# What are the worst books you've ever read? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [March 12, 2002, 7:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896 "2002-03-12T19:21:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Netbrian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/71e660/32.png) [@Netbrian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Netbrian)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/41 "2002-03-13T03:00:33Z")
I read Ethan Frome and hated every word of the piece of tripe. Same goes for Great Expectations. My desires to read any more of Charles Dickens’ work is completely and utterly quashed. Most Christopher Stasheff novels. BTW, could someone define Harlequin Romance for me? _gives puppy dog eyes_ ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/42 "2002-03-13T03:23:17Z")
Some of the worst “cience fction” books: **The Null Frequency Impulser** (can’t recall the author – but it’s bad) **Cataclysm!** by Don Pendleton **Galaxy 666** by Pel Torro. In fact, just about anything by this guy, under his zillion aliases, is pretty awful. But Galaxy 666 shows off his crack-open-the-thesaurus-so -I -can-pad-my-word-count style better than most ---
**Author:** ![Winnowill](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/4491bb/32.png) [@Winnowill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Winnowill)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 3:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/43 "2002-03-13T03:49:10Z")
Hmm. All the ranting about Anne Rice brings up another one. I can’t BELIEVE I forgot it the first time around, as it was the worst glurge I’ve ever read. _Violin_. I couldn’t even sell it to the used bookstore, because they already had more copies than they could stock. I finished it, though. I don’t know why. Morbid curiosity, I suppose. Actually, a book has to be actively boring or distasteful for me NOT to finish it. Even when I’m not crazy about the story I still usually want to know how it turns out. It’s sad when I don’t care how it ends. But, there is another one I thought of that I didn’t bother to finish: Edward Rutherford’s _London_. Boring, boring, boring. ---
**Author:** ![Kat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/b19c9b/32.png) [@Kat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kat)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 3:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/44 "2002-03-13T03:56:53Z")
A fantasy novel called _The Unlikely Ones_ and I can’t remember the author. I managed to struggle through to the end of the second to the last chapter and then just put it down and never picked it up again. And I can usually manage to read completely through anything, no matter how bad it is, but I cared so little for the characters that even that close to the end I couldn’t force myself to continue and find out how it ended. ---
**Author:** ![Glory](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/7cd45c/32.png) [@Glory](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Glory)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 3:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/45 "2002-03-13T03:57:32Z")
Piers Anthony trilogy: Bio of a Space Tyrant Stephen King: Desperation, The Regulators, Dreamcatcher Dean Koontz: That book where the guy can only come out at night and talks like a surfer dude Stephen R. Donaldson: The Gap Into Ruin (series…sooo depressing) Laurell K. Hamilton: Narcissus in Chains (laughably bad in a goofy soft core porn way) ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 3:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/46 "2002-03-13T03:57:47Z")
I have to add these Classics: **A Separate Peace** – had to read this one _twice_ for chool \*\* A Death in the Family\*\* by James Agee Anything by Henry James, the Man Who Does not now How to End a Sentence. He managed to make a _ghost story_ boring ( **Turn of the Screw** )! I especially hate **The Beast in the Jungle**. Nothing happens in this book. The whole _point_ of this book is that nothing happens. But it takes so damned long to not happen! ---
**Author:** ![KarlGrenze](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/dbc845/32.png) [@KarlGrenze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KarlGrenze)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 4:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/47 "2002-03-13T04:10:49Z")
Well, my personal book for worst book I’ve read goes to: Death Be Not Proud (yes, the book, not the poem) Made me talk to my parents and make them promise NEVER write a book about me if I die young and of some horrible or incurable way, like cancer. Don Quijote - I liked the novel. Remember, the whole story are his adventures as a knight and his delusions, so the windmills are part of the story. I’m with Guinastasia about The Witching Hour . I liked that book, and even Lasher a bit, but the last book of the series was too much. It made the effort put by people on the first book useless!!! ---
**Author:** ![Lamia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 4:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/48 "2002-03-13T04:15:23Z")
I’ll second _The Bridges of Madison County_. My mother bought a copy when it was popular (she ended up hating it too), and I read it to see what all the fuss was about. The “all the ships that ever went to sea” passage was so bad that I just had to call up my best friend and read it aloud to her. I liked _Clan of the Cave Bear_, but barely made it through the sequel, _Valley of the Horses_. It was a Paleolithic Harlequin! I hoped that the third book (_The Mammoth Hunters_) might be better, but gave up after the first couple of chapters. _To the Resurrection Station_ is a thankfully obscure sci-fi novel that my sister picked up at a secondhand bookstore. It’s about a young lesbian on some futuristic colony on another planet who goes back to Earth with a robot inhabited by the spirit of her grandfather so he can get a new body from some sort of ancient and abandoned cryogenic station there. Along the way they meet a giant talking rat who comes along so he can get a human body too. They get the new bodies…and that’s it. They just go home. That’s the whole plot. But just to make it creepy as well as bad, right towards the end the author has to mention that the heroine finds herself attracted to both grandpa (now in the body of a young woman) and the rat (now in the body of a young man). More recently, I checked out a library copy of _The Hunger_. I had seen the movie and enjoyed it, although it wasn’t really very good. I figured the book would probably be a lot better. Was I ever wrong. Whoever adapted the novel for the screen must have been a genius, because they managed to turn a stunningly bad book into a film that was merely mediocre. The book has some of the least appealing sex scenes I’ve ever read, and the main character, despite being described as a supersmart vampire with thousands of years of experience under her belt, displays all the intelligence of a stapler. Whitney Streiber deserved to be abducted by aliens after writing this. ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 6:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/49 "2002-03-13T06:26:29Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by The Tim \* > \*\*I agree with _Atlas Shrugged_ being one of the biggest pieces of shit ever written. Not so much because of the philosophy but the style of Ayn Rand’s writing is barely tolerable and her characters are about as far from real people as you can get. > \*\* I can’t argue with that one. When I left for college, my Dad ordered me never to read this book. If I had listened, I would have saved about fifteen hours of time and a lot of mental anguish. I’m quite surprised that nobody has yet mentioned _The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People_ . It has got to be the most annoying collection of English language words ever assembled. I don’t have a clue how it topped the best-seller list for several months. I’ve read a lot of science fiction. My worst memory is of a book called _Freedom’s Landing_ by Anne McCaffrey. It’s about aliens who attack Earth in gigantic spaceships and abduct a bunch of human beings, then drop them on an uninhabited planet. The next 400 pages deal mostly with people walking around and commenting on the scenery. None of the plot lines are resolved in the end (probably because the author wants you to buy the sequel). And it features a jarringly bad inter-species sex scene. ---
**Author:** ![Fern\_Forest](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/71c47a/32.png) [@Fern\_Forest](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fern_Forest)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 6:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/50 "2002-03-13T06:46:24Z")
Oliver Twist. Maybe I was just too young but that was so damn boring and excruciating. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 7:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/51 "2002-03-13T07:07:42Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by CalMeacham \* > **Galaxy 666** by Pel Torro. In fact, just about anything by this guy, under his zillion aliases, is pretty awful. But Galaxy 666 shows off his crack-open-the-thesaurus-so -I -can-pad-my-word-count style better than most \*\* By the seven green moons of Gongle, you didn’t like this book? To be fair, I couldn’t even finish it, myself. John Vornholt’s _War Drums_ is easily the worst Star Trek novel I’d ever read, and one of the worst overall. It’s the only book I’ve ever tossed into a recycle bin instead of giving it away, because I believed it would better serve being mashed into pulp than wasting another person’s time. ---
**Author:** ![Yookeroo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yookeroo/32/323_2.png) [@Yookeroo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yookeroo)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 7:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/52 "2002-03-13T07:12:22Z")
Something by David Eddings. It was just so generic that I can’t remember anything abou ti. ---
**Author:** ![Mephisto](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/48db29/32.png) [@Mephisto](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mephisto)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 7:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/53 "2002-03-13T07:20:09Z")
Two of Dean Koontz’s three novels suck. I can forgive Stephen King for _Hearts In Atlantis_ because he was getting burned out and had medical problems, but surely somebody at the publishing company should have stopped this one. Almost everything I ever encountered that was written by a Russian was terrible (maybe Russian just doesn’t translate into English well?). I’ve never been able to finish either a Romance or a Western. > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by ITR champion \* > \*\* > I’m quite surprised that nobody has yet mentioned _The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People_ . It has got to be the most annoying collection of English language words ever assembled. I don’t have a clue how it topped the best-seller list for several months. > \*\* I have two clues. One, people like my former boss, the president of [I’m scared of slander], who orders hundreds of copies of this book a year and then forces all his employees to read it during these semi-regular “corporate improvement classes.” And two, Oprah really likes Stephen R. Covey. ---
**Author:** ![SoulFrost](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f07891/32.png) [@SoulFrost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SoulFrost)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 7:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/54 "2002-03-13T07:26:10Z")
Interesting tidbit related by my third-year Creative Writing prof, which may or may not be true: _Atlas Shrugged_ was written as a parody of the typical fiction of the day–but nobody got the joke, and it became a best-seller. If true, perhaps you’ll like the book better in that context. My absolute least-favorite novel: _Black House_, the supposed the sequel to _The Talisman_ by King and Straub. I first read _The Talisman_ as a seventeen-year-old who had only recently been exposed to the Fantasy and Horror genres…and I totally fell in love with it. About sixteen years later, this abortion called _Black House_ comes out, so I simply HAD to read it. Which I did. And it sucked. Hardcore. I wanted Wolf and the Territories and the Queen and Jack…what I got was another of King’s ass-dragging tales about that damned Tower. I have never burned a book in my life…but upon finishing page 625–God!–I was tempted… -David ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_Wright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/848f3c/32.png) [@Steve\_Wright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_Wright)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 10:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/55 "2002-03-13T10:37:17Z")
I’m going to try to be virtuous here, and resist the temptation to list books as “bad” just because I didn’t like them. For example, I’ll grit my teeth and allow that there are good things about Henry James. I can’t see what they are, I find James totally unreadable - after about thirty pages of any James book, if I’m still awake, it’s because I’m yelling “For God’s sake, will something please _happen_! Something! _Anything!_” But others (including James Thurber, a writer I respect) read and appreciate James, so I suppose he must have something going for him. Most books that have a reputation and a following have them for a reason… which doesn’t mean that everyone has to like them, but does suggest that they have some good qualities. Really _bad_ books are generally obscure… deservedly so. Somebody already mentioned _Galaxy 666_, by “Pel Torro”, better known as the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe. The _only_ reason people know about this book is because it’s part of Fanthorpe’s famous (in SF circles) output (he signed a contract with a very low-quality publisher that required him to produce books at an insane rate). If it wasn’t associated with such a well-known figure, _Galaxy 666_ would have been printed, remaindered, and never heard of again. So, I’ll list the worst book I’ve ever read. It’s _The Evangelist_, by Saul Dunn. It’s nominally SF, it’s the third and last book in an abortive series, and I’m fairly confident that none of you will ever have heard of it, or its author, before. Why? Because it’s total rubbish, that’s why, and it sank without a trace into well-deserved obscurity. And may all of its ilk do the same. ---
**Author:** ![Cazzle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cazzle/32/75_2.png) [@Cazzle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cazzle)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 10:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/56 "2002-03-13T10:52:59Z")
Mistlewaite - the “sequel” to The Secret Garden. ---
**Author:** ![Guinastasia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guinastasia/32/5751_2.png) [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/57 "2002-03-13T14:05:44Z")
If only it were a parody. But all of Rand’s books are like that, and the woman had no sense of humor whatsoever, as far as I can tell. ---
**Author:** ![sidle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ee59a6/32.png) [@sidle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sidle)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/58 "2002-03-13T14:33:04Z")
I’ll see your Bridges of Madison County and raise you The Rules. Although it did make me laugh, so I guess it was good in a comedic way… . I’ll also add American Psycho, anything by freakin’ Hawthorne (snooze), and a book by Ann Rice’s son Christoher Rice. Don’t know remember care what the title was, but it was a vampire book similar to his mother’s writing. Apparently, Christopher Rice is gay. That is great. If he’s happy, I’m happy. However, the whole book dripped of homosexual references and scenes until I really felt like I was reading gothic gay soft porn. Which maybe I was, but the jacket did not indicate this. I had no problem with it, except that it seemed silly, overdone, and shoved in your face. Like the show Ellen _after_ she came out. Anyone know this book? ---
**Author:** ![unwashed\_brain](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/a9adbd/32.png) [@unwashed\_brain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/unwashed_brain)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/59 "2002-03-13T16:30:43Z")
**Wizard’s First Rule** by Terry Goodkind. ---
**Author:** ![Knowed\_Out](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/knowed_out/32/7380_2.png) [@Knowed\_Out](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Knowed_Out)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2002, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896/60 "2002-03-13T16:49:30Z")
_Mad Merlin_ by J. Robert King. Avoid this book at all costs. I picked it up because I thought it’d be like A.A. Attanasio’s retelling of the Arturian myths, and I thought it’d be interesting to see another author’s take on it. Shoulda known better. The entire book is a series of vignettes about Merlin and his hijinks. Mainly, he eats a lot, acts crazy, and has story book magical adventures with his faithful sidekick, Arthur. There is no plot. King probably assumed he didn’t need to devote any effort to plot since surely everbody’s already familiar with knights and wizards and stuff. There’s lots of neato keeno D&D type fireballs and lightning bolts and junior high-level literary special effects, but no story. I think there was one chapter where Merlin made a horse for preteen Arthur out of clouds and they went and fought reanimated roman statues in some ruins somewhere. I stopped after that. I assume if I had read any further, Morgan LeFey would have appeared in a house made out of gingerbread and flying around on a broom. Maybe the book was marketed towards kids, but it sure weren’t for sale in the kindergarten section. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-worst-books-youve-ever-read/97896.md?page=4)