I'm looking for a word for "bad" books, or "bad" literature, something that describes the book as "poor" not by being necessarily "bad written", but by author's lack of knowledge about the subject, or by being just a bunch of things the author took from his own mind and sold as "a general law" about that subject.
I have a teacher who once used the expression "airport literature", and it's cool, but I'm not sure people understand its meaning without proper explanation. I also thought about "cheap" or "poor" literature (or books), yet I'm not sure people get it, as they could think I'm talking about a low price book, or even worst: they might think I'm judging the people who are reading as "poor", and I don't want to take the risk of a misunderstanding about it.
I'll try to narrow the possible answer by giving more details about the kind of book I'm talking about. A "bad" book, in the way I'm trying to express, means:
- A book written by a disqualified author in the subject (like Britney Spears writing about, i.e., neuroscience). Something the author think to know everything about, but he never deeply studied the subject.
- A book meant to be a specialized content in a certain subject, but that is actually poor and filled with lots of clichés and common sense contents.
Do you know the word I'm looking for? Something that express what I said?
Thanks in advance.
PS: Edited. And I apologize for the huge change, but I wasn't framing my question in the right understandable way.
Best Answer
I would probably call such a book trash or junk in the sense of low quality. Both of these are often used in referring to books, but interestingly, the word trash is more often associated with fiction, while junk is more often associated with non-fiction.
Here's a list of "trash novels".
A trash novel is a poor quality novel, a junk history book is a bad quality or inaccurate book.