What is the WORST book that youve ever red?

Some stupid book about left-handed people. (Yes, I'm a lefty.)

It was selling toward an adult audience, but its contents were extremely weak. My advice: If you're left-handed, and are looking for some lefty facts, leave them behind! Chances are books about lefties are at a child's reading level, designed for children, and are not up-to-date (and therefore quite inaccurate as there are always new findings.) It had come with excellent reviews, so I guess those people don't know as much about left-handedness as I do. The mistakes were shocking and unbelievable!

Hannibal Rising a few weeks ago. What a piece of trash. I am glad the hardback version was on special at Kmart when I bought it.

Something so shockingly badly written with such a mindnumbingly dull plot and thin characters that I've permentantly erased the title and author from my mind. It featured the 13 silver coins Judas was paid, and some guy wandering around trying to get rid of them. Just pure tripe. I only soldiered on because I couldn't believe that it wouldn't get better somewhere, after all it did get published.

Bonfire of the Vanities. Heinous.

The Chosen by Ricardo Pinto, though I'm in the minority in this view. Worst book I've ever finished (I didn't completely finish the two books I rated a 1/2 star).

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown would definitely have to be up there. Badly written, poor predictable plot and downright silly. Oh, and White Teeth by Zadie Smith - another one of these vastly over-rated, en vogue books that will never stand the test of time.

I loved The Chosen! What did you dislike about it?

The worst book I've ever read is Rebel Angels by Libba Bray.

I'm with bookishbunny. Bonfire never should have been put out (pun intended!)

I can appreciate that Oliver Twist was a product of its times, but I still loathe it with every fibre of my being.

As far as simple poor writing goes, I think The Stud by Jackie Collins would have to be near the top. I normally enjoy her books in a fun, trashy sort of way, but that one was pure garbage. My one foray into Harlequin-style romance, via a Barbara Cartland novel, was also pretty horrid. I never expected that one to be good, but I hoped it would at least be laughably bad. No such luck; it was just plain painful.

Reading_fox, thats one of the Dresden Files books by Jim Butcher, titled Death Masks. While I would agree it isn't great literature, I wouldn't go so far as to call it tripe, especially if you haven't read any other books in the series, as it isn't a stand alone book.

klarusu, I feel the same way about that book. It just wasn't for me, though some people may enjoy it.

Bonfire was utter trash. Wolfe simply cannot write. I was living in NY when it came out and everyone there thought it was brilliant. I lived there for 8 years and it was like living on another planet. What passes for depth in NY is simply self-indulgent posturing to me.

Of course, this is a generalization. Lots of New Yorkers are cool.

Probably...Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion.

"The Lonely Lady" by Harold Robbins, although I hear most of his other other books are also "pornographic muzak", as Basil Fawlty memorably described them!

The Celestine Prophesy by James Redfield was the book I liked the very least.

littlegeek, got to agree with you there. Bought 3 of Wolfe's books because they came highly recommended - thought I must be missing the point in the first 2 because I found them torture, but by Book 3 had just decided the guy can't write!

#12 NO! I like Jim Butcher's Harry books, as I've said on other threads. It was at least 15yrs or more ago, definetly nothing at all like Death masks.

I know its a fairly common theme: this was just a really turgid interpretation of it.

Message 16: Cameraman61 -- Oh, come on -- Harold Robbins is high-quality literature (not)! But I've enjoyed his books as great trash of the 60s-80s or so. Read his The Carpetbaggers -- a true classic of trash and, really, one of his best.

#6, 10, 14 I've said it before, but I read Bonfire of the Vanities when it first came out in paperback in the 80s, and I loved it -- maybe not great writing (I'm not a Tom Wolfe fan in general), but a wicked, satirical look at NYC in those days. Having not read it since, I do believe it could seem dated and boring now.

rebeccanyc,

You are obviously a confused and misguided person.

Just kidding! I actually know several people who like it. On the other hand, I have a friend who wouldn't speak to me for week for letting her borrow 'such a bad book'.

>21 rebeccanyc: Satire is not for wimps. Like timing in standup, it takes real skill to give satire the light touch that keeps it from being a frying pan to the head. Skill that Wolfe just does not have.

Sometimes I think people respond inordinately to place in works of fiction. The often and obvious references to NY landmarks and eateries, etc. probably made New Yorkers all misty or in-the-know or something. I dunno, I'll never really understand.

I enjoyed Bonfire... and I've never been to NY. (Not even American.) But the film is irredeemably bad.

#23, The attraction for me was that it captured the foibles of certain "leaders" and "big shots" of the time (not the NYC locations, although I admit I always like seeing these in movies).

#24, As soon as I saw who was cast in the movie (I've blocked it out), I knew it would be no good and never saw it.

The novel had its moments and the movie was terrible, but the book about making the movie, The Devil's Candy by Julie Salamon, was fantastic.

#24, BoPeep...

::Sob:: I don't even know you anymore!

::runs out of the room crying hysterically::

Barbara Cartland actually wrote a handful of OK (not great, but she had potential) books early on, but then she discovered a formula that sold well and proceded to write the same two or three books over and over for the next seventy years. She was quite proud of being able to dictate a book to her secretary in about two weeks and did little revision. And she made a lot of money doing it.

I have to say The Lovely Bones. I know that it was a great hit with so many people but I really couldn't get into it. I just wanted to finish it as fast as possible so that I could start a different book.

I hated {Cold Mountain}. I have tried three times to read this book and hit the wall after about an hour. I adored the movie but just could not get into the book.

I'm with you, alterlisa. Cold Mountain was a dog. Couldn't finish it.

Lisey's Story by Stephen King......I had to force myself to get through it......BooYa Moon.....give me a break!

The worst book I’ve read in years is without doubt and hesitation The Teeth of the Tiger by Tom Clancy. A bit nervous, since his last book The Bear and the Dragon wasn’t really all that great, I still looked forward to reading yet another Clancy. I stopped midway throwing the book against the far wall, kicked it from where it landed all the way down the hall into the kitchen and ultimately dumped it in the garbage. I can see you gaping at those acts of mine in distaste and let me assure you that I have never before or aft’ kicked a book but this one deserved it.

I don’t remember who introduced me to Tom Clancy’s work some 10 years ago but I do remember that it was done through pointing out Hunt for Red October to me. I tore through it at breakneck speed and I loved it. This book and all the others I subsequently read were a great mixture of a fast-paced story, machismo, tech-talk, honour, firefights…all this adolescents on the loose kind of stuff. This book however featured a ludicrous storyline and relies heavily on dialogues along the line of “Hello” said Jack. “Hello Jack” said John. “How do you do, John?” asked Jack. “I am fine, thank you.”… you get the picture. Wooden doesn’t begin to cover it. So what’s new, one might ask. I tell you what’s new. Mr. Clancy took his “America, the land of the free and home of the brave” attitude (and there is nothing wrong with such an attitude. It’s what you want reading books like his) and took it to the next level. Hence his new book promotes an ultra-right to downright racist mentality combined with the idea of an anti-“everything we deem a threat” organization that reports to nobody but the president and that only to be pardoned for murder of possible terrorists. It’s been more than a year that I’ve started to read this pamphlet and I still get furious thinking about it.

#33 Glad I stopped at the bear and the dragon then. I tried a few of his spin off / co/ ghost written Op-centre books and gave up on them too. Sounds like teeth is downright awful. Its a shame because his best stuff is really quite good.

My mom used to buy those Clan of the Cave Bear books by Jean Auel when they came out in paperback and she would give them to me. They were just the worst!

Pawleys Island: A Lowcountry tale by Dorothea Benton Frank. Stilted unbelievable plot and dialogue. Hypocritical, unlikeable characters (why is it justifiable for Abagail to have an affair with a married man but Charlene is trash?) Classist, pompous drivel. Too many cliches. Blecchhh.

I can't believe I finished it, think I was just curious if she could maintain such a level of bad writing.

#36 - Yeah, I know what you mean. Sometimes its like a train wreck that you just can't look away from.

The Eight by Katherine Neville. This piece of trash .. arrrggghhhh! Actually, she had a good premise, but barely can write herself out of a paper bag. Another instance where someone who doesn't deserve it is making too much money ... I know there are a lot of people who like this book ... but Neville really needs to go back to school and actually learn to write!

Actually, I think it's worse when someone gets hold of a good idea, then proceeds to butcher it by executing it poorly. Other instances where I've seen this done have been in movies ... "Stargate" was one, as well as "Highlander."

Great ideas ... trashy execution. It's practically criminal.

I read "The Exorcist" by William Peter Blatty and loved it; scared the wits out of me. Then, Mr. Blatty, basking in his success, wrote another one. Big mistake.

His next book was something like "You'll Like My Mother;" I don't think that's the exact title but it's close. Anyway, I read about half of it and just gave up. Boring. Terrible.

So I wrapped the book up, along with a cover letter and sent it back to the publisher (it was a cheap paperback, New American Library maybe). I told the publisher to note that the book was only half read - "I kept falling asleep."

I got a refund for $2.95 and a thank-you letter from the publisher.

Ralph

Jimmy carter's 'the Hornets nest" I gave it up after five or six chapters. Nothing was coming together

There's good/bad and bad/bad. I love MST3K so good/bad is great in my book. I have yet to read a bad book just to make fun of it, tho.

The one that comes to mind for me is Elizabeth Berg's Talk Before Sleep. In my experience, dying of cancer is neither trite nor boring but you couldn't tell that from this book.

#41

>>In my experience, dying of cancer is neither trite nor boring but you couldn't tell that from this book.

Difficult. Do translations count? If so it was the Dutch translation of Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake. If not it was one of them Magic books... I like stuff like Robert E. Howard, but that has style...

What is MST3K?

I'll aprobably figure it out as soon as I post this.

Ralph

#44 - Mystery Science Theater 3000.

#44,

Don't look directly at it. It will suck you in.

the worst book i ever read was so bad the title is banned from my consciousness but i do remember that somewhere in the book there was a one paragraph sentence of 56 words

Message 47: cdyankeefan -- don't join The Haunted Soda group. They're writing a story called The Thing in the Library, each posting limited to one sentence. The first sentence alone took up more than one screen.

AH, kageeh! I was so going there! I do believe that is the worst book I've ever read, and the title has been swiped from my memory, too. (Just kidding)

bookishbunny, I'm impressed that you've read it! I couldn't get through the first sentence :D

Actually, I didn't either. :) I 'accidentally' hit that little 'x' on the right.

>42 bookishbunny: Why, thank you!

Oops :)

Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Her philosophy is the antithesis of mine, so I found myself wanting to tear the book up, rather than read it. If it wasn't assigned Summer reading prior to my senior year in high school back in 1989, I never would have chosen to read it.

We are totally in accord, twoDs. Ayn Rand = Evil Woman. So short sighted she can't even she that she is. Or couldn't/was.

Don't worry, Rand died alone and bitter, if it matters to you. Woman had serious issues.

>>Don't worry, Rand died alone and bitter, if it matters to you. Woman had serious issues.

Well said, bookishbunny. The lady does have her adherants/admirers. Agree or disagree, she was a strong personality and still today has many followers.

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter

Sorry, I didn't mean to offend. It seems like it's true. I saw her on Donohue (anyone remember him?) just before she died and she was angry and bitter. I didn't say I thought it was just desserts, only that some people here might.

And she did have issues.

We all have issues. It's yet another inconvenience of the human condition. As I recall from what I've read about her, she was a very young woman at the time she witnessed the Communists take over in Russia. She was greatly traumatised by this, so, yes, she had 'issues'. She wasn't some armchair academic poo-pooing socialism. She was deeply affected, at a very fragile time of her life, by a violent regime. She also believed strongly in the promise humanity held. She didn't suffer whiners and freeloaders lightly. I read Atlas Shrugged when I was nineteen, and while reading, I thought "Yeah! I am strong. I can do all kinds of stuff. And nobody owes me anything, and I don't owe them, either." It's actually pretty liberating. Again, her ideals swing to an extreme that even I find uncomfortable, but art does that. It takes an ideal and distills it to make a point.

bookishbunny, congratulations on retaining for so long something so difficult for so many to understand. You definitely got the message.

As an interesting (you'll be the judge of that) aside, a major bank in North Carolina recently announced that it would not participate in funding any project which involved a government using eminent domain to take property for commercial development. They specifically cited the principal of objectivism as the basis of their business decision. People flocked to open new accounts with them. Rand's ideas are not dead.

Some frighteningly awful book by Dean Koontz called The Bad Place. Not especially well written and just a really bad book. Nil chance of me reading anything else written by him.

What is the WORST book that youve ever red?

Red is a color, I don't understand your question...

EncompassedRunner -

Why? You just didn't like his book? His conclusions? Or you just don't like the man? What? I'm curious.

Ralph

Message 33: I stopped reading Clancy after The Sum of All Fears. Jack Ryan becoming president was too much for me. That along with the increasingly bad writing. My favorites are still The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising. Two good books in the same genre are Arc Light and Invasion by Eric L. Harry.

I would have to go with "Lost Girls" by Andrew Pyper. This is a work of Canadian Fiction that was really hyped when it came out about 10 years ago and the author was lauded as some kind of boy wonder. I hate, loathed and despised this book to the very core of my being. To date it is the only book I have ever thrown across the room out of sheer annoyance.

Hello! I'm new to Librarything...

Worst book? For me, it's got to be "Girl with a Pearl Earring" by Tracy Chevalier. Ugh!

Thakhek (#65)

-False premises
-False information (lies) presented as facts (revisionist history)
-Perilous conclusions
-Methodology: (1) Instead of even somewhat presenting both sides before analyzing and coming to a conclusion (whether on one side or other or in between), Carter presented mostly 99% one side, therefore misrepresenting reality, (2) the memoir/travelogue aspect of the book would not be so bad, even for such a serious foreign policy topic as this, if at least there were endnotes, but instead we're given all sorts of anecdotes with often totally unidentified people (just some Hamas leader, for example, no name; or some Samaritan, no name), (3) uses sleazy approach of quoting others (usually unnamed) to criticize Israel, but then Carter leaves their statements without countering them--thus gives the appearance that Carter's not making the accusations, just reporting them, but in reality he is since not only does he not question their lies, but in book promo tours he repeats their statements but making them his own (such as the lie that Hamas has never committed an act of violence or terrorism since August 2004)
- Is not just anti-Israel, but anti-Jewish (i.e., antisemitic, yes it is) in that Carter goes beyond attacking Israel or even what he calls the Jewish Lobby in America, but criticizes Jews from 2000 years ago
- Advocates for terrorists and terrorism--ex, portrays Marwan Barghouti as a "revered prisoner" seeking to advance peace and not mentioning that he's serving 5 life sentences for being a murdering terrorist
- Repeatedly misuses and abuses Bible scripture and is riddled with religion-baiting (interesting since Carter just announced starting a new religion with Bill Clinton with the convocation to be in 2008 and to de-emphasize doctrinal gospel for social gospel)

... I could go on, but basically, false premises, bias by omissions as well as outright lies, dangerous conclusions, and writing that though fair-enough is geared for the general reader, should at least have endnotes, but does not.

Probably the most evil, satanic book I have ever read.

EncompassedReader -

Did any of the critics/reviewers get this one-sidedness?

#69 - I think you mean 'method', 'methodology' is the study of methods.

And the answer is yes, all those books are incorrect.

A Frolic of his Own by William Gaddis is the only book I couldn't finish. As I recall, it had no discernable plot and a bare minimum of punctuation.

The Magus by John Fowles is my all-time least favorite book. Many people love it. I couldn't stand it.

I thought I was going to hate The Magus, and I did like it. That book was so very odd!

ggchickapee (#72): William Gaddis is definitely an acquired taste ... it's one I've happened to acquire, but I can always understand people who don't like him ... I was "lucky" in that the first book of his I found was Carpenter's gothic, which is light reading compared to JR or The recognitions.

I didn't particularly like Catch-22, although in terms of absolute WORST book I've ever read, the Big U would have to take the prize. I really like Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, but the Big U was his first book, and its horrid. The basic idea would have been interesting if better executed, but huge plot holes, missing explanations, and all sorts of other problems doomed it. Honestly, I'm kind of mad that I made myself finish it.

Juniper498 - Agreed that The Lost Girls was pretty awful. I expected so much more. I just went back & read my journal entry about it. Underwhelmed and apparently it took me forever to read because I was so disinterested.

ggchickapee - I didn't like The Magus either. I couldn't finish it. It started out brilliantly and I thought I would love it, then it just started to get old. Deception upon deception and dramtic scene upon scene, all of which we'd read just a few hundred pages before. Bah. I so wanted to like it.

I recently tossed aside Neuromancer. I've heard Gibson is supposed to be a good sci-fi author, but I really didn't like him. It just felt like something a highschooler would write.

#70, Yes, Thakhek,

you guessed right, the Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, Christian Identity antisemites, islamists, Islamist front groups (like CAIR which is sending the book to libraries with a promotional letter), and other members of the ultra-left (including Comsky, counterpunch, Jewish groups like tikkun, etc) and ultra-right (stormfront, whitenation, etc)--all of these Carter supporters are shockingly one-sided in their praise.

Fortunately, folks like me remain objectively unbiased.

RE: The Magus

I also wanted to like this book, I really did. The French Luitenant's Woman is a favorite of mine, so I had high hopes for a John Fowles book that made the Modern Library's Top 100 list. But, dang! Not for me. The short review I posted on LT sums up my feelings:

I could not stand The Magus! It may be the only book that I actually hate. Those pompous nitwits running around that stupid island playing games with each other! And all the time spouting humanistic gobblygook about the death of God, or whatever they were on about. It has a cult following, but I thought it was overwrought nonsense.

Oh, and RE: William Gaddis

As much as I hated A Frolic of His Own, I have both JR and The Recognitions on my TBR shelf. This tells me two things: One, that they won the Booker prize or are on some other "must read" list. Two, that I am too compulsive about my reading lists and must learn to cut myself some slack.

ggchickapee (#80): Well, I know Gaddis never won the Booker ...

Most books that I have really hated I will not have got far with, so the ones that I would cite are ones that were really disappointing, or which took an excellent premise but ruined it in the execution.

A good recent example of the latter was Romanitas by Sophia McDougall, where the banal writing was in my view a huge missed opportunity to write about a fascinating alternate timeline.

The Idiot was turgid and dreary, even speaking as someone who, as can be seen from my library, am no stranger to reading classic Russian literature.

2001: A Space Odyssey - I love a lot of classic SF (Wells, Wyndham, Asimov) but have never been able to understand why this is so highly regarded. I read it at school, but have not done so since. I suppose I ought to, but watching the hugely overrated film version does not tempt me to re-attempt the book.

I have to say there are two terrible books that I have read in the last little while. The first is She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb and the second was Heaven by V.C. Andrews. Just a waste of time.

I liked Heaven. Of course, I was about 10 when I read it, so my tastes were not as sophisticated. It's the later V.C. Andrews series that bugged me. I don't know if heaven was actually written by Andrews or the conglomerate, but the later efforts flounder in stagnation.

#84 - Oh - filmfan -- I just loved She's Come Undone. It was depressing but I thoght Delores was unforgettable!

One of the worst books that I have ever read that is supposed to be good is Them by Joyce Carol Oates. It won the National Book Award and it is listed in 1001 Books. . but I thought it was abyssmal. Almost unreadable, disorganized, erratic writing style, just no plot resolution, just no point, really.

#81: Doh! Of course Gaddis never won a Booker, since he's not a Brit. But I can't keep all my lists straight in my little peabrain.

He won the National for JR. But from what I've read about it, I don't think I will enjoy it.

Anything by Tom Wolfe, but I see he was the first mentioned for Bonfire.

66> I stopped reading Tom Clancy after the Sum of All Fears also! I thought his megalomania (through Jack) was scary. I also had to stop reading Robert Ludlum but I forget which book.

I'm reading romance right now and there are some amazingly bad books by good writers. Some is just soft core porn with little plot or likeable characters.

Huckleberry Finn for sure. I could not take the language or Mark Twain's style. I've not been able to read anything by him ever again.

Huckleberry Finn is definately one of the all time painful reads........

Great Expectations by Dickens another nightmare from high school........

#84 filmfan14 - She's Come Undone definitely ranks up, (or should I say down?), there for me as well. I'll admit, I didn't finish it, but I honestly don't think I could've stood Dolores for another hundred and fifty pages. I wanted to reach into the bood and throttle her. She remains one of my least favourite literary characters of all time.

I'd like to thank xicanti for agreeing with me on She's Come Undone. It was recommended to me from a number of people and I don't understand why. If someone would like to explain why it was such a great read I would appreciate it. Maybe I missed something ...

#71,
Whoa, jargoneer, so true, I mean "method!" and I've probably been going around using the word "methodology" uncorrected for years--yikes!
What's the question to the answer though?

I did a course on European literature a few years ago and about the only thing I can remember is the professor ranting and raving about the use of the word 'methodology'.

To be honest, I have no idea what else I was talking about. Obviously I've had one too many pints of Guiness since posting it.

I hated The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. I'm so sorry to all those out there who adored it. The writing was fine - that's why I could finish it. But I didn't give a crap about any of the people in it, didn't think the plot was crafted at all, felt like the author had read a bunch of stuff she found interesting that would have been put to better use in a research paper and mistakenly thought, "I have a great idea for a novel!"... yuck.

And I know this doesn't count, but - I couldn't get through The Bridges of Madison County. One day in the mid-nineties I picked it up at my sister's, thinking I ought to read it since so much of America had loved-loved-loved it. I didn't get past "he liked the word 'blue'." Or whatever. Personal thing. That character had all the self-couscious pretentions of every loser I've ever dumped; I knew he was going to get lucky -- it made my teeth hurt, and my skin crawl.

Ditto, Bridges of Madison County. My mom gave it to me, thinking she knew my taste in books. I didn't get very far into it and gave up on it and US culture, considering it was such a big bestseller. But then, Danielle Steele still tops the bestseller lists. We are doomed.

Easily the worst book I ever read was Beloved by Tonii Morrison. I know, I know..Pulitzer Prize and all of that...I plugged away at it thinking surely it would all come together and makes sense, but it didn't.

After I read it I was so confused I started asking people who had read it to explain it to me. It was the featured story on the cover of Time, so I read that article to see if it would clarify it for me. Nada. I'm still scratching my head over that one.

I can't remember the title but it was written by James Patterson and is the only book that I ever read that went straight to the trash can. I couldn't imagine inflicting it on anyone else. I will never read any other book written by him, even though I know he is a very popular author and has many fans.

Anything by J. K. Rowling

>99 desultory: So you've read all her books? Even with them being the "worst?"

Tried to read them all, out of a sense of parental solidarity. Actually managed to finish one! Mind you, I was on holiday in Italy at the time, so normal standards didn't apply. There was nothing else to read.

Ah, understood. Everyone's tastes are different.

The only reason I asked is because sometimes people jump on the "I hate this popular book" wagon without even reading the thing!

Morphidae, thanks for your calm and sensible reply. I thought I was going to get blitzed by a Potterphile. I'm genuinely not a fan, and I genuinely find them almost impossible to read, but on reflection I think there was an element of mischievousness in my saying what I did.

So, for that, I apologise. I wish I enjoyed them as much as you do! I don't think I've felt that way about a book since I first finished Lord of the Rings, years ago - I envy you that sort of enthusiasm.

Cheers - and enjoy the last one. (Who's going to die?)

desultory, even though there are a lot of Harry Potter's fans among us (I am one of them), it is only sensible (and polite) to acknowledge that someone else might not find the series' books palatable or her/his cup of tea!

:-))

>I thought I was going to get blitzed by a Potterphile.

Naaaah. I don't judge someone on whether they like a book or not.* I've just seen too much of the "I haven't read this book but I'm going to trash it anyway" lately. And no need to apologize though perhaps I should apologize for being a bit sarcastic myself.

*Okay, I lied. I do when it comes to books on certain political or religious subject matters.

My worst book ever was Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

could not figure that book out for a second

I've read a bunch of doozies over the course of my life -- many years of bagful bargains at used book sales has seen to that. And let's not forget some truly memorably bad 1970s Star Trek books like Spock Must Die and Spock Messiah (well, those are the titles that come to mind; I'm guessing that there were others I read as a pre-teen/teen that were worse that I've repressed all memory of........).

My current new (a.k.a. recent release) bad book is The Accidental Florist by Jill Churchill. Her last couple Jane Jeffry books had been less good than her earlier cozy mysteries but this most recent one should have been put out of its mercy long before it saw a press. First time in my life I've returned a book to the store just for being bad, as I usually figure the chance at a bad book is part of the book buying lottery. But this was bad enough that I wrote a review at Amazon as well as returning it.

I would have to say to date, it's been Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. Self important, pointless bullshit and just one of the reasons I refuse to waste my time any further by jumping into The DaVinci Code bandwagon.

"James Patterson"

Isn't he the 'author' who doesn't write the books published under his name (or, at least, doesn't anymore)?

I think he's the one who now employs ghost writers for 'his' fiction.

The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve. I had to read two chapters to convince myself that it's awfulness was real.

I just joined this website and have not yet posted any of my books. But the title of this section intrigued me so I scanned the messages. I do not have a worst or a best; having read so many books over my lifetime I am hard pressed to advance any title to the top of the list. Sometimes a book is hard to get into but as one reads along it gets better; the converse is that the reading deteriorates (smile). I am an ecletic reader and try not to restrict my subject or author material. And I take all with a grain of salt !

#89 bloody_book_worm you have shocked me to my giblets! Huckleberry Finn is surely one of the greatest and funniest novels ever written. Did you get past the Tom Sawyer-like beginning? If not, please try again. The bulk of the novel is absolutely superb, though it has a Tom Sawyer-like ending, too.

Sophie's World: a novel about the history of philosophy. I read it in high school, so I can't remember exactly why I hated it -- it just seemed completely lame.

I managed to get through She's Come Undone okay, although I admit the story is depressing. My nomination in this category goes to The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton. Misery, misery, misery right up to the end. At least Undone had an optimistic ending!

The worst book for me was definitly The ruins: a novel by Scott Smith. It was interesting the first few pages, but afterwards the story was to predictable... I had to force myself through the second half of the book. The best thing about it was still its unusual binding.

I recently tossed aside Neuromancer.

I tossed aside Neuromancer three or four times before finally finishing it. It has some sort of weak spot early on, about a chapter in, and for some reason, it was hard to get past that point. But when I did, I liked the rest, and was impressed with Gibson's worldbuilding abilities. I liked the next novel in that series, Count Zero, even more, and since then I've read most of Gibson.

I don't know about you, but for anyone else who gets stuck early in Neuromancer, keep going, and see if it doesn't improve.

Not sure.

Probably the worst book I ever finished was Crossroads of Twilight, the tenth Wheel of Time book. You can literally skip over it to Knife of Dreams and not miss anything of importance.

There's most likely been worse books I've read, but generally I won't finish a bad book, and I've forgotten them by now.

Madam Bovary. I think it was eleven pages to describe the items on her writing desk that she was about to sit down and write at. :shivers:

The Harry Potter books

I've tried two and gave up after the first five or six chapters...poorly written...moronic in its repetitive use of various phrases...a poor excuse for literature...and the two movie versions I tried to watch put me to sleep...

I apologize if I just alienated 75% of the world's readers, but they just aren't that good and certainly not worth the pain of re-reading.

And please don't even get me started on James Patterson or Dan Brown

Please feel free to flag as abuse if so desired

I would never flag you for abuse for stating your opinion. But I do wonder about what criteria you're basing it on. I find them charming. Sure, there's the occasional badly rendered plot point, or belabored story arc (house elves! Whatever!) but in general it creates a wonderful world with well-drawn characters and exciting adventures. But to each their own.

Re: Bonfire of the Vanities: Now that's interesting. I read this book and was totally engrossed in the plot. I thought I had found a great new author, but tried another of his books and was bored to death!.

Bonfire ...

I listened to it on audio narrated by Tom Hanks. He was brilliant with the voices: " ... Sherman, Sherman!" However, it didn't make me want to run out and read more by the same author.

In response to littlegeek's message 120:

I just find them unreadable with storylines that are not very interesting...to me. I have to confess to a relative lack of interest in fantasy and that may be part of it, but I was enthralled by the Rings Trilogy...several times. My daughter and ex-wife and just about everyone else I know "adore" the Potter books, but I just cannot get into them despite my efforts

There's an awful lot of 'worst books' that I haven't read - I havent got enough years of life to persevere with a book that just isn't doing it for me, but the worst one I actually finished was 'The Life of Pi' I was absolutely rivetted, despite the gory bits which I hated, then I got to the end and I just wanted to scream!

Yes! I was just about to list Celestine Prophesy as possibly the worst book I ever read. Preposterous story, poor writing, cardboard characters. What's not to loath?

The Bridges of Madison County may be a close second.

Oh I had forgotten Celestine Prophecy! I totally agree - it was so unbelievable I got really annoyed with the whole concept. I have a friend who absolutely believes it is all true and organises many parts of her life according to it - scary!!

#126 same happened to me. A family member was totally taken by Celestine Prophecy, took it too much to heart. Back to yuck books: I loathed Angela's Ashes. Really got me down

I like anything by J.ROWLING but to me the test is, would you read this book again. I enjoyed all of them for what they are but have no desire to read them again. Whereas The Lord of the Rings I have read several times over the past 30 years as say the Foundation trilogy. I have just read the Sot-weed factor by John Barth which I will certainly read again. The reasoning is that what i got from a book in one decade I will get a different view/experience from in another decade.

The bad experiences, well a recent one was The Alchemist
by Paulo Coelho. This is the review I wrote.

Kelly Taylor, from Bristol, who has been given less than a year to live, wants doctors to increase her medication to induce a coma-like state. She has heart and lung and a spinal condition and has been in constant pain all her life. Tell her that she should follow her dream. This is new age bull that ignores that being positive is only part of the picture.

It fails as a fable with its cloying, repetitive new age psycho-babble. If you want to see and experience how bad it really is read anything by Italo Calvino such as Adam, one afternoon and other stories, Cosmicomics , or Our ancestors. Or The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. Here you see what it could have aspired to and doesn’t.

That is sold millions is a shocking indictment of the spiritual illiteracy that we endure in the 21st century.

#128> That is sold millions is a shocking indictment of the spiritual illiteracy that we endure in the 21st century.

Are you referring to Italo Calvino or to The Alchemist?
I have not read anything by Paulo Coelho, hence I cannot judge his writing, but I have read many of Calvino's books when in school in Italy, many years ago, and loved them. By the way, he was far from being New Age, quite the opposite; perhaps the translation fails to render the excellent quality of his writing and the originality of his ideas.
Liking or disliking an author is a matter of taste, like for anything else, but I think there is no need to be so vehement.

I'm usually not too critical. I can read lots of things without pain that would lay low many a bibliophile. But I confess trying to read Michner's Centennial three times. Never got past the dinosaurs.

Only those who are like children will come to me - something like that is what Christ said. Going back to children level can maybe help to discover important facts of life.

lexh2004

I cannot say Lisey's Story was the worst book I ever read, but that whole "language of marriage" theme was tedious indeed. I enjoy King's novels, but this was a book I wanted to get through in order to move on to something "good"

One of the "worst" books for me became The Rule Of Four when the authors inexplicably and unnecessarily included the graphic torture scenes.

I don't know if it's the worst book I've ever read,but I have to agree with BiblioBillaBong. Hannibal Rising is pretty awful. Shame, as I loved Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. Hannibal Rising left me with an unshakable unclean feeling though...icky.

# 84 - >>2001: A Space Odyssey - I love a lot of classic SF (Wells, Wyndham, Asimov) but have never been able to understand why this is so highly regarded. I read it at school, but have not done so since. I suppose I ought to, but watching the hugely overrated film version does not tempt me to re-attempt the book.

2001: A Space Odyssey is a little weird in that the book was written concurrently WITH the movie. The movie was not made from the book, nor was the book a novelization of the movie. Clarke was never really happy with the way it turned out. And, I think the movie was so popular because it was fun to watch while stoned (so I've heard) :-).

I always enjoyed Arthur C. Clarke's short stories more than his novels, although Childhood's End wasn't bad. Give Clarke another chance. You may be surprised.

It's a toss-up for me between 3:

1. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
2. A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe
3. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susannah Clarke

i liked the first 2 clan books.

133- I agree with your choice of The Rule of Four
My recent choices of bad books are
The Rose Grower by Michelle de Kretser and Riding in Cars with Boysby Beverley Donofrio

I was disappointed in The rule of four as well.

The books I genuinely hate are ones that I've been enjoying until they bust out a surprise ending that seems completely at odds with the plot or characters they've established. My Sister's Keeper and The Dive from Clausen's Pier were both guilty of that. Sophie's Choice pissed me off too. I hated the way the story of a Holocaust survivor was waylaid by the dull, pathetic, sexually frustrated narrator.

Anne Rice's pseudonymous porn... thing. I forgot the title and whatever pseudonym she used. A high school friend handed it to me with a suppressed squeal of delight and told me to read it. A case of train-wreck mentality kept me going throughout the first volume, but apparently my friend found it geniunely hawt stuff. I still shudder to think of it.

I agree with The Rule of Four - drivel! I felt the same way about Labyrinth by Kate Mosse. Cheesy DaVinci Code rip-offs.

The Celestine Prophecy! I'd forgotten about that piece of dreck. I read it on the recommendation of a pen pal - only later did I realize he was just as weird and boring as the book.

Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series is pretty bad too; I did read the first five, before giving up - it was clear that he'd taken what was at best a four-book set of ideas and stretched them out beyond all endurance.

But the WORST book... That would have to be Duncton Wood by William Horwood. I picked it up in the store, thought it looked bad but read the first few pages anyway just in case. I put it down immediately. Talking moles I could handle. Talking moles with names like "The Scribe" and talking moles about to set out on Quests - gah. Too, too much!

I was a huge Stephen King fan - read everything he had written right up to Misery. The level of sadism was more than I could take and I haven't read anything he's written from that point on. I still re-read the earlier works, though.

Bridges of Madison County...bleeccchhhhh!!! Pure, unadulaterated, over-rated drivel.
Interestedly enough, I read it on the recommendation of a supervisor.......things that make you go hmmmmmm

i had a really tough time with anna karenina when it was an oprah selection- i thought i would never get through it

The the Celestine Prophesy was the most badly written book I've ever read. Truly bad.

i have to agree that The Da Vinci Code is way up there on my worst book list for a major publication.

dreadful.

david perrings

Hi, I'm new to librarything.

THE worst book I have ever read has to be a book a couple of years ago...I think it was called "Hello Mr. Bowditch" or something. It was so boring I kept falling asleep and the book moved through the main character's life so fast that it was boring. It was the dryest book ever read by me.

I was unimpressed by Huckleberry Finn as well. I read it in high school and had to do a paper on it and it was my only C paper all year. For the life of me, I couldn't find anything important to say about the story. Maybe I just didn't get it.

#124, I had a bit of a hard time understanding the point of Life of Pi as well when I first finished reading it. But then I happened to notice the "study questions" at the end and mention of how the author considered chapters 21 and 22 the core of the book, despite being awfully short chapters. So I went back and read those chapters and then the purpose of the story dawned on me. It's all about "the better story." What would you rather be "true" in a story? Pi loved "God" in all the various religions he adopted because he loved the stories. In his eyes, there didn't need to be conflict over religious affliation any more than conflict over favorite pieces of literature. Same goes for the events of the book itself. Which version of events would you have enjoyed as being true (at least within the confines of the story)? It's like what Joseph Campbell once said: Follow your bliss.

cestovatela - The Dive From Clausen's Pier is a strange book for me. It's like a love/hate relationship. On the one hand, I thought it was badly written and just sort of lame. On the other hand, I identified with it SO MUCH. I had just ended a relationship with a guy who was really, really sick (a diabetic who did not take care of himself) and, like the main character, was facing a lifetime of being someone's nurse. I was 21 years old and this was my second relationship (the first one where I really put someone else before myself). Then I chose to put myself first and the results were disastrous, but that's another story.

I don't read many bad books - life is too short, and my TBR list is too long. My interests are eclectic, and I will try almost anything, but if it doesn't grab my interest within the first 50 pages, it goes right back on the shelf. This approach has saved me from reading many of the truly awful titles listed here, including Da Vinci Code, Celestine Prophesy, Bonfire of the Vanities, etc.

Unfortunately, a dear friend gave me a copy of Red Storm Rising, and then kept asking me what I thought of it. Not wanting to insult his judgment, I kept trying to read it, but I never managed to slog through more than a few chapters. Granted, this is not a genre I would normally read, but I just couldn't get past the stilted dialog, the jingoism...actually I hated everything about this book.

...edited to correct the title - apparently I hated that book so much that I even blanked out the title!

this is an oldie, but it was so bad it has stuck in my mind for over 25 years. Even cowgirls get the blues. I felt compelled to finish it to see what would happen to the main character, but the whole book seemed plotless and pointless. And back then I was much more open minded than I seem to be getting in my old age, so I am pretty sure I would dislike it even more now. As a matter of fact, I don't attempt to read anything of Tom Robbins

Amazon sent me The Secret or Secret (?) when I was supposed to be getting Love in a Cold Climate - now there's a quantum leap - so I browsed through it before mailing it back. Found what I skimmed of it to be absolutely ghastly. I hadn't heard about it until it showed up in my mailbox but was surprised to learn that it was garnering some kind of cult following.

#152 - Unfortunetly Red storm Rising is not the worst of Clancy's work. They've been going downhill steadily and I gave up after The Bear and the Dragon which is much worse than red storm. It is more stilted and jingoistic and , well just worse all round.

Acorna: The Unicorn Girl by Anne Mccaffey. If there were some sort of contest about how many bad SF cliches you could stuff into 300 pages, this turkey would win hand's down. Truly abysmal.

I happened to be on a direct flight of over three hours with only this as my reading material. Otherwise it would have been that very rare book that I pick up and don't finish. Boggles the mind that this mess has spawned a bunch of sequels.

Okay, I just have another bad read to add to the list: The Colorado Kid by Stephen King. It somehow tries to market itself as hardboiled (which isn't my favorite mystery genre anyway) but is nothing of the kind. In short, two Maine locals tell a young reporter the story of a dead John Doe found by a beach 25 years earlier. It could have been an interesting tale, but King keeps stuffing the story with unnecessary digressions and even fails to resolve the mystery in the end. Boring!

Interestingly, in the acknowledgement section, King makes it perfectly clear that he couldn't care less what people think of this book which perhaps isn't all that surprising.

I think Stephen King may have become one of those big name authors who has so much clout that he can publish and sell just about any dreck he wants to. It's a pity because he has come up with some great stories in the past.

Agreed that it isn't hardboiled fiction which is what it was commissioned for, but that doesn't make it a bad story although I think it would have made a better short story than a novel(la). He still has the stories though, but I think he just gets caught up in the sound of his own voice (so to speak). It took me a while, but once I got into his latest book, Lisey's Story I liked it a lot.

Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice. In a word - disgusting. I stopped reading her after that book.

It would be a toss-up between The Da Vinci Code and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. The first was so bad, I kept reading, just to get some more laughs. The second was just bad: hokey prose, bad dialog, annoying characters, more annoying sentiment, unbearably annoying philosophy. I had to stop to keep my head from exploding.

#153(mydomino1978) - You may have felt differently if you'd started with Still Life with Woodpecker instead of Even Cowgirls get the Blues. It made me into a regular Tom Robbins fan, and I was actually disappointed when I read Cowgirls.

A Prayer for Owen Meany is a good choice for worst book I ever read. There are others: Portnoy's Complaint and The Ginger Man.

Phlox72 #160, Same here! That's exactly when I stopped reading Rice. She went off on that religious tangent and hasn't come off it since. Too bad, since her earlier work was so unusual and fantastic; both the vampire and witch series. Nothing against religion (I'm a Catholic, too), but geez, it's so boring!

Upon further reflection, maybe my Catholic upbringing was part of the problem. Felt like I was back in school being lectured to by nuns all over again. Ugh.

did anyone read Rice's Beauty series. I hated it. I don't mind sex but forced sex, I believe that's called rape. Hated it, hated it, hated it.

I'd have to say something by Laura Ingalls Wilders. No suspense, horrible plot, boring writing, terrible beginnings, and unspeakable endings.

I actually kind of liked {The Life of Pi}. but I couldn't stand {Gifts} by Ursula Leguin. It was so hard to get through, and I gave up after a few chapters.

For me, the worst book that I've attempted to read in recent history was The dragonbone chair by Tad Williams. I finally gave up about 70 pages into it, bored to actual tears. Yes, I get it, the main character is a dreamy kid. Please stop telling me about every useless way he likes to waste his time.

I was very surprised to find that most of the reviews here on LibraryThing were so positive; it made my roommate jump when I shouted "You've GOT to be kidding me!" at my computer.

I can't imagine any turn of events that would redeem such a boring first half of a book.

ANYTHING that is written by Dan Brown.

Hi--He did win the National Book Award (US) a couple of times I think (definitely for _JR_); must say it pains me to see either _The Recognitions_ or _JR_ come up in this discussion. But I can understand readers who don't have the patience for either book. To each his or her own.

Re: Msg 170 above

I meant to ref #74 & #80 on William Gaddis.

Books that I've been disappointed in lately are two by Matthew Pearl: _The Dante Club_ and _The Poe Shadow_. I really wanted to like both of them, and the ingredients are all there (great material, historical detail, gruesome murders), but there's something missing. I found both of them hard going.

>149 iamjackson:: iamjackson, Was that Carry On, Mr. Bowditch? I read that one when I was in junior high because my next-door neighbors were descendants of Nathaniel Bowditch. Don't remember anything about it :)

I enjoyed the Da Vinci Code, but Angels and Demons was total rubbish. I couldnt believe how far fetched it was, totally unbelievable.

Falling Leaves; the true story of an unwanted Chinese daughter by Adeline Yen Mah. Without doubt a terrible time and story, but the book was self-indlugent, egotistical, badly written, and just shocking. The worst few pounds I have ever spent; read Jung Chang instead.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova.

#171: thank you! I tried and tried to like The Dante Club because I love Dante and many of the authors featured in the book. I simply could not slog my way through it. It just dragged for me. I finally gave up about 2/3 of the way through. Perhaps one day...

#176 > tiffin, you are not alone. I gave up too, in spite of my love for Dante and interest in all the other characters. It was just the writing style, I guess.....it did not click....

I agree. I HATED The Historian too! I was amazed by how bad it was and how well it sold. I am also with you on the Bridges of Madison County, couldn't finish the book nor the film.

I don't know if i could just pick 1 really bad book. Seems I tend to come across some really bad ones often.
Here are a list of some I can say I truly hated:
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
Blindness by Jose Saramago
Lisey's Story by Stephen King

For billythefish, Chinese Cinderella was much better than Falling leaves}. Same story, but just a shorter version about her childhood written for young adults. Loved it but couldn't get into Falling Leaves.

Hated Cloud Atlas, The Magus, Notes on a Scandal, most of the books on any booker prize list (why do they have to try and be so intellectual, a good plot and interesting characters are SO much better, like Vernon God Little)

Catch 22 was really hard going as I just got interested in what was happening then it was the end of the chapter and he never finished telling you the story I had just got into.

I used to finish every book I started to read, even if I hated it, but as I get older I realise this is such a waste of good reading time!

#125>> MarzipanLady>> I think that Celestine Prophecy was there specifically to have cardboard characters and a proposterous plot. It was more promoting a way of thinking and dealing with events than convincing you to believe that that exact story is realistic. Magical realism and metaphor are common techniques, and approaching books with that in mind can make unbelievable settings seem educational or at least, if you hate the lesson, understandable.

The Da Vinci Code is one of the worst books I ever read, I'm amazed at it's popularity.

I was very disappointed in Banners of Gold by Pamela Kaufman, the sequel to her Shield of Three Lions, which I really enjoyed. While Shield was lively and original, Banners was leaden and plodding. I find it hard to believe the same author wrote them both.

One of the most recent is Margaret Atwood's Surfacing. I love almost everything else she's written, but that book was absolutely terrible.

First that comes to my mind is
one hundred strokes of the brush before bed by Melissa P.

Lisey's Story by Stephen King. I read the entire book and I still don't really know what I read.

I so agree. What was that all about.

My wife handed me The Secret last night and suggested I might get something out of the chapter on health. I skimmed the text and agree with Tiffin that it was ghastly -- in fact beyond ghastly. Why does the public fall for such babble?

I've read some really terrible horror novels and the occasional horrible fantasy novel (I liked the first Robert Jordan and couldn't finish the second one). But the book that really stands out for me in recent years is Frank McCourt's Teacher Man. (grains, or entire shakers of salt may be applicable here, since this outsold my own teaching memoir by probably a hundred to one). He says very early in the book that nothing remarkable happened to him in 30 years of teaching and then goes on to prove it in the rest of the book. This really seemed like a case of "people will buy anything with my name on it, so I'll slap another book together even though I really don't have anything else to say." Urgh.

Eldest, the sequel to Eragon. I can cope with the plot and characterisation, but the prose was achingly awful. Such clunky sentences... I was howling in pain.

Second would have to be The Riddle-Master's Game trilogy, I got through it but was very disappointed.

Oh, and I've been trying to read A Tale of two Cities since about 1999...

Edited to add:
Fingersmith was truly awful, far too gratuitous.
The Cement Garden was disgusting and I never got the point of it.

anything by Jane Austen
Hacker Cracker
Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos

And the biggest waste of my money ever is, by a wide margin:

Taking the Quantum Leap by Fred Alan Wolf.

Probably His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. I was really getting into the Golden Compass, and it seemed promising, but all the sudden BAM. "Lets over throw God!" I kept waiting...and waiting...for everything to go right and...it didn't. Plus, what was with castration??? Ugh...oh and the Edge Chronicles! DISGUSTING! And people call it fantasy! You know there are sadly just so many...

The Cement Garden was disgusting and I never got the point of it.

I haven't read the book but it was a pretty decent movie. (Movie is American for 'film,' by the way.)

Shantaram. A very tedious and pretentious book.

Anything by Tom Clancy. I can't see how a person make intrigue and military adventure so boring. I have yet to be able to read through any of his works.

>189 Yarrow:: why gratuitous? Was it the erotic element that you disliked so?

>195 hazelk: Yes, I think so. It wasn't that I had a problem with the lesbian aspect - far from it. I felt that the plot had been based around the erotic bits far too much and the story had the potential to be so much better had the author not tried to bring the two heroines together at the end.

>192 Nichtglied: To be fair, I read it about 5 years ago when I was 17. Maybe I was too young. Anyway the thought of it still makes me feel slightly queasy!

> 193: Now you tell me that! I have just bought it...

I HATED Bridget Jones’ Diary I was stuck with it while on travel and had nothing else to read. I finished it because people said that it was so great... I wanted to rip my eyes out when I finished the thing! I am just glad that I picked it up at a book swap and didn't pay a cent for the friggin' thing.

The worst book I've ever read is, without a doubt, Meatless Days by Sara Suleri. It's the cryptic memoir of an ivy league professor growing up in Pakistan. I've never read such bombastic, pompous, self-centered drivel in my life. I had to read it (and write about it) for a class at university, so I had to read it very closely. My prof loved it, so I didn't feel free to trash it in my essay or exam. That took great restraint. I want those hours back.

Sorry Romanus ... you may like it. A lot of people seem to have. I was expecting a "gangsters in Bombay" and Shantaram is far from that. The author has an interesting story to tell, I am sure, but he drags it out and the interesting aspects are buried. Honestly, I just didn't get the point of the book.

Anyway, I found Sacred Games a much more interesting read, both in terms of depth and literary value.

In my search for good vampire novels, I've found that most of then seem to be more steam than story, if you catch my drift. The one that stands out in my mind as an example of this is Incubus Dreams by Laurel K. Hamilton. I think the writing itself is quite good, but the novel was far too much sex and not close to enough plot for my taste. I haven't read any of the other Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series for that reason.

The Rule of Four - came across it the other day and threw it on the stack of stuff to be given away. I fell for the hype and regretted wasting my time reading it.

The Hobbit - read it in my late teens and just *hated* it. I had to force myself to finish it. And I've never read The Lord of the Rings trilogy because of The Hobbit. (I did enjoy Bored of the Rings, though).

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed by Alan Alda was a bit of a snooze and Pope Joan annoyed me to no end.

overrated books: Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses, Focault's Pendulum. of those, i have the most respect for Joyce.

The worst book I've ever read was Wedding Season by Darcy Cosper and the 2nd worst is Four Blondes by Candace Bushnell. Horrible characters, plot line, and writing. I give both of them 2 thumbs down.

I posted earlier about Bridget Jone's Diary but I just remember how much I hated A Girl's Guide to Fishing and Hunting, which I hated as much (probably more). I think that I have something against female British authors.

The Violin by Anne Rice. Appallingly bad writing. I was pretty much a fan of hers until I attempted to read this piece of garbage. I have almost never failed to finish a book, except for this and one or two others. There were several paragraphs in the center that seemed as though she had put a dictionary in a blender and poured the resulting slop onto the page.

Nobody knows how to beat a dead horse like Anne Rice.

Seven Deadly Wonders: A Novel by Matthew Reilly was awful. Deus ex machina left, right, up, down, and center. Pacing was way too fast. Very shallow characters.

I agree with Bridget Jones Diary and the Rule of Four. Started reading them and quit after a couple chapters. It was too boring.

My mom recently gave me the Patridge Family books I had when I was 10 -- I have not been able to bring myself to read them yet, but I am thinking they will be among the worst I have ever read...

(The Partridge Family TV show tie-ins, with David Cassidy on the cover...yikes.)

#205 - I'd almost managed to forget about Four Blondes. Absolutely horrid book.

I think Ivanhoe. I had to read it in middle school. It was the biggest pain to read, of any book, assigned or for pleasure, in the entirety of my existence thus far.

There are quite a few books I haven't finished that are just awful, but the worst book I've finished recently is The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks. Drivel. The writing was terrible, the plot was pointless, the characters...I just didn't care. I only finished it because it was short.

Forever by Pete Hamill, a man who has never heard of adverbs, but is endowed with an alarming ability to drop like a hot potato anything remotely in danger of developing into an interesting plotline
The Lovely Bones, which I thought was pretty bad until I got to that last bit, at which point I found it to be an unmitigated pile of sub-adolescent fluffy rubbish.

"But I confess trying to read Michener's Centennial three times. Never got past the dinosaurs."

I enjoyed that one, although I've not gone back to re-read it. I also enjoyed Space, which is another of his door-stoppers.

Cheers
Simon Haynes

I've tried to read a lot of books where I had to give up out of boredom, but YMMV. However, for sheer bad writing, too absolute standouts - The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville, and The Digital Fortress by Dan Brown. Threw into the kitchen trash...

Funny how these two authors come up on this list.

(Fingersmith) was absolutely awful. Probably because it slowly slided into a book I would have never read normally.

And probably everything my friends have given me and which I have never dared try yet. They know I love reading and give me books on my birthday. I know... they are so sweet...

i agree about Tom Clancy. twice, i was bored out of my mind and desperate for any book; plane flights, etc. i still couldn't get into his books. i would have been happier reading stock prices.

> logic:

Yeah, I never got the Clancy appeal either. Whenever I read his books for school, I had to keep lists of who the characters were, since he enjoyed introducing a new character (with a long, hard-to-remember Russian name!) every other page.

I find it interesting what qualifies a book as the 'worst' by different posters.

For me, Foucault's pendulum (read it completely) which I thought might be good since I liked the movie Name of the Rose. The violence of American psycho just from flipping though it in the bookstore made me literally sick to my stomach. Correction, the lead character's attitude towards the violence made me sick which doesn't make it a bad book but I didn't buy it.

#202 TheBratPrince

Why in the world would you pick up a book that is 12th in a series and expect to enjoy it?

#222 I dunno, The Letter of Marque is pretty good.

I meant with out reading 1 thru 11 in the series. I mean maybe this is common for some people to do. I always start at the begining and read them in order. Do people pick up in the middle of a long series?

There are two authors whose works I have tried to read again and again for some reason or another, but I can't do it. Tom Robbins and Chuck Palahniuk (sp?) = (Don't really care how his name is spelled.)
Tom Robbins is just too much. I get overstimulated and then bored. I even tried to listen to Even Cowgirls Get the Blues on tape once while I was commuting and I couldn't finish it.
Chuck Palahniuk is so dull and trite and irritating.
I've never read Dan Brown, although a roommate of mine who enjoyed both Angels and Demons and The DaVinici Code had an arrangement with me that if I read fifty pages into The DaVinci Code, (after which he thought I would get into it) he would read fifty pages into Journey to the End of the Night (after which I thought he'd be enthralled). Needless to say with our differing tastes, neither of us expanded our reading list.
It is funny that Bonfire of the Vanities is mentioned. I just found a signed copy at a thrift store of all places and was relieved I found a signed Tom Wolfe book instead of another author because I have no intentions of keeping it. Hopefully someone will want it so i can make some money, but if many people have the same tastes as this forum, I may not get my $1.40 back. Sad.

#225 WellRead, I'm relieved to see I'm not the only one with a bad case of Palahniuk masochism. The last one I read was Choke, although a more appropriate name would have been Do (incredibly rude word for the developmentally disabled) dream of deformed sheep?.

New Peoplemaking by Virginia Satir.
New age touchy-feely self-help book whining about communication.

"Why can't we all just be friends."

Does skimming a few pages out of curiosity, and then refusing to touch it with a ten-foot pole count? If it does, I'm going to nominate anything by Zane. I don't mind erotica, but what I saw in those books was just ... vulgar. And unappealing. And the non-sex scenes were still absolutely appalling writing.

I don't understand why they're some of the most popular titles at our library. I admit urban fiction wouldn't be my thing in any case, but some of the (other) writers are decent (from what I can tell in a quick skim). Why she is unquestionably the queen of the genre ....

I'm going to say The Devil's Advocate, by Andrew Neiderman. Any movie with Al Pacino in is worth watching in my book (no pun intended) but I find it hard to believe that a great movie came from such a terribly written book.

I hated Mourning Ruby, by Helen Dunmore as well.

Some book by Harold Robbins... I can´t even remember the title. When I finished the book I was so upset that I had wasted my time reading that trash that I swore to never read anything by him again. That was almost 25 years ago and I kept my promise :)

Dr. Adder by K.W. Jeter.
Gerald's Game by Stephen King.
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

226- Yes, I too tried to read Choke. One of my friends who usually has great taste in books, loves Palahniuk so I tried, I really tried. But I couldn't connect at all. I thought it was ridiculous. I never mind Chuck's subject matter, I love the bizarre and the inane, but there is something about his writerly voice (more like a croak). I hate it. Wait, I don't hate it, it doesn't merit that strong of a reaction. I am mildly annoyed that Chuck exists.

232 - Chuck can actually produce some interesting vignettes of the bizarre when he tries, and if he was half the nihilist that he gets billed as, he'd be interesting. But he's rather pedantic and sentimental, and he tries to cover it up with shock value.

He lost my trust early into Choke with the story about how a silhouette by a Greek girl is the source of all art. My first thought was, "Geez, haven't you ever heard of cave paintings!?" Since he can't get basic art history right, it makes his random fact schtick all the more annoying. (And his books all the more sloooow.) And the characters were incredibly stupid, like the misbegotten offspring of Jar Jar Binks and Beavis (or Butthead) stupid.

Chuck can actually produce a decent vignette of the bizarre (Choke has a few), which makes it all the more disappointing how turgid Haunted is.

"And the characters were incredibly stupid, like the misbegotten offspring of Jar Jar Binks and Beavis (or Butthead) stupid."

OW. And the visual isn't too pretty either!

abundance was awful, I never finished it. thank god it was a book rental and I didn't actual shell out money for it.

But he's rather pedantic and sentimental, and he tries to cover it up with shock value.

Thank you, Carlos, I've been trying to put my finger on what annoys me about Palahuniak for a while. You nailed it.

235 messages and I can't believe nobody has mentioned The Horse Whisperer. One of my major regrets in life is finishing that book. I knew what I was doing, but I just kept turning the pages... Why? Why?

New to Librarything. Hello!

I had to toss out J.K. Rowling too. I tried to read her first book. At first I thought I didn't like it because of the muddy looking American cover, so I went to the trouble of buying copies in Canada, but although I liked the cover better, and was pleased not to have it "translated", I still didn't like the book. I only got 1/3 of the way through it and then put it down.

And I tried to read Romanitas and was disappointed. I just looked at the first page and said, "this is not enough for me to want to continue with such a large book which will be a large trilogy".

>107 killearnan:

The Price of the Phoenix was bad, so bad that although I actually read it, I couldn't touch the sequel.

>168 KevlarRelic:

I loved Tad Williams’ previous book Tailchaser's song so thought I would enjoy The dragonbone chair. I did finish it (this was about 20 years ago) but was not interested in anything else in the series and dropped him as an author.

I've read other novels and such by Douglas Coupland before and loved them, but I honestly detest jPod with such passion.... I took me forever to finish the book.

Hannibal is the worst book I can remember reading at this moment. I loved Silence of the Lambs movie first, book second. The Clarece in Hannibal is not the same strong, intelligent woman as the Clarece in Hannibal. The violence in Hannibal was obscene. It's right up there with a portion of the movie Sin City I saw. Hannibal was a purely money making project with no redeeming social value. The Bonfire of the Vanities is a not too distant second. I like Tom Wolfe's writing generally. Reading Bonfire I wanted to throw it away every 75 pages or so but kept looking for something that I never found. Every character in Bonfire deserved killing on general principles. Two bad books.

Well I have to admit I did not make it through all the posts but I can think of 2 I read all the way through and felt it was way harder than it was worth and that was The Corrections by Franzen and Special Topics in Calamity Physics

The Time Traveler's Wife.

Blech.

Wild Animus by Rich Shapero, a self-indulgent piece of trash in which the title character is so similar to the author that he's even writing a book called Wild Animus. The plot is that he's some guy who likes climbing so much he wants to be a sheep. So he dresses up like a sheep and gets chased by wolves. (No, really.) People here may recognise it, as 50,000 copies were distributed by the author through BookCrossing. I doubt he sold even a fraction of that amount.

Lots of comments - only one disagreeing, though.
128 - Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics. I love that book - it's the only one of his I've read, though I'm interested in others. It is utterly weird and great. (129 - no, ablueidol was saying that Calvino was writing well what Coelho was writing badly.)

130 - Michner's Centennial. Dinosaurs! I've read the first chapter - the geology and dinosaurs - three or four times; never managed to read the rest of the book. I think the first time I got another chapter or two in before I dropped it. After that I didn't even bother to try. I have Space and someday may try it.

143 - Duncton Wood by Horwood. Yes. I have no clue why or how, but I read this book and at least one sequel. Maybe I was jonesing for Watership Down? It is incredibly stupid.

149, 172 - Carry On, Mr. Bowditch. Pawcatuck, I'm assuming the same as you. And I love that story. Read it first in school, then years and years later (about 4-5 years ago) found it again. It is a trifle shallow - you get a lot more about what he did than why - but if you recall that it's actually a biography...Nathaniel is interesting, his milieu is fascinating if you're at all interested in Colonial/early American Republic life in New England and the trading schooners. It is written for children (well, YA anyway), but rivals A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver as the best children's biography I've ever read.

156 - Acorna. Yes, yes, yes. Bleah. I managed to read I think 3 books of the Peytabee series, but Acorna stopped me in the first chapter. I really don't remember any of it except the fact of the 'unicorn girl' being found in a life-capsule by some 'rough miners' - but I do recall my firm intention not to ever read any more of it. And you're reading here the words of someone who even mildly enjoyed the entire Freedom series!

My noes:
Anything by Philip Pullman - I read all of...I _think_ it was Golden Compass, not sure. That series, anyway. Reading along, didn't think it was wonderful but lots of interesting concepts...and then at the end he killed off one of the major characters. Just like that, for no good reason - it would have been stronger if they'd escaped! - and I decided I didn't like the way he thought.

Anything by Stephen Donaldson. This one is really annoying, because I _love_ his concepts. His ideas and worlds are fascinating, and I _cannot_ stand his characters. I read the first Thomas Covenant and wanted to slap Thomas throughout - he's so used to being hopeless that he can't let go of it. Then Donaldson dumped him back into his hopeless life...arrgh. So I picked up the next book thinking maybe Thomas would accept Land and being healed and so on, even though he might end up back home at the end...nope. Same depressing Thomas. OK, put it down and don't read any more. So then I found this book that sounded _fascinating_ - a new kind of magic, mirror magic. Mirror of Her Dreams, I think it was (or A Man Rides Through, whichever was the first book). I got about half-way through, slogging for every page - then I looked and realized it was a Donaldson and quit. I mean, the hero is a failed apprentice - not your classic failed apprentice where he's sure he could do it if he only got the chance, even though all his masters have given up on him - no, Donaldson's is just as sure as his masters that he's a complete failure, but he's too hopeless to leave. And the heroine is a girl who has so little self-esteem that she fills her house with mirrors to remind herself that she exists. Bleah. I'm supposed to identify with or feel for either of these? No thanks.

Would say anything by Stephen King but I just picked up a pop-up book by him (The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon) and it actually had a good ending. So maybe I'll consider him in the future (very gingerly!). I generally hate horror, which I define as people being helpless before disaster. The Thing is horror. Aliens is horror even though Ripley gets out. I'd classified King entirely as horror; now I'll consider some of his stuff, with care.

I've read a lot of bad books in the sense of boring. But there's one (can I remember the title?) that still stands out, despite my having read it easily 10-15 years ago - it's a Star Trek novel, Shadow Lord by Laurence Yep. Incredibly bad. As I recall, he established some quite alien aliens - humanoid in a very broad sense (they were 7 foot tall, most of that legs, and furry). Enterprise was transporting a prince back home from Federation school. The entire bridge crew(?) went down to the planet (for some reason) and ended up helping the prince escape from a rebellion. Sulu a) could handle a sword from there well enough that he was the best swordsman around (including the prince and his bodyguard) and b) was extremely attractive and attracted to the people they ended up hiding among (remember 7 ft tall and furry?). I have no idea how it ended - no, that's not true, the prince's party won mostly because of the Enterprise crew and then they all sailed away into the sunset to the sighs of the maidens...eeech. At that point I was reading all the Star Trek novels as they came out. Shadow Lord and Black Fire - in which Spock was chosen as the best person to pretend to be a space pirate in order to trap somebody-or-other - eventually convinced me otherwise. I'll still read a Trek novel but I need a real reason (like an author I know I like, or a specific recommendation) to do so.

There are a lot of 'classic novels' that I've read as required and hated, but I don't count them as 'bad books', just books that are wrong for me. It doesn't count as bad unless it's supposed to be aimed at me (remember, at the time I read Shadow Lord I was reading _every_ ST novel as it came out!) and still totally fails. So I hate Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Their Eyes Were Watching God and many others...but I wouldn't consider them bad.

Oh, and I read the first Harry Potter book and never mustered enough interest to pick up the second. Not bad, just not interesting to me. Love The Hobbit, like LOTR, but I'd rather read Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci stories (Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant) if I want children-learning-magic and anything by Enid Blyton or Rudyard Kipling's Stalky and Co. if I want children-in-English-school.

And why won't it touchstone Diana? Weird - she's got a page, under that name...Diana Wynne Jones Hmmmph.

I threw Oscar and Lucinda across the room when I finished it. I was ready to hate Ralph Fiennes in the movie, but it never showed in my town. I have declined to look at anything by Peter Carey since then.

Robert

I, like others, have blocked the memory of the worst book I've ever read from my mind, almost entirely - the only thing I do remember is that it ends with a main character passing a baby named Adolf.... Hitler. And I did throw the book across the room, and in fact, almost (I don't think I actually did) considered throwing it away, (which is sacrilege for me), so others would not have to experience such awfulness. And now I kind of wish I could remember what the book was, so I could warn people not to read it!!

I believe I have just read the worst book of my life - The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis. That Narnia ends with a overtly racist (among many things, he actually uses "darky" as a perjorative), xenophobic rant is deeply tragic.

250 A_musing

I hated that book, too, when I read it back in high school

I made the mistake of reading it aloud to the kids (we did this with the whole Narnia series); I'm going to be trying to explain a few things for a while.

I added a review to the database detailing much of what I absolutely hated about it.

A_musing - um. Did you notice who was using said pejorative? Those Dwarves were representing all the close-minded, selfish, nasty people in the world...so they called the Calormenes darkies (among other pejoratives for other groups). Makes sense to me. And you did notice that there were good Calormenes (Emeth, for one) and bad Narnians (Shift, the Cat, the Dwarves...) among the characters?

If Lewis had only expressed one side of the story, it wouldn't have been a story. And I would have agreed with you completely if the story had been heroic Narnians against evil Calormenes - but it's quite thoroughly mixed. I find it interesting that the Calormenes are pretty clearly Arabic, but _not_ Muslim.

The enemies throughout the series have been the Calormenes and the Northern Giants - both depicted as cruel and often stupid with it. You didn't find The Silver Chair xenophobic? What about The Horse and His Boy? I don't see that the depiction of 'enemy' in The Last Battle is particularly different. 'Enemy' is those who willingly harm others for their own benefit. Heck, the Telmarines in Prince Caspian and the White Witch and her allies in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (and in The Magician's Nephew) fit that description as well. Sorry, it seems to me you're reading too much into Lewis's portrayal. (Yes, I read your review as well.)

Harry Potter and the Half-blood prince. The worst of JKs Harry Potter books.
The Curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.

Agree with those who said She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb was a horrible book. In fact, it's very possibly one of the worst books ever written. Awful, awful, awful.

And jagmuse, are you maybe talking about "Genesis and Catastrophe," by Roald Dahl? (That's a short story, not a whole book, so maybe that's not what you were talking about, but it sounds like that's the work you're describing.)

When I was a public librarian and we had a program of reading authors the general public liked, I had to read Superstitious, the adult novel that R. L. Stine wrote. All I remember is that eyes were eaten or gouged out with with a glop glop noise. And I had to read some novel by Danielle Steel. I think it was Malice by Danielle Steel.

#256
The trials of being a public librarian...

Well, I just stopped three pages into a book.

Yeah, that is a little much, I admit, but I picked up the book to read for fun and while the first two pages were ok (if irritatingly published in non-typical format and font), the third page (maybe I got onto the fourth page) was just so much overdramatization and purple prose and just plain bad writing that I couldn't take it seriously.

I mean, really, if a book makes me laugh, it should be at what it says, not how it's written, don't you think?

It's really funny how opinions can differ. I loved, loved, "She's Come Undone," and recommended it to everybody.
My worst book is still to come because there's always something worse than the last one I tossed aside, which was "On Beauty." I'm sure I'll hate something even more than that. Oh, and I'm sure there's lots of you out there that think "On Beauty" is magical.

>258 bluesalamanders: Well, what book was it?

*taps her foot impatiently*

Without a doubt, Moby Dick.

I couldn't make a dent in it in high school, didn't get much further in undergrad, and still couldn't get through it in grad school. Last year, I finally tried the audio and didn't allow myself anything else until it was done (no dessert until you eat your veggies type thing.) I honestly tried to like it. I am very non-judgmental when it comes to books - many books on this list of "worsts" I really enjoyed (no matter how poorly written!) But with Moby Dick - I just didn't care about the characters at all. I did finish it though, so I was able to cross it off my list of "books I have to finish because I never finished in high school" list. At least there was a positive outcome!

260 Morphidae

LOL

It was Blue Bloods by Melissa de la Cruz. I'd heard some good things about it and I like a lot of YA fantasy, and some vampire fic, so...but no.

I've always harboured an especial hatred of Dickens' "The Cricket on the Hearth".

repeated mentions of chuck palahniuk upthread have reminded me that I read and absolutely detested invisible monsters. I have since been variously told that it's "not his best book", but I've never been tempted to verify that by trying another.

> #225: Tom Robbins is just too much. I get overstimulated and then bored.

I love tom robbins, but I do know what you mean; I have to be in the right frame of mind to cope with his style.

#190: I read plenty of popular science books, and Taking the Quantum Leap by Fred Alan Wolf is certainly pretty mundane. But what else can you expect from a science author who feels compelled to put "PhD" after his name (at least in the edition available in New Zealand, and also in his more recent The Spiritual Universe).

My all-time worst popular science book has to be one given to me c. 1965, called First Stop: the Moon by Wolfgang Schroeder. Maybe it's unfair to be too critical of attempts to predict the future that get it badly wrong, but this one was dreadful: even as a 15-year old I knew the science was crap (e.g., rockets should take off horizontally, so as to gain maximum advantage from the earth's rotational velocity), and the book was pervaded with an unpleasant neo-Nazi flavour as well.

As for fiction: I don't read a lot, but someone persuaded me that The Da Vinci Code was an entertaining thriller worth reading. Utter, utter, crap.

Shadow of the wind by Zafon, absolutely dreadfully, tear my hair out boring. Arthur and the minimoys, by that french film director who promptly turned it into a film (my boyfriend reminded me: it's Luc Besson), written with such a disdain for children and children's books it's immoral, Coelho, Dan Brown, yes The lovely bones, Human traces by Sebastian Faulks, Becoming strangers by Louise Dean, Labyrinth by Kate Mosse. I could go on.

The worst book I remember reading is the apparent "original uncut" version of Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. I normally am not into sci-fi or fantasy, I'll freely admit that, but due to its widespread alleged influence on further generations and well-known philosophizing (and it being free), I gave it a shot.

Wow. Some interesting ideas, maybe, but simply so poorly written! Cardboard characters. The entire book seems like Harshaw going on...and on...and on.... That and ending with the least subtle Jesus on the cross metaphor in history. I forced myself through it, but man did I regret it.

The worst book I ever started was Politics: A Novel by Adam Thirlwell as an advance read. Unbearably pretentious. Seemed like every other line was an unbearably smug narrator stating "well, let me tell you what they did". Literally.

This thread takes about five days to load on a land line. Time for Worst Book Ever Read II?

Very disappointed in The Psychology of Baseball. Might better be titled The Psychology of Mindnumbing Statistics.

#267 (eswnr) - I totally agree with you on politics: a novel. you don't say whether you finished it, but if you didn't, I can assure you you missed nothing except the discovery that behind all that smugness was a tale of mind-numbing banality which the author was trying desperately to make interesting through that unbelievably annoying voice.

Not strictly the worst book that I've ever read, because I couldn't actually finish it, but Report on probability A by Brian Aldiss.

You're right, ECGTB is dreadful but I'd encourage you to try any of his other works. We all have bad days at work.

>272 MartinDavies: - when responding to a previous post it's best to preface your post with the number of the original post. That way people will understand what you're talking about.

Worst fiction book ever - The Magus and I am gratified to know that I am not alone in that.
Worst non-fiction book - Food for the Dead - On the Trail of New England’s Vampires - a complete waste of paper and ink. The author of this book was so short on material that he actually wrote a paragraph or so describing the upholstery of the chairs in the library where he was doing his research. He also had great swathes of conversation (a curious thing for a non-fiction book) where each line of quoted dialogue was rendered in the I asked, he said, she answered format. I hated it so much that I threw it away - something I hardly ever do.

Is there a point to this exercise? How is this thread helpful? I think a list of good books is much more useful than a list of books one hasn't liked.

Although I am glad to see I'm not the only one who thought Riddle-Master stunk. : )

#274Fourpawz2 - The Magus wasn't the worst book I've read, but it was certainly one of the creepiest.

#275: BobNolin "How is this thread helpful?"

Must it be helpful? We like discussing books, and this subject has been thought interesting enough for a couple of hundred people to post to it.

#274 and 276 --- so we gently disagree. The Magus is one of the best books I've ever read. But I did read it while in Greece, which as I remember it, drew me so deeply into the book, I felt as if I were part of it. I should read it again to see how it hits me this time.

I don't think I've yet read the worst book, but this year I grew so frustrated with the wordiness and lack of action in On Beauty, that I'd put on my list for 2007.

I love this thread! I imagine everyone else has this experience reading it: you scroll through, agreeing with many books, thinking "ah, that one's not so bad," then suddenly - "what? That's a great book! What's wrong with them?!"

So I'm sure that someone will have that reaction when I say I hated Infinite Jest (and am surprised no one else has mentioned it. So tedious!). I agree with the Lisey's Story hate, and can't read any of Rowling's books, but some of my favorites are represented here too. (Time Traveler's Wife? Loved it!).

Really disliked just about anything recent by Dean Koontz, and the last few dogs by Crichton have really made me cringe (State of Fear and especially Next), but I keep subjecting myself to both authors in audiobook form while commuting, because if I miss a bit, it won't matter much to the plot.

I absolutely hated Walter Scott'sGuy Mannering when I was at school, and even now cannot bring myself to read anything else by him.
I think one of the all-time worst books I've ever read, though, was St. Valentine's Night by Andrew Greeley. Poorly written rubbish.
And lately? Well Three Junes by Julia Glass was pretty appalling!

None, because as soon as i dont like what i am reading i just leave it and forget about it. I dont like to waste my time reading books i dont like. I am very specific about my tastes.

I agree with chisme311. I have a rule that if the said book has not 'got' me by page 100, I ditch it! I always wanted to read a Booker/Pulitzer prize winner at the time it won to see if I agreed with the verdict. Last year I read The inheritance of loss by kiran desai, I got to page 100, thought it was rubbish, but decided to carry on (well it must be good, it won a prize). I got to page 200, and still absolute rubbish, it had'nt moved on from the first page, so I ditched it!!

(I didn't exactly ditch it, as gave it to my local charity shop. I was in there today-10 Jan-and I noticed that it is still sitting there on the shelf).

I tried to do the specific page number, but that doesn't work for me. I just stop reading if I get too bored/frustrated/disgusted/etc. to continue. Sometimes that is 200 pages in. Sometimes it's 3 pages in. I don't owe the book anything.

I have to add When the Sleeper Wakes to the list. There are a couple books I've become bored of and they fell to the wayside, but this was the first book I made a conscious decision to quit reading. I flipped to the last page to find out what happened, and then put it in my stack of books to sell.

I remember really disliking The House on Mango Street and the Color of Water when I had to read them in high school. More recently, I found Stephen King's Desperation absurdly bad (and I usually liked King). Also, I took a class in college on ethical issues in modern literature, and our professor had abysmal literary taste, forcing on us garbage like Professor Romeo and Sarah Phillips.

I don't know if it is the worst book I ever read but I nominate Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth. My former book group picked it--sounded great but it was written like a dissertation that was spun out into a book. Boring and poorly written.

#246 - I could not agree with you more - I posted a message concerning Wild Animus in another discussion, though at the time I could not even remember the title. Just awful.

Nooo! Not Play It As It Lays!

The first book I was ever unable to finish was Little Women, and to this day I've never finished. In a similar vein, I've never made it through Gone with the Wind, book or movie (people always jump all over me and say I just can't get past the racism-- of course I realize that it's more complex than it seems, etc., but I *still* don't like it).

I'm one of the non-Rowling people, I'm afraid. I think the first three were okay, but, after that, I rapidly grew frustrated with the plots and characters. I confess that I did not finish the entire series, though I did make it all the way through 2 or 3 more books after the third, thinking I must be missing something; I can't even remember how much more I read.

I've read some terrible stuff (lately, Ghostwalk comes to mind), but one that stands out is Bridget Jones's Diary: when Amazon posted a lengthy excerpt, I couldn't even make it through that.

Something by sue grafton...maybe 5 or 6yrs back...regarding the Internet...her pretentiousness in her writing was and probably still is horrific....would never touch another one of her books. bad stuff.

I'm new to this club. Hi everyone. This is my first post. The worst book I've read (actually, I didn't read it. I borrowed an audio book from the library and tortured myself listening to IF NOBODY SPEAKS OF ORDINARY THINGS - or something very much like that. I can't remember the author. But, was it dull?! On and on it went with in- depth descriptions of people making cups of tea..."He poured the water into the cup..." It was an incredible trip of utter tedium, And all it was about was a a child being knocked down by a car and a woman getting pregnant. It was just so boring, I couldn't believe that the author could do this to his readers...The title seemed to suggest that nothing much might happen, but....Jeez!

Hmmm...anything by Amanda Scott and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I'd have been better off playing chicken with my hand and a knife.

Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. Not the stupidest book ever written, but one of the worst. It earns this distinction by virtue of the fact that it was taken seriously by so many people. I think Mein Kampf was probably viewed with more skepticism in its day than this wretched tome was when it first slithered onto market. I feel dirty even thinking about it.

One of the only books I've begun and just couldn't finish was Wideacre by Philippa Gregory. A truly awful book! The "heroine" kills her father, has sex with her brother, tries to kill the man she supposedly loves...that's where I stopped.

Jan, thanks for telling me that. I've resolved to get rid of my unread Wideacre trilogy. No way do I want to read a soap opera.

I love many of the books mentioned here, but I agree with The Color of Water and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Those were horrible. I'd like to add Rock Star Superstar by Blake Nelson (EXACTLY like listening to a self-absorbed high school kid yak about his band) and Bastard Out Of Carolina.

I'll second that one on Bastard out of Carolina. I don't think I made it past 70 pages or so.

Welcomer Tarser. I hope you enjoy Library Thing as much as we all do.

My vote is Running With Scissors and The Road.

the worse books I've ever tried to read was anything by John Barth.

the worse book I have ever actually read was THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS by James Fennimore Cooper.

I have found Wilkie Collins very heavy going, although I did finish The Woman in white and also The secret agent by Joseph Conrad. They would both go on my list as 'worst'.

The Famished Road by Ben Okie (is that how you spell it?). This is a book so hated in our house that it is used as an example along the lines of "That's awful but its not The Famished Road" or "It could be worse, it could be The Famished Road."

I also hated The Third Policeman by Flann O Brian and I still get depressed at the thought of anything by Thomas Hardy and DH Lawrence after being force-fed them at school.

I was driven back to the library with Darkmans by Nicola Barker because it is weird and unreadable and considered writing to the Times critic who raved about it to ask for my £1.25 reservations fee back which I had had to pay to order it.

#275 BobNolin - I agree that a list of good books is useful but it's also good to have a warning about a real stinker of a book (or series of them) before I waste my time with them.

It's always up to your own taste in the end but if someones library is very similar to mine I'm happy to be guided by them before I pay good money for a book and if I'm still not completely sure then there's always the library before the bookshop.

Besides, if you have spent time and money on a truly horrible book then this thread is a kind of therapy to help you get over it.

Ha! Posts 299 and 301 mention three of my favourite books!

My own citations for worst book ever would be some rubbish by Martha Grimes called The Train Now Departing and Auto da Fe by Elias Canetti.

Re Lisey's Story - what went wrong there then? Up until now I must have been one of SK's biggest fans - loved every word he ever wrote - but I took this on holiday last year and couldn't even finish it. That's never happened to me before with his.

I have been lucky enough to never even considered reading most of the books listed. Some of them though I really liked.

Dune by Frank Herbert is without a doubt the worst thing I ever read for fun or for a class. Read it for fun a few years after it came out then had it assigned for a collage English class.

The biggest dissapointment I ever had was the 1950 winner of the Edgar for the Best First Mystery by and American author, What a Body. The plot could have been something but the voice was from the turn of the 20th Century.

#305: "Dune by Frank Herbert is without a doubt the worst ..."

I thought Dune itself had some redeeming features, but the series definitely went downhill from there.

I agree with The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold and I also hated The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike

Pargeters was so bad I threw it away when I was done with it. Some books are just better off as compost and
Indigo Children was truly awful.

I have to agree with the person who said Hannibal Rising. I thought it was the worst. Couldn't even finish it.

You are SO right!!!

#309/310 Did I finish it? Can't remember. That has to be a bad sign, right?

the bible followed by the story of o

The Bible? That surprises me! I know it could benefit from some good editing and should come in the 'fiction' section of the bookshop but it has some great stories in it and, in bits, some beautiful writing.

I, too, am pretty new to Library Thing and LOVE IT! The books that immediately sprang to mind were The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald (Booker prize winner along with The Sea which I don't even want to dignify with a most anything!) and My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult. I despised that book with every fiber of my being even as it choked me up, which made me hate it even more.

I have to agree with SqueakyChu on The Celestine Prophesy; my husband says his is Master of the Five Magics, a fantasy book he read as a kid. Another dog for me was Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Blech!

theworstbookIeverreadwas Helen Keller's autobiography.
SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO BORING!!!!
spareyourselftheagonyanddon'treadit,ever.

Recently The Shakespeare Secret by J.L.Carrell (American title Interred with their Bones)
was pretty awful.
Apart from that I agree fully with those who say The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova and The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon in that both were much over-rated and not worth the time and trouble reading.

> # 297 My vote is Running With Scissors and The Road.

I enjoyed running with scissors, but then as someone coming from a pretty dysfunctional background I like burroughs' rather dry take on his insane family.

just finished the thirteenth tale by diane setterfield, which was pretty dire although I (just about) made it through.

I remember many of the good books but I also remember the bad ones... The bridge of San Luis Rey was one, And Johnny Got his Gun was another. Anything by Charles Dickens - I've never been able to finish A Tale of Two Cities for example.

#319:
I think the first page of Tale of Two Cities is one of the worst pieces of crap ever written.

I've forgotten most of the bad reads of my life, only the more recent disappointments are still present. For example Mutant Message Down Under by Marlo Morgan or Iacobus by Matilde Asensi.

The End of Alice by A. M. Homes. This was the entry I made in my reader's journal when I finished the book in 2004 Q: When I finished this book I felt A: Distressed. If I wrote that then this one needs to take its place at the top of my list of worst books. I' also wrote: Very sexually graphic and the ending was confusing.
It was an interesting style of writing though alternating between the letters of the young girl protaginist and a man in prision and then it moved to how his fantasies played out as he read her letters. Also need to add to the list The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst The dog witnesses the wife fall out of a tree, the husband tries to teach the dog to "talk" so he can find out if it was an accident or suicide.

#318:

yeah, wasn't the thirteenth tale kind of brutal? i work at a bookstore and everyone there had read it and raved like crazy about it... customers too, and i passed it to my mom, who loved it, but i thought it was lacking depth in story and literary quality... a disappointment.

I was forced to read Fifth Business by Robertson Davies in a college class. My God, what a pompous windbag! Also, tried once to read something by Margaret Atwood. Horrible. Didn't finish. Can't even remember what it was now. I really hate CanLit.

Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife...I don't know what I was thinking reading a "sequel" to Pride and Prejudice. I couldn't finish...the author actually described the consumation of Elisabeth and Darcy's marriage. Apparently (although I never got that far in the book) Mr. Bingley cheats on Jane and has a child with another woman.

I read bad books all the time... Meaning - I have some critical awareness of the fact that much of what I enjoy is quite bad.

I am a science fiction fan and I enjoy horror and exotic adventure. I've read most of Alistair MacLeanand large numbers of paperbaks with submarines on the cover... I still love Doc Savage and Captain Future. I even have special interest in some sub-genres such as apocalypse and post/apocalypse stories and in the sub-sub genre of apocalypse's; zombie stories. So I know BAD.

One novel that has stuck in my mind for sheer badness is Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror by Steve Alten. Bad title aside... From the tag-line on the cover: "If you see her glow... It's too late" to the review blurb from the LA Times, "Two words: JURASSIC SHARK!" readers are warned of what to expect. But, I happen to love sea monsters and Megalodon sharks are my second most favorite sea monster (First? Giant squid. Somebody else can warn you about Peter Benchley's Beast). Truth be told; the writing isn't so appallingly awful but the plot is just painfully silly at times. Early on we find out that the protagonist carries the 7" tooth of a megalodon shark around. I knew at that point that he would wind up having to fight a giant shark with just the tooth as a weapon. I figured he'd be stabbing it in the eye or something, cuz we're talking about a 50-60' shark here and there's no other way you could hurt it with a... well... a 7" dagger. I was wrong. You will not believe how it is done. Stupid!
Meg is just impressively bad and it's an example of a trend in the pulpish edge of adventure fiction these days. The trend is towards action that is as outlandish, improbable and, often, physically impossible - just like you see in the movies.

More recently I read Natural Selection by Dave Freedman, another sea monster book. Is it worse than Meg? It's hard to say. The science and pseudo-science pile up much deeper (-). The characters are less one dimensional (+)... But it's boring! I always say "Boring OR stupid is OK - Boring AND stupid is just plain BAD."

#326. If you know that they are going to be bad books, then they're not bad, if you see what I mean. You are getting what you expected. It's when you buy and read, say, Pride and Prejudice expecting it to be some great work, and you see what it really is!!! And you've wasted your time.

#325 - How DARE they make Mr. Bingley cheat on Jane? Sacrilege!

#325 - someone once told me that there's actually a Pride and Prejudice sequel in which Elizabeth and Darcy get divorced! Gah!

Evil!

#329 - someone once told me that there's actually a Pride and Prejudice sequel in which Elizabeth and Darcy get divorced! Gah!

------------

Well, I hope he didn't make her sign a prenup!

:-)

Haunted by Chuck Palaniuk
The Pact by Jodi Picoult
She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb
Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding

#247: Yep, I agree with you on The Mirror of Her Dreams by Stephen R. Donaldson; pretty awful stuff. (And, yes, it is the first book, followed by A Man Rides Through.) Waaay too long to deserve a sequel, imo. I would love to see an abridged version of these two books; then maybe I'll read the sequel. :)

I love Stephen King, but he's one of those either-you-love-him-or-you-hate-him writers. I would recommend The Eyes of the Dragon (it's fantasy), but, again, a lot of the fantasy readers I've met really hated it. And, yeah, you can never go wrong with pop-up books. :D

The tallow image, looked like a good read, but it was sheer torture!

Also, we had to read Hard Times for school. I thought it was awful and I had to make myself read a page at a time, just to get through it.

Oh, that's right, I forgot: The Celestine Prophecy and American Psycho: baaaaaaaad! The first just made me bored out of my mind, the second one actually made me sick to my stomach.

#334, I have just started Hard Times, and yes I'm finding it difficult, but not awful. I don't think it's a book for school, probably for the more 'mature' reader as it is full of social comment.

I have now finished it, and still maintain the same opinion. I did have to work very hard at it, but it was worthwhile in the end. To give this to children to read in school must be classed as abuse!!!!

#334: Yeah, American Psycho isn't my fave either. And you're right--you're either bored to tears half the time or nauseated. Probably one of the few examples of where the movie's better than the book (1- it takes up less of your time, and 2- Christian Bale's in it ;).

For me it was Silas Marner by George Eliot. I was forced to read this way back in 19** for High School. Hated it then and have tried to read it serveral times over the decades and still hate it.

When I see book burnings recreated on TV, or movies or read about them they make me cringe at the idea of burning or banning books, But! "Silas Marner" is the one book I would think about throwing on the flames. I wouldn't do it. But the thought would cross my mind.

#337: I love George Eliot! But Silas Marner IS my least favourite of her works.

To be fair I have read Adam Bede and it wasn't to bad. I think old "Silas" was just forced on me at a time when I wanted to read other stuff.

You should read Middlemarch or The Mill on the Floss

It's funny that you mention Middlemarch because I almost bought it this afternoon

Lasher by Anne Rice. My gosh. All about a demon schtupping his witches to breed another demon. I must've been possessed because I even finished it in the hope it would improve!

Really, Lasher? :O I loved Anne Rice's Witch Chronicles, though Taltos (the one that follows Lasher) wasn't my favorite in the trilogy. (She did write erotica before this, so the "schtupping" part wasn't too much of a shock for me. ;)

Okay, show of hands here -- how many people have gone looking for a book based on the "anti-recommendation" given here? I own several books on this list, and just found myself looking at another, when I realized how funny that was.

lol . . . No, sorry, ireed, I haven't. :)

Is the "Unsuggester" still hidden somewhere? I haven't been able to find it lately. When it was working, I was surprised to see how often I would have the "unsuggested" book - usually a combination of knitting or quilting with something in the realm of history or science.

# 344 > how many people have gone looking for a book based on the "anti-recommendation" given here?

*puts hand up* I tend to check out anything that sounds as if it might interest me. after all, there are a fair few books listed here that I liked a lot...

Oh absolutely, The Price of the Phoenix it's one of the worst novels I have ever read. And the sequels are even worse, oh god...

see my review:
http://www.readingstartrek.com/index.php/review-1977-the-price-of-the-phoenix-by...

The worst bookI have ever read is Becoming Naomi Leon, but any other book I've read are really good

Digital Fortress by Dan Brown

Wasn't too fond of Angels and Demons or The DaVinci Code, but DF is much, much worse than either of those two.

@344: I have looked at the Unsuggester suggestions for many of my favorite books, and most of them turn out to be Christian inspirational books!

The Unsuggester is hilarious.

My take on Digital Fortress:

3741. Digital Fortress, by Dan Brown (3 May) Because of all the hype re this author's The Da Vinci Code, which of course was not available at the library, I read his first book, about computer geniuses at the National Security Agency and it reads very excitingly but after two or three hundred pages the steady flow of incredible violent happenings, alternating between the Agency headquarters in Maryland, where the lead female is, and Seville, Spain, where her boyfriend is, begins to pall and the story becomes too fantastic, too last-minutey, and it was really too much. But I read it to the end, full of last-minute or last-second escapes and decided it was simplistic fare, though full of computer geniuses who are always screaming and yelling. Unless Dan Brown gets better I don't know I should read another of his books, but I might.

I did read one more, but that is it for me and Dan Brown.

Some of the books listed as being bad are among my favourites: Pride & Prejudice, Bonfire of the Vanities.

However some books I really didn't like are:

The Rainbow D.H. Lawrence - occassionally it was interesting, but more often than not it was boring & tedious. The characters were annoying & nothing really happened in the book.

The Crimson Petal & the white by Michel Faber. The narrations wasn't consistent, at the beginning of the book the reader was almost like a character (which I kind of liked) but then this disappeared, and then sometimes came back which I found confusing. The characters were soooo annoying & unlikeable & you never really found out what happened to them. If I have invested that much time in a book, I like to know what happens.

Angel by Barbara Taylor Bradford. This book was leant to me & I detested it. In my readers journal at the time, I said it was like eating junk food, seemed like a good idea at the time, but left you feeling unsatisfied. I thought it would be a good book to read if you were sick, because you don't have to pay much attention as everything is spelt out for you.

Widow for one year by John Irving. I read this for a book club & no-one in the club liked it. For a start the cover of the book compared John Irving to Shakespeare, Dickens etc, I mean come on. The female characters were so unrealistic, and seemed like a 16 year old boys fantasy (no offence to 16 year old boys). The books was about authors writing autobiographical books, which I thought this was also. & everything is spelt out way too much for you. I don't like authors to tell me who to like & want to feel, I think I can manage that fine for myself.

In recent years, there have been two that were so bad I couldn't even get halfway through them: The Jester by James Patterson & Andrew Gross and Shadowmancer by G.P. Taylor. I disliked both for similar reasons. The characters moved around in their plots like paper dolls, and the exposition in general was klunky. I think I actually began to wince as I read Shadowmancer. The Jester just made me roll my eyes. I quit reading that one after I'd jumped around awhile and happened upon a love scene between the jester and his royal main squeeze that resembled a would-be video called Mimes Gone Wild. (I may be overstating that, of course. It's been a year or two since I tried to read the book, but I vaguely recall thinking that the lovemaking description lacked a certain intimacy between the characters...you know, like love. It seemed thrown in merely to meet its obligatory sex quota.)

I think Shadowmancer could have been a great story, but it read like it had been rushed to publication. It wasn't finished. The Jester, too, might have been more interesting if the characters had been less "handled" by the authors and the demands of the plot.

Da Vinci Code.

There are plenty of candidates, but a conversation I had today reminded me of one from a long time ago, still painful to recall: Love Story by Erich Segal . . . it was wildly popular and made into a TERRIBLE film and spawned the ridiculous catchphrase "love means never having to say you're sorry." Blech!

There was also a vapid but popular girl in my high school class who told me this book was the only one she had ever read "all the way through." Felt as though I had just met an alien.

I've posted somewhere else about how much I hate most of the books my book club picks . . . My Sister's Keeper among them.

It's absurd to have The Recognitions come up on a list like this. It's one thing to take yourself to be defeated by a book one way or another, and quite another to take your defeat to be a sign that the book itself is deficient. Anyone listing novels by William Gaddis here is saying more about themselves than about Gaddis.

357 etcetera

I've never read that book, but I would never assume that there is something wrong with a person just because they don't like a book that I like. Or that they do like a book that I dislike, for that matter - there are plenty of people who adore books that I've listed here as most hated. Your tastes aren't more right than anyone else's.

Thanks, blue. I wanted to respond but couldn't think of a "nice" way to do it.

You're welcome, Morph. It took several drafts, believe me.

I composed some drafts in my head, but none came out as nicely as yours, bluesalamanders, so thank you.

Count me in. One of the best things about LT is that we can all express our opinions about books (and lots of other things) without being subject to ad hominem attacks. It would be too boring if we all liked the same books for the same reasons.

>362 ejj1955:

Ain't that the truth! If everyone liked the same thing, no one would ever find interesting "treasures" at bargain prices, because everyone else would be looking for them too!

Another vote here for Shadowmancer. It's like a rough first draft - terrible writing, random characters popping up and then disappearing, annoying and one-dimensional main characters. In some respects it's very imaginative, but the way its done makes it agony to read. I hated G.P Taylor's second book, Wormwood, too, and started to read Tersias but decided life was too short.

No one hates any Ian McEwan?

Leaving aside The DaVinci Code which I would never have picked up had it not been so mind boggling popular, my worst book that I've finished has got to be Saturday by Ian McEwan.

I've been underwhelmed by plenty of books I thought I'd like, but this one drove me batty. Sentimental, nothing happens and when it does it's entirely unbelievable, filled with bizarre surgical jargon, and that main character spends ever other page opining about how horrible 9/11 was and how the threat of terrorism looms. Which seemed even more forced because the main character is british and living in London.

I suspect that Atonement may actually have some redeeming qualities, but after that disaster I can't even bring myself to try.

Ian McEwan's not worth hating. One of those utterly forgetable popular novelists. Gives people something to read when they don't feel like thinking. Me, I'd rather pick up the cereal boxes at those moments.

What I don't get are all the awards fawning British literati bestow on the guy. It's like the way they all fall over alleged poet Ted Hughes - don't they realize there's nothing there?

There is no there there.

(Thanks, Gertrude Stein.)

eta touchstone

I tried reading Little Women a few years ago and couldn't believe how stilted the writing was, so gave up.
The book that actually made my skin crawl was not a novel but a poem, Howl by Ginsburg. The further into it I read the more I became convinced that it was the rantings of a lunatic. Then I read the brief bio included and saw that I was right. I finished with the feeling that the only reason it was still in print was because of the legal case it brought about. I know some people think he was a tortured genius but I can't stand the guy.

Definitely The Celestine Prophesy - James Redfield

Of recent reads, Heart of Darkness. Not because of racism, but because I found it just so dully written and unengaging. It took me 4 days to read even though it's so short.

the book that pops into my head is Honeymoon by James Patterson
It boggles my mind that this won a best thriller award

Stan, I don't think it was the worst I ever read but I am shocked it won a best thriller award!

312... the bible followed by the story of o
What a wonderfully ironic juxtaposition!

322... The End of Alice by A. M. Homes... Very sexually graphic...
The only thing I've read by Homes is a surreal (and most definitely sexually graphic) short story called "A Real Doll," about a teen boy's fling with his sister's Barbie doll. I think I'd have been much more disturbed by it if it hadn't been so hilarious.

351... I have looked at the Unsuggester suggestions for many of my favorite books, and most of them turn out to be Christian inspirational books!
Same for me! With the exception of my G.K. Chesterton books, that is.

Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey. When I finished it I threw it across the room and shouted, "Why'd you bother writing it if that's what you were going to do with it?" Except I talked dirty.

Robert

312 and 373> Maybe not so ironic.

I read The Story of O in college when it was fairly fresh in America, if I remember correctly. The proper take on it was that it was "mystic sexuality." I didn't know what that meant, although I said it; I read the book because it was timely and for the sordidness.

I've read it more recently, like in the past twenty years, and I realized it was absolutely analogous to religious commitment. There are the same themes of obedience and depersonalization that occur in becoming a monk. The book could in fact be taken as a caution to someone thinking of going in that direction. Mind you, the women did not flee their circumstances, and so that mysticism could be construed as serving them, just as giving up one's life to God serves one.

Robert

#322 and 373 I read The Mistress's Daughter by A.M. Homes, her memoir, and thought it was poorly written whining drivel. Unfortunately for A.M. Homes, I read it just after The Glass Castle, which is one of my top 5 books of this year so far.

A book that I absolutely despised but read for my bookclub this year was Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. The concept was interesting to a point but ultimately I didn't care about any of the characters except perhaps Y.T.'s mom.

I also despised Cold Mountain. (It's been a while - don't remember the character names). I liked reading about the woman, but hated the stuff with the man. I seem to remember alternating chapters...? And, without giving anything away, I HATED HATED HATED the ending. I was at work reading at lunchtime. When I read the last sentence I threw the book against the wall! I'm usually quite careful with my books.

karenmarie, I agree 100% with regards to Cold Mountain. If anyone has the urge to read that blather, pick up The Odyssey instead, or better yet, rent the movie "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?".

No hesitation: A confederancy of Dunces made me loath reading for a while. I seldom finish the books I don't like, but by the time if you hadn't read this one (and praised it) you would be so off... I was called names for saying it was rubbish. I still think so. It was not edited in the author's lifetime, should never have been.

Anything by Shakespeare, truly awful in my opinion.

I liked Cold Mountain a lot, but agree that the ending was a disappointment. Frazier's next book, though, Thirteen Moons, better, although it didn't get the acclaim.

The worst book I ever read, in terms of hating the style, etc., was Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence. Self-absorbed twaddle, if you ask me. I like some of his short stories, but never read a novel of his (and I had to read some in college) that I could stand.

Funny, though. Some of my favorite books of all time are on this list. Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent? Confederacy of Dunces? Hey, it's cool, we all have our opinions and I'm not putting anybody down. Some of you are probably reacting the same way to my listing of Women in Love. It's just amazing how different we all are in our perceptions of books and reading.

I have to say I HATED 'We Ned to Talk About Kevin'. It was SO overwritten - she could never use one word where 25 would do! The premise (letter writing - the rest I won't reveal in case someone hasn't read the book) was clumsy and too elaborate and somehow none of the characters was convincing. Full of self-pity but it did nothing to help one understand what it might be like to be in her position. Apparently Shriver does not have children of her own and, although that doesn't necessarily disqualify her from empathising with a mother, in this case it was so far from the experience of any mother I could imagine! Possibly might have been acceptable if each sentence were cut in half, most adjectives and adverbs cut out and if she had left SOMETHING to the reader's imagination!!

I'm from the UK and love much American fiction but wonder if there is a culture gap here? US readers please let em have your opinion (most of my UK friends agree with me on this one!)

The Books of the Black Current by Ian Watson

I had it lying around forever, because it didn't look appetizing; then I was jobhunting for 6 months.
Fortunately I had a backlog of unread books, but not enough to last for 6 months of Wednesday and Sunday nights!

By the time I finally sat down to read this book, I was aching for some new material.

That is the only reason I read it. It was that bad.

Uhgh.

Welcome to Library Thing ToanZhou--loved your thread "What Book Would You Like to Step Into".

My worst book or in the top 10 worst was a recent book club read Snow by Orhan Pamuk--boring, boring & more boring.

The God of Animals .............hated it. So negative and ugly in every way.

raintree: inferno by linda howard, i normally like her stuff but this one was so bad that i wanted to get a pair of boots step into a pile of manure and rip up the book and than stomp on it! course i did rip it up and throw it in the garbage. that was fun! :D

Worst book I actually finished The Bridges of Madison County. Total drivel!

Most overwritten book (thought he had some wonderful moments in it, but it needed a STRONG editor to cut 400 pages) A Man in Full.

"The Bridges of Madison County. Total drivel! "

agreed!

The worst I'd say was The Notebook. Such crap.
And I didnt like Shadowmancer because it really rubbed Christianity in your face.

This would be a threeway tie for me between Picturing Will, The Dive From Clausen's Pier and Malice, which I read to see if Danielle Steel is as bad as people say she is. They were right.

(killearnan)

I completely agree...I hve trouble believing that Churchill actually wrote the book; it seemed like someone who had no knowledge of the series (or English language) was writing for her. Sad, because I liked the characters and the series up until that one!

Anything out of the Shannara series by Terry Brooks. I read ten of them and ended up ranting about all of them to friends at various points in time and throwing half of the books across the room repeatedly while reading them. They were so painful to read; I have no idea why I was compelled to read all ten that I owned.

Heart of Darkness is somewhere on the list partly because the writing was so dense as to make it completely incomprehensible, and partly because it was thoroughly overanalyzed in the British lit class that I read it for.

And my pet hated-book is Eragon by Christopher Paolini (so much so that I completely forgot that it existed until I was reading some of the other posts). There's a reason why it was self-published after having been rejected so much. AUGH. I got all the way through, then promptly walked it back over to the friend who loaned it to me and berated him for encouraging me to read it. A joke among my writerly friends is a modification of a fairly well-known quote—"Those who can, write. Those who can't, write Eragon."

Dr. Frankenstein in Frankenstein could be the posterchild for all that is emo (or maybe Mary Shelley is...). Unfortunately, it isn't even hefty enough to go a good distance when you throw it, so it fails there, too.

Jude the Obscure was awful purely because it was four or five hundred pages of NOTHING. At least he had cause to whine all the time.

Dragonworld by Byron Preiss was complete tripe, on par with the Shannara books.

Michelle West's Sun Sword series was painful because it was so long and lacked anything happening. There were so many characters and this complex system of measuring time and eight jillion gods and... I can't for the life of me remember what it's actually about. Oh well.

Nothing comes close to Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis ... other than thinking it "might get better" I have no sane reason for fininishing this one. It was absolutely horrid in every way I can think of.

Other ones I truly disliked and feel rather like I'm living on a lone planet based on their warm receiptions overall are: 1) The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (a book club thing I was obligated to read - everyone else in the club despised it too, many could not finish); and 2) Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold ... ugh and double ugh.

Carolyn

I couldn't finish The Alchemist fast enough -- just to be rid of it. I also did not care for On Beauty by Zadie Smith, Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach, and The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier. I had a hard time with The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck because it is by far the most violent and gory book I've ever read, and I've read a lot of "China" books, WWII books, etc. I kept looking at the author photo and wondering who could write like that and survive it.

I agree at #247 with the Thomas Covenant series. The main character is too much of a whiner, and early on in the first book he rapes somebody, which put me off right there. I already disliked him, but after that I despised him. Anti-hero, my fanny.

On a similar topic, anyone ever try to read Space Tyrant by Piers Anthony? That man is one sick puppy.

A book I keep around to remind myself of what bad writing is all about is Tam Lin by Pamela Dean. Hundreds and hundreds of plotless pages featuring colorless characters obsessing about their uninteresting college boyfriends, with about 20 pages of fantasy stuck on the end. Also, Dean has an annoying habit of retelling entire Shakespeare plays inside her novels, sometimes even having the characters read them out loud word for word. Like MST3K might say, "Never put a good story inside your crappy story."

> 394

Yes, I read Bio of a Space Tyrant. I was 16. And being Canadian, I was quite annoyed when I found he had thought of equivalents for little places like Crete, which didn't even enter the story, but completely omitted Canada.

> 394

I am glad I am not the only one to be put off by Thomas Covenant's rape of that young woman. I nearly threw the book across the room at that point--literally. I am ended up finishing the book only because there were a couple of other characters I was interested in, but it was impossible for me connect with or even see anything redeeming in Thomas after that.

Interestingly enough, most people I know who have read the book don't remember the rape and I was beginning to wonder if I imagined it.

So was the book good past that point? I've had many people tell me if I could just have read further, I would have liked it. A statement I doubt very much, but I never did find out.

#396 - Yes, yes, yes LiteraryFeline and Tigercrane. If I ever get my act together and get the blog going I want to rant about Thomas Covenant. I think for the time being I'll start an "Explain it to me" thread. I'm not one who demands "likeable characters" or "someone to root for." But if the main character performs an act that is that hideous, the author better give me some reason to keep reading (cf. Lolita - loathsome main character- wonderful book). What do we get? A Tolkein pastiche? Sorry, I'm not that enamored with Tolkein to begin with. Why are you telling me this story?

I just read As Good As It Got by Isabel Sharpe no touchstone.

It is certainly in the top three

bad, very bad.

For me, it's a three-way tie among Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries, and Un Cri dans le silence (by Brigitte Bardot). It's not for their messages that I condemn them, but for their writing. All of them are atrociously ignorant and boring.

Tigercrane - I haven't read any of the other books in the Thomas Covenant series if that tells you anything. I did end up liking certain aspects of the story and the writing, but I never did grow any less disgusted with Thomas Covenant.

Twacorbies - I'm with you there. I don't have to like the main character necessarily, but there has to be something there that holds my interest and prods me to read on. I've come away enjoying books quite a bit that had characters I never especially cared for. A lot depends on the story and the way the author pulls it all together.

Interesting question...

While there are many books I haven't liked or cared for - there is only ONE book that I can actually say I hated.

Clive Barker's - The Great & Secret Show. It was over 600 pages long (I believe) and when I got to about 50 pages from the end, I thought, "I don't care. I could never finish the last 50 pages and I would not care or ever wonder what happened to these characters!". I forced myself to finish it (since I had invested SO much time).

I don't know what I expected - as this was my first (and last) Clive Barker. But I thought it just dragged on and on.

#365 twomoredays
No one hates any Ian McEwan?

here, me *puts hand up*

although "hate" is maybe too strong a word. but I was terribly annoyed by Atonement - IMO the premise could have made a fascinating book, but instead it skirts around all the truly interesting aspects of the basic story and ends up amounting to some sort of bland "oh, whoops".

I only read one Nicholas Sparks book, but kept throwing it down. The vocabulary was about 6th grade, and the plot was so predictable! The imagery was trite or over-used. Really felt cheated! Anyone else feel this way about an author?
Another trait I HATE, and have read several popular authors who do this, is to mention the brand names of shoes, clothing, kitchen products, etc. as part of the description. Yes, then one can picture each object, and has an idea of the amt. of money spent on said objects, but it is such an elitist, lazy way of writing! It alludes to that character's shopping habits, when the subject matter has nothing to do with shopping! I cannot read further when I encounter this "writing affliction."

I agree with the comments above about Thomas Covenant. I just couldn't get past the rape. I loathed the main character, so needless to say I did not read the rest of the series. I know a lot of people think those books are brilliant, so maybe I am missing out. Do they get better after the first one?

Also loathed The Celestine Prophesy. I friend recommended it to me years back when I was going through a tough time in my life, telling me that it was inspirational and would change my life... Not so much. Pure drivel, if you ask me.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was another book that I was told would inspire me...I just plain didn't get that one.

I couldn't even finish Your Best Life Now by Joel Osteen. Yet another friend highly recommended it when her Bible study group was reading it. It made me want to vomit. I struggled through the first half and then gave it to Goodwill. I have never seriously considered burning a book before.

Receiving honorable mention: Sophie's World, Two on a Tower (I like Thomas Hardy but obviously even he was bored with it or he wouldn't have given it that horrible ending!), and The Historian (seriously, why all the hype?)

Three Bags Full. Although, I think something was, literally, lost in the translation.

The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle

I hated it. It was disturbing in the extreme.That girl needs therapy.

404 augustdreams

I certainly agree about Nicholas Sparks (I read The Notebook and consider it the worst book I've ever read).

As to the other...it depends on context. I couldn't give a blanket statement about that particular writing quirk, because I've seen it used effectively (and for a purpose) in a number of books. If there's no point to it, then I suppose it is lazy (although I have trouble seeing the description of shopping habits as "elitist", personally).

#404, 408, August and Blue,

I guess I'd tend to agree with the "elitist" tag, as the shopping being described and name brands being flung about tend to be for expensive/luxury items that don't fall in the normal reader's lifestyle. I recently read a book (forgot the name) that exemplified this; the heroine simultaneously was disdainful of her shallow sisters-in-law and their shopping, while being described endlessly in terms of designer gowns and fabulous jewelry and, of course, having multiple residences. But she had deep thoughts, or something like that, so we were supposed to think she was better than her sisters-in-law. Right.

The exception to this kind of drivel often seems to be in detective novels, where you find the hero/heroine driving the ten-year-old car and eating fast-food or shopping at Wal-Mart. It's reverse snobbery, perhaps, and can also be a bit relentless, but I prefer that to the dropping of names such as Valentino and Chanel and Rolex and Mercedes.

Of course, I take it all back in a series such as Robert Parker's Spenser books; I don't mind knowing the brand of sunglasses or vintage of wine as long as Spenser and Hawk are the ones being the consumers!

409 ejj

I wouldn't call it elitist because I've always heard elitist used referring to education/intellectualism, not money/shopping. If I were going to call it anything, it would probably be closer to "snobby".

The books that I've seen branding used successfully in are books in which it plays an actual role in the plot - Pattern Recognition, for instance, and So Yesterday, and Peeps, where things being a specific brand is actually important, it's not just an easy way to not be descriptive.

Well, it is snobby, too, but I think of "elite" as referring not only to the intellectual elite but also to those considered so because of wealth or social status.

Of course I'd agree there's a distinction between branding being important as a plot point and the kind of gratuitous name-dropping that I think August was originally referring to, and that brought up some examples for me of where I'd also disliked that. It's as though you can tell what kind of person the character is just because of the kind of car they drive or clothes they wear. I get this feeling from Mary Higgins Clark, whose heroines all seem to be the kind of pearls-and-cashmere-twinsets type who get their clothes from Talbots or maybe LL Bean (for wear at their country places, you understand).

And I love LL Bean and happily buy shoes from them, though I own neither pearls nor twinsets.

I guess my point is that sometimes it seems to work for me, and other times it emphatically doesn't, and just seems like cheap name-dropping designed to dazzle hoi polloi with the lifestyles of the rich and famous, even if fictionally rich and famous.

1984-ponderous, everything about was annoying.
The worst thing about it was how much I wanted to like it.
I tried several time to read it and each time, I just “ran into a wall” and could not finish it.

#404 augustdreams
Another trait I HATE, and have read several popular authors who do this, is to mention the brand names of shoes, clothing, kitchen products, etc. as part of the description.

the one book where I really noticed this was T.C. Boyle's Talk Talk. there, it didn't seem to serve any particular purpose except perhaps to ensure that the novel would sound dated even faster than its subject matter already more or less guarantees. it was so clumsy that I started wondering whether he perhaps had some kind of product placement deal... but then the entire book is a rather cheap and pointless effort anyway. IMO. I love some of T.C. Boyle's stuff, but not this one.

This Book Could Save Your Life - forgotten authors name

By far the most mundane thing I've had to endure in recent years. A friend lent it to me asking for my opinion on it, so I felt obliged to read it and then had to to say I thought it was banal, unoriginal and uninspiring to an astonishing degree (when compared with its success and title). And she said she thought so but that she just wanted to check. I guess there's a scary trend at the moment with TV book clubs marketing the hell out of sub-standard stuff that would never otherwise make it into anyones radar - apart from maybe genre readers at the library. Another book that strikes me as being in this category is 'And Then We Came to the End' from the opening chapter I read before tossing it aside in disgust. What was it someone once said of terrible books "I can't believe I've spent years reading Banal Author X's work when there's Philip Roth out there waiting to be read" - or words to that effect.

The worst book I've read this year, anyway, was A Woman of Substance. I should have known at the beginning that I wouldn't like it, but I gave it a chance. The middle was okay, but the ending was quite awful. A cheap imitation of Gone With the Wind, my favorite.

I wasted several hours of my life reading: Sail by James Patterson. Awful. Brand dropping, cliché dialog, silly situations, you name it. How does he sell so many books?

bookladykm, I never understood the allure of James Patterson. He's been the darling of grocery store mysteries for so long.

I've only read one Patterson. It was a mystery. Didn't hate it. The big draw I see for him is that his writing is very simple and straight-forward (no hidden meanings or feelings to delve into) purely written for entertainment and the chapters are ridiculously short which is very nice for those who have small snippets of time to read.

Da Vinci Code is definitely the worst book I've ever read. Can't stand it.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon - 200 odd pages of complete rubbish.

Patterson's early books are decent. He has definitely gone down hill.

I thought the Maximum Ride series was pretty good. I mean, not a literary wonder, or anything, but entertaining. I haven't read the 4th one yet, though.

422 I did enjoy the first two of those.....

I've just discovered that Captain Corelli's Mandolin is pretty bad.

"Les Confessions", Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiography was the most annoying and pointless book I've ever read. He's supposed to be an influential philosopher in my country but this book just taught me to despise this superficial big mouth.
Also, I had a good laugh reading all the hate posts directed at Ayn Rand : objectivism is not recommendable in practice because it's extreme. But you have to learn to put things in perspective and acknowledge some of the undeniable truths her philosophy is based on. To me, people whose philosophy is "the antithesis" of hers are as dangerously foolish as her blinded radical followers...

At first I would say The Silmarillion, but upon further (not really deep) thought it is obviously Angels and Demons.

The worst book I've read recently was How Mrs. Claus Saved Christmas. The author made what might have been an interesting history of Puritan attitudes towards the Christmas holiday into an extremely boring book for an undefined audience. It's too plodding and unbelievable for adults and too boring and non-magical for kids.

Hmmm...let's see.....there are so many truly wonderful books out there, but over the years I have encountered some clunkers. Here are my "top six of the bottom:"

Sex and the City - I'm all for mind candy, but this book is pure garbage - and so poorly written!; the first and only time I would ever advocate watching tv over reading.

Miranda Seymour's Mary Shelley - wonderful subject matter completely disrespected by some of the worst biographical writing I have ever encountered. Boring, long-winded and repetitive - it didn't have to be any of those things.

My Lady Scandalous, The Amazing Life and Outrageous Times of Grace Dalrymple Elliott, Royal Courtesan - another instance of a would-be fascinating character ruined by poor research and worse writing. The first time I simply could not finish a book...

Mommy Dressing, A Love Story After a Fashion: wah, wah, wah - who gave whiney Lois Gould a book deal? Why????

The Burgermeister's Daughter: Scandal in a Sixteenth-Century German Town one more example of a historical figure done wrong by a lousy author.

and.....

Girl with Pearl Earring ...ugh!!!!

Mefs . . . I'm with you on Sex and the City. I loved the TV show, but the book was absolutely unreadable. Just.couldn't.do.it.

Disagree about Girl with the Pearl Earring though. Loved that one. But then I'm a Vermeer geek.

What is the WORST book that you've ever read?

Didn't finish it and forget it's name. It may be one I wrote myself!

haha i randomly went on this group and found this post. I loved reading it! SO interesting because I have actually read...or decided not to read a lot of these books. It's good to hear others opinions about these books, even if I disagree with some.

WELL, I instantly thought of Grendel by John Gardner when I read the question. Horrible book, I had to read it for high school. It was just really messed up and then i had to read Beowulf "cringes". It was just a bad time for me all around.

There are so many terrible books I've read.... where to even begin?

The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
Emma by Jane Austen (IT WOULDN'T END!!!)
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
'Tis by Frank McCourt
Watchmen by Alan Moore
Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom
For One More Day by Mitch Albom
A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon
Persuasion by Jane Austen
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
Treasure Island by R L Stevenson
Girl With the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
The House at Riverton by Kate Morton (since when do freakin' 7, 8, and 10 year olds or however young they were supposed to be have sophisticated political dialogue and are educated in all sorts of classical literature???? I couldn't get past the second or third chapter because of this. Soooo forced and contrived...)

.....I could go on forever, but the worst of the worst is probably The Lost Symbol. (I'm still seething over the $35 the bookstore charged for it, too.....)

Interesting list. Shows how much readers differ. You have some that I'd put in my group of top books, including Persuasion, Emma, and On the Road, and some that wouldn't fall far below, like Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Hard to imagine any of those being called "terrible", or among the "worst." It's good to be reminded how different readers can have such different reactions.

Oh yes, and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Tragic. Just tragic gimmickry.

Down To A Sunless Sea by David Graham. Really can't believe I finished it. The ending beggars belief, I literally threw it to the floor.

It has a vast number of 5 star reviews; I can only assume I read a different book with the same cover.

To quote a reviewer on Amazon - "...apparently written by a 12 year old public school boy who's never actually spoken to a woman let alone had sex with one."

>432 yellowfairy3: ( yellowfairy3)

I rather liked the C.S. Lewis ones. Full agreement re the others in the list which I've read. Thanks for warning of the ones I haven't read. There are too many good books out there than to waste one's precious time.

So many bad books get published and so many good ones never. Is it the market demand since the bottom line for publishers is - well - the bottom line?

I'm anxious that what follows might sound a tad snotty, and there isn't a single title I'd feel comfortable identifying as a truly terrible book.

Sure, there's a whole pile of stuff I haven't got around to finishing, but that has very little to do with finding any of them 'trashy' or 'overly high brow' or 'mind-numbingly dull' or anything else for that matter. I'm inclined to describe myself as 'still reading' some of them; I've had Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book on my night stand for more than a year already and still haven't gotten more than 200 pages into it. On the other hand, I can remember taking very nearly two years to read Dog Years by Gunter Grass and that it was definitely worth reading. If I can't quite seem to manage something, I put it down and find something else to read until I'm ready to get back to it.

I'd have as much trouble trying to identify the best book I've ever read. I suspect it depends on whatever's happening in the world and, even more so, in my personal life.

The worst books I have read were some free ones I got from the Barnes and Noble free eBooks section.

Virginia the Vampire Mistress - So full of spelling errors and misused words that I cant imagine how it got "published". I should have guessed the quality by the title...

The Unsuspecting Mage - unemotional and flat YA novel. The main character is a high-school kid and in one scene one of his schoolmates gets eaten by wolves, his reaction to finding the body was so weak and robotic that I just lost interest in reading further. It's written in a really annoying perspective too. I feel kind of bad for this author because when you go to his site and read his bio, it almost sounds like he quit his job to write these novels and it caused his divorce.

The statistics page of LibraryThing tells me I have assigned 60 books a half star, which is surely a lot of worthless books I have read. Fortunately, all the other categories have more, with 407 having five stars --which seems to indicate that I give out 5 stars too liberally. But any way, though I don't know all those half star books I know one was The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai (read 6 Nov 2006) (Booker prize in 2006) (National Book Critics Circle fiction award for 2006) and another was The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, by Oscar Hijuelos (read 19 Feb 1991) (Pulitzer Fiction prize in 1990)

Since I read all Pulitzer fiction winners and also try to read all Booker winners, that idiosyncrasy of mine explains why I read these books

>439 Emidawg:, 440

And, to be fair, you can't say a book is terrible until you have actually read it, or at least some of it.

Though I do think the title Virginia the Vampire Mistress was a clue!

I read Twilight a while ago and wasn't inspired to read the rest of the books until faced with the prospect of taking my great-nieces to see the newest movie. I don't think they are well-written, and I dislike the main character (she's a nitwit), but I can still see the appeal, especially to young girls. The author perfectly captures the obsessive, "I'll die without him" nature of teenage first love. Unfortunately, my reaction is to want to slap her and say, "snap out of it!", particularly when she makes one of her many stupid, life-endangering decisions.

>439 Emidawg: I read about 100 pages of each of those titles before passing judgment. I probably would have finished the Virginia the Vampire Mistress title if the eBook hadn't just ended abruptly in the middle of a chapter. I didn't have a morbid enough curiosity to seek out a non-corrupted version of the book to finish.

That said I have read several decent freebies from the free eBook section. Hero Wanted was an amusing parody of some of the hero saves the world fantasy books I read as a kid.

I just finished Big Girl by Danielle Steel. One of the worst books ever. It is boring and someone should take her word processor away. The repetitions were terrible.

>441 ejj1955: I agree with you about Twilight. It was hard enough to listen to the first book. I would have gone insane trying to read or listen to the rest.

>443 xorscape: I'm determined to slog through the series, although I don't think it's going to get any less absurd. I've begun the third book and reached a bit where Bella is comparing herself to her ditzy mother and thinking that she herself has always been the rational, cautious one, and my reaction is, in what alternate universe? I'm left wondering if the author really believes this about a character who has been portrayed throughout as a girl who operates on pure, over-the-top emotion, and who commits unbelievably self-destructive acts on a regular basis. *Sigh*

I can't remember the title of the last Danielle Steel book I read, but it was pretty dreadful, full of bad writing and unbelievable plot. I once read that she locks herself in the library for 48 hours to write one of her books. I can believe it.

The Grave Tattoo by Val McDermid - So, so bad.
Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind - To be fair, the Lord of the Rings copycat fantasy epics aren't really my bag, but still, this was awful.
The Wicked Ways of a Duke by Laura Lee Guhrke- I DID pick this up at my local supermarket, having never read a "romance/guy with glistening pecks on the cover" novel, so my hopes weren't high, but since then I have read a few I quite liked (Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale is now among my Favorites), and this one is just bad.

The one I wrote myself. I don't recommend it to anyone. I forget it's name. :)

#446: Oh, yeah. I read that one. Just AWFUL! :P

#447

Isn't it.

Without a doubt, At Swim, Two Boys I couldn't drag myself to the end.

#449

Are there still copies of it out there? I'm embarrassed. Try instead At Swim, Two Birds

I have read some really bad books (especially those I was forced to read in school).

The worst book I've read by choice would have to be The Return by Bentley Little.

He is one of those authors that can write some REALLY GOOD horror novels (i.e. The Association, The Store, The Walking, The Ignored, and Death Instinct), but he has also written a couple of bad ones (The House and The Town), but The Return is the worst of the worst of the worst!

BTW, the worst book that the original author of the original thread (who disappeared, and deleted his message/identity) read was apparently his phonics book in elementary school.

"you've", NOT "youve", and "red" is a color, not a past tense verb, should be "read".

I'm tempted to nominate Ulysses, but I almost - *almost* - enjoyed the penultimate chapter. Almost. My prize has to go to obscure 'horror' novel Walkers, by the same guy who would end up writing the novelization of such classics as "Howling III," and "The Brain Eaters." Bad stuff. I think he may have turned me into a writer, because even in my late teens I knew I could write better than that.

#451: Ha! Yeah, I think most of us have noticed the typo in the title of this thread, but oh well. Until LT incorporates spellcheck, it's just going to happen. Nobody's perfect. :)

The title of this topic: "What is the WORST book that youve ever red?"

It was called Blue :)

Controversially, Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World

I didn't like Ray Bradbury's style of writing at all.

I didn't particularly enjoy Fahrenheit 451 either, so it's not just you. I'd heard people rave about it, including my not-very-bookwormy boyfriend, so was expecting something incredible, but I just got a bit bored in the end.

I read Brave New World last week; my only conclusion was that I preferred 1984. It also made me want to watch Logan's Run again.

#452

Ulysses!? I bet you didn't even read it the requisite 5 or 6 times. What's next? Gargantua and Pantagruel? Tristam Shandy? Gravity's Rainbow? Horrrors!

I've read Ulysses, but once. To be fair, the book regarding the maternity ward visit - with it's 20 some-odd changes in writing style - did make me want to toss it across the room. But please. not the worst. Not deserving of joining the excellent selections in this thread.

Now, as for Finnegan's Wake, whatapieceofcrap.

:)

A Tale of Two Cities? Yes anything by Dickens A Tale is by far far his best work. I just hate the character studies. Anything by Ayn Rand her books are a communist plot to send you insane before you die from acute stupidity.

Oh, nooooooo . . . love Dickens. Love Bleak House and Dombey and Son. He created some truly memorable characters and was a genius at tying up disparate plot elements at the end in one big satisfying bundle.

#459 - You are the weak link. I don't like Dickens either. I have been forced to read worse (The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan and Siddartha by Herman Hesse), but not many.

Actually, I may have to make a correction to my statement in message 451. The Return is pretty bad, but I would never wish The Joy Luck Club upon anyone that I wouldn't want put into a death sentence. "The Joy Luck Club" is about as bad as lethal injection.

#458 - "Anything by Ayn Rand her books are a communist plot to send you insane before you die from acute stupidity"

Tell me about it! In my case, send me insane before I graduate highschool and go off to college with a loss of brain cells reading Anthem in 4th quarter of my senior year.

Can't teachers come up with better stuff to read? I enjoyed Beowolf and 3 of the 5 Canterbury Tales that we read (Miller's, Reeve's, Pardoner's). That was about it. Everything else I ever read in Senior years of highschool were absolute trash! Junior year wasn't any better. The Fall of the House of Usher by Poe was ok. The rest was garbage!

Where I went to highschool, American lit was Junior year, British and Foreign authors was Senior year. They should read books that will keep the interest in students. Books with some form of excitement. Some meat to the novel.

For example:
Junior Year - Poe (Yesteryear), Clancy (Modern)
Senior Year - Beowolf/Chaucer/Jules Verne (Yesteryear), Child/Follett/Forsyth (Modern)

I actually haven't read the majority of these. Did read Beowolf (12th grade), couple of items by Chaucer (12th grade), and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (7th grade) for pleasure (not assigned reading by any stretch), but I can already tell you that this is more interesting than Tennessee Williams (American) or Ayn Rand (British/Foreign) is to a teenager.

Ayn Rand was Russian and became an American--not British at all.

Different strokes, I guess--I liked a lot of what I read in high school. Enjoyed Shakespeare a lot, liked F. Scott Fitzgerald, and, as mentioned, Dickens. Loved Jane Austen from whenever I first read her.

Kids can read popular fiction whenever they like, if they like. One reason to read the classics in high school is to teach the difference between literature and popular fiction and expose kids to it who might never encounter it again. Because some of them will like it and treat it as a revelation, an introduction into a world they did not previously think existed.

help i'm trapped in obedience school

I could never finish it. It's sooooooooooo boring. My copy was signed by the author and everything. Which was cool. But I still couldn't read his book. Sooo boring. Nothing I ever had to sit through in school and no other book I've ever read, was ever that boring. Dung beetle documentaries on the discovery channel are more interesting than that book. UGH. I'm so frustrated just thinking about it.

What I love about this entry is, I can visit my 2007 entry and be happy knowing that I still haven't read a book as horrible as The Time Traveler's Wife. This makes me so happy.

'Goodbye Jeanette' by Harold Robbins is one of the only books to have disgusted me so thoroughly that I got rid of it.

Re: 443 Big Girl

Your biggest clue was that the author is Danielle Steel, if you ever want to read a book that does NOT stink your first step is avoiding Danielle Steel.

>465 deanae: Totally agree.

The most hideously awful books I have ever read were all during October this year. These included The Life of Pi, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Lord of the Flies and The Catcher in the Rye. All of which were mandatory reading for my English class, unfortunately (except for Pi, which I picked up after many recommendations.) Awful. I was absolutely bored to death by all of them.

Edited for grammar.

I wish this game had been narrowed down to the worst novels we had ever read because, except at school or college (see #467 above for example), we mostly (mostly!) buy or borrow fiction that we think we have a good chance of liking because it's our genre or an author we like. The most disappointing books I've come across are long-winded biographies. Too much, too much, I keep muttering as in these thick wodges of text every little detail or acquaintance is mentioned. Six hundred, even seven hundred pages: give me a break please.

#468

I agree with you that the majority of "garbage" that we read is in schools (see 460 and response to 461 below - also includes my view of schools and the real world today - possibly biased, but if you think about it, likely and sadly true).

However, that said, my post 451 is something I specifically chose to read. Some authors, like Bentley Little, can write one really good book, and another complete piece of junk, and it's authors like this where you'll likely run into your "Worst Ever Book" experience outside of school.

#461

I never said that Ayn Rand was specifically British. The "British/Foreign" pertains to the course. Russian is Foreign in an American school.

As for your comment about classic writers, wouldn't Jules Verne fit that category? I mentioned him along with Chaucer and the unknown author of Beowolf. At least something is happening in his books, and it's not the dull, boring, dragging, half the class can't stay awake book like "Rebecca" (another boring novel I had to read).

There was a study in the past that Girls accelerate faster than Boys, and that went for Elementary, Junior High, and Highschool. If you look at the majority of what is read in school, I'd say at least 80 to 90% of it is stuff that would be of more feminine interests than masculine interests. Not saying a woman never reads an adventure novel or a novel featuring a monster, like Dracula. Not saying a man never reads about another's personal life story (ficticious or not, doesn't matter). But in the long run, it's the truth.

Tell me if you think this list isn't geared more toward a woman's interests. Not saying there isn't a tale or two that would interest male students (i.e. Beowolf), but majority I'm talking. These are many of the books read at my school when I attended in 1990-1993 and my writing and English classes for non-majors in college (1993-1994):

- Wuthering Heights
- Rebecca
- The Glass Managire (may not have that spelt right)
- Siddartha
- The Joy Luck Club
- Anthem
- The Pigman
- The Pigman's Legacy
- Beowolf
- Of Mice and Men
- Jane Eyre
- Little Women
- The Red Badge of Courage

Now imagine if these books were in the mix, whether you'd perhaps gain more attention from male students. These are all classic in nature, not the modern "pop-fiction" novel. It seems like if there is a touch of science or a touch of horror (outside of Beowolf) to a book, they throw it out.:

- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
- The Time Machine
- Tales of Poe (we read 1 plus the Raven poem)
- The Story of King Arthur and his Knights
- Frankenstein
- Dracula
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

See the difference in the 2 lists? Don't you think some books should be picked from each list above, and not all from the first?

Combine that with all of these pushes for Women's Rights (that's 90 years old now...we got the message...the generations that live today don't believe in male dominance - at least for the most part), the fact that places push diversity so hard and that they want to avoid frivilous lawsuits about descrimination that most people I know work for companies that are well above 50% women when you would think it should balance out 50/50, and the fact that if a man and a woman both committed the same crime, the man would get the harsher punishment, all leads me to believe that this country (The United States) is specifically set up for the woman to succeed and the man to fail, and by 2050, this country will be right were it was in 1900 with genders reversed, where men will have no say to anything at all!

NOTE: Talking "Average Jane" vs "Average Joe" here. Not talking Bill Gates or Oprah levels of success.

From your first list, I'd expect Of Mice and Men, Siddartha, Anthem, and The Red Badge of Courage to appeal to more traditionally masculine than feminine interests; I'm not familiar with The Pigman so can't say.

As for the political/cultural screed, it's absurd. Women still make less than men for equal work; women are still underrepresented in both houses of Congress, on the Supreme Court, and, of course, in the presidency. At Fortune 500 companies, just 3 percent of the CEOs are women. Women are more likely than men to live in poverty.

Women comprise almost half of the workforce, men slightly more than half, so any specific company that has more women than men does not represent the whole of the workforce in terms of percentages.

Ellen Foster! There was lots of symbolism and lots of jumping around in the book. The grammar was based upon a ten year old so there were no indetations of paragraphs and some words were even spelled wrong. It was the worst book by far, I would not reccomend this book for anyone!

#470

As for the 4 books you say "ought" to appeal more to men, I can tell you that "Of Mice and Men" was "OK, not great", and the other 3 stunk!

With the way politicians are now, I figure that most women are too intelligent to get involved in a Federal Government (Palin didn't get the memo, but then again, she's a complete idiot!) full of idiots along with those that can't keep it in their pants.

Also, wasn't O'Connor in the supreme court like, forever? Only say because you mentioned Supreme Court.

As for CEOs, give it time, that will change too. Hence why I said 2050 and not 2011 that women would be in total power with total domination over men.

As far as pay for the same job, that depends on where you are working. I'm sure many of the larger companies have policies against that as they'd likely be sued (you can sue Bank of America a lot easier than you can sue Joe Shmo's Bakery). I know that teachers in NC aren't paid differently based on gender. A man with a Master's Degree who has taught for 14 years gets paid the same amount as a woman with a Master's Degree who has taught for 14 years. Of course, that's changing in NC in 2012, where it will be "Pay for Performance", which means it's all based on parent reviews, which is BS, as one parent who has a kid that got only a C can blame it on the teacher when everything else they got were A's, when the real problem was that the student goofed around in your class, and never came for help after school if he or she really felt he or she was struggling, but alas, there goes that teacher's pay!

I've never heard the more likely to live in Poverty statistic. If anything, I'd have "thought" (can't say I have any facts to go based on) that it would have been the other way around, partially because the vast majority of people standing near traffic light intersections holding cardboard signs (i.e. Panhandlers) asking for money, with "God Bless" and "Homeless" are men.

I'll admit though, the poverty statement is based on my own perception, not fact.

One thing that is a fact. My father-in-law, an ELCA Lutheran pastor, was once told to his face that he was denied a job because he was White, and that they needed a Black pastor as 3 White and no Black didn't look right to them, but that he truly was the most qualified of those that applied! Cases like this are why I see discrimination that is the absolute reverse of 150 years ago taking over this world in 40 years, where White Men are the ones who will be getting the cold shoulder in 2050.

I made my statements after looking at US census records. Personal experience usually does color one's perceptions.

O'Conner has been on the Supreme Court for quite a while, but my point is that women are half the population but now, in modern progressive 2010, still only a third of the court. Of the US Senators, 17 out of 100 are women. Of members of the House, 75 out of 435 are women. Of the 44 US presidents, 0 have been women.

And, getting back to the book discussion portion of this thread, my point about the books is that the titles I mentioned had subject matter that might have been expected to appeal to traditionally male perspectives. Not liking the books themselves is another matter--just because Jane Eyre and Rebecca might be considered more feminine is no guarantee that every girl who reads them in high school is going to love them (though I have to admit I did). But I also enjoyed Poe quite a lot and loved Sherlock Holmes--read every single page of my two-volume complete collection.

>472 ThrillerFan:. I work at a university and among the faculty, only about 25% are women, even though at the lower levels, the male/female ratio is 50%. There are many reasons for this -- discrimination is a factor, but not the only one. Women's opportunities and perspective on their opportunities are affected by the need for flexibility required to bear children and have a family, since child care is difficult in this country. Chairs of university departments are overwhelmingly men. People invited to give seminars are overwhelmingly men etc. etc. etc.

The fact that men are standing at the corner holding homeless signs does not mean that more men are homeless. Woman can not safely stand out on a street corner and ask for money. Think about it... Women are more likely to live in poverty because they usually have to support children after divorce with or, often without, child support.

The fact that your father-in-law was told he was denied a job based on race doesn't mean that more white people than people of other races are denied jobs on that basis. Even 10-20 years ago, black people had a very difficult time getting mortgages for homes in white neighborhoods. I don't think white men are yet in as much danger as you think.

Also, I loved 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and am currently reading and enjoying Frankenstein. I don't (didn't) care for Wuthering Heights, the Joy Luck Club, or Jane Eyre.

I think it is worth rethinking these stereotypes.

k4k

With no doubt in any shape or form:
The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. Utterly: banal, trite and trivial. A six year old kid could have written it

#475: so,so right!

#475/476

Did you consider Mitch Albom may have been 6 when he wrote it? If he was, would probably change the book from "worst" to "funniest".

#474

I fully admit there are areas that are statistically more men. Chairs of Universities you mention because of time factor when bearing children. The difference here is, that's a matter of choice. A father can raise a child. A couple isn't obligated to have kids. Too many "traditionalists" feel that the man should work, the woman should raise the kids. That's not discrimination. That's choice.

I think the best solution, with the technology this country has, is to keep names of all applicants hidden, all interviews have a screen separating interviewer from interviewee, voice scrambler so you can't tell age, race, sex, ethnicity, etc, and be obligated to choose the candidates that get the jobs from that, and only after then, can you see the person's name, and the only way you can reverse your decision is if that person has a documented criminal history. That way, if you hired nothing but black women, you can safely say it was because they were the most qualified in the bunch, not because they were black or female, and you don't have to worry about hiring a lower-qualified person just to balance the race or sex.

I'd say Stephenie Meyer's Twilight was the worst thing I ever tried to read; I picked it up before it was popular and bought it because my girlfriend at the time recommended it to me. I literally could not get pass the first page and walked right back into the store to return it. Bella's whining was something I couldn't do.

Another one I couldn't stand was To Kill A Mocking Bird. I got half way through or so.

>477 ThrillerFan: I like that idea for job interviews. As a freelancer, a lot of my work happens over the Internet and the people I work for don't know what I look like unless I have posted a profile picture they've looked at. Works for me.

>478 yokanyabuta: I actually read the whole series but agree that it's pretty dreadful--not well-written and I spent almost the whole time wanting to slap some sense into Bella, one of the silliest characters I've ever encountered in a book. But my pre-teen nieces love, love, love the movies.

>478 yokanyabuta: I hated Twilight, too. Someone brought the books to me while I was laid up in the hospital, thinking they were doing me a favor by bringing me something to read, and I got stuck with them because I couldn't very well throw them out with the hospital food, or the person who brought them by would see they were missing when she came to visit (and I couldn't say, "these are dreadful; could you please bring me something readable next time?"). I don't know what on earth made her think I'd like them, but like >479 ejj1955:, I was ready to throttle Bella. Bad writing, contrived, predictable . . .

Really tried with Labyrinth by Kate Moss, but gave in around p80. Horrible, clichéed writing and stock characters: all the bad parts of Da Vinci Code, without the pace to drive it. Also hated The Da Vinci Code, by the way, but listened to the audio book over several months. Felt bad for the actor who had to read such terrible dialogue and prose. Benefit of the audio book was being able to tune out while still getting through it, and also being able to multitask while listening: I can say I didn't waste a minute of my life reading DVC.

The most recent book I abandoned because of poor writing was The Map Thief, by Heather Terrell. Was a shame because the subject matter deserves a better treatment.

Too many books, too little time to be wasting it finishing a book I know I'm going to hate.

(And a controversial choice: I *hated* Wuthering Heights when I read it in high school. Hated the story, hated the characters. Hated.)

I deliberately read what I consider badly written books to learn how not to write. Yet I must always keep in mind that "one man's junk is another man's treasure". There are more reasons for reading than there are genres of writing. Though I have a motto, "don't just read good books, read only the best", I have to decide which are the "best"--one man's junk is - - - - - - .

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Hated it. H-A-T-E-D it.

A close second is Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

There's quite a number of books listed above that I enjoyed, including The Fountainhead, The Dragonbone Chair, Madame Bovary, etc.; I guess the idea is to identify the book you least liked, not necessarily worst written? Hard to tell when the first message has been deleted.

The worst book I started to read - I can't say read - was Keeper Martin's Tale after I fell victim to Robert Stanek's scam. I was excited to find a copy at a used booksale after all the "wonderful reviews" on Amazon. So glad I didn't play more than a couple bucks for it. I wouldn't even have paid that much if I'd read the first couple of pages first.

There's quite a number of books listed above that I enjoyed, including The Fountainhead, The Dragonbone Chair, Madame Bovary, etc.; I guess the idea is to identify the book you least liked, not necessarily worst written? Hard to tell when the first message has been deleted.

The worst book I started to read - I can't say read - was Keeper Martin's Tale after I fell victim to Robert Stanek's scam. I was excited to find a copy at a used booksale after all the "wonderful reviews" on Amazon (looks like he's even planted a couple here on LibraryThing; that guy REALLY gets around). So glad I didn't pay more than a couple bucks for it. I wouldn't even have paid that much if I'd read the first couple of pages first.

EDIT: Wow, LibraryThing gave it a spam alert and deleted the false reviews. Huh, I've never seen that done here before. If only Amazon would do something similar.

Without a doubt, Book of Days by James L. Rubart. Just got it as an ER copy and the writing was so awful... 4 similes/metaphors per page, and not clever ones.

I have changed as a reader, so if things really are stinking, I have a pretty tough 60-page-ish rule. Life's too short and there are too many awesome reads. But probably the WORST book I ever read and finished, was Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis. What a piece of poo.

But close recent seconds in the last couple years (which I finished because I felt I wanted to rip on them with impunity) go to Anna Karenina and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo ...

Say it ain't so! Ann Karenina shows up on this thread TWICE? Oh, that hurts.

#488: Sandydog1 -my instinctive reaction is also to say, like you, 'it hurts' but when I look back to when I read it in my late teens I was only really interested in Anna and Vronsky: the problem is that Tolstoy throughout the novel dabbles in a variety of subjects such as land reforms, government departments, local government, the wealthy classes, religion and philosophy. He weaves them briefly into the stories of the novel, not in any depth just brushing against them then on to something new.

Excellent point, Hazel; I've blocked all that out. Conversely if you'd ask about my comments regarding the two Epilogues in War and Peace, I'd probably reply, 'There were epilogs?"

I remember completely disagreeing with Tolstoy's view of history as presented in War and Peace; if I remember correctly, he basically discounted the role of the "great man" (Napoleon, for example) and said something along the lines that it was the inevitable movement of masses of people that led to wars, etc. I may be phrasing it badly, as it's been a very long time since I read it.

On the other hand, despite my disagreement, I don't think it was a bad book by any stretch of the imagination. Still a masterpiece.

491: Tolstoy actually helped me stop believing in the "great man" theory by explaining how there are so many forces at work at a single given moment in time, there's no possible way that one person drives history and there's no method available to trace all of the components that made the "great man" possible in the first place.

I take your point, but I still don't quite buy the idea that hundreds of thousands of French men would have invaded Russia had not Napoleon wanted to. What happened after that--well, inefficiency and nature had as much to do with the horrific results as anything the French or Russian armies did.

Emma

Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers. My LT review- A frustrating and appallingly silly book. Gaudy Night is an interminably related love story framed by an underdone mystery- perfect if you like that sort of thing. Its one redeeming value is that it gives the kind of lift to a highball you just won't get with a coaster.

The Deadly Joke by Hugh Pentecost - filled with so many tropes and stereotypes I don't know what I read

The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian - I had the book totally figured out less than a quarter of the way through, and that's unusual for me

The Legate's Daughter by Wallace Breem - author took waaaaaaay too long to set things up, and even then he went hell-for-leather in the wrong direction. Good fictional depiction of the life of ancient Romans, but totally and completely useless for moving the book forward.

Since I last contributed to this thread eight years ago, probably the worst book I've read, or attempted to, as I got through only between a quarter and a half of it, was Whitechapel: The Final Stand of Sherlock Holmes by Bernard Schaffer. I'm a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes and have read many spin off novels/novellas/short stories of varying quality, but this novel completely destroyed the integrity of the characters, and I felt actually revolted by the experience of reading it, a reaction I don't recall ever feeling before.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving was also disappointingly dull for most of its short but fairly painful duration.

I think the worst I have ever read are two books I was given to review:

Wishing on a Star by Jody Lynn Nye - a cloying saccharine sweet tale of fairy godmothers and tooth fairies, but supposedly written for the YA market!

Midnight Train to Paris by Juliette Sobanet - an absurd story where time travel is used to extract the heroine every time she gets in trouble. Besides the constant deus ex machina occurences, there was absolutely no explanation for how or why time travel could exist in the world - it just mysteriously occurred whenever the author couldn't figure out how to get the protagonist out of a jam! Total drek!

Just stumbled on this thread and skimmed through it but I am amazed (and maybe I missed it somewhere) that nobody has mentioned the worst, most overrated book ever The Shack. Or am I the only one stupid enough to listen to people who said it was life-changing. I had a hard time finishing the stupid, poorly written drivel ugh....did I mention I hated it??

I agree with some on worst books, and can't believe some that some of you hated what I loved. To each his own though.

Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice. Tried to read it twice, didn't get past 100 pages either time. And I NEVER abandon books. This was the exception.

Well, based on my star rating, which is only a subset of books in here — those that I remember really well from before joining LT and the ones I have read since joining — it's a 3-way tie. However for this honor I will selected Wedding Night by Sophie Kinsella because I reviewed it and the word "nauseated" appears in the comments. I didn't finish it. Based on an average rating of 3.5 stars among LT readers, I have to assume that this is just not my genre.

I read Estleman's take on Sherlock Holmes, The Perils of Sherlock Holmes . Until that book, I didn't actually think it was possible to be disappointed in Holmes. : - / Thanks for nothing, Lauren Estleman.

Thanks for the heads up, John257hopper I've been thinking of reading that title. I might just avoid it, now.

The Closing of the American Mind by Bloom - it's title should have been Fulminations From a Perfectly Closed Mind. It amounts to little more than a stereotypical ivory tower denizens complaints about how the current generation of youth is going to the dogs (primarily because students seem to be forsaking his courses and flocking to courses that might prove to be of some worth in life). It is one of a very small number of books (6) I have actually thrown in the garbage rather than give away.

The Confederation of Dunces and The Historian are hands down the worst I've ever read, and I've read some lousey books. I found nothing the least bit amusing about Confederation. The characters were unbelievable and extremely hard to feel any empathy toward. Historian was simply slow moving drivel.

Is this the ultimate zombie thread? It's been going since a few weeks before I joined LT, but apart from the five year gap after >493 ejj1955: it never seems to have been away for more than a few months at a time. Obviously we all love posting about things we didn't like, even though we know that that information is unlikely to be of much interest to anybody else.

Judging by the posts I skimmed through above, the book in question is always going to be one of:

1- a well-loved classic that the teacher completely failed to make interesting when I was made to read it at school
2- an overhyped recent bestseller which with hindsight was obviously going to be a waste of time
3- a book I should never have picked up because I disagree with everything the author stands for
4- an illiterate self-published piece of trash I should have known better than to try

...have I missed anything?

Seems to cover the bulk of it, yes.

Yup!

Item #4 might have two subsections, for self-published and traditionally-published. I don't know what some publishers were thinking.

>508 Cecrow:
4B might just as easily be a specific case of version 2.

>509 AnnaClaire:, ah but then we will require a 2B of the not-so-recent, perhaps-not-bestsellers we in this case foolishly chanced.

>510 Cecrow: ...which might shade into 1B - books that haven't stood the test of time, despite what people say!

Let's see if I can cite something that won't fit. The Wizards and the Warriors is supremely awful fantasy trash, the worst example of the genre I've had the displeasure of reading, but gets plenty of good reviews. Not a classic, recent bestseller or illiterate self-published work. My objection is primarily to the nonsensical plot, not its ideas (although they are also nonsense). And to the fact he was able to write and have published nine more of these.

Rumble Fish, by S.E. Hinton. I really liked The Outsiders by her, but this book was just awful. It was written in a dumbed-down way, as if for a young child, but the content was almost X-rated. Or at least rated R. It was pretty bad, which is a shame, because Hinton is such a good author generally speaking.

>505 thorold: Nice!

>513 SDaisy: provides us with a 5th: the visceral hatred of a dud by an otherwise beloved author. I can relate, my dislike of Wodehouse's Psmith, Journalist was so strong put me off his books for a couple of years. I just finished How Right You Are, Jeeves to my delight, but every time I pick up a Wodehouse I think 'Yes, but he wrote Psmith, Journalist.'

>514 SomeGuyInVirginia: I read Three Men and a Maid by Wodehouse and did not enjoy it (2.5 stars) although my review says the ending was funny. I don't actually recall. Does this mean I should try more of his works? Thanks.

Similarly, cases where sequels or books otherwise related to those we love should not have been written and are best forgotten. I get sucked into trying these sometimes, when I'm longing for a recapture of the atmosphere or characters and am met with utter dreck instead. Often and most obviously happens with modern attempts to write sequels for the classics, but sometimes even the original authors should have thought twice about going back (e.g. Conference at Cold Comfort Farm).

On comments 497 and 502, I have long thought of reading some of those more modern takes on the Sherlock Holmes Series, but I have never actually done it, and reading what others are saying about the books does not make me regret this choice. I must say, though, that the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are some of the best stories I have ever read. Thanks for informing me about these retakes of the classic, I'll beware.

And at Thorold in comment 505, I disagree that nobody thinks this topic is interesting... I think that reading about books that people don't like is a good way to know what the people DO want, and it's helpful for authors and those who aspire to be authors. It's also helpful in case you were thinking of getting one of the books discussed.

>515 krazy4katz: Absolutely, Wodehouse is a rare treat. Pick up any Jeeves book and enjoy.

>518 SomeGuyInVirginia: OK thank you! I need some light reading at the moment.

#517 - as I said, I have read many other Sherlock Holmes spin-offs and some of them have been very good, some only okay, but none as bad as the one I cited. June Thomson and Paul D Gilbert's spin-off short stories I generally find to be good.

I have found that spin-off stories based on other characters in the canon are more hit and miss, such as David Dickinson's novellas about Mycroft Holmes and Patrick Mercer's about Dr Watson.

Thanks for the info, I'll try to remember that if I ever run across the books. :-D

>514 SomeGuyInVirginia: >515 krazy4katz: >518 SomeGuyInVirginia: >519 krazy4katz:

Three men and a maid is a book Wodehouse wasn't very happy with. The later UK edition, under the title The girl on the boat was quite heavily revised (amongst other things, he added a couple of chapters and rearranged the time sequence), and it works a bit better. There are some good lines and one or two rather memorable bits of description - the scene with the Orchestrion is a classic - but the structure still doesn't feel quite right. I don't think the film (featuring Norman Wisdom!) was a massive success either.
Psmith journalist has an even more complicated history - it's a reworking of something that was originally written as a Mills & Boon romance.

Early Wodehouse (before about the mid-1920s) tends to be a bit patchy, which is a pity, because those are the things available out of copyright that people naturally pick up first. I suppose it's fair enough for someone whose writing career spanned more than 70 years to take a few years to establish what we think of as the "timeless" Wodehouse style. Apart from the Jeeves stories, look out for things that were written between the early 1930s and the mid 1950s, and you can't go far wrong.

>520 john257hopper:, have you read The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer? I've a copy of that one waiting to be read, and I'd understood it's among the best of the Sherlock spin-offs. It made the list of 501 Must-Read Books, which is usually a good sign.

#523 - yes, I read it around 20 years ago, and remember quite enjoying it, but the details are fuzzy now. I actually think Sherlock Holmes stories work better as short stories than as full length novels (and I think that also applies for the most part to Conan Doyle's four Holmes novels vs. the 56 short stories).

>523 Cecrow: I read The Seven-per-cent Solution and I don't remember anything about it, so it must have been at least OK but not amazing. Ditto The Whitechapel Horrors.

>523 Cecrow: I read the Meyer book several years ago. Wasn't too bad from what I remember. All my reviews got wiped out with Shelfari's demise, so I can't be more specific. But, it was a fun quick read.

Thank you - this is first time I've read anything here that wasn't just filled with boundless joy over some of the most boring plots and tedious awful characters ever invented...
Jane Austen.

ULYSSES - could not get past the nose episode.

THE GREAT GATSBY - truly really boring rich angst.

and there's always the jaw-dropping racist drivel of Rhett and Scarlett's locale...

There are more, but the worst one is the one I buried in my path. I live in the country
where the grass grows fast and high and so recycle all paper into big brown paper bags
which are then covered with weed cloth and free (from the county) wood chips to
create a path away from ticks.

This book was so horrible - racist, sexist, badly written, the works - that it was not possible
to donate in fear that it might actually inspire someone. If it ever resurfaces when path
wears down (weed barrier cloth is pretty ineffective - ideas welcome), I'll add it.

>528 m.belljackson:, I've read Ulysses and while I appreciate what's great about it, there's little fun to be had in reading it. Read The Great Gatsby and found it just okay, not sure what people are raving about. Might re-read that someday and try to figure it out, it's not nearly so painful.

Re - Books we own that many others hate: The Da Vinci Code. I enjoyed reading it and LOVED the photographs.

And, MOBY DICK (Vegetarians get to skip all the gross de-whaling parts) is one of my all time Favorites.

Someday, when Social Security again rises, I want to buy a Lithographs MOBY DICK t-shirt!

I don't know about a t-shirt, but I'm definitely a fan of Moby Dick. That's one of the classics I read young that I actually do remember well and appreciated.

The Legate's Daughter by Wallace Breem : Despite lengthy depictions of Roman life, the first half of the book depicting the main character Curtius's life has little to do with the last half of the book depicting the mission Marcus Agrippa sends him on. Despite the protracted depictions of Curtius's life, there is little support for Curtius being chosen for the mission that takes up the rest of the book. They feel like two separate and unrelated books. :-/

I hate Wuthering Heights by Brönte.

You know, another book that I absolutely hated was The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey. I don't remember why, in fact the only thing I remember about the book was a sick man staring at the cracks in his ceiling, but I had a marked antipathy to the book while reading it. So much so that I'd never consider reading anything else by her.

The Kite Runner. I don't think I have ever wanted to throw a book so bad, so hard. I literally wanted to throttle Hosseini for making me read that drivel.

Killer cupcakes by Leighann Dobbs Author apparently knows nothing about a) being a baker or b) owning a small business. The main character is not interesting enough by half to pull this off, and to top it off she has a weird fetish for mile-high stilettos. Not to mention that she is so self-centered that she keeps all her day old cast-offs for herself instead of donating them to a shelter. All the while talking about how blessed she is because of her metabolism. Like I said, no knowledge of small business or baking, or even how to fit into a small community. For a baker who has loved to cook since she was little, there is no baking, or business management, in this book. Don't waste your time.

Not the worst book, by far, but I'd been looking forward to The Yard, by Alex Grecian, and just couldn't get further than half-way through. I really, really wanted to like that book. But no.

Revival!

I nominate everything by Paulo Coelho. A self-proclaimed guru who veils his simple answers to complex questions behind self-indulgent, clichéd, trivial kitsch.

I'd like to chime in with Sweetbitter: A novel by Stephanie Danler. Still shaking my head over the bidding war over this awful book. All that critical praise for a self-indulgent walk-of-shame? YUCK.

How about a Nomination for the worst book you're sorry you ever read through to the end?

(Different from the many titles nominated here that we never finished or left a dent in the wall
within a few pages.)

BLEAK HOUSE by Dickens is my most recent candidate.

I'm going to go with Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saaverda. Can't stand it. It's one of the only books I've ever put down - I haven't been able to get past the first 3-4 chapters. It just seems.... boring to me. Like a chore to read.

You can't judge such a huge tome based on the very beginning. Don Quixote is a lot of fun. There are some slow times, and the beginning definitely starts slower, but it's well worth it. And I certainly don't see how being a little slow qualifies as being the worst book ever.

Here's a new twist to the category: a Book you really were enjoying, even loving some parts, then HATED.

Moment to Moment, poetry by David Budbill, who proclaims a love for Buddha, then shoots a young woodchuck.

>543 m.belljackson: Ugh. Hm, I think House of Leaves was sort of like that for me, I didn't hate the last bit of it but I was really irritated because it was a total anti-climax. Like, all this crazy insane shit going on through the whole thing and winding up and up and then ...all done the end. Uhhhh wat?!

>544 .Monkey.:, I can't say House of Leaves was the worst thing ever, but since I don't even remember now how it ends and I just read it a couple of years ago ... yeah, that sounds about right.

>544 .Monkey.: Yes--I didn't love House of Leaves but I enjoyed it till the end, & I didn't hate the ending but it was perfectly inane. As you say there were so many pains taken building the story and then, suddenly, a Hollywood ending with a moral to boot. I don't understand the author's taking immense time & effort to construct layers & to play games only for the sake of saying in the end, 'Love conquers all'.

Right? All that time and effort to make this super unique intricate thing and then ...he got bored? it was too much work? he ran out of ideas?! Just weird.

I enjoyed 'The bridges of Madison County', but your comments did make me laugh!

Moll Flanders
Moby-Dick
Look Homeward Angel
The Golden Bowl

I know these are highly regarded but I found myself shouting at the author to
Just Get On With It!!! I've read plenty of long, and long-winded, books but these were too looooong-wiiiinded for me...

>549 Crypto-Willobie:

You might want to stay away from Dickens too!

#550 - Dickens's marvellous characters lift even some of his more long-winded novels such as Little Dorrit or Our Mutual Friend.

#549 - agree with you on Moby Dick. I gave up about 40% of the way through. I gave up on Moll Flanders even less far in, but I will give that another try some day as the idea has potential, and Defoe is a better writer than Melville for my money.

>550 m.belljackson:
I've read a fair bit of Dickens. I don't find his style overly periphrastic.
Tale of Two Cities (touchstone?)
David Copperfield
Great expectations
Hard Times
Bleak House
Pickwick Papers
Oliver Twist
Little Dorrit

...not to mention many other long or long-winded works that in my opinion pull it off, including...
Tristram Shandy
Ulysses
The Way we live now
Anna Karenina
Absalom, Absalom
Giles Goat-boy
Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable
Naked Lunch
Paradise Lost
The Nightmare Has Triplets
Little, Big
Crime & Punishment
Gormenghast Trilogy
Invisible Man
Parade's End
Portrait of a Lady
Wolf Hall
Don Quixote
Sabbath's Theater
Baudolino
Ivanhoe
Gog
Grapes of Wrath
Native Son
The Master and Margarita
The Childrens Book (Byatt, no touchstone?)
Jonathan Strange and Doctor Norrell (no touchstone)
... I could go on, but won't.

So it's not mere length or style, just that I think those four I named were to me more irritating than successful...

ETA - it appears all the touchstones failed at once???

>551 john257hopper:
>552 Crypto-Willobie:

I've been reading Dickens straight through on DailyLit.com >

and love Tale of Two Cities and Christmas Carol
and many of the memorable characters
and the incredible descriptions of places in Great Expectations and others,
while hating Bleak House.

I loathe so much time spent developing over and over the tedious intricacies
of the truly awful characters ("writhing") and skipped over a lot, like today with Mr. Bumble. Dear God.

Oliver Twist was good, with fewer of the just-skip-this-chapter characters and the anticipated
Happy Ending. Yet, too much death - did he have to kill off the dog too?!