Worst Book You've Read

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

::gasping for breath:: * Catcher in the Rye * Holden Caufield? Where everyone around him is a phoney? The most perfect image of adolescence: the feeling of responcibility that is quite beyond yourself, as Holden has to catch the children falling in his dreams? Oy. When I read it in high school, my mother told me that when it came out, all of her friends were in love with Holden.

And ::choke:: * Sun Also Rises*, which gave me one of my favorite quotes: “She walked with a great deal of movement.” Oy.

My sophmore english class got All the King’s Men stricken off the reading list. We’d do the reading, come in and laugh at it the next day, much to the chagrin of the teacher. Eventually, we collectively stopped reading it altogether.

A little persistance goes a long way. Announcing:

“I go on guilt trips a couple of time a year. Mom books them for me.” A custom made Wally .sig!

82

I usually like Ursula Le Guin. However, Always Coming Home was an exercise in agony.

Tinker

83

I have never been able to get through anything by James Joyce, Theodore “Oughtta write nicer” Dreiser, or E . . . L . . . Doctorow . . . (I think “E.L.” stands for "Ellipses-Lovin’).

Now, that doesn’t mean they’re bad writers (well, maybe except for Dreiser). Just means I can’t stand 'em.

84

The worst book I’e read recently is Object Linking and Embedding, first edition, by Microsoft Press.

I mean, it used the old OLE 1.0 mechanism of posting DDE windows messages, fer cryin’ out loud? What good is that gonna do in our modern world of COM objects?!

85

I’m with Eve on this one, which is why I haven’t chimed in before now. There’s lots of books I’ve found not worth reading, but when I come upon one, I typically bail out. Alleged great works of literature to have met this fate so far: Crime and Punishment (and I see I’m not the only one), Absolom! Absolom! (despite my card-carrying Southerner status I’ve never had much use for Faulkner), and Finnegans Wake (much as I love the rest of Joyce – even Ulysses – I can’t believe that it’s worth the effort).

Ike:
Glad you spoke up on behalf of McTeague. Knew I liked you.

I kept hoping someone would counter Green Bean’s slam of The Crying of Lot 49, but no takers so far. I can see saying that nothing is resolved in Lot 49 – indeed, that is part of the point – but not that it doesn’t make sense. GB, don’t ever, ever pick up V or Gravity’s Rainbow if you thought Lot 49 was tough to understand. The two good things about the worst grad school class I took were that I finally read Moby Dick and Lot 49.

“Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be common.” –Satchel Paige

86

William Kotzwinkles “The Fan Man”. Ugh, stinky, stinky, stinky.

Jack Kerauac’s “Maggie Cassidy”. I’m guessing those were the heavy drinkin’ years…

“Sounder” “Old Yeller” and “Where the Red Fern Grows”. Yep, best way to teach the little kiddies the cold, cruel truth about death is by killing a lovable dog.

87

I’m not sure if this is appropriate or not, but I’ve noticed an inordinate amount of jabs at Steven King.

Here’s my question: Does it seem that once SK stopped using drugs his stuff began to suck ass?

I ask not what you can do for me, but what you can do for me right now.

88

Whenever anyone stops using drugs, their stuff suffers. Robin Williams now: funny as hell. Robin Williams in the 70s when he was coked up enough to literally climb the walls as “Spiderman?” Genius. Seriously. His HBO special from 1980 or so is amazing.

[disclaimer]SwimmingRiddles does not advocate the use of illicet drugs. She is just observing that when people are fool-hearty enough to do so, they tend to be brilliant.[/disclaimer]

A little persistance goes a long way. Announcing:

“I go on guilt trips a couple of time a year. Mom books them for me.” A custom made Wally .sig!

89

Here’s a hearty amen to Rysdad in declaring that Great Expectations did sucketh most mightily.

And put me down in the ‘Catcher in the Rye isn’t worth all the salivation everyone else gives it’ column, too. Sorry, Swimming.

But the worst book I’ve ever read was “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”. An awful, miserable book that couldn’t decide whether to be a parody or a real Chandler-style detective novel, ending in the standard ‘make you feel either angry or stupid because the detective solves the crime using information not reveled until the detective explains his reasoning’ Christie-Doyle crap. All the characters were flat and boring, even the toons. Summary- Movie: brilliant and amazing. Book: Avoid like the plague.

JMCJ

Give to Radiskull!

90

My mother INSISTED I read “I’ll Be Right Back”, an autobiography by Mike Douglas (!), ancient talk show host. I love show biz biographies, so I read it, and it’s not worth the considerable amount of paper it’s printed on. Mainly just a laundry list of famous people who spent 5 minutes on his show in the last hundred years. No stories or juicy anecdotes. Mr. Douglas, you will be happy to know, has led a happy happy wonderful life and is married to the most fabulous woman in the world. Whoopee.

91

Anyone ever read “Angony and the Ecstacy” by Irving Stone? It was required reading for an English class, and I think everyone started to read the book (because no Cliff’s Notes were available), but only five people (out of 40) finished it. It was terrible. It wasn’t an interesting story, and Michelangelo wasn’t a character you could relate to in anyway. I especially hated the way those random Italian words were thrown in. And that sex scene was just laughably bad.

“I need the biggest seed bell you have. . . no, that’s too big.”–Hans Moleman

92

I had an assignment to read “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway in sixth grade. The teacher resigned about two days before the book report was due. Lucky me; I couldn’t get past the first few pages of the book.

I love Douglas Adams’s writing (witness my sig line), but I hated “Mostly Harmless.” It felt like a book he was forced at gunpoint to write, rather than one he wanted to write, like the others.

Chaim Mattis Keller
ckeller@kozmo.com

“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective

93

Ever? I dunno. But recently, I have read three that would vie for the worst. (And, yes, I read through all of them – I wrote book reviews of them.)

The Millennium Bug: How to Survive the Coming Chaos, by Michael Hyatt

Reaching to Heaven, by James Van Praagh

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Being Psychic, by Lynn A. Robinson and LaVonne Carlson-Finnerty

94

It’s hard to know the worst book since I usually don’t finish rotten books. I can make an exception for Bridgit Jones’ Diary. Ugh–it started out as a moderately interesting commentary on being a single woman in your thirties besieged by Couples who are fascinated with their own Couplehood. It degenerated into a improbable and boring nightmare of crappy writing and mediocre plot twists. I almost puked in Borders last night when I found it nestled up against The Great Gatsby.

95

Dare I say the names? Dare I get vile evil curses laid on me?

Tony Hillerman. Leaphorn and Chee have the combined detective skills of a tree shrew. Eight characters will die in the near vicinity of the cop, leaving only one character left alive, who wanders off into the desert and presumably dies. These aren’t mysteries, they’re lethal games of musical chairs.

J.R.R. Tolkien. I’ll admit, “The Hobbit” was fine. But those three craptacular sequels, hooey! I had no clue what was going on. But it still was making too much sense, so Tolkien invents whole new languages to keep up the confusion. His friends had to talk him into publishing this. His friends should have been strung up by the Achilles tendons for inflicting this on a luckless public.

Don’t hate me too much…

don Jaime de los Resorbitos
Free the Water Tower 3!

96

Though I’d like to defend some of the books previously mentioned (McTeague, Great Expectations), I won’t: this is all taste, and I can’t change anyone’s.

However, the most putrid pile of mule-dung that I ever had to shovel was Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. You see, there was this award set up by Ted Turner, for the best “optimistic” science fiction novel. Ray Bradbury was one of the judges, I think Lester del Rey was on the panel too, along with some other yahoos. (I like to think Ray and Lester got outvoted by whoever else was there.) Anyway, it was a big deal in the media, this Turner Tomorrow award, especially since word leaked out that the panel couldn’t find any book they could remotely agree on.

Eventually, amid much forced gaiety and canned fanfare, the machine spat forth Ishmael, and it was lousy. A pseudo-Socratic dialogue between a moron and a talking gorilla, it combined the thrills of drying paint with the political sensibilities of someone Earth First! would consider a little too radical. The basic point of the narrative was that everything was fine in the world until humans invented agriculture, and everything’s gone to shit since then. (I’m still not sure what was “optimistic” about it – that we could all throw off our civilized trappings and live the lives of our ancestors, free and unencumbered, living on the fat of the land, at least until 99% of us starved to death, perhaps.)

For my sins, I had to read this book twice – once when it was first submitted to my employer and then again when it had been “extensively revised.” (Not extensively enough, I thought – there were still words on those pages.)

From the reviews on bn.com and amazon, it seems that a lot of overprivileged trust fund cretins have taken Ishmael’s message to heart. Sadly, they all seem to just mope around whining about how badly we treat the world, instead of actually trying to live in the wilderness, by doing which they could die and get out of our way.

I weep for a world in which this could be published, but I am glad that I’ve never had reason to crack open The Celestine Prophecy.

I’m your only friend
I’m not your only friend
But I’m a little glowing friend
But really I’m not actually your friend
But I am

97

Oh yeah. Jack Kerouac. I usually love his stuff but the only reason I finished The Subterraneans was that it was so short.

``You’re just an empty cage girl if you kill the bird.’’ – Tori Amos.

98

I didn’t like BJD either. Maybe I’m just the wrong age for satire, but to me it just boiled down to one joke: this woman can’t walk and chew gum. Somehow I was able to stifle my mirth. Also, I didn’t like the way every chapter had a “scare” in it, like My dad’s going to kill himself! Oops, false alarm. I’m pregnant! Oops, false alarm. My friend’s been beat up by his SO! Oops, false alarm. If that was the joke: that every time it looked like it was going Very Special on us, it turned out to be a false alarm, it went right past me.

“His eyes are as green as a fresh-pickled toad,
His hair is as dark as a blackboard,
I wish he was mine, he’s really divine,
The hero who conquered the Dark Lord.”

99

I feel quite confident that the Celestine Prophecy is the worst book written in English, ever. I can’t say I ever “read” it but my buddies and I used to crack it open and burst out laughing. The man cannot write and his ideas are unspeakably absurd.

Bridges of Madison County comes in at no.2. For the full effect you’ve gotta listen to it on tape. We used to play it at a bookstore I worked at. Hearing Waller’s fluty voice gush over his horrible prose is, well, an experience.

And nobody’s mentioned the Left Behind series yet?

Also, is it just me, or are best sellers getting worse and worse?

Perked Ears indicate curiosity - Know Your Cat

100

Worst book? The Stranger by Albert Camus. HAD to read it in H.S., nver understood it.

Also ‘The Witching Hour’ by Anne Rice, and anything she’s written after Interview With The Vampire.

lindsay