The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy.
My 12th grade English teacher made us read this. NOBODY in the class could get through the first chapter. When we complained she let us watch the Masterpiece Theater version of it. Even that didn’t make any sense.
16 years later and I still shudder at the thought of that book.
My vote goes for The Island of the Day Before, by Umberto Eco and translated from Italian by William Weaver. It’s one of those novels you completely forget about as soon as you put it down, and it’s one of a very few books I didn’t finish. I don’t think it’s just a bad translation, because the same guy translated Eco’s other two novels, which are among my favourites.
I have read almost exclusively non-fiction since college and the worst book I have ever read was The Secret Man : An American Warrior’s Uncensored Story by Frank Dux. I liked the movie Blood Sport and thought his life story might be interesting. After about 1/4 of the book I stopped, I just couldn’t get over how stupid he must have thought his readers were. There is not one episode in it that could have possibly ever happened.
KJ:
Good to hear I’m not alone. I had to read “A Separate Peace” for TWO different classes, so I had to read and critique it TWICE! They made a movie out of it, which I don’t intend to see, ever. (And bear in mind that I did go to see Battlefield Earth.)
My main problem with Ethan Frome was that I never understood whty Ethan had married Zeena in the first place. As far as I could tell, she had always been a disagreeable, shrewish bitch. So, like, why’d he marry her? It makes no sense to me. So I had a hard time feeling sympathy for him…it’s not like she used to be cute & fun & had turned old & bitter; she’d just always been bitter. Since I didn’t feel any compassion toward his plight, I thought the book sucked.
& Great Expectations sucks, no matter what age you are when you read it. the same theme is handled much more adroitly in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage.
Hmm I know Stephen King’s written some pretty bad books, but I think, by far the WORST was Tommyknockers. I paid full price for that thing hardback and still took it out back and shot it rather than even give it to someone else.
I tend to be a very picky reader and harsh critic, and I think Theodore Sturgeon was underestimating when he said 90% of everything is crap. I don’t have the patience to spend much time reading anything I don’t like. OTOH, I spent over a year reading Gravity’s Rainbow in my spare time, so if I like something I have plenty of patience. But as a result, there are plenty of books that I’ve stopped reading after the first chapter.
What stands out in my memory, though, is a book that I refused to finish when I had less than 20 pages left: Interview with the Vampire. I’ll probably get flamed by Rice fans (which is ok by me, I rarely visit the Pit- see above reasoning :)), but I read Lestat before Interview, and loved it. But Interview… once Lestat left the story, I just had no interest at all in what happened to the other characters. Boring. I saw the movie after reading the series, and felt the same way about it.
I was able to finish the third book in the series, Queen of the Damned, though it left me with no interest whatsoever in a fourth. Damned reads like a bad superhero comic without pictures, IMHO.
I would also nominate anything by Emily Dickinson. I love good poetry, especially Whitman, cummings, and Paz. But I cannot figure out the appeal of Dickinson, no matter how hard I try.
As for Stephen King, I’ve liked most of the movies based on his books, but I’ve only read one: The Stand. It was great, right up until the ending, which was so unbelievably disappointing. I just don’t have the heart to try another book by him.
My vote is for “THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS” by james Fenimore Cooper. A basically good story, but JFC screws it up royally-the book is just too damn wordy! What really puzzles me is that this novel took Europe by storm! JFC was one of the most poular authors of his day, and enjoyed fame on both sides of the Atlantic.
I guess 19th century novels are a little beyond our ken today!
IIRC, she helped take care of his dying mother (she’s a cousin of some sort) and after his mother died, I guess he felt sorry for Zeena, or he was just used to having her around, or something like that.
After that, she started doing the hypochondriac thing. She had an amazing “recovery” after the sledding “accident”.
I think that the point of the whole book was that living in rural New England (at that time), especially in the winter, does strange things to one’s brain. (Heck, it made the narrator of the book obsessed with some old guy with a limp.) If Ethan had trusted his instincts and left to go out West with Mattie, he probably would have been all right. He didn’t do that, though, so he must have already been too far gone.
So, that’s not where your username comes from, I take it? I agree, Great Expectations sucks. I’m just not a Dickens fan in general.
Oh but she was. She was a nice pretty young girl. And she did help care for his mother. The thing is, it was winter when E’s mother died so rather than face the long cold winter alone, he asked Zenobia to stay. (If it had been spring he probably wouldn’t have.) He really didn’t know much about Zeena though…basically he married her for superficial mistakes. That’s why he had no idea she would become a bitter, barren, corpse-like hypochondriac.
Sorry for the hijack but I must go on. (Wanna open an all Ethan From thread if any of you want to discuss some more?)
The sled thing was kind of…well, ludicrous. But maybe that’s the point. To show how suicide isn’t a viable option, and that instead of trying to end your problems with a quick fix, you have to deal with them, head on. (Ethan, incidentally, sort of moves the sled at the last minute. He doesn’t really do anything in his life “head on”- he won’t go out west, commit sucide correctly…his heart isn’t in anything.)
Earth in the Balance by Al Gore. But it may be topped by Hillary Clinton’s new book.
Wow, I really like several of the books mentioned here, particularly Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations.
Anyway, the worst novel I have ever read, strictly because of the content, was The Turner Diaries. Yes, it was for a class. Can’t get more disturbing than that.
I loved Pride and Prejudice. Hated Moby Dick,
The Scarlet Letter, and Ulysees.
Don’t listen to Spooje, Hannibal is a fine book. While its not the best I’ve ever read, and it obviously has its flaws including over cliched characters and irratic pacing, Hannibal manages to constantly surprise and change the direction of the story. Thomas Harris is an exceptionally skilled writer, and by altering Clarice Starling from a feminist icon to a puppet of [Warning - Spoiler] Lecter, he has offended many die hard Silence of the Lambs/Red Dragon fans. Don’t let this put you off however, - you will be gripped.
It was never published, and it’s certainly not book length, but I really do have to propose “The Eye of Argon” for this honor. It’s not only bad, it’s entertainingly bad. It’s the “Plan 9 from Outer Space” of slush pile manuscripts, and has been an open secret at sf conventions for the past 15 years. Not many people saw the thread I started on this a couple of weeks ago, but it’s definitely worth a look:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=56297
Yeah!! Ethan’s a big wuss!! THAT’S why the book sucked!! Thanks for reminding me, Zoggie…it’s been a while since I read that one, & I’ve tried to blot it out of my menory as much as possible.
& Tamex, IIRC, the evil bitch in Great Expectation was called Estella, & I’m just plain Stella. My name comes from a far superior book…Stella Fantasia is a classmate of Dolores “Lolita” Haze in Nabokov’s excellent novel.
OK, you may now resume spewing vitriol about books that suck.
Geez, How could i have forgotten Eye of Argon? I guess because I think it’s so hysterical that it’s actually a great story to me. I think the MST3K version is the funniest, but the unadulterated text is priceless as well. The first time I read it I laughed so hard I cried.
“The paunchy noble’s sagging round face flushed suddenly pale, then pastily lit up to a lustrous cherry red radiance.”
I almost put this one for my .sig:
“Gaping from its single obling socket was scintillating, many fauceted scarlet emerald, a brilliant gem seeming to possess a life all of its own. A priceless gleaming stone, capable of domineering the wealth of conquering empires…the eye of Argon.”
[Pointless trivia: Despite the fact that no one would ever use the term “scarlet emerald” and expect to not be mocked, there are rare gems that are red beryls and are often legimately (IMHO) referred to as red emeralds. My dad had one, but I believe it got stolen. ::sigh:: Well, it was tiny and probably only worth a couple thou.]
I like the fact that he obviously accepted no research that disagreed with his hypothesis. Typical.
And, tourbot, speaking of horrors inflicted upon the literary world by Anne Rice, what about the appallingly bad Violin? So many people hated it that I couldn’t even sell my copy to a used book store. Hell - I offered to GIVE it to them and they wouldn’t take it. To your Stephen King point, I had a similar experience - I read Thinner years ago, and enjoyed it up till the last five pages, which I hated. Only watching The Green Mile made me decide to give him another try.
Before I could even open the thread, I was planning on panning Mr. Faulkner’s ** The Sound and the Fury ** but was beaten to in most eloquently. Haven’t got a lot of good to say about ** Pride and Prejudice ** either. My late wife was a huge Jane Austin fan and I am definitely not. I think it may be a XX chromosone thing.
But then ** xekul ** mentioned ** Umberto Eco ** and I knew that I had to nominate ** Foucault’s Pendulum 
**. All the more for being impressed with The Name of the Rose, both book and movie. “Dang,” I thought, “This guy knows how to write rich, complex plots with lots of depth.” So I kept going back to the beginning again and again. Sorry, I couldn’t get past page 50 or so after half a dozen tries. Couldn’t figure if he was going for some sort of magic realism or what.
Any ideas?
My vote: the unedited re-release of The Stand. I have to finish a book once I start reading it, and this was freakin’ painful. There’s a reason for editors, people. That Old Mother Hubbard character annoyed me no end. Geez, it’s been so long I can’t remember all the things I hated about that book.
Actually, let me vote for any Stephen King novel. What do you call that writing style? New England Hillbilly?
To his credit, when accused of being a populist, King replied, “yeah, so? Shakespeare was a populist.” That made me laugh, not just because that was a clever retort, but the juxtaposition of Stephen King and Shakespeare… ::snort::