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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anything by Marcel Proust.
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.
You know what, I think I spend too much time here, I actually forgot that I already posted in this thread…:smack:
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 
The most painful book I’ve ever read was ‘The Scarlet Letter’ by Hawthorne. Ugh.