What was the worst book you’ve ever read?

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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.

236 comments