What are the worst books you've ever read?

Cafe Society
81

My vote is a three-way tie between A Separate Peace (forced to read it in high school), Lord of the Flies (ditto), and The Magus (world’s longest shaggy-dog story).

I read The Magus only a few years ago out of curiosity. John Fowles toys with the reader the way the Greek sadist toys with the novel’s narrator. Eventually you realize that the mental torment he’s putting the poor patsy through on that island is a metaphor for the mental torment the novelist is inflicting on the reader. Knowles had a great idea for a ripping good story. But instead of admitting he didn’t know how to write it, he went ahead and produced a hugely bad novel out of sheer contempt for the reader. He keeps teasing you that the payoff is just around the corner but after 656 pages the payoff never comes. He couldn’t even write an ending for it! The stupid book just stops with no ending.

I welcome this chance to get back at John Knowles, John Fowles, and the rest for the dreary crap they put me through.

What’s all this about Ethan Frome? I never heard of it apart from everyone at the SDMB unanimously slamming it.

I read The Pushcart War when I was maybe 9 years old. I don’t remember it being disjointed in style. I totally dug the plot of the little guys banding together to get the big guys. It was fun.

82

I had to read Tess of the D’Urbervilles for a college class. Wanted to kill the professor after I finished it. A total waste of my time.

Anne Rice’s The Vampire Armand remains to this day the only book I ever threw into the trash can. Oftentimes if there’s a book I don’t plan on keeping anymore I’ll either sell it at the used books store or donate it to the library. But I could not, in good conscience, contribute to the merest possibility that this book could be inflicted upon another reader. Complete and utter shite.

83

I can’t believe I had to get to the second page before Hearts in Altantis was mentioned. It sprung to mind just upon seeing the thread title. Way too wordy even for Steven King, and absolutely no connection between the first, second and third parts, except for that Carol kid, who was only a minor character in each part. This book was definitely going to get my vote…

And then Drastic reminded me of Killobyte. I am diabetic, and I can tell you, for all the bragging that author did on the amount of diabetics he interviewed for his research, he still did not get one aspect of this disease correct. Booster shot? What the hell is that? And why was that girl named after a devil? And she wouldn’t have crashed if she had bothered to do what most people do after they take a shot - EAT!

Of course, I, too, have to include anything by Dean Koontz. If that’s all the talent it takes to become a millionaire best-selling author, then I missed my calling.

84

I don’t know if anyone has objected to this yet, but I just have to disagree with you. The High School Shakespeare I read tended to be boring because either the textbook edited things out and so it made less sense or they weren’t presented well by the teachers. I guess everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I think Romeo and Juliet was pretty good. Better, in some ways, than Macbeth. This is all my opinioin, of course, but I have to take exception to Romeo and Juliet being among the worst you have ever read.

85

Hmmmmmmm. What is it that makes a bad book bad? Is it merely poor writing, or is being actively offensive? Is a book that demostrates a competence in the craft of writing, but is unbearably offensive bad? How about books that are competently or even well written, but have a severely flawed ending that leaves you disappointed. I’ve read books that I didn’t care for that were nonetheless competently written and which I would hesitate to label bad simply on the basis of my disliking them. I don’t care for Faulkner, but that’s a matter of his style not interacting well with my personal taste in literature; I recognize the deep talent he posessed and can understand why he is so admired.

Several of my favorite books are listed here. I consider Lord of the Flies one of the great novels of the 20th century. My students and I both love The Pushcart War; it’s a little easy for the gifted 5th graders I teach, but it’s so useful as a tool for teaching tone that I can’t leave it out of my curriculum. I find The Chocolate War compelling; it’s a good introduction to the concept of literary tragedy, though I tend to prefer I Am the Cheese. I like A Separate Peace a lot. I think Steinbeck is a god.

My personal choice: Let’s Go Play at the Adams by Mendel Johnson. I read this one summer during college. A college girl is babysitting three children in the Adams family, little Bobby and Cindy and their older sister during the summer. So that they can “have some fun” unhampered by adult authority, they use some chlorofom from their father’s office (he’s a doctor) to knock her out, intending to keep her tied up for a few days then release her. They, and a teenage boy neighbor, proceed to keep her bound and gagged, stripped naked, for a week, using her as a toy to be played with, gradually escalating to torture and rape. They finish by tying the girl naked to a fence post and torturing her to death with a red-hot fire-place poker. They frame a homeless Hispanic drifter for the crime and get away with it, without even feeling very guilty about it.

My hatred for this book know no bounds. It isn’t enough that the book itself is thinly disguised bondage porn. Johnson goes out of his way to make it worse by giving the victim a chance to escape (by injuring the little girl during a bathroom trip), which she fails to capitalize on (she’s too weak to do what’s necessary to save herself, so she is partly at fault). He implies that once the first step was taken (cloroforming and tying up the girl) the rest was an inevitible progression which could have happened with any similar group of kids, and that they were basically good kids who just got a little carried away in a situation kids are ready to handle. The girl wasn’t the victim of an unspeakable act of evil, she was just unlucky.

All this isn’t enough, though. I would remember the book as offensive, but would hardly have this vivid, unreasonable hatred of it 20 years later were it not for the last chapter. The final chapter deals with what might have become of the girl’s soul as a result of her death, in which it is implied that she may be eternally mute and immoble because of how her life ended.

Maybe not the worst book I’ve read–I’ve read books that showed less competent craft–but certainly the book I dislike the most. The truly badly written books I tend to discard unfinished and forget. There are too many good books out there waiting to be read to waste time on the bad ones.

86

I know this has turned up on best books lists, but I HATED Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. Idiotic, uninteresting, narcissistic drivel.

Anything by John Grisham…apparently he doesn’t bother with character development, description of anything, correct grammar, or tying plot lines together. The only thing he can do is think up a somewhat entertaining story.

I liked Interview With a Vampire and I didn’t mind Lestat either (then again I was in high school), but what I truly hated was one of Rice’s attempts at erotica. I think it was called The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. I rather liked her descriptions of blood-sucking in Interview – they seemed somehow erotic, so I thought she’d be good at the genre. Maybe some would have liked it, but it was like reading a book about torture. Some serious S&M there, and it wasn’t erotic at all.

I love that so many people hate Atlas Shrugged. She’s so subtle, though – was she trying to promote a philosophy or something?

87

The Waterworks, by E L Doctorow. I like most of his books, but this was so dull and dry it was like being forced to eat plates of chalk. How anyone could take a story about a cabal of 19th century robber barons faking their own deaths and paying a mad doctor to prolong their lives by abducting children and draining them of their vital juices {the childrens, not the robber barons} and make it stupefyingly boring is beyond my feeble ken. I counted, and one thing happened every 25 pages. The rest was taken up by turgid metaphorising about the city as emblem of the human capacity for cruelty and greed: then it all ends at the titular waterworks, which symbolises redemption or the importance of personal hygiene or something. The steam-powered lesbian robot assassins were quite good. though.

88

I liked The Waterworks; at least, I liked a lot of Doctorow’s phrasing in the book. He can put some beautiful sentences down on paper. It was a very slow book, though. I haven’t bought anything else by him since reading that. Maybe I should give him another shot.
Re: Aztec: I’m glad your friend, liked it, Winnowill. It probably was not as bad a book as some that have been mentioned; it may have been that it just didn’t suit my taste. Of course, I didn’t read enough of it to decide.
RR

89

Now, that’s too bad. I liked Atlas Shrugged, although I think Rand could have written it in about half the pages.

Black House by Stephen King…I LOATHE books written in present tense, and to boot, it was also written in the second person. Very VERY hard to get into, but I finished it because, well, it IS Stephen King. If I had to list one book I thought was a waste of time by him it would be The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. It seemed rather pointless.

I read the first few Wizard’s First Rule books by Goodkind…didn’t get to Faith of the Fallen, I lost interest in it.

But my number one, top of the heap, most hated book would be The Bear by Faulkner. I had to read it in high school and I never got past the first chapter. Stream of consciousness sucks. I did like A Rose for Emily though.

Life’s too short to read bad books…I have no compunction slamming a book shut if I’m bored with it or disgusted with the storyline.

90

My brain is actually suppressing the memories. The reasons that (immediately) come to mind are the glacial pacing, lack of strong characters and the preachy overtones. Moreover, the shift when Pamela’s suitor goes from beyond an abductor/would-be filandering rapist to the very epitome of a suitable husband drove me over the edge. I strongly suspect the plot was derived by flipping coins.

At least Moll Flanders had a strong main character and a few laugh-out-loud moments. At the very least, it was interesting to read about the dark and sordid details of her life.

In my opinion, the only good thing I got out of Pamela was the ability to read Shamela afterwards and get all of the jokes.

91

I am so heartened that at least two people mentioned Stephen King, who seems to have such a convinced following, as among the ‘worst’. I have never been able to get past page 15 without feeling that I am REALLY wasting my time. It’s not so much that it’s boring, but that it’s so cheezy (as in, hmm, a sort of with-it high school junior is putting has hand to pen). I’d rather be bored by Ethan Frome and Moby Dick.
Of course, I haven’t bothered to pick up King book for 18 years. Maybe he’s gotten better?

92

They are both suffering from Stephen King disease - they’ve gotten so big that they’ve stopped listening to their editors (or their editors are too terrified of them to try to edit their books). So you get pages of repetition and mental mastrubation. I liked Interview With a Vampire, I liked Hunt for Red October, but I’ll probably never read any more of the new stuff. Stephen King I’ve also given up on (of course, I’ll read all of the remaining Dark Tower books!!).

93

It never fails- something like Titanic," or “Gladiator.” It’s almost always a film that was highly successful and/or highly acclaimed.

Ask for the worst song of all time, and you’ll invariably hear the name of a multi-platinum hit single (“Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” “Billy Don’t Be a Hero,” “My Heart Will Go On”).

Now, even people who hated “Gladiator” will usually admit that it wasn’t REALLY the worst movie ever. But one just feels compelled to say such things when something we dislike is just so dang POPULAR!

Truth to tell, the worst movie ever made is undoubtedly something that wasn’t even good enough to find a distributor, and the worst song of all time is being played in a dingy club by a band you’ve never heard of.

The worst books ever written are ones we’ve never read… or that we put down in boredom and disgust after a few pages, and promptly forgot about. However, as expected, virtually everyone who’s posted has named a book that sold millions of copies or that’s widely regarded as a “classic.”

Hey look, I was tempted to name Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections.” NOT because it was a horrible novel. In truth, it’s just a so-so novel. Still, I was tempted to choose that one, simply because every literary critic on earth overrated it unforgiveably, and because Franzen himself struck me as a pompous jerk.

Still, since everybody else is naming famous, popular books (rather than the unknown books that are REALLY the most wretched), I’ll be a sheep, and follow suit. The worst POPULAR book I ever read was “Who Moved My Cheese.”

Not just because the pop philosophy was so annoying.

Not just because the underlying message is repulsive (i.e. that anyone who expects loyalty or stability in his relationships or at work is a whiney rat).

But mainly because that super-short book, consisting of fortune cookie philosophy, cost as much as a brtand new, hardcover bes seller.

94

Well…

I read The Green Mile after I saw the movie - it finally made me break the vow I had made after finishing Thinner years before. Thinner’s ending made me so very angry that I said I’d never read another King book until I had a damn good reason to do so. So I read The Green Mile, which was really well-done, well-written, and a great story. So I thought I’d venture a little farther and read The Stand, since I had enjoyed the miniseries so much. Blew me away. Figuring that I had give Mr King a bad rap all those years and that I had missed something fantastic, I purchased a whole buncha King novels at the used bookstore, and started reading. Needful Things - eh…maybe he was in a slump. Rita Hayworth & The Shawshank Redemption, one of my favorite movies - where the hell is the rest of the plot? Good, but…what the hell? Dolores Claiborne. Hmm. This is really pretty dull. Misery. I hate this. Why am I putting myself through this? Do I really care? Insomnia. Nope. I’m done. That’s it, I’ve had enough. Taking back Rose Madder, It, and any others I have around.

Now I just figure that The Stand and The Green Mile are the only excellence in the sea of mediocrity that is Stephen King.

95

I might as well add The Tommyknockers by Stephen King. King really shouldn’t try to write science fiction. He has a bright six-year-old’s belief that if you take a bunch of junk from the hardware store and solder it together in the right order and attach it to a train set transformer, you’ll have a time machine or antigravity. (In King’d defense, according to his book On Writing, he wrote The Tommyknockers while out of his mind on coke.) Now, when King is really on his game, he can be a damned good storyteller, and certainly thinks of stuff that Dean Koontz would never come up with.

(Scene from the cartoon Family Guy: a van runs over a figure on a country road. “Oh my God, we ran over Stephen King!” “No, that’s Dean R. Koontz.” And the van backs up and runs over him again.)

Timeline by Michael Chricton. The author supposedly spent months doing research in France, yet seems to know less about the 14th century than I do. After thirty years of producing best-sellers, Crichton still has not learned how to write. His character development consists of a three-paragraph character sketch; his plot development consists of an endless series of arbitrary crises. Further, this particular book contains huge logical holes. Feh.

96

Anything by Tom Robbins.

97

In the worst fiction category, the Book of Mormon, hands down.

98

Actually, I meant Misselthwaite! It’s by Susan Moody , so I guess it’s the same book under another title.

99

The worst book I’ve ever read is one that I’ve blocked the author and title from my mind. I think part of the title had “Lowman” in it, but I don’t remember. All I do remember is thinking that its about some American-Indian who’s well-liked by all his friends and has a girlfriend and is horribly depressed by all of this and kills himself. I was forced to read it in a college English class, and I kept thinking, “What the hell’s this guy’s problem? He’s got a girlfriend, he’s got friends who like him? So why’s he so damned depressed?” (Mind you at the time I didn’t have a girlfriend or very many friends.) The class was ran by an instructor who’s whole point seemed to be that white people are bad and we make minorities suffer horribly at our hands. :rolleyes:

Same English class, this one I do remember Native Son by Richard Wright. A horrible, horrible, heavy handed piece of crap.

Then there was Cassandra, which was a modern retelling of the Trojan War from the perspective of the Trojans. Whiny crap about how war is bad and it changes people into things they weren’t before the war and it’d be so much better if we could all live in peace and harmony in a world run by women. (Not saying that men have done such a bang up job of running the place, but anyone who thinks that women can’t be as tyrannical as men is so out to lunch that they might as well not bother trying to come back.)

Finally, anything by William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, two ham-fisted writers who seem to be incapable of creating characters that are anything other than Southern stereotypes.

100

one of the worst books i have ever read was if angels fall by rick mofina I thought it was going to be pretty good. a man takes his children on a trip out to sea. and he wasn’t paying attention or something and they drowned. and he is now about 30 years later kidnapping children to replace them and plans on drowning them to bring his kids back.
they told you who the kidnapper was in the very beginning and there is this dectective in there that keeps meantioning seeing a murdered baby. I read 280 pages out of 473. this book is pure crap!
I aslo read half of the vampire lestat.
I just couldn’t get into it at all. I read almost of of stephan king’s the girl who loved tom gordin or something like that.
it wasn’t bad, It was just depressing. I found remember me by sharon sala to be generic and annoying.