The worst book you've ever read or had to have read

I absolutely have to agree about The Bell Jar. My English teacher sent it to me when i was home for three weeks with mono. I absolutely loved it, thinking the whole time how brilliant it was and that everything made perfect sense. And then i read it again a month later when i wasn't on the hydrocodone my doctor prescribed me for the pain. Completely terrible. The only time i would recommend it is when you are heavily dosed on prescription narcotics and her losing her mind is actually pretty understandable.

I am absolutely shocked no on has mention Robert Jordan! The series is a display in the death of character and plot development. It seemed to me like every time something was finally going to happen every single character would revert to the state they were in at the beginning of the series, and this would happen several times a book! I kept thinking i had already read parts of the newest book i had because it was so repetitive. And when he wasn't failing completely to make the characters be anything more than headstrong morons or the same battle happen for the fifth time for the same exact reason as the times previous it was his repetitive description. I don't know how many voluptuous women running around in low cut dresses are out there, but i guarantee you every single one of them must have converged upon the Wheel of time series. Not to mention every single room had the same gilded furniture that would annoy the perpetually annoyed Nyaneve to the point of pulling the braid i wish i could have jumped into the series to hack off!

If you want to save yourself months of your life, do not read the Wheel of Time series!

 

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. We had to read it for school. I got a C on the test, and I got the highest grade in the class.


Oh yeah, I liked Catcher in the Rye. It was pretty cool.

 

It has to be Eragon...I found everything about the book, including the character Eragon, unbearably annoying.
And I don't think I have ever, or will ever, read a single book filled with so many fantasy clichés. Absolutely horrible.

 

Hmm, I don't know. I didn't like Jean Auel's books. I liked first three, but then i found Ayla too annoying-ly perfect in every way.
And then fourth and fifth, were plainly boring to me. Almost every other page is describing either nature or sex. I made myself read it to the end, but I skipped most of parts. I just read parts with dialogue.

I didn’t like most of books that we had to read for class. There were two books in series that we had to read. (Vauvan and Inspector of garden elves- rough translation). Plot was hard to follow. Hardest thing was determining what the point of book was. I never managed to that.

 

I must agree. I liked the first couple and then got the distinct impression that this series was just thinly disguised cave-man porn.

Is that even a genre?

 

Death on the Ice by Cassie Brown. It told a story of a sealing disaster in 1914 that happened just off the coast. It could have made a great story, but it read more like a history text book. The only good part of the book was when the fisherman wondered around the ice sheets looking for help from another boat, after a few days of searching many of the men gave up and actually killed themselves by walking into the ocean or slitting their own wrists.

 

And many of the readers were ready to do the same?

 

Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind. I forced myself to finish it. Don't know why. I found Richard Cypher(Rahl) too much of a know-it-all even though it was his first time away from home. Also, after some interview with Goodkind he said something like "I'm not like other authors, I don't just show off my world. I show my characters" or whatever. And yet, the first book (if you look at the map) had Richard and Kahlan conveniently hitting every mark on the map. Oh, and the 200 pages of S&M should've rendered this book a failure from the start. And now it's becoming a show on ABC....

Eragon comes right up behind Goodkind's work. Never read the book but saw the movie and that was enough for me. This book should never have taken off like it did.

 

I'm going to say, so far the worst book I've ever read (couldn't get through 200 pages of it, a nearly 900 page book) is Dhalgren, by Sam R. Delany.

Such pointless garbage. Ugh!!! It infuriates me to think about it!

 

One book I find overrated is Atonement by Ian McEwan, which I read in my lit class last year. By the end of the story, I still wasn't sure what the point was, and I didn't feel attached to any of the characters. Sure, it's considered a psychological novel, but there wasn't a single part of the story that was particularly eye-opening. It was too thought-oriented and the tension was too subtle, to the point that it just seemed pretentious. But if anyone can convince me, I'm willing to give it another chance.

 

I have a few books that I haven't been able to finish (that happens rarely). I'm not saying that they were awful, but they just couldn't keep me interested:

The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick: I couldn't feel anything for the characters, and it was somehow so... irrational. I didn't like anything that was happening. It seemed somehow messy, too unbelievable. Maybe I should have read it in English. The translations are always worse. Usually I do read everything in English, but this was an exception.

Abarat, book II by Clive Barker: I adored the first book of this series, but for some odd reason, I hated the second. I love his dark style. I love the characters. I love the bad guy. And the way he paints all the interesting events. But it just didn't have enough plot. It was terribly boring, and nothing happened. I couldn't finish it. We had already learned to know the world in the first book; it would have been nice to get somewhere in the second.

The City of Ashes by Cassandra Clare : This book really is for teenagers only. It's the second book of The Mortal Instruments trilogy, and I just couldn't finish it. It's about good-looking demonhunters, girls who can learn to use runes without any prior knowledge of them, best friends that turn into vampires because otherwise they would be so uncool, make-overs, "I'm your father"-moments, and just over all silly dialogue that doesn't really fit at all.

But as I said, I don't often read bad books, and I don't really think of many books as bad. I like light, dark, humour, slow, silly, artistic... almost anything. But it has to have something that keeps me reading. I loved Inkheart, but I couldn't finish that either. Someday I hopefully will. Oh, and there are a few Finnish novels that I would not recommend to anyone (like Juhani Aho's Rautatie... argh!!).

 

School books.

So far-

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald- it just sucked, and the chapters were too long. I hate it when authors do that.

A Hero of Our Time by some guy I don't remember his name - well I had four days to read it and my teacher shoved everything about that book down our throats but I maybe would've liked it if she didn't

Things Fall Apart by some African guy whose name is hard to pronounce (see how much I pay attention in class) I usually love reading about African tribes, but I couldn't feel anything for the characters or the plot. The story overall was bland and I didn't much care for it.

And books I haven't read in school but didn't like-

Daughter Of The Blood by Anne Bishop - I didn't even finish that book I hated it so much. The setting changes confused me, aswell as the dialouge and characterization. And the whole traveling on webs and magic and whatever I was like WTF? I even had three people telling me about it, and it made it easier to understand, I just couldn't get into it. The thing that's most annoying is that ALL of my friends are obsessed with it, it's like, how?

I've never read the Harry Potter books, but I saw the first two movies and from what I heard they're word from word from the books. But after the second, I saw the tird and fourth and didn't bother with even reading it. I'm not much into wizards or anything so that may be why. I'll try reading the books and see if I like it better.

 

Great Expectations--Charles Dickens...Worst book ever written.

 

Concrete Island - Ballard.

Terrible, just terrible. Ballard has a knack of repeating himself, or reiterating an intended moral every other page, but I can tolerate that in Kingdom Come - But when your story is about being stranded on the motorway, it makes for an irritating read.

When Nietzsche Wept is also turning out to be a dry novel as well, but I haven't finished it yet....It just seems the poor bastard of an author spent too much time on research than on writing a good story. Details are a noisy killer.

 

second that! couldn't push myself past the second chapter

 

For real?? Man, I loved all of Terry Goodkinds books. Incredibly epic.

Worst book in history: Z For Zachariah. My God. Shoot me now.

 

Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton: I couldn't stand it. It was just smut with vampires in it.

City of the Dead by Brian Keene: Demon possessed corpses that become zombies intelligent enough to use weapons, set traps, and speak. With great lines like "Quick, let's overwhelm him with our numbers!" before the second chapter. I put the book down and never read it again. Please for all that is good and decent in the world, do not read this book.

The Once and Future King by T. H. White: I loved Arthurian Legend until I read this book. It is the most dull and long winded book I have ever read. It made a great story so unbelievably boring that to this day I cannot stand to read it.

There was one other, I don't recall the name or the author but it was set in New England during the American Revolution. I was forced to read it for school and hated it. I remember something about the MC being a silversmith apprentice but his hand is injured. Regardless, it was a pointless meandering tale.

 

Disagreed

 

Well the first on my list would have to be Havoc Junction by Joe Donolley, ick. I really didn't connect with the main character and thought she could have shown a little more desperation concidering she is a mother trying to portect her children it really was very lame. I force myself to finish all the books I read so it may help improve my writing skills. Now I know what not to do.

The second, Elizibith Moon's the hunting party. It put me off Sci-fi for a very long time it's sitting in my bookshelf still waiting for me to finish reading it.

The third, the saint of dragons by Jason hightman. Major cheese here...

 

The Odyssey was agonizing. That might've had something to do with my English teacher adoring it. Mainly, I couldn't stand Odysseus, and spent the whole poem waiting for something to kill him off. This would've spoiled epics for me if I hadn't read Paradise Lost right after.

Eragon is of course up there, too. The plot was every cliche known to man, disguised as a harmless Lord Of The Rings rip-off. What else can be said?

 

I'm soooo with you! Just cuz it's classic doesn't mean it's good!

 

Deception Point - Dan Brown

Awfull... but at the times I was interested, it kept me entertained.

 

Can we just make an umbrella statement and say that most anything by Dan Brown isn't worth much? Too much hype, not enough good writing.

 

What!?! Why not just stab me in the face! I thought the Odyssey was an awesome story, I loved the whole "surviving crew" feel and the adventure. It was great!

I mean c'mon, if you don't like Scylla grabbing sailors and making them into Kibbles n' Bits while they are trying to dodge a cyclone... well you might as well read the newspaper

 

I agree with you. I could rarely go through one page without seeing a horrible cliche. Below is a rant about the plot, but it contains spoilers in case any brave soul would want to find out for themselves. Not that you wouldn't know what happens since it's the same as every other book of its type.

Spoiler

The whole story starts with a nobody who loses a family member and goes off to get revenge with an old bearded man who dies later in the story and the kid becomes a great person etc., etc. And that's only a few of the cliches.

The worst book I've ever read is probably one I haven't finished. I had to read The Scarlet Letter for school a while back and it was agonizing. I mean, the plot was alright, from what I could make of it, but it's so rich. Peace Child (which I also had to read for school) was annoying too. I don't think it was written very well. I was almost falling asleep as I read.