What are the worst books you've ever read?

[RickJay]

We've had threads before about bad movies, bad songs, and the like, but I haven't seen any threads about really bad books.

What books, fiction or nonfiction, were a total waste of your time and money - pretentious, stupid crap that make you regret you ever read them? Children's books don't count.

My votes would be for

Iron John by Robert Bly. A book about how to be a man, by a guy who apparently knows nothing about it. Almost bad enough to be funny, but not quite. Incredibly bad.

The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield. Fifty times worse than "Iron John." Hysterically dumb.

Hannibal by Thomas Harris. My God, this book was bad.

[Chekmate]

I know that it is an American Classic, but The Great Gatsby bored me to tears.

[Big Kahuna Burger]

I saw this thread and Ethan Frome immediately came to mind.

[belladonna]

Well, let's see....

1) Anything by John Saul

2) Most of Dean Koontz's stuff (I'll admit to loving Watchers and Lightning though)

3) Anything V.C. Andrews "wrote" after she died

4) Just guessing, but anything with an illustration exposing more than one nipple (male or female) on the cover, e.g.--Harlequins, can't be too intellectualy satisfying

5) Ethan Frome---gah!

bella

[RealityChuck]

The worst book I ever actually finished reading was The Ultimatum to Mankind (http://www.tangentonline.com/reviews/anthoreview.php3?review=178) by Zeev Dickman. If I hadn't been reviewing it, I wouldn't have finished.
I'm also currently reviewing Moses in Sinai by Simone Zelich, which is nearly as bad. Favorite howler: "From the bottom of his feet, Moses screamed" (Note to author: look up the difference between "soul" and "sole")

The Pleistocene Redemption by Dan Gallagher is probably the worst book I own, but I've never gotten past the first few pages. I guarantee you that no other book in the topic can top this for awfulness. See Red Mike's Review (http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/r_tpr.htp)

I also used to have a self-published novel by a friend of the family that was egregiously awful -- the author was a lawyer and his sex scenes sounded like a legal brief.

[monster]

Moral Fear, by Greg Iles (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451180410/qid=1015961895/sr=2-3/ref=sr_2_3/104-5167986-9912768)

Ugh. The only book I was tempted not to finish. I'm a trooper and finished it, but GOD, did it suck!

[phouka]

I have actually blocked the name of this book and the author from my mind, but it was a piece of crappy geekboy porn disguised as science fiction.

The galaxy was ruled by a Japanese style emperor, served by anthropomorphized lions who apparently lived by the code of Bushido (but it was never called that). The emperor liked molesting little children, the queen was tragically noble, the son was a vicious little monster, and the daughter was the only one with brains.

The author seemed to have written the book primarily so he could put in his own nasty little fetish scenes that included:

- a little boy who was chained to the emperor's thrown with the last link of the chain surgically inserted between the two bones of his forearm, then drugged on happy dust, then fondled by the emperor, then had his testicles crushed by the emperor when the royal jerk got bored.

- a concubine of the emperor's who was a "living mineral". The emperor suspected her of cheating on him, so he had her freeze dried and then spent a day with hammer and chisel lopping off parts of her while another character mused that she was probably still alive and could feel everything.

- the only decent character being crushed to death by one of the lion samurai while details of how he wet his pants just beforehand were lovingly described.

gah. I was a teenager when I read it and hadn't figured out that I didn't have to finish every book I read. I don't know what I did with that book. I hope I burned it.

[Lissla Lissar]

Big topic. There are so many terrible books... I would have to nominate In The Skin Of A Lion, by Michael Ondaatje. I was cruelly forced to read it in high school English, and I've managed to block most of the details out. Harlequin romances are so bad that they're hysterically funny- I see women reading them on the subway with straight faces, and I don't know how they manage it. Romances are excellent anti-depressants... "thickets of chest hair..."and all. Especially when one of the characters is named "Randy". Heh heh.
I also hated The Wars by Timothy Findley, and I Who Have Never Known Men... can't remember the author. Weird science fiction about some girl who's imprisoned with a bunch of other women. It kind of starts depressing, and gets worse.

[booklover]

The book that comes to mind is "The Fundamentals of Play" by Caitlin Macy. It's fiction and was kinda billed as a "Great Gatsby" of the nineties--about a bunch of rich twentysomethings suffering their way through the world of trust funds and private clubs.

The weirdest part was that it was supposed to take place in the late 1990's, but it felt as though the author had written it maybe 10 years earlier and then dusted off the manuscript for publication. The scene that stood out was one in which a guy pulled out a cell phone and one of his buddies had never seen one being used before--I think there was also this similar tone of awe when talking about the Internet and email. I just had no sympathy for the characters---never like Gatsby either.

I don't know if this book is bad---all I know is that I've started to read it several times and have failed to complete it---"Moonwise" by Greer Ilene Gilman.

And my vote for too long/convoluted goes to "Those Bones are Not My Child" by Toni Cade Bambara.

[racinchikki]

Another vote for Ethan Frome. Also, Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius - I kept thinking "Why in the world does he think anybody CARES?" and then finally I realized that he thinks people care because they bother to read the damn book. At that point I returned it to the library.

[Spoons]

I know they're classics, but these are the worst ones I've ever read:

Wuthering Heights, by Bronte
The Scarlet Letter, by Hawthorne
Dr. Zhivago, by Pasternak

There are many out there who truly love these works, and indeed, I was looking forward to them too when each was assigned as part of various literature courses I've taken (and three different courses I took assigned Dr. Zhivago). But I found that each was a book that I didn't enjoy and that I had to force myself to finish.

[Zoff]

I know a lot of people liked this book, but I absolutely hated Interview With The Vampire. I'm a guy who will finish a book when he starts no matter how dry or painful. Yet, I couldn't finish this book despite picking it back up twice. I was less than 75 pages from the end, but couldn't take it.

I really thought I would like this book and had really high hopes, but it sucked. And it wasn't even diminished expectations that soured the book for me. It was the pretentious style of writing. "Look at my stylistic prose. I am so evocative of the senses. Come explore a different time with me as I paint a vivid picture in your imagination."

[Fiver]

The first book that comes to my mind is How to Mutate and Take Over the World by R.U. Sirius and St. Jude :rolleyes:

It was an epistolary novel, consisting mainly of emails between the two authors and their publisher and other people. No, wait, it wasn't a novel; in the authors' words, it was an "exploded post-novel," although they never defined that term.

All through the text were sidebars of varying relevance to the authors' conversation. One of the sidebars was a (negative) review of that very book.

It was a horrible, huge exercise in pointless vanity, and I wanted my money back even though it was a free review copy.

And if the content wasn't bad enough, the design was even worse: purple letters on white paper, in a computer-looking font like you often see in Wired. And again like Wired, it actually, physically hurt the eyes to look at it.

I only got about a third of the way into it. I didn't feel bad at all about reviewing the whole book based on that third; I'm quite certain it didn't improve.

[Winnowill]

Insomnia, by Stephen King. I got maybe a third of the way through it before I gave up. Didn't care about any of the characters, didn't care what was going on with the little bald doctors, hated the storyline. I'm still peeved about the time I wasted on that one.

Moby Dick. I tried. I really did. But I just couldn't make a go of it. After two entire chapters dedicated to the differences in head shape between two different types of whale, I couldn't go on any further. To this day, I don't get how this is great literature.

[Jeep's Phoenix]

The Pushcart Wars. I had to read this book in the 6th grade, and I absolutely hated it. There was no plot--it seemed as though each chapter was written by a different person, and the editor had decided not to check for continuity.

[bobkitty]

Fifth Sacred Thing, by Starhawk. Ugh. Even though I'll never be able to look at military vehicles the same way, I find Starhawk's writing unbelievably tedious. I was propping my eyelids open with toothpicks by the last 100 or so pages.

Witching Hour, by Anne Rice. First 100 pages, good. Last 50 pages, good. Everything else in the middle, like everything that isn't Scottish, was CRAP.

Grapes of Wrath. I have a real hatred for Steinbeck.

Anything by Ernest Hemmingway.

I'll chime in on Wuthering Heights, and raise you a Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and Vindication on the Rights of Women.

-BK

[fiddlesticks]

Last of the Mohicans by James Fennimore Cooper. The 19th Century Tom Clancy. Blech.

[TigoleBitties]

Was behind you all the way till

Originally posted by bobkitty
Grapes of Wrath. I have a real hatred for Steinbeck.

Anything by Ernest Hemmingway.

-BK

Now that stings....The Old Man and the Sea was wonderful and Grapes of Wrath or even Of Mice and Men...brilliance in my eyes

IMHO, Saul Bellow makes me cringe. He is so utterly long winded that getting to the point seems to be a chore for him. And I had to read at least 5 of his books in Advanced Placement Lit because the professor thought ol Bellow pissed genius.

[Baldwin]

My third try at posting this:

I was once suckered into losing three hours of my life by reading The Bridges of Madison County. Possibly the most annoying thing in the book is that the fatuous author keeps telling us the protagonist is brilliant, but the guy never says anything that would be startling coming from the mouth of a tipsy college sophomore. (The most annoying thing about having read this book is the people who won't believe that I hate it because it's so badly written; they're sure I'm just not "romantic". Morons. Same thing happened thirty years ago with Love Story.)

A female friend asked me to read Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus, but I just couldn't finish it. Simplistic crap. (Incidentally, the author, "Dr." John Gray, got his PhD from Columbia Pacific University, a "diploma mill" that has since been shut down.)

Phantoms by Dean Koontz. Sheer formulaic crap. (I should admit that I did watch the crappy movie version on cable. Amusing, the movie retained the book's reference to the human brain as weighing "six pounds". Apparently nobody involved, from Koontz himself, to his editor, to the director, knew how much a brain weighs.)

[Helen's Eidolon]

Two come to mind immediately:

She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb made me throw it down in disgust and pick it back up again 'cause I had no other books to read at least five times.

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad. I just can't say enough bad things about this book. I had to read if for my class this semester. It was pure hell. I'd look up at the clock every five minutes 'cause I was so damned bored.

[Capt. Spaulding]

I'm assuming that this thread'll probably get heaved over to the IMHO soon, but.......

The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice has to be some of the worst fiction ever foisted upon the literate public. Actually, everything she's written after Interview with the Vampire has been pure drivel and it makes one have to reassess the praise and celebrity she received from that first novel.

White Palace by Glenn Savan made my hometown of St. Louis look like a cartoon of itself. I met Savan a few times (he's the ex of a friend) and he's an insufferable, pompous snob. The plot concerns a love affair between a young, wealthy widower and a middle-aged, white trash fast food waitress - presumably it's semi-autobiographical. If Savan was trying to physically demonstrate that the rich are out of touch with the "lower" classes, he succeeded by reducing his "hoosier" (the slang term for white trash in St. Louis) characters as completely one-dimensional. Small wonder he turned out to be the same in real life.

I could never make it past the first 5 pages of Clan of the Cave Bear (can't even remember the author's name for that matter) or Frank Herbert's Dune either. Expect I'll get lambasted by a sci-fi fan for that last one.

[Guinastasia]

Most of you already know this one, but Atlas Shrugged. What a steaming pile THAT was! I weep to think of all the trees that have given their lives to become part of the horror that is Ayn Rand's world. This book made me want to crawl into a hole and hide from the world. It made me hate life and everything in it.


This is Guinastasia speaking to say that John Galt can bite me.

Romeo and Juliet. Yes, I said it. Yawn yawn yawn. Bleh bleh bleh. I think it's evil to make freshmen read this-I was put off of Shakespeare until I read Macbeth.

Anastasia: the Lost Princess by James Blair Lovell. One of the worst pieces of crap I've ever read associated with the Romanovs. The book was flawed, poorly-researched, numorous mistakes and the author treats tin foil conspiracy theories as fact. Laughably depressing.



Speaking of Harlequins (we used to call the really bad ones, "Housewife Porn",), my friends and I would get a bunch out of the library and read the sex parts for shits and giggles.

Hey, remember that one site-the Victorian Sex Cry Generator?

[Guinastasia]

Heh. I found the site-but I'm not linking here, because there was a porn ad at the top.

Although, the weirdest thing-at the bottom is a link to Stoid's site! Doesn't she run Retro Raunch?

[Meatros]

monster-first off it was Mortal Fear. Second off, it was a decent enough book.

Zoff- I have to disagree with you. I didn't find the book too pretentious I thought it was well written (as if that isn't a sign of doom).

Winnowill- I full heartedly agree with you on Insomnia. Let me just say that I had the book on tape and I still couldn't get through the thing. Now that's got to be bad.

As for my own opinion I'd have to give a nomination to a book written after a videogame. I can't even believe I bought the freak'n thing. I forgot the author but it was a book based on Baldur's Gate. If that doesn't take first place in a shit hole filling contest I don't know what does.

[Smeghead]

No competition. Far and away the worst books I've ever read were the Mission Earth series, by L. Ron Hubbard. They were the literary equivalent of the slime that coats the walls of sewer tunnels. They were bad on so many levels - on every level that exists, for that matter. Gah. They were awful. I've never wanted to remove my brain and scrub it except for the day I finished that series.

And I actually subjected myself to all 10 books, out of some perverse desire. I wanted to be able to warn people about it, and I figured I couldn't do that fairly if I hadn't read the whole thing.

[Rubicon]

The Street Lawyer by John Grisham. He was pulling more melodramatic levers than your average episode of Boston Public. Very bad.

[The Tim]

I agree with Atlas Shrugged being one of the biggest pieces of shit ever written. Not so much because of the philosophy but the style of Ayn Rand's writing is barely tolerable and her characters are about as far from real people as you can get.

I hate Ann Rice's writing. I've tried to read a couple of her Vampire Chronicle books and I never get past the first few pages. I flip to middle parts to see if it will get better, it never does and so I return it to the library tempted to buy a copy to burn.

Other than that I generally like the fiction that I read. Even if it isn't particularly good it usually has something I latch onto and find inspiring. Hell even Atlas Shrugged made me think of a really cool trailer for the movie version (if such a thing is ever brought into this world).

[HerMajestyLorna]

I will say it:

I like Ethan Frome! I've read it twice and enjoy it.


Real total and complete crap is Wish You Well by David Baldacci. (.here (http://www.david-baldacci.com/novels/wishwell.htm))The most formulaic, hackneyed story ever. And this is a #1 Best selling author.

I only read it because I had to. It was for school, and he came and visited our class.

I wish I could have those hours back.

David Baldacci--never write another "heartfelt" sotry. Please!

[CrankyAsAnOldMan]

OUCH! It does hurt to see books I enjoyed listed here! I have Last Of the Mohicans in leather, that's how much I loved it. LOL. I liked Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but part of that was being a parent myself.

I'd have to say "Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas" was the most recent horrible book I attempted to read.

I read a Dean Koontz movel a few years back that seemed really bad. It's the only one of his I've read but I got the distinct impression he'd already written 25 just like it and was tired of trying. Can't recall the title, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter.

[Guinastasia]

The scariest thing about L. Ron Hubbard is that a religion was built around his books.

[widdershins]

Ones I finished:

The Fourth K - Mario Puzo. Stupid from beginning to end.

Silas Marner - George Elliot. So dull it hurt to pick it up. Teachers who assign it should be removed from the job.

Puerta Villarta Squeeze - Robert James Waller. So bad I had to imagine it was a straight-to-video film to get through it. A friend loaned it to me after she read a Discworld book I loaned her. So I felt I owed it to her to finish it. The scary thing is it's tied for her favorite book with The Remains of The Day.

Ones I quit:

Interview With The Vampire and The Witching Hour - Anne Rice. I never felt the urge to burn a book until I tried to read these. Is she really that deluded to think this is good or even serious writing?

Bio Of A Space Tyrant Vol. 1 (whatever the title is) - Piers Anthony.
Rape and misogyny...in space...oh joy.

[Guinastasia]

The Witching Hour was probably the only Rice book I actually LIKED. I liked the going back in time parts, the whole history of the Mayfair family. Unfortunately, later on the whole thing about Lasher and the weird race of people who can only live on breast milk was just too bizarre for words. What the hell has this woman been smoking?

[JessEnigma]

Usually, I try to avoid books that I think I won't like. Not too hard--I find a friend with similar tastes and ask their opinion.

The only book that I have ever seriously thought of burning is Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. I don't like Civil War-era novels much as a general rule and the content was just too much.
My 10th grade English teacher assigned the class that one for summer reading. I have to wonder if she actually read the book before she assigned it or just looked at the awards listed. It was entirely inappropriate for a class of high school sophomores.

jessica

[Asylum]

Originally posted by Guinastasia
The scariest thing about L. Ron Hubbard is that a religion was built around his books.
Are you talking about his fiction? As far as I know the basis of the religion has nothing to do with his sci-fi novels but with Dianetics and assorted other books he wrote that detail the (supposed) path to mental health and IIRC detail how we all came to Earth from a race of aliens or something. Hmm, come to think of it that does sound like sci-fi, but they believe it.

[Duke]

Chesapeake by James Michener. I read it for a book report in 10th grade, and hatedhatedhated it. The last sentence of my report was something like, "This book is too long, and life is too short to read it."

[Jabba]

Interview With a Vampire and Salem's Lot. These marked the end of my attempts to "keep up with popular authors".

[MusicJunkie]

Well, as it has been said Mission to Earth sucks. Not only does it suck but it also blows, at the same time! In my whole life I have never even heard of so much drivel put togeter in a book.

Robin Cook also had one that I think was called abduction or something like it that was pure garbage. Inspired by nice feelings but still garbage.

Dean Koontz's From the Corner of the Eye is amazingly, incredibly bad.

Anne Rice's vampire chronicles are bearable until The Bodysnatcher or whatever the name of the one about the guy that steals bodies is. And The Witching Hour wasn't completly without its positive points. The rest is shit. Pompous, longwinded, self-conscious shit.

Heinlen's final novels were bad.

Philip K. Dick's VALIS is so bad it made me depressed.

And you people that criticized Fitzgerald and Moby Dick are crazy:D .

[Minor Irritant]

Don Quixote , by Cervantes.

Take the entire run of Seinfeld. Leave it for five hundred years, and translate it into a different language. Not funny? Neither is Don Quixote.

If I were Spanish, or lived in the 1500s, it might be funny. But I'm not, and it's not.

Additionally, it's too damn long, and seems to wander off on tangents which have nothing to do with the rest of the book.

Stupid windmills.

[Merhouse]

Originally posted by MusicJunkie

Heinlen's final novels were bad.



Aha! That's who it was! I can't remember the name of the book, but after struggling through about 400 pages and not understanding anything that was going on, I thought I had finally figured it out till I got to about page 475, 20 pages to go, when I realized I still didn't get it. I put it down, never finished it, and never looked back.

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest ;)

Mike

[DrFidelius]

_Titan_ by Stephen Baxter. About the attempt by a group of misfits to use all of our shuttles (and the Saturn Vs presently being used as lawn ornaments) to reach the Saturn system. For some reason.

The people left on Earth don't see any point to the expedition so they don't bother shipping the extra supplies. So everybody dies. Not that I liked any of them to begin with. But then two of them get resurrected. Don't know why or how.

Oh, and about three quarters of the way through the book we learn that the Chinese developed their own space program for the express purpose of dropping an Alvarez-type impactor onto Earth. They do this, and everybody on Earth dies (including bacteria, apparently since the only examples of Earth-life the Titanians can find in the Far Future are the aforementioned dead astronauts who they clone or something which includes their memories). Sorry, but he couldn't even make the complete extinction of the biosphere interesting, nor didhe even hint that the Chinese might have had a motive for doing it. Except for being inscrutable, or something.

Sorry for being so long-winded, but this book stuck in my craw.

Oh, and _Moby Dick_ is one of the five best books I have ever read.

[Netbrian]

I read Ethan Frome and hated every word of the piece of tripe. Same goes for Great Expectations. My desires to read any more of Charles Dickens' work is completely and utterly quashed.

Most Christopher Stasheff novels.

BTW, could someone define Harlequin Romance for me? *gives puppy dog eyes*

[CalMeacham]

Some of the worst "cience fction" books:

The Null Frequency Impulser (can't recall the author -- but it's bad)

Cataclysm! by Don Pendleton

Galaxy 666 by Pel Torro. In fact, just about anything by this guy, under his zillion aliases, is pretty awful. But Galaxy 666 shows off his crack-open-the-thesaurus-so -I -can-pad-my-word-count style better than most

[Winnowill]

Hmm. All the ranting about Anne Rice brings up another one. I can't BELIEVE I forgot it the first time around, as it was the worst glurge I've ever read.

Violin. I couldn't even sell it to the used bookstore, because they already had more copies than they could stock. I finished it, though. I don't know why. Morbid curiosity, I suppose.

Actually, a book has to be actively boring or distasteful for me NOT to finish it. Even when I'm not crazy about the story I still usually want to know how it turns out. It's sad when I don't care how it ends. But, there is another one I thought of that I didn't bother to finish: Edward Rutherford's London. Boring, boring, boring.

[Kat]

A fantasy novel called The Unlikely Ones and I can't remember the author. I managed to struggle through to the end of the second to the last chapter and then just put it down and never picked it up again. And I can usually manage to read completely through anything, no matter how bad it is, but I cared so little for the characters that even that close to the end I couldn't force myself to continue and find out how it ended.

[Glory]

Piers Anthony trilogy: Bio of a Space Tyrant
Stephen King: Desperation, The Regulators, Dreamcatcher
Dean Koontz: That book where the guy can only come out at night and talks like a surfer dude
Stephen R. Donaldson: The Gap Into Ruin (series...sooo depressing)
Laurell K. Hamilton: Narcissus in Chains (laughably bad in a goofy soft core porn way)

[CalMeacham]

I have to add these Classics:

A Separate Peace -- had to read this one twice for chool

A Death in the Family by James Agee

Anything by Henry James, the Man Who Does not now How to End a Sentence. He managed to make a ghost story boring (Turn of the Screw)! I especially hate The Beast in the Jungle. Nothing happens in this book. The whole point of this book is that nothing happens. But it takes so damned long to not happen!

[KarlGrenze]

Well, my personal book for worst book I've read goes to:

Death Be Not Proud (yes, the book, not the poem)

Made me talk to my parents and make them promise NEVER write a book about me if I die young and of some horrible or incurable way, like cancer.



Don Quijote - I liked the novel. Remember, the whole story are his adventures as a knight and his delusions, so the windmills are part of the story.

I'm with Guinastasia about The Witching Hour . I liked that book, and even Lasher a bit, but the last book of the series was too much. It made the effort put by people on the first book useless!!!

[Lamia]

I'll second The Bridges of Madison County. My mother bought a copy when it was popular (she ended up hating it too), and I read it to see what all the fuss was about. The "all the ships that ever went to sea" passage was so bad that I just had to call up my best friend and read it aloud to her.

I liked Clan of the Cave Bear, but barely made it through the sequel, Valley of the Horses. It was a Paleolithic Harlequin! I hoped that the third book (The Mammoth Hunters) might be better, but gave up after the first couple of chapters.

To the Resurrection Station is a thankfully obscure sci-fi novel that my sister picked up at a secondhand bookstore. It's about a young lesbian on some futuristic colony on another planet who goes back to Earth with a robot inhabited by the spirit of her grandfather so he can get a new body from some sort of ancient and abandoned cryogenic station there. Along the way they meet a giant talking rat who comes along so he can get a human body too. They get the new bodies...and that's it. They just go home. That's the whole plot. But just to make it creepy as well as bad, right towards the end the author has to mention that the heroine finds herself attracted to both grandpa (now in the body of a young woman) and the rat (now in the body of a young man).

More recently, I checked out a library copy of The Hunger. I had seen the movie and enjoyed it, although it wasn't really very good. I figured the book would probably be a lot better. Was I ever wrong. Whoever adapted the novel for the screen must have been a genius, because they managed to turn a stunningly bad book into a film that was merely mediocre. The book has some of the least appealing sex scenes I've ever read, and the main character, despite being described as a supersmart vampire with thousands of years of experience under her belt, displays all the intelligence of a stapler. Whitney Streiber deserved to be abducted by aliens after writing this.

[ITR champion]

Originally posted by The Tim
I agree with Atlas Shrugged being one of the biggest pieces of shit ever written. Not so much because of the philosophy but the style of Ayn Rand's writing is barely tolerable and her characters are about as far from real people as you can get.


I can't argue with that one. When I left for college, my Dad ordered me never to read this book. If I had listened, I would have saved about fifteen hours of time and a lot of mental anguish.

I'm quite surprised that nobody has yet mentioned The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People . It has got to be the most annoying collection of English language words ever assembled. I don't have a clue how it topped the best-seller list for several months.

I've read a lot of science fiction. My worst memory is of a book called Freedom's Landing by Anne McCaffrey. It's about aliens who attack Earth in gigantic spaceships and abduct a bunch of human beings, then drop them on an uninhabited planet. The next 400 pages deal mostly with people walking around and commenting on the scenery. None of the plot lines are resolved in the end (probably because the author wants you to buy the sequel). And it features a jarringly bad inter-species sex scene.

[Fern Forest]

Oliver Twist. Maybe I was just too young but that was so damn boring and excruciating.

[Bryan Ekers]

Originally posted by CalMeacham
Galaxy 666 by Pel Torro. In fact, just about anything by this guy, under his zillion aliases, is pretty awful. But Galaxy 666 shows off his crack-open-the-thesaurus-so -I -can-pad-my-word-count style better than most [/B]
By the seven green moons of Gongle, you didn't like this book? To be fair, I couldn't even finish it, myself.

John Vornholt's War Drums is easily the worst Star Trek novel I'd ever read, and one of the worst overall. It's the only book I've ever tossed into a recycle bin instead of giving it away, because I believed it would better serve being mashed into pulp than wasting another person's time.

[Yookeroo]

Something by David Eddings. It was just so generic that I can't remember anything abou ti.

[Mephisto]

Two of Dean Koontz's three novels suck. I can forgive Stephen King for Hearts In Atlantis because he was getting burned out and had medical problems, but surely somebody at the publishing company should have stopped this one. Almost everything I ever encountered that was written by a Russian was terrible (maybe Russian just doesn't translate into English well?). I've never been able to finish either a Romance or a Western.

Originally posted by ITR champion

I'm quite surprised that nobody has yet mentioned The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People . It has got to be the most annoying collection of English language words ever assembled. I don't have a clue how it topped the best-seller list for several months.


I have two clues. One, people like my former boss, the president of [I'm scared of slander], who orders hundreds of copies of this book a year and then forces all his employees to read it during these semi-regular "corporate improvement classes." And two, Oprah really likes Stephen R. Covey.

[SoulFrost]

Interesting tidbit related by my third-year Creative Writing prof, which may or may not be true: Atlas Shrugged was written as a parody of the typical fiction of the day--but nobody got the joke, and it became a best-seller.

If true, perhaps you'll like the book better in that context.


My absolute least-favorite novel: Black House, the supposed the sequel to The Talisman by King and Straub.

I first read The Talisman as a seventeen-year-old who had only recently been exposed to the Fantasy and Horror genres...and I totally fell in love with it.

About sixteen years later, this abortion called Black House comes out, so I simply HAD to read it.

Which I did.

And it sucked.

Hardcore.

I wanted Wolf and the Territories and the Queen and Jack..what I got was another of King's ass-dragging tales about that damned Tower.

I have never burned a book in my life...but upon finishing page 625--God!--I was tempted....

-David

[Steve Wright]

I'm going to try to be virtuous here, and resist the temptation to list books as "bad" just because I didn't like them. For example, I'll grit my teeth and allow that there are good things about Henry James. I can't see what they are, I find James totally unreadable - after about thirty pages of any James book, if I'm still awake, it's because I'm yelling "For God's sake, will something please happen! Something! Anything!" But others (including James Thurber, a writer I respect) read and appreciate James, so I suppose he must have something going for him.

Most books that have a reputation and a following have them for a reason... which doesn't mean that everyone has to like them, but does suggest that they have some good qualities. Really bad books are generally obscure... deservedly so. Somebody already mentioned Galaxy 666, by "Pel Torro", better known as the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe. The only reason people know about this book is because it's part of Fanthorpe's famous (in SF circles) output (he signed a contract with a very low-quality publisher that required him to produce books at an insane rate). If it wasn't associated with such a well-known figure, Galaxy 666 would have been printed, remaindered, and never heard of again.

So, I'll list the worst book I've ever read. It's The Evangelist, by Saul Dunn. It's nominally SF, it's the third and last book in an abortive series, and I'm fairly confident that none of you will ever have heard of it, or its author, before. Why? Because it's total rubbish, that's why, and it sank without a trace into well-deserved obscurity. And may all of its ilk do the same.

[Eliahna]

Mistlewaite - the "sequel" to The Secret Garden.

[Guinastasia]

If only it were a parody. But all of Rand's books are like that, and the woman had no sense of humor whatsoever, as far as I can tell.

[sidle]

I'll see your Bridges of Madison County and raise you The Rules.
Although it did make me laugh, so I guess it was good in a comedic way.. .
I'll also add American Psycho, anything by freakin' Hawthorne
(snooze), and a book by Ann Rice's son Christoher Rice. Don't know remember care what the title was, but it was a vampire book similar to his mother's writing. Apparently, Christopher Rice is gay. That is great. If he's happy, I'm happy. However, the whole book dripped of homosexual references and scenes until I really felt like I was reading gothic gay soft porn. Which maybe I was, but the jacket did not indicate this. I had no problem with it, except that it seemed silly, overdone, and shoved in your face. Like the show Ellen *after* she came out. Anyone know this book?

[unwashed brain]

Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind.

[Knowed Out]

Mad Merlin by J. Robert King. Avoid this book at all costs. I picked it up because I thought it'd be like A.A. Attanasio's retelling of the Arturian myths, and I thought it'd be interesting to see another author's take on it.

Shoulda known better. The entire book is a series of vignettes about Merlin and his hijinks. Mainly, he eats a lot, acts crazy, and has story book magical adventures with his faithful sidekick, Arthur. There is no plot. King probably assumed he didn't need to devote any effort to plot since surely everbody's already familiar with knights and wizards and stuff. There's lots of neato keeno D&D type fireballs and lightning bolts and junior high-level literary special effects, but no story.

I think there was one chapter where Merlin made a horse for preteen Arthur out of clouds and they went and fought reanimated roman statues in some ruins somewhere. I stopped after that. I assume if I had read any further, Morgan LeFey would have appeared in a house made out of gingerbread and flying around on a broom.

Maybe the book was marketed towards kids, but it sure weren't for sale in the kindergarten section.

[booklover]

Originally posted by cazzle
Mistlewaite - the "sequel" to The Secret Garden.

There can't be two heinous sequels out there--are you sure you don't mean "Return to the Secret Garden" by Susan Moody?

Two other much-despised books: "The Chocolate War" by Robert Cormier (technically a children's/young adult book, but I work for a kid's literacy org & read lots of children's books) and anything by Deborah Tannen (had to read for communications classes in college).

[crazy4chaucer]

I detested Vanity Fair , by Thackeray. I tried about 6 times to get past the first chapter, then finally gave up and tossed it in the pile for the used book store.

And despite being a rabid Shakespeare lover, I totally detest "Romeo & Juliet." Had Prozac existed back then, this truly heinous play would never have been written.

[Estilicon]

All the latest books by Anne Rice and Tom Clancy are horrible. I don't know if the Brazilian Author Paulo Coelho is known outside the region but he ought be shot.
I don't care that Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a nobel prize he sucks (except "a hundred years of solitude" and "Chronicle of an announced death")
Stephen King is in my "I wish he were abackstreet boy" list. He is not funny, not creepy (well his phot is) I don't know why people red his stuff.

[Drastic]

Piers Anthony, Killobyte, was the first truly bad book I ever forced myself to finish, and so it still stands out in memory.

Tabitha King (wife of Stephen, and based on the one book read, only published because of that) wrote some execrable thing that involved women being abducted via Shrink Ray and forced to live in dollhouses. I can't recall the title.

[Politzania]

I don't know about WORST book - but I did not like "Tess of the D'Ubervilles". I'm not a big fan of 19th-century novels in general, and this one seemed triter than most.

The really bad thing was I had to *teach* it in a 1-semester high-school Brit Lit class. I had to hide my Cliff Notes from the students.... :D

I do like Ayn Rand ...in small doses. I was first exposed to her as a high school senior - much too impressionable at that age.
I spent most of that summer scouring used book stores for her and Vonnegut's books.

I'm surprised my brain didn't implode.

[Kantalooppi]

Originally posted by SoulFrost
Atlas Shrugged was written as a parody of the typical fiction of the day--but nobody got the joke, and it became a best-seller.

Actually, my current half-serious theory is that Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged as a parody of Robert Tressell's Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. I had first read Atlas Shrugged and greatly disliked it, and then read Ragged Trousered Philantropists (I think someone from this board suggested it to Guinastasia when she was reading Atlas Shrugged). While there's a low "I've read this before, but horribly twisted and contorted" vibe going on throughout the book, what really got this theory going was this passage:

Originally written by Robert Tressell
The men work with their hands, and the masters work with their brains. What a dreadful calamity it would be for the world and for mankind if all these brain workers were to go on a strike.

[CalMeacham]

Somebody already mentioned Galaxy 666, by "Pel Torro", better known as the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe. The only reason people know about this book is because it's part of Fanthorpe's famous (in SF circles) output (he signed a contract with a very low-quality publisher that required him to produce books at an insane rate). If it wasn't associated with such a well-known figure, Galaxy 666 would have been printed, remaindered, and never heard of again.

No, I',m afraid I can't buy that explanation.

If you go to the Fanthorpe website (God help us, there's a website devoted to this man's abysmal output!), you'll see that the book has been reprinted at least three times!!!!!

I can accept contractual obligation for the thing getting into printonce. But to have this damned thing reprinted multiple times means that either somebody likes it, or someone is a sadist. My god, some poor book designers actually had to sit down and come up with new covers for the reprints! The book wasn't even worth one[ cover.




I'm convinced that Fanthorpe's purpose in the universe is to give hope to the Unpublished. As in "Well, if he can get published, then anyone can get published!" Worked for me.

[RiverRunner]

One of the few mercies of having a terrible memory is that recollection of lousy books tends to go by the wayside. Still, there are a couple of stinker I vaguel recall:

Aztec by someone I can't remember. It started out OK, but I got less enchanted with it the further it went. I finally put it down and only picked it back up to put it in the trash.

Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Danieken(sp?). It was at least mildly amusing, though.


Someone mentioned The Pushcart War. I must have read that one twenty or more yeears ago. I enjoyed it immensely at the time.

I have liked several of Stephen King's books -- including Salem's Lot -- but I ran into the same problems with Insomnia that someone else did. It's gathering dust now.


RR

[RiverRunner]

. . . and I had never even heard until this thread.


RR

[slortar]

Pamela. In all my years of education, I hadn't read anything that made me hurl the book across the room more than 3 times. I finally just gave up on the last 100 pages.

[RiverRunner]

I mean, I had never heard of Fanthorpe until this thread.

I think it's time for a lie down.


RR

[Infovore]

The worst book I've ever read is "The Legend of Rah and the Muggles," by Nancy K. ("N. K.") Stouffer.

This is the children's book at the center of a lawsuit against "Harry Potter" author J. K. Rowling--Stouffer claims Rowling stole her ideas, including the word "muggle" which she claims to have trademarked.

Rowling has *nothing* to worry about. "Rah and the Muggles" is badly written, badly edited, the characters are boring and one-dimensional, and the book itself is not appropriate for any age group--the language is too convoluted for little kids and the story is too...well, *bad* for anybody.

If you don't believe me, check out her website at realmuggles.com--she's got an excerpt up on her site.

[meyer]

The Pearl by John Steinbeck - usually I don't mind Steinbeck, but this was the most boring and pointless thing I have ever read. It is truly amazing that this much banality could be packed into a book that can't be more than 100 pages long.

The Empty Space by Peter Brook - This is supposed to be a great theatre book filled with insightful wisdom, but I thought it was horrible. The author spends several pages at one point talking about how he did not choose to become a director, it was a duty thrust upon him, and he must bravely soldier on despite the pressures of being a god-like figure to actors the world over. Gah. Bleah. After reading this, I would be tempted to say that Peter Brook is the most pretentious person that ever lived.

If it weren't for...

How I Grew by Mary McCarthy - she actually is the most pretentious person that ever lived. This whole book is so filled with self-absorbed drivel from start to finish as to be almost humourous. She goes on and on about how hard her life was, and every second sentence mentions how intelligent she was and how she was such a special child. This is the only book I have ever read that has made me actively angry at the author. It was so bad, I read it twice just to see if I was missing something the first time. Also, I would like to point out that Mary McCarthy has a son named Reuel, which I think is a pretentious name.

[Winnowill]

Originally posted by RiverRunner
Aztec by someone I can't remember. It started out OK, but I got less enchanted with it the further it went. I finally put it down and only picked it back up to put it in the trash.
Gary Jennings. There's a sequel. (I haven't read either of them, but a friend LOVED Aztec.)

[BurnMeUp]

I used to really like Douglas Coupland... especially Microserfs and Generation X... but lately his stuff has become a festering pool of crappy hippie whining. I just can't stand it anymore. Especially Postcards from the Dead.

[MrAtoz]

I've mentioned this book before in another thread, but it bears repeating. He Came To Set the Captives Free. I've forgotten the author's name, but she is (or claims to be) a medical doctor.

The horribleness of this work is explained when you look at the verso of the title page, and note the words "Jack Chick Publications." Basically, our intrepid doctor/author became aware that the administrators of the hospital where she worked were Satanists, and were sacrificing patients to their dark master. She couldn't go to the police, because they were in on it too! She couldn't even trust her pastor, because even he was a Satanist. Thus she was alone, battling the forces of darkness with only the power of Christ to help her.

Her grip on reality can be judged by the chapter in which, while driving home from work one dark night, she was attacked by a werewolf (you heard me, a werewolf), sent by Satan to kill her because she'd interfered with his evil plans once too often.

I wish I thought this book was a joke, but it reads as if she believes every last word she's written. Maybe that doesn't really qualify as the worst book I've read, but it's certainly the scariest.

[Jeep's Phoenix]

Originally posted by winterhawk11
The worst book I've ever read is "The Legend of Rah and the Muggles," by Nancy K. ("N. K.") Stouffer.

I read the excerpt.

I wish I hadn't.

How does this woman think anyone could mistake that load of bullpoo for Rowling's work? The illustrations (shudder) alone are enough to let you know that this isn't Harry Potter.

[ITR champion]

Originally posted by slortar
Pamela. In all my years of education, I hadn't read anything that made me hurl the book across the room more than 3 times. I finally just gave up on the last 100 pages.

I've never understood why Pamela is so thoroughly despised. From my Eighteenth Century British lit class, all I remember thinking is that it was a lot better than Moll Flanders. I've always just assumed that Daniel Defoe was hired to churn out rubbish at fifty cents per page and that the idea of having an editor proofread the story hadn't yet caught on in those days.

[Globe-trotter]

Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being left me bitterly disappointed. I had really been looking forward to sinking my teeth into it, but alas there wasn't much to sink my teeth into. You know you're in trouble when the only character you like is Karenin the dog. I've been told that his best novel is Immortality but I don't care, he's on my 'Never again' list.

As is Henry James. I tried reading a few of his novels and ended up tossing the damn things. Life is too short to suffer like that.

There are others, but I can't think of them at the moment.

[Shayna]

I have never read a more vile or disgusting book than Lawrence Sanders' The Case of Lucy Bending. It's child pornography/pedophilia disguised as an adult erotic thriller. This putrid pig actually writes descriptive sexual scenes between an 8 year old girl and grown, adult men. The book ends when the child is willingly (yes, he makes this child a sex maniac!) giving a blow job to a man in her parents' kitchen and someone (I can't recall who) comes in, sees what's going on and shoots both the girl and the man. I wish he'd've shot the author. I was seething angry when I finished that book, and certain that Sanders was a twisted f*** who should be institutionalized for even coming up with that kind of garbage. I feel dirty just typing about it. <shudder>

The Horse Whisperer also sucked. There was basically no horse "whispering". It was mostly about a lame, self-centered, bored, middle class housewife who cheats on her loving husband in front of her child, then has his love child and makes her husband raise it (because he wouldn't dare suggest that the ho-bag twit be thrown to the curb for her adultery - he's too nice of a guy). Thoroughly disgusting book. I wish I'd never read it.

Weaveworld by Clive Barker. It's about a world of people (or creatures, or whatever) who live in a rug. 'nuff said.


___________________
I really appreciate your consideration in avoiding stepping on my penis - Spiny Norman
© Jeg elsker dig, Thomas ©

[Johanna]

My vote is a three-way tie between A Separate Peace (forced to read it in high school), Lord of the Flies (ditto), and The Magus (world's longest shaggy-dog story).

I read The Magus only a few years ago out of curiosity. John Fowles toys with the reader the way the Greek sadist toys with the novel's narrator. Eventually you realize that the mental torment he's putting the poor patsy through on that island is a metaphor for the mental torment the novelist is inflicting on the reader. Knowles had a great idea for a ripping good story. But instead of admitting he didn't know how to write it, he went ahead and produced a hugely bad novel out of sheer contempt for the reader. He keeps teasing you that the payoff is just around the corner but after 656 pages the payoff never comes. He couldn't even write an ending for it! The stupid book just stops with no ending.

I welcome this chance to get back at John Knowles, John Fowles, and the rest for the dreary crap they put me through.

What's all this about Ethan Frome? I never heard of it apart from everyone at the SDMB unanimously slamming it.

I read The Pushcart War when I was maybe 9 years old. I don't remember it being disjointed in style. I totally dug the plot of the little guys banding together to get the big guys. It was fun.

[Atreyu]

I had to read Tess of the D'Urbervilles for a college class. Wanted to kill the professor after I finished it. A total waste of my time.

Anne Rice's The Vampire Armand remains to this day the only book I ever threw into the trash can. Oftentimes if there's a book I don't plan on keeping anymore I'll either sell it at the used books store or donate it to the library. But I could not, in good conscience, contribute to the merest possibility that this book could be inflicted upon another reader. Complete and utter shite.

[lorinada]

I can't believe I had to get to the second page before Hearts in Altantis was mentioned. It sprung to mind just upon seeing the thread title. Way too wordy even for Steven King, and absolutely no connection between the first, second and third parts, except for that Carol kid, who was only a minor character in each part. This book was definitely going to get my vote.....

And then Drastic reminded me of Killobyte. I am diabetic, and I can tell you, for all the bragging that author did on the amount of diabetics he interviewed for his research, he still did not get one aspect of this disease correct. Booster shot? What the hell is that? And why was that girl named after a devil? And she wouldn't have crashed if she had bothered to do what most people do after they take a shot - EAT!

Of course, I, too, have to include anything by Dean Koontz. If that's all the talent it takes to become a millionaire best-selling author, then I missed my calling.

[sjc]

Originally posted by Guinastasia

Romeo and Juliet. Yes, I said it. Yawn yawn yawn. Bleh bleh bleh. I think it's evil to make freshmen read this-I was put off of Shakespeare until I read Macbeth.


I don't know if anyone has objected to this yet, but I just have to disagree with you. The High School Shakespeare I read tended to be boring because either the textbook edited things out and so it made less sense or they weren't presented well by the teachers. I guess everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I think Romeo and Juliet was pretty good. Better, in some ways, than Macbeth. This is all my opinioin, of course, but I have to take exception to Romeo and Juliet being among the worst you have ever read.

[Kaitlyn]

Hmmmmmmm. What is it that makes a bad book bad? Is it merely poor writing, or is being actively offensive? Is a book that demostrates a competence in the craft of writing, but is unbearably offensive bad? How about books that are competently or even well written, but have a severely flawed ending that leaves you disappointed. I've read books that I didn't care for that were nonetheless competently written and which I would hesitate to label bad simply on the basis of my disliking them. I don't care for Faulkner, but that's a matter of his style not interacting well with my personal taste in literature; I recognize the deep talent he posessed and can understand why he is so admired.

Several of my favorite books are listed here. I consider Lord of the Flies one of the great novels of the 20th century. My students and I both love The Pushcart War; it's a little easy for the gifted 5th graders I teach, but it's so useful as a tool for teaching tone that I can't leave it out of my curriculum. I find The Chocolate War compelling; it's a good introduction to the concept of literary tragedy, though I tend to prefer I Am the Cheese. I like A Separate Peace a lot. I think Steinbeck is a god.

My personal choice: Let's Go Play at the Adams by Mendel Johnson. I read this one summer during college. A college girl is babysitting three children in the Adams family, little Bobby and Cindy and their older sister during the summer. So that they can "have some fun" unhampered by adult authority, they use some chlorofom from their father's office (he's a doctor) to knock her out, intending to keep her tied up for a few days then release her. They, and a teenage boy neighbor, proceed to keep her bound and gagged, stripped naked, for a week, using her as a toy to be played with, gradually escalating to torture and rape. They finish by tying the girl naked to a fence post and torturing her to death with a red-hot fire-place poker. They frame a homeless Hispanic drifter for the crime and get away with it, without even feeling very guilty about it.

My hatred for this book know no bounds. It isn't enough that the book itself is thinly disguised bondage porn. Johnson goes out of his way to make it worse by giving the victim a chance to escape (by injuring the little girl during a bathroom trip), which she fails to capitalize on (she's too weak to do what's necessary to save herself, so she is partly at fault). He implies that once the first step was taken (cloroforming and tying up the girl) the rest was an inevitible progression which could have happened with any similar group of kids, and that they were basically good kids who just got a little carried away in a situation kids are ready to handle. The girl wasn't the victim of an unspeakable act of evil, she was just unlucky.

All this isn't enough, though. I would remember the book as offensive, but would hardly have this vivid, unreasonable hatred of it 20 years later were it not for the last chapter. The final chapter deals with what might have become of the girl's soul as a result of her death, in which it is implied that she may be eternally mute and immoble because of how her life ended.

Maybe not the worst book I've read--I've read books that showed less competent craft--but certainly the book I dislike the most. The truly badly written books I tend to discard unfinished and forget. There are too many good books out there waiting to be read to waste time on the bad ones.

[tesseract]

I know this has turned up on best books lists, but I HATED Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. Idiotic, uninteresting, narcissistic drivel.

Anything by John Grisham...apparently he doesn't bother with character development, description of anything, correct grammar, or tying plot lines together. The only thing he can do is think up a somewhat entertaining story.

I liked Interview With a Vampire and I didn't mind Lestat either (then again I was in high school), but what I truly hated was one of Rice's attempts at erotica. I think it was called The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. I rather liked her descriptions of blood-sucking in Interview -- they seemed somehow erotic, so I thought she'd be good at the genre. Maybe some would have liked it, but it was like reading a book about torture. Some serious S&M there, and it wasn't erotic at all.

I love that so many people hate Atlas Shrugged. She's so subtle, though -- was she trying to promote a philosophy or something?

[tetsusaru]

The Waterworks, by E L Doctorow. I like most of his books, but this was so dull and dry it was like being forced to eat plates of chalk. How anyone could take a story about a cabal of 19th century robber barons faking their own deaths and paying a mad doctor to prolong their lives by abducting children and draining them of their vital juices {the children`s, not the robber barons`} and make it stupefyingly boring is beyond my feeble ken. I counted, and one thing happened every 25 pages. The rest was taken up by turgid metaphorising about the city as emblem of the human capacity for cruelty and greed: then it all ends at the titular waterworks, which symbolises redemption or the importance of personal hygiene or something. The steam-powered lesbian robot assassins were quite good. though.

[RiverRunner]

I liked The Waterworks; at least, I liked a lot of Doctorow's phrasing in the book. He can put some beautiful sentences down on paper. It was a very slow book, though. I haven't bought anything else by him since reading that. Maybe I should give him another shot.


Re: Aztec: I'm glad your friend, liked it, Winnowill. It probably was not as bad a book as some that have been mentioned; it may have been that it just didn't suit my taste. Of course, I didn't read enough of it to decide.


RR

[ivylass]

Now, that's too bad. I liked Atlas Shrugged, although I think Rand could have written it in about half the pages.

Black House by Stephen King...I LOATHE books written in present tense, and to boot, it was also written in the second person. Very VERY hard to get into, but I finished it because, well, it IS Stephen King. If I had to list one book I thought was a waste of time by him it would be The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. It seemed rather pointless.

I read the first few Wizard's First Rule books by Goodkind...didn't get to Faith of the Fallen, I lost interest in it.

But my number one, top of the heap, most hated book would be The Bear by Faulkner. I had to read it in high school and I never got past the first chapter. Stream of consciousness sucks. I did like A Rose for Emily though.

Life's too short to read bad books...I have no compunction slamming a book shut if I'm bored with it or disgusted with the storyline.

[slortar]

Originally posted by ITR champion


I've never understood why Pamela is so thoroughly despised. From my Eighteenth Century British lit class, all I remember thinking is that it was a lot better than Moll Flanders. I've always just assumed that Daniel Defoe was hired to churn out rubbish at fifty cents per page and that the idea of having an editor proofread the story hadn't yet caught on in those days.

My brain is actually suppressing the memories. The reasons that (immediately) come to mind are the glacial pacing, lack of strong characters and the preachy overtones. Moreover, the shift when Pamela's suitor goes from beyond an abductor/would-be filandering rapist to the very epitome of a suitable husband drove me over the edge. I strongly suspect the plot was derived by flipping coins.

At least Moll Flanders had a strong main character and a few laugh-out-loud moments. At the very least, it was interesting to read about the dark and sordid details of her life.

In my opinion, the only good thing I got out of Pamela was the ability to read Shamela afterwards and get all of the jokes.

[cleops]

I am so heartened that at least two people mentioned Stephen King, who seems to have such a convinced following, as among the 'worst'. I have never been able to get past page 15 without feeling that I am REALLY wasting my time. It's not so much that it's boring, but that it's so cheezy (as in, hmm, a sort of with-it high school junior is putting has hand to pen). I'd rather be bored by Ethan Frome and Moby Dick.
Of course, I haven't bothered to pick up King book for 18 years. Maybe he's gotten better?

[shelbo]

Originally posted by Estilicon
All the latest books by Anne Rice and Tom Clancy are horrible

They are both suffering from Stephen King disease - they've gotten so big that they've stopped listening to their editors (or their editors are too terrified of them to try to edit their books). So you get pages of repetition and mental mastrubation. I liked Interview With a Vampire, I liked Hunt for Red October, but I'll probably never read any more of the new stuff. Stephen King I've also given up on (of course, I'll read all of the remaining Dark Tower books!!).

[astorian]

It never fails- something like Titanic," or "Gladiator." It's almost always a film that was highly successful and/or highly acclaimed.

Ask for the worst song of all time, and you'll invariably hear the name of a multi-platinum hit single ("Don't Worry, Be Happy," "Billy Don't Be a Hero," "My Heart Will Go On").

Now, even people who hated "Gladiator" will usually admit that it wasn't REALLY the worst movie ever. But one just feels compelled to say such things when something we dislike is just so dang POPULAR!

Truth to tell, the worst movie ever made is undoubtedly something that wasn't even good enough to find a distributor, and the worst song of all time is being played in a dingy club by a band you've never heard of.

The worst books ever written are ones we've never read... or that we put down in boredom and disgust after a few pages, and promptly forgot about. However, as expected, virtually everyone who's posted has named a book that sold millions of copies or that's widely regarded as a "classic."

Hey look, I was tempted to name Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections." NOT because it was a horrible novel. In truth, it's just a so-so novel. Still, I was tempted to choose that one, simply because every literary critic on earth overrated it unforgiveably, and because Franzen himself struck me as a pompous jerk.

*

Still, since everybody else is naming famous, popular books (rather than the unknown books that are REALLY the most wretched), I'll be a sheep, and follow suit. The worst POPULAR book I ever read was "Who Moved My Cheese."

Not just because the pop philosophy was so annoying.

Not just because the underlying message is repulsive (i.e. that anyone who expects loyalty or stability in his relationships or at work is a whiney rat).

But mainly because that super-short book, consisting of fortune cookie philosophy, cost as much as a brtand new, hardcover bes seller.

[Winnowill]

Originally posted by cleops
I am so heartened that at least two people mentioned Stephen King, who seems to have such a convinced following, as among the 'worst'. I have never been able to get past page 15 without feeling that I am REALLY wasting my time. It's not so much that it's boring, but that it's so cheezy (as in, hmm, a sort of with-it high school junior is putting has hand to pen). I'd rather be bored by Ethan Frome and Moby Dick.
Of course, I haven't bothered to pick up King book for 18 years. Maybe he's gotten better?

Well...

I read The Green Mile after I saw the movie - it finally made me break the vow I had made after finishing Thinner years before. Thinner's ending made me so very angry that I said I'd never read another King book until I had a damn good reason to do so. So I read The Green Mile, which was really well-done, well-written, and a great story. So I thought I'd venture a little farther and read The Stand, since I had enjoyed the miniseries so much. Blew me away. Figuring that I had give Mr King a bad rap all those years and that I had missed something fantastic, I purchased a whole buncha King novels at the used bookstore, and started reading. Needful Things - eh...maybe he was in a slump. Rita Hayworth & The Shawshank Redemption, one of my favorite movies - where the hell is the rest of the plot? Good, but...what the hell? Dolores Claiborne. Hmm. This is really pretty dull. Misery. I hate this. Why am I putting myself through this? Do I really care? Insomnia. Nope. I'm done. That's it, I've had enough. Taking back Rose Madder, It, and any others I have around.

Now I just figure that The Stand and The Green Mile are the only excellence in the sea of mediocrity that is Stephen King.

[Baldwin]

I might as well add The Tommyknockers by Stephen King. King really shouldn't try to write science fiction. He has a bright six-year-old's belief that if you take a bunch of junk from the hardware store and solder it together in the right order and attach it to a train set transformer, you'll have a time machine or antigravity. (In King'd defense, according to his book On Writing, he wrote The Tommyknockers while out of his mind on coke.) Now, when King is really on his game, he can be a damned good storyteller, and certainly thinks of stuff that Dean Koontz would never come up with.

(Scene from the cartoon Family Guy: a van runs over a figure on a country road. "Oh my God, we ran over Stephen King!" "No, that's Dean R. Koontz." And the van backs up and runs over him again.)

Timeline by Michael Chricton. The author supposedly spent months doing research in France, yet seems to know less about the 14th century than I do. After thirty years of producing best-sellers, Crichton still has not learned how to write. His character development consists of a three-paragraph character sketch; his plot development consists of an endless series of arbitrary crises. Further, this particular book contains huge logical holes. Feh.

[lissener]

Anything by Tom Robbins.

[David Simmons]

In the worst fiction category, the Book of Mormon, hands down.

[Eliahna]

Originally posted by booklover


There can't be two heinous sequels out there--are you sure you don't mean "Return to the Secret Garden" by Susan Moody?
Actually, I meant Misselthwaite! It's by Susan Moody (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0340610808/qid=1016167985/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/104-4955790-2611958) , so I guess it's the same book under another title.

[Tuckerfan]

The worst book I've ever read is one that I've blocked the author and title from my mind. I think part of the title had "Lowman" in it, but I don't remember. All I do remember is thinking that its about some American-Indian who's well-liked by all his friends and has a girlfriend and is horribly depressed by all of this and kills himself. I was forced to read it in a college English class, and I kept thinking, "What the hell's this guy's problem? He's got a girlfriend, he's got friends who like him? So why's he so damned depressed?" (Mind you at the time I didn't have a girlfriend or very many friends.) The class was ran by an instructor who's whole point seemed to be that white people are bad and we make minorities suffer horribly at our hands. :rolleyes:

Same English class, this one I do remember Native Son by Richard Wright. A horrible, horrible, heavy handed piece of crap.

Then there was Cassandra, which was a modern retelling of the Trojan War from the perspective of the Trojans. Whiny crap about how war is bad and it changes people into things they weren't before the war and it'd be so much better if we could all live in peace and harmony in a world run by women. (Not saying that men have done such a bang up job of running the place, but anyone who thinks that women can't be as tyrannical as men is so out to lunch that they might as well not bother trying to come back.)

Finally, anything by William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, two ham-fisted writers who seem to be incapable of creating characters that are anything other than Southern stereotypes.

[secretkeeper78]

one of the worst books i have ever read was if angels fall by rick mofina I thought it was going to be pretty good. a man takes his children on a trip out to sea. and he wasn't paying attention or something and they drowned. and he is now about 30 years later kidnapping children to replace them and plans on drowning them to bring his kids back.
they told you who the kidnapper was in the very beginning and there is this dectective in there that keeps meantioning seeing a murdered baby. I read 280 pages out of 473. this book is pure crap!
I aslo read half of the vampire lestat.
I just couldn't get into it at all. I read almost of of stephan king's the girl who loved tom gordin or something like that.
it wasn't bad, It was just depressing. I found remember me by sharon sala to be generic and annoying.

[ruadh]

I don't care what woodstockbirdybird says ... Geek Love is the worst book ever .

[Yersinia Pestis]

Originally posted by DrFidelius
_Titan_ by Stephen Baxter. About the attempt by a group of misfits to use all of our shuttles (and the Saturn Vs presently being used as lawn ornaments) to reach the Saturn system. For some reason.
<snip spot-on plot summary and commentary>

Ooh, I have been trying to remember who wrote that stinker and what it was called. Amusingly, I'm reading some other Baxter books now--I returned Manifold: Time to the library last week. It was mildly enjoyable at the time but gets worse the more I think about it. Huh. I picked up Manifold: Space at the used bookstore and started it yesterday. The plot seems more interesting, although it was a little startling to see him using the same characters, and I even noticed a sentence or two of description repeated verbatim. We'll see how it turns out. Should be good for the airport, at least.

Okay, digression over. I wish to nominate books in different categories of bad:

I-fundamentally-disagree-with-the-writer bad:
The Archaic Revival by Dennis McKenna. Hallucinogens may be fun, but I doubt that humanity will all be living in the logosphere by the time of the Mayan Millenium in 2012.

Ludicrous-but-fun bad:
Can't remember the author or title because I gave the book away. It was a thriller about a master jewel thief and some Gypsies teaming up to rescue some friendly aliens from Area 51. It came out within the past five years and I think it had a silver cover.

Egregiously awful:
Pussy, King of the Pirates by Kathy Ackerman. A friend gave this to me because she thought the title was hilarious and it had been remaindered down to $1.00. I couldn't finish it because I didn't care enough to expend any energy on figuring out what was going on or who any of the characters were. I think the action jumped from a whorehouse in Egypt to a girls boarding school, but I wasn't sure, which seemed like a pretty good sign that this was Not the Book for MeTM. I just checked out the reviews at Amazon and they're pretty funny. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/080213484X/qid=1016194643/sr=2-2/ref=sr_2_2/103-1767425-5819821

[Crusoe]

The Rainbow by DH Lawrence bored me to tears with its heavy-handed metaphors. Absolutely awful.

Alcohol: The Ambiguous Molecule by Griffith Edwards looked like a decent read when I picked it up--a history of alcohol and alcoholism--but was a simplistic, shallow skim on the subject and left me pretty unsatisfied. It's one of a few non-fiction books I've read lately that have been poor. I bought one at the weekend--basically an extended opinion piece about web community proponents who emphasise the virtual over the real--and left it on the bus one chapter in. It was that bad. I've even blanked the name out.

[PunditLisa]

Message in a Bottle - oh my, it was bad. It was the Three's Company of fiction in that not only was it horrible in and of itself, but because it topped the charts for so long you began to lose faith in your fellow Americans. You wonder if they know the difference between "art" and "dreck"?

The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon. I loooove Diana Gabaldon's other books. I patiently waited 3 long years for her to publish this book, which was supposed to be Book 5 of 6 in a double trilogy. After spending $20 on the hardcover, I was put to sleep by page 100. Nothing of substance happened....in over 1000 pages! I was cruelly disappointed! And now Gabaldon says she's going to extend the Outlander series to 7 books. Well, no wonder! Nothing happened in #5! Now I'm going to have to wait another 3 years to find out what happens to Jamie and Claire. Dammit!

Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. It's a sad day when Hollywood can greatly improve a story. Actually the plot wasn't horrible, but the prose....egads!!! It was so convoluted that I thought, "Man, they should fire this translator." Only to find out that English was this dude's first language!

[auntie em]

I don't know if this has been said already, but The Male Crossdresser's Support Group by Tama Janowitz was so horrid I couldn't finish it. I was tricked into reading it by a friend, who later confessed that "she just wanted to know that another human being had suffered through it." (With friends like these... :rolleyes: )

Speaking of Harlequins, though... my mom was once laughed out of a Berkeley bookstore when she asked for a Harlequin! :D

[CalMeacham]

Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. It's a sad day when Hollywood can greatly improve a story. Actually the plot wasn't horrible, but the prose....egads!!! It was so convoluted that I thought, "Man, they should fire this translator." Only to find out that English was this dude's first language!


PunditLisa, if you feel this way, then you have to read "James Cooper's Literary Offenses" by Mark Twain. It is a hilarious dissection of Cooper's prose style that will knock you out of your chair.

[KarlGrenze]

Please explain to this ignorant poster what is a/an Harlequin. All I think when I read that is a clown with bells at the end of his shoes dancing to Italian music.

[CalMeacham]

Please explain to this ignorant poster what is a/an Harlequin. All I think when I read that is a clown with bells at the end of his shoes dancing to Italian music.

Harlequin Romances. Book line that sells only romance novels. Published in phenomenal numbers. Several titles per month. The older ones had comic-book-art covers, but they've become more sophisticated. I used to do volunteer work at our library, and wee had tons of them donated to us. You can also see the shelves groaning under their weight at used book shops in the US.

Pretty chaste romances, from what I hear. Not great literary merit. I seriously doubt if any guy would voluntarily admit to reading any -- another imponderable difference between the sexes.


I'm sure they have a website somewhere. Probably a lot of fan sites, too.

[CalMeacham]

Yup:

http://www.eharlequin.com/

Maybe they're bot as chaste as they used to be, judging from the covers and the stuff on the "Silhouette" line.

And they've got a subsidiary in Australia.

[Aleq]

My vote is for ANYTHING by Janet Morris. Good lord, a more clunky, tin eared writing style I have never encountered in my life, and that's saying something. Usually if I don't like a book or find the writing style annoying I'll just shrug it off, but this person got my back up so far it went over to my front! The kneepads this woman had to have in order to get published must be works of the cushioners art...

Think I'm exaggerating? First line of one of her stories: "Run, Holy Mother of God, run!"

All I could picture was the Virgin Mary hiking up her skirts and sprinting away, and it didn't get better after that...

:rolleyes: :wally :rolleyes:

[crazy4chaucer]

Originally posted by David Simmons
In the worst fiction category, the Book of Mormon, hands down.

Mr. Simmons,
The Book of Mormon is not fiction. You have the right to despise, detest, dislike it. I don't particularly care what you think about things. I do care that you've taken a book that I believe (and a lot of other people believe) to be scripture and thrown it out on this trash heap.

You may not believe the Bible, the Koran, or any other book of scripture to be true, and I hope that you wouldn't throw them in the same category as the worst fiction.

[elf6c]

There I said it. I agree with the earlier poster:

Moby Dick. I tried. I really did. But I just couldn't make a go of it. After two entire chapters dedicated to the differences in head shape between two different types of whale, I couldn't go on any further. To this day, I don't get how this is great literature.

In his time he was considered a talentless hack as I recall- only later, after his well deserved death, did his crappy work get foisted on us by the then current "high society" most likely as a prank on the lower classes.

I really tried to read Billy Budd, after all its a "classic." Classic pile of crap is more like it. After 50 or so pages I simply gave up.

Melville you overrated, untalented hack- you suck! There I feel much better.

Oh, Tom Clancy has been phoning it in since "Red Storm Rising" and his non-fiction stuff is a pathetic joke.

-me

[ivylass]

Originally posted by PunditLisa
The Fiery Cross[/I] by Diana Gabaldon. I loooove Diana Gabaldon's other books. I patiently waited 3 long years for her to publish this book, which was supposed to be Book 5 of 6 in a double trilogy. After spending $20 on the hardcover, I was put to sleep by page 100. Nothing of substance happened....in over 1000 pages! I was cruelly disappointed! And now Gabaldon says she's going to extend the Outlander series to 7 books. Well, no wonder! Nothing happened in #5! Now I'm going to have to wait another 3 years to find out what happens to Jamie and Claire. Dammit!

[

I have the whole series, and I have to agree, Fiery Cross was not her best effort. All I can say is that if you can keep reading it, things really start cracking the last 100 pages or so.

At least we know the next one won't be the last one...I went back and reread the entire series again after FC...I wanted to refresh my memory (and wallow in the story again.)

[ivylass]

Originally posted by PunditLisa
Message in a Bottle - oh my, it was bad. It was the Three's Company of fiction in that not only was it horrible in and of itself, but because it topped the charts for so long you began to lose faith in your fellow Americans. You wonder if they know the difference between "art" and "dreck"?

The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon. I loooove Diana Gabaldon's other books. I patiently waited 3 long years for her to publish this book, which was supposed to be Book 5 of 6 in a double trilogy. After spending $20 on the hardcover, I was put to sleep by page 100. Nothing of substance happened....in over 1000 pages! I was cruelly disappointed! And now Gabaldon says she's going to extend the Outlander series to 7 books. Well, no wonder! Nothing happened in #5! Now I'm going to have to wait another 3 years to find out what happens to Jamie and Claire. Dammit!

Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. It's a sad day when Hollywood can greatly improve a story. Actually the plot wasn't horrible, but the prose....egads!!! It was so convoluted that I thought, "Man, they should fire this translator." Only to find out that English was this dude's first language!

[ChordedZither]

Originally posted by CalMeacham


PunditLisa, if you feel this way, then you have to read "James Cooper's Literary Offenses" by Mark Twain. It is a hilarious dissection of Cooper's prose style that will knock you out of your chair.

CalMeacham beat me to this recommendation, but I'll add a link to the Project Gutenberg text: Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses (ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext02/mtfco10.txt)

It almost makes me want to go back and read some Cooper so I can laugh along with Twain!

[CalMeacham]

ChordedZither:

Nice link, but the version displayed there is not complete!

It leaves out the part about "notwithstanding the odioudness of the task , he bore the more comestible fragments upon his back...", and the part where he pares down a lengthy paragraph by Cooper -- some of the funniest stuff in the piece.

Look up this article in a Twain anthology. I know it's in Letters from the Earth, edited by Bernard de Voto, as well as other collections.

[booklover]

Originally posted by Aleq
My vote is for ANYTHING by Janet Morris. Good lord, a more clunky, tin eared writing style I have never encountered in my life, and that's saying something. Usually if I don't like a book or find the writing style annoying I'll just shrug it off, but this person got my back up so far it went over to my front! The kneepads this woman had to have in order to get published must be works of the cushioners art...

:rolleyes: :wally :rolleyes:

Is Janet Morris a different person from Jan Morris? I hope so, as I enjoy Jan Morris' writings greatly.

I never read this, but I was deeply insulted by the implications when my uncle's Christmas gift to me a couple years ago was "Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives" by "Dr Hypocrite" Laura Schlessinger.

[slortar]

Originally posted by Yersinia Pestis


Ooh, I have been trying to remember who wrote that stinker and what it was called. Amusingly, I'm reading some other Baxter books now--I returned Manifold: Time to the library last week. It was mildly enjoyable at the time but gets worse the more I think about it. Huh. I picked up Manifold: Space at the used bookstore and started it yesterday. The plot seems more interesting, although it was a little startling to see him using the same characters, and I even noticed a sentence or two of description repeated verbatim. We'll see how it turns out. Should be good for the airport, at least.




I've read M:S. After the astoundingly mediocre first hundred pages, it gets better. Very cynical and morbid.

This reminds me of Paul MacAuley. After his Confluence trilogy, I was eager to read more. The book I settled on next was...damn, slipping my mind already, something like "The Secret of Life." Bad, bad, bad. Hippie, tree-hugging conspiracy-ridden cyberpunk wanna-be...I seriously hope he goes back to something that...well, something that doesn't suck.

[Legomancer]

Here are a few I can remember:

Psychodrome - author unknown. Why I bought this, I have no idea, but it was a sci-fi book about a futuristic tv show where an all-star cast goes on adventures. The viewers follow along with virtual-reality headsets. Okay so far. Our protagonist happens to find, in a gutter, a winning lottery ticket that allows him to be on the show. What follows is something that at the time (1987) I did not yet have to vocabulary to describe (and now can identify as godawful insertion fan-fiction). Of course the beautiful star of the show tries to seduce the hero, and of course, when he refuses her because 'it wouldn't be right' she is even MORE taken with him. Just truly terrible.

Shadows of the Empire by Steve Perry. No, not the one that sang for Journey though I'm sure he couldn't do worse. I'm a Star Wars fan and picked this up at a used book store. I usually stay away from Star Wars books, as most of them seem to be crap, but for some reason I thought this one might be better. I was so very wrong. This book was muchly-hyped - with a fake soundtrack, toys, and so forth. It reads - again - like bad fan fiction. All throughout it I was saying, "My god, if this guy makes a living as a writer, how is it that not everybody does?" I would read passages out loud for my wife to laugh at because they were so horribly written. And don't get me started on the "Princess Leia almost naked" scene. Shudder.

The Fifth Guardian? - actual title and author unknown. I picked this up used because it purported to be very similar to The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which I enjoyed, to some extent. It wasn't. It was really really inane, and I gave up on it about a hundred pages in. I think it's the first part of a trilogy (naturally) but I've never encoutnered anyone who's read all three.

[furryman]

My list of the worst books I've ever read:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=68ac39466208e
I don't see any reason why a book has to be so depressing.

[furryman]

Sorry the above link should be:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=68ac394666208e

[evilhanz]

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever by Stepehn Donaldson. I had heard such good things about this series, so I bought the first three books. My bookmark is still sitting in the middle of book two where it has been for about 12 years. What a piece of crap.

There was another book I read at about the same time by A. A. Attanasio called Last Legends of Earth. Pure tripe. Why does most scif-fi have to be so terrible?

[lokij]

The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis.

Written by a 16 year old boy in about 1970, inspired by his love of Robert E. Howard's "Conan" novels.

The game, which is played at various Sci-Fi cons, is to see who can read the most without laughing.


I got to page 3.

http://ftp.logica.com/~stepneys/sf/eyeargon.htm

[nefertari]

That awful David Eddings book was probably "The Redemption of Althalus" which was boring and awful, I can't remember how it even ended. And I *love* his other stuff.

I actually really liked all of the Vampire Chronicles, but hated "Witching Hour". I still haven't finished it, keeps putting me to sleep!

And I'm sorry, beat me if you will, but I cannot get into Joyce's "Ulysses". I haven't given up on it yet, but I've read the first two pages five times each. Ugh.

nefertari.

[Diff T]

The Tenth Justice was a bunch of pointless liberal hogwash (spelling?)





Such garbage from a man who used to write Clinton's speeches.

[käse]

"The Winning Clue" by James Hay Jr.

This is actually a book I refused to read further. What a racist. I feel bad for Mr. Hay Sr.:mad:

[Eve]

I recently got a collection of hard-boiled 1930s and ’40s crime novels outta the library. I enjoyed "The Big Clock" (though the too-tidy ending indicated they’d already sold it to MGM). But "I Married a Dead Man"—yikes! Here’s a bit about a woman waiting for the elevator: “Her back was to the door now. The door that wouldn’t open. The door that was an epitaph, the door that was finality.” And that is where Baby went, “Oh, fer chrissakes” and slammed the book shut . . .

[Zanshin]

Holy Christ, we're three pages into this thread and nobody's mentioned William Shatner's Tekwar series yet? Yet more proof that good ol' Bill should have stuck to Star Trek.

Notable mentions:
- Any of Piers Anthony's later stuff. His first six or eight Xanth novels, his Incarnations of Immortality series and the first Blue Adept series were actually pretty good stuff. But in later novels, he got both seriously boring as well as seriously pedantic.

- Anne Rice. I tried several books in this series but couldn't get more than thirty pages into any of them before throwing them across the room in disgust.

- Later novels by Stephen Koontz (or is it Dean King)? Loved The Talisman, It, Lightning, Watchers, Strangers, Carrie, The Dead Zone and The Stand... but anything put out by either of these two in the last five years has just been tripe.

- Richard Marcenko's Rogue Warrior series. Three hundred pages of Marcenko masturbating about how cool he is for being ex-Special Forces. I ain't impressed, Richard. Next.

- Anything by John Grisham. The only series I've read which is worse at characterization is the above-referenced Tekwar series.

- Someone mentioned Melville before. I was forced to read Billy Budd in high school English class and still carry the scars. Pfaugh.

- And it's been said before and I'll say it again -- fantasy fiction based on role-playing games can only be so good, but it can be SO bad. For example - the Avatar trilogy by 'Richard Awlinson' published by TSR. That was some of the worst RPG-related fiction I've ever read and almost turned me off the Forgotten Realms setting for life.

[leechbabe]

Originally posted by tesseract
but what I truly hated was one of Rice's attempts at erotica. I think it was called The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty.

I had the misfortune to pick up Beauty's Release and start to read it - urgh. What I can't get over is there is a series of novels known as "The Beauty Books," that Anne Rice did under the name A.N. Roquelaure. Not even good enough to wipe my bum on.

[Winnowill]

Originally posted by ruadh
I don't care what woodstockbirdybird says ... Geek Love is the worst book ever .
OMG - semi-funny story about this one (one of those "you had to be there" ones, probably). In 1990, I was an exchange student in England. My mom and her best friend came to visit. Mom's friend was reading this (she said she had purchased it thinking the title was actually Greek Love. No, I don't know why she would have bought a book with that title, either. But she bought it for travel reading and, once she was on the plane and started it, she was stuck with it. I think she continued out of morbid curiosity. But each morning, she would fill us in with the details of what had occurred in her reading the night before. What a bizarre tale!