Okay, I know that there are several fairly well agreed on “Worst Movies ever made” but is there also such as agreement of “Worst book ever written”?
For example, Bring up the “worst movie ever”, and it will only be a few minutes before “Battlefield Earth” and “Freddy Got Fingered” is mentioned, but books seems to be far harder to get a similar analyses of.
So, is there such an agreement? Or failing that, What would you consider to be the worst book ever written?
I’m talking about boring, poorly written, cardboard characters, inane dialouge, stuff like that. Bad in every way a book can be bad. No, or very few redeeming features.
I can’t think of one at the moment, but then again, I probably blocked any such book out.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The Mission Earth series by L. Ron Hubbard is the worst thing to happen to books since the invention of fire. The only reason I read it all the way through is so that I could truthfully warn people to stay as far away from it as they could.
Yeah, but Mission: Earth was more of a publisher’s clearinghouse explosion. Besides, you’re lying, man. Nobody’s ever read all the way through that thing without being abducted by alien ghosts and zapped with a brainscrambling cleaner ray.
There’s a book, Prison Ship, that I’d like to nominate for the position. (Can’t recall the author’s name. And he’s fortunate, or I’d have to track him down and slap him with a copy of this magnum opus.) The main character, who narrates the story, tells his entire life story, except the parts he forgot to mention, and the bits he misremembers, and…
It’s just bizarre. He talks about being a computer geek, and he and his buddy hacking some government network with Radio Shack equipment, getting busted and sent to prison at the age of 17, and fails to mention that he’s also a massive killer biker dude, and later on after he and the rest of the inmates who really run the prison intercept signals from a spaceship (the one named in the title) they construct a massive underground hanger for the ship, so they hide the thing’s landing from the black helicopters looking for it, and he and the head alien prisoner discover that they’re lifelong buddies because they both love to fly (when the fuck did this guy have time to learn how to do all this?) jet fighters, and then…
It is excrement. I read this thing the way you slow down to watch a traffic accident. You know it’s wrong, and you know you shouldn’t, but you just can’t help yourself.
Makes me wonder how much of an honor being published is?
I mean, if stuff like that (if it’s as bad as you say) can get published…
Makes me wonder if I should quit trying (to get published, I’ll keep writing until they pull the keyboard from my cold dead hands), or if I should try even harder to do so and outsell these guys…
One of my highschool English teachers back in the day gave me an Anthology of Science-Fiction Short Stories to read as part of a requirement for a semester long project. He was a young teacher, about 26, bit of a hippy/rebel type. Always bucking the system. Teacher dress code required Men to wear ties… he didn’t like that idea so always wore a ridiculous bolero.
Anyhow… this is the book he lent me:
Rucker, Rudy, Peter L. Wilson, and Robert A. Wilson - Semiotext(e) (SF)
(a collection of “radical” sf published by the Semiotext(e) postmodernist journal.)
Yes. He was definately a post-modernist… but I was unsure if he had even read the Anthology himself and just lent it to me because he thought it was Sci-Fi… it basically amounted to bizarre SF stories and alot of borderline porn. Like a good little student I read it cover to cover. And without hyperbole I can say that it is a collection of the worst stories known to humanity.
For example… one story is about a man who has this video tape of Nancy Reagan… he is naked… he watches the video tape and freezes a frame on Nancy’s face… he then plucks all his body hair. He then cuts off his penis. The story then ends.
OK, this probably isn’t the worst book ever witten, but I found it excrable. Julian Barnes’ ‘History of the World’ is utterly pretentious. Whats more, the author has a certain smug and superior attitude that I simply cannot stomach.
-Oli
Assuming we’re limiting ourselves to books published by legitimate publishers, I’d like to nominate “Flowers in the Attic,” which may or may not be by V.C. Andrews.
Holy crap, that book was bad.
No, wait, I forgot “Cyclops,” by Clive Cussler. I read that book at my father-in-law’s girlfriend’s cottage because there was nothing else to do. It was bad beyond description.
I know it’s not a full book, and I know it has been mentioned on this board before, but I simply can’t let a discussion of bad writing go by without citing The Eye of Argon?
I nominate The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. In this satire against Stalin, the Russian novelist apparently thought the best way to tear apart the world’s most lethal atheistic dictator was through pointless invective against Christianity. Furthermore, the way he reacts against Soviet censorship of his works is best compared to a high-school outcast who writes a short story about how all the mean bullies perish in some big explosion at school while he’s away. If only Bulgakov could have stuck to venting steam by keeping a hit list in his desk drawer, we wouldn’t have this travesty.
Sticking just to Top 10 Bestsellers, my nominees would be:
SPHERE by Michael Crichton (it’s about a UFO… no, it’s about time travel… no, it’s about mind control… no, it’s about how women are evil… I’m firmly convinced that Crichton wrote the book the night before it was contractually due to his publisher and the same day he broke up with his girlfriend)
PANDORA by Anne Rice- yes for the love of Jesus, Grandpa Walton, and all the ships at sea, Anne, we get the point… omnisexual aristocrats whine a lot when made into immortals! Write something else! How about a cabdriving vampire, or a werewolf who really wants to direct!
THE WITCHING HOUR by Anne Rice- GREAT beginning, bogged down middle, cool family history, then an ending that makes HANNIBAL’s look fresh and viable.
LOTS OF OTHER STUFF by Anne Rice
THURSTON HOUSE by Danielle Steele (it takes a lot of talent to make San Francisco in the era of railroad barons and the great quake boring, but she managed)
NORTH AND SOUTH series by John Jakes (take away the history 101 namedropping, hack plots, and gratuitous sex scenes and you have the ISBN)
HOLLYWOOD by Gore Vidal- based on the shocking premise that the rich control America and use the media for propaganda. Next week: a novel with the premise that Nazis were evil.
I would second “Sphere,” except that I’m pretty sure “Congo” was worse. Albino gorillas who smash people’s heads with disc-shaped rocks in a lost city built over King Solomon’s Mines on a volcano, and only a gentle gorilla who has learned sign language can save the day … the only thing worse than the book was the movie.
I never read Crichton’s Sphere or Congo so I can’t judge the books, but the movies sure were awful.
However, I did read The Lost World, the Jurassic Park sequel, and thought it was the worst thing I’d ever read.
Until Timeline. Why do I keep reading his books? Cardboard characters, cliche plots, inane dialogue. LW had two stowaway kids who save the day! Wow, I haven’t seen that since… um… Jurassic Park. :rolleyes:
Timeline had a scar-faced villian! An evil corporation! True love triumphs! Blech! Worst of all, it reads like a Hollywood blockbuster. Only a matter of time (no pun intended).
