Holiday Gift Guide: Something to read aloud

Gift Idea #8: The e-book edition of Irene Iddesleigh, by Amanda McKittrick Ros ($3.49)

You're gonna have to bear with me on this one. First, here's the publisher's description:

If your idea of a good time is curling up with a gripping nineteenth-century domestic drama, give this novel a try. Irish author Amanda McKittrick Ros is known for her rich, lyrical, densely layered language – not to mention her knack for closely observed characters and juicy plots. Fans of Austen and the Bronte sisters will love this book.

That is a series of lies of such impressive scope that if they gave out awards for lying, it would sweep all categories. Amanda McKittrick Ros is not known for her "rich, lyrical, densely layered language"; she's known for being one of the worst writers ever published. (And I'm pretty sure the spirits of Austen and the Bronte sisters are waiting for the author of the above description to die, so they can have some pretty crisp words with him/her in the afterlife.) People have held contests to see who could read Ros's stuff aloud for the longest period without laughing. Her works include a book of poetry called Fumes of Formation and three novels full of writing like this, a sentence from her book Delina Delaney, which describes the heroine's reasons for working as a seamstress:

"She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father's slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness."

This woman was a treasure, and now that Barnes and Noble has made at least one of her titles available as an e-book, I can't think of anything more delightful than the idea of whiling away the quiet hours of Christmas day, torturing my family by reading snippets aloud.