I like going to yard sales on Saturday mornings from spring to early fall and this Saturday I was at one where the lady was selling books for 25 cents. There were quite a few Ann Rice novels so I grabbed interview with a vampire and another stand alone book of hers.
The lady who lived there had a shirt that said “be whatever you may be, but always be inclusive”. I wanted to ask her to explain that to me but I held my tongue. So is Ann Rice worth the read?
It's fun pseudo-Gothic trash for a few books. First three, as I recall, before she completely munchkins her main character and it gets really faggoty. Interview With the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and Queen of the Damned, and then stop. If you find yourself with Tale of the Body Thief in your hands, you've gone too far and need to go back.
She's got some porn books under a pseudonym too--"Anne Roquelaire" or something like that, I'm not looking it up. Interestingly, she was the one who kicked off the modern resurgence of the female obsession with BDSM, and she also brought "ponyplay" into the mainstream consciousness.
I read them as a teenager, so it's quite possible these are worse than I remember. At the time, I was reading stuff like Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, and Larry Niven...also Raymond Feist for fantasy, and I found Rice to be trashy in comparison, but not prohibitively so. I dunno. I read her because nerdy-but-hot teenage girls were reading her, and I wanted to bang them. Eventually I did, so it all worked out.
I love Heinlein. You have a favorite by him? I have been there. In high school this girl I liked was very much into Dawson’s Creek so I watched it just to talk to her about it but looking back that probably made me look gay because I was too shy to openly ask her out. I read Twilight Series and Fifty Shades because I was working at a mostly female call center and they kept raving about those books so I checked them out due to curiosity
I remember really liking Job: A Comedy of Justice and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I also remember being so disgusted by The Cat Who Walks Through Walls that I stopped reading Heinlein. Never really cared for his Lazarus Long and Jubal Hershaw self-insert books. A lot of fantasy and sci-fi authors do this--fall in love with their own characters--and it always got gross, weird, and boring.
I think it's always a good idea to sneak a peek behind the curtain and see what's rattling around in the noodles of potential romantic interests.