Color of Light by William Goldman. This came highly recommended, but I just hated every page of it. Every “dramatic plot twist,” including the GREAT BIG REVELATION clumsily delivered with the last line of the last page, was stupidly obvious to me several chapters ahead of time.
The protagonist, Chub (yes, “Chub”), would be in the middle of some stupid crisis moaning, “Oh, who could be anonymously torturing me this way?” and I’d be almost shouting out loud, “It was THE BUTLER, you moron!” Sure enough, thirty idiotic pages later it would turn out to be the butler.
Every time he got bored or ran out of stuff to ponder, either another pseudo-crisis would start or a new character would conveniently pop up who had been incredibly important in Chub’s past, even though we’d never heard of this person before.
Hated hated HATED this book. I only finished it to avoid disappointing the person who recommended it to me.
Second place is a tie between everything I ever read by Ayn Rand.
I faked myself through that one and never read it. The teacher was a nice guy
actually, but all I did on the tests was parrot back the essence of his lectures (and
I DID grasp the themes so I was able to put some of my own analysis in there too).
Worst in comparison to what came before: the final book of the Dark Tower series.
What started out intriguing and imaginative became rote and hopelessly predictable at the
end. Man that was disappointing…
I had to watch the movie for a class in college. 600 pages? Man, I’m glad I didn’t have to read the book, because I could barely stand the movie.
I figure I learned all I need to know about Great Expectations watching the South Park episode “Pip”. The book would also have been much improved with this bit of plotline: “Miss Havisham explains why she has her daughter Estella break hearts. Miss Havisham will use the tears from the men with broken hearts to power her Genesis Device, allowing the old woman to become young again and put herself in Estella’s body, and then she will continue breaking men’s hearts for another generation. She then uses her robot monkeys to attack Pip.”
As for awful books I’ve read, I generally manage to avoid them in my reading for pleasure. Most would be books I had to read for school, with works like A Seperate Peace, Tess of the Duerbervilles (my brother and I, who don’t agree on much about literature, both agree that we hate Hardy, as he got stuck having to read Jude the Obscure), and several other books all vying for first place. I’ve ranted before about Dark Tower V; in the time it takes to read it, you could watch Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven, and A Bug’s Life and get pretty much exactly the same plot.
Hmm…I’m not sure I can come up with a worst book ever, but let me throw in either Stranger in a Stange Land or Number of the Beast. Stranger in a Strange Land isn’t very shocking when you first read it in the late 1990s and Number of the Beast just plain sucks. Maybe I could throw The Cat Who Walked Through Walls in there as well. Wow, I’ve read a lot of Heinlein and could easily name half-a-dozen books I either didn’t like or hated.
You think that’s bad? I read Great Expectations in 10th grade, moved to a new high school that summer, and had to read the damn thing again in 11th! Granted, I don’t count it among the very worst books I’ve ever read, but it was boring enough the first time I read it. To have to read it a second time… :mad:
And speaking of horrible books you’re assigned to read in high school, count me among the Scarlett Letter haters.
Umm, well, they were real tough street hoods. I was in, ya know, serious mortal danger. I had to establish street cred. They dragged out one of their sexy gun molls, ya know, hard-bitten ‘bitch dames’. And she looked at me with a gang challenge. And I knew my credibilty and manhood and survival in front of those warriors of the asphalt was at stake, right then and there. I had to do it. For the sake of the glorious Totally Authentic, I’ve Been There BOOK I was writing. Ahem. Yes, folks, I “did her”. I, umm, “fucked the bitch”, as the spoken currency, the argot, would have it. All in the name of Research. I had to Do Myself Proud, I was being evaluated. When the Deed was Done, they “slapped” me what is known as “high fives”. Take note. I am way cool. I “get it”. I, umm, blend right in. But I’m telling you, it was a scary moment, I was right there on the edge. But I am way cool. I “fucked” a “chick”. You have to be ready for anything if you’re going to do this kind of thing, and if you can’t handle the Nitty Gritty, umm, then don’t go there. It’s not for everyone. Not everyone could handle having to have sex with a 14 year old girl to avoid being perceived as a total schmuck by a bunch of 17 year old urban “toughs”. But I did and I am here to tell you the tale.
This reminds me of another piece of literary crap I had to read - Tom Jones. And that reminds me of Pamela. God, 18th-century novels in general make me want to scratch my eyes out. Although to be fair, they fall into the “novels I appreciate for their literary/historical significance but that I personally loathe” category.
This book got all kinds of raves. It won awards. It was set in the area of the country where I live, always a draw.
My office assistant had the book. I mentioned that I was going to buy it and she said that she had bought it and would be happy to give it to me. Because she was going to bury it in the backyard anyway.
Now, I am a fast reader. I seldom don’t finish a book, mostly because even if the writing is bad? I want to know how it turns out. I ZIP through books. So even if they aren’t all that good, it isn’t as though I have to spend all that much time to get through them. I read fast, and so…I seldom get all frustrated with books.
But…this book drove me NUTS! It is the slowest moving book I have ever read… It had all kinds of wonderful visual images of the PNW, and that is great. BUT…the “story” was so buried in there, and so slow…that I threw it across the room at least once. NOT something I can ever remember doing ever before.
Truth is, I HATED that book. I don’t think I have ever hated a book before, but I hated THAT one. And I finished it, too. Just because I thought I should. And then I tried to give it BACK to my OA. She refused to take it back.
I can read anything. I can read Harlequin romances all the way through. I can read Xanth books without cringing. I read cereal boxes or canned goods labels if there’s nothing else within reach.
I once read a book named The Unlikely Ones by someone whose name I can’t remember and refuse to look up. I read all the way through to the end of the 2nd to the last chapter. It was boring as Hell, but I made it that far. Then, I put the book down and never touched it again. It’s probably still sitting in my room at my mother’s house. The book was so boring, and the characters were so non-likable (not unlikable, I didn’t dislike any of them, but I also didn’t like any of them, I didn’t give a damn about them one way or the other–at least if I hate or even just dislike a character, I’ve got some kind of emotional investment) that even after slogging almost to the end, I didn’t care enough to even read that little bit more to find out if they finished their quest successfully. It just wasn’t worth that tiny bit of effort.
OH GOD I had actually blocked that book from my memory. I think that surpasses both The Scarlet Letter and Pride and Prejudice for my least favorite book I read in school.
me too! except it was in grade 8 and grade 9. Grade 8, we didn’t spend much time on it, but grade 9… I don’t even remember what else we read that semester. And, to be honest, I only remember bits and pieces of Great Expectations. (Miss Havisham and her wedding dress, Estella being a crazy man-hater, Pip being really poor and some random guy giving him a bunch of money… there was a fire somewhere in there too)
All I really remember is that, before I had quite gotten it into my head that my idea of fun was (and apparently still is) sort of immature. And after we read the book, we got to have a tea party in class. Extra points for participation. Which sounded WAY FUN to me (still does.) so I wore my Miss Havisham dress (which is just an old, long, slightly poofy greyish dress) and brought cucumber sandwiches. I won’t be able to forget that at least until I graduate because I was the only one who came dressed up and everyone (well, the majority of everyone. including my teacher, who was a real jerk. And not including my good friend who also thought tea parties were fun but didn’t have a dress. And who, apparently, gave everyone who showed up the same grade) made fun of me. Some of the boys still call me Miss Havisham.
Great Expectations is traumatic!
Atlanta Nights. It was designed to be the worst book ever written, and it is hilariously successful. Maybe it shouldn’t count, since it’s a parody, but since RealityChuck posted here…
I’m tempted to re-nominate The Da Vinci Code, but at least that thing had flow - unlike Washington Square, The Chosen, and a couple of other books I vaguely remember from high school that were boring and ponderous in every way. We all hated Great Expectations, but I think there were worse books.
A dreary story about a totally unsympathetic protagonist, written by an author who can’t make up her mind whether she’s doing a serious literary novel or a lame *Exorcist * rip-off.
I read mysteries all the time where Sherlock Holmes is resurrected by someone who has never “gotten” that he’s smart. The “missing cases” are full of villains and chases and clues, but they always miss the connection: They have him find the villain by setting a trap or being ambushed, not by using the clues to figure out who and where and how and why.
So, instead of being a story where logic beats crime, it’s a story where luck beats crime.
I found this book in a hotel “library”, the kind where the books are all for decoration. These are the books that no-one in their right mind would steal. Being not in my right mind, I stole it. The idiot title serves as your warning. It is all about the inane “racy” (at least for 1968) hijinks at a ski resort.
It is so stupid, with such idiotic characters and tortured prose, just reading ANY random passage is enough to send me and the GF into gales of laughter. I will try to dig it out and favor y’all with a few quotes. It is no surprise that it was this guy’s first and last work of fiction. McGraw-Hill, what the hell were you thinking? Yah, yah, blame it on the 60’s.
“The Ladies of the Club”, I think it was. A six-inch thick paperback written by a 90-something year old woman. It is the only book I started I never finished, and I have finished some stinkers!
Granted, I don’t count it among the very worst books I’ve ever read, but it was boring enough the first time I read it. To have to read it a second time… :mad:
The idiot title serves as your warning. It is all about the inane “racy” (at least for 1968) hijinks at a ski resort.