was younger but just decided not to and we just never find out about that until like near the end of the second book uh we have the main character deciding she wants to turn the entire world into furries we have her uh realizing she's an aztec god and trying to bring balance to the earth it's man it is just so out there and then there are the sex scenes which are painful and i largely skipped over them but i don't know other people may get a kick out of those it's just bonkers because all of this is meant to be taken 100% seriously like the author seriously thought she was making a statement about environmentalism and a statement about racism and she well she was making a statement but not the one she intended because she was just an idiot she had no idea what she was doing and man i just i don't know if you don't believe me you can watch my video but i i seriously left stuff out even though it's a two and a half hour video i left stuff out uh save the pearls book one and book two have some really really great gems hidden in there if you just are looking for something to laugh at the second to last book i will recommend today is Hades and that is book two in the halo trilogy now again i did this series a long time ago and you may be thinking well james why would you only recommend the second book and that's because well the first book is really really boring like that's the worst in the series because like nothing happens there and the third book there are things that happen but they aren't really connected in any way there's not really a conflict or anything and it's just not as crazy or as interesting so i wouldn't really recommend reading that one either there's a few moments in there that are fun don't get me wrong but mostly i would recommend reading the second book because that's the best one because that's where things happen like it's still terrible but things happen in there and i wouldn't even recommend reading the first book before you get into it i would just jump right into the second and then be confused about some stuff because trust me the actual explanations are probably more boring and whatever you imagine is more entertaining basically the series is about some angels who come down to earth to help humans and then one of them whose name is bethany church just stupid name stupid name uh falls in love with a human boy and then you can guess the rest from there like it's a young adult fantasy romance it's you understand what's going on but in the second book bethany gets dragged down to hell on a literal highway to hell and then she has to try and escape so in terms of like the actual quality yes it is better than the others just because there's an actual conflict and there's an actual plot and things are happening but in terms of just craziness what you can laugh at it's also the best because you run into stuff like satan being called big daddy by all the other demons and he dresses like dug dimadome like i'm i'm not even making that up that happens or how bethany meets nazis in hell but they're not in hell for all the nazi shit they did like i'm not trust me i don't have time to get into that or how her friends like start fighting possessed nuns up on earth and she can just watch them while it's having it's it's beautiful it's off the wall man it is bonkers and the best way and i love it like i don't want to talk too much more about it because a lot of it is just uh i don't know it's just more fun if you're surprised by it when it happens but hades is by far the best part of the halo trilogy because it's so terrible that it becomes a riot and the last book that is so bad it becomes funny that i'm gonna talk about today is evermore now i'll tell you right now i've not finished this series yet as of the time of this recording i'm partway through book four but so far it is shaping up to be one of my favorite so bad that it's good books i've ever read or book series i've ever read because it's reminding me why so many of my really long and depth book reviews are uh young adult books because sure some of them are bad in a boring way but a lot of them are bad in an insane way like they just take these really bizarre plot points and these really bizarre world-building bits and these really bizarre decisions by characters and just play them totally straight and strange things happen throughout and we're just supposed to go along with it and i guess if you're into that more power to you but i just i can't it makes me laugh way too much now evermore is the exact same plot as elixir where there's a man who drank the elixir of life hundreds of years ago and then he has a girlfriend who keeps reincarnating and dying horribly and i'll get in some horror of that whenever i make a review of these but it's it's very much the same plot as elixir like elixir is a total ripoff of this uh but then there's just so much dumb shit in here which never really leads anywhere like how the main character's boyfriend for a while has to wear a magical full body condom whenever they're together or he might die i'm not explaining that you'll just have to find out later uh or how there's just a dreamland they can go to whenever they want and how they can just manifest stuff whenever they want like they just manifest a car without even uh exerting themselves or thinking about it or how nothing is ever explained in here like it's at the point i'm at uh it still hasn't explained why exactly ever keeps reincarnating oh also the main character's name is ever bloom and her boyfriend's name is daemon august like just these are not real names okay these i don't know but i just uh god i i'm saving so much for a future video so i just don't want to talk too much about evermore here but oh man it's amazing it is one of my favorite bad books i've ever read i would recommend checking out at least the first one if you're at all curious and yeah that's it for today there's just a lot of oh god there there's a lot of books out there that are so bad they're good please let me know some more down in the comments uh you know share them with each other share them with me because i always like to read those things and check out some of the things i brought up today if you're curious uh i appreciate you watching this far goodbye super special thanks to everyone who has watched this far you've seen the entire thing except for the credits of course these names here are my patreon patron people uh the ten dollar and up patrons are oppo savallainan olivia rayon brother santotes buffy valentine carolina clay dan anseljevic dark king dio echo flax great grebo johnny st claire carcat kitsune lyza rudicoba lord tiebreaker microphone peep the toad roby reviews sad martigan sillier the vixen stone stairs tesla shark vei victus and wesley and of course all the other names you see here these people they're all great and if you watch this far maybe consider becoming a patron so you can get your name on the list here and also get early access to videos and other stuff if you don't feel like doing that you can also become a youtube channel member which is like the same thing except worse and you could also like you know rate the video and comment on it and subscribe to help share it around if you don't feel like doing any of that or if you're unable to like you know that's cool too i guess um you're all you're all cool people i'll i'll see you later goodbye