Worst book ever?

What's the worst fiction book you ever read?

The book that just made you angry at the entire publishing industry and made you vow never to read another book again?

I'd got two contenders: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy by Boring McDrivel.

I was really expecting to like Cryptonomicon, but I found the characters really flat, the plot simultaneously dull and overly convoluted, and the flow of the book overly cluttered with the author's digressions on the details of random, boring things. I thought the book was very poorly edited for typos. Virtually all the female characters were put there for the sole purposes of giving the male characters someone to screw. And Stephenson used the word "interstitial" 7 times.

I read it on a road trip to Canada, and I repeatedly wanted to just chuck the whole thing out the window.

Lord of the Rings was just boring. I liked the movies, but the movies cut out 80% of the books, and in a good way. So tedious with the walking and the walking and the stupid songs that go on for 5 pages relevant to nothing and the walking and then there's a battle scene for two pages followed by 40 more pages of walking. I just didn't care about any of the characters at all, and I really had to painfully struggle to finish the last book.

So what's the worst fiction book you ever read?

I can't choose just one. All of them are hideous, "I'm selfish and that's all right, fuck you" right wing claptrap. And she was a fucking crappy writer.

with another human being.......

can you imagine the selfish sexual attitude? Yuck.

Those guys should reproduce... NOT

Best explaination I've read of Rand's appeal.

'The Day After Tomorrow' by Alan Folsom

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=208&topic_id=1728

terrya's excellent spoiler here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=208&topic_id=1728#1784

"And inside the box was the head of...Adolf Hitler"

GOD. :puke:

:loveya:

That was the worst for me. I never tried to read any of her other books.

He was just oh so perfect when the book started, and just oh so perfect when the book ended.

Oh, except for that rape-but-not-really-because-she-liked-him thing.
Silly girls!

"So Atlas Shrugged", tried it and couldn't make it past 100 pgs.

self-indulgent bull shit!" -Name the movie and character.

A neighbor gave it to me shortly before my son turned 1. BAD TIMING. I thought it was gratuitous emotional drivel and it gave me nightmares for a week.

:boring:

i find no interest in one man's epic battle with a fish.

No adverbs. The man writes like an ape! I don't care what anyone else says. And the Odyssey, a fucking soap opera at best; written by a gossip monger with one name! I don't care HOW old it is!
No kidding. I am famous for hating that book.
Too damn funny!



:rofl: :thumbsup:

I had to read it for 11th grade English, and it was so boring. I usually love to read, and I like most of the books that I've have through out school, but it was just so boring, that I'm afraid to pick up and read any other Hemingway novel.

Spencer Tracy pulls it off....

I still like the book though.

I believe John Sturges directed that film, if I am not correct....

But to each his own. I can sea why some people wouldn't be into it though.

Our book club read it in near proximity to two other awful books - "The True Story of the Russian Moon Landing" and "The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay" - so it's hard to sort out the three in my mind as they were all long piles of unedited crap - we read a book called "A Winter's Tale" that was similarly bad. Ayn Rand unfortunately can write well enough, though I find her content to be insanely awful. She's more of a propagandist.

I got lost in it for a week. I also thought Kavalier and Klay was overrated, but still a good read. You have to have time to read them, though, not two or three pages at a time before bed.

I guess I shouldn't recommend "Soldier in the Great War" for you then, should I?

Mark Helprin is a raving rightwinger.

Ack!

But so's Ray Bradbury these days, so whattaya gonna do, not read?

(I'm willing to overlook working for Bob Dole, since that was just an incompetant campaign) but that doesn't mean it isn't beautiful. I try not to have a political or social litmus test for artists or writers. Heck in Ann Coulter wrote something readable, I'd peruse that too (luckily, she's a hack, so that's not gonna happen)

I know what I believe, I don't read to reinforce it. It's why Michael Moore bores the hell out of me. It's why I don't listen to Air America or Rush Limbaugh, I prefer to be amused and challenged, not spoon-fed pedagogy.

but the knowledge of Helprin's ideology caused me to read everything through that filter, and I just couldn't enjoy it. My loss, perhaps.

But in general I agree with you -- that art of any kind should stand on its own merits.

I credit Bradbury, who I read when I was nine and ten, with igniting my love of literature. I'm not going to relegate him to the trash bin. It's just plain sad, though!

I mean really, 350 pages dedicated to bashing coffee? I can agree that it can be hard to put aside politics, but reading is supposed to be challenging, at least I think so. Curling up in an easy chair on a rainy saturday in October with a glass of port requires serious, challenging reading. The summer belongs to the Dick Francises of the world, light and easy.

kudos to you for talking Helprin even if you don't agree with him (it's a good thing for him, I think, because the people who DO agree with him aren't smart enough to read his books)

until colder weather. I'm not up for it at the moment. But it looks incredible.

I'd never thought of it before, but I guess I am pretty sensitive to politics in books, and that might be why I favor classics and foreign writers these days: I can enjoy the machinations of politics and history without getting all het up.

I really do marvel at the phenomenon of Mark Helprin. His conservative pals have so little use for literature! Sometimes I think they LOATHE literature... yet that's the world in which he's comfortable. There must be something about liberalism that he can't stand. Anyway, it's interesting.

I liked "The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay" x(

Very expository, stilted dialogue. In Kavalier and Klay, he had an idea that I don't think he really executed. I've noticed that in a lot of recent books. They pick some very interesting period of time and place (in this case, the comic book writers all living together) and yet they don't have a strong enough plot and an interesting enough group of characters to support it. Also, I think K&K could have lost what I call the "Shackelton" chapter - gratuitous Arctic scene.

It's what Tom Clancy'd be if only he liked writing about machines and technology. It wasn't my choice to read it--it was just lying around and I was trapped.

It was like reading technical manuals with a hard-on for military stuff.

Oh yeah, do you have you flame suit on?
On second edit--I don't want people to think I like Infinite Jest!
On edit I'd like to add Infinite Jest--four hundred pages into it and I realized--no he's not still setting the stage--this (1) IS what this book(2) is gonna be like(3).

1 Horribly self indulgent, dense, deliberately hard to follow with use of copious endnotes.
2. Book (n) a collection of written chapters: Usually paper, hard or soft bound.
3 Like--similiar to, bearing a great resemblance to, as in "it seemed that the remainder of the book would not veer from its chosen course! Oh no, not when it so clearly believed it was inspired by the deepest and most sincere muse--but rather, it would continue on its own already described fashion. Also taken to mean "little changed.

Has written the same crappy novel four times and is now a multi-gazillionaire. :grr:

or whatever that was called.

But you are right the rest sucked.

is on.

Tom Clancy was pretty bad too, come to think of it.

"Let's describe a submarine for two chapters, followed by the 50-year-old protagonist having sex with a stacked 18-year-old, then it's back to the submarine!"

:puke:

I was called an uneducated idiot for not "getting" that book. I get it. I get that it's self-indulgent masturbatory pap. I guess we're supposed to like it because he "subverts conventional form." Again: :puke:

I made it about as far as you did. Trying to challenge conventions in form is one thing...but this... It may as well have been called: "Infinite Jest or How I Didn't Get Into Film School."

UGH. WORST BOOK EVER.

Only book I've ever started and not finished. I literally threw it at the person who loaned it to me after about 40 pages.

I actually made myself finish it in a fit of masochism.

I lost IQ points.

didn't finish lord of the rings, if a book be tedious, no one will shoot me if i put it down

there are many books

Pure guano...

Self-indulgent, psuedo-cosmic tripe.

Want more proof? Neil Diamond made an LP out of it.

and not just because of the incest. Having to share the planet with someone who actually gets paid to write such drivel is almost more than I can bear. :puke:

Can't see why people like them as it made me feel sick too. I can't understand why pay money to read that.

it from a friend, and one night I picked it up and read it and was glad I did just so I could talk to her about it (she was about 13, and she HATED to read, so I really wondered what it was that made her want to read it, when it was kind of a struggle for her)

she's been dead two decades, her name is a franchise

swear to jeebus

and i thought the book, one of the very few she may have actually written, was a hoot

shuffled off her mortal coil and will write no more. (I can't believe I actually just typed that!)
:bounce:

Well mainly in the early part when she was actualy writing them. I grew up on those books and I absolutely adore them even though they were a little bit overwrought with sex, especially incestous sex (at least they were brother/sister).

Actually, her best series was the Casteel series (the second one) about a girl who grew up dirt poor in West Virginia only to find out she was actually the granddaughter of a very wealthy family from Boston. It was also during that series that VC Andrews passed away although she had most of that series completed and even a prequel to the Flowers in the Attic Series. According to a biography I found about her, she had outlines for like 60+ different book series and the family opted to hire writers to flesh out those series under her name. The Cutler series was probably the first series completely done under this system and was pretty decent, but after that the books all tended to have the same predictable plotline. I've read all of the Landry & Logan series, but the Arnold series I barely touched. By then the new plan for creating series was coming up with 4 girls and writing a book for each of them with a final novel bringing the 4 girls together. With that structure the books took on more of a pre-teen nature of writing and I haven't read any of those types of series. I've seen where they went back to the original format with the DeBeers series but I haven't read any of those.

It's hard to explain the appeal of VC Andrew books. Let's face it, there's no way they could ever get away with the amount of incest that was in the original Dollanger series (and when I say incest it's not none of this "Daddy/Uncle wants to touch you in a bad place stuff - 2 teenage kids were stuck in an attic for almost 4 years, hormones happen)

That's my take!

steaming shit-pile "Infinite Jest."

God only knows what that thing was about. I never got past the first 50 pages.

Currently. said copy of book is being used to hold up a corner of a living room table. I wanted to get some use out of it.

Or just assumed it must be brilliant--after all it is really long! I remember thinking wow, really ambitious, elements of screwball comedy, a Shakepeare reference in the title, man I bet this book is gonna be awesome!

Oooooooohhhh how wrong could I be? When I realized that the Col. Klink inspired tennis instructor was supposed to be the funny part--ooff, that was painful. I wasn't even curious enough to see what was on that video tape that killed everybody who saw it. I assume it was explained those damn end notes though.

nothing is for everyone

get a wooden block and sell your copy to someone who can appreciate it

says it all about addiction

pure dreck along with 99.99% of the crap she writes.

Bible is a close second.

want to borrow the flame suit?

I didn't read it, but Toni Morrison has a bit of a cult following, unlike the Bible.

:crazy:

her books give me headaches, and they were required reading in a course i had to take.

In a world where Nicholas Sparks and Nora Roberts are lauded, Toni Morrison ain't dreck.

Sooooo bad that it is good. The writing is bad, the story boring, really bad. I kept reading and hoping something would happen. Then came the non-thrilling explosive climax! Give this book to English teachers and people who want an example of dark&stormy night books. Here's the exciting first paragraph from a copy found in a free box. Studd, sohpisticated, cool and deadly, Studd is out for big game-and the quarry is a ruthless killer!

There are several books that I quit reading within the first 100 pages because it was clear that they were not worth my time. I am less forgiving in this with books than movies because books require a more active role.
Of the books that I was required to read for high school and college, and actually did have to read all the way to the end, I got really bored with "The Old Man and the Sea" when I read it in 10 the grade. I know that John Steinbeck is a good writer so it wasn't that it was poorly written. It just wasn't much of a story in my opinion.

Not Steinbeck. I didn't particularly like it either. Not his best.

but steinbeck is equally awful.

Utterly forgettable. I read it three times. The problem was the second and third time I did not remember I read it before until I was 75-100 pages into the fucker.

Attention Mr. DeLillo: When one writes fiction, the goal is to entertain your audience. There are several ways to do this. Discover one of them or find another job.

I also read Cryptonomicon. Boy did that suck. The women were incredibly hot, and just ready to sleep with a middle aged engineer!!!!!!!!!!!!!

not painfully dull, but just not very good.

And DeLillo is hailed like the second coming of every author mentioned in the "good books" thread, but I just don't get it.

But if he's not on your wavelength, then that's just the way it is. I think he's great, tops of the quality-lit game.

I also love Martin Amis. He get's shat upon here all the time. I don't care.

I think Steve King sucks. Koontz sucks. I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein: Suhhhh-ucked! David Foster Wallace, sucks.

I love Vonnegut. Cat's Cradle is the perfect piece of art. Rosewater, Slaughter House five, Mother Night, Sirens of Titan are great. Galapagos is very good. Slapstick Suhhh-ucked!

Rowling Rox. I Love the HP books. (Snape? I quote: "Dead! I want him dead! I want his family dead! I want his house burned to the ground! I want to go there in the middle of the night and piss on his ashes!")

Worst novel I ever finished was King's Tommyknockers.


(actually Libra is Delillo's 'best' in my mind. Ratner's is my fav, tho.)

I just didn't get into it... there was nothing there for me.

You kill whatsisname you're going to have to go through me first.

:-)

(and no spoilers!)

Perhaps it, the great body of his work, is an acknowledgement of--or hinting at--that America (USA) has a gun barrel in it's mouth and has gotten used to the taste of the oil(to steal a quote from Amis).

They're not happy books. To quote from The Names: "It was the nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder of the world."

Whether one likes his stuff or not, his attitude should be adopted by more writers:

ennui-fest for 300 pages.

I don't need to read to get ennui... I have enough in my life already.

where do you get ennui?

the other poster's quote about "the fallen wonder of the world" might express it

there's magic in the everyday, the most photographed bridge, elvis, watching the line of cars of the kids moving to college, the hitler studies expert who knows no german

our world is wacky and wonderful

springsteen said it -- our poets down here don't write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be

you heathen

i was entertained

great book, means a lot to some of us

maybe you had to be there

3 fucking times.

Mr. Delillo may be perfectly nice and able to do some things well. Maybe he mows a fine lawn or could use his ability to type as an assistent clerk somewhere. However in his chosen profession, novel writing, he does his job extremely poorly. I also read Libra (before WN) and found it quite dull.

I can't remember who wrote it and I no longer have the book. I'm personally glad I don't have it any more. It was one of those books that seemed interesting by the title and I just needed to fill up my freebies to get the Brian Froud Faeries book and the Stephen King books I wanted from The Science Fiction Book Club. Sci Fi apparently isn't my thing as much as horror. Maybe that is why none of those other free books seemed to get my attention or keep it. I liked Brain Plague in the beginning but then they kept killing off the little creatures in the woman's brain that I liked. I hate it when a character, even a creature, I like gets killed off. "Tsk. Tsk." to any author who does that. I usually don't forgive them for it too easily.

I loved The Hobbitt, but I agree with you on the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I couldn't even make myself finish the first one of the three. Too much mundane boring crap to read through. After a while, you find yourself either nodding off or daydreaming or hating the author when they do stuff like that.

But it was supposed to be bad:

"Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream is the purported science fiction masterpiece of an Adolf Hitler who, after briefly dabbling in German radical politics, emigrated to the U.S. and became an author, a sort of bastard mix of Harlan Ellison and Philip K. Dick. Hitler's book is 'The Lord of the Swastika,' a fever dream sword and sorcery epic, gripping in its action and pathology.

Spinrad's over-the-top Nazi saga has a reasonably straightforward fantasy setting. A secret king returns from exile among the barbarians to discover his legacy and raise his nation to greatness and power. His nation is in the midst of a ruined post-nuclear war world, a genetically untrammeled island in a sea of mutants and abominations. A common enough idea in sci-fi and fantasy, which Spinrad makes interesting by using Nazi ideology as the vehicle of redemption. The tale is Mein Kampf made flesh, Hitler's demented fantasy of genetic purity realized. It is a thinly veiled invasion of the Soviet Union, and the destruction of the Jewish "puppet masters" who were thwarting German racial destiny. Biker storm troopers appear as knights, the racially impure as demons, and, if we didn't know what was really going on, The Iron Dream is a rollicking, action-packed adventure that pulls the reader in with its very excess and ends with the SS clones blasting off to colonize the universe."

Not just because it's fundie drivel, but it's some of the WORST writing I've ever read, except for this thing a friend of a friend wrote. Sheesh!

You didn't specify that we had to COMPLETE the book, right?

I didn't finish the first book, and read it mainly for entertainment value, but it HAD A DISCERNABLE PLOT, unlike some of the books mentioned here.

When my kids were babies I kept getting that book as a present. Argh! It's supposed to be for kids, but what kid wants to think about their mother growing old and sick????

The "details of random, boring things" are what his books are all about. And they are great.


My candidate would be the Illuminatus trilogy.

and "Zodiac," so it's not that I don't like Stephenson in general, but GAWD, any work of fiction that needs a multipage appendix to explain the minutia of some of the digressions is just poorly written. I liked the tangents in Snow Crash, but they seemed germane to the plot and they were short enough and spread out in such a way that they fit in the natural progression of the story line.

I thought Cryptonomicon could have been a really cool book if Stephenson had just shoved it under his bed for a year and then done some very strict editing, but as it stood, I thought it seemed like the publishers knew that he had enough of a cult following that they could totally neglect editing the book, both on a large and a small scale, and that seemed pretty disrespectful of me, the reader.

just don't care about stupid people skateboarding

cryptonomicon was to me a great treasure hunt

it takes all kinds

i wouldn't cut a word, it was a perfect puzzle the way it fit together

I dunno why, but people have foisted a few of his books on me and I just find his stuff monumentally irritating. Your mileage may vary...

timescape seemed wonderful at the time

a bit stale now

in recent years he just goes through the motions, no spark, very mechanical

Just awful.

Thanks for being the first to say it. (However... you should probably brace yourself for the cries that you're "persecuting" people.)

said it first, along with her total demolition of toni morrison.

... and giving credit where credit is due. I didn't mean to slight anyone. I had simply scanned only the subject lines for a quick look at the list of titles. I guess it would have been more accurate for me to offer thanks and congratulations for being the first one to mention the Bible as the first choice in the subject line.

It's all good :-)

I love the Song of Solomon, the Psalms, Book of Job, story of Rachel, etc.

Seminal literature, there.

Also, "The Scarlet Letter."

I hated this book. And I was expecting to like it; it came out around the same time as "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" (which I loved) and "Everything is Illuminated" (which I at least thought was beautifully written and quite interesting), which for some reason I grouped together in my head as a similar genre. I was appalled by The Corrections. It was so self-serving, condescending, smarmy and disgusting. I actually stopped reading when I had about 10 pages left; didn't want to give the author the satisfaction of me finishing it (as though somehow he'd know).

I've heard it's a little redemptive right at the end, but there was no redemption after 400 pages of slop.

He's very polarizing, I think. Personally, I like his writing and "The Corrections". But a lot of people feel the same as you do.

Plus there are so many good ones out there. I give them the heave ho at the first sign of sucking.

But "The Lovely Bones" certainly had a horrendous first page and backflap.

that there are a lot of the same books mentioned in both "best books ever" and "worst books ever"

Sucking hard and long is clearly a matter of which side you're on.

;-)

the best books that resonate perfectly for one type of person clearly leave the others scratching their heads

:hi:

A woman I was...uhh...friendly with in Berlin bought a copy of this book at the Stars and Stripes Bookstore. Then she had me read it--to confirm that a book that shitty had actually been written.

I daresay it was the ONLY copy of this book to ever be bought at a Stars and Stripes Bookstore.

We seriously considered buying the other five copies they had and burning them just to make sure no one else would suddenly get the urge to gouge their eyes out over the plight of Mgungu, but stopped when we realized that the money we'd spend on this act of benevolence could be more profitably used for other things...like a bottle of halfway decent wine and a room for the night.

Just couldn't get into it after about 150 pages. Became totally uninteresting to me.

Other than that, I can't really say anything I didn't really like. I couldn't get into "Beloved" by Toni Morrison. Tom Clancy's books are pretty entertaining, but they've become bloated, blowhard ego fests and I can't even read his stuff anymore.

A sickening romance novel disguised as literature.

:puke:

I didn't have any intense hatred for it or anything. Not particular love either. :)

...well, you DID say fiction.:evilgrin:

He starts off mis-interpreting his Indian interviewee, who said "The World is now LEVEL!!!!" and runs with his own loopy non-sequiturs. I couldn't take the laughter anymore. Better than Airplane!

"All the runways are flat...except Niner!"
"Why isn't Niner flat?"
"Because that's just what they'd be expecting from us!"
"What's it shaped like?"
"A BIG TYLENOL! But that's not important right now."

The man can't fucking write. And he has one basic plot that he keeps recycling. He's a tremendously overrated hack.

I thought Cryptonomicon was great, but I LIKE detail and minutiae. I'm just geeky that way.

And Lullaby, but he is a one trick pony. He's a highly stylized writer and pretty much does similar things over and over. I couldn't even finish his latest.

Mum said it was great and everybody was reading it and it was crap. The romantic notion of a bird that kills itself to sing a sweet song? Doesn't sound like much of an evolutionary advantage. We're not Catholic, but my guess is that my mother was into the temptation of the Priest.

The characters are clueless, and the violence is avoidable and gratuitous. I know a lot of guys think he's the be-all and end-all of current fiction, but I wanted to throw the book across the room. Plus, he puts in whole paragraphs in untranslated and no-context Spanish, the point being what?

I think McCarthy is just a "guy thing" that I'll never get.