What's the worst book you've ever read?

I can't think of anything right now besides Gordon Lish's What I Know So Far. I just didn't like it. It was a total drag for me to finish it.

Most of the time though - I won't get halfway through a book if it's terrible.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven. God, I hate that fucking book.

Oh and The Lovely Bones. I pretty much couldn't stand that book. I finished it because I thought there was going to be some awesome reveal at the end. Nope - you knew the story right from Chapter 1. It made a pretty shitty movie too.

I loved The Lovely Bones. And The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Perhaps I'm a sap (I often couldn't get through more than one page at once because I couldn't read from crying so much).

I didn't like Anna Karenina. Usually I'm a fan of Russian literature, but not in this case. I thought it was so boring. Also, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

We do have really similar taste. I liked it because of the author's back story. It was very...therapeutic, I suppose.

I'll let you slide this time.

Honestly, Tell-All is coming to mind right now.

That's being a little harsh... Either you haven't read that many books or you're really Joseph Suglia.

No, I know. You're right. Uh...let's see...Infinite Jest is pretty damn terrible, at least what I was able to slog through. Definitely worse than Tell-All.

My girlfriend is literally telling me right now how much she didn't like this book.

"Too much name-dropping."
"Stupid chorus."
"Predictable."

But I still maintain that people hate it because they want Choke, Fight Club, Survivor, etc.

Yeah - I liked it good enough though.

It's not his best, but it's better than Snuff. I enjoyed it. I stated before it reminded me of Sunset Blvd. And I really like that movie.

you're doing it wrong!

you have to have read it all the way through.

i'm not sure that i have one. if i don't like a book i generally stop reading it.

Despite what a lot of people have been saying, I'm still eager to read Tell-All. I'm worried that it's going to be yet another Snuff, with perhaps less sex and hopefully a much better ending.

I haven't read either of them, but my husband says that Snuff is the worst book he's ever read (even worse than That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, which we both hated) and that he wanted to tear it up on the train one day.

I liked the ending of Snuff.

I'm not just saying it to be snarky, but Snuff and Pygmy are tied in my recent memories for biggest wastes of my time.

Tell-All can't possibly be worse than Snuff. Snuff reminded me of them taking a mediocre 3 minute SNL sketch and trying to expand it into an hour and a half movie. Only worse.
And then there's Pygmy. I bought it out of sentimentality in having all Chuck's books lined up but couldn't even bring myself to opening it.

It's possible that I'm a nut, but I enjoyed Snuff. It didn't compare to Choke or Survivor like you guys said, but it was a different type of book. It was a fun, light, and quick read. I'd put it above Diary and maybe even Lullaby. Those books had better story lines, but they were tougher to finish for me.

I just wish he'd do something that got me excited to read him. I bought Haunted because i was on a Palahniuk kick, but probably wouldn't have bought it had i not been, and i've not been interested in anything he's written since then.

And, yeah, i know, it's cool to hate Palahniuk, but i really just don't like him very much. Survivor and Fight Club are great, but i'm pretty meh about the rest.

The worst book i've read is probably My Antonia by Willa Cather. Maybe Heart of Darkness, though.

I agree with eddy about those books being very similar. I read Survivor, Choke, and Invisible Monsters around the same time, and I felt like it was the same thing with different material. I think it's one of the reasons that I love Rant so much. It wasn't like that. It was more human, rather than an amalgamation of facts. Granted, I read Rant first, but in my mind, it's so different from the others.

pretty sure you know the story just from reading the blurb on the back cover

I've heard that Rant is actually quite good, and it's the only one of the new one's i thought sounded interesting, but i never got around to reading it. Anyway, probably won't read it because i've heard [not just from Suglia] that's it's pretty much wholesale lifted from Crash by JG Ballard, and i really really did not like that book either.

Actually, that can go here, too. It's just, i don't know, so endlessly bizarre. I felt like i was reading it at armsreach the whole time. It disturbed me, which i'm sure was part of the intention, but i just never connected with it in any way. It was kind of like a Lynch move, in that, i can see the talent, i know he's brilliant at what he does, but he's never made something that i want to see or enjoy seeing.

maybe i should have made a 'what's the worst chuck palahniuk book you've ever read?' thread instead...

perhaps.

Interesting, I felt this way about the film of Crash. I liked the book just fine, but the film is awful. Still in my opinion it is not Ballard's best work.

I will add Da Vinci code for its smug tone and hamfisted writing, and I'll throw in another one called Rogue Angel, which had some of the worst writing I've ever seen, including these gems so bad I had to blog about them:

"She swung the sword, cutting through Lesauvage's pistol before he could fire, hitting the barrel and knocking the weapon off target."

Huh? Cutting through it AND hitting it? How?

One of my favorites from page 311:

"A waterfall of glistening water poured into the lower cave."

Yes, not just ANY waterfall... this one was made...of WATER!

And lastly (because I really could do this all night, but don't want to waste much more time on this pile), my absolute favorite:

"The motorcycle went airborne. Throwing her body sideways, Annja turned it with her, performing a tabletop aerial maneuver she'd seen on X Games."

Full review here:
http://monkeywright.com/read/2007/02/rogue-angeldestiny-by-alex-archer.h...

I like Da Vinci Code. WHY DO I ALWAYS DEFEND THIS BOOK I KNOW IS CRAPY?

hahah.. you know a book has to be exploring some seriously intellectual shit when it's referencing the x-games

It's not just that, but the implausibility of the whole thing. If I recall, she wasn't exactly a motorcycle expert to begin with, and then she catches air (a pretty scary proposition) and then, hey why not, she pulls off a table top. This would basically be suicide if you didn't know exactly what you were doing, but she's all "It's okay! I watched X-Games, I got this!"

the phrase 'don't try this at home' never even crossed her mind!

Naked Lunch, though for a long time before actually getting to reading it I thought it was gonna be one of my favourite books. Too much of a disappointment though. Ok, and Twilight.

I understand the critique of Naked Lunch, but i really liked it. I mean, i couldn't tell you what it's about or even really what happened, but that book is hilarious. You're kind of always lost in it, things collaging wildly, and everything's confusing, then there's all this talk of penises, but i laughed the whole way through and read it in one sitting.

Very bizarre, to be sure.

echhh naked lunch. a sequel to Pygmy, written by that daVinci code guy would be better than that pile.

Twilight.

Vicious Spring by Hollis Hampton-Jones.

Prozac Nation.

There are others, but this just stood out as being the most whiny and biggest waste of paper...

PS I loved The Lovely Bones so stuff you Pete Goutis.

Copy and pasted from another thread.

One book I stopped reading because it was terrible, but got tricked into coming back to it was The Other End Of Time, by Frederik Pohl.

In TOEOT, two hundred pages go by with the characters sitting in a featureless room, talking. That's nearly another novel inside this book where nothing happens. Zip. The better characters were one dimensional, the rest were simply unbelievable. You've got a serious fucking problem when the most intelligent character in your novel is an alien named "Dopey", folks.

I read his Gateway a long time ago and it was outstanding so I revisited TOEOT. The quality of writing in those two books was so divergent, I couldn't believe the same person wrote them. After the first fifty pages, I read as an educational example of how not to write.

It holds the distinction of being the third worst book I've stuck with in my life.
Amazing considering Gateway is one of my all time favorites. How the hell can some writers be so profoundly inconsistent? It's like they get to a certain point and say, "Fuck it, I already made it."

*Edit*

I put Atlas Shrugged as my first runner up, and upon further reflection, there are a lot of books I'd rate lower. I did hate that book though.

It's only coming to mind because I read it recently, but Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann was terrible.

Maybe it's just because it's been a really really long time since I've read Crash, but the only similarity that I see here is them driving around in cars...

Less Than Zero really jumps out at me. I wanted to stop reading, but made myself finish it because there was such a big sensation about it right then (it was new or something). I turned the last page and set it down, face-down so I wouldn't have to look at it, and decided then to never read another book based upon buzz or hype ever ever ever again.

What a load of crap.

Son of Rosemary, by Ira Levin, was the worst book I've ever read. And that was very disappointing, because I really enjoyed all of his other books. Rosemary's Baby is one of my favorites, but honestly, the sequel was completely stupid.

***SPOILER***

At the end of Son of Rosemary, Levin reveals that it was ALL a dream. None of it ever happened...they never even moved to the new apartment. GAY!

I'd add The DiVinci Code and Snuff to my list, too.

Did this guy not make it to 10th grade, because that's when I was taught to never EVER end a story like that. What a cop-out.

I know, right? Look at his other works: The Boys from Brazil, The Stepford Wives, Sliver (the book, not the lame movie). There was a huge gap of time between his original works, and then Son of Rosemary, which was one of the last things he wrote. Maybe he really needed the money or something.

I thought of one! Perks of Being a Wallflower. It bored the crap out of me and it was depressing and sloppy but i actually finished it. I'd rather not waste my time on something i'm not enjoying, especially a book.

This is so offensive to me. What is bad about Infinite Jest?

The Condemned by Noah Cicero. Because of expectations, I mean; it's probably not worse than Stephenie Meyer. At least it didn't take long.

Objection! Counsel for the defense moves to strike, on the grounds that "crap" could never, ever read like this:

There would be about a hundred teenagers dancing in front of a huge screen on which the videos were played; the images dwarfing the teenagers--and I would recognize people whom I had seen at clubs, dancing on the show, smiling for the cameras, and then turning and looking up to the lighted, monolithic screen that was flashing the images at them. Some of them would mouth the words to the song that was being played. But I'd concentrate on the teenagers who didn't mouth the words; the teenagers who had forgotten them; the teenagers who maybe never knew them.

i thought it was ok.. at least it's fairly short