What is the worst book you have ever read?

[Valka D'Ur]

Empire by Orson Scott Card

It's about an American civil war. Liberals vs Conservatives. All those caricatures of "liberals" and "conservatives" you see in the media were brought to life by Mr. Card, who did an amazing job of taking the most extreme and ridiculous portrayals of members of both camps and for some reason made them into actual characters in his story. So as a result you have these .. strawmen walking around, talking to each other. And you're expected to take this all at face value.

It's not supposed to be a funny book, it's supposed to be serious. So right off the bat, as you're reading this thing, you think to yourself "Something isn't right here"

It gets worse and worse the more you read. I won't include any spoilers in case anyone actually wants to read this drivel, but honestly, don't bother. Card is usually a very good author. The only explanation I have is that somebody paid him big bucks and said "here's my book outline, here are the characters I've invented, here is the plot, make all this into a novel and I will give you a load of cash"

One thing I usually liked about his books are the characters and how well I can relate to them and how interesting the interactions between them are. But in this book there pretty much aren't any characters, just walking caricatures. You read on and on hoping it's some sort of a joke and that the real characters will be revealed sooner rather than later.. but nope, it's not a joke, this is actually the book.

Throw in some silly technology like walking robots terrorizing New York and you have yourself the worst book I've ever read.

I did something I swore I wouldn't do after meeting Card at a science fiction convention in the early '80s: I read another of his books. He wrote a trilogy of novels based on the women in the story of Jacob, and the sheer repetitiveness reminded me of Kevin J. Anderson's nuDune books. It's like he thought that if it didn't mention the same detail about a character every other page, the reader would forget and no longer understand why the character acted as she did.

Card's version of Leah (mother of 7 of Jacob's offspring) was said to be "tender-eyed" because she was so nearsighted as to be almost functionally blind. Okay, whatever. But Card mentioned the phrase "tender-eyed" so many times in that stupid book that if it had been a drinking game, I'm sure I'd have ended up in the hospital for alcohol poisoning.

So I have renewed my determination that no more Orson Scott Card books shall pass over the threshold of my home. My first decision had been made on the basis that he was rude to me at the convention. My second decision is made on the basis of that, plus he's just a really bad writer who should have caught all this repetitious nonsense in the editing stage, but I have to wonder if that book was actually edited. Or maybe Kevin J. Anderson looked at it and said, "Repeating this detail every other page? Works for me, my books sell like hotcakes, and anyone who doesn't agree is just a talifan anyway, so what do they know?".

Any book that has a map included but the first location mentioned in the book, is not on that map.
Nothing pisses me off more. And double shame when there are multiple maps.

Examples of books that do this?

I noticed that issue with the Fighting Fantasy gamebook I'm currently preparing to adapt to prose form. At the beginning of the book the character is just sitting around somewhere, happens on a dying Dwarf, who tells him that the war-hammer of King Gillibran has been stolen and would the character take up the quest, since he (the dwarf) can't do it? So of course the character says 'yes' and the dwarf tells the character to go to Yaztromo's Tower and buy some magic stuff to help get through Darkwood Forest, because Darkwood Forest is where the war-hammer is and it's a really dangerous place.

So the problem about the map is that there's a map of Darkwood Forest, marking Yaztromo's Tower... but the story starts out at the opposite end of the forest. As someone involved in writing the FF wiki said, it makes no sense for the story to begin at some unspecified location north of the forest, where the dying dwarf is encountered, and then the character walks all the way around the forest to get to the tower to buy magic stuff to actually walk through the forest and look for the war-hammer. Why not just start the story south of the forest from the get-go?

Well, I've decided on a quicker way to get the character from north to south instead of having to walk, but it's still annoying not to have the very first location where the character meets the dwarf pinpointed on the map.

 

[GoodEnoughForMe]

Frakenstein is exceptional, delete this thread.

My answer is some crappy generic horribly written fantasy. Like Robert Jordan. Or some of the bottom-of-the-barrel DnD books.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

World War Z

 

[Lohrenswald]

"The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha". I just could not see the humor in it, but I did read an english translation. From wiki "it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published" so this may say more about me than the book.

I heard a lot of the humour in it is like misspellings and puns and such in spanish that can't be translated

Worst book I started reading and couldn't finish was a youth type roman called "Stormbreaker" by a guy called Anthony Horowitz

 

[Manfred Belheim]

The Bible is pretty terrible too actually. And I have to admit to not finishing that one.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Well, I have been accused of being a pedo for a long time. I couldn't read Lolita.

Okay, fair game, but how does that make Lolita the worst book you've ever read? First of all, you clearly haven't read it. Second, and even more important, you seem to be put off by the theme of pedophilia itself, not by prose, bad characters or anything of the like So, in essence, both criteria: (1) worst book and (2) I've ever read are not even fulfilled

Lolita is.. not a suggested read.. but an important book focusing on an illness which to this day is impossible to understand. Too few people ( men and women ) are capable of expressing the illness for fear of stigma. If there was more data, maybe we could find a means of therapy, but unfortunately, mostly, all we have to work with are victimizers who may or may not be pedophilic, but more likely, strangely, are not, just as rape is to be considered a violent crime rather than sexual.

Not to branch off topic. Don't read it if you can't handle a protagonist with interest in particularly young females.

It definitely is the main focus, but there is a lot of other stuff to take away from the book that readers routinely miss: Usually we completely strip children from their agency, but Lolita, while being manipulated and abused, actually manipulated back. She has a mind of her own, she's not just the victim, she also knows how to exploit her situation to the fullest.

This situation is even more important today, I feel, where underage refugees leave their country on their own, survive through hardship and evade mortal dangers, just to be victimized and seen as the result of a civil war, persecution and so forth. Children should be written and viewed in a different way imo, at some point the arbitrary age barrier of 18 (or whatever it is in your country) will crumble. Even today in Germany the police has no idea how to deal with young repeat-criminals who haven't reached 18 and therefore cannot be punished in any meaningful way. It's a really interesting moral dilemma and I'm glad Lolita explored such a subject and made it known to a wider audience!

Frakenstein is exceptional, delete this thread.

My answer is some crappy generic horribly written fantasy. Like Robert Jordan. Or some of the bottom-of-the-barrel DnD books.

I liked it, too. I suppose I can understand why people don't care for it, but it's got beautiful prose, well-written characters, great pacing, very evoking imagery and some of that obscuro-magick stuff that I'm a sucker for. Though I wish they had included more details about digging up corpses and performing strange experiments on them. Guess that would have been too much for its audience back then though

 

[Lexicus]

Mankiw's introductory econ textbook might be my entry.

 

[Zelig]

Rich Dad, Poor Dad

I only got a few dozen pages in before the aggressive assault from all the logical fallacies forced me to quit.

 

[NovaKart]

A Separate Peace by John Knowles. I hated that book.

 

[Zkribbler]

Either:
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, which I trudge through bashing my head on the wall because it was required reading
or
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. I made it through a chapter, maybe a little more. I recognized the words as English but they were arranged in such a way that they made no sense.

 

[Zkribbler]

"The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha". I just could not see the humor in it, but I did read an english translation. From wiki "it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published" so this may say more about me than the book.

It was one of the first novels ever written, if not the absolute first, which is why it is celebrated. Almost anything published today is better.

 

[dusters]

Ok, "Lolita" was the book that triggered me the most, not the "worst" book. I have no idea about bad books, my intution usually tells me to stop reading them after 10 or 30 pages.

 

[REDY]

I do not like Stendhal. I read Red and the Black and Charterhouse of Parma. I was totally bored.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

It was one of the first novels ever written, if not the absolute first, which is why it is celebrated. Almost anything published today is better.

Almost anything published today? Really?.. I can't even think of one """great""" contemporary author since David Foster Wallace died. Maybe Houellebecq, but he's far from universally liked. Don Quixote is well-liked for all the best reasons and it has little to do with being canon or "coming first". It's one of those universal tales that inspires both working class men (and women) with nothing but a high school education and ivory tower scholars.

As much as I agree with your stance on Rand, I really wonder what drove you to this statement. What exactly is it that books "published today" do better?

By the way, the first novel ever written was "Tale of Genji" (though you said "one of", not trying to one up you or anything! ), actually by a woman. (Genji Monogatari: Murasaki Shikibu). It's really good and not just because it's the first one

Ok, "Lolita" was the book that triggered me the most, not the "worst" book. I have no idea about bad books, my intution usually tells me to stop reading them after 10 or 30 pages.

Fair enough! Same here, though I can't even think of a single book I've quit.

 

[Snerk]

I read this book on philosophy written by this greek guy called Kyriakos or something. Oh the horrors, it was terrible. I still sometimes have nightmares about it.

In truth I really can't think of any. I know I've read books I've not been very enthusiastic about. But if so then I'll go on to forget about the whole ordeal. No book I've read has been so bad that it's made a lasting impression on me. So yeah, IDK.

 

[GoodEnoughForMe]

Rich Dad, Poor Dad

I only got a few dozen pages in before the aggressive assault from all the logical fallacies forced me to quit.

My dad made me read that when I was a young kid. He loves that book. Even fallacies aside, it's so, so simplistic.

 

[warpus]

The Bible is pretty terrible too actually. And I have to admit to not finishing that one.

Spoiler :

Everyone dies at the end.

 

[The_J]

The Bible is pretty terrible too actually. And I have to admit to not finishing that one.

Should just be updated with modern language.
Had to read the book of Hiob during religion class, was awful. But probably anything written in such a style would be awful. A friend of mine read the Odysee, he said it was terrible. I read a modern adaption by a german assembly-line fantasy author, was actually pretty good.


From school: Effi Briest, was mandatory reading. The plot is not exactly interesting, but that's not the biggest problem. The author spends to much time describing tiny BS. I think the first 5 pages are describing the garden of the house in which the protagonist lives in. I have no idea why. Average reading speed for that horrible book was 20 pages/hour for me, normally I'm around 50.

In my free time: Tried to read a fantasy book from Stephen King (not the Dark tower, cannot remember), was written in such a boring way, that I couldn't deal with it for more than 10 pages.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The Bible is pretty terrible too actually. And I have to admit to not finishing that one.

Try the Lolcat Bible. It's still the same basic thing, but with cats. You'll need to learn lolspeak first, though.

Here's the main page of the Lolcat Bible translation project. No, I did not take part in this. And since I have a black cat, I disapprove of Basement Cat being equated with Satan. But it's still an interesting project.

 

[warpus]

All cats are Satan, pretty much.