Ever since the Nixon-Eisenhower White House wedding in 1968 I have wondered about America’s need for royalty and royal weddings.  While old George showed his sanity and humility by not allowing the rest of the colonials to make him king (I’m speaking of our first President, not the inept British king the colonials defeated), it seems that many of my compatriots feel short-changed.  Many of them go after the gossip, intrigues, and photos by the paparazzi like ants at a pastry makers’ picnic, all in their haste to find a truly American substitute.  And when the Lohans and the Pitts just don’t do it, there’s always a White House wedding.

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(Dean Koontz, Breathless, Bantam Books, 2009, ISBN 978-0-553-80715-8)

Dean, Dean, tell me it isn’t so.  I’ve been a fan of yours for years, delighting in your stories of good versus evil, relishing your use of words and turns of phrase, and feeling my skin crawl with your pseudo-scientific-supernatural creations.  Stephen King’s writing was always second rate to your masterful way with the written word.

But now you seem to have been reading too much creationist and intelligent design literature.  The creatures in Breathless are new humans, not evolved but spontaneously generated.  As one of the characters says, “…their sudden appearance suggests some mechanism entirely different from evolution through natural selection.  In the Cambrian period…a hundred new phyla appeared, thousands of species.”  This character is a physicist and a mathematician, a dabbler in chaos theory.

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Since I’m already accused of being dark, negative, and pessimistic by some, I thought it might be interesting to collect readers’ opinions on the worst books in the English language, said list to be added as a complement to the “classics” categories.  ”Worst” has a special meaning here.  By this I mean a terrible book that you have been forced to read by those erudite practitioners of mind-numbing torture in high school or college English classes.  Or a book that everyone has told you that you must read and it gives you a frontal lobotomy without surgery.  To make it more specific, let me start the ball rolling by mentioning a sample from my own list.

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