The Celestine Prophecy is probably the worst thing I’ve had the misfortune of slogging through. James Redfield was the Dan Brown of the early 1990s, but for whatever reason did quite end up reaching Dan Brown’s level of “success”.
I’ll 2nd (3rd or 4th) Tom Clancy, starting with whichever book it was that ended with a Japanese pilot landing a 747 into the US Capitol.
My mother & I read The Clan of the Cave Bear together. I must have been about 18. We both liked it. Then we both struggled through Valley of the Horses and *completely *gave up on the “throbbing members” of The Mammoth Hunters. Ugh.
I’m trying to figure out if Carlos Castaneda continues this sequence back to the 70s or if he’d be more of a spiritual predessor of “The Secret” instead.
Damn ain’t that the truth. I read it because friends who worked in public libraries and bookstores said they couldn’t keep it on the shelves. Absolute dreck; a bright 7th grader who’d seen a couple of New Age documentaries and a travelogue about Indians could have done better. have no idea what the man’s secret was to selling that many copies of crap but I want to consult with him if I ever decide to sell a book.
I’ve managed to avoid Dan Brown & Bridges of Madison County. Excerpts & opinions from people I trust warned me away. But I actually read Kostova’s tripe–hey, it had a nice cover. It was a trade paperback.
Kostova was trying to impress us with her well-traveled, educated background. But she can’t write. A big “surprise” was telegraphed. And the introduction referred to a fictional terrorist event that supposedly displayed the inability of Christians & Muslims to ever get along. However–the plot showed Christians & Muslims cooperating.
Pompous crap.
I didn’t think Clan of the Cave Bear was the worst, but the “ignorant caveman” thing is laid on way too thick. Is there anything the Clan can do that Ayla can’t do better?
She’s a better hunter, a better medicine woman, better with animals, basically figures out how reproduction works by observation, and so on.
Reading it, at times I wondered how the Clan and their race managed to survive for as long as they did. Yeah, they knew a lot of stuff, but they seemed mostly incapable of learning new things. Which begs the question, how did they learn anything they knew how to do in the first place?
This had me really confused for a while, because I thought you were addressing without quotation a book mentioned by Running with Scissors. Then I looked through the thread and realized that Running with Scissors had not posted. About that time it dawned on me that there might be an actual book titled Running with Scissors… :smack:
Throwing in another vote for Anne Rice. Also, Sampiro, check your PMs!
If you think the book Running With Scissors is bad, try the movie.
On second thought…Don’t.
D’oh! :smack:
Agreed, what dreck.
Anything by Robin Cook. His characters and dialogue are completely wooden.
Both of these have already been posted, but I wholeheartedly agree.
Catcher in the Rye. Holden is an asshole. In my undergrad English class, I was the only one who spoke up to say they hated it. Everyone else just went on about how they identified with him.
**
Eat, Pray, Love**. The “eat” part was okay, but I didn’t give a fuck about the “pray, love”. I did not get through the rest of it.
Oh hell, Ayla probably invented the bodice herself - she invented pretty much everything else! If Auel had kept writing, Ayla probably would have invented the vacuum tube, the windmill and the steam engine. (er, maybe she DID. I quit after the second book).
Oh good god, I had a couple of those as audiobooks from the library and yeah, they were pretty horrid! My mind, mercifully, had blanked out who wrote them, in an effort to prevent me from accidentally picking any more up.
I liked The Runaway Jury, but after I finished The Appeal
I wanted to throw it across the room, I hated the ending so much.
I’ll stick up for Clancy-- he was never a good writer, but he could tell great stories. His early stuff is all great, high-class airport reads.
That ended pretty much after The Sum of All Fears (although Without Remorse has its moments). Everything since then has been painful cliche, reading almost like a parody of his earlier stuff, and markedly declining in quality with each novel.
Don’t get me started on all the “Tom Clancy Presents” crap… ugh.
Either Twilight or The Bridges of Madison County. I also thought The DaVinci Code was awful, but I rank it as somewhat less bad because while it was stupid and badly written at least it managed to be fairly exciting. The other two are stupid, badly written, and BORING.
It’s been long enough since I read The Bridges of Madison County that I couldn’t say whether it or Twilight is more stupid, badly written, and boring. I’m inclined to name Twilight as the absolute worst just because it was targeted at impressionable young girls and sends a terrible and dangerous message about romantic relationships. The Bridges of Madison County does glamorize marital infidelity, but at least it doesn’t glamorize abuse.
I liked Clan of the Cave Bear, but like others here felt the series took a huge nosedive afterward. The parts of Valley of the Horses that involved Ayla on her own were okay, but I was uninterested in the hero or his huge dick and the whole thing just degenerated into a prehistoric romance novel. A year or two later I decided to give the third book a chance, thinking Auel might have gotten the romance thing out of her system, but after a couple of chapters I realized it was if anything worse than the second book and abandoned the series altogether.
Although I haven’t read either book, I do know that in the last books to both the Twilight and Clan of the Cave Bear series the heroine gives birth to a child which she names using a ridiculous portmanteau of the names of two other characters. This needs to be on some list of things not to do in fiction. Actually, I suspect it’s already on some list of “signs you’re writing a bad fanfic”, but published authors of original stories shouldn’t be exempt.
It’s basically written by a music geek for music geeks, and if the reader isn’t, he can’t get much within the book. You can’t read it as a novel. The plot is irrelevant, it’s just a vehicle for the inside jokes and stories for the record nerds. As such, it functions well, and for me it was a fine read.
It’s genre, so it may not qualify as “everyone’s read it”, but…
Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” series.
I read a lot of fantasy. I’ve read a lot of bad fantasy, and managed to enjoy a lot of it. But, man, I only made it halfway through his first book, before setting it aside, never to return. Bad dialogue, overblown characterization, and I found myself not curious in the least about what was going to happen.