Worst book you've ever read?

Rather than keep banging on in the Shop Class thread, I figured I'd borrow a page from the Worst Movie thread as well.

So, what's the worst book you've ever read?

I'm gonna wreck this thread:

Everything contradicts everything else!

In reply to Trans_Maro:

Oh, there can't be that many contradictions, can there?

Oh, berkeley me.

it's kinda dicky to derail and probably kill a thread in the first reply. i have read the bible, it does contradict itself in places and much of it is boring(do i really need to know who begot who over and over for generations?), but the general message in most of it holds true no matter what one believes in. not counting the angry vengeful old testament stuff, but the jesus loved everyone equally and be good to each other stuff.

the hobbit. maybe it's because i could care less for the fantasy stuff, maybe because the opening line of "Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit" made me think WTF. did not care for it.

I think the last book I read all the way through was 1984 and that must have been 13 years ago. It was awesome. I guess on the good side, I cannot name a "worst book I've ever read".

Every single berkeleying worst or worse or whatever new negative thread gets started.

I think y'all need to just smile and be happy for a while. This is getting very tiring.

Honestly I know its a classic but back in high school I read a tale of two cities, damnit if that wasnt the most boring longest book ive ever read, and I like to read. I have the entire collection of Louis L'amour western books. I was even named after a character in one of them (my dad was a huge fan of that author). Those books if your into westerns are the absolute best out there.

The Red Pony by John Steinbeck. Had to read it in high school. Haven't ever read another Steinbeck book. Some people say he was a good author.

Followed by every Shakespeare pos they crammed down our throat.

Had to read this in middle school, got to a point where I was doing my reports about how awful it was, and still got As.

I would say Great Expectations, but I never read that, two kids did and the answers were distributed on a very predictable bracket system in the morning before class.

I don't know about worst. But the most boring book I ever read was the Bureau of Labor Statistics Handbook of Methods. It's a US government publication that describes exactly how the CPI, unemployment rate and several other Labor Dept. stats are compiled and calculated. I had to read for a class in grad school. It is a sure cure for insomnia

Hm. Lots of subcategories here. I'd say the book that I read (and finished) that I disliked the most was Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. That was in school, thus not by choice, and well, it's in French.

The worst book I actually chose to read but didn't finish, is Lord Foul's Bane, by Stephen R. Donaldson. Ugh.

The worst book I chose to read and did finish was Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. I slogged through three novels (Red, Green, Blue) and got to the end only to find there wasn't really an end. A bunch of stuff happened, but there wasn't really a plot. It didn't link together to tell a coherent story -- it was just there. Blech.

Man, this thread is leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Time to go read something that's actually good! I've got an Alastair Reynolds sitting on the table that I haven't started yet...

ryanty22 wrote: Honestly I know its a classic but back in high school I read a tale of two cities, damnit if that wasnt the most boring longest book ive ever read, and I like to read.

Dickens was paid by the word, and it shows.

Trans_Maro wrote: I'm gonna wreck this thread: Everything contradicts everything else!

Well at least you actually read it. I find that most of it's followers haven't actually read the whole damn thing. If you haven't consumed it all, you have no place trying to convince me it's the Word of Anything.

Back on topic:

Great illustration of how to use 20,769 words to say something that could be said in 17. I hated that book so much I couldn't wait to give it away and rid my house of it.

Arthur C Clarke's 3001 The Final Odyssey. I bought it to read on a flight and had finished it by the time we landed. I typically keep books, but this one I was going to leave on the plane until I realized that some helpful soul might see it and think I had forgotten it. At the first trashcan in the terminal, I chucked it in.

Ever, not sure. But withing fairly recent memory George R.R. Martin's "Feast for Crows". That's right, I'm about to knock motherberkeleying Game of Thrones. I really enjoyed the earlier books in the series, but this struck me as a prime example of an author having become so successful that his editors were afraid to do their damned jobs and tell him to get rid of unnecessary crap.

There was no plot. It was 900 pages of people walking around not getting anything done. Of the 9 or so characters the book spends time following around, only one has her personal plot move forward at all. And by that I mean, moves from exposition and character development to some actual rising action. No story arcs get resolved in 900 pages.

In high school, I absolutely hated Walden; or Life in the Woods, and everything else about Henry David Thoreau. A few years later, I bought another copy and began to understand it a little better. Eventually, I made sort of a pilgrimage to Walden pond, though that probably had more to do with the fact that I heard Dana Delaney mention that she used to skinny dip there when she was in college.

There are many bad books, but few I've ever read through. Normally I stop and go find something else to read. Several have been mentioned above that I found bad, usually for the reasons already given.

Another I'd offer up, Doctor Zhivago. It drags at a glacial pace, and switches names of characters randomly. I know there's a Russian basis for the name switching and obfuscation, but as a western reader, it frequently left me lost as who the character actually was.

Anything Dickens. Read a couple--two for school, one on my own--all just wordy and horrible. He was the trashy supermarket author of his time.

One of the Steinbeck books--can't remember which, because I didn't even finish it. Funny, because he is one of my favorite authors.

I've never read most of the "worst books" because they're bad. I stop reading them.

A lot of books/authors I have big issues with their writing styles, but can forgive it for whatever reason. For instance, Tolkien is unneccessarily descriptive, and having 18 names for the same character is infuriating. That being said, there is something about the books that draws me in.

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Got about 100 pages into it. The main problem I had was that Ayn Rand seems completely unable to understand that an intelligent person might disagree with her for well thought out, logical reasons. So she made all her antagonists a bunch of zombies.

Well, actual zombies might have been a lot better - seeing Hank Rearden battling a host of undead with a Rearden Metal chainsaw might have been more entertaining than watching him deal with in-laws who just didn't get the symbolism of his presenting his wife with a ring made from the first casting of an experimental alloy.

And the argument between the Taggart siblings over the Mexican railroad line? I found myself imagining how it could have gone if James Taggart had half a brain. I could think of a half dozen reasons why using an untested light metal alloy to rebuild a complete railway line could go horribly wrong. What if it had galvanic corrosion problems caused by some sort of chemical nobody had thought to test it with, or welded itself to steel locomotive wheels under heavy braking?

Dagny would have looked reckless to the point of insanity if James brought up any of those possible issues, unless she'd already set up a prototype installation a couple miles long and had been testing it for a while. Which she would have brought up in the argument if she had done it, so it was pretty clear she'd never seen Reardon Metal being used outside of a laboratory. So the whole scene had me wonder how on earth a man who seemed totally opposed to actually doing the work needed to make a railroad run and a woman who was prone to taking seriously irresponsible gambles had ever built a successful railroad. The two of them should have driven Transcontinental into bankruptcy long ago.

I stopped reading after those two scenes.

nicksta43 wrote: Every single berkeleying worst or worse or whatever new negative thread gets started. I think y'all need to just smile and be happy for a while. This is getting very tiring.

Feel free to not join in on any thread that you disagree with. We have half a dozen threads about great book recommendations already. Besides, it's interesting to see some of the "Emperor's New Clothes" titles - books everyone thinks they're supposed to like, but which are actually terrible. And, as evidenced by the movie thread, it's also interesting to see how a matter of interpretation or taste makes the difference between loving or hating something.

On the original topic, I have to say, I have a strange compulsion to finish a book once I start it, almost no matter how bad it is. One of those was the aforementioned Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In fact, it took me 3 tries to get through it, which is rare for me. And in the end, well, it just wasn't worth it.

Here's another - a novel about an armless, legless child of carnival people, whose mother deliberately took drugs during pregnancy in order to create birth defects, who grows up to create a cult where normal people ritually amputate their limbs in stages until they are eventually just living torsos. It got great reviews. Yes, I read the whole thing. NO, it had no redeeming qualities whatsoever:

Oh another one... Art of Racing in the Rain. Sorry, most of it was just depressing and whiny. Very little about racing, not a happy dog book, not particularly well written. No thanks.

Just...odd. I expected too much perhaps, and the end was a let down. At least it was free.

Toly's Ghost by Burt Levy is probably the latest "worst." I may have others in my distant past, but I've forgotten about them.

I read every book in the series up until this one. While the stories were good, each book in the series suffered more and more from the lack of good editing. Finally, I got to this one and tried to read the first few "wall of text" pages and just gave up. I've still got the book since I revere books, but I doubt I'll ever crack it again.

On the topic of Ayn Rand: what you have to remember (and what is not readily apparent) is that her novels are Romantic books. Not as in romance (because, frankly, that's the scariest side of her writing), but as in demonstrating the greatest virtues and worst flaws of mankind. As such, her characters are meant to be clearly Good or Bad. They are more like melodramas written to capture a specific moral point. They're not meant to be entertainment for its own sake.

Here's another of my candidates for Worst Book I ever read, and yes, I know this is heresy to many folks:

I hated every word of this book and everything about Holden Caufield - and I was even in the throes of my own angst-ridden teen-something self-identifying struggles when I read it. By page 5 I just wanted to slap him and send him to his room until he grew up and stopped being such a whiny, self-pitying bitch.

Honorable Mention goes to pretty much anything Ernest Hemingway ever wrote. Hemingway used his characters to cover his own insecurities the way The Edge uses hats to cover his head. Guess what, Edge, we know you're bald. Guess what, Ernest, we know you can't get it up. Quit the posturing and move on with your life. The best I can say about Hemingway is that at least he wasn't epically wordy.

Worst book ever: anything by L Ron Hubbard. I read the first few books of the excruciatingly long Mission Earth series and they were just horrible. At some point I realized that I was not obligated to finish the series and that was a very good day for me. There's nothing redeeming in them and it's only my pigheaded stubborn "must finish what I start" nature that misled me to finishing 2 or 3 of them.

MadScientistMatt wrote: I stopped reading after those two scenes.

It honestly doesn't get any better. The only people that think her books are any good are ideologues and teenagers that have just discovered them, are too naive to not trust everything they read, and think they're the answer to everything. Guess which one I was - I'm embarrassed to admit I thought they were good at one point. They really aren't.