The Worst Book Ever: Less Than Zero or Something Else?

I love Less Than Zero even though I know it's terrible in more ways than one.

For too long, le salon has focused solely on the best books, but what about the worst books ever written, literary (or vainly attempting to be literary) or otherwise? What about them? Don't they deserve to be acknowledged for their excellence in excrement achievements?

I think The Rules of Attraction is actually a worse book than LTL.

My pick (no, not Ulysses) but The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to the Blessed Life. A book so reductionist and formulaic in its supposed Christian ethos, turning the discipline of prayer into a veritable How to Win Friends and Influence People (another worst book of mine) type of empty exercise, that I get steamed if I consider it for too long.

The worst book I've read since I started keeping this librarything is Jews Control America, Therefore the World--Is That a Good Thing?, by "Chairman of the Romanian National Vanguard".

But Less Than Zero is pretty bad.

The worst book ever is probably something by C. Le May. But Less Than Zero is, I think, the book I have personally read and finished that I hated the most.

While this thread will be fun, I think it's rather pointless. Listing worsts is even more subjective than listing bests. At least with best there are standards of writing quality, construction, characterizations, and so forth. The thing that makes books "the worst" is their pure unreadability. Some people will rebrand a really cruddy book as experimental or something, here I'm picturing FL's take on Finnegan's Wake, a book I've never read nor had the desire to read. I don't read worst books, they get tossed well before I get to a point I would describe as the end. I don't claim to have read a book if I haven't read every word.

That said:

A short list of the worst books I've ever read:

Stranger in a Strange Land
The Stand
Sex Life of a Cop
I read a James Patterson once, don't remember what it was. Formulaic, thrown together, mush, eminently forgettable.
West of Eden SF is tough for me to get into
Life on the Mississippi dental torture is preferable.
Neuromancer Does anyone know WTF that was about? Did anyone care?
Looking for Mr. Goodbar put me off modern fiction pretty much permanently.

Well, that's a start. A total waste of time, each and every one, with the exception of Sex Life of a Cop which I read when I was fourteen. I'm sure if I read it now it would either strike me as hilarious or really mysogonistic. There are so many other mediocre to bad books I've read, but do they really qualify for a list of worsts?

The only Ellis I've read is Lunar Park. It was awesome. If you like unreliable narrators. If you like playing "spot the homage." If you like funny, scary and real. You'll like Lunar Park.

Anything by Nicholas Sparks.

Worst book that has received great acclaim: Soul Mountain. There are definitely worse books, but they aren't as acclaimed.

The Last Battle by CS Lewis. I love everything about Narnia until you hit this incredibly pendantic, bigotted and nasty conclusion. Poorly written, constructed and conceived and downright evil in its substantive world view.

I think it's important, though, to see the silver lining of even the worst of all books. Like for Geneg, he indicated that Looking for Mr. Goodbar put him off Modern Fiction entirely.

A_m, I never looked at it that way, but you are right. It was a blessing. I may not otherwise have been introduced to the giants of Western Lit.

My vote would be for The Human Stain by Philip Roth, if only for the sexy milkmaid who chooses to be illiterate and who also is willing to have sex with the skeevy old guy.

But Less Than Zero certainly had is low points.

I think its important to exclude "self help" books and political/religious rants so that the bottom 800 aren't just variations of The Shack and The Secret.

>9 A_musing: Testify! It's so sad-feeling, too--like he created this wonderful fantasy world with a loosely Christian flavour, just one more element in the phantasmagoria, but then with the last book he decided to actually start wrangling with the implications of his belief system (meaning his particular strain of belief, not meaning to hack on religion) and produced this ugly mess almost despite himself.

I feel compelled also to mention The Octopus

But Less Than Zero certainly had its low points.

RidgewayGirl,
was that fun pun intentional? I must know.

Had I heard that about Soul Mountain sooner, I'd of abstained from acquiring it. I just figured since it was written by a foreigner (from my Ameri-centric perspective, I mean British) with a hard-to-pronounce name; it must be good! Anybody else weird like that, in assessing the merit of a novel and author unknown to them?

Lunar Park is an exception in the Ellis ouevre. Don't believe Steve Almond's blast in the Boston Globe from '05, calling it the worst novel he'd ever read. Almond would do well to write something that good.

Let's see, Tama Janowitz was always stupendously horrendous. As was that LTZ wannabee, whose name escapes me ...

Nothing, I think, will ever come close to The Turner Diaries by Andrew MacDonald, AKA supreme racist William Pierce. Complete joke of a book. Disgusting.

There seems to be a pretty big market of ridiculous anti-semitic 'non-fiction.'

15: Sort of in that vein, I have not read anything from the anti-semite corpus (except for the Protocols when I was studying up on holocaust denial, boy you feel like you have to take a bath in bleach after delving into that particular underworld...) I read the Satanists Bible in high school and it was not so much disgustingly bad, as "so bad it was funny".... like watching a really old low-budget sci-fi movie. What did anyone see in these books?

The Left Behind series is also supposed to be pretty badly written though I would not waste my time reading it. I like the blog "Slacktivist" which has been going through the Left Behind series very slowly with very entertaining results, for the past few years.

Again, I think we have to leave out the political and religious tracts and concentrate on books that their authors intended to be literature. That means that Harlequin Superromances are also exempt, as are pulp detective fiction and Doc Savage type novels.

Although the fun that could be had pulling excerpts from those books for our edification and entertainment...

Shouldn't we retitle this thread "The Book Worse Than Which Cannot Be Conceived"?

Ah, yes, urania, the Ontological Proof of the Devil.

I think my nomination of CS Lewis' The Last Battle is the only nomination with a second thus far. Should we move the motion?

Methinks Susan was the only one who really made it to heaven. The rest of them, well, all is not really as it seems.

Ah A_musing,

You never miss a beat. I would vote The Last Battle, with the proviso that we are voting for a book that has received some serious critical attention and the understanding that my nomination in no way reflects my admiration for many of Lewis's other works - namely Till We Have Faces, which I reread every few years. If these conditions are met, I will vote for the Last Battle although there are so many bad books from which to choose. Fortunately, most were so terrible I have forgotten them.

Although I also am very indignant on behalf of Susan, I don't know about the Last Battle being worse than Less than Zero. I did get mad at both books so there's that.

And >5 geneg: geneg,

Meet me in the moon room, where I will explain to you about wtf Neuromancer is and why you should care.

Part of what makes The Last Battle so bad is how good Lewis often is. A monumental no-net fall from grace followed by the thunderous thud of horrendous writing.

I posit that it takes a much admired writer to write the absolute worst of the worst.

And that is why Ayn Rand didn't write the worst book.

I was wondering when that little shit would get mentioned.

I picked up by the pool today a copy of Paul Arden's God explained in a taxi ride. It was either written for children, or for people with an IQ of 4.

>24 QuentinTom: Murrushka,

So tell us what you really think.

Worst novel by a Nobel Prize winner--and perhaps a top contender in the list all round--has got to be BURNING BRIGHT by John Steinbeck. The same pointless morality tale is told not one, not two, but three times, with the change of environment in each instance supposed to add meaning. It doesn't--it subtracts it. A shame, really, because Steinbeck, though a variable author, definitely had moments of greatness. It just shows how important it is to have distance from your work--and effective feedback.