I once asked a very smart and learned Episcopal clergyman what he thought of The Da Vinci Code and, after a pause, he said, “There’s a reason you’ll find it in the ‘Fiction’ section of bookstores.”
I did. I bought a copy and read it to smite the Ayatollah and push back against his fatwa. The book was all right but not great.
I see this nomination has already been seconded and thirded, so let me fourth it. (My copy was a gift from my mother. :o )
Most of my fiction reading is simple thrillers. Some are very good (though I forget to memorize the good authors’ names :smack: ); many are just OK. I thought Davinci Code was OK, better than most thrillers, just not deserving of its huge hype.
A thriller writer to avoid is Colin Forbes, as I mentioned in a previous thread on this topic.
Of bestsellers I’ve read in their entirety, I’d say The Bridges of Madison County and The DaVinci Code were the worst. I don’t remember The Bridges of Madison County well enough to judge between them, but I do remember that the writing was so terrible that I had to call a friend up to read bits of it aloud to her.
As others have said, I think The DaVinci Code worked reasonably well as a thriller and I did feel motivated to keep reading to find out what happened next. So on that level I’d say it was a success, but it’s also extremely stupid and badly written.
When the Twilight series was at peak popularity I spent a weekend reading the first book aloud with friends, which proved to be quite entertaining. (At one point someone literally fell off the couch because she was laughing so hard.) Reading aloud is slower than reading to oneself though, and we didn’t get even halfway through the book. I later took a copy off the shelf at the library thinking maybe I’d finish it just for the sake of finishing it, and flipped through it until I found the place where we’d left off. I read a few pages and then put it back on the shelf without checking it out. It was bad enough that, without someone to play literary MST3K with, it seemed like it would be a real chore to get through. Twilight isn’t just badly written, but (if you’re not making fun of the bad writing) it’s also really, really boring. There are several points where even the author seems to have become bored with the story and just started writing about what she’d be cooking for dinner that evening. There’s also an extended, almost Waiting for Godot-like sequence where the heroine is planning a road trip to Seattle that doesn’t even happen.
In the case of Harry Potter, that “someone” seems to have legitimately been the reading public. The first book was rejected by several publishers and wasn’t expected to be a big hit even by the one that did pick it up. However, it received good reviews, proved to be popular with kids, and won several awards. Even so I don’t remember hearing much about the series aside from a book review or two until 1999, which was the year the third book was released and (perhaps more importantly) the film rights were sold. Then Harry Potter was all over the media and a lot of people stood to profit from the franchise continuing to be successful, but things got to that point only because the first few books had already done so well.
I remember, before the Harry Potter series really took off, the British publisher did a special edition of the first book for grownups who didn’t want to be seen in public reading a “kids’ book.”
You may be right, but the gigantic puff piece that Time magazine did was at the time of the first book, and was probably a big part of why it sold so well. They may have been following promising early sales…but they certainly gave the book a hell of a boost.
Anything Danielle Steele. Awful. I don’t mind trashy novels, but the writing was just so damn bad.
Judging by the beach reading I noticed a few years, everyone liked the “Girl” novels–Dragon Tattoo etc. I thought they were just awful.
Clan of the Cave Bear I found impossible.
There was a Time cover story (“Wild About Harry”) about Harry Potter in September 1999, around the time of the US publication of the third book, but I don’t remember any “gigantic puff piece” in Time prior to that.
I’m a librarian and have access to a database containing Time articles going back to 1923 through work, and I just checked and got no hits on “Harry Potter” at all prior to the spring of 1999. (The first book was published in the UK in June 1997 and in the US in September 1998.) There was a one-page article in April 1999 about the “stunning popularity” of the first two books, the second of which was soon to be published in the US after already becoming a bestseller in the UK. In July 1999 there was another one-page article about how the third book had been a smash hit in the UK (“The Birmingham Waterstone’s sold 32 copies in the first 10 minutes. Blackwell’s sold 92 in the first half hour. At Storyteller, in the small town of Thirsk in north Yorkshire, a staggering 56 were snapped up that first afternoon”) and was hotly anticipated in the US, where there were already “more than 1.7 million copies of the first two books, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, in print”.
The September 1999 Time cover story must have helped increase sales of the third book in the US, but again, the series was already very popular by that time…and presumably wouldn’t have merited a cover story if it hadn’t been.
You beat me to it. Egads, that book stank on ice.
The “Left Behind” books–I read the first two and got about two chapters into the third before I finally gave up. I only got that far into them because of a girl I liked. They are horribly written dreck, and they sold like hotcakes to the Christian audience they pandered to.
I’ve read a few and they do receive a C grade from me at best. However, they are far better than Twilight. They are adequate.
I appear to be misremembering it, then. Never mind.
I love the concept of the “Left Behind” books. Bummer that they didn’t live up to the potential.
Same for Piers Anthony’s “Bio of a Space Tyrant.” The concept is magnificent, the life of a poor immigrant who rises to absolute power. But the actual writing (according to the reviews I’ve read; I’ve never read the books) was really crappy.
Chesapeake
Tai Pan
Without Remorse
Scarlatti Inheritance
The Negotiator
Illusions
Mirrors of the Soul
From Russia with Love
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Telltale Heart
Wait, are we talking about worst works of best-selling authors? 
Without Remorse? You’re surely joking…Tom Clancy wrote FAR worse books than that.
BUT, I read his worst as a young un. Read WR long after I outgrew Clancy.
Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity was very good but I regret reading it. I ended up wasting hours of my life reading some of his other books, all of which are utter dreck. Evidently his family missed the money and, realizing that a dreck ghostwriter can’t be any worse than Ludlum himself, some of “his” recent books were written while he was six-feet underground. :smack:
Nitpick: It’s “The Scarlatti Inheritance.” Every Ludlum book has a three-word title: The, Proper-Name, Noun. Perhaps he has a copyright on this phrase formula. 
Mad magazine once suggested a title for a Ludlum book – The Marsupial Knish.
I’ll take a dozen copies!
Anything by James Grey. I’ve read A Million Little Pieces and Bright, Shiny Morning and they were both dreadful. I couldn’t finish My Friend Leonard.
How dare you, sir.
Seriously, that’s a pretty good book. Well, it’s a pretty fun book. Well, it’s okay.