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

Anything by Laura Levine [I know you're asking for a specific title, but her books are all almost carbon-copies of each other, so I might as well include all of them ]. Levine's books (mystery genre) are chock-full of cliches, and they read like a really cheesy and repetitive TV show. However, what really irked me was how she took the offensive stereotype of the dumb, nasty blonde to an unheard of level - 95% or more of the blond female characters in her books fit this stereotype. Talk about insensitivity on the author's part - I got mad, and I'm not even blonde!

 

Pride and prejudice. I read through two chapters and was thoroughly disgusted.

 

Well done! I couldn't make it that far.

 

Pride and Prejudice is quite possibly one of my most hated books. I read through it once and found it tedious, and I've read through it a second time to see if my opinion had changed. It hadn't.

Also Ender's Game bored me to tears. I read it for an English class and found it dreadfully dull.

Oh, let's not get me started on Twilight...

 

Focoult's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. The characters were totally flat, and I think were just mirror images of how he wanted himself to be viewed. I understand Eco is extremely clever, and that the book also is, but in a literary sense I thought it was awful.

 

I loved it. I agree that it's plot-driven rather than character-driven, but I think that the way the reality and the fiction collapsed into each other was wonderful and masterfully written.

His "The Island of the Day Before", on the other hand, I never managed to finish.

 

When I was younger I used to ADORE The Babysitter's Club
They are perhaps some of the worst books though, childrens in general. Babies and toddler aimed books are cute, but re-reading some of the stuff I read when I was 10 makes me cringe.

I also particuarlly disliked Alice in Wonderland; it was soooo boring I couldn't finish it.

 

Ok, I've read a lot of books that I've loved, and a lot that just didn't quite grab me, but there's only been a few that I despised while reading them. The ones that immediately come to mind are:

"The Good Earth" - Pearl S. Buck. My GOD, I hated that book. For a school assignment I wound up having to read it all in one night, and it consisted of 500 pages of how bad Chinese life sucked at the turn of the 20th century. Sounds promising, but I promise you, it isn't. It follows one guy's entire life - literally - and contains not one shred of mirth or hope. Just melancholy and boredom.

"Ethan Frome" - Edith Wharton. Another hopeless book. This lugubrious piece of literature drowns in its own tears - its self-pity is unbearable. Nothing happy happens in this book either. Nobody even succeeds in offing his or herself. They just live together in tragic despair into decrepit old age.

"The Awakening" - Kate Chopin. You're probably sensing a theme here, if you've read these: I don't like "woe is me" books. This is perhaps the ultimate "woe is me" book, as our tragic heroine experiences her "awakening" to her gender's oppression, experiments with her autonomy and very nearly takes a lover, and then, when the time is right to make her break from society and seek fulfillment - she goes and offs herself, unsolicited, in the ocean. Why, woman, why? You just as easily could have run away to Mexico with what's-his-face!

 

Oh my gosh, that reminds me. The Babysitter's Club, now that I think about it, was pretty awful. I remember how in the beginning of each book there was a big infodump. That always irritated me, because my thinking was "If you've read all the books before, why keep repeating the info in the beginning of every book?" No doubt for the people who would pick up book #12 in the series first and not know what was going on. But why would people do that anyway, pick up a book in the middle of the series when they haven't read the ones before it???


I say do the big infodump in the first book, and then just continue the story. Anyone who wants to understand will start where they're supposed to, with book #1, not with book #12.

I totally agree with you, Unit7.

 

"Life of Pi"
I had to read it for a book discussion club I was in and by far, that was just horrible! I mean, the main point of the book was some dude sitting in a row boat with a tiger that sure as hell was gonna eat him. I couldn't even finish it.

 

I know I'll get slammed, but Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen just PRATTLES ON. I prefer Charlotte Bronte and Jane Eyre, now THAT'S a romance story. Jane Austen is pretty cliche IMO.

 

I'll fly against popular opinion here (probably) and say that 'The Kite Runner' is a vastly over-rated and tiresome book...

 

hmm many books you just mentioned ,, they are on my 'plan to read' list

i ''h have to reconsider it again

i hate the book " why he's so last minute & she's got all wrapped up "

for Allan & Barbara pease

its just rephrasing and rewrtinig for their book ( why men dont listen &women cant read maps)

 

Any R.L. Stine book. Seriously, they're all cliche and they're all the same. He's a wannabe horror writer. Every book he has is dreadful....well, maybe one or two are good. I can remember maybe two or three that I liked, but that's it. And he writes so much, and each book is crappier than the last.

 

You know i read that book, then listened to it on E format and had a totally different experience with it.

 

The Hound of the Baskervilles. I know, classic Sherlock Holmes. I just can't go on with the whole dialogue of the book. I had to read it over the summer for school, and I never understood any of it.

 

I had to read it for school too, and I didn't particularly like it but I managed to force myself to read it. At least it was short.

 

I can't remember the title, but it was the sequel to The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The sequel was unbearably long and it droned. I couldn't understand much of it, either. That's the only E. A. Poe story I don't like.

 

Ugh, the outsiders, the plot was ridiculous and it was just so awful. The author tried to make the characters perfect; genius, athletic, lots of friends. Never read it.

 

Oh my god!! My thoughts EXACTLY!

We just read it in school and it was horrible!!! The plot had the potential to be good, but it was wrecked by the author's limited skills. No idea how it got to be in print.

 

The Dreaming Tree by C.J. Cherryh.

So. Terrible.

For those of you who haven't read her- don't. Here's a good comparison to what she's like:

I love Peter Jackson. Big fan of his films.
But, he tends to overuse slow motion. If you look for it, it's pretty easy to notice. Now imagine if he shot an entire film in slow motion. A film where every single action, every single sentence spoke by every single character has some cosmic, universal effect on everything. Irritated yet?

Yeah, so that's pretty much what The Dreaming Tree is like.

 

Haha, I got free two copies of The Outsiders from my bank or something, I can't remember, but anyway I didn't get past the first couple of pages. It sounded good but it actually wasn't from what I read.

 

Dante's Inferno. I'm sure the guy is a brilliant poet - he wouldn't have survived otherwise so long - but I just couldn't get past the disgusting subject matter.

 

My mind just blanks the awful books, but a few stand out:
Oliver Twist - boring !
Storm Born ( Richelle Mead ) - riddled with spelling and grammar errors, not to mention cliches. I can't comment on the story futher than Chap 3 because I binned it - and I don't normally do that to books. I at least use them as ass paper first.
Twilight - nuff said
Harry Potter - I tried the first book, couldn't get past page 1, seriously.
The Green Dwarf by Charlotte Bronte - hilarious, but for the wrong reasons
101 Days of Sodom - well my own fault for picking it up in the first place I guess. No wonder it was banned, still should be IMO.

Most of the books I had to read in school, I enjoyed, but there was one I HATED with a vengeance - Wide Sargasso Sea. Please, please someone tell me why this piece of turgid fanfic made it onto the curriculum ?! Even Jane Eyre wasn't that bad....

 

the only book that i have never read through to the end (and consequently threw across the room in frustration) was "Don Quijote". The guy got his helmet stuck on his head in page five and i just gave up.

though i have to admit, "The Outsiders" was not one of my favorite books i had to read in junior high either :/