What is the worst book you have ever read?

For me? Hands down, it's got to be Left Behind. Aside from the subject matter, it was just very poorly written IMHO. The characters names even make me cringe. Buck Williams! Ray Steele!

Blah.

:hide:

:spank:

...... *whispers* Catcher in the Rye. I hated it.

I thought it was awful. That Holden was a whiny little bitch. Get over yourself Holden. :puke: :mad:

I couldn't believe I read the whole thing. x(

in high school. I just didn't see the big hoopla over that book. I found it to be annoying, and I didn't care for the Holden character.

A Seperate Peace.

I can barely remember a damn thing from the book. I think it was because it was so bad that I blocked it from my memory. Selective amnesia.

and wanted to rip my eyes out the entire time I was reading it...I didn't think it was possible to care less about characters in a book

And to make things worse apparently we were actually supposed to read it over the summer BEFORE the school year started because we were starting out with a test on it.

I never got the letter telling me to do that.

So I had to try and read it as fast as possible. A book that's damn near impossible NOT to put down, and I had to try and read it in two days.

never could figure out why it was so important

:hi:

No way are books with characters with those names popular, but not ironic.

Whatever Ayn Rand book I had to reed in high school was pretty awful, and probably the worst (I'm not counting books that I couldn't/didn't finish). The Master and Margarita (not sure on the spelling) was pretty horrid, though I guess it's kind of popular. Really bad though.

I would guess that there are much worse books out there, but I haven't read them.

I despise Ayn Rand, and her writing is mediocre at best.

They were bad, but they were still slightly more tolerable than Left Behind.

Atlas Shrugged sent me running and screaming to the left. Biggest turd of a book ever.

...and because I'm a glutton for punishment,
"Son of a Witch".

I didn't make it through the sequel.

But the cover art is WONDERFUL!!!

by Dwight David Eisenhower. I can never get more than two or three pages into it. The worst writing ever.

I can't believe I read the whole damn thing.

Sorry, Joyce fans.

I can't decipher enough of it. Don't know how else to put it. Once I get stuck I give up.

Frustrating, because I loved Portrait.

I forget which James Joyce book I had to read for one of my English classes in college, but I wanted to personally go back, dig James Joyce up from his grave and kill him again.

I had to read it..and I despised it.

I had totally blocked the title out - it was THAT painful.

But maybe I just got a bad translation from the original Gibberish.
:hi:

Poorly written, asshole characters, typos, boring, pedantic, WAAAAAAAAAAAAY too long, jumped around a lot, and HORRIBLY sexist. It's the only novel I've ever read with appendices.

Any more questions?

I want to take a stake and drive it through the heart of Edward Cullen. No idea who that is? Oh, you'll know...and then you'll agree with me.

If memory serves, this book is roughly 11,000 pages long, which is about 10,000 pages longer than it needed to be. After reading superior King books like "The Shining" and "Misery," which were essentially about two or three characters, I was not prepared for the Dickensian cast of characters and spraaaaawling narrative of "It." Not that it fits the parallel to Dickens, either--troubled writer protagonist, battered women, and a whole lot of abused minorities who were there simply to be abused...unoriginal Stephen King deja vu all over again, in other words.

After reading a 20-page chapter exclusively devoted to the life and times of the wife of a character who dies almost as soon as he's presented, I lost interest. I've never seen the movie, but unless it's 5 hours long, I'm sure it's better than the book.

kept jumping from the time when the main characters were 12 years old, and the time when they were 30-something years old, and I had trouble keeping up with what year it was supposed to be.

Like "The Stand" (although there were some things I liked about that book), way too long and too many characters.

By Bill O' Riley. It was kind of hard to even take the man seriously, because he was wearing this windbreaker on the paperback cover that said "just hurry up and take this cover picture" I think I was forced to read it in High School, and forced reading is the highlight of my education experience.

In high school? Where did you grow up?

in Eastern Washington. Population of around a thousand, and there's no other community for another thirty miles, so this town is pretty isolated. We only get a couple of radio stations, and one of those is 1510 AM (hate radio) and it has more or less brainwashed the entire town. The assignment was to read of all things a self-help book, and O'Reilly's turd was featured prominently on our choice of books. Someone else had already taken my first choice which was a Pat Riley book. The teacher said that Bill O' was a far and balanced guy. I knew that wasn't the case before hand, but I had to find out for my self ... and I did. It was like a car wreck you just had to keep looking, even though I really didn't want to..

I was thinkin' someplace south of Spokane, like Cheney or Rockford, but they're not nearly as isolated as this place you describe.

Out in south-western Lincoln County. The only fast food outlet in the county is a Subway in Davenport. In micro towns like ours the only form of recreation for the locals is church, No bowling alley, no movie theater and no dope. =] I'm just happy to be out of there and in college in Ellensburg.

I read it on a friend's exuberant recommendation.

I can't say anything further about it until I'm cleared of the charge of murdering my friend, rest his soul.

While part of me would love to pick a classic beloved of many DUers that will start a flame war, truth is, nothing I've read anywhere, whether it be in Lit classes or Greyhound-station bathroom walls, is as bad as 'Left Behind.'

The porn-star names of the cardboard wish-fulfillment male characters are the ONLY entertaining thing about it.

Finnigan's Wake because anything that has a running scholarly debate whether it is "truly readable" and has more onomatopoeia than words or even syntax per sentence has to be more elaborate joke than culminating lifetime work of the last 20 years of the author's life.

Left Behind is just an embarrassing artifact of our age about the epic fall from basic English language education and publishing standards. Absolutely disgraceful from a grammatical and editing perspective alone. To even contemplate the literary construction of the story and characters beyond the basic grammatical errors is an effort in Herculean masochism. That it is a best selling series is even a greater edifice to our shameful state of national literacy; it's more like a black velvet Elvis painting to declare cultural allegiance than actual individual aesthetic appreciation.

I read it because I received it as a gift and thought I should at least know what all the hype was about. Well, I found out. Now what upsets is me that there are legions of people out there that absolutely believe all that is what will happen, and that the mere appearance of these books is a harbinger that we are Near the End Times and it is all prophecy ...and not the result of a couple of fundies seeking a way to get rich on other people's gullibility.

:rant:

Honestly, though... I liked Dry better than Running With Scissors.

I love Ayn Rand's work.. all of it.


hmm... the worst book i've ever read is The (un)Holy Bible (--->parentheses mine).
who would believe 1500 yr old lies as Truth, while rejecting confirmed Science?

and Ended the Republican Revolution" by Naftali Bendavid

I saw no ruthlessness and nothing ended. :hi:

Hated it in school, still hate it 30 years later.

Hated it every time and will not try to get through it again.

I related to a lot of what the main character felt, and parts of it are really out there, which I enjoyed. I'm sure there is some symbolism and whatnot in there that I didn't get, as I was just reading it for fun, but sometimes there are aspects of books you don't really mind being confused by. I know about getting frustrated with having to read stuff for school, though. There were a handful of books I was assigned in high school that I never finished, and I still feel a little bit guilty about that...

Black Like Me, I'm to lazy to look up the author.

Cry the Beloved Country-still to lazy

Summer Lightning

Things Fall Apart-some dude named Achebe.

Ugh.

Thats calling out Charlie and Algernon DU'er isn't it?:rofl:

I could not get past the first chapter. I tried to read that book four different times and still could not get past the first chapter.

When it was published, the book was recommended for "reluctant young adult readers".

After reading it, my son and I decided we now know what makes young adults reluctant to read.

I've mercifully erased the title and author from my memory, but it was on the bestseller list. Even more badly written than the DaVinci Code, though that sounds improbable: a completely ridiculous plot, cardboard characters, stilted dialogue, and some of the worst English sentences it's ever been my misfortune to read. Guy made Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler look like literary giants.

Pity, because the whole Templar story is one of the most fascinating episodes of European history. But believing a Templar monastery of thousands still exists hidden in the French countryside today? I've got some fragments of the True Cross you might be interested in...

That Laurel Hamilton has written lately. She used to write witty, sexy novels with decent plots and strong heroines, but her latest offerings read like they were lifted whole from the pages of the Penthouse Forum. It's not just porn, it's bad porn: the kind that succeeds in making sex sound excruciatingly tiresome and athletic.

Made me go back and read Anaïs Nin to take the nasty taste away. That was a woman who knew how to write sexy.

catch-22

Ugh. Sorry Bronte Sister fans...

And I was the teacher! Hahahaha!

All that begetting "Abraham begot Isaac" blah blah blah..
Plus I can't find shit in there about dinosaurs or unicorns. :shrug:
The whole thing seems to end on a downer unless you join the team.
Sort of remainded me of Dubya's "You’re Either With Us Or You’re Against Us".
Maybe bush is the voice of gawd? :shrug: hmmm I recall reading about a burning bush..:hide:

OMG... :puke:

RL

I thought it was just me.

Julie

and so full of the "author's" ego, it was sickening.

:puke:

RL

I thought the movie was wonderful.

A Separate Peace was the worst book I was ever required to read. Why this book about whiny rich kids in a boarding school is considered a classic is a mystery to me. Maybe an English teacher would care to explain?

Bridges of Madison County was probably the worst book I read based on a friend's recommendation. I found it trite and overly sentimental. Even worse for me, the characters never consumated their affair.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was the worst book I ever read on my own. The mystery was never resolved satisfactorily and I felt cheated.

Dishonorable mention: Wuthering Heights, The Yearling and The Hobbit

I tried to read that book about a dozen times. I finally threw it out.

WTF?

Read any of her ghost stories. The collection called "Haunted," is pretty atrocious.

...I picked up Michener's "Space".
I'd never read anything by him, and knew that he had a reputation as a respected author by some.

Let's just say that anybody that can make space exploration boring has a gift.

Years later, I got a smile out of a Simpsons episode in which they visit a bookstore, and Lisa walks past a table full of books with a sign that says "Michener: 99 cents a pound".

I couldn't force myself to read the whole book.

I always figured I would go back and re read it to see if it was not the steaming pile of shite I thought it was the first time. Too many other things to read I guess:shrug:

Dune

A History of the Arab Peoples by Albert Hourani

Xenocide (one of the Ender's Game series) - I liked the first two books actually but after that it went quickly downhill.

The Centaur by John Updike

:hide:

It was one of my MIL's books. I couldn't finish it.

I just finished Les Miserables. And I despise whoever his weak kneed editor was. Surely someone at some point said, "maybe no one really gives a shit about the sewer of Paris."

The actual story is fantastic though.

I disliked Catcher in the Rye for reasons already mentioned here.

Most of the time I will just stop reading if it is bad though.

another book by that author and it bored me to tears.

BTW, I agree with you on Left Behind, see my post further down the thread

BLARG!!! Overwrought, boring, and I could barely finish it.

out of a freshman fiction workshop.

and mentioning the book might actually be advertising, in a back-handed way, for the POS book.

The book that began my hatred of Coupland

and the US. It's like Tom Clancy, without the plot subtleties and dialog and rich characters. Oh wait, Tom Clancy's writing is bereft of plot subtlety and good dialog, well, that makes Dale Brown...well, worse.

I was stuck offshore for about a month and had to read whatever was lying around. I'll say this for Dale Brown (who was Navigator in the Air Force) he doesn't relly even try to hide the chip he has on his shoulder about pilots and the entire US Navy.

But to be honest, I really didn't expect any more than cookie cutter genre fiction out of him, so other books have irritated me more. For examples Infinite Jest and A Confederacy of Dunces.

I read the beginning, had to just skim the middle of the book, read a bit of the ending and then threw it away so I didn't accidently give it to someone else to suffer through.

Thanks for the warning!

my nomination would be One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn. Maybe I'd actually think it was great if I read it now, but all I know is that it bored fifteen year old last_texas_dem to death.

I loved both The Catcher in the Rye (in fact, I'm re-reading it for the fifth time right now!) and A Separate Peace (although Knowles actually has several books that I like more; unfortunately, A Separate Peace seems to be the only thing the guy is known for), though!

*(I know Left Behind isn't considered to be a classic, but most of the posters on here seem to be sticking with "literature," so that's what I'll do. I've certainly read plenty of books that can't be called great literature- I've read eight or nine by the horror writer John Saul, for example- but it would probably be too difficult to think of what was truly the most poorly written one I've ever read.)

Egads.

I fucking hated that book and we had to spend an entire semester on it. No matter how many times someone explains it to me I will never understand the pig. UGH!

Put me to sleep every night for a week, though.