Forrest Gump by Winston Groom, and Exquiste Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite for completely different reasons. I think both authors should cut me a check for having wasted a few hours of my life to read such utter dreck.
*Crash *by J.G. Ballard. I wasn’t horrified, I wasn’t shocked, it didn’t make me think. It just made me bored. And then it made me angry that I had fallen into the “OMG, this is an IMPORTANT book! Must read! Must read!” fallacy again.
I actually came in to mention this one. I read this in high school for a book report (!) and was really unsettled by it.
Ditto. Well, except for the first handful of Xanth books which, while not Great Literature, were mildly entertaining.
The one in particular I’d really like to forget was first in a series about a young man who, with his family, was travelling on a ship between one of Jupiter’s moons, and another moon (or Jupiter itself? or maybe it was Saturn), and the ship is repeatedly boarded and people are killed, raped, taken away as slaves, killed, raped, taken away, lather rinse repeat. The protatgonist winds up being the only survivor or something. His name was Hope or Spirit or something.
Needless to say, I did not read any further books in the series.
I don’t think you’re actually being asked to sympathise. Covenant is portrayed throughout the book as a thoroughly unlikable character.
I loathed the book but forced myself to read it as I’d gotten it from a book club. That’s about 12 hours I’ll never get back. The “high point” was the rape. The main character is toxic and everything he touches goes to hell. Nor does he ever seem to learn anything. Oh, and I found the book itself badly written, with utterly obscure vocabulary.
Definitely Hannibal. Hands down the worst book I’ve ever read. I would gladly forget it.
The best thing I got out of those books (yes, I read all of them, and I have no idea why - I think maybe I was bored with the library’s selection that summer), was a better understanding of leprosy. And I think that was the first chapter of book one.
Thomas Covenant is a horrible person, which I get is the whole point of the entire series. It makes for a deeply unpleasant read, however.
The Thomas Covenant books were kind of slogs, but one thing that really hooked me was The Land itself. It’s kind of fascinating…all of these strange creatures living with what look like regular humans, with interesting powers. The magic system was just esoteric enough to not be a cliche, and the opening up of the world in the second Chronicles was epic. I never did really get to like Covenant, but everyone else in that world was fascinating. (I loved the Giants, especially)
Bio of a Space Tyrant is the series. Hope Hubris was the character. I recall that some scene from the series showed up at the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition a few years ago. That’s all I really want to remember about this series. (I can’t recall if it was the school or public library that had them, but I read them at the same age I read the Xanth books, somewhere in junior high); I still don’t know why I felt compelled to finish the series. Yeesh.
Fool of a Took! Then you would not know to punch Thomas Harris in the neck for writing it if ever you chance to meet him.
*Silas Marner, *by George Eliot. The most godawful boring piece of crap ever written. We had to read it in a high school “advanced” English course . . . I think they figured that smart kids could deal with any level of boredom. It made most of us wish we were in the remedial class, which read The Yearling. I don’t know what the “normal” kids read.
Oh, and they never told us that George Eliot was a woman. Not that it would have changed our opinion of this dreck.
The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch. We’d been lent it by someone whose opinion I had thereunto respected, and we were poor and had few books and no money for any other entertainment, so we read it aloud. Damn that’s a bad book. It’s boring, wordy, pretentious, patronising, navel-gazing, disgusting (but not even shocking, just gross), arrogant, self-absorbed, and shallow, to name but a few of its qualities. It’s like porn written by a sixteen year old paedophile who thinks everything he knows is worth sharing. Ponderously. And even if it wasn’t badly written, the plot (if you can call it that) is both predictable and preposterous, and goes nowhere. We kept waiting for something to happen. Nothing ever did, except that a series of characters no-one could ever like, care about, or sympathise with, died in stupid ways. I would very much like back the part of my brain occupied by this book and the nauseous rage it caused me.
Also Moby Dick. I won’t bother explaining that one. I agree about Catcher in the Rye, too.
Oh, I actually forgot this one. And now I want to forget it again.
“Hannibal” was just the most disgusting and preposterous peice of shit ever puton paper. Maybe Thomas Harris used to be good, but “Hannibal” read more like an teenaged boy’s really gross fan fiction sequel.
Stranger in a Strange Land
Hannibal
The works of Richard Brautigan, Anne Rice, Henry James, and John Irving
Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher, Desperation, and The Regulators…heck, Lisey’s Story too. (I love you, Steve, but oh honey, those books were m-o-o-n, that spells shit.)
As for all the other books mentioned here, I will avoid them like the plague, although after hearing so much about Twilight, I have a perverse urge to read just a page or two…
I’ve shared this before, but I enjoy typing it:
Hannibal was never meant to be published–or, more accurately, Harris never meant to publish it. You see, after the enormous success of Silence of the Lambs, he took another advance and moved to Italy, where he spent about 8 years whoring and drinking as is the custom, and got so busy he forgot to write the book. Eventually St. Martin’s Press sent a couple of junior editors–and by that of course I mean “psychopthic goons” to his villa with instructions to return in a week with either a completed manuscript, the advance (plus interst) or Harris’s testicles in a week. Having just spent the last of the advance on the services fo bisexual triplet hookers, Harris pounded out the manuscript in terror over the course of 5 days, sure it was so bad the publisher would demand a rewrite.
The published it instead.
World War Z, the chapter where the guy talks about the pet store.
Animal neglect/abuse/abandonment really hits deep buttons in me, so reading about the animals not killed by zombies but dying slowly in the secure store hit me hard.
Lord Foul’s Bane and Silas Marner are, I think, the only books that sucked so hard I’d like to forget I’d ever read. I’ve also had the misfortune of reading a few short stories by Flannery O’Connor that need neuralization.
However, the absolute worst dreck I’ve ever read is Wallace Stevens’s poetry. It’s everything you’d expect in poetry from an insurance company lawyer, and less.
I read a Mills & Boon romance once - because it came free with a magazine…that I also got free. I should have known. Anyway no need for the eraser ray. I’ve already forgotten everything about it except the cover, the fact that it was set in Italy and the shame I felt for stooping so low as to waste time reading it.
Carry on.
:eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:
Absolutely anything by Andrew Greeley. This man either has the worst editors in the history of publishing, or else he does his own editing.
The gaps, inconsistencies and leaps of “faith” in his stories are the stuff of legend.
Erase them now…PLEEEEEEEEEASE