The worst book you've ever read

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One day, I was in a Book-A-Million in Savannah, Georgia, browsing the place for some works by Philip K. Dick, when I happened across Stephanie Meyer's (in)famous novel Twilight. I knew what I was getting myself into when I stood in the aisle, and opened the book, revealing the first page. Immediately, I closed it and put it back on the shelf. When your story fails to pique interest on the first page, then something is very, very wrong. You'd be suprised how much junk makes it to the top of the New York Times Bestseller list, like those sleazy erotic novels you can get for around a buck in an adult entertainment store in the red light district of a high crime area.

Twilight reads like the kind of thing a 14 year old emo girl would write. Honestly. I think the copyeditor only removed the lowercase spellings, and if those were intact, it'd read like a bad teen fic.

I hated reading through it to get a feel. It was... a chore.

Yeah. So how did Nathaniel Hawthorne become famous? I never could read any of his books. After the first few pages of agitated boredom, I concluded, "This guy's just a bad writer."

I'd say the worst work of fiction that I've actually made myself read start to finish was Great Expectations.

Oh, I also had to read The Bridges of Madison County for a class, but there was a fun twist to the assignment - it was pointed out in advance that this was a good example of vapid "best seller" type literature, and we were supposed to analyze the author's techniques for writing something whose sole purpose is commercial appeal.

Then we got to write an essay comparing The Bridges of Madison County with Leda and the Swan - from a Marxist feminist perspective.

I completely agree that Twilight is a terrible book. I suffered through 100 pages of the 1st book, wondering exactly why it's so addicting to teenage girls and disillusioned housewives. I couldn't find any good qualities; the descriptions of he characters made me roll my eyes and laugh. Twilight is for people who want vampire stories but are not mature enough to handle better vampire depictions like in Anne Rice's novels and Hellsing.

Anyway, the worst book I've read purely in terms of content (but not writing) was A Child Called It. Its subject matter was stomach-churning, to say the least. To this day I still wonder whether it was a true story or some fabrication like A Million Little Pieces (which by the way is actually quite good).

Funny, the worst I ever read was a Philip K Dick book, Paycheck, but he gets away with it for writing at least 3 bona fide classics in his career and quite a few other good ones.

Books that seem great from the first start often are only great at the start and dissapoint from then on. Dave Egger's Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius being a good example, the introduction/first chapter is amazing and the rest of the book takes a nosedive from there.

Last edited by racooneyes on 18 Jan 2010, 2:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I didn't like Dune.

Not counting classic literature, the book I disliked the most was 'The Lovely Bones'. I saw the trailer for teh film though; it ooks quite good.

I didn't finish Twilighlight either. I went on Cracked.com and they managed to sum up the entire plot line of all y7 books in 2 pages. Oddly enough, the films weren't as bad as I thought. It's weird; I usually hate films based on books.

The worst book I ever read was in my hotel room. I flipped it open at random and landed on a passage talking about smashing babies' heads against rocks! Unbelievable that this stuff is published as reading material.

It's hard to say the worst, but the book I remember being bothered by the most is The Wheel of Time book 1. There wasn't anything in that particularly rubbed me the wrong way. It's more that I felt bored to tears by it and I couldn't even finish the measly few chapters left. Seemed like Robert Jordan had taken a 300 page story and stretched it out to infinity.

The Catcher in the Rye...truly awful

Whale Rider. Had to read it for novel study at school. And then do chapter summaries, analysis, essays, memorize quotes, in-character roleplaying, etc., etc., etc... As well as being decidedly dull and predictable, I also found the chapters written entirely in Maori rather irritating. They didn't add anything to the book for me - just meant that there were big chunks I didn't understand!

Idaho Rose: A Child Called It is true. There is a sequel where life turned out a little better.

Writing OK, content terrible: Time Enough For Love by Heinlein.

And yeah, I hated Catcher In The Rye too.

Anybody here remember Jonathon Seagull. I remembered the middle two syllable name til I went to type it. I hate aphasia.

The Alchemist
I literally HATE that book.

The Alchemist?! !!

That is one of my favorites.

seriously?! but it's so pretentious and badly written!! maybe I had some bad translation but I just found it irritatingly shallow and overly optimistic, like a crappy pop song

Last edited by anna-banana on 18 Jan 2010, 4:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I hate Twilight with a flaming passion.
I couldn't get past the first five pages.