“Globules of Liquid Lava”

With book awards season coming quickly to its clamorous conclusion, we’ve been spending a lot of time thinking here about whose novels are the best. When we do that, though, we forget about the whole other end of the scale. After all, without a worst novel, how can you even have a best one?

We wouldn’t want to begin to think about who might have written the worst mystery ever but, when it comes to mainstream fiction, the conclusion has already been reached. According to The Telegraph, there’s one author who wins that distinction easily:

The heaving bosoms, trembling lips, quivering voices and clammy hands that inhabit the world created by Amanda McKittrick Ros won her many admirers among the literary elite.

Her novels provided the entertainment at gatherings of the Inklings, a group of Oxford dons including [C.S.] Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien who met from the 1930s to 1950s. They competed to see who could read her work aloud for longest before starting to laugh.

The laughter will pick up again at a “Ros reading challenge” to be held during the Celebrate Literary Belfast festival at the John Hewitt pub in Belfast, Ireland, on September 26.

You can read the Telegraph piece here.