Worst book you've ever read?

Zep said:
Anthony Trollope's "The Warden". Compulsory school text, being a story originally published in parts in a gentile Victorian English weekly newspaper.

Soul-crushingly B...O...R...I...N...G...!!!
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Actually, The Warden is only the first (and shortest) installment of a six part epic. It is probably the most interesting of the six. Hello... Zep... Zep.. are you OK?
 
Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand. Fascist drivel.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Just drivel.
Anything by Michael Crichton. The absolute worst popular novelist. He writes screenplays, not novels.
I have started to read The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad on at least six occasions (I have a family interest in the story) but have never got past the first chapter.
 
I've read a few of the other nominees:

Timequake -- oh yeah, it sucked it long and hard. This was the first thing I read by Vonnegut. I've never even picked up anything else by him.
Guns, Germs, and Steel -- not great, but certainly not the worst thing I've ever read. I got it from Amazon, and don't regret the purchase.
Lord of the Flies -- This was required for some class or the other, so I can't judge it fairly. Still, it wasn't the worst thing i ever read.

Not counting fan fiction/vanity press/etc -- the worst thing I've tried to read (I gave up):
I Will Fear No Evil by RAH.
 
"Descent of Woman" - a book supporting the "aquatic ape" theory of human evolution.

Has the pace, language and forethought of a drunken usenet post. I'm not kidding! I'll give it to anyone in the T.O. area if you don't believe me.
 
Don´t be so hard on Tolkien. After all, he didn´t have thousands of contemporary fantasy authors to copy from. ;)
Though, I admit, LOTR would indeed have profited from editing.

What´s more, without Tolkien, I don´t think we´d have all those other, real good, fantasy authors, like (you may disagree with the list) Eddings, Kerr, Goodkind, Jordan, etc.

Well, the worst I ever read...that´s probably "Faust", by J.W. Goethe. (written in rhyme :eek: )
 
"Report on Probability A" - by Brian Aldis. THere is no reason to ever read this book. None.

Or "The Moon's Fire-eating Daughter" -by John Myers Myers. Supposed to be a sequel to Silverlock, but impossible to read.
 
"The Belly of the Bow" by KJ Parker, vol 2 of The Fencer. The first was pretty good and reminded me of Gemmell but in the second I just cannot bring myself to care about anyone or anything. Some minor interest might be found in the tedious info on how to build a bow but I already know that thanks. It has less emotional interest and character development than "Report on Probability A" which, by the way, serves the excellent purpose of ending a whole field of SF writing by its very existence. I've read it at least 5 times and struggled to read 1/3 of Belly of the Bow.
"This is not a book to be put down lightly. This is a book to be thrown away with great force"
Oh, did I mention his second trilogy is the same? Give the man another try I thought. You need something to read, I said to myself, quite forgetting that I could read the care instructions on my laundry instead.
 
A waste of paper called The Future and Its Enemies by Virginia Postrel. This book is so illogical it even got my dessicated critical faculties firing.
 
There are some I've read that are so bad I've forgotten everything (including titles) except a bare smattering of what passed for plot. They seemed to be Oriental-produced potboilers with the mid-40's detective type transplanted to Tokyo (or the environs) in the 60's or so, and solving all sorts of crimes. The use of judo etc was prevalent, instead of the use of 1911A1's, and the overly large-chested beauties of the cover illustrations and the stories all had mammary equipment above and beyond the call of gravity.
Invariably, each of these stories (omigawd -- I remember -- "Kill Me On The Ginza", part of the 'Earl Norman' thrill series...guess that diagnosis of Alzheimer's was wrong) ended with ALL the conflicts wrapped up and resolved in the last two pages (if not the last two paragraphs) with the bad guy meeting some well-deserved but messy end. These books were/are 'Plan 9 From Outer Space' kinda bad. They were like train wrecks...you just couldn't put 'em down. You had to see if they could get worse with each passing chapter...and they could and did...every time...
 
Diamond said:


BLATENT PLUG BY AUTHOR - ALERT!! MODS!!! MODS!!

:D
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Bad Astronomy: A Brief History of Bizarre Theories
by Linda Zimmermann, Joseph Gyscek (Illustrator) (Paperback - February 1995)
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I'm quite sure that our Bad Astronomer is not Linda Zimmerman.
 
I hated "She's Come Undone" by Wally Lamb with the passion of a thousand white hot suns. In all the books I've read I've never seen a main character so deceitful, manipulative, selfish, and shallow who is at the same time presented as someone the reader is supposed to feel sympathy for. If I had a fireplace this would have been one of the first books I would burn. What a sad waste of trees.

And you couldn't pay me to read "Billy Budd" again.
 
"Lord Jim" by Joseph Conrad would hit my list of books I don't like.

I liked his story "Heart of Darkness" and then I took a shot at "Lord Jim."

It's hard to understand what's going on in the book and to me the story was uninteresting.
 
Worst. Book. Ever.

Any of the Gor series. Tarnsman of Gor, Barbarians of Gor, Warrior-Kings of Gor, they're all horribly written, cheaply bound, and the ink comes off on your hands! they all revolve around an Earth type planet that's in a Trojan orbit with Earth, constantly on the other side of the sun, where humans decided they like the Hyperborean age of Conan so much, they stayed there. Oh, and there's lots of poorly written S&M nonsense. Lots of women trembling in anticipation of the lash's burning kiss and all that. I don't know why I read more than one of them, I think I plowed my way through about three before I finally just gave up on the lot.

My late husband was just wild about Jerry Ahern's The Survivalist series, which HAD to have been paid for by the word, considering how many times we were treated to the description of the steely eyed protagonist and his pair of matched, bored and magna ported Dektonics with pearl grips and intricate leather holsters....
Can you say overcompensation, boys and girls? I knew you could...

We were assigned to read Tess of the D'Urbervilles in High School, I tried to crack into that book like a safecracker in Fort Knox, but in the end I just settled for taking an imcomplete and getting on with life instead. Thomas Hardy may well have been a leading literary light of the 19th century, but a book where the first 200+ pages is all exposition and scenery? PASS!
 
Re: Worst Books Ever Read

GroundStrength said:
The Scarlet Letter..Uhgh
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I, for one, found it extremely amusing. A great example of why religion and government need to stay the hell away from each other!

However, I would have to say:

Faustus by Thomas Mann
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Beloved by Toni Morrison

Faustus was absurdly long and empty. The entire novel lacked a necessary conciseness that such topics require (the Faust myth, but a musical composer and only one, possibly resulting from syphillis, scene involving the "devil' with no additional supernaturality).

The Catcher in the Rye is every depressed teenager's anthem in novel form, following Holden Caulfield in his absurd wanderings throughout New York City and his interaction with characters that he is incapable of reacting with in a way characteristic of a normal (or even psychologically imbalanced) human being.

Beloved leaves me speechless. At times I found it obscene, at others trite, always unpleasant. I'm not sure what the purpose of the novel was. Certainly not entertainment.
 
I found The Old Man and the Sea to be extremely boring. Now I'm not sure about worst book, storywise, but Jinn is, without question, the worst edited book I have ever read. I have never read a book filled with more typos, run on sentances, past-present tense confusion, missing words, character mix-ups, and pretty much anything else you can think of that would ruin an otherwise good story. I couldn't even finish it. It was that bad. Whoever edited that book should be fired. Awful.
 
Linda said:
Jean Auel's most recent offering in the Clan of the Cave Bear series was so bad I've forgotten the name of it. I enjoyed the first volumes so much and was eagerly anticipating the new volume. My husband even went out and bought it at retail the first day it came out as I had just come home from the hospital after major surgery and it was a homecoming gift. I finished it just to see if it would ever improve, but it didn't. Apparently Auel was being paid by the word and 300 of the 600 pages were devoted to each character introducing themselves every time they met another character. What a disappointment!
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I have to agree. Of course, I really only enjoyed the first as a sort of SF. A dear friend once described the series as "a stone age soap opera" and I can't say I disagree.

With that said, I'm about to commit sacrilege, and skewer a few sacred cows. The books that I enjoyed the least often include books that are considered quite good by everybody else.....

"Gone with the Wind" (Scarlett O'Hara desperately needed a good spanking)

"Grapes of Wrath" (read it, and then excuse yourself for a quick slash at your wrists)

"Four Lords of the Diamond" by Jack Chalker: Look, I'm not a feminist, by any stretch of the imagination, but I was STILL massively offended by his "girls as sex toys" attitude.

90% of Anne McCaffrey's work; the dragons were cute the first couple times, and after that, I wanted to puke.

Selected works by Heinlein (I'm thinking, "Time Enough for Love," "Farnham's Freehold" etc.) Again, you have to be very VERY sexist to get me riled, but these pushed me over the limit.
 
jallenecs said:


I have to agree. Of course, I really only enjoyed the first as a sort of SF. A dear friend once described the series as "a stone age soap opera" and I can't say I disagree.

With that said, I'm about to commit sacrilege, and skewer a few sacred cows. The books that I enjoyed the least often include books that are considered quite good by everybody else.....

"Gone with the Wind" (Scarlett O'Hara desperately needed a good spanking)

"Grapes of Wrath" (read it, and then excuse yourself for a quick slash at your wrists)

"Four Lords of the Diamond" by Jack Chalker: Look, I'm not a feminist, by any stretch of the imagination, but I was STILL massively offended by his "girls as sex toys" attitude.

90% of Anne McCaffrey's work; the dragons were cute the first couple times, and after that, I wanted to puke.

Selected works by Heinlein (I'm thinking, "Time Enough for Love," "Farnham's Freehold" etc.) Again, you have to be very VERY sexist to get me riled, but these pushed me over the limit.
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Robert Heinlein - I loved his so called juvenile books, but his adult stuff is really really really really bad. I would say much of it is just his rather sick, twisted sexual fantasy. Not that I disagree in any way shape or form with polyamory, I don't. But I do think incest is wrong, wrong, wrong, especially between a parent and a child and yet this shows up in several of his books. It is appalling to me. I still quite enjoy, Have Spacesuite Will Travel, Podaykayn of Mars, Red Planet, Spaceman Jones, etc. - of course all are rather dated, but still a fun read, and they are what drew me into the world of Sci Fi.

Don't get me started on the Dragons of Pern because I loved it, and I admit that I cry everytime I re-read to books and come to the part where Robinton dies. I was saddened though that when Anne McCafferey decided to write the Masterharper of Pern, her story went a little awry, and many of the events in that prequal did not match up with the events and story lines in the original series. I admit, it is still one of my favorite series although I think Anne McCafferey has a hard time writing strong women who don't come out as just plain mean, and that is sad.
 
Oh, so many bad books, so little time to read. I now have a personal rule that if I am not totally involved in the first 15 pages, I toss it aside and go on to the next.

One of the worst books I've ever read would probably be most any book by F.Scott Fitzgerald. Perhaps Gatsby would be an exception, but the first book I ever threw across a room was one of his. I sometimes wonder if he would have been any better if he had ever written while sober.
 
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