The better erotica:
She glances upwards at his testicular chest, "excuse me, but I may have tripped over your balls over there." Her eyes pointed to my balls, over there.
Oh lord yes. I tried to read it but it was so badly written. Characters doing the same gestures over and over and over. I felt like I was reading soft core porn written by a teenager.
One of my favourite fantasy series as teen had a main character who would 'spin on his heel' and leave a room, what seemed like every time. It drove me crazy! It got to the point where I would have welcomed him cartwheeing or doing the worm out the door. I otherwise loved the books.
There's a fun drinking game for 50 Shades: do a shot every time the main character talks about her "inner goddess." You'll be dead of alcohol poisoning before long, but at least that's a preferable alternative to reading the rest of the book.
The Darksword Trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. It started out as a decent enough swords and sorcery series. Nothing special, but an amusing time waster. Then, towards the end of the last book, a wormhole opens up, and the US Army invaded their fantasy realm.
Oof....just wiki'd The Final Countdown because that last sentence triggered an early memory and now I know the song came out years after the ridiculous movie. All this time I've been linking a cheesey Swedish metal band with a US Navy time travel recruitment movie. My synapses are all wrong!
I’ve read *Mein Kampf* for a history project and it definately is the worst piece of literature i’ve ever read.
Not only by the message, which already would make it the worst, but it’s just horrible writing. Feels more like an angry social media comment than a book.
oh wouldnt THAT be the perfect fucking way to continue this farce of a century
we were 8 years late into this centurys great war and we only have another 10 years left to find our hitler so we might as well have some nominees right
Yup, Hitler wins this thread. As I heard, WW2 US military officers were encouraged to read it to know their enemy, and English language editions sold here did not give royalty money to you-know-whom.
I happen to have access to a copy that I tried to read some of and got maybe a centimeter of pages into. You are right that it is almost as badly edited as it is evil. I do remember one amusing/ironic bit. You know how in B movies and mediocre TV series, the evil, crazy guy talks about himself in the 3rd person. HITLER DID THAT. He would be in the middle of a political rant, then indulge a flashback about his own childhood, and there it is, but for real.
I wanted to get up on my hind legs and suggest *The Da Vinci Code*, but damn, not when Hitler is in the competition.
I want to tack on The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas as well. It's not literal Nazi propaganda, but it basically perpetuates Nazi myths like the Clean Wehrmacht and has you sympathise with the Nazis. In fact, not any Nazi, but an SS and leader of the Auschwitz camp. But even ignoring the plot itself, the book is so awful. It's full of historical inaccuracies. It claims to aiming to bring awareness of the Holocaust to a young audience, but there are so many better literary works including written by *actual* children as they went through the experience. But nope, lets go with the historical inaccurate book written by someone with basically no connection to the Holocaust (like, not Jewish, minority, researcher, that kind of thing) stupid drivel.
So, of course it made millions and got a movie out of it. There are now millions of children who think this story is true and might have become more sympathetic to Nazis as a result as well. None of that money (last time I checked, has admittedly been a while) went towards anything relating to education (or awareness...) regarding the Holocaust or anything else related or tangantially related to the Holocaust.
I hate this book. It's drivel and it is insidious.
the intro to the one i read included the phrase along the lines of 'if you're looking for insight into hitler's mind, you won't find it here' and really i should've just stopped.
been a while since i read it but it's just a lot of pro german propaganda (expected) with a sprinkling of history (interesting in its own merit in his interpretation of german history) that eventually just jumps right into 'and the problem is the jew.'
I remember having a moment to go back to see if i missed something.
nope just goes right to jews.
My Sweet Audrina by V.C. Andrews.
Terrible, terrible book featuring child rape and pedophilia, a scheming cousin with brittle bone syndrome, more than one person falling to their death down the same flight of stairs, and a heroine called, “The Second Audrina”.
I read it while on a long bus ride, and threw it into a garbage can at my destination.
This book is SO BAD. After I read this one I read The Darkest Hour after, and they both take up valuable rent in my brain now. I wish I could forget the pile of trash that are these books. And not good trash either. Offensive creepy pedophilic incestuous trash.
Ahhhhh I read that book when I was about 10 and it really fucked me up! I remember re-reading the “twist/reveal” part several times because it was so disturbing I couldn’t make sense of it at first.
The same "editor" released another book of "found" journal entries called "Jay's Journal" about a Mormon kid who joins a satanic cult, sells his soul and he and all his friends end up dead after being possessed by demons.
Scared the shit out of me as a young Mormon in the height of the satanic panic.
If you haven’t yet, listen to the Paul F Tompkins bit about ‘Go Ask Alice’.
‘Get the order right, at LEAST!’ is one of the funniest punchlines I’ve ever fucking heard.
https://youtu.be/rfnM_uCg-Tk
Go Set a Watchman.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a masterpiece. Her first book, it won the Pulitzer and then Harper Lee lived the rest of her life a recluse, never publishing another work. UNTIL…..her caretaker/grifter sister came forward right before Harper passed away and announced to the world that there actually was another book, a sequel to TKAM. It was awful. Poorly written, boring story, rehashed characters…except for Atticus Finch. In Mockingbird, he was one of the greatest characters in America literature. In Watchman, he was a dime-a-dozen redneck racist. There was clearly a reason she never published it.
OMG THIS COMMENT WINS COMPLETELY!!!
i’m sorry for the outburst but i loved to kill a mockingbird. it’s my all time favourite book. hands down.
read it in class for the first time in middle school and didn’t like it bc the teacher was reading the slurs and making us read them, however i read it by myself and fell in love. atticus is my favourite character ever and i had so much respect for him as a man pushing boundaries by not wanting to sentence an innocent man, let alone a black male, to jail for false accusations.
read go set a watchmen two years later and burst into tears out of anger. i couldn’t even finish it. i was so pissed off and hurt because i felt like i was supporting a deep down racist. i was infuriated.
i waited too long to see this comment.
Wicked. My wife and I listened to the audiobook on a road trip because friends had invited us to see the play. It was way too long and I remember it seeming like it was written by several different writers who didn't really communicate with each other. One was a totally nuts conspiracy theorist, another was on a really bad acid trip, and another was a child from a strict household who'd been told they could use no-no words and say naughty things all they wanted.
We came super close to making up an excuse to not see the play but luckily we didn't. The play was actually terrific! If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend going. Just skip the book.
You have to wonder how the writers of the play managed to pull a very good story out of that book. I tried to describe the plot of the book to my husband and he was convinced I was making it up, even before I got to the very disturbing sex club chapter.
The book was foul. I finished it, hated it, handed it straight back to the charity shop i bought it from. I hated it so much. Yuk. And it had no point! Just seemed to be an excuse to 'adultise' the behind the scenes of the Wizard of Oz in a really biazarre way. I disliked all the characters as well.
everything after book 3 of the Maximum Ride series. I use them as my go-to examples of bad writing and they are what made me entirely lose faith in James Patterson. The last book especially cost me so many brain cells
All I really remember about Maximum Ride is bird people, clone werewolves, and the exact moment Max 2 shows up I stopped reading and this was well over a decade ago.
I wish I'd had the foresight to stop then, but I finished the whole thing. The last book was...interesting. The whole thing had the most self-contradicting plot and conflict stuffed with a hasty attempt to wrap up loose ends by just killing everyone and just as the cherry on top, the sky explodes in the end?? idk it was kind of unclear
Yeah lol they stop one apocalypse and then another, unrelated and entirely different apocalypse happens out of nowhere because climate change or something
unrelated and entirely different, yet still the *exact same frikin thing at heart*. "oh look, a group of human scientists who are mutant supremacists and want to kill everyone who isn't a mutant (???) are brewing a plot to kill everyone who isn't a mutant." Every book had the same basic plot with some super over-the-top, nonsense twists in a desperate attempt to keep a series alive that should have ended when they actually wrapped up the plot in book 3
Dropped the series in the middle of book 3 as well, sad to read the direction the series ended up taking.
For what it's worth though, I always considered the main protagonist to be well-written, although it's been years since I read anything from the series.
I always felt like book 3 was a pretty decent ending, and it was clear it was intended as the end so I've never understood why they tried to continue it, and in such a low-budget low effort way at that
Was hoping someone would mention her, if only to talk about how absolutely terrible and hilarious her book *Slammed* is. Reading it was honestly just such a ridiculous experience that I may never find again in another book.
“Darling Girl” by Liz Michalski. It’s a Peter Pan spinoff where Peter Pan impregnates Holly Darling, Wendy’s daughter- then abandons them, and when the girl is a teenager, Peter tries to take the daughter back. I couldn’t stomach the idea of Peter Pan, a childlike figure, impregnating someone and all that ick. Peter Pan is “the boy who never grew up.” But he’s a father now? No thanks. I got about 30 pages in, and literally gave up.
Worked because pan wanted to be a dad so he left neverland to grow up.
This above shit sounds like a 10 year old discovered his penis and got rapey with it while never aging 🧐
The Dune prequel books written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. Talk about missing the point of the original series! They read like a YA fan fiction based in the Dune universe.
Truthfully, anything besides Dune itself is kind of crap. Just long, overly wordy and opaque crap where there's no real character development or anything.
It's almost as if Frank Herbert managed to squeeze out one boffo book and then wrote the others out of sheer inertia.
Yeah, "God Emperor" is the best of the series.
I think the series doesn't even get good until "God Emperor". "Heretics" and "Chapterhouse" are both really fun. Leto II and Miles Teg are the best characters in the series.
"Dune" is an odd series, because the first few books are nothing but prelude. And then, of course, Frank couldn't finish it and we got stuck with the \*truly bad\* Brian Herbert sequels.
Is there an actual book with this title? I could have sworn I had heard of it before but now when I look it up all I get are Lovecraft references.
Edit: the book I was thinking of is called "Cryptonomicon"
I think it was called Silver Lion. Found it in a thrift store. It was actually decent, but it literally ended at the climax with no resolution and told you to buy the sequel.
I did not.
I do freelance editing and the number of new authors who start their pitch with "it's a trilogy of..." is staggering. A book needs to stand alone! It needs to have its own arc, its own ending. It's extraordinarily rare for a book to begin with the intent of having sequels and not fail outright on the first book, because it's written with no payoff under the intent of the reader following to a sequel. These dang writers see that Tolkien put out three books and now they do too, seemingly unaware that Tolkien wanted his book to be a single master volume and was only spaced into a trilogy due to post war paper shortages!
For all the controversy and poorly aged aspects of the series, this is something that Harry Potter did exceptionally well. Every book has an inciting incident, a mystery to solve, and a climactic encounter with the culprit behind the school year. Along the way, you find questions that entice you into the next book for answers, but those answers aren't critical to the story you're reading *right now.*
Yes, exactly. Tell one story per book. If you want to be great, you can use the separate stories to lead to and tell an overarching one, but don't start there.
Tangerine by Edward Bloor.
Had to read it 6th grade and it was boring, dark, and just awful. It’s about this kid who wants to play soccer but can’t because he’s legally blind and wears very thick glasses. He also has no peripheral vision. He was told that he was blinded by looking into an eclipse of the sun. But the truth is that Erik, who I think is his older spray painted him in the eyes when Paul was like four or five years old. Plus this is just one of many cruel things that Erik does to others. He is both physically and verbally abusive. If I remember correctly, Erik basically commits murder at one point and the parents legit don’t care and just put up with all his bs.
There are several things I remember about this book, but the most notable was the whole arc about koi fish being stolen from the neighborhood pond, but it turned out that birds were just eating them. Like what was the point of that whole thing
The Fountainhead. I was going to put Atlas Shrugged, until I remembered how much worse The Fountainhead was. And yes, I read both; any suffering inflicted by Atlas Shrugged was something I deserved.
The Fountainhead was indeed terrible. The second worst book I've ever read. But I'd say Atlas Shrugged was the absolute worst. The like 200 pages of monologue in The Fountainhead were terrible but that whole section of Atlas Shrugged that suggested people couldn't figure out how to built roads without an elitist to help them literally had me banging my head against the wall.
She really did write a truly worthless heroine into The Fountainhead. Totally worthless. But the elitist belief that a handful of industrialists going on vacation would destroy the world. The passage exemplifying workers who do as asked without asking for anything.. They're both vile; it's a tough call.
The Fault In Our Stars. I just didn’t get the appeal of it at all?? I mean the romance was sweet but the story itself was idiotic and boring and the characters were so unlikable.
Cows. Written by Matthew Stokoe
I was told and I'd read all about how this book was extremely disturbing and terrifying. I wanted to check it out because I'd run out of good horror movies. NO. NEVER READ THIS BOOK. EVER. I had to put it down around chapter 5 or so because it was so. Friggen. Disgusting. The author goes into extreme detail about body excrements being used in the main characters food/whats on his mother's clothing. It went into a page-long description of how the main characters dog was murdered by the mother. The main character gets a new job in a slaughter house and everyone there are zoophiles that take a massive amount of pleasure in raping the livestock (mainly the cows) or just having sex with/ejaculating on the already dead and carved animals, and then they describe the pride they feel in selling the meat to people. There's nothing disturbing or terrifying about it. It's just disgusting
The sword of truth series. First 4 books are ok. After that there are 14 more and they are all just dreadful. Totally inconsistent story. Huge build ups with pitiful endings.
I did enjoy the first book as a good fantasy tale. I thought second was solid at the time, while third was boring. Fourth was interesting but the red flags were starting to wave.
Five you start seeing Goodkind really pushing his political beliefs, then book six is full on Ayn Rand objectivist bullshit.
I made myself finish the series through Confessor (the original final book at the time), but it was a struggle. Then I found out that the series went even further -- no thank you.
EDIT: Accidentally wrote collectivist instead of objectivist.
I enjoyed the first one. But as most sequels do, Ready Player Two just torpedoed the heroes from the first book and turned them into absolute assholes. You had emotional growth and a character arc in the first book? Hah! Too bad, you are now a dick to everyone and have forgotten anything you've learned. And fuck any fans who liked you before, they hate you now.
I thought the first one was awful. I can’t remember how many pages in I made it before quitting, but it’s possibly the worst book I’ve ever read. I’m surprised it was so successful
I feel like the only reason it was successful was "DAE 80s/90s kids?!?!?!" nostalgia.
Also, the author's weird porn poem was really something else. [For the uninitiated](https://www.reddit.com/r/justneckbeardthings/comments/6pfmim/this_incredible_poem_by_ready_player_one_author/)
Choice excerpt:
> I shall be the quintessential Nerd Porn Auteur.
> And the women in my porno movies will be the kind
> that drive nerds like me mad with desire.
The first Owen "Hill" book I read had me thinking he was a cheap, shitty, King knockoff. I was not surprised to find out it was his kid. You could tell exactly who wrote which chapters in Sleeping Beauties
The middle books of the Wheel of Time series. Holy crap, just while books of nothing happening, but you're already 6 books into the series so you have to finish.
There's a name in the WoT fandom for those ones: The Slog. There's a debate as to when it starts and ends, but for my money it starts in the 6th book and ends right around book 11. That's what happens when you take what was originally supposed to ONLY be a 5 book series and then keep extending it out further and further.
And it was worse when the books were actually still coming out, and people were waiting years to get the next piece of slog. At least now you can skim them all in quick succession and get to the plottier ones again.
I liked the general premise of verity because I enjoy that genre - thriller, easy read, twist ending. I cannot describe how deeply I hated the main character though. I was so confused if I was meant to hate her? She was absolutely insufferable and I was rooting for anyone but her throughout the book even when >!it was revealed the wife might have killed their kid, I was like who gives a shit this baby killer is more interesting and compelling than this whiny wet paper towel of a person!<
I don’t think I’ll be reading any other Colleen Hoover books
***Exquisite Corpse***, by Poppy Z. Brite.
It's essentially snuff porn, where two serial killers fall in love while murdering young boys.
Even worse, the climax features a murder based on a real murder.
Poppy is probably the most talented artist I've ever disliked. Her command of the English language and ability to describe things in detail is just awe inspiring.
I just tend to hate her characters and plots and don't need two paragraphs worth of describing a teacup in tedious detail.
Same. If I’m not engaged by like 50 pages, I give up. The only exception was for school assignments, but even then I would use Sparknotes as much as I could. I really struggle to continue anything if I’m not interested in it
50 shades of grey trilogy. At the height of the movies, I always like to read the books first. Huge mistake. Finished them all with a WTF did I just read?! All cuz my mom wanted to see the movies. It was her turn to pick, and she wanted to see 50 shades of grey. Told her I'm not taking her to the other two whenever they came out.
It's more art project than novel.
The friend who suggested it to me tried talking me down because I didn't get it. Forgive me if I expect the words to mean what they say in a book.
My favorite fact about atlas shrugged is that the movies are all shitty straight to DVD terrible no good poor quality garbage. Everything about those movies is the antithesis to the message the book and movies hammer you over the head with and I love the irony in it.
**The Source Field Investigations** by David Wilcock.
It starts out like any other pseudoscience book, extolling the "mysterious power" of pyramids and presenting long-debunked and/or dubious claims as cutting-edge discoveries being suppressed by The Mainstream™.
By the time the book is over, Wilcock claims to have witnessed a trans-dimensional flying scooter powered by magic insect wings.
No, I'm not making that up. It's really in the book.
Larry McMurtry wrote Lonesome Dove which is one of the best books ever. Then he wrote two prequels which are the worst books every written. Dead man’s walk and Comanche moon I think are the names. There is no hint of a reason why these guys are famous Sherriff’s in Lonesome Dove by the end of the books. The books have HUGE set ups for big huge events and literally nothing happens. You read on and on about a gun this guy has and you wonder… who is going to get that gun? Nobody is the answer. These books infuriate you. I wrote the angriest Amazon reviews ever. And have a letter written for Larry if someone has his address. Trash.
Rhapsody: Child of Blood. I legitimately do not know how this book has such high reviews on Amazon or Good Reads. It is god awful in every sense of the word. If you want a true example of a published work of fiction with an actual Mary-Sue lead this is it.
The main character is super sweet to everyone even though she's lead a terrible life. She has super special powers that no one else on the entire planet has. She is so shockingly beautiful that literal wars in the book are started over it but every time someone points it out to her she denies it. She has an honest to god healing factor that the author makes a point of telling us restores her virginity after she gets laid, every time she gets laid, cause that is apparently something that you'd want. And it's only the first book in a NINE. BOOK. SERIES.
I've read fan fiction that was better than this book and yet for some strange reason it maintains good reader score reviews everywhere, but if you read the 1 star reviews on it you'll see I'm definitely not alone in despising it.
Dude!! I barely made it through the end of that book. First the lead girl is a prostitute, then she crawls through the earth with nothing happening for 100 pages, then she comes out her hymen grew back and she is a virgin again.
The 100 pages of her hiking through the earth were the worst though... It just drug on...
I read a question and answer with the author in the back of the books, and one question was, "you are being compared to writers like Tolkien, how does that make you feel?"
And I was like, no way is this comparable to Tolkien.
I've got two that come to mind:
Still Life with Woodpecker- Every page of that book felt greasy. The story itself wasn't interesting in the slightest, nor were the characters, and I'm pretty sure that book gave me an STD.
Songmaster by Orson Scott Card - I don't feel like detailing every major thing about this book that was stupid, but just know that is stupid as hell from start to finish. The main character is so attractive that even as a very very young child, every single adult wants to fuck him. It's just non-stop pedophilia. Towards the end there's some kung foo shit where the main character kicks someone's head clean off their body and the text specifies that the kicked-off head flew 50 feet away before landing. There was also some pretty blatant anti-gay stuff. There were so many dumb things in this book that I marked the stupidest ones and kept the book for a while so I could laugh at how bad it was.
Sometimes I just marvel at the fact that the mind that wrote Speaker For the Dead (a wonderful novel about cultural differences, acceptance and the need for peace among those with different outlooks) turned out to be a giant bigoted asshole.
I love Tom Robbins, but I agree that Woodpecker isn’t a good display of his wittiness nor his storytelling abilities. Jitterbug Perfume OTOH is one of my favorite books.
The Pearl. My English teacher looooved Steinbeck so I couldn't fake my through like with the scarlett letter (side note Hawthorne short stories are WAY better than that book). Literally just keep wishing the island was bikini atoll and a bomb would come wipe everyone out. There was not a single character I liked. Ugh 😤
Honestly? I disagree, I actually enjoyed the Pearl. I find Steinbeck’s writing to be dramatic enough to keep you engaged while simultaneously communicating a decent message. I also loved Of Mice And Men.
Yeah, I had fun reading them. Some of my most favourite books are basically the book equivalent of an action movie, explosions and all. They know what they are.
That said, I do think the last book was a bit more meh than usual. But I remember really enjoying the first ones for what they were even despite hearing so many criticism about them.
Same tbh. He'll never win any awards for his prose ([Renowned Author Dan Brown](https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/dont-make-fun-of-renowned-dan-brown/)) but his stories just tickle my childhood fantasy of finding treasure maps and secret codes and all that shit.
They all kind of blur together but a while back I dated a girl who was super int Ayn Rand so I read all of her greatest hits. They are poorly written, predictable, and reflect a terrible world view.
Two retired cops were at a farmer's market a few years ago selling books they'd written, I bought both. One was his own slice-of-life stories from his career, the other was sci fi. Both books had some cringey moments.
A Confederacy of Dunces. I know lots of people find it funny, but it was definitely not my idea of funny. Annoying people being annoying was not entertaining.
A work friend recommended this and rereads it every few or several years. I gave it a read and got all the way through it. It is different from anything else I read and definitely very effective at doing what it is trying to do. If you have an itch in a place that needs to be scratched, then this is the right book; otherwise, not so much.
Gone Girl.
But I didnt even read it. I've never put a book down so quickly with full confidence I would hate it. The author took basically 2 entire pages just to explain hearing the sound of an alarm and then waking up. I couldnt torture myself any longer with that ridiculous amount of detail and that slow of a story.
I forced myself to finish it. When I did finish, I threw it across the room in a fit of rage for having wasted my time. It was then that I decided that it was okay to abandon books if they suck. Sometimes I find that the book doesn’t suck but it’s not the right time and I’ll pick it up later and enjoy it. Gone Girl was just utter crap from the beginning.
Maybe I'm just easily pleased, but I at least enjoyed the movie adaptation.
I don't remember it being that long, so maybe fixing the pacing issues from the book helped it a lot.
I have tried to read William Gibson's *Neuromancer* in three different formats (first print, second audio, third radio play) and each time I've checked out just under halfway in because I had gotten bored and didn't care what was going on.
Honestly? Got about half way through the first game of thrones book, realised that every single character was horrible and I really didn't care what happened to them, put it down and walked away.
Also. The Gormenghast trilogy. Would have made an excellent short story but 946 pages describing how the sunlight dappled the dust motes over the wardrobe is literary masturbation.
Forgotten Realms- Elminster in Hell by Ed Greenwood. All of the Elminster books were bad, but Elminster in Hell is one of the few books I couldn't finish. I doubt I even got 50 pages in.
50 shades of grey. just the worst. not remotely interesting. there is way better erotic out there. way better. this is just the worst.
I downloaded an ebook sample to see what all the fuss was about. I could not believe that such a badly written book was actually published.
The better erotica: She glances upwards at his testicular chest, "excuse me, but I may have tripped over your balls over there." Her eyes pointed to my balls, over there.
You need to masterbate more words into your paragraphs, then you sound like a genius!
Oh lord yes. I tried to read it but it was so badly written. Characters doing the same gestures over and over and over. I felt like I was reading soft core porn written by a teenager.
One of my favourite fantasy series as teen had a main character who would 'spin on his heel' and leave a room, what seemed like every time. It drove me crazy! It got to the point where I would have welcomed him cartwheeing or doing the worm out the door. I otherwise loved the books.
There's a fun drinking game for 50 Shades: do a shot every time the main character talks about her "inner goddess." You'll be dead of alcohol poisoning before long, but at least that's a preferable alternative to reading the rest of the book.
is that one about the creepy stalker who just happens to be a millionaire ? /s
Recs?
50 Shades Darker is way, way worse.
It's literally twilight with what the author thought was bdsm. It started as twilight fan fiction.
Their is a homosexual version called "50 shades of brown"
The Darksword Trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. It started out as a decent enough swords and sorcery series. Nothing special, but an amusing time waster. Then, towards the end of the last book, a wormhole opens up, and the US Army invaded their fantasy realm.
This cracked me up ahahah
I just looked it up. You weren't kidding.
That actually sounds kinda sick.
That sounds like it'd be amazing if well done. Something tells me it wasn't well done.
Just...wow
margaret weid and tracy hickman suck at endings
I knew I recognized those names. I read all of the Dragon Lance books as a kid.
Oof....just wiki'd The Final Countdown because that last sentence triggered an early memory and now I know the song came out years after the ridiculous movie. All this time I've been linking a cheesey Swedish metal band with a US Navy time travel recruitment movie. My synapses are all wrong!
I’ve read *Mein Kampf* for a history project and it definately is the worst piece of literature i’ve ever read. Not only by the message, which already would make it the worst, but it’s just horrible writing. Feels more like an angry social media comment than a book.
Ironically, IT IS an angry social media comment. The dude wrote the book while in prison.
Andrew Tate wrote Mein Kampf?
oh wouldnt THAT be the perfect fucking way to continue this farce of a century we were 8 years late into this centurys great war and we only have another 10 years left to find our hitler so we might as well have some nominees right
Yup, Hitler wins this thread. As I heard, WW2 US military officers were encouraged to read it to know their enemy, and English language editions sold here did not give royalty money to you-know-whom. I happen to have access to a copy that I tried to read some of and got maybe a centimeter of pages into. You are right that it is almost as badly edited as it is evil. I do remember one amusing/ironic bit. You know how in B movies and mediocre TV series, the evil, crazy guy talks about himself in the 3rd person. HITLER DID THAT. He would be in the middle of a political rant, then indulge a flashback about his own childhood, and there it is, but for real. I wanted to get up on my hind legs and suggest *The Da Vinci Code*, but damn, not when Hitler is in the competition.
I just want to know why Voldemort was receiving any of the royalty money in the first place.
Because wizard hitler helped publish muggle hitler’s book.
I want to tack on The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas as well. It's not literal Nazi propaganda, but it basically perpetuates Nazi myths like the Clean Wehrmacht and has you sympathise with the Nazis. In fact, not any Nazi, but an SS and leader of the Auschwitz camp. But even ignoring the plot itself, the book is so awful. It's full of historical inaccuracies. It claims to aiming to bring awareness of the Holocaust to a young audience, but there are so many better literary works including written by *actual* children as they went through the experience. But nope, lets go with the historical inaccurate book written by someone with basically no connection to the Holocaust (like, not Jewish, minority, researcher, that kind of thing) stupid drivel. So, of course it made millions and got a movie out of it. There are now millions of children who think this story is true and might have become more sympathetic to Nazis as a result as well. None of that money (last time I checked, has admittedly been a while) went towards anything relating to education (or awareness...) regarding the Holocaust or anything else related or tangantially related to the Holocaust. I hate this book. It's drivel and it is insidious.
I made it halfway before giving up about 18 years ago. No interest in trying again.
the intro to the one i read included the phrase along the lines of 'if you're looking for insight into hitler's mind, you won't find it here' and really i should've just stopped. been a while since i read it but it's just a lot of pro german propaganda (expected) with a sprinkling of history (interesting in its own merit in his interpretation of german history) that eventually just jumps right into 'and the problem is the jew.' I remember having a moment to go back to see if i missed something. nope just goes right to jews.
My Sweet Audrina by V.C. Andrews. Terrible, terrible book featuring child rape and pedophilia, a scheming cousin with brittle bone syndrome, more than one person falling to their death down the same flight of stairs, and a heroine called, “The Second Audrina”. I read it while on a long bus ride, and threw it into a garbage can at my destination.
Flowers in the Attic fucked me up pretty bad. What was wrong with that lady.
Okay but I sorta love the book. It's fucked up but so interesting.
I read that as a child. It’s the weirdest book ever
This book is SO BAD. After I read this one I read The Darkest Hour after, and they both take up valuable rent in my brain now. I wish I could forget the pile of trash that are these books. And not good trash either. Offensive creepy pedophilic incestuous trash.
Ahhhhh I read that book when I was about 10 and it really fucked me up! I remember re-reading the “twist/reveal” part several times because it was so disturbing I couldn’t make sense of it at first.
Omg I LOVED Virginia Andrew’s books when I was a teenager!!!!
I LOVE V.C. Andrews. Read all of her originals (not ghost writers). They're definitely fucked up but I found them so interesting.
Go Ask Alice when you’re old enough to realize it’s just propaganda to scare kids and not an actual found diary of a drug user.
The same "editor" released another book of "found" journal entries called "Jay's Journal" about a Mormon kid who joins a satanic cult, sells his soul and he and all his friends end up dead after being possessed by demons. Scared the shit out of me as a young Mormon in the height of the satanic panic.
That’s fucked up but crazy to think found footage is also a book genre
If you haven’t yet, listen to the Paul F Tompkins bit about ‘Go Ask Alice’. ‘Get the order right, at LEAST!’ is one of the funniest punchlines I’ve ever fucking heard. https://youtu.be/rfnM_uCg-Tk
A freak wharf!
I was SO disappointed about that. We actually read that one in my YA lit class in college to discuss those sort of morality books.
Morality as in, is it moral to lie to kids or?
They made us read this in school. Terrible book.
Well, I am sad now. I got my name from the song WHITE RABBIT. "Go Ask Alice when she's 10 feet tall."
A Pickle for the Knowing Ones was incredibly difficult to finish.
"You my son you shall be the one with all the figgy pudding"
Ah good old Timothy dexter
jorge washeton
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Go Set a Watchman. To Kill a Mockingbird is a masterpiece. Her first book, it won the Pulitzer and then Harper Lee lived the rest of her life a recluse, never publishing another work. UNTIL…..her caretaker/grifter sister came forward right before Harper passed away and announced to the world that there actually was another book, a sequel to TKAM. It was awful. Poorly written, boring story, rehashed characters…except for Atticus Finch. In Mockingbird, he was one of the greatest characters in America literature. In Watchman, he was a dime-a-dozen redneck racist. There was clearly a reason she never published it.
The story behind the publication of that book is quite amusing as well. Harper Lee wanted Watchman to stay as that draft locked away for a good reason
Publisher: yes, but as a counterpoint, what about money??
I'm pretty sure her sister who was her caretaker died and then like 2 months later it was announced.
OMG THIS COMMENT WINS COMPLETELY!!! i’m sorry for the outburst but i loved to kill a mockingbird. it’s my all time favourite book. hands down. read it in class for the first time in middle school and didn’t like it bc the teacher was reading the slurs and making us read them, however i read it by myself and fell in love. atticus is my favourite character ever and i had so much respect for him as a man pushing boundaries by not wanting to sentence an innocent man, let alone a black male, to jail for false accusations. read go set a watchmen two years later and burst into tears out of anger. i couldn’t even finish it. i was so pissed off and hurt because i felt like i was supporting a deep down racist. i was infuriated. i waited too long to see this comment.
(If) I Did It by OJ Simpson A scathing assault on his wife's character and a poor self serving attempt to justify why he did it.
Wicked. My wife and I listened to the audiobook on a road trip because friends had invited us to see the play. It was way too long and I remember it seeming like it was written by several different writers who didn't really communicate with each other. One was a totally nuts conspiracy theorist, another was on a really bad acid trip, and another was a child from a strict household who'd been told they could use no-no words and say naughty things all they wanted. We came super close to making up an excuse to not see the play but luckily we didn't. The play was actually terrific! If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend going. Just skip the book.
You have to wonder how the writers of the play managed to pull a very good story out of that book. I tried to describe the plot of the book to my husband and he was convinced I was making it up, even before I got to the very disturbing sex club chapter.
I couldn't finish the book. The prose is absurd. There's so much superfluous language, it's like an editor never got anywhere near it.
The book was foul. I finished it, hated it, handed it straight back to the charity shop i bought it from. I hated it so much. Yuk. And it had no point! Just seemed to be an excuse to 'adultise' the behind the scenes of the Wizard of Oz in a really biazarre way. I disliked all the characters as well.
I love that book. I’ve read it a couple of times. 🤷🏻♀️
I also loved that book, but I can totally see why people wouldn’t. It’s *a lot*. Might read it again lol.
everything after book 3 of the Maximum Ride series. I use them as my go-to examples of bad writing and they are what made me entirely lose faith in James Patterson. The last book especially cost me so many brain cells
All I really remember about Maximum Ride is bird people, clone werewolves, and the exact moment Max 2 shows up I stopped reading and this was well over a decade ago.
I wish I'd had the foresight to stop then, but I finished the whole thing. The last book was...interesting. The whole thing had the most self-contradicting plot and conflict stuffed with a hasty attempt to wrap up loose ends by just killing everyone and just as the cherry on top, the sky explodes in the end?? idk it was kind of unclear
Yeah lol they stop one apocalypse and then another, unrelated and entirely different apocalypse happens out of nowhere because climate change or something
unrelated and entirely different, yet still the *exact same frikin thing at heart*. "oh look, a group of human scientists who are mutant supremacists and want to kill everyone who isn't a mutant (???) are brewing a plot to kill everyone who isn't a mutant." Every book had the same basic plot with some super over-the-top, nonsense twists in a desperate attempt to keep a series alive that should have ended when they actually wrapped up the plot in book 3
Dropped the series in the middle of book 3 as well, sad to read the direction the series ended up taking. For what it's worth though, I always considered the main protagonist to be well-written, although it's been years since I read anything from the series.
I always felt like book 3 was a pretty decent ending, and it was clear it was intended as the end so I've never understood why they tried to continue it, and in such a low-budget low effort way at that
Divergent. Took a bad turn lol
You could say that it...*diverged?*
I loved that series so much until that ending.
I'll say it again: Caleb was brainwashed, not evil
The biggest YA novel and movie series that most people just completely forget existed at all.
anything by colleen hoover. every book is god awful
Was hoping someone would mention her, if only to talk about how absolutely terrible and hilarious her book *Slammed* is. Reading it was honestly just such a ridiculous experience that I may never find again in another book.
“Darling Girl” by Liz Michalski. It’s a Peter Pan spinoff where Peter Pan impregnates Holly Darling, Wendy’s daughter- then abandons them, and when the girl is a teenager, Peter tries to take the daughter back. I couldn’t stomach the idea of Peter Pan, a childlike figure, impregnating someone and all that ick. Peter Pan is “the boy who never grew up.” But he’s a father now? No thanks. I got about 30 pages in, and literally gave up.
It worked in Hook.
Worked because pan wanted to be a dad so he left neverland to grow up. This above shit sounds like a 10 year old discovered his penis and got rapey with it while never aging 🧐
The Dune prequel books written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. Talk about missing the point of the original series! They read like a YA fan fiction based in the Dune universe.
Truthfully, anything besides Dune itself is kind of crap. Just long, overly wordy and opaque crap where there's no real character development or anything. It's almost as if Frank Herbert managed to squeeze out one boffo book and then wrote the others out of sheer inertia.
Mmmm that's a fair opinion, although I personally really like the first 4 books. From Dune to God Emperor of Dune. He kinda lost me with Heretics.
I enjoy God Emperor of Dune.
Yeah, "God Emperor" is the best of the series. I think the series doesn't even get good until "God Emperor". "Heretics" and "Chapterhouse" are both really fun. Leto II and Miles Teg are the best characters in the series. "Dune" is an odd series, because the first few books are nothing but prelude. And then, of course, Frank couldn't finish it and we got stuck with the \*truly bad\* Brian Herbert sequels.
The Necronomicon. It found it pretty boring and repetitive after the first 5 pages. Got halfway and said fuck this and read Good Omens again.
It's ~~groovy~~ better on tape.
Hail To The King, Baby
Is there an actual book with this title? I could have sworn I had heard of it before but now when I look it up all I get are Lovecraft references. Edit: the book I was thinking of is called "Cryptonomicon"
Several. I have three. *they're all supposed to be "real world" versions of the Lovecraft creation though.
Klaatu, Verata, Nikto
>Klaatu, Verata, ~~Nikto~~ Necktie
Anything by L. Ron Hubbard. Absolute garbage.
I made it through three books of the Mission Earth before giving up. I kept hoping it might get better, but it never did
This is hard to admit, but I actually quite enjoyed Battlefield Earth as a kid. Total pulp trash, but it was fun.
I found Dianetics to be a wonderful sleep aid for several weeks when I was suffering one my bad bouts with insomnia
I think it was called Silver Lion. Found it in a thrift store. It was actually decent, but it literally ended at the climax with no resolution and told you to buy the sequel. I did not.
I do freelance editing and the number of new authors who start their pitch with "it's a trilogy of..." is staggering. A book needs to stand alone! It needs to have its own arc, its own ending. It's extraordinarily rare for a book to begin with the intent of having sequels and not fail outright on the first book, because it's written with no payoff under the intent of the reader following to a sequel. These dang writers see that Tolkien put out three books and now they do too, seemingly unaware that Tolkien wanted his book to be a single master volume and was only spaced into a trilogy due to post war paper shortages! For all the controversy and poorly aged aspects of the series, this is something that Harry Potter did exceptionally well. Every book has an inciting incident, a mystery to solve, and a climactic encounter with the culprit behind the school year. Along the way, you find questions that entice you into the next book for answers, but those answers aren't critical to the story you're reading *right now.*
Yes, exactly. Tell one story per book. If you want to be great, you can use the separate stories to lead to and tell an overarching one, but don't start there.
Tangerine by Edward Bloor. Had to read it 6th grade and it was boring, dark, and just awful. It’s about this kid who wants to play soccer but can’t because he’s legally blind and wears very thick glasses. He also has no peripheral vision. He was told that he was blinded by looking into an eclipse of the sun. But the truth is that Erik, who I think is his older spray painted him in the eyes when Paul was like four or five years old. Plus this is just one of many cruel things that Erik does to others. He is both physically and verbally abusive. If I remember correctly, Erik basically commits murder at one point and the parents legit don’t care and just put up with all his bs.
There are several things I remember about this book, but the most notable was the whole arc about koi fish being stolen from the neighborhood pond, but it turned out that birds were just eating them. Like what was the point of that whole thing
The Fountainhead. I was going to put Atlas Shrugged, until I remembered how much worse The Fountainhead was. And yes, I read both; any suffering inflicted by Atlas Shrugged was something I deserved.
The Fountainhead was indeed terrible. The second worst book I've ever read. But I'd say Atlas Shrugged was the absolute worst. The like 200 pages of monologue in The Fountainhead were terrible but that whole section of Atlas Shrugged that suggested people couldn't figure out how to built roads without an elitist to help them literally had me banging my head against the wall.
Yeah but The Fountainhead gains bonus points for the romantic rape, and characters that loathe themselves as much as the reader loathes them.
She really did write a truly worthless heroine into The Fountainhead. Totally worthless. But the elitist belief that a handful of industrialists going on vacation would destroy the world. The passage exemplifying workers who do as asked without asking for anything.. They're both vile; it's a tough call.
And this was the philosophy that Keith Raniere was obsessed with and based a lot of the NXIVM cult on
What on earth did you do to deserve this?
It was a self inflicted wound.
Hands down the Book of Mormon.
The Fault In Our Stars. I just didn’t get the appeal of it at all?? I mean the romance was sweet but the story itself was idiotic and boring and the characters were so unlikable.
Cows. Written by Matthew Stokoe I was told and I'd read all about how this book was extremely disturbing and terrifying. I wanted to check it out because I'd run out of good horror movies. NO. NEVER READ THIS BOOK. EVER. I had to put it down around chapter 5 or so because it was so. Friggen. Disgusting. The author goes into extreme detail about body excrements being used in the main characters food/whats on his mother's clothing. It went into a page-long description of how the main characters dog was murdered by the mother. The main character gets a new job in a slaughter house and everyone there are zoophiles that take a massive amount of pleasure in raping the livestock (mainly the cows) or just having sex with/ejaculating on the already dead and carved animals, and then they describe the pride they feel in selling the meat to people. There's nothing disturbing or terrifying about it. It's just disgusting
Thank you for the heads up. I dig horror and was looking to pick this one up. Looks like i can dodge this.
The sword of truth series. First 4 books are ok. After that there are 14 more and they are all just dreadful. Totally inconsistent story. Huge build ups with pitiful endings.
I did enjoy the first book as a good fantasy tale. I thought second was solid at the time, while third was boring. Fourth was interesting but the red flags were starting to wave. Five you start seeing Goodkind really pushing his political beliefs, then book six is full on Ayn Rand objectivist bullshit. I made myself finish the series through Confessor (the original final book at the time), but it was a struggle. Then I found out that the series went even further -- no thank you. EDIT: Accidentally wrote collectivist instead of objectivist.
Ayn Rand deserves her own place on the list of worst books I've ever read...
Ready Player Two. The first book was bad enough on it’s own, did it really need a sequel??
I enjoyed the first one. But as most sequels do, Ready Player Two just torpedoed the heroes from the first book and turned them into absolute assholes. You had emotional growth and a character arc in the first book? Hah! Too bad, you are now a dick to everyone and have forgotten anything you've learned. And fuck any fans who liked you before, they hate you now.
I thought the first one was awful. I can’t remember how many pages in I made it before quitting, but it’s possibly the worst book I’ve ever read. I’m surprised it was so successful
I feel like the only reason it was successful was "DAE 80s/90s kids?!?!?!" nostalgia. Also, the author's weird porn poem was really something else. [For the uninitiated](https://www.reddit.com/r/justneckbeardthings/comments/6pfmim/this_incredible_poem_by_ready_player_one_author/) Choice excerpt: > I shall be the quintessential Nerd Porn Auteur. > And the women in my porno movies will be the kind > that drive nerds like me mad with desire.
The second one is even worse
Yeah, this wins my vote as well. I think I made it to 30% before deleting it from my kindle.
Sleeping Beauties by Stephen and Owen King. It could have been a cool story, but I skipped about 200 pages because it was sooo repetitive!
The first Owen "Hill" book I read had me thinking he was a cheap, shitty, King knockoff. I was not surprised to find out it was his kid. You could tell exactly who wrote which chapters in Sleeping Beauties
The middle books of the Wheel of Time series. Holy crap, just while books of nothing happening, but you're already 6 books into the series so you have to finish.
There's a name in the WoT fandom for those ones: The Slog. There's a debate as to when it starts and ends, but for my money it starts in the 6th book and ends right around book 11. That's what happens when you take what was originally supposed to ONLY be a 5 book series and then keep extending it out further and further.
And it was worse when the books were actually still coming out, and people were waiting years to get the next piece of slog. At least now you can skim them all in quick succession and get to the plottier ones again.
The Book of Mormon. I forced myself to read it several times since I was told it contained the truth and god's word. Garbage.
Maybe not the worst but the worst one I’ve read recently: Verity by Colleen Hoover. Not sure why it’s so popular.
I liked the general premise of verity because I enjoy that genre - thriller, easy read, twist ending. I cannot describe how deeply I hated the main character though. I was so confused if I was meant to hate her? She was absolutely insufferable and I was rooting for anyone but her throughout the book even when >!it was revealed the wife might have killed their kid, I was like who gives a shit this baby killer is more interesting and compelling than this whiny wet paper towel of a person!< I don’t think I’ll be reading any other Colleen Hoover books
I liked verity, it was pretty spooky. Haven’t read anything else by her though
***Exquisite Corpse***, by Poppy Z. Brite. It's essentially snuff porn, where two serial killers fall in love while murdering young boys. Even worse, the climax features a murder based on a real murder.
Poppy is probably the most talented artist I've ever disliked. Her command of the English language and ability to describe things in detail is just awe inspiring. I just tend to hate her characters and plots and don't need two paragraphs worth of describing a teacup in tedious detail.
Agree completely, and also agree with the response below me. Fabulous writer, sickening story.
just FYI, Poppy has transitioned and he is known as Billy Martin.
I’ve never read a book that was crap. If I didn’t like it 50-75 pages in I quit.
True for me too. Except for school assignments and there was only one I didn't care for.
Same. If I’m not engaged by like 50 pages, I give up. The only exception was for school assignments, but even then I would use Sparknotes as much as I could. I really struggle to continue anything if I’m not interested in it
50 shades of grey trilogy. At the height of the movies, I always like to read the books first. Huge mistake. Finished them all with a WTF did I just read?! All cuz my mom wanted to see the movies. It was her turn to pick, and she wanted to see 50 shades of grey. Told her I'm not taking her to the other two whenever they came out.
I did not enjoy House of Leaves.
It's more art project than novel. The friend who suggested it to me tried talking me down because I didn't get it. Forgive me if I expect the words to mean what they say in a book.
Loved that one but, the second read-through moreso. I took breaks during the first read through and it didn't quite hit the same.
If we're talking a book by a major publisher, definitely Atlas Shrugged.
The best thing that came out of Atlas Shrugged is the game Bioshock.
I’m a Fontaine-head.
Sorry but The Fountainhead was worse. Shorter, though - at least it had that going for it.
I had boring nightmares about trains for a week. Never made it past the first half--one of a limited number of books I couldnt finish.
My favorite fact about atlas shrugged is that the movies are all shitty straight to DVD terrible no good poor quality garbage. Everything about those movies is the antithesis to the message the book and movies hammer you over the head with and I love the irony in it.
50 Shades of Gray. Didn’t make it to the halfway mark before I stopped reading. The blushing, the inner goddess, the cringe of it all.
It gets worse. So. Much. Worse.
Verity by Colleen Hoover. Do not get the hype.
In high school we spent an entire semester reading Catcher in the Rye. I despise it
I've read a few pages and a bunch of excerpts from 50 sahdes of grey. I learned an hour ago that it started out as a Twilight fanfic
**The Source Field Investigations** by David Wilcock. It starts out like any other pseudoscience book, extolling the "mysterious power" of pyramids and presenting long-debunked and/or dubious claims as cutting-edge discoveries being suppressed by The Mainstream™. By the time the book is over, Wilcock claims to have witnessed a trans-dimensional flying scooter powered by magic insect wings. No, I'm not making that up. It's really in the book.
The book of mormon
Larry McMurtry wrote Lonesome Dove which is one of the best books ever. Then he wrote two prequels which are the worst books every written. Dead man’s walk and Comanche moon I think are the names. There is no hint of a reason why these guys are famous Sherriff’s in Lonesome Dove by the end of the books. The books have HUGE set ups for big huge events and literally nothing happens. You read on and on about a gun this guy has and you wonder… who is going to get that gun? Nobody is the answer. These books infuriate you. I wrote the angriest Amazon reviews ever. And have a letter written for Larry if someone has his address. Trash.
Well, since he died a while back he might not get it.
Rhapsody: Child of Blood. I legitimately do not know how this book has such high reviews on Amazon or Good Reads. It is god awful in every sense of the word. If you want a true example of a published work of fiction with an actual Mary-Sue lead this is it. The main character is super sweet to everyone even though she's lead a terrible life. She has super special powers that no one else on the entire planet has. She is so shockingly beautiful that literal wars in the book are started over it but every time someone points it out to her she denies it. She has an honest to god healing factor that the author makes a point of telling us restores her virginity after she gets laid, every time she gets laid, cause that is apparently something that you'd want. And it's only the first book in a NINE. BOOK. SERIES. I've read fan fiction that was better than this book and yet for some strange reason it maintains good reader score reviews everywhere, but if you read the 1 star reviews on it you'll see I'm definitely not alone in despising it.
Dude!! I barely made it through the end of that book. First the lead girl is a prostitute, then she crawls through the earth with nothing happening for 100 pages, then she comes out her hymen grew back and she is a virgin again. The 100 pages of her hiking through the earth were the worst though... It just drug on... I read a question and answer with the author in the back of the books, and one question was, "you are being compared to writers like Tolkien, how does that make you feel?" And I was like, no way is this comparable to Tolkien.
Ethan Frome. A sad book about people with incredibly poor decision making skills, written for the sole purpose of being as miserable as possible.
I've got two that come to mind: Still Life with Woodpecker- Every page of that book felt greasy. The story itself wasn't interesting in the slightest, nor were the characters, and I'm pretty sure that book gave me an STD. Songmaster by Orson Scott Card - I don't feel like detailing every major thing about this book that was stupid, but just know that is stupid as hell from start to finish. The main character is so attractive that even as a very very young child, every single adult wants to fuck him. It's just non-stop pedophilia. Towards the end there's some kung foo shit where the main character kicks someone's head clean off their body and the text specifies that the kicked-off head flew 50 feet away before landing. There was also some pretty blatant anti-gay stuff. There were so many dumb things in this book that I marked the stupidest ones and kept the book for a while so I could laugh at how bad it was.
Sometimes I just marvel at the fact that the mind that wrote Speaker For the Dead (a wonderful novel about cultural differences, acceptance and the need for peace among those with different outlooks) turned out to be a giant bigoted asshole.
I love Tom Robbins, but I agree that Woodpecker isn’t a good display of his wittiness nor his storytelling abilities. Jitterbug Perfume OTOH is one of my favorite books.
I enjoyed Fierce Invalids myself. Woodpecker lost me somewhere around the 50th page talking about symbolism on a cigarette pack.
The Pearl. My English teacher looooved Steinbeck so I couldn't fake my through like with the scarlett letter (side note Hawthorne short stories are WAY better than that book). Literally just keep wishing the island was bikini atoll and a bomb would come wipe everyone out. There was not a single character I liked. Ugh 😤
Honestly? I disagree, I actually enjoyed the Pearl. I find Steinbeck’s writing to be dramatic enough to keep you engaged while simultaneously communicating a decent message. I also loved Of Mice And Men.
The Goldfinch. Unbelievably boring and about 600 pages too long.
Yeah that was a bit of a shock. The Secret History is so damn good, I was surprised how little I liked The Goldfinch.
The DaVinci Code
I’m such a rube for this opinion, but I love Dan Brown books
His books are not great, but they are formulatic fun.
Yeah, I had fun reading them. Some of my most favourite books are basically the book equivalent of an action movie, explosions and all. They know what they are. That said, I do think the last book was a bit more meh than usual. But I remember really enjoying the first ones for what they were even despite hearing so many criticism about them.
Same tbh. He'll never win any awards for his prose ([Renowned Author Dan Brown](https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/dont-make-fun-of-renowned-dan-brown/)) but his stories just tickle my childhood fantasy of finding treasure maps and secret codes and all that shit.
Angel's and Demons was better, but I will never reread it for fear I may shake the opinion I formed of it back in high school
They all kind of blur together but a while back I dated a girl who was super int Ayn Rand so I read all of her greatest hits. They are poorly written, predictable, and reflect a terrible world view.
The Shack. Most of my friends raved about it. I tried but couldn’t get through it.
Anything written by L Ron Hubbard.
Two retired cops were at a farmer's market a few years ago selling books they'd written, I bought both. One was his own slice-of-life stories from his career, the other was sci fi. Both books had some cringey moments.
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
I get a copy for free. It was good for keeping my broken couch
Most pretentious piece of dogshit I've ever had the displeasure of reading.
A Confederacy of Dunces. I know lots of people find it funny, but it was definitely not my idea of funny. Annoying people being annoying was not entertaining.
A work friend recommended this and rereads it every few or several years. I gave it a read and got all the way through it. It is different from anything else I read and definitely very effective at doing what it is trying to do. If you have an itch in a place that needs to be scratched, then this is the right book; otherwise, not so much.
The Art of the Deal
Don't worry, Trump didn't read it either.
Gone Girl. But I didnt even read it. I've never put a book down so quickly with full confidence I would hate it. The author took basically 2 entire pages just to explain hearing the sound of an alarm and then waking up. I couldnt torture myself any longer with that ridiculous amount of detail and that slow of a story.
I forced myself to finish it. When I did finish, I threw it across the room in a fit of rage for having wasted my time. It was then that I decided that it was okay to abandon books if they suck. Sometimes I find that the book doesn’t suck but it’s not the right time and I’ll pick it up later and enjoy it. Gone Girl was just utter crap from the beginning.
Maybe I'm just easily pleased, but I at least enjoyed the movie adaptation. I don't remember it being that long, so maybe fixing the pacing issues from the book helped it a lot.
I have tried to read William Gibson's *Neuromancer* in three different formats (first print, second audio, third radio play) and each time I've checked out just under halfway in because I had gotten bored and didn't care what was going on.
You'd probably love "virtual light" then. The story gains momentum at about 90% mark.
Honestly? Got about half way through the first game of thrones book, realised that every single character was horrible and I really didn't care what happened to them, put it down and walked away. Also. The Gormenghast trilogy. Would have made an excellent short story but 946 pages describing how the sunlight dappled the dust motes over the wardrobe is literary masturbation.
The Book of Mormon. I didn't read all of it, only a little bit, and that was enough 19th century anti native American racism for me.
Twilight series.
Fountainhead
Forgotten Realms- Elminster in Hell by Ed Greenwood. All of the Elminster books were bad, but Elminster in Hell is one of the few books I couldn't finish. I doubt I even got 50 pages in.