ok first off let me say, Leave Mr. Hubbard alone. Espeacially Battlefield…this book falls into the category of my thread about good stupid books. I loved that book. Anyway, the worst book in history, that still makes me want to gag when I think about it was “Miracles on Maple hill”. I had to read in 5th grade, I still have nightmares.
BTW, She is known in the States as V.C. Andrews. Why do I know this? Because, in my impressionable youth, I enjoyed some of her stuff. Of course, after the first six or seven books, it was no longer “her” stuff. It’s amazing how prolific she continues to be fifteen+plus years after her death. I think you need to slow down when you die.
Worst book I’ve ever willingly tried (without being instructed) to read? Gotta be Moby Dick. Ugh, ugh, ugh. Why did I need two whole chapters describing, in minute detail, the features and differences in the heads of a right whale and a sperm whale? That’s when I realized that I just couldn’t take it any more.
Under current reading, I’m having difficulty figuring out just why I want to finish Stephen King’s Insomnia. I couldn’t care less about the little bald doctors. :rolleyes:
“Insomnia induced the opposite.” Wish I had a nickel every time I heard that. 
(I didn’t like it either.)
I’d feel bad, naming the worst book I’ve read recently, cuz it’s a first novel. The guy who wrote it saw my name on a horror-related message board and spammed me to read it and let him know what I thought. I read the intro on his website. It wasn’t awful, so I sent $14 to somebody for the book.
It wasn’t godawful bad, but it was silly in parts, a major character was left hanging, there was a stupid deux ex machina (sp?) ending, stuff like that. It could have been readable.
I found some nice things to say about it, along with some negative, and the writer responded, yeah, he knew all that stuff, other people had told him the same thing, but he was in a hurry to get it published and was tired of working on it.
Look, buddy, when the only character in your book that I cared about was a rat trying to avoid falling into a lava flow, maybe you’d better take your time, or this first novel will be your last.
How is Insomnia a first novel, AuntiePam…I thought SK’s first was Carrie?
Though i have to agree…i could never get into it. I got it from the library one year (awhile ago; when i was first into SK), and I couldn’t get past it. I have a hardcover copy of it sitting on my bookshelf…I was 3/4 into it. (Don’t feel too bad, I only paid two dollars for it at a used book sale.)
Okay V.C. Andrews…yes. I heard people make such a fuss over her and when I read Flowers in the Attic it was such a saccharine piece of tripe. Nauseatingly sweet.
E. Frome? I loved that book! The one book I’ve ever liked to read for school. It was dark. I really dig that kind of stuff.
Okay now I’ll get back to you on my picks later.
Zoggie, I don’t think AuntiePam was talking about Insomnia in her anecdote, but seguewaying from jadailey’s post.
Anyway I can’t read anything by Henry James, otherwise I’m non-discriminating.
I though Ethan Frome was well-written enough to hold my attention, but the [omninous tone]SLEDDING TO THEIR DEATH[/omninous tone] bit just makes the whole thing seem so silly. I find it hard to be compassionately concerned about the fuck-up Ethan and his love made of their lives when they are so stupid as to attempt suicide by sledding into a large tree. Ever think of using a gun if you want to do it right? How about throwing yourself off a tall cliff? Sheesh, it’s suicide, not brain surgery.
I’d have to nominate Dianetics as the worst book ever. What a steaming pile of pseudoscience. And L. Ron has some defintite issues with women, yikes. Apparently he believes that nearly all women attempt to abort their offspring by poking sticks into their uteruses up to several dozen times, and that this sort of pre-birth trauma is part of why adults are so f’ed up.
[Edited by Gaudere on 01-29-2001 at 06:56 PM]
Thanks, Sterling, yeah, that was a segue-what-you-said.
Zoggie should know I know my King better than that.
LRH=JDT???
Hey, it’s just a thought… Quit looking at me that way!!!
My vote for the worst is Islands in the Stream. Hemingway wrote great short stories, but I had to quit this one at the halfway point (yes, I was in the middle of what was supposed to be a romantic dialogue.) I’m sorry, but I’m sure Hemingway is still rolling in his grave over their publishing it.
Amazing, I just discovered there’s another Doper who goes by AuntiePam. Anyway, I’m not her.
The worst book I ever read, in a Comparative Lit course in college, was The Elective Affinities by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. So bad, that I would rise from the sofa shrieking “No, no, you idiotic butthead, you telegraphed this plot point 131 pages ago!” and hurl the book at the nearest wall. Luckily had a very calm boyfriend back then. When we got to class discussion, I caused something of a scene by opening with “If I had turned in any chapter of this book in a Creative Writing course, I would have received–and deserved–an F for it.” Prof. Gelley, who up till then had never heard one word from anyone in the class about the assigned reading, huddled behind his lectern, and tried valiantly to make some points about it being a different century and style --Yeah, but the French were writing wonderful, complex, vivid characters and novels with actual narrative drive by then, and had been doing so for about a hundred years previous (like Dangerous Liaisons). Believe me. Maybe this guy Goethe can write poetry. Maybe it even sounds good in German. But the basic structure, characters, and dialogue in The Elective Affinities are just plain incompetently awful!
Sorry…I should know. After all, as a true King fan, I’m sure you know that Insomnia was part of his later more feminist streak. I realize you were talking about another book.
That’s weird. How are we going to deal with the two Auntie/Aunt Pams? One of you must be an imposter! Oh wait. This isn’t the SDMB Soap Opera.
Hmmmmm. This’ll be interesting. I don’t think I’ve ticked anyone off lately, so you won’t have to worry about Dopers bearing grudges.
I don’t think people will get us mixed up. I’m the old lady from Iowa who reads Joe Lansdale. You’re the one who reads Goethe. (You probably even pronounce his name correctly.)
No problem.
The World According to Garth - What a piece of crap. Everyone in the book either gets killed in some horrible way, or just has something horrible happen to them.
Also Lost World - Exactly the same plot as Jurassic Park with the same basic characters (just altered race/sex). Also, Crichton felt the need to contradict major portions of JP (which wasn’t Nobel prize material, but it as least had an engaging plot. Lost World, he phoned in.
Books that hurt me on a deep, personal level:
[ul]
[li]Wuthering Heights (There are 800 characters named Catherine and I don’t give a damn about any of them.)[/li][li]Wide Sargasso Sea (Okay, now NONE of the characters have names and I still don’t care.)[/li][li]Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (I want to hit this book and never stop.)[/li][li]Insomnia (I read this for the first time during my big Stephen King phase, and I didn’t like it much. I read it again a few weeks ago to see if it was as bad as I remembered. It was worse.)[/li][li]Scarlett (Alexandria Ripley, I expect a full refund and a letter of apology. That whirring sound you hear is Margaret Mitchell spinning in her grave.)[/li][li]I Know This Much is True (Yeah, whatever. The only thing I know to be true is that Oprah and her book cult must be stopped before they kill again.)[/li][/ul]
I’m sure there are others, but I’m shaking too hard to type any more just now.
Oh, and PharmBoy…I’m wild about Garp, but you’re spot-on about Lost World. It pisses me off to no end that it’s a sequel to the movie rather than the book. Every time someone mentions it, I have to point out that MALCOLM DIED IN THE FIRST BOOK. He was written in to Lost World because none of the stars from the movie would sign on for a sequel besides Goldblum. Crichton, you are a dirty, rotten cheater and I will get you for this one. Just you wait.
Wow, CalMeacham, I thought I was the only person who hated “A Seperate Peace.” I recently read this (last month) for school. Horrible. The author took 196 pages to say “This guy likes this other guy, then the othey guy dies, and it’s partly the first guy’s fault.” Then the author throws in a bunch of cliché symbolism about losing innocence. The book was incredibly boring, and I don’t think I should have ever been forced to read it for school.
But it’s definately not the worst book I ever read. That award goes to “Torpedoes Away!” which I read in 7th grade as a book report or something. If you’ve never heard of it (which I certainly hadn’t) it’s probably because it’s such a horrible book. It’s about 300(???) pages long, and every word of it is indecipherable submarine lingo. There was no recognizable plot. I really really tried to read all the way through it, but I could never get past about half way. Nothing but “set the output modules to CR-377. BEEP BEEP BEEP Lower torpedo shaft #3FB and get over here, stat!” The only plot, from what I could tell (mostly from reading the back of the book) was that some people were on a submarine, and it sinks somehow, then they get on another submarine. Boring. Terrible. Only a person who was on a submarine during WW2 could have possibly thought this book was interesting (it reminds me of an episode of Home Improvement where Jill (Tim Allen’s Wife)'s dad writes an incredibly boring book about military tactics. Only worse.)
One thing that really bugged me about the book was the author’s shameless overuse of italics. They were everywhere, in totally unnecessary and inappropriate places. The whole book looked like someone forgot to add a [ /i ] in their vB code, only it was done intentionally. I remember actually going through the book and keeping track, and every single page in the entire book, except for 6 or 7 pages, had at least one italic word or phrase in it (usually a lot more.) I don’t know why, but it really pisses me off.
The Jesus Incident, by Frank Herbert. Put me off SF for years. The proofreader was asleep, too, which didn’t help the book any.
I Will Fear No Evil: RAH’s worst book.
I like Insomnia, don’t you guys have to admit it’s a better book than Gerlad’s Game?
Okay, I’ll grant you that, TnM
Gaudere, you are so right about Ethan Frome! That is the book I hate most, even if it is not the worst-written book in the world. Imagine if Juliet had seen Romeo lying there and said, “O churl! Drunk all, and left no friendly drop to help me after? Guess I’ll use my sled!” It just doesn’t work, OK?
Isn’t the scene where they get all worked up touching the same piece of cloth a bit too much as well? And the stupid pickle dish thing…I have a lifelong hatred of pickle dishes now. Thanks a lot, Edith Wharton!
Love Ethan Frome (love Edith Wharton!), and I LOVED the World According to Garp (although my Aunt got 4/5ths through it and winged it into her fireplace, that’s how much SHE hated it). Great Expectations should not be forced down the throats of innocent freshmen ever again, although I think it holds some value to older people.
I had a hard time with Kurt Vonnigut’s “Galapagos”. I just couldn’t get into it like I did most of his other books.
Juniper200, I’m with you on Wuthering Heights. And I couldn’t keep the Catherines straight either.
Another one I’ll gladly never open again is Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. That’s the one I think of when I recall what one of my old classmates once said about Russian literature: “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl agonize about it for hundreds of pages.”
I could at least finish “Hannibal.” I try to read
“Black Sunday” every Superbowl Sunday and have yet to finish it.
How two such good reads as Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs could be written between those two is amazing.