Steph read and liked Delroy's review of The Ruins:

"This may be the worst book that I have ever read in much the same way that I feel Mission to Mars is the worst movie I have ever seen. There is plenty of crap out there, but sometimes a piece of crap manages to find itself in the shoe-shine pile and...more This may be the worst book that I have ever read in much the same way that I feel Mission to Mars is the worst movie I have ever seen. There is plenty of crap out there, but sometimes a piece of crap manages to find itself in the shoe-shine pile and gets lots of money thrown at it and gets splashy reviews and buys out the front rack at the distribution center for the arts and you are in a hurry to get your culture on so you don't see that the polish this turd has been given barely managed to make its good side gleam, and certainly didn't get to any of those hard to reach spots that would have given it the edge of being a piece of crap that you later laugh about having paid for rather than hating yourself for being so hasty as to have been tricked into shelling out thirty clams for what is essentially a runny, unfinished short story not about the horror of Mayan flora, but about my own inability to differentiate (despite years of training) between a passable beach book and the ruin of western civilization this work suggests is already in progress.(less) "