What was the worst book you’ve ever read?

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.

I wonder how many just check out when they get to the list of begats

Best-selling work of fiction amirite

I read all of Mission Earth. All 12(?) volumes. I couldn't possibly say why - I hated 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?

Tried a few times and can never get past the first few chapters.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Wizards First Rule is Goodkind not Brooks, Brooks wrote Shanarra

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wait until you get to chapterhouse!

I feel you. Sorry you had to go through that experience.

Is it just the (lead) character or do you think the book itself is also shit?

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.

You're saying that the book couldve been an essay?

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.

Oh man. Thank you for bringing up that repressed memory.

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 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.

I enjoyed it...until the insanely problematic ending.

Oh fucking hell, yes! How could I forget!? It's so loooonnnngg. There's a whole chapter that's an encyclopedia of whales.

Noooo :( I love Moby Dick.

Granted I listened to the audiobook

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.

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.

Same for me

I just had a friend tell me he loved the whole series (with caveats), why didn't you like it?

Oh yeah this one was really bad.

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."

I have to ask what possessed you to not give up after the first couple

The movie was good! No horse fucking, though.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.