I know, I stayed up all night reading it and hated every minute. Can’t explain it. Think it’s a horrible thing for young girls to read, though.
I’d vote Jonathan Livingston Seagull as well.
ETA - I almost forgot Hope for the Flowers! Cute illustrations, but saaaaaaappppppy. Everybody used to have a copy of that one.
You only really need the first five words of that sentence to be accurate. I’ve tried not to let my dislike of the man’s actions or those of his organization influence me in my evaluation, but I really fdo think that if the man had died before publishing Scientology, I’d still hate his works.
Besides which, the only reason Battlefield Earth sold so many was because of his Tactical Buying Squad. Later on people read them because they were ubiquitous. But i don’t think even that helped with his Mission: Earth “dekalogy”
They’re long and complex? No offence, but you need to expand your library.
(PS It’s great that the HP books inspired a whole generation to get excited about books, it’s just a shame they weren’t a bit better.)
PPS My nomination for the OP would probably be Dickens. He wrote amazing sentences, great paragraphs, intense chapters, but lousy books.
I actually had The Satanic Diaries out from the library when the fatwa was declared. I had already discarded it as being one of the worst reads I could recall.
Oh, it was massively popular – in Nazi Germany. If you had any Nazi friends, it was a good idea to buy a copy and leave it in a prominent place. And if you were a Nazi, then you definitely would buy a copy. I doubt it was read all that often, but the sales made Hitler wealthy.
It was displayed in households as a patriotic symbol, but even then hardly anyone actually read it. It’s all but unreadable.
The Satanic Verses, maybe?
Running with Scissors – I remember tons of hype around that book when it first came out and when the movie premiered. I finally got around reading it this year… .and it is awful! Burroughs basically just tears apart everyone he ever knew as a child, and gives them few moments of humanity. Everyone’s dirty, stupid, perverted, and selfish, while Augusten looks down his nose at them all. Plus, his writing style is just terrible and better suited for TMZ than literature.
Alice Hoffman’s Here on Earth is one of the worst books I’ve ever read that tries to pass itself off as real literature. I don’t know how popular it was, but it did make Oprah’s reading list. The novel is a modern adaptation of Wuthering Heights, but not one character has a quarter of the intensity of Bronte’s characters. They were all poorly contrived, shoehorned into certain situations to fit the classic’s mold, all the while the lead villain was ridiculously awful and only needed a Snidely Whiplash mustache to twirl to complete the picture.
I’m going to go with Catcher in the Rye. We get it - he’s a whiny brat with an over-developed sense of entitlement.
" I had already discarded it as being one of the worst reads I could recall. "
It must have been! Apparently you didn’t get past the first words of the title. :-Þ
Oh, yeah, I hated it. I don’t care if anyone’s all weird, but neither are you necessarily clever or interesting *because *you’re weird.
Anything by Dean Koontz.
Stephen King is the WalMart of Horror literature and Dean Koontz is the Pamida.
I’ve never read crap by Coulter, Hubbard or some of the other morons mentioned above.
Of the authors I have read Meyers and Brown are quite bad, but Chrichten was the king of terrible writing. I’m amazed his junk ever saw the light of day.
I note that I never finished any book by these people. I have only read parts.
My feelings are hurt. I thought Jonathan Livingston Seagull was the deepest, most thought provoking book I ever read. When I was eight. The Notebook was even worse, though.
High Fidelity. I got about a third of the way through and I was so disgusted that I just left it on the train.
I think that word does mean what she thinks it means.
Wow. Jokes about naming error aside, I thought it was amazing. Rushdie has a rather opaque and dense style, and it’s not to everyone’s taste, but he is definitely literate (and IMO an amazing prose artist. Midnight’s Children is one of my top 5 books).
Practically every book by John Grisham, as far as I’m concerned. He’s a dreadfully dull writer, and his plots are idiotic. “Pelican Brief” is probably the worst of the bunch.
Personally I liked Clan of the Cave Bear or parts of it at least, but its sequels should have gotten the author deported to Siberia regardless of where she was born. Ayla stopped just short of using bamboo stalks, mammoth tusks and bison hide to build a sewage treatment plant. (I stopped reading by the third book but I think that’s one of the series that the author just stopped writing halfway through as well.)
Personally I liked A Time to Kill, The Firm and The Client as “before you doze off” entertainment reading (though Grisham himself has compared TIME to To Kill a Mockingbird which may be true in plot but not at all in quality). Unfortunately after those he became so cookie cutter plots and cardboard characters that you could literally read the opening chapter and tell pretty much every twist and turn it was going to take other than the ones that were completely unnecessary and almost non-sequitur. (For example: in The Rainmaker I’m convinced he inserted a plot he dusted off from something else- the one about the abused girl the character falls in love with and her trials and tribulations and arrest- because it just doesn’t fit with the rest of the book.)
Some of my least favorite reads- and with some I admit I kept reading the series even when I stopped liking it-
First Man in Rome and its many sequels were great in concept as well but hack written (imho). They were incredibly well researched- I bought a couple of them just strictly for the notes and glossaries at the end- but the dialogue especially was dreadful with a big helping of “Men don’t talk like that!” (True it’s ancient Rome but even then I doubt people talked that flowery or whatever.) I never read The Thornbirds or Tim so I don’t know if McCullough’s always a hack or was good but was just slumming with this series.
And of course there’s a special spot in this thread and in hell for Anne “I will not be edited because it insults by Dickensian principals” Rice and her 7,392 “Beautiful bisexual European becomes a vampire and spends the next hundreds or thousands of years thinking up new ways to whine about it” books. Aside from the fact that ultimately all of her characters sound like Lestat there’s the fact that even in her best books (the earlier the better- Interview and Vampire Lestat weren’t bad) the woman can spend 8 pages describing a tree when all she really needs to let you know is that there’s a big tree with lots of moss there.
Ayn Rand- it has nothing to do with her philosophy- she’s simply a dreadful novelist. Perhaps it had more to do with English not being her first language, but I can barely read anything she writes. I think she included the sex scenes strictly for press and to get people to read past the first few pages.
As classics go, Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel has some of the most beautiful passages and phrases I’ve ever read. Unfortunately they’re black pearls in a mound of rotting oysters. Another “would you please get on with the damned story!” style writer who can spend 35 pages telling what other writers describe perfectly well in 5.
The absolute worst bestseller I have read in years was The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff. It’s about- sort of- Brigham Young’s apostate wife Ann Eliza who divorced him, and also a modern day boy from a polygamous cult in Arizona, and it alternates their stories- interesting in principal but Shiatsu Jesus was it awful.
I should admit a bias: Brigham Young was once a biographical obsession of mine and I read everything about him I could find at the library and in bookstores and I knew all about Ann Eliza and to most people she’s pretty obscure, but it wasn’t so much the fact he changed history as he changed it for the much more boring and left out all the most interesting parts of her story. He rewrites her memoir (Wife Number 19) to include graphic sex scenes in romance novel prose- something a woman writing in 1877 would not have done in a memoir for mass marketing (I’m not even sure she legally could have) and then includes these long neverending go-nowhere florid purple prose inserts from other characters all of whom talk exactly the same. My personal favorite (or least favorite) was a deposition written by Ann Eliza’s brother for her divorce trial in which he spends 30 pages describing sunsets and how the cat slept on his chest as he made this major life decision and how he heard his baby girl crying and blah blah blah as he awakened spiritually and blah blah yawn and again- THIS IS A DIVORCE TRIAL DEPOSITION! And then the far more interesting storyline- the modern day one- he lets hang and never fleshes out the characters at all.
Anyway, horrible novel, but what kills me is that on Amazon.com it gets 4 stars and has 100 glowing reviews. I am a wordy writer- it’s invariably the biggest criticism of my writing- yet Thomas Wolfe makes me look like a Hallmark card writer in terms of brevity while David Ebershoff makes Tom Wolfe look like someone who writes Jeopardy questions. The American reader’s attention span just isn’t long enough for me to be convinced that 100 people wrote in to praise this book in such glowing terms when not only is the writing floridly horrible but there are plotholes you could drive the Mormon Battallion through and no two of the dozen or so characters who write in the first person sound different from each other. I’m convinced the writer- a creative writing professor- called in favors from all friends to give it glowing reviews.
Some of the books listed above you might not like, but the worst? *Catcher in the Rye *is really worse than the following?
The Shack.
Memoirs of a Geisha.
Eat Pray Love.
If I had to pick only one of the above, I couldn’t.