When I was an undergraduate, a friend of mine wrote a book review of the bible for the student newspaper.
The opening sentence was: "Not since Naked Lunch has such a boring book been saved by the constant barrage of sadomasochistic homosexual pornography."
Yep. Bible. Pretentious, boring and way too much first - person stuff.
Best-selling work of fiction amirite
I wonder how many just check out when they get to the list of begats
the begats ain't so bad, it's only a couple short bits in the first book, as i recall, which is otherwise one of the best books that i read, with lots of relatively interesting short stories. the worst part in the early first books that i read in their entirety would have to be in exodus, where god spends ages going on and on to moses about the precise details of his dream tent. it feels like it goes on for a hundred pages, and then, a few chapters later, he does it all again.
I don't know if this counts, but when I was about 13I was very excited to find an enormous book in my favorite genre at the time, Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard.
It was the first book I ever put down in disgust without finishing. In the almost half-century since then, there are under a dozen that I haven't finished. Shows you just how bad it is.
I read all of Mission Earth. All 12(?) volumes. I couldn't possibly say why - I hated it.
I would love to hear more about this. Those books are SO long
Well, I think I figured out by book nine that it was never going to get any better, but by that point there were only three books to go and they weren't exactly difficult reads. Maybe I was hate-reading. "Will you continue failing to meet my expectations L. Ron Hubbard, you miserable cunt? I bet you will."
And I have a tendency to think that any satire is brilliant and biting and I'm just not worldly enough to get it.
As a young teen scifi nerd I enjoyed the world, and tech he built in that book. I read the 600+ pages pretty quick. I think I was too young to critique it as a literary work.
The movie was absolute garbage.
I tried reading his "Mission Earth" series. I did not finish the series; I managed about two and a half books before I realized that I wasn't obligated to finish it just because I'd started.
Oh man, I really enjoyed Battlefield Earth. And the movie. What turned you off?
Even as a 13-year-old, I could see gaping holes in the plot and inconsistencies. The aliens were hardly alien.
Even more so, I could see that the writing was clumsy and the dialogue was stilted. I could see how the writer was developing the story, and so I was not pulled into it at all. I was actually thinking to myself that I could write something like this. And I was 13!
I haven't seen the movie, but from the sounds of it many of the problems with the book are also on screen.
The bible. Inconsistent, unethical, and immoral.
Tried a few times and can never get past the first few chapters.
LOL. Try the Quran, it has the same characters and same stories but written in a way that makes much more natural reading
Thanks, but no thanks. :)
I haven't read the entire book, but I've read like 10 pages of Fifty Shades of Grey when my then-girlfriend was reading it. Besides the story and subject matter, the writing itself is horrible.
First 10 pages was probably the bulk of the story; the rest was just email replies.
Never read it, just some parts here and there because a girlfriend was reading it and it was hilarious LOL The descriptions are supposed to be sexy or alluring or god knows what but they are so cringey! It took me a bit to understand that my friend was reading it seriously.
that's an easy one, Atlas Shrugged
That is, still, to this day, the only book I could not finish.
Got about 2/3rds of the way through it and violently set it down. I love books too much to set it on fire, but I wanted to. It was the worst pile of shit I've ever read in my life. Completely divorced from reality.
And she died penniless and depending on the support of the same social services that she demonized in her book to convince people that capitalist leaders are paragons of humanity and the rest of us are just peons.
It's the cliche answer for good reason. I think I appreciated it better than most people who hate it, and I still barely finished it for class. All the clumsy symbolism and retro-futuristic sci-fi schlock was right up my alley. The premise about rich terrorists absconding with all of the fucking money... not so much. The whole third act is just Ayn Rand's vengeance fantasy about killing everyone who ever failed to agree with her hard enough. I was skimming through by that point, and still had to double-take and re-read where her derision toward "looters" included farmers.
My final paper roundly calling it a bloated screed by a mediocre author largely criticized it on its own terms and still turned vicious. John Galt is is among the worst monsters in literature because he wouldn't feel satisfied having his name carved into the face of the moon in recognition of everything solved with his infinite energy glitch. Any mere worker acting as Rand insisted they should died in the apocalypse her tradwife-cosplaying nobility deliberately caused. It is a bad story about bad people told badly by a bad person, and the worst part is that it's so fucking boring.
That said, we watched the black and white adaptation of The Fountainhead mid-semester, and it kinda works. Big surprise that the woman who hired an editor purely to check for typos had a more cogent opinion about authorship than she did about economics or human interaction. Probably helps that the movie's over in two hours. Definitely helps that Gary Cooper can get it.
I was far too young to read Animal Farm. I thought it was going to be like Charlotte's Web. I did not have any of the historical or political context for the metaphor. It just made me angry.
Left Behind. I'm probably a huge idiot for not realizing for the entire thing without knowing before hand what the context was, but I read it with the idea that it was some kind of apocalyptic sci-fi, and then only in the very last few pages of the book did it finally hit me in the face that it was religious doomsday bullshit. I do have to compliment it for the storytelling and world setting, but holy shit was I disappointed with the end direction 🤦
You should see the movie. It stars nic cage and he did it as a favor to a friend. It's fucking awful. funny thing though, my story is identical to yours. Had no idea until it was too late lol.
I didn't finish the last couple books, but I did enjoy it fully knowing the subject matter was about Revelations. I mostly read it as a kid and re-read for a bit as an adult. I did not grow up in a religious household. There was a point though where the books went a little too off the rails, and I gave up.
Ready Player One
The cringe is massive with that one.
The entire thing is the author wanking himself silly over his knowledge of pop culture references from his childhood. Some of it reads like it was written by a 14 year old who isn’t all that into books.
The bit about the gaming suit that wanks the user off but also means you’re exercising so you get fit from wearing it was honestly one of the cringiest things I’ve ever read. If I thought the author was capable of the level of self reflection required, I’d have thought writing that part of the book was him acknowledging that the book is literally a work of literary masturbation.
It should have received the same response as The Room; a bad book only made into a cult classic by the people laughing at it.
I enjoyed Ready Player One at the time even though some of it was just ridiculous. Re-enacting Ferris Buellers Day Off for example.
Armada, Cline's next book was awful. So many references on every page, I stopped reading. I remember a line that was something like, "my mum wouldn't let me past, like Gandelf in the mines of Moria." Sheesh! Let it go!
I fully read Ready Player Two but the guy has no story telling abilities. Every time the main character encounters a problem, e.g. I need a level 49 sword to get past this problem, but there's no way to get one, it was always solved with the same solution, "oh, I own the game and all Admins have level 1000 swords because we do!"
I think I reached my limit when he managed to shove in a Shaun of the Dead reference just because he mentioned a cricket bat!
The Silmarillion.
Probably the only book I excitedly pushed myself to read, but just couldn't.
The Silmarillion is one of my favourite books, but I totally get this. Unless you’re really into Tolkien’s world as well as this style of book it’s not a fun read.
That was actually my favorite Tolkien book. He was a terrible fiction writer with an excellent story to tell... but when he was writing non-fiction style in the Silmarillion he was really in his element... and/or the posthumous editing was top notch.
I had the same experience with the two towers. I can't watch the movie of the two towers. And I can't make it more than 60 or 70 pages into the book before my brain gives up and says they've been walking through the fucking Hills and talking to the trees for 30 pages this is some bullshit.
Maybe I'm cutting myself short by not pushing through but I just literally cannot build up the energy it takes to push through this wall of infinite text.
Wizard’s First Rule by Terry BrooksGoodkind. I suffered through the whole thing because I was young enough that I thought that’s what you should do when you’ve started a book, but I was also old enough to know that it was very bad. I’ve heard many people say they read it as teens and loved it, but I assure you, it does not hold up.
I don’t know if it’s the absolute worst I ever read but the parts I read were pretty bad. At some point I was like “What kinda Ayn Rand bullshit is this?” and quit reading. It turns out that he was a Ayn Rand make-super-improbable-and-convoluted-examples-in-my-fictional-fantasy-world-to-justify-terrible-political-views school of writing type guy.
It’s probably not the worst for me either but it’s easily the first thing I think of. Really left a bad taste I guess.
In the later books they accidentally open a portal to the part of the world where there are communists and for a while afterwards Richard finds himself unable to eat cheese as penance for all the communists he's killing but then he realizes that communists are so evil it's ok to kill them so he can eat cheese again
I read a bunch of those books because my roommate was in love with them. It established an idea of a writing flaw in my mind that I called "The Heirachy of Cool". Basically the guy practically has an established character list of who is the coolest. Whichever character in any given scene is at the top of the hierarchy is mythically awesome. They have their shit together, they are functionally correct in their reasoning, they lead armies, they pull off grand maneuvers, they escape danger whatever...
But anyone below them in the Heirachy turn into complete morons who serve as foils to make the people above them seem more awesome whenever they share page time together. These characters seem to have accute amnesia about stuff that canonically happened very recently (in previous books) so they can complicate things for the hierarchy above, they usually make poor decisions due to crisises of faith in people above them in the hierarchy... But because that hierarchy is infallible it's predictable. Less cool never is proven right over more cool.
... Until that same character is suddenly alone and they go from being mid of the hierarchy to the top and all of a sudden they have iron wills and super competence...
Once I caught onto that pattern it became intolerable to continue.
Remember when Richard defeated the evils of socialism without his magic by pulling himself up by his bootstraps really really hard by (without practice or training) carving a really really good statue and all the lazy worthless slacker librulls were like dang, I love capitalism now, and then everyone looked directly into the metaphorical camera and said "Communism: Don't let it happen to you"?
To be honest no... Because I think I violently expunged it from my memory and mind as my brain probably interpreted it as some kind of threat to my cells.
Funniest part of that was that Terry Goodkind clearly did not know anything about socialist realism
That was the beginning of the end for me. I think by the time I got to that part the series had already been going downhill but I remember that being a really sharp turning point.
I tried to press on a little further. The introduction of the straw man nation with the innocent child king who's only existence was to be blown the fuck out by the brilliance of objectivism is when I finally decided I just couldn't go on.
On a somewhat lower pedestal: Eragon. What a hugely derivative poorly written piece of crap. I've run D&D campaigns with better dialogue and pacing than that.
Oh yes I agree! And I’m a huge dragon fan, so it was extremely disappointing. That one I gave up on after maybe 50 pages. I couldn’t get past the prose. So I didn’t even get to the heavily recycled tropes, but I did see the movie once and they were plenty obvious from that.
I got to "Barges? BARGES? We don't need no steenkingBARGES" and threw the book away
What I remember most vividly from that series is how absolutely bone-chilling everything about the Confessors were. You could absolutely have a really cool and interesting fantasy series in which they're the main villains, but Terry Goodkind's political views just wouldn't allow it.
Or even just digging into their internal struggles due to the inherent loneliness that their powers creates. Instead we got a wierd post period sex blowjob to Richard role playing as his brother or something stupid that I can't remember
Glad I've blocked that out
Wizards First Rule is Goodkind not Brooks, Brooks wrote Shanarra
Ack thank you, I mix them up even though I’ve never read Brooks, who seems to be better loved.
I'd rate them about the same, personally. Though Brooks is at least just derivative and juvenile; Goodkind gets increasingly self indulgent.
Damn I legit liked this book, one of my top series. I just enjoyed the magic system, the antagonists, and the over the top nature. I might just have bad taste though lol.
Me too, friend.
After ruminating on it though, everything I liked was just lifted from better works.
Leatherclad red-themed group of women who enjoy causing pain and are able to negate men's magic? Red ajah.
What other examples are there?
I for sure see the links between SoT and Wheel of Time. I started seeing a lot of things lifted after reading both. But I still find myself liking both for different reasons. I dunno, I've accepted that I do like some things that are generally viewed as "bad" and I've come to terms with it haha.
Yeah but some things are bad because they are deliberately trying to make you bad too
Maybe. But I think it matters of entertainment it's not as evil as that. Sure engaging with bad media might fuel them to repeat that behavior, but IMO if it harms no one it's not an issue. Like for example I've read the SoT series a few times and I'm not a Marxist or what have you.
Ahh I think you've misunderstood.
He's a raging, obnoxious capitalist who thinks poor people are poor because they don't try.
Haha that's how much I missed it I guess. Well I do appreciate you clarifying that, I never got a good, concise answer about what people we're hating on it for.
"The Cat Who Walked through Walls" by Robert Heinlein...
Now Heinlein is usually kind of obnoxiously sexist so having a book that opens with what appears to be an actual female character with not just more personality than a playboy magazine centerfold, but what seems like big dick energy action heroesque swagger felt FRESH. Strong start as you get this hyper competent husband and wife team quiping their way through adventures in the backwoods hillbilly country of Earth's moon with their pet bonsai tree to stop a nefarious plot with some promised dimensional McGuffin.
Book stalls out in the middle as they end up in like... A swinger commune. They introduce a huge number of characters all at once alongside this whole poly romantic political dynamic and start mulling over the planning stage of what seems like a complicated heist plot. Feels a lot like a sex party version of the Council of Elrond with each of these characters having complex individual dramas they are in the middle of resolving...
Aaaand smash cut. None of those characters mattered. We are with the protagonist, the heist plan failed spectacularly off stage and we are now in his final dying moments where we realized that cool wife / super spy set him up to fail like a chump at this very moment for... reasons? I dunno, Bitches amirite?
First time I ever finished a book and threw it angrily into the nearest wall.
I feel that a lot with Heinlein. Starts good with an interesting premise, becomes weirdly sexual, and the ending leaves you wondering whether the premise even mattered.
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is one of my fave books in the genre if I just ignore 1/3 of it.
I can't really remember of all time, but recently I started reading Dune: Messiah, and I had to stop reading it was so bad. I might be in the minority but the tonal shifts, changes in character attitudes, and jumping right into these assassination plots, all of it just came out weird and misplaced. Definitely did not slap with even 1/4th the power of Dune.
Herbert didn't want to continue Dune and was pressured to write a follow up. It was an era when most science fiction was still published in periodicals. The first half of Messiah are the results that were then compiled into the start. It is like a really shitty draft. Everyone experiences the same thing. I put it down for quite a while too. If you can make it to the second half, it will become one you can't put down, like the first. It does setup well for what is to come. After I got back into Messiah, I read all the way to the end of the entire series, even the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson stuff. Those last two are not like Frank's writings, but are their own thing and still more readable than the first half of Messiah. IMO the first half of Messiah is a great example of what happens when Art takes a back seat to an anxious banking type mentality. Bankers make terrible artists and advisors.
GEoD is IMO the best book in the series as it eviscerates many cultural norms and deep assumptions like fascist altruism, eternal boredom, the coexistence of misogyny and feminism, manipulation that is both brutal and kind, and if an alien can be human. It even infers the question of potential delusional prescience in my opinion. It will make you think about the motivation of leaders and what you may endure because of their vision of a future.
Hell yeah this is great to hear, thank you. I'll have to open it back up and try again. Then its time to read the Foundation.
The two prequels to foundation are awesome, don't miss them.
Don't read the prequels by Brin and Bear, they are not only awful but also steer the lore into really dumb place which i'm pretty sure was not intended by Asimov. Though to be honest the two prequels by Asimov are also much worse than the main series.
I mean, none of that is true, and Herbert stated he had parts of Messiah and Children written before Dune was even finished.
In the forward to Heretics of Dune: "Parts of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune were written before Dune was completed. They fleshed out more in the writing, but the essential story remained intact."
A sequel to Dune (1965), it was originally serialized in Galaxy magazine in 1969, and then published by Putnam the same year.
I forget where the rushed admission and poor quality was blamed on the periodical and premature release, but am certain that is somewhere out there.
Parts of the serialized story were fleshed out and became Dune.
I read the first four dune books this year and I think they all suffer from the same problem, that is they have interesting characters, original lore, great world building, but nothing interesting happens until the very ending of the book. They all felt like a slog to get through to me.
Wait until you get to chapterhouse!
An introduction to organic chemistry
I feel you. Sorry you had to go through that experience.
The bible. Set aside any religious connotations and just look at it as a piece of literature: it's terrible.
Catcher in the Rye. I try it again every couple of years just to see if I can relate to it, and nope - it's still just as stupid as the first time I read it.
Is it just the (lead) character or do you think the book itself is also shit?
Everything about the book is just dull and frustrating.
I felt the same way (spoilers for whoever hasn't read it). The protagonist just kept encountering significant people where it seems like there's going to be a struggle to overcome, leading to character development and newfound maturity, but no. He just moves on to another scene instead and they're not seen again. It was just annoying.
The teacher that feels he's not living up to his potential? The private school friends that he hangs out with but often finds frustrating? The childhood friend who he shares unexplored romantic tension with? The nuns whose meals he pays for despite having dwindling funds? The prostitute he just wants to have a conversation with? Her pimp, who attacks him? The potentially rapist family friend? For pretty much all of them a relevant conflict is initiated just for him to leave it unresolved, probably after labeling them a phony.
The only exception is his sister, who he sees like two or three times. And then the final conflict at the end is like:
"Hey sorry for taking your birthday money so I could keep wandering around these past couple of days instead of talking to our rich parents."
"That's ok, I forgive you. You're my brother and I love you. But I worry about you sometimes."
"Yeah anyway, I'm bitter about the world so I kinda want to disappear into the wilderness."
"Please don't do that."
"Ok I won't."
Canonical answer is The Homecoming Saga by Orson Scott Card, since it turns out that if the good guys have a mind controlling god computer that's always right on their side it gets really hard to have meaningful conflict.
You didn't make it past the first book??
Lucky.
DISCLAIMER: Orson Scott Card is a bad person and I have since gotten rid of my collection and tell everyone not to support him because he uses his platform to hurt marginalised groups of people for religious reasons.
Now, I would argue that you're skipping over a lot of interesting stuff.
The Overseer (mind-controlling satellite robot) was built by humans to keep rewriting human brains so they would perpetually forget how to invent the wheel until they proved that they'd evolved beyond their barbaric nature and would not go on to invent the nuclear bomb. The satellite then dies of old age millions of years later because humans are just kind of shitty. The book ends with the main character's family hopping onto an Ark rocket back to Earth aaand... Hundreds of years have passed and all the characters you've invested in emotionally are long dead, here's some bat furries I guess.
Some pretty cool ideas in there, despite who it was written by.
Now, the worst thing I have ever read was also by Orson Scott Card and I refuse to speak about it.
I did read it up until about halfway through the last book, thinking that it would eventually get better while it instead just got worse. Decided that the whole thing had been a complete waste of time besides maybe giving me a greater appreciation for the fact that the real world was less of a slog
Ooh, if you want waste of time read the Alvin Maker series. Oh but I think he wrote another one since I read them (not that I'm willing to give it the chance to change my opinion).
You're saying that the book couldve been an essay?
I don't think it would've made a very good essay either
Ooo, I was trying to think of what to answer in this thread and you just reminded me of another Orson Scott Card book, Empire.
Absolute trash. Prior to that I had read all of the Ender and Bean series and loved them. Didn't know much about Card personally, but picked up this book because it was supposed to be tied in with a video game I was looking forward too.
Reading this book is how I found out what a shitty person he really is. It was basically all him hitting you over the head with his shitty fascist ideology while jerking off to a bunch of military porn like a dollar store version of Tom Clancy. I never did play the game.
The Alchemist and Song of Achilles are some popular books that I thought were mediocre. Probably not the worst book I've ever read though.
That probably goes to Sean Hannity's Conservative Victory that my grandma gave me when I was 12.
True slop. Fuck Sean Hannity.
I enjoyed The Alchemist and The Zahir at the time, but in hindsight I think The Zahir was an elaborate cuckold fantasy. I think if I reread it I'd remember the rest of it but that's what it feels like thinking back over a decade later.
I didn't read the Zahir but I felt like The Alchemist was a shallow Siddhartha-wannabe when I read it. I couldn't help but think it was trying too hard to be profound
Mein Kampf. I read it when i was still a succdem, expecting some genius rant that converted people en masse to nazism. Instead it was barely coherent disgusting racist drivel. I guess this book didn't make anyone into nazi, it just given nazis what they would like to read. This and the fact nazi state bought huge amounts of it to distribute, making Hitler richest writer in Germany.
I'm sure I've read worse but one that stands out as making me question the time I put into reading it is Out of the Dark by David Weber. I go into it expecting a military sci fi, and for the vast majority of the book that's what you get - aliens invade Earth and plucky humans resist etc etc. The aliens however have more reserves and air superiority so are slowly winning as the end of the book approaches, at which point you expect the main characters to pull a rabbit out of the hat and do something different. Except that's not what happens.
::: spoiler spoiler
What actually happens is that Count Dracula appears out of (almost) nowhere and flies with a bunch of vampires up to the alien spaceships to kill the aliens, winning the battle for Earth.
:::
I was definitely not satisfied with this ending, even if there was some foreshadowing earlier in the book that made sense after knowing this was a possibility in this universe.
Oh man. Thank you for bringing up that repressed memory.
Moby Dick is the book I hated the most. Just the worst slog that i remember making it through.
Oh fucking hell, yes! How could I forget!? It's so loooonnnngg. There's a whole chapter that's an encyclopedia of whales.
Two chapters, IIRC.
Noooo :( I love Moby Dick.
Granted I listened to the audiobook
I know there are a lot of people who love it for the same reasons I hated it, people have different tastes.
I love Lord of the Flies because it gets to the point!
I picked it up from the library years ago on a whim and surprisingly really enjoyed it.
Well, except maybe the multiple pages long chapter about varieties of whales. That was a bit much.
Stephen King's It
Great story, but the writing was exceedingly dull, apart from the first chapter. I even tried getting through it via audiobook and still only made it halfway through. It's just a chore.
I don't get Stephen King. I've never read a thing by him that I thought warranted the accolades.
I like some of the films based on his books, but those are all punched up quite a bit.
No, King writes well. It's very much from the heart and you can relate to the emotions he lays down effortlessly on every page. I think his strength is creating mysteries, and his weakness is over-explaining said mysteries.
Maybe you relate to the emotions "he lays down effortlessly on every page", but I sure don't. If you enjoy reading King, go for it, read it, even share your opinion and preference to contrast mine.
No need to tell me my opinion is wrong. Both things can be true that you like King's writing and I don't.
When I said "No", the tone wasn't "No. You are wrong. Prepare for assimilation.", it was a gentle musical inflection of "nooo, here have a sandwich and let me tell you about the butterflies I love so much."
👍 comment retracted then. I've been getting quite a bit of "your opinions are trash" stuff lately, it's been feeling like some of the reddit subs I had blocked back in the day.
The lemmiverse has been feeling pretty active lately
I also like some of the films, so I tired to read "The Stand" as it was one of his more lauded books. My mistake was buying some anniversary edition which came in two tomes and was apparently a longer uncut version the author had initially written, that was then edited down to the produce the initial release.
Couldn't finish even half of the first tome. King writes good, but loooves to write a lot. I quickly understood why the classic version of the book was cut down so much - I was screaming for all this exposition to cut to the action finally, and it just didn't come, always being teased as being behind the corner.
Also I found out that as any classic his style has been immitated so much in literature and other media, that by now I've basically consumed a ton of Stephen King-like stories and I really don't get much more from reading his books. So I just gave up on that front, while appreciating him as an author and perpetuum-idea-generator.
I enjoyed it...until the insanely problematic ending.
It's been quite a while since I've read it, so this may not be a fair assessment. But, I fucking hatedThe Catcher in the Rye. I wasn't even required to read it for school or anything, I just did. Perhaps I just found Holden to be insufferable. I think that was the point, but it did not make it a particularly enjoyable or insightful read at all, save for the overwhelming supertext of DO NOT BE LIKE THIS GUY. The part where he hires a prostitute and just cries in front of her really stuck in my mind. That was when it really sunk in for me that someone read this book and decided that Holden's views were so accurate that he had to go shoot John Lennon with a gun for being phony. Almost unbelievable.
I'm curious at what age you read it. Because I first read it at 15 and thought it was the best book ever. I would even recommend it to people for years.
Then I read it again in my late 20s and had the same reaction you did. I thought he just came off as a whiny little shit. I still feel embarrassed that I recommended that book to people for over 10 years.
I remember telling my wife this after I reread it (she was someone I recommended it to) and she was like, "yeah, I didn't want to say anything at the time, but I hated it."
When I was 13 I thought "You go Holden! Tell off all those phonies!" At 18 I thought "This whiny asshole won't stfu." Then as an adult I realized "Oh, poor kid was dealing with a lot of unaddressed trauma."
Then as an adult I realized "Oh, poor kid was dealing with a lot of unaddressed trauma."
I hadn't thought of that angel before. That's actually a really good way to look it.
It was the end of 9th grade, so I was 15 or 16. I read it immediately after To Kill a Mockingbird, which did not make it look good in comparison 😂
Well 15 year old you had much better taste than 15 year old me
It's gotten worse over the years, don't worry ;)
My top recommended movie right now is Freddy Got Fingered
the Piers Anthony novelization of the movie Total Recall. it's very bad!
I haven't read that, but his original novel Firefly is the only book I ever threw away instead of adding it to my collection shelves or trading it back to the used book store. It's horrifically gross. One of the main characters is shown in a flashback enthusiastically participating in her rape as a five year old. Anthony is a problematic writer already, but this was way worse than I could have guessed.
I read all the Xanth novels as a teenager and it probably made my brain mushy. More mushy.
My brain is just very mushy. The first few books were okay..ish, but they just got worse. And not just in a sexist way, but also a poorly written way.
Yeah, they were fine for my low standards as a young teenager, but I reread a couple and they aren't great. Heck, book one has the MC making an amicus brief on the wrong side of a rape trial.
Yeah, its a book series I'll leave in the past where it belongs!
Read the first book as a kid, thought it was pretty good, but was put off by all the sex stuff. Started reading the second book when I saw it in a library when I was about 15, and couldn't get through the first chapter because of how sexist it was.
Three Body Problem.
Same for me
I just had a friend tell me he loved the whole series (with caveats), why didn't you like it?
The handwaving "science" part. And then in the end there's this deus ex machina plot point that comes out that makes all the rest of the plot utterly pointless.
I've read a lot of SF, that was the worst because I had such high hope for it after reading what everyone had to say about it. And it turned me off reading anything that's won a Hugo entirely. That and Redshirts...
That definitely makes sense. What's a good SF book you've read recently?
Mainly short story anthologies for the last year. Been bingeing Dozois' Years Best series and moved into Strahan's recently.
Oh nice, thanks for the recommendations
It really puts your suspension of disbelief to the test, and all the characters are terrible. I actually thought the netflix show was better than the book because the characters were alot more relatable.
Yeah same here, I thought it was one of the few cases where the adaptation was better than the book. It cuts out a lot of the waffle from the books and patches up lots of holes, especially with characters like you said.
Yah, totally forgot to mention how horrendously bad the characters were. Like 50's SF bad.
Oh yeah this one was really bad.
Absolutely agreed. Three body problem is overhyped garbage.
bit of a cheat but 120 Days of Sodom
The one redeeming part is the guy who fucks a horse and it gives birth to a half man half horse and then the fucks that
the rest is descriptions of pedophilia, coprophagy and torturing children to death.
The movie was good! No horse fucking, though.
You thought Saló was good? It may not have had horse fucking but it definitely has everything else.
It was an insane movie that made a very poignant statement with some INSANELY FUCKED UP imagery, scenes, and themes. I’ve never read the book but I went into Saló looking for a shock film like August Underground, and went away thinking “that was so much less shitty than I thought it would be.”
50 Shades… terrible writing and the sex was boring AF. The books were recommended to me. I couldn’t get through the first one. Time I’ll never get back.
The first 5 or so of Trump's books. No meaningful lessons in business to be had. Just him bragging about people he knew, people he'd screwed over, how good he thought he was at pretty much everything. How he got back at anyone who crossed him. Insufferable. I knew he was one of the worst people ever before he even mentioned getting into politics.
And in those 5 books, he probably name-dropped every New York socialite he ever met. It's consistent with his whole image of self-worth and needing to look and feel important. You know who he didn't mention? Someone we've seen him with in several photos? Who he definitely would have mentioned if there wasn't a reason not to? Jeffrey Epstein.
I have to ask what possessed you to not give up after the first couple
I already bought the books + it was like watching a car accident. I just couldn't believe this guy was a successful businessman.
Spoiler: he wasn't. It was "The Apprentice" that made his fortune, before that it was just him squandering an inheritance.
[My initial reply got posted top- level for some reason]
True, he straight up admits many times in the books that he would lie about his wealth so that other people would work with him. I assume that came out during his fraud case in NY.
He had a few deals that worked out - all starting with dad's money. He managed to squander 4 out of 5 of everything he tried. Casinos in Atlantic City, Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Ice, Wollman Rink, etc. It's a long list. But the 1 or 2 that worked is why he has any money at all. If I remember correctly, it's mostly the golf courses and an option he bought in the 70s for an old railroad yard in lower west side Manhatten I think. He really fucked someone over on that one. He bragged about how much he screwed them for pages and pages. Like it brought him more joy to fuck someone over than it did to have a success. He's a complete psychopath.
Mine is "the catcher in the rye".
The main character is insufferable and not enough bad things happened to him to make it worth reading the book.
War and Peace. Heard so many good things about it. Despite everything, went in not having super high expectations.
The whole book turned out like a reality tv show. All the characters had some petty drama that they blew out of proportion. Hundreds of pages where nothing really happens, people just complain or bad mouth other characters.
I had to stop half way through.
I could only make a few pages in to the first chapter, it was hard to read, very, very detailed, which should be a good thing but I found myself losing track of where we even were or what the scene was about for all the detail. Once they started describing the buttons on the coat of one of the characters and how it had been the fashion some years prior at some point in the 19th century to wear them that way... I gave up. I'd like to try again some time but I can't see myself experiencing it differently. Curious about the 7 years in the making Soviet film adaptation, but its also 7 hours long.
I really liked the series with Paul Dano
That looks really well done. And a lot of stuff would be condensed by having viduals.
Doesn’t look like my preferred style… Maybe that’s why I couldn’t get into the book either 😅
I tried reading the book but it was too much for me, so the series was easier to follow.
I also tried listening to an audio book of tale of two cities but couldn't get past the narrator constantly changing voices and accents for characters. I prefer when they just read
The sookie stackhouse books that got turned into true blood have such a fun premise but are appallingly written. A friend and I used to play the audiobooks at parties for laughs.
The worst book I've ever read has to be 1984.
The book is excellent, but did not do good things for me so it goes down as the worst
Did you ever contrast it with Brave New World? In many ways the latter is more disturbing since the masses are kept busy with frivolity to question their world.
Oh, interesting. I always see Huxley's later Island as the counter to his Brave New World. Interesting to place all three side by side.
I gave up on Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close after one chapter. No wonder neurotypicals think autistics are just insufferable nobs.
Ayn Rand's fountainhead, by a fat mile. I was young and didn't know better
God, me too. I thought I was too dumb to "get it".
I listened to Atlas Shrugged as an audio book and it was ok at best. One massive criticism of communism and how it doesn't work but suggested anarchist society as the solution. Weird rape-y sex scene in the middle also. Should have stuck with the social criticism instead of anarco capitalism utopia stuff and it'd have been good.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. If you could distill pure insufferable smugness into a liquid, this was him squirting it into your mouth while you’re not paying attention and laughing at you while you sputter and gag.
The Great Gatsby.
I've read a lot of books, but that one I literally remember nothing about. Not a quote, not a character, not the plot... All I remember is the cover was some weird abstract art piece with creepy eyes, my brain purged everything else about it book. Probably for my own sanity.
A book called The Night by a Venezuelan author.
I feel a bit bad saying this because there are definitely worse books but this one stuck with me as the premise sounded really interesting but the book was nothing like it.
There is a review on goodreads that sums it up pretty nicely.
Literature about literature, books about books, literature about books, books about literature, literature about literature, books about books, ...
I was assigned Ethan Frome in a high school lit class and to this day I think it is one of the worst books to assign to emotional, angsty, experience-limited teens.
I also don't understand why Romeo and Juliet is the go-to Shakespeare work that we default to.
How do we handle complex romantic relationships? Suicide / attempted suicide, of course! Just what every teen needs to hear /s
Possibly because Romeo and Juliet were stupid teenagers and and part of the tragedy is about the impulsiveness of youth. A good teacher can sometimes get that across, but I suspect it doesn't really sink in. And if they didn't teach it with A Midsummer Night's Dream it's also a missed opportunity - Romeo and Juliet is satirized during the Pyramus and Thisby play-in-a-play.
I completely agree about Ethan Frome, but perhaps you'll like this video, which cracked me the hell up.
Amazing. 100% faithful to my memory of that book.
The Pearl by John Steinbeck. Its technically a novella but still. Hated it.
Oh sad face. It is one of my favorite books and also think the movie is a piece of art.
Might be different for me today if I reread it but I just mean from my first and sustained reaction reading it that was how I felt at the time, but I was also quite young
The Alchemist, I had to read it for a community college class. It's probably the most predictable book I've ever read, but not in an entertaining way. Just painfully boring.
I read Siddhartha for highschool a couple years before, I would say that the books are almost identical, except I liked Siddhartha more.
You want a book with similar themes but actually amazing? The wizard of Earthsea.
I know the books aren't literally the same. But the vibes feel very similar. I want to say they have very similar structure, but my memory doesn't work that great.
A collection of short stories by Harlan Ellison.
It was an absolutely insufferable read. Specifically, his foreword between each story.
"Repent Harlequin!"
He is an insufferable narcissistic nobhead, but his writing is punchy and definitely interesting.
I am not sure about 'ever' (I am old and have been reading for over 4 decades now), but a book I hate-read recently was Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco. It is meant to be a satire on conspiracy theories and as such it is still a relevant book after 35 years or so. However, the point of satire is to get to the point eventually, preferably within 500 pages. It was pompously written and sometimes felt like a showcase of 'look how much I know!'.
The Casual Vacancy
I forced myself to finish it at the time, but I hated every single moment. They were all bad people and I had zero sympathy for any of the kids or adults, except for the one girl who died at the end. Obligatory Rowling can jump off a cliff too.
I tried reading two different series from Stephen R. Donaldson, and it seemed to me he was somehow unable to write a book without a horrific rape. I just stopped reading the first book in each case because I felt like they were salacious and hateful.
The third Twilight book ended by dumping everything which was built up to in the previous book out.
Tom Sawyer. I don't think i'd hate it as much if I read it today, but having to read it in middle school was a bitch
Hmm, maybe that’s why my English teacher assigned Huck Finn instead (which I remember liking).
The old man and the sea. I learned to hate reading because of assigned books in school and this was the one that drove that hatred most. At times in my childhood I enjoyed reading a couple of novels, but assigned books absolutely destroyed any interest I had. Also having religious cult like parents that always had something stupid to say about reading had a major impact.
Art of War in the Middle Ages. Just fucking interminable.
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. I am usually a huge SciFi fan, but I like the genre for it's ability to reflect on humanity by extrapolating on current technologies/trends or comparing our culture to unique alien ones.
Revelation Space was technobabble and descriptions of weapons for pages upon pages, and it was totally devoid of any philosophy or reflection on humanity. I never DNF a book, but this one I almost gave up on.
Silas Marner has to be the most boring book I've ever attempted to read.
Didn't help that it was an assignment for school, but it also didn't help that it's literally one of the most boringly written books ever.
Game of thrones, for me. Made for a good basis for a show. Fucking terribly dull to read.
Yeah I finished the first book and put it down and said fuck this shit.
I enjoyed the suspense of wanting to see what would happen but then I realized that the author is a sadist who only wants the readers to suffer and that was enough to end the entire series for me. I got roped into watching the first episode of the first season and I was like oh it's the entire first book in one hour fuck this shit and I've not watched anymore of it.
I hope you're joking.
Martin knows how to write people. He can create the most vile, repulsive, irredeemable characters known to man and then teaches them mercy, honour, and sacrifice by forcing them into situations where they have to question who they are.
He redeems the irredeemable, not only in the text, but also outside of it by merit of the sheer humanism he expresses in his works.
I learned a lot about humanity, mercy, and forgiveness just by reading his books. No other author has come close to reaching me in such ways.
Hmmmmmm
I'm not sure about that
"whilst I concur wholeheartedly with the detailed rebuttal you have given, I alas remain uncertain, caged by the incongruous gut feeling that compels me."
I read them all (so far anyway) and they're decent enough.
I don't think he redeems anyone who is irredeemable or has any special insight into humanity. There are some awful people who are complicated and there are his favorites who get away with anything and come back from death multiple times. They all make good decisions and bad decisions and get good consequences and bad consequences and those don't always line up.
I don't want to diminish your experience but I really don't see it.
bah, humbug
I think it is great that you were able to gain so much from reading his books. I personally did not. That is not to say the values you drew from them are invalid in any way. It's not an assault on you personally. You liked his books, I didn't. Both of those things are ok. So no, I am not joking. While I have read other works that impress me to the level that you describe, Game of Thrones did not do so for me.
I don't know if he's joking, but seriously they sucked. I barely made it through them
A fan translation of the Redo of Healer light novel.
If you know you know.
I haven't read a whole lot, but so far: Madame Bovary. We had to read it in high school, because it was culturally significant and because it caused a large amount of controversy when it came out due to its subject matter. When I was reading it though, it felt like I was reading a literary version of every TV soap opera ever. It was a slog to get through and I was bored and annoyed throughout.
Probably Don Quixote. It started off really well, but it devolved towards the end into this long-unending self-referential rant full of name-drops and exposition, and I could barely follow any of it and pushing through that was a huge chore.
I later learned I had read a bad translation, and that there is one good translation out there I should try, but the whole thing has left a bad taste in my mouth and I don't want to go anywhere near that book again.
I tend to quit books if I don't find them very good. One I did finish that I fucking hated was The Girl on the Train. All of the characters were fucking insufferable.
I thought the film was good.
Worst book I've quit is Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. What a horrible book!
Worst I've finished is Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, immediately followed by Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I'll throw in a special mention for The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby. All terrible books that I finished only because they were required reading in school.
Huh. I loved Seveneves.
Same. Loved the world building over millenia. I was hoping to see another book each on the miner people, the Navy men, and the spacefarers who went out into the wilds after water.
My older sister hated it, she wants stories about characters and not the world-building. She compares the pages on moving through 3D space with small jet thrusts to the pages of whale info in Moby Dick.
It's a book I recommend with caveats. Not everyone is going to like it. Lesson learned, as much as I liked Snow Crash and Anathem too, I won't recommend them to her. And moving beyond Stephenson, I'm confident she would immolate Canticle for Leibowitz halfway through.
As much as I loved many of Stephensen's books, I could not get into Anathem.
I don't even remember the title, but it was written by Clive Cussler.
It was the dullest, most stereotypical adventure book with the bog standard protagonist and plot, with no interesting twist or unexpected event at all.
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
There are books I started and did not finish that I do not remember. However, there a few that I finished but hated. The worst was:
Reverie - this was a lgbt book club thing in Libby. The protagonist was a whiny incapable teen that never redeemed themself. I kept thinking it would get better and it never did. Things resolved because magic, so poor/lazy writing.
Profiles in Courage - John F. Kennedy
Should have stuck to being a president… maybe it’d land differently now, but in like 9th grade, it was a total slog.
Anything by David Foster Wallace.
Smug, preachy stream of consciousness garbage that is then annotated to oblivion by more stream of consciousness smug preachiness.
Timequake. I love Vonnegut but I just remember it being impossible to follow and overall not interesting.
That was my intro to Vonnegut and I rather enjoyed it. Enough to read more from him which is when I realized it wasn't a great book.
I think it was only the worst book for me because of how high my hopes were.
I think I had the same feeling the first time I read Sirens of Titan. Then I read it a few years later, and it just clicked and I was enthralled by the long crazy ride.
Probably not the worst I ever read, but whenever a question such as this comes up my mind immediately goes to one of the Tarot books by Piers Anthony. I don't remember which one, it was just in a pile of books people left in a dorm one time and I had nothing to read.
I finished it, but I can't tell you anything about it other than the vague recollection that I hated it.
The Rings Of Saturn
Was chosen by my Community College English professor and it was the most mind numbing thing I've ever had to read. It was translated from German, so there are multi-page, run-on sentences that haunt me till this day.
I finished Battlefield Earth.
The thing is, I remember enjoying it. I mean, it wasn't literature, but it was a lot of dumb fun.
The author - whose searchable name will not appear here - was once good at writing absolute trash. And fiction too.
Irony: when we lost everything in house fire, I'd borrowed a hard-cover copy of that famous nonfiction work, and then couldn't return it. I paid SO much to have it replaced with a good hard-cover copy that I must be on some watchlist now.
Z for Zachariah. I read it when I was like 15 for school. Man I remeber feeling the book is like a farming manual when they tried to survive after the nuclear war. The older man trying to rape the other 16 year old girl survivor also made me super uncomfortable. Maybe it would be better if I read it now. I just remeber it being a drag.
Alone with you in the ether. Both characters just bothered me with their weird ways of thinking. Could not relate to either of them
"Meteor" by Dan Brown (could be a different name in the original language). It was the first time I read something that was bad. Up until then book were cool and fun and interesting. It was a puzzling experience.
Edit: it's called "Deception Point" in the original.
The book of a thousand nights and a night. Went in knowing it was the original inspiration for Aladdin. Was not prepared for a litany if short stories about sex and racism
The Tarot of the Bohemians.
I couldn't get through the DaVinci code, it had such a weird writing style and format if I remember right
a novelization of one of my favorite video games
I suffered through it because I love the franchise so much and it wasn't that long but holy shit, I was the writing quality of a grade schooler but with added unnecessary and gross romance between two children.
It's probably "Rich Dad, Poor Dad". If you're interested in any personal finance book, there is already nothing to learn.
Bill McKibben's Enough is on my shelf purely so I can flip through it and get mad. A dense little paperback on how technology and progress should just stop. Not even return-with-a-v to some imagined utopia, like Ted Koweveritspelled. Straight-up 'change might be bad, so let stop right here, the moment this book is published.' Pushed with such flimsy arguments that my copy is about half post-it notes, by weight, from the month I read it for a philosophy class. They stop halfway. I just didn't consider rebuttal necessary past a certain point. You don't have to eat the whole turd to know it's not a crabcake.
Twilight
On the Beach by Nevil Schute
There was a movie adaptation, which was also shit.
i kinda wanna say atomic habits. the concepts it presents are functional but it presents them in an extermly forgettable and uninteresting way.
Sirens of titan. Well, Vonnegut in general. His stories are fine, probably ground breaking for the time in the sense of exploration, but the characters have no depth. It's like reading a book about npcs. Then there's the misogyny. Women are simply livestock kept around for breeding in this one, worse than an afterthought.
I don't think it's valuable to read even from a historical standpoint. Wiki synopsis would be suggested.
I've read so many it's hard to say but recently the Star Wars book about Phasma stands out (most of the books since Disney took over are not great). Also a series someone on Reddit recommended that turned out to be basically a guy writing down a game of Stellaris. I don't remember the name of it but it was awful.
Worst book I've finished?
Probably Fellowship of the Ring.
Return of the King was great, though.
There are worse books I started and put down.
What was wrong with fellowship for you? I know its a slow book but haven't heard someone actively hate it
For me, I tried reading it years ago and it felt slow like he was going into too much detail about things that didn't matter, like the slope of the road or some such. After the movies came out and I enjoyed them, I decided to go back and give it another try. What finally made me stop was when I realized a scene he was describing that was dull and boring in the book was actually exciting and intense in the movie. I'm glad for the people who like it, but I'm glad I got to see the story in movie form instead.
The Bible
When I was an undergraduate, a friend of mine wrote a book review of the bible for the student newspaper.
The opening sentence was: "Not since Naked Lunch has such a boring book been saved by the constant barrage of sadomasochistic homosexual pornography."
Yep. Bible. Pretentious, boring and way too much first - person stuff.
Best-selling work of fiction amirite
I wonder how many just check out when they get to the list of begats
the begats ain't so bad, it's only a couple short bits in the first book, as i recall, which is otherwise one of the best books that i read, with lots of relatively interesting short stories. the worst part in the early first books that i read in their entirety would have to be in exodus, where god spends ages going on and on to moses about the precise details of his dream tent. it feels like it goes on for a hundred pages, and then, a few chapters later, he does it all again.
I don't know if this counts, but when I was about 13I was very excited to find an enormous book in my favorite genre at the time, Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard.
It was the first book I ever put down in disgust without finishing. In the almost half-century since then, there are under a dozen that I haven't finished. Shows you just how bad it is.
I read all of Mission Earth. All 12(?) volumes. I couldn't possibly say why - I hated it.
I would love to hear more about this. Those books are SO long
Well, I think I figured out by book nine that it was never going to get any better, but by that point there were only three books to go and they weren't exactly difficult reads. Maybe I was hate-reading. "Will you continue failing to meet my expectations L. Ron Hubbard, you miserable cunt? I bet you will."
And I have a tendency to think that any satire is brilliant and biting and I'm just not worldly enough to get it.
As a young teen scifi nerd I enjoyed the world, and tech he built in that book. I read the 600+ pages pretty quick. I think I was too young to critique it as a literary work.
The movie was absolute garbage.
I tried reading his "Mission Earth" series. I did not finish the series; I managed about two and a half books before I realized that I wasn't obligated to finish it just because I'd started.
Oh man, I really enjoyed Battlefield Earth. And the movie. What turned you off?
Even as a 13-year-old, I could see gaping holes in the plot and inconsistencies. The aliens were hardly alien.
Even more so, I could see that the writing was clumsy and the dialogue was stilted. I could see how the writer was developing the story, and so I was not pulled into it at all. I was actually thinking to myself that I could write something like this. And I was 13!
I haven't seen the movie, but from the sounds of it many of the problems with the book are also on screen.
The bible. Inconsistent, unethical, and immoral.
Tried a few times and can never get past the first few chapters.
LOL. Try the Quran, it has the same characters and same stories but written in a way that makes much more natural reading
Thanks, but no thanks. :)
I haven't read the entire book, but I've read like 10 pages of Fifty Shades of Grey when my then-girlfriend was reading it. Besides the story and subject matter, the writing itself is horrible.
First 10 pages was probably the bulk of the story; the rest was just email replies.
Never read it, just some parts here and there because a girlfriend was reading it and it was hilarious LOL The descriptions are supposed to be sexy or alluring or god knows what but they are so cringey! It took me a bit to understand that my friend was reading it seriously.
that's an easy one, Atlas Shrugged
That is, still, to this day, the only book I could not finish.
Got about 2/3rds of the way through it and violently set it down. I love books too much to set it on fire, but I wanted to. It was the worst pile of shit I've ever read in my life. Completely divorced from reality.
And she died penniless and depending on the support of the same social services that she demonized in her book to convince people that capitalist leaders are paragons of humanity and the rest of us are just peons.
It's the cliche answer for good reason. I think I appreciated it better than most people who hate it, and I still barely finished it for class. All the clumsy symbolism and retro-futuristic sci-fi schlock was right up my alley. The premise about rich terrorists absconding with all of the fucking money... not so much. The whole third act is just Ayn Rand's vengeance fantasy about killing everyone who ever failed to agree with her hard enough. I was skimming through by that point, and still had to double-take and re-read where her derision toward "looters" included farmers.
My final paper roundly calling it a bloated screed by a mediocre author largely criticized it on its own terms and still turned vicious. John Galt is is among the worst monsters in literature because he wouldn't feel satisfied having his name carved into the face of the moon in recognition of everything solved with his infinite energy glitch. Any mere worker acting as Rand insisted they should died in the apocalypse her tradwife-cosplaying nobility deliberately caused. It is a bad story about bad people told badly by a bad person, and the worst part is that it's so fucking boring.
That said, we watched the black and white adaptation of The Fountainhead mid-semester, and it kinda works. Big surprise that the woman who hired an editor purely to check for typos had a more cogent opinion about authorship than she did about economics or human interaction. Probably helps that the movie's over in two hours. Definitely helps that Gary Cooper can get it.
I was far too young to read Animal Farm. I thought it was going to be like Charlotte's Web. I did not have any of the historical or political context for the metaphor. It just made me angry.
Left Behind. I'm probably a huge idiot for not realizing for the entire thing without knowing before hand what the context was, but I read it with the idea that it was some kind of apocalyptic sci-fi, and then only in the very last few pages of the book did it finally hit me in the face that it was religious doomsday bullshit. I do have to compliment it for the storytelling and world setting, but holy shit was I disappointed with the end direction 🤦
You should see the movie. It stars nic cage and he did it as a favor to a friend. It's fucking awful. funny thing though, my story is identical to yours. Had no idea until it was too late lol.
I didn't finish the last couple books, but I did enjoy it fully knowing the subject matter was about Revelations. I mostly read it as a kid and re-read for a bit as an adult. I did not grow up in a religious household. There was a point though where the books went a little too off the rails, and I gave up.
Ready Player One
The cringe is massive with that one.
The entire thing is the author wanking himself silly over his knowledge of pop culture references from his childhood. Some of it reads like it was written by a 14 year old who isn’t all that into books.
The bit about the gaming suit that wanks the user off but also means you’re exercising so you get fit from wearing it was honestly one of the cringiest things I’ve ever read. If I thought the author was capable of the level of self reflection required, I’d have thought writing that part of the book was him acknowledging that the book is literally a work of literary masturbation.
It should have received the same response as The Room; a bad book only made into a cult classic by the people laughing at it.
I enjoyed Ready Player One at the time even though some of it was just ridiculous. Re-enacting Ferris Buellers Day Off for example.
Armada, Cline's next book was awful. So many references on every page, I stopped reading. I remember a line that was something like, "my mum wouldn't let me past, like Gandelf in the mines of Moria." Sheesh! Let it go!
I fully read Ready Player Two but the guy has no story telling abilities. Every time the main character encounters a problem, e.g. I need a level 49 sword to get past this problem, but there's no way to get one, it was always solved with the same solution, "oh, I own the game and all Admins have level 1000 swords because we do!"
I think I reached my limit when he managed to shove in a Shaun of the Dead reference just because he mentioned a cricket bat!
The Silmarillion.
Probably the only book I excitedly pushed myself to read, but just couldn't.
The Silmarillion is one of my favourite books, but I totally get this. Unless you’re really into Tolkien’s world as well as this style of book it’s not a fun read.
That was actually my favorite Tolkien book. He was a terrible fiction writer with an excellent story to tell... but when he was writing non-fiction style in the Silmarillion he was really in his element... and/or the posthumous editing was top notch.
I had the same experience with the two towers. I can't watch the movie of the two towers. And I can't make it more than 60 or 70 pages into the book before my brain gives up and says they've been walking through the fucking Hills and talking to the trees for 30 pages this is some bullshit.
Maybe I'm cutting myself short by not pushing through but I just literally cannot build up the energy it takes to push through this wall of infinite text.
Wizard’s First Rule by Terry
BrooksGoodkind. I suffered through the whole thing because I was young enough that I thought that’s what you should do when you’ve started a book, but I was also old enough to know that it was very bad. I’ve heard many people say they read it as teens and loved it, but I assure you, it does not hold up.I don’t know if it’s the absolute worst I ever read but the parts I read were pretty bad. At some point I was like “What kinda Ayn Rand bullshit is this?” and quit reading. It turns out that he was a Ayn Rand make-super-improbable-and-convoluted-examples-in-my-fictional-fantasy-world-to-justify-terrible-political-views school of writing type guy.
It’s probably not the worst for me either but it’s easily the first thing I think of. Really left a bad taste I guess.
In the later books they accidentally open a portal to the part of the world where there are communists and for a while afterwards Richard finds himself unable to eat cheese as penance for all the communists he's killing but then he realizes that communists are so evil it's ok to kill them so he can eat cheese again
I read a bunch of those books because my roommate was in love with them. It established an idea of a writing flaw in my mind that I called "The Heirachy of Cool". Basically the guy practically has an established character list of who is the coolest. Whichever character in any given scene is at the top of the hierarchy is mythically awesome. They have their shit together, they are functionally correct in their reasoning, they lead armies, they pull off grand maneuvers, they escape danger whatever...
But anyone below them in the Heirachy turn into complete morons who serve as foils to make the people above them seem more awesome whenever they share page time together. These characters seem to have accute amnesia about stuff that canonically happened very recently (in previous books) so they can complicate things for the hierarchy above, they usually make poor decisions due to crisises of faith in people above them in the hierarchy... But because that hierarchy is infallible it's predictable. Less cool never is proven right over more cool.
... Until that same character is suddenly alone and they go from being mid of the hierarchy to the top and all of a sudden they have iron wills and super competence...
Once I caught onto that pattern it became intolerable to continue.
Remember when Richard defeated the evils of socialism without his magic by pulling himself up by his bootstraps really really hard by (without practice or training) carving a really really good statue and all the lazy worthless slacker librulls were like dang, I love capitalism now, and then everyone looked directly into the metaphorical camera and said "Communism: Don't let it happen to you"?
To be honest no... Because I think I violently expunged it from my memory and mind as my brain probably interpreted it as some kind of threat to my cells.
Funniest part of that was that Terry Goodkind clearly did not know anything about socialist realism
That was the beginning of the end for me. I think by the time I got to that part the series had already been going downhill but I remember that being a really sharp turning point.
I tried to press on a little further. The introduction of the straw man nation with the innocent child king who's only existence was to be blown the fuck out by the brilliance of objectivism is when I finally decided I just couldn't go on.
On a somewhat lower pedestal: Eragon. What a hugely derivative poorly written piece of crap. I've run D&D campaigns with better dialogue and pacing than that.
Oh yes I agree! And I’m a huge dragon fan, so it was extremely disappointing. That one I gave up on after maybe 50 pages. I couldn’t get past the prose. So I didn’t even get to the heavily recycled tropes, but I did see the movie once and they were plenty obvious from that.
I got to "Barges? BARGES? We don't need no steenking BARGES" and threw the book away
What I remember most vividly from that series is how absolutely bone-chilling everything about the Confessors were. You could absolutely have a really cool and interesting fantasy series in which they're the main villains, but Terry Goodkind's political views just wouldn't allow it.
Or even just digging into their internal struggles due to the inherent loneliness that their powers creates. Instead we got a wierd post period sex blowjob to Richard role playing as his brother or something stupid that I can't remember
Glad I've blocked that out
Wizards First Rule is Goodkind not Brooks, Brooks wrote Shanarra
Ack thank you, I mix them up even though I’ve never read Brooks, who seems to be better loved.
I'd rate them about the same, personally. Though Brooks is at least just derivative and juvenile; Goodkind gets increasingly self indulgent.
Damn I legit liked this book, one of my top series. I just enjoyed the magic system, the antagonists, and the over the top nature. I might just have bad taste though lol.
Me too, friend.
After ruminating on it though, everything I liked was just lifted from better works.
Leatherclad red-themed group of women who enjoy causing pain and are able to negate men's magic? Red ajah.
What other examples are there?
I for sure see the links between SoT and Wheel of Time. I started seeing a lot of things lifted after reading both. But I still find myself liking both for different reasons. I dunno, I've accepted that I do like some things that are generally viewed as "bad" and I've come to terms with it haha.
Yeah but some things are bad because they are deliberately trying to make you bad too
Maybe. But I think it matters of entertainment it's not as evil as that. Sure engaging with bad media might fuel them to repeat that behavior, but IMO if it harms no one it's not an issue. Like for example I've read the SoT series a few times and I'm not a Marxist or what have you.
Ahh I think you've misunderstood.
He's a raging, obnoxious capitalist who thinks poor people are poor because they don't try.
Haha that's how much I missed it I guess. Well I do appreciate you clarifying that, I never got a good, concise answer about what people we're hating on it for.
"The Cat Who Walked through Walls" by Robert Heinlein...
Now Heinlein is usually kind of obnoxiously sexist so having a book that opens with what appears to be an actual female character with not just more personality than a playboy magazine centerfold, but what seems like big dick energy action heroesque swagger felt FRESH. Strong start as you get this hyper competent husband and wife team quiping their way through adventures in the backwoods hillbilly country of Earth's moon with their pet bonsai tree to stop a nefarious plot with some promised dimensional McGuffin.
Book stalls out in the middle as they end up in like... A swinger commune. They introduce a huge number of characters all at once alongside this whole poly romantic political dynamic and start mulling over the planning stage of what seems like a complicated heist plot. Feels a lot like a sex party version of the Council of Elrond with each of these characters having complex individual dramas they are in the middle of resolving...
Aaaand smash cut. None of those characters mattered. We are with the protagonist, the heist plan failed spectacularly off stage and we are now in his final dying moments where we realized that cool wife / super spy set him up to fail like a chump at this very moment for... reasons? I dunno, Bitches amirite?
First time I ever finished a book and threw it angrily into the nearest wall.
I feel that a lot with Heinlein. Starts good with an interesting premise, becomes weirdly sexual, and the ending leaves you wondering whether the premise even mattered.
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is one of my fave books in the genre if I just ignore 1/3 of it.
I can't really remember of all time, but recently I started reading Dune: Messiah, and I had to stop reading it was so bad. I might be in the minority but the tonal shifts, changes in character attitudes, and jumping right into these assassination plots, all of it just came out weird and misplaced. Definitely did not slap with even 1/4th the power of Dune.
Herbert didn't want to continue Dune and was pressured to write a follow up. It was an era when most science fiction was still published in periodicals. The first half of Messiah are the results that were then compiled into the start. It is like a really shitty draft. Everyone experiences the same thing. I put it down for quite a while too. If you can make it to the second half, it will become one you can't put down, like the first. It does setup well for what is to come. After I got back into Messiah, I read all the way to the end of the entire series, even the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson stuff. Those last two are not like Frank's writings, but are their own thing and still more readable than the first half of Messiah. IMO the first half of Messiah is a great example of what happens when Art takes a back seat to an anxious banking type mentality. Bankers make terrible artists and advisors.
GEoD is IMO the best book in the series as it eviscerates many cultural norms and deep assumptions like fascist altruism, eternal boredom, the coexistence of misogyny and feminism, manipulation that is both brutal and kind, and if an alien can be human. It even infers the question of potential delusional prescience in my opinion. It will make you think about the motivation of leaders and what you may endure because of their vision of a future.
Hell yeah this is great to hear, thank you. I'll have to open it back up and try again. Then its time to read the Foundation.
The two prequels to foundation are awesome, don't miss them.
Don't read the prequels by Brin and Bear, they are not only awful but also steer the lore into really dumb place which i'm pretty sure was not intended by Asimov. Though to be honest the two prequels by Asimov are also much worse than the main series.
I mean, none of that is true, and Herbert stated he had parts of Messiah and Children written before Dune was even finished.
In the forward to Heretics of Dune: "Parts of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune were written before Dune was completed. They fleshed out more in the writing, but the essential story remained intact."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_Messiah
I forget where the rushed admission and poor quality was blamed on the periodical and premature release, but am certain that is somewhere out there.
Parts of the serialized story were fleshed out and became Dune.
I read the first four dune books this year and I think they all suffer from the same problem, that is they have interesting characters, original lore, great world building, but nothing interesting happens until the very ending of the book. They all felt like a slog to get through to me.
Wait until you get to chapterhouse!
An introduction to organic chemistry
I feel you. Sorry you had to go through that experience.
The bible. Set aside any religious connotations and just look at it as a piece of literature: it's terrible.
Catcher in the Rye. I try it again every couple of years just to see if I can relate to it, and nope - it's still just as stupid as the first time I read it.
Is it just the (lead) character or do you think the book itself is also shit?
Everything about the book is just dull and frustrating.
I felt the same way (spoilers for whoever hasn't read it). The protagonist just kept encountering significant people where it seems like there's going to be a struggle to overcome, leading to character development and newfound maturity, but no. He just moves on to another scene instead and they're not seen again. It was just annoying.
The teacher that feels he's not living up to his potential? The private school friends that he hangs out with but often finds frustrating? The childhood friend who he shares unexplored romantic tension with? The nuns whose meals he pays for despite having dwindling funds? The prostitute he just wants to have a conversation with? Her pimp, who attacks him? The potentially rapist family friend? For pretty much all of them a relevant conflict is initiated just for him to leave it unresolved, probably after labeling them a phony.
The only exception is his sister, who he sees like two or three times. And then the final conflict at the end is like: "Hey sorry for taking your birthday money so I could keep wandering around these past couple of days instead of talking to our rich parents." "That's ok, I forgive you. You're my brother and I love you. But I worry about you sometimes." "Yeah anyway, I'm bitter about the world so I kinda want to disappear into the wilderness." "Please don't do that." "Ok I won't."
Canonical answer is The Homecoming Saga by Orson Scott Card, since it turns out that if the good guys have a mind controlling god computer that's always right on their side it gets really hard to have meaningful conflict.
You didn't make it past the first book??
Lucky.
DISCLAIMER: Orson Scott Card is a bad person and I have since gotten rid of my collection and tell everyone not to support him because he uses his platform to hurt marginalised groups of people for religious reasons.
Now, I would argue that you're skipping over a lot of interesting stuff.
The Overseer (mind-controlling satellite robot) was built by humans to keep rewriting human brains so they would perpetually forget how to invent the wheel until they proved that they'd evolved beyond their barbaric nature and would not go on to invent the nuclear bomb. The satellite then dies of old age millions of years later because humans are just kind of shitty. The book ends with the main character's family hopping onto an Ark rocket back to Earth aaand... Hundreds of years have passed and all the characters you've invested in emotionally are long dead, here's some bat furries I guess.
Some pretty cool ideas in there, despite who it was written by.
Now, the worst thing I have ever read was also by Orson Scott Card and I refuse to speak about it.
I did read it up until about halfway through the last book, thinking that it would eventually get better while it instead just got worse. Decided that the whole thing had been a complete waste of time besides maybe giving me a greater appreciation for the fact that the real world was less of a slog
Ooh, if you want waste of time read the Alvin Maker series. Oh but I think he wrote another one since I read them (not that I'm willing to give it the chance to change my opinion).
You're saying that the book couldve been an essay?
I don't think it would've made a very good essay either
Ooo, I was trying to think of what to answer in this thread and you just reminded me of another Orson Scott Card book, Empire.
Absolute trash. Prior to that I had read all of the Ender and Bean series and loved them. Didn't know much about Card personally, but picked up this book because it was supposed to be tied in with a video game I was looking forward too.
Reading this book is how I found out what a shitty person he really is. It was basically all him hitting you over the head with his shitty fascist ideology while jerking off to a bunch of military porn like a dollar store version of Tom Clancy. I never did play the game.
The Alchemist and Song of Achilles are some popular books that I thought were mediocre. Probably not the worst book I've ever read though.
That probably goes to Sean Hannity's Conservative Victory that my grandma gave me when I was 12.
True slop. Fuck Sean Hannity.
I enjoyed The Alchemist and The Zahir at the time, but in hindsight I think The Zahir was an elaborate cuckold fantasy. I think if I reread it I'd remember the rest of it but that's what it feels like thinking back over a decade later.
I didn't read the Zahir but I felt like The Alchemist was a shallow Siddhartha-wannabe when I read it. I couldn't help but think it was trying too hard to be profound
Mein Kampf. I read it when i was still a succdem, expecting some genius rant that converted people en masse to nazism. Instead it was barely coherent disgusting racist drivel. I guess this book didn't make anyone into nazi, it just given nazis what they would like to read. This and the fact nazi state bought huge amounts of it to distribute, making Hitler richest writer in Germany.
I'm sure I've read worse but one that stands out as making me question the time I put into reading it is Out of the Dark by David Weber. I go into it expecting a military sci fi, and for the vast majority of the book that's what you get - aliens invade Earth and plucky humans resist etc etc. The aliens however have more reserves and air superiority so are slowly winning as the end of the book approaches, at which point you expect the main characters to pull a rabbit out of the hat and do something different. Except that's not what happens.
::: spoiler spoiler What actually happens is that Count Dracula appears out of (almost) nowhere and flies with a bunch of vampires up to the alien spaceships to kill the aliens, winning the battle for Earth. :::
I was definitely not satisfied with this ending, even if there was some foreshadowing earlier in the book that made sense after knowing this was a possibility in this universe.
Oh man. Thank you for bringing up that repressed memory.
Moby Dick is the book I hated the most. Just the worst slog that i remember making it through.
Oh fucking hell, yes! How could I forget!? It's so loooonnnngg. There's a whole chapter that's an encyclopedia of whales.
Two chapters, IIRC.
Noooo :( I love Moby Dick.
Granted I listened to the audiobook
I know there are a lot of people who love it for the same reasons I hated it, people have different tastes.
I love Lord of the Flies because it gets to the point!
I picked it up from the library years ago on a whim and surprisingly really enjoyed it.
Well, except maybe the multiple pages long chapter about varieties of whales. That was a bit much.
Stephen King's It
Great story, but the writing was exceedingly dull, apart from the first chapter. I even tried getting through it via audiobook and still only made it halfway through. It's just a chore.
I don't get Stephen King. I've never read a thing by him that I thought warranted the accolades.
I like some of the films based on his books, but those are all punched up quite a bit.
No, King writes well. It's very much from the heart and you can relate to the emotions he lays down effortlessly on every page. I think his strength is creating mysteries, and his weakness is over-explaining said mysteries.
Maybe you relate to the emotions "he lays down effortlessly on every page", but I sure don't. If you enjoy reading King, go for it, read it, even share your opinion and preference to contrast mine.
No need to tell me my opinion is wrong. Both things can be true that you like King's writing and I don't.
When I said "No", the tone wasn't "No. You are wrong. Prepare for assimilation.", it was a gentle musical inflection of "nooo, here have a sandwich and let me tell you about the butterflies I love so much."
👍 comment retracted then. I've been getting quite a bit of "your opinions are trash" stuff lately, it's been feeling like some of the reddit subs I had blocked back in the day.
The lemmiverse has been feeling pretty active lately
I also like some of the films, so I tired to read "The Stand" as it was one of his more lauded books. My mistake was buying some anniversary edition which came in two tomes and was apparently a longer uncut version the author had initially written, that was then edited down to the produce the initial release.
Couldn't finish even half of the first tome. King writes good, but loooves to write a lot. I quickly understood why the classic version of the book was cut down so much - I was screaming for all this exposition to cut to the action finally, and it just didn't come, always being teased as being behind the corner.
Also I found out that as any classic his style has been immitated so much in literature and other media, that by now I've basically consumed a ton of Stephen King-like stories and I really don't get much more from reading his books. So I just gave up on that front, while appreciating him as an author and perpetuum-idea-generator.
I enjoyed it...until the insanely problematic ending.
It's been quite a while since I've read it, so this may not be a fair assessment. But, I fucking hated The Catcher in the Rye. I wasn't even required to read it for school or anything, I just did. Perhaps I just found Holden to be insufferable. I think that was the point, but it did not make it a particularly enjoyable or insightful read at all, save for the overwhelming supertext of DO NOT BE LIKE THIS GUY. The part where he hires a prostitute and just cries in front of her really stuck in my mind. That was when it really sunk in for me that someone read this book and decided that Holden's views were so accurate that he had to go shoot John Lennon with a gun for being phony. Almost unbelievable.
I'm curious at what age you read it. Because I first read it at 15 and thought it was the best book ever. I would even recommend it to people for years.
Then I read it again in my late 20s and had the same reaction you did. I thought he just came off as a whiny little shit. I still feel embarrassed that I recommended that book to people for over 10 years.
I remember telling my wife this after I reread it (she was someone I recommended it to) and she was like, "yeah, I didn't want to say anything at the time, but I hated it."
When I was 13 I thought "You go Holden! Tell off all those phonies!" At 18 I thought "This whiny asshole won't stfu." Then as an adult I realized "Oh, poor kid was dealing with a lot of unaddressed trauma."
I hadn't thought of that angel before. That's actually a really good way to look it.
It was the end of 9th grade, so I was 15 or 16. I read it immediately after To Kill a Mockingbird, which did not make it look good in comparison 😂
Well 15 year old you had much better taste than 15 year old me
It's gotten worse over the years, don't worry ;)
My top recommended movie right now is Freddy Got Fingered
the Piers Anthony novelization of the movie Total Recall. it's very bad!
I haven't read that, but his original novel Firefly is the only book I ever threw away instead of adding it to my collection shelves or trading it back to the used book store. It's horrifically gross. One of the main characters is shown in a flashback enthusiastically participating in her rape as a five year old. Anthony is a problematic writer already, but this was way worse than I could have guessed.
I read all the Xanth novels as a teenager and it probably made my brain mushy. More mushy.
My brain is just very mushy. The first few books were okay..ish, but they just got worse. And not just in a sexist way, but also a poorly written way.
Yeah, they were fine for my low standards as a young teenager, but I reread a couple and they aren't great. Heck, book one has the MC making an amicus brief on the wrong side of a rape trial.
Yeah, its a book series I'll leave in the past where it belongs!
Read the first book as a kid, thought it was pretty good, but was put off by all the sex stuff. Started reading the second book when I saw it in a library when I was about 15, and couldn't get through the first chapter because of how sexist it was.
Three Body Problem.
Same for me
I just had a friend tell me he loved the whole series (with caveats), why didn't you like it?
The handwaving "science" part. And then in the end there's this deus ex machina plot point that comes out that makes all the rest of the plot utterly pointless.
I've read a lot of SF, that was the worst because I had such high hope for it after reading what everyone had to say about it. And it turned me off reading anything that's won a Hugo entirely. That and Redshirts...
That definitely makes sense. What's a good SF book you've read recently?
Mainly short story anthologies for the last year. Been bingeing Dozois' Years Best series and moved into Strahan's recently.
Oh nice, thanks for the recommendations
It really puts your suspension of disbelief to the test, and all the characters are terrible. I actually thought the netflix show was better than the book because the characters were alot more relatable.
Yeah same here, I thought it was one of the few cases where the adaptation was better than the book. It cuts out a lot of the waffle from the books and patches up lots of holes, especially with characters like you said.
Yah, totally forgot to mention how horrendously bad the characters were. Like 50's SF bad.
Oh yeah this one was really bad.
Absolutely agreed. Three body problem is overhyped garbage.
bit of a cheat but 120 Days of Sodom
The one redeeming part is the guy who fucks a horse and it gives birth to a half man half horse and then the fucks that
the rest is descriptions of pedophilia, coprophagy and torturing children to death.
The movie was good! No horse fucking, though.
You thought Saló was good? It may not have had horse fucking but it definitely has everything else.
It was an insane movie that made a very poignant statement with some INSANELY FUCKED UP imagery, scenes, and themes. I’ve never read the book but I went into Saló looking for a shock film like August Underground, and went away thinking “that was so much less shitty than I thought it would be.”
50 Shades… terrible writing and the sex was boring AF. The books were recommended to me. I couldn’t get through the first one. Time I’ll never get back.
The first 5 or so of Trump's books. No meaningful lessons in business to be had. Just him bragging about people he knew, people he'd screwed over, how good he thought he was at pretty much everything. How he got back at anyone who crossed him. Insufferable. I knew he was one of the worst people ever before he even mentioned getting into politics.
And in those 5 books, he probably name-dropped every New York socialite he ever met. It's consistent with his whole image of self-worth and needing to look and feel important. You know who he didn't mention? Someone we've seen him with in several photos? Who he definitely would have mentioned if there wasn't a reason not to? Jeffrey Epstein.
I have to ask what possessed you to not give up after the first couple
I already bought the books + it was like watching a car accident. I just couldn't believe this guy was a successful businessman.
Spoiler: he wasn't. It was "The Apprentice" that made his fortune, before that it was just him squandering an inheritance.
[My initial reply got posted top- level for some reason]
True, he straight up admits many times in the books that he would lie about his wealth so that other people would work with him. I assume that came out during his fraud case in NY.
He had a few deals that worked out - all starting with dad's money. He managed to squander 4 out of 5 of everything he tried. Casinos in Atlantic City, Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Ice, Wollman Rink, etc. It's a long list. But the 1 or 2 that worked is why he has any money at all. If I remember correctly, it's mostly the golf courses and an option he bought in the 70s for an old railroad yard in lower west side Manhatten I think. He really fucked someone over on that one. He bragged about how much he screwed them for pages and pages. Like it brought him more joy to fuck someone over than it did to have a success. He's a complete psychopath.
Mine is "the catcher in the rye".
The main character is insufferable and not enough bad things happened to him to make it worth reading the book.
War and Peace. Heard so many good things about it. Despite everything, went in not having super high expectations.
The whole book turned out like a reality tv show. All the characters had some petty drama that they blew out of proportion. Hundreds of pages where nothing really happens, people just complain or bad mouth other characters.
I had to stop half way through.
I could only make a few pages in to the first chapter, it was hard to read, very, very detailed, which should be a good thing but I found myself losing track of where we even were or what the scene was about for all the detail. Once they started describing the buttons on the coat of one of the characters and how it had been the fashion some years prior at some point in the 19th century to wear them that way... I gave up. I'd like to try again some time but I can't see myself experiencing it differently. Curious about the 7 years in the making Soviet film adaptation, but its also 7 hours long.
I really liked the series with Paul Dano
That looks really well done. And a lot of stuff would be condensed by having viduals.
Doesn’t look like my preferred style… Maybe that’s why I couldn’t get into the book either 😅
I tried reading the book but it was too much for me, so the series was easier to follow. I also tried listening to an audio book of tale of two cities but couldn't get past the narrator constantly changing voices and accents for characters. I prefer when they just read
The sookie stackhouse books that got turned into true blood have such a fun premise but are appallingly written. A friend and I used to play the audiobooks at parties for laughs.
The worst book I've ever read has to be 1984. The book is excellent, but did not do good things for me so it goes down as the worst
Did you ever contrast it with Brave New World? In many ways the latter is more disturbing since the masses are kept busy with frivolity to question their world.
Oh, interesting. I always see Huxley's later Island as the counter to his Brave New World. Interesting to place all three side by side.
I gave up on Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close after one chapter. No wonder neurotypicals think autistics are just insufferable nobs.
Ayn Rand's fountainhead, by a fat mile. I was young and didn't know better
God, me too. I thought I was too dumb to "get it".
I listened to Atlas Shrugged as an audio book and it was ok at best. One massive criticism of communism and how it doesn't work but suggested anarchist society as the solution. Weird rape-y sex scene in the middle also. Should have stuck with the social criticism instead of anarco capitalism utopia stuff and it'd have been good.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. If you could distill pure insufferable smugness into a liquid, this was him squirting it into your mouth while you’re not paying attention and laughing at you while you sputter and gag.
The Great Gatsby.
I've read a lot of books, but that one I literally remember nothing about. Not a quote, not a character, not the plot... All I remember is the cover was some weird abstract art piece with creepy eyes, my brain purged everything else about it book. Probably for my own sanity.
A book called The Night by a Venezuelan author.
I feel a bit bad saying this because there are definitely worse books but this one stuck with me as the premise sounded really interesting but the book was nothing like it.
There is a review on goodreads that sums it up pretty nicely.
I was assigned Ethan Frome in a high school lit class and to this day I think it is one of the worst books to assign to emotional, angsty, experience-limited teens.
I also don't understand why Romeo and Juliet is the go-to Shakespeare work that we default to.
How do we handle complex romantic relationships? Suicide / attempted suicide, of course! Just what every teen needs to hear /s
Possibly because Romeo and Juliet were stupid teenagers and and part of the tragedy is about the impulsiveness of youth. A good teacher can sometimes get that across, but I suspect it doesn't really sink in. And if they didn't teach it with A Midsummer Night's Dream it's also a missed opportunity - Romeo and Juliet is satirized during the Pyramus and Thisby play-in-a-play.
I completely agree about Ethan Frome, but perhaps you'll like this video, which cracked me the hell up.
Amazing. 100% faithful to my memory of that book.
The Pearl by John Steinbeck. Its technically a novella but still. Hated it.
Oh sad face. It is one of my favorite books and also think the movie is a piece of art.
Might be different for me today if I reread it but I just mean from my first and sustained reaction reading it that was how I felt at the time, but I was also quite young
The Alchemist, I had to read it for a community college class. It's probably the most predictable book I've ever read, but not in an entertaining way. Just painfully boring.
I read Siddhartha for highschool a couple years before, I would say that the books are almost identical, except I liked Siddhartha more.
You want a book with similar themes but actually amazing? The wizard of Earthsea.
I know the books aren't literally the same. But the vibes feel very similar. I want to say they have very similar structure, but my memory doesn't work that great.
A collection of short stories by Harlan Ellison.
It was an absolutely insufferable read. Specifically, his foreword between each story.
"Repent Harlequin!"
He is an insufferable narcissistic nobhead, but his writing is punchy and definitely interesting.
I am not sure about 'ever' (I am old and have been reading for over 4 decades now), but a book I hate-read recently was Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco. It is meant to be a satire on conspiracy theories and as such it is still a relevant book after 35 years or so. However, the point of satire is to get to the point eventually, preferably within 500 pages. It was pompously written and sometimes felt like a showcase of 'look how much I know!'.
The Casual Vacancy
I forced myself to finish it at the time, but I hated every single moment. They were all bad people and I had zero sympathy for any of the kids or adults, except for the one girl who died at the end. Obligatory Rowling can jump off a cliff too.
I tried reading two different series from Stephen R. Donaldson, and it seemed to me he was somehow unable to write a book without a horrific rape. I just stopped reading the first book in each case because I felt like they were salacious and hateful.
The third Twilight book ended by dumping everything which was built up to in the previous book out.
Tom Sawyer. I don't think i'd hate it as much if I read it today, but having to read it in middle school was a bitch
Hmm, maybe that’s why my English teacher assigned Huck Finn instead (which I remember liking).
The old man and the sea. I learned to hate reading because of assigned books in school and this was the one that drove that hatred most. At times in my childhood I enjoyed reading a couple of novels, but assigned books absolutely destroyed any interest I had. Also having religious cult like parents that always had something stupid to say about reading had a major impact.
Art of War in the Middle Ages. Just fucking interminable.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/44308/pg44308-images.html
It's also FULL of errors
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. I am usually a huge SciFi fan, but I like the genre for it's ability to reflect on humanity by extrapolating on current technologies/trends or comparing our culture to unique alien ones.
Revelation Space was technobabble and descriptions of weapons for pages upon pages, and it was totally devoid of any philosophy or reflection on humanity. I never DNF a book, but this one I almost gave up on.
Silas Marner has to be the most boring book I've ever attempted to read.
Didn't help that it was an assignment for school, but it also didn't help that it's literally one of the most boringly written books ever.
Game of thrones, for me. Made for a good basis for a show. Fucking terribly dull to read.
Yeah I finished the first book and put it down and said fuck this shit.
I enjoyed the suspense of wanting to see what would happen but then I realized that the author is a sadist who only wants the readers to suffer and that was enough to end the entire series for me. I got roped into watching the first episode of the first season and I was like oh it's the entire first book in one hour fuck this shit and I've not watched anymore of it.
I hope you're joking.
Martin knows how to write people. He can create the most vile, repulsive, irredeemable characters known to man and then teaches them mercy, honour, and sacrifice by forcing them into situations where they have to question who they are.
He redeems the irredeemable, not only in the text, but also outside of it by merit of the sheer humanism he expresses in his works.
I learned a lot about humanity, mercy, and forgiveness just by reading his books. No other author has come close to reaching me in such ways.
Hmmmmmm
I'm not sure about that
"whilst I concur wholeheartedly with the detailed rebuttal you have given, I alas remain uncertain, caged by the incongruous gut feeling that compels me."
I read them all (so far anyway) and they're decent enough.
I don't think he redeems anyone who is irredeemable or has any special insight into humanity. There are some awful people who are complicated and there are his favorites who get away with anything and come back from death multiple times. They all make good decisions and bad decisions and get good consequences and bad consequences and those don't always line up.
I don't want to diminish your experience but I really don't see it.
bah, humbug
I think it is great that you were able to gain so much from reading his books. I personally did not. That is not to say the values you drew from them are invalid in any way. It's not an assault on you personally. You liked his books, I didn't. Both of those things are ok. So no, I am not joking. While I have read other works that impress me to the level that you describe, Game of Thrones did not do so for me.
I think I'm bad at communicating the usual wink I have in my tone when I disagree with people: https://lemmy.ml/post/21428751/14330685
I don't know if he's joking, but seriously they sucked. I barely made it through them
A fan translation of the Redo of Healer light novel.
If you know you know.
I haven't read a whole lot, but so far: Madame Bovary. We had to read it in high school, because it was culturally significant and because it caused a large amount of controversy when it came out due to its subject matter. When I was reading it though, it felt like I was reading a literary version of every TV soap opera ever. It was a slog to get through and I was bored and annoyed throughout.
Probably Don Quixote. It started off really well, but it devolved towards the end into this long-unending self-referential rant full of name-drops and exposition, and I could barely follow any of it and pushing through that was a huge chore.
I later learned I had read a bad translation, and that there is one good translation out there I should try, but the whole thing has left a bad taste in my mouth and I don't want to go anywhere near that book again.
I tend to quit books if I don't find them very good. One I did finish that I fucking hated was The Girl on the Train. All of the characters were fucking insufferable.
I thought the film was good.
Worst book I've quit is Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. What a horrible book!
Worst I've finished is Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, immediately followed by Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I'll throw in a special mention for The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby. All terrible books that I finished only because they were required reading in school.
Huh. I loved Seveneves.
Same. Loved the world building over millenia. I was hoping to see another book each on the miner people, the Navy men, and the spacefarers who went out into the wilds after water.
My older sister hated it, she wants stories about characters and not the world-building. She compares the pages on moving through 3D space with small jet thrusts to the pages of whale info in Moby Dick.
It's a book I recommend with caveats. Not everyone is going to like it. Lesson learned, as much as I liked Snow Crash and Anathem too, I won't recommend them to her. And moving beyond Stephenson, I'm confident she would immolate Canticle for Leibowitz halfway through.
As much as I loved many of Stephensen's books, I could not get into Anathem.
I don't even remember the title, but it was written by Clive Cussler.
It was the dullest, most stereotypical adventure book with the bog standard protagonist and plot, with no interesting twist or unexpected event at all.
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
There are books I started and did not finish that I do not remember. However, there a few that I finished but hated. The worst was:
Reverie - this was a lgbt book club thing in Libby. The protagonist was a whiny incapable teen that never redeemed themself. I kept thinking it would get better and it never did. Things resolved because magic, so poor/lazy writing.
Profiles in Courage - John F. Kennedy
Should have stuck to being a president… maybe it’d land differently now, but in like 9th grade, it was a total slog.
Anything by David Foster Wallace. Smug, preachy stream of consciousness garbage that is then annotated to oblivion by more stream of consciousness smug preachiness.
Timequake. I love Vonnegut but I just remember it being impossible to follow and overall not interesting.
That was my intro to Vonnegut and I rather enjoyed it. Enough to read more from him which is when I realized it wasn't a great book.
I think it was only the worst book for me because of how high my hopes were.
I think I had the same feeling the first time I read Sirens of Titan. Then I read it a few years later, and it just clicked and I was enthralled by the long crazy ride.
Probably not the worst I ever read, but whenever a question such as this comes up my mind immediately goes to one of the Tarot books by Piers Anthony. I don't remember which one, it was just in a pile of books people left in a dorm one time and I had nothing to read. I finished it, but I can't tell you anything about it other than the vague recollection that I hated it.
The Rings Of Saturn
Was chosen by my Community College English professor and it was the most mind numbing thing I've ever had to read. It was translated from German, so there are multi-page, run-on sentences that haunt me till this day.
I finished Battlefield Earth.
The thing is, I remember enjoying it. I mean, it wasn't literature, but it was a lot of dumb fun.
The author - whose searchable name will not appear here - was once good at writing absolute trash. And fiction too.
Irony: when we lost everything in house fire, I'd borrowed a hard-cover copy of that famous nonfiction work, and then couldn't return it. I paid SO much to have it replaced with a good hard-cover copy that I must be on some watchlist now.
Z for Zachariah. I read it when I was like 15 for school. Man I remeber feeling the book is like a farming manual when they tried to survive after the nuclear war. The older man trying to rape the other 16 year old girl survivor also made me super uncomfortable. Maybe it would be better if I read it now. I just remeber it being a drag.
Alone with you in the ether. Both characters just bothered me with their weird ways of thinking. Could not relate to either of them
"Meteor" by Dan Brown (could be a different name in the original language). It was the first time I read something that was bad. Up until then book were cool and fun and interesting. It was a puzzling experience.
Edit: it's called "Deception Point" in the original.
The book of a thousand nights and a night. Went in knowing it was the original inspiration for Aladdin. Was not prepared for a litany if short stories about sex and racism
The Tarot of the Bohemians.
I couldn't get through the DaVinci code, it had such a weird writing style and format if I remember right
a novelization of one of my favorite video games
I suffered through it because I love the franchise so much and it wasn't that long but holy shit, I was the writing quality of a grade schooler but with added unnecessary and gross romance between two children.
It's probably "Rich Dad, Poor Dad". If you're interested in any personal finance book, there is already nothing to learn.
Bill McKibben's Enough is on my shelf purely so I can flip through it and get mad. A dense little paperback on how technology and progress should just stop. Not even return-with-a-v to some imagined utopia, like Ted Koweveritspelled. Straight-up 'change might be bad, so let stop right here, the moment this book is published.' Pushed with such flimsy arguments that my copy is about half post-it notes, by weight, from the month I read it for a philosophy class. They stop halfway. I just didn't consider rebuttal necessary past a certain point. You don't have to eat the whole turd to know it's not a crabcake.
Twilight
On the Beach by Nevil Schute
There was a movie adaptation, which was also shit.
i kinda wanna say atomic habits. the concepts it presents are functional but it presents them in an extermly forgettable and uninteresting way.
Sirens of titan. Well, Vonnegut in general. His stories are fine, probably ground breaking for the time in the sense of exploration, but the characters have no depth. It's like reading a book about npcs. Then there's the misogyny. Women are simply livestock kept around for breeding in this one, worse than an afterthought.
I don't think it's valuable to read even from a historical standpoint. Wiki synopsis would be suggested.
I've read so many it's hard to say but recently the Star Wars book about Phasma stands out (most of the books since Disney took over are not great). Also a series someone on Reddit recommended that turned out to be basically a guy writing down a game of Stellaris. I don't remember the name of it but it was awful.
Worst book I've finished?
Probably Fellowship of the Ring.
Return of the King was great, though.
There are worse books I started and put down.
What was wrong with fellowship for you? I know its a slow book but haven't heard someone actively hate it
For me, I tried reading it years ago and it felt slow like he was going into too much detail about things that didn't matter, like the slope of the road or some such. After the movies came out and I enjoyed them, I decided to go back and give it another try. What finally made me stop was when I realized a scene he was describing that was dull and boring in the book was actually exciting and intense in the movie. I'm glad for the people who like it, but I'm glad I got to see the story in movie form instead.
I didn't say I hated it.
If I hate a book I don't finish it.
Fair enough, im still curious