The Thursday Throwdown

I'm really excited to kick off a new blog feature today, The Thursday Throwdown!

For The Thursday Throwdown I'll be reading two books that have a really similar plot (or for non-fiction, two books on the same subject) and comparing the two!

I had a really busy week last week, so I knew that I needed to read two books that were pure fluffy entertainment because those are the kind of books I can read the fastest. But I hope to read books in a variety of different genres for future editions of The Thursday Throwdown.

The crazy thing is that I've been meaning to do this feature for awhile now and have never gotten around to it and then last week I accidentally read two books with the same plot. I didn't even plan it. I read the first one and then got half-way through the second one and thought, Wait a minute. I'm starting to feel like I'm in that movie Groundhog Day.

Both books feature a pregnant woman who is abandoned by the father of her baby and the ends up falling in love with someone else during the pregnancy. There were most likely 500 books to choose from featuring this plot because it's one of the most common romance novel plots. Which makes perfect sense because this happens so often in real life. If I had a dollar for every person I know that this happened to . . . Oh wait, no. Actually, the only person I've ever heard of that this has happened to was Heidi Klum. Which begs the question: why do we keep reading books with such a ridiculous plot? I spent the entire time I was reading both books asking myself what is wrong with me that I find this an acceptable use of my time. I haven't been this ashamed of my entertainment choices since I watched the reality show about Tori Spelling's marriage unraveling (which included a 7 minute argument about a baked potato that somehow felt like it lasted for 40 minutes.)

But after reading these two books, I've decided that if loving books with ridiculous plots is wrong, I don't want to be right. Because I do love them. So much.

Since I recognize that both books are ridiculous, and I'm entertained by the ridiculousness of them, I've decided that the winner of this weeks edition of The Thursday Throwdown will be the book that is the most entertainingly ridiculous. I'm not looking for quality here. I'm looking for the book that is so bad it's almost kind of good. The kind of book that a person would never admit to loving at a dinner party (because no one would ever respect them again) but that they LOVE. SO. MUCH.

The two books competing for the title of Crappiest But Most Entertaining Book Of The Week:

Oh yeah, that's right. I read a Danielle Steel book and a Chick-lit book with an annoying cover. And I'm not even sorry. Judge me if you want to. But it won't matter. I spent all of elementary school, junior high and high school being known as the girl who loves Little House on the Prairie, so if you judge me for my cheesy taste, I won't even be able to feel it. I'm completely numb to the judgement of my entertainment choices, which has freed me up to openly love; The Brady Bunch, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, Amish romance novels, early 90's Lifetime TV movies. It's fantastic. I can wallow in my bad taste and not even have to care.

The Pregnancy Test was definitely the more well-written book of the two. But that's not what I was looking for here. I was looking for cheesey cliches and bad dialogue. But if you're looking for the book with the higher quality of writing, you will probably prefer this one. That is, if you don't mind that a third of the book was devoted to lengthy descriptions of the two main characters having sex in various tropical locations. I found it annoying that a third of the book was devoted to this because it took up so many pages that the rest of the story felt rushed. But hey, if you enjoy reading endless love scenes (yeah, we'll be tasteful and call them loves scenes, even though there seemed to be endless descriptions of the two main characters licking one another) then you'll love this book. And if you do enjoy reading about people spreading their saliva all over the place, then go for it. I spend my spare time watching people argue about baked potatoes, so I'm in no position to judge your entertainment choices.

Heartbeat was exactly the kind of cheesy, crappy, badly written entertaining goodness that I was looking for. It was so bad it started to loop back around and become good again. And I loved every minute of it. It had everything I look for in bad TV, but since it was a book I could almost pretend like I was engaging in a worthwhile pursuit. There was an over-the-top cartoonish villain, a main character who was so good and decent I couldn't even relate to her, a plot where all the loose ends got tied up into a neat and tidy and totally unrealistic bow, and endless descriptions of the food everyone ate and the clothing they wore. And you know a book is good when the author feels like you can't enjoy the story without knowing that one of the characters is wearing white pants and a navy blazer (I can't even talk about what a bad fashion choice that is) while cooking a mushroom omelet and mixing up a fruit salad. This was a 400 page book, but it could have been cut down to 300 pages if the references to every single outfit and meal the characters wore/consumed were removed. But the book was written in 1991, so I can't get enough of the descriptions of how the main character was a well dressed woman because she wore turtlenecks and jean skirts.

I definitely recommend reading Heartbeat, but you have to approach it the way you would watching bad TV. This not a book that is meant to be read in a serious and sincere way. This is pure camp. It's pure cheesiness. I recommend you approach it the way my sister and I once did. We briefly formed a sarcastic book club, in which we picked books that were really badly written and then we sarcastically discussed them as if there were serious, important works of literature. Our first book was a Danielle Steel novel (Vanishing. And it was awful and wonderful.) Sentences like "how dare you suggest Danielle Steel is not one of the finest novelists of our time" were used. We read, we fake argued, we mocked and a good time was had by all (even though I did feel a tiny bit guilty about mocking someone's book so much. But hey, Danielle is busy writing 3 books a year and counting her millions, so I doubt she has time to be offended by the horrible people like me who are mocking her!)

Have you ever read two books with the same plot? Tell me all about it in the comments section.