i vote for " Go ask Alice " The front of the book says real diary , but certain sources tell me that it is only BASED on a diary and was changed around and rewritten to seem more interesting. I couldnt help but hate that book , i mean it didnt make any sense , A girl goes from her normal happy life on LSD and speed , to running away from home and being strung out on pot?
THis one or the next 10 books?
Holy shit, Minty. I just broke my jaw by dropping it on the floor.
Interestingly enough, a friend said the exact same thing when I put the question to her.
Devlin’s Triangle by Basil Heat. Very, very, very cr**py detective story. The author desperately tries to persuade you that the hero is a hi-class, suave, sophisticated guy. He succeeds in persuading you that the author is a low-class geek who really needs to get a life.
Not only did this garbage get published, but it apparently sold well enough to spawn a couple of sequels.
The worst book I ever read right to the bitter end was, proudly, an Aussie product.
It’s The Season co-written by respected journalist/broadcaster Roy Masters and Bob Ellis writer/filmmaker. A novel about a fictional Sydney rugby league side, it has no element that doesn’t make the reader cringe - names, characters, plot are all amateurish. It reads like a book thrown together in a weekend by drunks and then printed without editing.
I read the book in slackjawed wonder that 2 people with good names to preserve would allow it out on the market. Surely they knew it was schoolboy crap?
One particularly striking feature of the novels descriptive style was that every character had their nose classified - “a strong nose”, “hawklike nose”, “thin nose”, “bulbous nose”, “fat nose” etc. Never seen anything like it before or since.
Yes, this book was massively irritating. I had to return it to the library because I was trying to use it as light non-fiction before bed, and it kept making me pissed off.
Apparently Barnes thinks that Africa is not part of the the world, 'cause there sure isn’t any history thereof in his book. Basically it felt pretty old-fashioned to me, and heavily weighted towards European history. (Which is interesting and all, but shouldn’t “world history” try to be a little more global?)
However, I would have to nominate Pussy, King of the Pirates, by Kathy Acker as the worst book I’ve ever read. Though I didn’t finish it, either. But that’s because I literally couldn’t figure out what was going on. Are these the same characters as were in the first part of the book? Are they male or female? That kinda thing.
One of the worst books I finished reading was Wizard’s First Rule, which pretends to be a fairly pedestrian fantasy novel for the first few hundred pages, then there’s about a hundred pages of really graphic S&M, then a truly truly hokey and crappy ending.
I haven’t actually read any of his books but I think Harry Stephen Keeler deserves a mention in this thread since he seems to have gained a reputation and following as a bad author. He may become to books what Ed Wood is to movies.
I hate to saw it, but Ed Wood’s films aren’t THAT bad. Corny? sure. Cheesy? Sure. Horrible SFX? yep. Inane Dialouge (Well, plan 9 really)? Yep.
But also funny in it’s sheer crappiness. Besides, he had the excuse of having to shoot in a hurry with a limited budget. Writers often don’t have that excuse.
Yersinia Pestis - big agreement for Wizard’s First Rule. That book (author is Terry Goodkind) single-handedly made me stop trying new authors through buying their books. What a waste of precious birthday book vouchers! And he wrote like five sequels too.
scorpio, yersinia, the terry goodkind sequels have more S&M, less fantasy. and i read them in the way that i rubber neck at car crashes…
my nomination is for “The Tin Drum” by Gunther Grass.
it’s TRULY HORRIBLE. really, really yucky.
Oh, I mean it. That book is mind-numbingly pretentious and entirely unreadable. I detest it with a passion that is entirely out of proportion even with its alleged artistic merits, not that such merits exist in reality anyway.
And this is by no means some kind of anti-intellectual position on my part. I used to teach college English. I have read and enjoyed many of Woolf’s British modernist contemporaries, and manyof my favorite novels have a hundred times more psychological depth and artistic complexity than anything in Woolf’s horrid little screed about gender, philosophy, and art.
Blech!
There is no way Go Ask Alice is a real diary. Check out the way the characters are introduced, and the way background information is given in such detail. No one writes in a journal that way. The purpose of journal writing is for YOURSELF, why would you feel the need to explain everything to death?
Also, isn’t it implied that she overdosed on LSD? Is that even possible?
Well, I got through that one and I think the next three, but when the main characters and a very important secondary character just drifted away I lost interest.
The dialogue isn’t very good, either, when you think about it.
I’m so ashamed, too, I bought them all in *hardback[/i.]
[quote]
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! **
Don’t forget the reaminated dead guy that wants to dance.
"Puttin’ on the Ritz! "
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=103551
This is the thread from last Spring where we discussed the same topic. Although my feelings about the books that I mentioned there haven’t changed, I do have an additional nominee that I had the misfortune of reading over the summer. Yup, you guessed it: Wizard’s First Rule. What a miserable book. With the exception of the hundred page dominatrix fantasy and the gratuitous torturing and murdering of children, everything in this stinker is stolen directly from Robert Jordan. Which is especially sad when you consider that Jordan is ninety percent copied from Tolkien. If you’re a talentless hack, you might as well plagiarize directly from the source.
[ul]Shardik.[/ul]
What A BORE.
Someone already voted for the Gor books of John Norman, but his non-fiction Imaginative Sex is much much worse.
And has anyone ever read anything by Lionel Fanthorpe
Clicking on the link gives you some idea
It’s a tossup between “Christine” or “Cujo” by Srephen King.
And I like most of his other stuff.
" Yersinia Pestis " ? Can I just say that I love your user name.