# Worse book ever written..... **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [November 25, 2002, 7:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-book-ever-written/138616 "2002-11-25T07:23:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Kat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/b19c9b/32.png) [@Kat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kat)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2002, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-book-ever-written/138616/61 "2002-11-27T03:42:08Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by HPL \* > THis one or the next 10 books? Yes. You know, though, I think if someone (with an inhuman amount of endurance and determination) went through and _edited_ the books, they might end up with a decent trilogy. ---
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2002, 4:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-book-ever-written/138616/62 "2002-11-27T04:00:33Z")
“You know, though, I think if someone (with an inhuman amount of endurance and determination) went through and edited the books, they might end up with a decent trilogy.” The same is true of Anne Rice, who in her contracts specifically refuses to be edited. I haven’t mentioned THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA by Ernest Hemingway (which I know has a cult following). A successful coin dealer named James Halperin wrote two near-future sci-fis entitled THE TRUTH MACHINE (a device that can tell with 100% accuracy if somebody is lying is invented and completely revolutionizes society) and THE FIRST IMMORTAL (a WW2 veteran is unthawed from cryogenic sleep in the late 21st century and learns that times have changed [among other things, TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL was finally cancelled) both of which have excellent premises, some great ideas, and easily the worst writing I have ever had to hack through to get to the point of the study. It’s awful when lousy writers have great plot ideas. ---
**Author:** ![Adam\_P](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ee7513/32.png) [@Adam\_P](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Adam_P)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2002, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-book-ever-written/138616/63 "2002-11-30T19:15:08Z")
INSOMNIA, by Stephen King DUNE MESSIAH by James Herbert or whatever his name is. STEPHEN HERO by James Joyce. An early, abandoned version of Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man. Published after his death. Christ, is it bad. HAND TO MOUTH by Paul Auster. I’m an Auster fan but this is the most self-indulgent piece of shit I’ve ever read. YOU BRIGHT AND RISEN ANGELS by William T. Vollmann. I’ve never understood the popularity of this book. It’s virtually unreadable. It doesn’t work as a Pynchon pastiche or as anything else. I like his SEVEN DREAMS series though. Speaking of Pynchon…VINELAND by Thomas Pynchon. Sure, the guy’s a genius and, with GRAVITYS RAINBOW, wrote the most influential book of the past 50 years but this crap is stunningly bad. The entire ouevres of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Badly written tripe to anyone over the age of 15. ---
**Author:** ![TwungTister](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbce88/32.png) [@TwungTister](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TwungTister)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2002, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-book-ever-written/138616/64 "2002-12-10T18:46:23Z")
Steinbeck’s lack of an ending is beaten by Hemingway’s lack of a point. But what _Shardik_ lacks is **pacing**. It takes as long to tell as it does to happen. Plus: unlike _Watership Down_, “Shardik” causes you to say, so what? Plus: Adams doesn’t explain customs to the reader. So, you wonder WHY a returning hunter must explain his discovery. So, you wonder WHAT’S going to happen after this seemingly important ceremony. Because of the **SLOW** pacing, however, NOTHING happens. The characters do the same thing again. They sing to the bear another day. _Mirror of Her Dreams_ wasn’t even this bad, for readers are given the point at the beginning. Even so, I didn’t finish it. I might have, if I’d taken the book home. But I couldn’t finish _Shardik_. Reading the whole book should be punishment for some intractable personality. Every sequel to _Mirror of Her Dreams_ in one single volume. With unknown characters, foreign rituals, daily and infrequent, and a point as elusive as Godot. Three million exclamation points. ---
**Author:** ![dorkusmalorkusmafia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dorkusmalorkusmafia/32/7266_2.png) [@dorkusmalorkusmafia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dorkusmalorkusmafia)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2002, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-book-ever-written/138616/65 "2002-12-10T18:59:21Z")
Master of the Five Magics was so bad I couldn’t finish it. Oddly enough Dave Mustaine from Megadeth liked it and wrote a song about it. I gave it to some friends who hated it so bad they burned it. ---
**Author:** ![Kantalooppi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/a5b964/32.png) [@Kantalooppi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kantalooppi)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2002, 7:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-book-ever-written/138616/66 "2002-12-10T19:10:10Z")
There was this one book I loaned from the library. “Tiikerin Tytär” - title would be “Tiger’s Daughter” in English. It was literally one cliche after another. The book opens with gods creating a world and populating it with races, each god creating one race, but wouldn’t you know it that one god is evil and everything gets screwed up. We then move to the tiger’s daughter in question, a human child raised by benevolent and wise and mighty and wonderful and so on tigers who are fighting against evil, and then the girl and the tigers go to unite all the races against the evil, one by one, and they have to do some quest for every race to get them to join and so on and so on and… …agh… …eekh… …sorry, my brain can’t continue proceduring the memories. It was horrific. Truly, truly terrible. ---
**Author:** ![dorkusmalorkusmafia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dorkusmalorkusmafia/32/7266_2.png) [@dorkusmalorkusmafia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dorkusmalorkusmafia)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2002, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-book-ever-written/138616/67 "2002-12-10T19:13:54Z")
I forgot about Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. Damn those books must have burned a whole in my cerebral cortex which would explain why I have been confusing movie points with books and such lately. ---
**Author:** ![Tangent](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tangent/32/3098_2.png) [@Tangent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tangent)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2002, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-book-ever-written/138616/68 "2002-12-10T19:19:17Z")
Definitely the _Left Behind_ series. Actually I stopped after the third one (I can’t believe I got that far). They read like they were written by a fourth-grader. ---
**Author:** ![OfBlinkingThings](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/ebca7d/32.png) [@OfBlinkingThings](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OfBlinkingThings)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2002, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-book-ever-written/138616/69 "2002-12-10T20:16:10Z")
Anything by Marcel Proust. ---
**Author:** ![Flowerchild](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/858c86/32.png) [@Flowerchild](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Flowerchild)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2002, 8:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-book-ever-written/138616/70 "2002-12-10T20:37:05Z")
I vote for “Go ask Alice” and “Jay’s Journal”. I hate those books,mostly becuase it says true story on the front and it is so obviously fake. Not to mention the fact that they’re just horrible books. ---
**Author:** ![Flowerchild](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/858c86/32.png) [@Flowerchild](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Flowerchild)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2002, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-book-ever-written/138616/71 "2002-12-10T20:39:00Z")
You know what, I think I spend too much time here, I actually forgot that I already posted in this thread…:smack: ---
**Author:** ![Odieman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/a87d85/32.png) [@Odieman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odieman)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2002, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-book-ever-written/138616/72 "2002-12-10T20:52:50Z")
I would nominate "Focault’s Pendulum"by Umberto Eco…well actually I don’t know how bad it actually was because I never managed to finish it…but I will vote for it anyway. I actually liked Julian Barnes **History of the World in Ten and a half Chapters"** , it was one of the better books I read that year, and it helps if you realized the structure was a bit circular. Now you have to know that I have a very low tolerance for crapitude and pretention, but I thought it was fine. Now his “Flaubert’s Parrot” sounds so cringingly pretentious that I haven’t even had a desire to find it. I do have to say the only book I threw across the room on completion was “Battlefield Earth”…unfortunately it didn’t destroy itself and I had to manually place it in the garbage 😃 ---
**Author:** ![ISiddiqui](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/97f17d/32.png) [@ISiddiqui](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ISiddiqui)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2002, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-book-ever-written/138616/73 "2002-12-10T23:07:03Z")
The most painful book I’ve ever read was ‘The Scarlet Letter’ by Hawthorne. Ugh. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worse-book-ever-written/138616.md?page=3)