What’s the most offensive book you own?

[scifisam]

In Death in the Clouds she was talking about a newly formed couple, and what they have in common.
I can't recall exactly but the gist was "they both liked cocaine and walks on the beach at night, and they also disliked rain, crowded tube trains and blacks"

The podcast I linked to upthread is very interesting. She had some drama herself, after her husband left her she went missing. Her car was found almost hanging off a cliff. A massive search was organised.
She turned up in a spa hotel where she had booked herself in, telling no one she was there

Yep, like I said, there was some casual racist language thrown around, occasionally in the mouths of characters (which is excusable if it fits the character because you can't pretend prejudices don't exist) but mostly in the body of the text. And there's a fair amount of anti-semitism in the same way. It was worse than a lot of other writers at the same time Christie was writing.

But in, say, Hickory Dickory Dock, there are several non-white characters and the way the non-whites are portrayed is sometimes fairly sympathetic. One black African character is portrayed as an medical student - therefore intelligent - who faces racism from the people he lives with and the police and speaks out against it - he was completely cut out of the David Suchet TV adaptation, as if they were scared of having a black character in Christie at all. In Death on the Nile locals are framed for a crime because all the white people assume locals are terrible thieves, and their assumptions aren't portrayed in a positive light. In Dead Man's Folly, an Italian is unfairly assumed to be guilty of a crime he couldn't have committed purely on the basis of his foreignness, and several times it's mentioned how stupid that assumption is.

It's definitely not straightforward to say that Christie was racist in her writings, basically.

 

[spanglechick]

Yep, like I said, there was some casual racist language thrown around, occasionally in the mouths of characters (which is excusable if it fits the character because you can't pretend prejudices don't exist) but mostly in the body of the text. And there's a fair amount of anti-semitism in the same way. It was worse than a lot of other writers at the same time Christie was writing.

But in, say, Hickory Dickory Dock, there are several non-white characters and the way the non-whites are portrayed is sometimes fairly sympathetic. One black African character is portrayed as an medical student - therefore intelligent - who faces racism from the people he lives with and the police and speaks out against it - he was completely cut out of the David Suchet TV adaptation, as if they were scared of having a black character in Christie at all. In Death on the Nile locals are framed for a crime because all the white people assume locals are terrible thieves, and their assumptions aren't portrayed in a positive light. In Dead Man's Folly, an Italian is unfairly assumed to be guilty of a crime he couldn't have committed purely on the basis of his foreignness, and several times it's mentioned how stupid that assumption is.

It's definitely not straightforward to say that Christie was racist in her writings, basically.

I have an audiobook of “Death Comes at the End” which is set in Ancient Egypt. It’s well-researched, although from an imperious point of view that patronises elements of the culture... but the characters themselves are no more or less well-drawn than those in her contemporaneous novels. Decent priests with a secret; precocious tweenage children; golddigging wives and fabulously blunt old birds doomed to die in the final act. Not nuanced, but no less so than any of her characters.

 

[yield]

Most of the Old Testament, Koran and the Talmud are pretty unsavoury pieces of writing and generally offensive to many modern people.

Suggesting such things as enslaving foreigners, stoning adulterers and homosexuals to death, 'eye for an eye' type punishments, beating children and women.

Yeah, it's offensive. The "eye for an eye" type punishments are about equivalent or retributive justice.

Which is still something to consider when some poor kid got six months inside for stealing some bottles of water in the 2011 riots.

Is six months in prison fair punishment for stealing bottled water?

In the aftermath of this week's riots, a 23-year-old student with no previous convictions was jailed for the maximum permitted six months after pleading guilty to stealing bottles of water worth £3.50 from Lidl in Brixton. Do you think the punishment is fair?

www.theguardian.com

 

[SpookyFrank]

There was a film about that in the 70s, starring Vanessa Redgrave as Christie. It tried to make her disappearance into a mystery from her books, not being entirely successful.

Agatha (film) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

There was also a (crap) episode of Doctor Who which attempted something similar.

 

[Geri]

Modern Primitives? I had a copy that got lost in various house moves.

View attachment 210841

Yes, that's the one.

 

[imposs1904]

Found this old thread looking for any threads on Richard Allen's old right-wing pulp fiction from the 70s.

If we are talking about actual physical books - and not something that would be easy enough to download from the usual book sites in about 2 minutes - it would have to be John Tyndall's The Eleventh Hour: A Call for British Rebirth. For some reason it was for sale in the Waterstones just by University of London Union and I bought it out of curiousity. I remember reading about 50 pages, and being shocked to discover that he was a dull, sinister, self-aggrandizing fascist cunt. The blurb on the back of the book lied to me.

 

[krtek a houby]

There was a film about that in the 70s, starring Vanessa Redgrave as Christie. It tried to make her disappearance into a mystery from her books, not being entirely successful.

Agatha (film) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Remember little about it, mostly the jazzy score

 

[petee]

In that case I'd definitely caution against reading 120 days of sodom - it's far, far, far worse than that sort of deeply odd sexual behaviour. It's the only book that I've physically recoiled from when reading sections of it.

i saw a copy once and opened it at random and read one paragraph, and that was it. unfortunately, i remember the content of that paragraph.

 

[petee]

My mum had fear of flying and some other erica jong books which I read around 12 or 13, which I found a bit shocking and quite horny

her daughter, btw, is a prominent never-trumper with a by-line in the Daily Beast

Molly Jong-Fast - The Daily Beast

All Molly Jong-Fast coverage by The Daily Beast.

www.thedailybeast.com

 

[Badgers]

Dan Brown

 

[dessiato]

In that case I'd definitely caution against reading 120 days of sodom - it's far, far, far worse than that sort of deeply odd sexual behaviour. It's the only book that I've physically recoiled from when reading sections of it.

I've only seen the film. Once was quite enough.

 

[TopCat]

Valerie Solanas SCUM Manifesto.
Amazing how people chortle at this shit.

 

[Pickman's model]

Valerie Solanas SCUM Manifesto.
Amazing how people chortle at this shit.

so often it's a choice of laugh or cry

 

[Part 2]

Modern Primitives? I had a copy that got lost in various house moves.

View attachment 210841

I remember buying this in a brown paper bag and reading it on the bus on the way to work. I've still got it along with the Re:search Freaks book and the William Burroughs one. It's not a book for public reading but more embarrassing than offensive as far as I recall.

I also remember looking at a book in Waterstones around the same time called Death Scenes: Proof the good old days never existed. Pictures taken by a police photographer of dead bodies. I put it down when I sensed someone behind me.

 

[Raheem]

Margaret Thatcher's The Downing Street Years. Or there's a Robert Mapplethorpe photo book with loads of images of dick torture.

Decisions, decisions.

 

[Fozzie Bear]

This is a wilfully offensive novel by an afro-american author that ramps up the stereotypes to absurd excess.

 

[Fozzie Bear]

This is a novel about someone who becomes obsessed with the gay neo-nazi skinhead Nicky Crane. Great book, but includes several illustrations throughout of neo-Nazi publications etc so is definitely not bus reading.

 

[nogojones]

read it awesome piece of critique. yes, the unabomber is my favourite bomber of all time

So inspired your Etsy page is now just bespoke, hand made, beautifully crafted explosives

 

[not-bono-ever]

 

[not-bono-ever]

Charity shop find. Appalling narrative but full of pics from China if a century + ago. One for the historian

 

[ska invita]

View attachment 287203

This is a wilfully offensive novel by an afro-american author that ramps up the stereotypes to absurd excess.

Sounds like a more full on version of (the Booker winning) The Sellout by Paul Beatty...quick google suggests Paul had read it

 

[Sweet FA]

I remember buying this in a brown paper bag and reading it on the bus on the way to work. I've still got it along with the Re:search Freaks book and the William Burroughs one. It's not a book for public reading but more embarrassing than offensive as far as I recall.

I also remember looking at a book in Waterstones around the same time called Death Scenes: Proof the good old days never existed. Pictures taken by a police photographer of dead bodies. I put it down when I sensed someone behind me.

I first saw it early-mid 90s I guess. Alex Binnie was a sort of crossover into that body mod world for me. I was working in Clerkenwell when Into You was there and you'd occasionally see people with a lot of black ink.

 

[weltweit]

My most offensive are the same as my most embarrassing.

 

[planetgeli]

Offensive to who?

To me, The Bible, by a country mile.

But I imagine How to talk dirty and influence people by Lenny Bruce might upset the local vicar.

 

[DaveCinzano]

My research interests mean I have a lot of cop memoirs, and things like this

 

[bellaozzydog]

On a whim I got Geoff Norcotts, Where did I go right. How the left lost me

thinking it’s worth knowing the enemies thoughts.

absolute pile of cliched drivel, confirming the guy is a one trick douche-knozzle

 

[hitmouse]

Yeah, offensiveness is in the eye of the beholder and all that. I think there's quite a distinction between offensive and embarrassing though, like my Callinicos books would probably score much higher for the latter than the former. And then unreadable's something different again.

Anyway, when I read Maldoror I was borrowing my housemate's copy, the only Houellebecq I've read was from the library and I can't remember if I actually have a copy of Portnoy's Complaint or not. I do definitely own two Gides (Immoralist and Counterfeiters), and a collection of Patrick Modiano books, which thinking about it would have to score pretty highly up there.

Spoiler: summary of Place de l'etoile from wikipedia

He first presents himself as an antisemitic Jew belonging to the French Gestapo living in Geneva who becomes friends with Des Essarts, a French aristocrat, and Maurice Sachs, who has miraculously reappeared. (Maurice Sachs was a real person, but deceased by the time of the narration.) After their abrupt disappearance, he reconnects with his father, a Jewish industrialist living in New York, and gives him his entire fortune which he had previously inherited from an uncle from Venezuela. He then enrolls in an academic preparatory school (a "khâgne") in Bordeaux, where he is influenced by M. Debigorre, professor of literature, former Pétainist, who is harassed by his students, and whom the narrator successfully defends against them. He then meets Levy-Vendome, a Jewish aristocrat who is in the business of sex slave trafficking and with whom he signs on as an associate in order to kidnap young women according to specifications. By virtue of his athletic good looks, his stature and his physical strength, he is able to seduce and capture and deliver to employer several women from the French provinces, first in Savoy and then in Normandy. He then flees to Vienna, where he becomes a pimp, believing himself to be the "official Jew" of the third Reich, friend of Heydrich, the official pimp of the SS and lover of Eva Braun. We next see him in Israel in a reeducation camp that very much resembles a concentration camp where the Israeli army "reforms" European Jews into good Israelis, freed from their obsessions over Jewish misfortune, Jewish thought and Jewish intelligence.

Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver and Bad by James Carr are both interesting books but I can understand why someone might never want to read them. I was going to say that I don't personally consider James Ellroy's novels to be that offensive even though they have 50000 slurs on every page, but then I remembered I have a copy of Blood on the Moon, which is actually is offensively stupid. Anyway, I think the Big Nowhere is good but Sarah Schulman disagrees, or at least disagreed. And thinking about it I was pretty reluctant to read The Black Dahlia cos I think that using a real-life murder as the basis for a work of fiction like that has some difficult moral lines involved, I think I wouldn't have read it if it wasn't for wanting to read the whole series it's a part of.

Oh, and can't remember whether I've read/own a copy of Crash, I'm pretty sure I do, but I definitely own a copy of JG Ballard's Rushing to Paradise. Which again I thought was both offensive and proper shit, it felt like a GB News attempt at challenging satire.

 

[Fozzie Bear]

Oh I just read a book by Fred Vermorel about people who were obsessed with Queen Victoria which has a lot of this sort of thing in it:

 

[May Kasahara]

Possibly was Lost Girls (Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie), but Mr K disposed of it a while ago. He said he felt quite uncomfortable reading it, let alone having it hanging round the house.

Quality-wise, perhaps Coldheart Canyon by Clive Barker, the only book I've ever actually thrown in the bin in disgust at how bad it was. So don't own that one anymore either.

 

[seeformiles]

I also have a copy of The Gas by Charles Platt, which was banned at some point.

That is one fucked up book. A mate of mine was into fetish and BDSM stuff had several shelves of what you might call extreme literature - this book amongst them. I liked the cover since it was similar to a lot of 60s psychedelic stuff but a quick skim through told a different story altogether - all manner of extreme stuff e.g. rape, wound fucking, mutilation, incest, etc. It made American Psycho look like a fairytale.
Not surprised it was banned