I’m confused by this. I liked In the Name of the Rose, and the movie based on it.
On the other hand, I never could slog all the way through his Foucalt’s Pendulum
American Psycho really blew. I don’t know why I finished it, but I did. I blame drugs. And it made a lasting impression on me. The impression was that Brett Easton Ellis was an overhyped hack. Strangely, the movie is really good.
But, Ayn Rand notwithstanding, the worst book I ever read was Armageddeon: The Musical. It was supposed to be a super-surreal comedy. It was neither.
Mike, Mike & Me by Wendy Markham.
I’d love to go into lots of details as to why it is an awful book, but there’s really only one reason: it’s horribly written. It reads like a mediocre-at-best grade ten creative writing assignment. And I’m not just talking plot and character, I mean the actual writing itself was bad.
I have no problem with the occasional book full o’ fluff, I like an easy read just as much as the next person, but this book was actually hard to read because it was so poorly written. I have no idea how this woman managed to get published, much less more than 60 books.
I haven’t (and won’t) finish it, but for me the answer is Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted. It was such a steaming pile of ludicrous, misanthropic shit that I couldn’t bear it. I’ve been trying to give it away but no one else wants it, either.
I wonder if I’m thinking of the right “In the Name of the Rose”. I never read it, but I downloaded a BBC radio dramatization and listened to it, because I had a vague impression that Umberto Eco was a Big Important Author-type person.
If I’m thinking of the right thing, it was an incredibly silly murder mystery set partially in a library filled with enough implausable clues, tricks, and gimmicks to make Dan Brown roll his eyes in disgust.
Sounds almost right, but, having read Brown’s book and sen the movie, I have to say he’s got Eco beat hollow in the “silly clue , trick, and gimmick” department.
Ya want proof? There’s no Cryptex in Rose (and vinegar doesn;t dissolve papyrus, anyway0.
I like Great Expectations… The worst book I was forced to read was The Perfect Storm. It’s the only book that ever had me contemplating suicide rather than finishing it. I really like the professor who assigned it, but I had to wonder what we did to him.
The worst book I ever read on my own from start to finish was The Twelve by Howard and Susan Kaminsky.
There are a couple of ways to co-write a story. You can write “together” in a whole collaborative manner or you can write alternating chapters. This pair chose a third method, which was very clearly to write alternating chapters, BUT to never ever read what the other author wrote. I guess that would be cheating. The sheer number of things written from chapter to chapter that contradicted what came before were mind-boggling. What I don’t understand, however, is how the cultist’s daughter ended up with 3 different ages at her time of death, since there were only two authors…
No, don’t. Email me your address and I’ll mail you my copy of *Eragon *(hardcover, too!). You can have it. It’s derivative of derivatives. I’ve ranted about it before on these boards. Maybe the kid deserves kudos for writing, but this book never would’ve been published if an adult had written it. The author liberally rips off everything and everyone (which lots of authors do), but never adds anything original, never inserts his own ideas. And the fact that he’s making more money off a movie version pisses me off to no end.
Ducking back into the thread:
I liked The Name of the Rose and its movie version (come on, it’s Sean Connery as a 12th century monk! What’s not to love here?). I didn’t mind Great Expectations. The Scarlet Letter was marginally decent. Surprisingly, I actually enjoyed The Historian quite a bit.
No, my (new) pick isn’t War and Peace, which I stuffed into the very bottom of my trashcan after three or four chapters. It’s not Ulysses, which had me drooling slack-jawed and snoring over its pages.
Nope. Having loved The Other Boleyn Girl and The Constant Princess, I, browsing the shelves of my library, picked up Virgin Earth by Philippa Gregory.
Never, ever, ever again.
I’ll raise you The Butlerian Jihad and all the other Dune prequels, including the preludes. I got two pages into House Harkonnen when I’d heard enough about how great Baron Harkonnen’s pecs looked in leather during his younger years. And since we’re going nuts, I’ll throw in all of the Dune series outside of the original trilogy. God Emperor made me chuckle, but c’mon. Leto II as Jabba the Hut? Slig pork? “Oh my god, they killed Duncan Idaho?” I’d add Children and Messiah, but I can’t say that those are really terrible.
Lisan Al Gaib deliver us when they release Sandworms of Dune.
The book I’ve hated the most, though, has been My Sister’s Keeper, which I had to read for an ethics class. The main storyline involves a 13-year-old girl who was conceived by IVF and chosen as a tissue donor match for her sister, who was fighting AML. The older daughter’s kidneys fail, and the younger one sues for medical emancipation when her mom expects her to give up one of her kidneys. It raises some intriguing moral issues, but I just can’t get past how humorously bad this book is.
For example, every character has a particular font for chapters written from their perspective. Gives “Harrison Ford in a tweed suit” a run for it’s money, don’t you think? Add to that to the one-dimensional daytime TV stereotypes and I lose all respect for this book.
One of the side stories involves the dad, a fire fighter, thwarting the efforts of an arsonist who turns out to be none other than…
The juvenile delinquent older brother! gasp
There’s also the turbulent romance between the girl’s lawer and
her guardian ad litem, who were both left scarred by their romance in their upscale high school. She a punk rocker and he of the yacht clube, and the reason he didn’t call was because he was in a car accident that left him an epileptic. HIGH SCHOOL, for chrissake! And that’s to say nothing of the professional breach their relationship amounts to.
The ending is the icing on the cake:
After building up all this sympathy for the poor younger sister, it turns out at the hearing that A) she was fighting the transplant because her older sister had asker her to and B) she gets killed in the car accident the VERY DAY she wins emancipation. She’s brain dead! Now her sister can have BOTH of her kidneys! Fuck yeah! It’s just made worse by the fact that the author builds up all this tension over the vanishingly slim chance that the transplant will make any difference, only to have the epilogue given by the older sister 20 years later. One in a million!
I wish a blogger would go after this one like they did The DaVinci Code. Jesus Christ, the fonts!
My first choice, “Catcher in the Rye”, may be more due to the fact it was assigned reading. However, at the time, the book sucked bloated goat testes to no end. Holden “Whiny Prick” Caufield reminded me altogether too much of my whiny teen friends at the time (read: reminded me altogether too much of myself at the time). the writing was bland and monotonous, and did I mention it was assigned reading?
My second choice, which was picked up of my own free will, was a lovely little work entitled, IIRC, “Cities in Flight”, which detailed… Well… Cities. Flying through space. Not spaceships, literally CITIES. Scranton, Pennsylvania was one.
Fergodssake, SCRANTON flying through space. Add in some crazy-assed longetivity drugs and witnessing the END OF THE UNIVERSE and you’ve got one seriously BAD work of literchure.
It sat on the coffee table for several months after I finished it simply because I didn’t want to touch it again. I think my roommate eventually accidently burned it.
Ultra mega HEAVY bad, that one was.