A Harlequin romance novel that shall go mercifully unnamed.
That might be the worst book I ever finished. Jonathon Livingston Seagull might have been more empty headed, though. It’s been too long for me to remember which was worse.
“Fools Die” by Mario Puzo. I started it my freshman year in college, but never finished it. I used to think of it as my favorite unfinished novel. Indeed, half-way through, it is full of posibilites and wonder.
A few years ago, I saw it on my shelf and I picked it up, forcing myself to read the rest of it. Dear God, the second half was Shyte! It possibly had the worst ending of any book I’d ever read…and I thought back with dread to all thosee knowing smiles of people to whom I’d told it was my ‘most favorite unfinished novel’. shudder
Well you know it was just a ma…
Never mind.
Shoeless, you’d probably enjoy Mark Twain’s essay, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” You can find it at: http://users.telerama.com/~joseph/cooper/cooper.html
I knew someone who tried his hand at writing. The result was Sarbola, a story about an embittered microbiology grad student suffering under the tutelage (and whips) of a nasty, female researcher. He decides to get back at all academia by releasing a virus that combines the properties of ebola and SARS. He sent me a copy to review. I never wrote back. It was published by one of those self-publishing houses. I like this review.
Don’t be so swayed by one bad review. The book has 3.5 stars at Amazon.com – not superb, but quite a few people seem to like it.
The worst book I’ve ever read might be Son of Rosemary sequel to Rosemary’s Baby. I loved the first book (and the Polanski movie), but the second one was horrible, moronic, and infuriating. I couldn’t believe the same guy wrote both of them. Son of Rosemary was only the second book Levin had written since the '70s; maybe he’s lost his touch. 
I also have no patience for bad books and only have qualms about abandoning them a quarter of the way through if someone recommended them.
That said, I hated The Scarlet Letter. It’s not that I didn’t get it. I just hated it. If I had a time machine, I’d go back and advise Nathaniel Hawthorne to become like a blacksmith or a doctor or ANYTHING but a writer.
I also hated Pride and Prejudice. I’m sure it’s actually very good compared to other books with similar subjects, but it bored me to tears. Okay, you’re all geting married and you’re all obsessed with romance. Can’t we have a plane crash or murder or a hostage situation or a horse or a dog or a huge betrayal resulting in war or death or someone losing their mind or even… vampires or something! anything! just do something interesting to make me hate you slightly less!
Among the worst books i’ve abandoned midway:
Little Girl Blue (a mystery book by someone whose name I can’t remember. It read like a bad fanfic- “her fiery-red hair lay in ripples down her slender back. Her sparkling green eyes scanned the crime scene, the walls splashed with crimson blood” (not an actual quote) I only got like three pages into this one before I decided I’d rather read the sort-of-boring backup book I had.
A is for Alibi: I tried. I REALLY tried. I got about 3/4 of the way through this godawful book and realized that, first of all, I already knew who the killer was. Not because it was a well-crafted mystery with a web of clues pointing to him, but because from the second he was introduced it was all about how sexy and attractive he was and how much we were supposed to like him. And second of all, 3/4 of the way into the book, it still sucked. Third of all, we knew barely anything more about the actual crime than we knew at the beginning.
Yep, Atlas Shrugged was the worst book I read, too (or maybe it was The Fountainhead - I read them both when I was 15 [21 years ago], which is, I imagine, the age Rand’s books are aimed at - I only read them both because I thought they were Important Works). Easily the worst writer in history ever to be considered of literary merit.
The Da Vinci Code It was sort of like a comic book for little kids, but without the awesome illustrations.
The Scarlet Letter I know literature could be a lot wordier back then, but Hawthorne’s prose was so dry and stilted.
The Red Tent Same as The Da Vinci Code; also, it really bothered me the way all the men were depicted so negatively.
I’ve stooped to reading a few ‘Star Trek’ novels, which probably count as the worst. And various & sundry paperback novels that I managed to acquire. But most of them were mercifully forgettable.
The worst book I’ve read recently was London Fields - a bombastic, ridiculous, pedantic, misogynistic, narcissistic slog. The mean-spirited and not-all-that-original ramblings of a british twit who thinks that being a british twit makes him a genius.
Every year my local public library has a big sale of books it can no longer use, $5 for a paper grocery bag full. I’ve found a few treasures, but more than a few stinkers as well. Just off the top of my head, two of the worst offenders were the novelization of “Goin’ Coconuts,” the 1978 Donnie and Marie movie, and the “Growing Pains” era biography of Kirk Cameron. Did you know he was named after Captain Kirk of the popular television program “Star Trek?” It’s true! And believe it or not…Kirk has never tasted chocolate!
Few people know this, but William Goldman wrote a sequel to his novel Marathon Man called Brothers. Awful. I think his motivation was to show the reader what it felt like to be cruelly tortured. And this guy wrote The Princess Bride!
Hannibal sucked pretty bad, too. I bought it the first day it came out, but there’s no way I’m reading the new one.
I came into this thread to mention this book, among others. I got my copy at a thrift store for 75 cents and ended up re-donating it to them a week later. It was clearly written during King’s “I can write whatever the hell I want and people will buy it. Also I’m stoned out of my gourd.” phase.
The people who mentioned The Da Vinci Code have clearly never read Brown’s earlier novel, Digital Fortress, which is about 15 times stupider, if you can fathom that.
Maybe not the *worst *worst, but horribly difficult to read because they were so overrated:
The Great Gatsby
The Catcher in the Rye
the last three Patricia Cornwells I read
The worst I’ve read is Galaxy 666, with its interminable thesaurus runs. t’s by Pel Torro, one of the many pen names of author Lionel Fanthorpe. All of his books are bad, I understand. Aside from excerpts, I’ve only read this one, which seems to have a special reputation for awfulness. It’s fun to read aloud and try not to crack up. As is;
The Eye of Argon, Jim Theis’ legendarily bad story, which now qualifies for this thread, as it has been published as a book:
The Null-Frequency Impulser by James Nelson Coleman. Bad Sci Fi. Fanthorpe was admittedly being paid by the word, and Theis was an amateur, but Coleman has no excuse for writing a book this bad.
Cataclysm[ by Don Pendleton. I know he wrote the Mack Bolan series, but even that can’t prepare you for the awfulness of Cataclysm. Again, he’s a professional - he ain’t got no excuse.
I’m a fan of Mr. King, but as he goes on cranking stuff out, the level of “crap” is growing, while the level of “gold” remains the same. I don’t think new readers of King should go plunging in without advice and recommendations from those of us who have already suffered through books like “Dreamcatcher”. If I can take a bad-book-bullet for someone else, at least my suffering will not have been in vain!
I’ve read a lot of awful stuff in my time, but the worst book is still one I was forced to read in 8th grade - The Red Pony by John Steinbeck.
Utter loathing. Hate. The whole plot ends in the first chapter and the rest is scenery. Words cannot express how terrible I found this book to be. And it’s considered literature!
Feh.
Does anyone read Nelson Algren? I tried to read The Man with the Golden Arm, because growing up in Chicago you hear about how great Algren was, and I like a certain amount of gritty realism.
But good Lord. It wasn’t enough for people to be drunk, they had to be drooling from bleeding gums and vomiting on the bar. It wasn’t enough for a place to be dirty, it had to reek of feces and dead cockroaches. I couldn’t choke down more than about 50 pages.
Exchange it for a good vampire story – Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin. Or if you wanted to read something with people traveling the world while investigating a possible myth, ask for Gospel by Wilton Barnhardt.
Oh, yeah – why I read them.
The first two are entertainingly bad, and worth reading for that reason.
The latter two I was challenged to read, so I took up the challenge.
As for classics that I hate – anything by Henry James . Turn of the Screw, The Beast in the Jungle
Jane Austen. I hated Pride and Prejudice
Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I liked Tolstoy’s other works that I’ve read (especially War and Peace), but TDoII is about “someone who’s dying, only not fast enough”. (to steal a great Dave Barry line about something else)