We’ve had threads before about bad movies, bad songs, and the like, but I haven’t seen any threads about really bad books.
What books, fiction or nonfiction, were a total waste of your time and money - pretentious, stupid crap that make you regret you ever read them? Children’s books don’t count.
My votes would be for
Iron John by Robert Bly. A book about how to be a man, by a guy who apparently knows nothing about it. Almost bad enough to be funny, but not quite. Incredibly bad.
The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield. Fifty times worse than “Iron John.” Hysterically dumb.
Hannibal by Thomas Harris. My God, this book was bad.
Most of Dean Koontz’s stuff (I’ll admit to loving Watchers and Lightning though)
Anything V.C. Andrews “wrote” after she died
Just guessing, but anything with an illustration exposing more than one nipple (male or female) on the cover, e.g.–Harlequins, can’t be too intellectualy satisfying
The worst book I ever actually finished reading was The Ultimatum to Mankind by Zeev Dickman. If I hadn’t been reviewing it, I wouldn’t have finished.
I’m also currently reviewing Moses in Sinai by Simone Zelich, which is nearly as bad. Favorite howler: “From the bottom of his feet, Moses screamed” (Note to author: look up the difference between “soul” and “sole”)
The Pleistocene Redemption by Dan Gallagher is probably the worst book I own, but I’ve never gotten past the first few pages. I guarantee you that no other book in the topic can top this for awfulness. See Red Mike’s Review
I also used to have a self-published novel by a friend of the family that was egregiously awful – the author was a lawyer and his sex scenes sounded like a legal brief.
I have actually blocked the name of this book and the author from my mind, but it was a piece of crappy geekboy porn disguised as science fiction.
The galaxy was ruled by a Japanese style emperor, served by anthropomorphized lions who apparently lived by the code of Bushido (but it was never called that). The emperor liked molesting little children, the queen was tragically noble, the son was a vicious little monster, and the daughter was the only one with brains.
The author seemed to have written the book primarily so he could put in his own nasty little fetish scenes that included:
a little boy who was chained to the emperor’s thrown with the last link of the chain surgically inserted between the two bones of his forearm, then drugged on happy dust, then fondled by the emperor, then had his testicles crushed by the emperor when the royal jerk got bored.
a concubine of the emperor’s who was a “living mineral”. The emperor suspected her of cheating on him, so he had her freeze dried and then spent a day with hammer and chisel lopping off parts of her while another character mused that she was probably still alive and could feel everything.
the only decent character being crushed to death by one of the lion samurai while details of how he wet his pants just beforehand were lovingly described.
gah. I was a teenager when I read it and hadn’t figured out that I didn’t have to finish every book I read. I don’t know what I did with that book. I hope I burned it.
Big topic. There are so many terrible books… I would have to nominate In The Skin Of A Lion, by Michael Ondaatje. I was cruelly forced to read it in high school English, and I’ve managed to block most of the details out. Harlequin romances are so bad that they’re hysterically funny- I see women reading them on the subway with straight faces, and I don’t know how they manage it. Romances are excellent anti-depressants… "thickets of chest hair…"and all. Especially when one of the characters is named “Randy”. Heh heh.
I also hated The Wars by Timothy Findley, and I Who Have Never Known Men… can’t remember the author. Weird science fiction about some girl who’s imprisoned with a bunch of other women. It kind of starts depressing, and gets worse.
The book that comes to mind is “The Fundamentals of Play” by Caitlin Macy. It’s fiction and was kinda billed as a “Great Gatsby” of the nineties–about a bunch of rich twentysomethings suffering their way through the world of trust funds and private clubs.
The weirdest part was that it was supposed to take place in the late 1990’s, but it felt as though the author had written it maybe 10 years earlier and then dusted off the manuscript for publication. The scene that stood out was one in which a guy pulled out a cell phone and one of his buddies had never seen one being used before–I think there was also this similar tone of awe when talking about the Internet and email. I just had no sympathy for the characters—never like Gatsby either.
I don’t know if this book is bad—all I know is that I’ve started to read it several times and have failed to complete it—“Moonwise” by Greer Ilene Gilman.
And my vote for too long/convoluted goes to “Those Bones are Not My Child” by Toni Cade Bambara.
Another vote for Ethan Frome. Also, Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius - I kept thinking “Why in the world does he think anybody CARES?” and then finally I realized that he thinks people care because they bother to read the damn book. At that point I returned it to the library.
I know they’re classics, but these are the worst ones I’ve ever read:
Wuthering Heights, by Bronte The Scarlet Letter, by Hawthorne Dr. Zhivago, by Pasternak
There are many out there who truly love these works, and indeed, I was looking forward to them too when each was assigned as part of various literature courses I’ve taken (and three different courses I took assigned Dr. Zhivago). But I found that each was a book that I didn’t enjoy and that I had to force myself to finish.
I know a lot of people liked this book, but I absolutely hated Interview With The Vampire. I’m a guy who will finish a book when he starts no matter how dry or painful. Yet, I couldn’t finish this book despite picking it back up twice. I was less than 75 pages from the end, but couldn’t take it.
I really thought I would like this book and had really high hopes, but it sucked. And it wasn’t even diminished expectations that soured the book for me. It was the pretentious style of writing. “Look at my stylistic prose. I am so evocative of the senses. Come explore a different time with me as I paint a vivid picture in your imagination.”
The first book that comes to my mind is How to Mutate and Take Over the World by R.U. Sirius and St. Jude :rolleyes:
It was an epistolary novel, consisting mainly of emails between the two authors and their publisher and other people. No, wait, it wasn’t a novel; in the authors’ words, it was an “exploded post-novel,” although they never defined that term.
All through the text were sidebars of varying relevance to the authors’ conversation. One of the sidebars was a (negative) review of that very book.
It was a horrible, huge exercise in pointless vanity, and I wanted my money back even though it was a free review copy.
And if the content wasn’t bad enough, the design was even worse: purple letters on white paper, in a computer-looking font like you often see in Wired. And again like Wired, it actually, physically hurt the eyes to look at it.
I only got about a third of the way into it. I didn’t feel bad at all about reviewing the whole book based on that third; I’m quite certain it didn’t improve.
Insomnia, by Stephen King. I got maybe a third of the way through it before I gave up. Didn’t care about any of the characters, didn’t care what was going on with the little bald doctors, hated the storyline. I’m still peeved about the time I wasted on that one.
Moby Dick. I tried. I really did. But I just couldn’t make a go of it. After two entire chapters dedicated to the differences in head shape between two different types of whale, I couldn’t go on any further. To this day, I don’t get how this is great literature.
The Pushcart Wars. I had to read this book in the 6th grade, and I absolutely hated it. There was no plot–it seemed as though each chapter was written by a different person, and the editor had decided not to check for continuity.
Fifth Sacred Thing, by Starhawk. Ugh. Even though I’ll never be able to look at military vehicles the same way, I find Starhawk’s writing unbelievably tedious. I was propping my eyelids open with toothpicks by the last 100 or so pages.
Witching Hour, by Anne Rice. First 100 pages, good. Last 50 pages, good. Everything else in the middle, like everything that isn’t Scottish, was CRAP.
Grapes of Wrath. I have a real hatred for Steinbeck.
Anything by Ernest Hemmingway.
I’ll chime in on Wuthering Heights, and raise you a Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and Vindication on the Rights of Women.
Now that stings…The Old Man and the Sea was wonderful and Grapes of Wrath or even Of Mice and Men…brilliance in my eyes
IMHO, Saul Bellow makes me cringe. He is so utterly long winded that getting to the point seems to be a chore for him. And I had to read at least 5 of his books in Advanced Placement Lit because the professor thought ol Bellow pissed genius.
I was once suckered into losing three hours of my life by reading The Bridges of Madison County. Possibly the most annoying thing in the book is that the fatuous author keeps telling us the protagonist is brilliant, but the guy never says anything that would be startling coming from the mouth of a tipsy college sophomore. (The most annoying thing about having read this book is the people who won’t believe that I hate it because it’s so badly written; they’re sure I’m just not “romantic”. Morons. Same thing happened thirty years ago with Love Story.)
A female friend asked me to read Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus, but I just couldn’t finish it. Simplistic crap. (Incidentally, the author, “Dr.” John Gray, got his PhD from Columbia Pacific University, a “diploma mill” that has since been shut down.)
Phantoms by Dean Koontz. Sheer formulaic crap. (I should admit that I did watch the crappy movie version on cable. Amusing, the movie retained the book’s reference to the human brain as weighing “six pounds”. Apparently nobody involved, from Koontz himself, to his editor, to the director, knew how much a brain weighs.)
She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb made me throw it down in disgust and pick it back up again 'cause I had no other books to read at least five times.
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad. I just can’t say enough bad things about this book. I had to read if for my class this semester. It was pure hell. I’d look up at the clock every five minutes 'cause I was so damned bored.