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

The only person I have ever heard recommend that book has a vampire fetish. Just sayin'.

 

A lot of girls like it.

 

Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger
The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

all were incredible snooze-fests and poorly written, and I have a hard time finding any redeeming features at all about them...


oh, yeah..and Lotr. I got to page 96 and then i couldn't go on. the hobbits had run into the black rider twice by then and it wasn't exciting or interesting at all...

 

I absolutely hated Twilight. There is no though required in reading these books. That's a problem to me. I know some people like them, and I don't want to start anything. That's just my opinion.

I also hated every Dan Brown book that I've ever picked up. That has nothing to do with controversial issues, though. His plots are too predictable, and they really weren't that entertaining.

 

The more i read Brown's books, the more i feel that too. Although the first time reading Angels and Demons i was impressed. I really hate Da Vinci Code, especially in comparison to it's predecessor. The hype, god, the hype!

 

Heart of Darkness by Josef Conrad.

It was a drag from start to finish, I barely survived to the end. Its only around 100 pages!

 

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne. I wasn't forced to read this, well not by anybody but myself. It was such a chore to get through; the numerous two page descriptions of the various types of sea creatures pulled in by the net of the Nautilus, the numerous descriptions of the various sea creatures he saw through the transparent walls of the salloon; I couldn't relate to any of the characters... I could go on .

The action scenes were O.K., though I didn't like the mass slaughter of the animals, even though they were only fictional.

Though it was a good intellectual read, and I did get a fair bit out of it, I was bored for the vast majority of the read.

 

Mortal Engines the third time round...I read all the good books I can lay my hands on at least twice but having enjoyed mortal engines twice a third time with teenagers who can't talk expressively reading it out at a snails pace...meh.

 

Mortal Engines was a strange one. My favourite is the third book, I think, although I liked the fourth too... my favourite character was Shrike once I read those, who's very weakly written in book one, you could say.

 

The Stranger by Albert Camus

I had to read this book in high school and I absolutely hated it. It was a boring read and I have never been a big fan of existentialism. The book flustered me so much I wanted to throw it against the wall.

I'm also not a fan of Dan Brown. I tried to read the Da Vinci Code when everyone seemed to be praising it and I couldn't get past the first few pages. I thought the idea was interesting but I hated his style. Usually if I like the plot I can choke through a book but I couldn't even do that with this book.

 

I tried to read Jurassic Park when I was 13 or 14 because I loved the movie. It was so, so boring.

 

The Inheritance Cycle by: Christopher Paolini. I found the books a boring version of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Only the last 100 pages were the good pages!

 

The current book i'm reading at the moment for an English Assignment is absolutely dreadful.

It is title; "Looking For Alibrandi" and won a ****-ton of awards in Australia. It is insanely boring, and I knew i'd hate it when in the second chapter the main character introduces her friends with a name, and then listing several qualities. Nothing memorable in it at all.

 

Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

I know I will get lynched for this; but I've got a copy of this novel that was published during the 1980s and it was just plain awful! So many grammatical errors and so many phrases that irritated me! I was not impressed. It may have been the particular copy I had - I don't really care if it is - but I have no intention of reading another Dickens for the foreseeable future.

 

First Post y'all!

I can't honestly say that I "Hate" any novel, but I do personally dislike a few. The first that comes to mind is Cell by Stephen King, or Dracula by Bram Stoker. (I do plan on revisiting Dracula in the near-future though for a second-chance.) I also had to read The Hound of Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for my English class.

 

worst one...

had to be the Grapes of Wrath...I had to write a book report on it for my econ class in high school. It was sooooo long and sometimes it was boring.

 

Worst book ever: The New Testament Code by Robert Eisman.

Having read some of the posts... I actually liked some of the books people picked as worst. There are many, many books I've read that were average, or mediocre, and some have picked above-average books here. To each his own, of course.

For me, the prize goes to a book that I read... or started to read, I didn't finish it... not because I had to read it, but because it sounded interesting to me.

It was a nonfiction book, of the "unusual/shocking theories on religion involving the Gnostics and the Dead Sea Scrolls" sort, similar to "Holy Blood/Holy Grail" which became famous after Dan Brown used the ideas in his "Da Vinci Code."

(I also read Holy Blood/Holy Grail, and would call it "okay, but not great.")

This book was called "The New Testament Code," by Robert Eisman.

I knew it would be a challenge because the book is large... over 1,000 pages, and the pages have small print and not very large margins, so they're densely packed pages. Somehow (on retrospect, I'm not sure how or why I did it) I read about 100 pages of the thing.

I still don't know what the book was actually about. It was some odd theory involving James, the brother of Jesus, and the cup of Christ. I was very disappointed because I was curious to know what the man's theories were, but I just couldn't get there.

The man might be a learned scholar, but he's no writer. Despite densely-packed pages of very small print, his run on sentences went for miles, almost without comma to allow a pause. By the end of each sentence, I had no idea what the sentence was about, and he seemed to have to go to Jupiter and back to finish a thought. I learned to my dismay that this was not his first book, and much was devoted to defending the attacks on his theories in his first book, assuming that I (the reader) was familiar both with his first book and with the attacks made against his theories. I, not knowing either his first book or the attacks on his theories, had no idea what he was talking about, but I could tell that he felt very much on the defensive.

These defenses would be inserted in the middle of a sentence, in which he'd go off on a long tangent about the horrible attacks on his previous book, and then come back to his sentence, and then go off on a tangent again, and then finish his sentence, I suspect, writing about 100-1,000 words (which felt like it approached infinity) before inserting a period at the end of the sentence.

He lost me, and I tried to find his point, I tried for 100 pages to find his point, but found myself swimming, my eyes going over the words without comprehension, because his sentences were incomprehensible.

I sincerely believe that a good editor could reduce the book to about 50 pages that might be very fascinating, by cutting all the garbage and the long, self-indulgent tangents and whining defenses of his previous book. As it was, it was too much work for too little insight.

I suspect, if he read my post, he'd assume that he's just too intelligent, or that I'm just too stupid, to get his points. That's not it. One who is intelligent, and is also a good writer, can take something very complex, and make it a good, compelling read. One who is a very bad writer can take something that's very simple, and make it complex and incomprehensible to the reader. That is what the author did in this book.

Truthfully, I find alternative views on the origins of Christianity fascinating. I don't consider them gospel (pun intended). I don't assume they're false either. I keep an open mind with a healthy skepticism and an interested look at the facts and analyses of the writings. I've read many books on the Gnostics, and was reading them before Dan Brown made them famous. (My favorites in the genre include the works by Elaine Pagels and the "Q Gospel" by Burton Mack.)

This book was truly horrible, and the reason is that it was poorly written, with sentences that went everywhere and lead nowhere. His theories might actually be very compelling. It was just too much work to find out what his theories actually are.

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I must add a dis-honorable mention, though fans of this book will want to kill me:

I read the book "Outlander," the first in a very popular series of historical fiction books, a time-travel fantasy with a twist of romance. I liked the book very much... UNTIL... the scene where the romantic "hero" beats up the heroine of the story, spanking her with a leather strap until she was bloody, and it's made light of... the woman-beating, the sexism and the glorification of spousal abuse... I just found morally repugnant. I could not get through the rest of the story... I was supposed to continue liking and sympathizing with this character, but instead, I found myself loathing him and wishing that the next scene would be the man's head getting chopped off. I came to utterly despise the character I was supposed to like. Consider the book highly un-recommended.


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Just remembered another dis-honorable mention, this one on the grounds of being dangerous, offensive, and contrary to its source:

The Left Behind series. Intended for evangelical Christians as an explanation of Revelation, this series, while certainly well written in terms of grammar and holding the reader's interest, is a perversion of actual Biblical teaching, their depictions of non-Christians and people deemed unworthy by the high-and-mighty (judgmental) authors, people such as atheists and homosexuals, are stereotypical figures and offensive cardboard cut-outs. I found the one book in the series that I read detestable, and expect the others are like it.

 

The worst stuff I've read have been unpublished/vanity press published novels. For something you can buy in an actual store, I think the only book I've ever regretted buying was the collected works of Amelia Lanier. It did nothing for me- I was very disappointed. Only one of my books from University I didn't keep. I've also been struggling with one of my recent purchases- David B Coe's The Sorcerer's Plague. As of 77 pages in, it's been all info-dumps, which is frustrating as I bought the book to research ways writers have introduced plagues into magic-heavy settings.

 

Letters from the Inside.
Can't remember who wrote it, but I had to read it for school. The writing itself wasn't all that bad, though I can't say I was fond of it being an epistle style it was written in. But there was no ending... seriously, one of the characters just stopped sending letters. No explaination... (Oh, my! Sorry for that massive end spoiler...)

 

One of my favourite blogs, Slacktivist, wrote a detailed deconstruction of the first book. Based on his findings, I can only agree that Left Behind is one of the worst books ever written that achieved some sort of commercial success. The only part of your statement I disagree with is about the quality of Left Behind's writing.

 

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever - Stephen R. Donaldson.

Awful. It's one of those fantasys where it seems like you have to learn another language just to understand what the hell they are talking about. There are way too many songs and poems in it, none of which make the least bit of sense. Plus the main charcter is a rapist, so i can hardly like him or pity him.

 

I liked this book, but I certainly did not like Dickens' writing style. Far too verbose and wordy to be of any use to me - by the end of the book I was quite annoyed. The story was good though, and it did have a lot of merits. You can see here where a lot of modern cliches came from. I also liked how the Oliver Twist character was used as a sort of catalyst for the events unfolding around him, rather than any kind of invincible protagonist.

And people dislike Dracula? Come on.

 

I keep a copy of 'Uninvited' By Justine Muse on hand so whenever I feel bad about my own work; I can look at hers and feel like i can write circles around anybody.
It's one of those Youth Fictions bull **** novels about a girl who finds somebody she loves(her brother) is connected to the Occult!
Now I know whenever people say 'said' is the invisible word. They were wrong. When it comes after or before every piece of dialog. Even when a character is alone, or only talking to one other person. It's disgusting.

 

Perhaps I was a bit generous regarding the execution. I did only read one of them, in the middle of the series. I still think it was grammatically correct and well-paced, and probably well executed as a propagandist work, but had horrible content offensive to the thinking mind, including to the religious thinking mind, and was indeed, propaganda.

I'd like to throw one more out there that I just remembered:

Michael Crichton's State of Fear. Because of it, I will never read another Michael Crichton book again.

This was a propaganda book intended to convince the reader that global warming doesn't exist. I will not be as generous about the execution either: I found the story lame, the propaganda poorly executed, and logically fallacious, and the conspiracy outlandish and false. More importantly, it is contrary to real science, and assuming its truth is dangerous.

Many religious people screamed about the Da Vinci Code (a great novel, by the way), but were either silent or praised State of Fear and Left Behind.

Da Vinci Code, and the idea that Jesus had a relationship with Mary Magdalene, NEVER motivated hate. Left Behind does.

Da Vinci Code also never motivated disregard for our environment. State of Fear does.

By the way, although I haven't read the blog, I'd like to see something like that written as a book. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of books debunking Da Vinci Code. We need a book debunking Left Behind.

 

The Ragwitch - Gath Nix can write and I am still amazed he followed this complete train wreck of a novel with the Fantastic Old Kingdom Series. Nix implies lots, explains nothing in a series of undeveloped ideas and sequences any of which might actually have made a decent story, but collectively justdon't gell.

Foundation and Earth - I felt like I was reading a 400 page essay. Chraracters debate everything, always at length. Pages of pages of debate, followed by characters actually doing something for a couple of pages then debating about it.