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

Hmm, I guess you can't agree all the time.

 

Ugh! Think how boring life would be! I love a good tempered yet heated debate over beers any day!

 

The Prodigy (1986) by Amy Wallace is surely the most boring biography ever written. I had to force myself to finish reading it. The book is a steady stream of sensationalism and inventions, and today's worst myths about prodigies originated from the book.

Lila by Robert Pirsig is even more boring and far worse written. I bought the book around 1991 (I'm looking at the copyright date; whew the book is old and smells it), and my page marker is on page 4. I managed to get to page 4 last year when I tried reading the book again. 468 pages!? I doubt that I'll finish reading it before I die!

 

I have to say "Blood Relatives" by Ed Mcbain. I've seen a few reviews saying it's good but I read it. I know I'm not very exsperanced but even I found holes. For example the story jumps of the plot and goes into way to much detail about a cops wife when it could simply be put "she was attractive".

Instead he told me usless infomation about a character I don't care about and who should be helping the story along not trying to lead it to another.
Another is the characters' just have no life. There is for the two kids who are in love (incest no less) but the other's don't really show modivation. I feel like a great writer because of that. I think if something that baldy written can be published I can be too. I'm pretty sure making someone hate to read your story isn't the way to go.

The story could be good if it was well written but the way he did it made me suffer when I tryed to read it. For anyone who has never read it or is intrested, the story line is basically a girl is murdered by her cousin who was jelous because the victim slept with the cousins brother. How much insect must a murder involve?

 

Lazy Bones by Mark Billingham. Boring beyond humanly possible...

 

The worst bad book I've ever read... it's a toss-up between The DaVinci Code and the first novel in Women's Murder Club. That probably makes me sound like a snob, but I'm not against populist novels at all--I read plenty of pop fiction and try to buy the Pulitzer winner every year. The DaVinci Code was horrible because I had already read Holy Blood, Holy Grail and so the theory was nothing new to me, and once you get past the cool theory the book really blows. Terrible dialogue, wooden characters, a character that goes from exposition guy to villain... It's just bad all the way around. The WMC book, which I borrowed from my roommate as a light read one night, had no sense of dramatic pace, suspense, or where to end a chapter, which are all the exact things that light reading should have. One chapter ends "suspensefully" when the heroine forgets to make a phone call to her doctor. I am not joking. I think I made it 23 pages in. And it had a large font.

I say the "worst bad book" because I've read a lot of books that looked like good books, and were good books, until I realized halfway through that they were MFA character masturbation studies and nothing would ever happen beyond a lot of internal monologue. These I actually threw against the wall in disgust. A book that is almost good is a much worse offense than a bad book. It's like the desserts at Starbucks. They almost taste good, so you keep eating them and waiting for them to be satisfying, but they never are. It's a much worse experience than simply eating a bite of bad pecan pie just before throwing the whole piece in the trash.

 

I absolutely agree about The DaVinci Code. A lot of people don't like it for religious reasons; I've been accused of that. I don't like it because Dan Brown just can't write well. The main character is afraid of small spaces, yet he only faces that twice in the book and it doesn't seem like that big a deal by the end. Plus, most conversations in the book go along the lines of:
"What's that all about[something mentioned by someone]?"
"Well, let me tell you!"
I read it for myself and felt like I wasted my time.

I also didn't like When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago. Most of the book is her complaining about how much her mom and dad sucked when she was a kid. Then she keeps complaining about every man that her mom was with throughout her childhood. That's about it. She moves around a lot, but all I really got out of it was that Santiago's mom couldn't find a good guy if he was standing right in front of her. It was one of the few books that I read for an English class that I didn't like.

 

Yeah, exactly, it felt like 1/2 of the novel was exposition. Also I didn't believe in any of the characters, even the main. A "symbologist"? Uh, right. What department would that even be in? I've certainly never heard of a "symbologist" and I really doubt they exist. If anyone ever declares that as their profession it is codespeak for "contract-employed adjunct."

Religious reasons have nothing to do with it. Holy Blood, Holy Grail is actually pretty good. It has things like, oh, an analysis of the Merovingian dynasty that suggests Mary Magdalene as an ancestor. It's a pretty far-fetched theory but the author uses evidence to back it up. DVC is just a poor "fictional" account of the same thing, only dumbed down.

Ugh, hate. I picked it up in an airport for a trans-Atlantic flight. That was a mistake.

 

I was looking back and came across this one. That was a really interesting and truly horrifying story! How could you not love it?

 

H.G. Wells, The Time Machine.

I'm sorry, I'm aware people consider it a "classic", but it was, in a word, boring. Page upon page of a degraded society which was thouroughly uninteresting. It may be that it was required reading but i seriously despised this book and would have happily burnt it.

 

I disagree with a few opinions here - I think Catcher In The Rye adds a lot to literature in certain areas; The Bell Jar was amazing; and I loved Heart of Darkness - but then I had an amazing teacher for that book so I don't expect everyone to adore it like I did.

I read David Copperfield by Dickens in the 8th grade to beat some girl at AR points (long story). Took me over a month to finish and I hated it at the time, but thinking back on it, it was a pretty good book.
The first 120 pages of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier are excruciatingly awful, but the rest of the book is awesome. I actually wrote my EE on Rebecca and Heart of Darkness.
I was assigned Ordinary People over the course of two weeks during which I was dealing with serious issues that almost paralleled those in the book, so it was painful to read - and it was an awful book, period.
That same year I was assigned The Fire Next Time, which is less of a book and more of a rambling essay with no focus - at one point he literally says "...a day when black and white men break bread together. And I am not talking about this processed, machine made bread we have today..." and talks for about 10 pages about BREAD. I would say that The Fire Next Time is definitely the worst book I have ever read.

 

I find it interesting that most people are listing "classics" as the books that they hate. Maybe this has to do with reading them too young, or being forced to read something that isn't there style. Since this seems to be the theme of this thread I'll add my favorite least favorite read of my life: Tolstoy's War and Peace. Too long for my taste, especially when I got very little out of it. There are some books that have tortured me more while I read them, alot of books by Hawthorne and Dickens come to mind, but I feel I learned more from them in the end. All I learned from War and Peace was that Russian aristocrats were stupid and that dress-making is really hard. Of course, I do talk about Tolstoy with many of my friends, so maybe I like it more than I know.

 

Basically anything I've had to read in my English class. Cosi - The Screenplay by Louis Nowra had the occasional amusing moment, but most of the humour relied on over-the-top swearing. Taronga by Victor Kelleher wasn't too bad, but it wasn't too good either. Hatchet by Gary Paulsen was pretty terrible, and I had to read it twice - once in year 6 and once in year 8.

 

This is a really funny thread. I can see a lot of the hatred stems from having been forced to read books in school. Being forced to read something these days would probably elicit the same response from me.

John Wyndham's The Chrysalids (alternatively titled Rebirth when published in the US), was one of those 'forced on me' English class books, and I remember thinking, how can a post-apocalyptic sci-fi tale be this tedious?! I hated it, and notwithstanding my comments on being forced to read stuff affecting opinions, I bet I'd hate it if I read it now.

Have to agree with some of the choices of other here too. Lord of the Rings is awful, the plodding prose is bad enough, but when stretched across three books, it's bordering on a hate crime. Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a good tale, but damn that prose is hard work, I don't exactly hate it, but it's hard to love.

Agree on Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird too, which was another one forced on me at school. I'm sorry, but I hated every page of the goddamed thing. Also agree on the Catcher in the Rye, which was not a book forced on me, but one I thought I would read to see what all the fuss was about, I'm still waiting for someone to inform me on that score.

Christine by Stephen King is another one I struggled with; more a case of literary fury than a Plymouth Fury. I was reading away and thinking, I don't mind exposition, but is this guy ever actually going to get around to buying the car that this book is supposed to be featuring at some point?

Anything by Tom Clancy. I don't care what the thrust to weight ratio of the engines are on the plane that's about to attack something is. Just get on with it for feck's sake! If you edited all that stuff out of Clancy's books, most of them would be a pamphlet.

Al

 

On the contrary to what has been said, I often enjoyed school books and realize why we read them. But the exception is definitely Frankenstein. The most glaring problem was that the characters lacked any drop of humanity. Frankenstein's sister/lover (ew), for example, was an exaggeration of a weak female character. Frankenstein himself was melodramatic without any depth. The monster was just strange and creepy. It was long, droning and BAD.

We read The Bluest Eye in the same year (which, amusingly, is someone's "worst book" on this thread) and the contrast was unbelievable. I know they were written by two completely different people at two completely different times in history, but the latter's development of character was so rich and tangible as opposed to the sap-fest of a novel that was Frankenstein.

 

The Final Warning - Maximum Ride.

Too played up, horrible, stupid, gross. So basically the author took everything that was good out of the series.

 

Actually, I liked a lot of the books I read in English classes. There were a few exceptions (When I Was Puerto Rican and The Bean Trees come to mind), but I enjoyed the vast majority of them. I also had awesome teachers, so that helps.

And I enjoyed Frankenstein, oddly enough. I can't really place what it was -- I read it in the first semester of my ninth grade year -- but I remember really liking the book. I guess I've always appreciated the whole "man plays god" theme. I also remember thinking that the creature was great because I was never really sure whether he or Frankenstein should be called the villain. If nothing else, I can laugh more at Young Frankenstein =P

Thinking about more books I dislike, The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson bored the crap out of me. It starts out interesting and has a lot of potential. But after the first quarter of the book, it feels extremely slow and uninteresting. I kept reading expecting it to get better, but it just never happens. A lot of potential that led up to a whole lot of nothing (ironic: I read it for a class....)

EDIT: actually, I didn't hate all of The Diamond Age. The science fiction part of it is interesting, and I appreciated some themes and life messages in the book. But the writing frustrated me and didn't inspire me to keep reading.

 

Eragon. Nuff said.

 

The Pearl.

 

The Pearl - that was another one forced on me at school. Didn't actually mind that too much, although personally I thought the 'promoting socialism' allegory that the tale is supposed to have as an underlying theme went a bit wide of the mark.

Al

 

I definitley agree with the Tom Clancy ones. I read about 20 pages of one of his books, 19 of which were talking about guns in stupid detail. Just tell me how many terrorists it can kill, and move on.

I want to raise a couple that I think people may argue.

Harry potter.

The Da Vinci Code.

I find JK Rowlings writing bland and she doesn't really invent stuff, just copy it. I mean all of it. I know in my story on here I've got elves, but at least my names are made up. Muggle is a street in London, I believe. But yes, shes made a lot more money than I ever will, so she wins.

I didn't particularly find the Da Vinci Code annoying, until I read Angels and Demons. If you read that you'll realise that Dan Brown uses the same plot in both. Literally he just seems to change some words. I also don't like the flashbacks where he describes things like the Fibonnaci (spelling?) sequence in 10,000 words, as it seems like it's only there to fill space.

I find people either agree with me totally over The Da Vinci Code, or try to kill me in it's defence...

But I'm not really a big reader so I haven't come across many books I don't like.

 

Death or Glory by Sandy Mitchell, literally the most dragged out screaming plot and first person view story I have ever had to read. Not recommended for hardcore Ciaphas Cain fans.

 

Ink by Hal Duncan (the sequel to vellum).

It's like he just threw words at the page and called whatever stuck sentences. It's so random, pointless and boring that it's laughable. His theological and cultural references were ridiculous (Amorica and Adonis Christ), and the end of the book was so anti-climactic it hurt. And because he writes "lyrically" (ie run-on sentences and bad poetical prose) and uses a thesaurus he's been under "literature" (with Dickens, and Eco and the like) at every European bookstore I've visited.

And what makes it worse is that there seems to be a decent fantasy writer and storyteller under all the crap. He's just trying way to hard.


Even read this article. I don't think he has any idea what he's talking about. He throws a bit of Hegelian dialetics in with some postmodern jargon and comes up with nonsense. Absolute nonsense. This is Ink. I really think he just finds words that he likes the sound of (but doesn't know the meaning of) and strings them together, hoping everyone else doesn't know the meanings either.

 

Rewan - I've found that, with some exceptions, the amount of pop-culture popularity a book has immediately upon publication is inversely proportional to how good it actually is. This is why I never read The Da Vinci Code and gave up on HP after book five.

Meta - you ought to write book reviews. That was awesome.

I'm tempted to post a quick defense of Catcher in the Rye, but I'd rather not hijack the thread with that argument.

 

yeah..Odessey. I know it suposed to be a great classic and all but it killed me basicly tor read it. It was so boring. and annyoing.