Straightforward: what bestsellers or classic works of lit do you feel are the most poorly written or otherwise qualify for a “worst” list?
A few of my pics:
Anything John Grisham has written since The Client. He’s far far far more formulaic than Stephen King ever thought of being, and while at his best he writes good escapist fare at his worst he’s positively painful with totally implausible endings and interchangable characters. (His best novel, Time to Kill, was clearly based on To Kill a Mockingbird, though sufficiently different to give it some merit.) The last novel of his that I tried to make it through was The Broker, which I put in the CD player for a very long car trip and before it was halfway through I was listening to a staticy Easy Listening channel instead- just impossible to get into.
The Da Vinci Code- too many threads already detail why
Almost anything by Danielle Steel (and yes, I have read her)
Several new age titles come to mind:
Shirley MacLaine’s mega bestseller Out on a Limb seemed deep to me when I was a teenager but on re-read a few years ago seemed more like a “What happens if you don’t have critical thinking skills” reader.
Anything Richard Bach wrote after Jonathan Livingston Seagull (and make up your mind Bach- was Illusions fact or fiction? You claimed it was fact in some writings and fiction in others, and nowhere did you mention that while you were out barnstorming and living the “romantic rootless vagabond” existence for several years that you left behind six kids to be raised by your ex-wife while you were out womanizing and reliving your youth.)
Anything by Clive Cussler. Literally painful to read, and the historical inaccuracies would make Oliver Stone grimace.
So step up, don’t be shy, bash your least favorite bestsellers or classics right heah ladies and germs!
I fear this might be an unpopular pick, but I really didn’t like The Catcher in the Rye. That Holden Caulfield’s a whiny, irritating bitch.
I’ve always thought, on the chance that I might have been in the wrong frame of mind or something when I read it, that I should probably re-read that one, but I can’t. I hated it so much that I just can’t seem to bring myself to read it again.
The only bestseller I really disliked was The Da Vinci Code. I was absolutely stunned by how dry and dead the writing was. Not to mention that the man’s name was Leonardo, not da Vinci.
(No I didn’t spend good money on it. It was lying around, and I needed fiction.)
The stupidest thread here I’ve ever wasted time on was much better than that piece of faux-literary trash. I’m sure I lost brain cells reading it and am now more susceptible to certain infectious diseases. Years later, my stomach is turning now just from recalling it.
For popular fiction, I’d say anything by James Patterson (Along Came a Spider, Kiss the Girls, etc.)
The stories actually aren’t bad. The characterizations are shallow but okay for the thriller genre. IT’S HIS AWFUL PROSE. The guy makes Ludlum seem like Joyce. He never describes characters (or sometimes even situations.) The lazy bastard just scribbles “Detective Jablome looked like Al Pacino. He was interrogating a suspect who was the spit-and-image of Martin Landau. He was thinking of his wife, who looked liked a shorter version of Cher. Before he could get anything useful out of him, he was interrupted by Chief Numbnutz, who poked his head in the door, reminding Jablome of a bitter Hal Linden.” How do people read that crap? (This is to say nothing of the supersaturation of gratuitous products and pop culture references.)
As for serious literatchuh, I’d go with Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Terrible. That fatwah was the best thing it ever had going for it.
Shelters of Stone by Jean Auel. I waited 12 years for that sequel to the Earth Children series, bought in hardback the first damn week, and was bitterly disappointed. She got very lazy, and it’s like she got tired of writing the books but knew her fans were clamoring for more.
I’ll probably pick up the next book at the library, but I’m not holding my breath for it.
Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand. I swear she learned English from reading Harlequin novels (or whatever the equivalent was in her day). And if her writing is fourth rate, her political philosophy is hardly better. With a little bump for generosity’s sake, we’ll call it third rate.
Everything by Dean Koontz. He’s written the same schlock horror novel over and over again. Burnt-out cop with a tragic past hero? Check. Plucky, brilliant female lead who falls in love at first sight with hero? Check. Sadistic, junk-food loving villain w/ paranormal powers? Check. Unusually intelligent, lovable dog? Check. Gah. My head is starting to hurt just thinking about the life-span I wasted reading his drek in my youth.
A bestseller from a few years back, The Celestine Prophecy, was painful to read. I couldn’t even finish it.
The Sound and the Fury was just that, a tale told by an idiot, a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. I think Faulkner is terribly overrated.
I also think the Lord of the Rings books were horribly boring. Thank God Peter Jackson came along, trimmed a lot of the fat (including the never-ending sequence with that worthless hippie Tom Bombadil), added some much-needed comic relief, and made three wonderful movies from them. Tolkien was a trendsetter with some wonderful ideas, but those books sapped my strength and resolve worse than the One Ring did to Frodo.
The Celestine Prophesy. Mega-million bestseller. Topped the lists for years. Just to see what the big deal was, I borrowed a copy from a colleague and read it.
Oh my God, it was bad. Laughably bad. Seeking different planes until you vibrate into, what, deification? My memory is hazy on the details. I get that is was suppossed to be a novel (you know–made up stuff), but there at the end of the book was a form by which you could send Redfield $25 bucks to “learn more” about the insights he was peddling. WTF?
The only way I was able to make it through without feeling insulted was to MST3K my way through. To her credit, my colleague felt the same way about it (we were both grad students in biology and not given over to a bunch of New Age crapola), so we were able to laugh about it togehter.
And although I’ve never read it, I suppose **Dianetics ** falls in a similar category.
Sue Grafton. I think there’s a special place in Hell already reserved for her. I find her books to be totally unreadable, and I am amazed and baffled at her success.
James Patterson’s mysteries are bad, but his two books “Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas” and “Jennifer’s Letters to Sam” are surprisingly good, but smatzy and sacchrine.
Darn it, somebody already took The Bridges of Madison County. What a waste of three hours of my life. You know the most irritating thing about that book? It’s not just that it’s stylistically bad, although it is. What bugged me was that we’re told, over and over, that the male protagonist is brilliant, yet he never says anything that you couldn’t hear from a slightly drunk college sophomore.
For consistent bestselling crapitude, I submit Michael Crichton.
Oh, BBVLou - gotta disagree with you there. He’s hard to get into, but when you do, wow. Try As I Lay Dying - far more accessible than the Sound and the Fury.
Regarding most of the best-sellers mentioned: first of all, I agree. Second of all, I basically expect them to be crap. Only rarely do I find a widely-read bestseller to be any good. Just like music: 95% of what is on the BillBoard Hot 100 is crap, too. Just the nature of the beast, I guess.
In terms of “literature” (say it with a snooty voice) that I found “worst of” - I have to go with “The Shipping News.” It won the Pulitzer! It’s a best-seller! Omigod, it’s just the best! Ugh. I got about 2/3 of the way through it - c’mon, it won the Pulitzer! You can do it! - then just frisbee’d it across the room. Man that felt good.
Right now I’m regretting I can’t change my screenname.
For worst classic novel, I give you Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. It contains so much pointless, eye-glazing exposition, written in ostentatiously long sentences full of subordinate clauses, that I couldn’t even get far enough into it to see the plot start. See Hitchcock’s movie instead. It’s what Conrad would have done had he had an editor.