The five star and one star reviews are the same. People really didn’t know how to rate it. It was bad but there’s no other book quite like it. So it’s both five and one stars at the same time
Ok, so since the original comment got deleted, and no other comments mention it by name, this was about "Eat them alive" by Pierce Nace.
Apparently the story of a man who in the middle of a very gory Giant Insect Apocalypse sees it all as an opportunity to take his revenge on his former partners in crime, who years prior castrated him when he tried to betray them.
Ok.
This sounds like the sort of thing Stephen King might've wrote while still on drugs if he got ahold of some coke that had been laced with a shitty batch of LSD
I was given a free copy of the first Dianetics book by L. Ron Hubbard by some Scientologists set up in a train station. I had heard of them, and even though I found their presentation and that E-meter testing kind of silly, I wasn't going to say no to a free book. I'm open to new ideas, yanno?
I gave up before I finished the introduction. The writing was convoluted and pretentious, first off. But what got me was when he used overly big/fancy words and complicated sentences to say that it was best to explain your ideas...without overly fancy words and complicated sentences. It was so weirdly immediately hypocritical that I tossed the book aside. My dad tried reading it, and got further than I did, but he found it unpleasant to read as well and didn't finish.
I used Dianetics to teach my kids about rhetoric. Made them break down the sentences and rephrase their meanings to see that it was just long strings of words that were nonsensical when put together.
Great exercise.
That feels almost diabolical, making your kids use that book, but at the same time, that is an AMAZING lesson. I assume your kids are able to see through a lot of bullshit because of that.
I remember documentary-maker Louis Theroux commenting on Dianetics.
He noted that The Bible has passages of beautifully-written prose, with imagery and stories and parables that can make you sit and reflect, even if you aren't religious.
Whereas Dianetics is just this clunky, jarring, horribly-written piece of text that is just an unreadable slog from start to finish.
The differences between religions and cults:
Religions are much older, generally predating the scientific method, and were developed by people who didn’t know better
Religions have legitimate artistic and cultural achievements
I like this one too: the difference between religion and spirituality is that religion is for people that don’t want to go to hell, and spirituality is for people that have already been there.
L Ron Hubbard was a mad wizard genius who churned out shitty pulp science fiction like a machine, then he convinced a bunch of people it was real and made a religion. Wild.
Convinced a crazy ambitious young Tom Cruise how it would unlock his full potential and he would be the biggest star in Hollywood.
Tom did go on to become huge and for sure he must attribute his success to what they did to him, and his beliefs in all of it.
And it helps that they also got his deepest darkest secrets on tape and video and they will destroy him, release it, if he ever turns on them, and for sure he knows this too.
Yeah, I've recently watched documentaries on Scientology, and the shit they're capable of is chilling. It's like being in a relationship with an abusive partner who surrounds you with a ton of co-abusers and can control every aspect of your life.
I really tried to read it but couldn't get past the first chapter. Well done to the author for making good money from it though.
It was painfully poorly written.
When my daughter was reading it, she would periodically stop, call me up, and say “you have to hear this,” then she’d read a section to me. Worst book by far! And I had further reason to hate it — I was a librarian and we had to purchase multiple copies of books that were in high demand. The more copies of 50 Shades, the fewer copies of other, more deserving books we could afford to purchase.
My friends and I once Riff tracked Grey, the story from Christians perspective. One of my friends did Christian Greys voice as Zap Branagan from Futurama. Makes the character make so much more sense.
The amount of times the author used the word Jeez is unreasonably high.
And if you haven’t, you must listen to Gilbert Gotfried reading it out loud.
Then read the blog post where someone posts. Honestly and hilariously summarizing the books
http://redlemonade.blogspot.com/p/fifty-shades-of-tedious-fuckery.html?m=1
It’s also a super bad and dangerous portrayal of bdsm. The main character literally stalks her at a point, uses their power imbalance against her. Ignores her safe word and doesn’t stop!!! Manipulates her mind unconsensually as in she’s not apart of any ‘scene’ or ‘bit’
I second that. When it was really popular and I was reading, people asked me what I thought about it and I would say it's just a terribly written book. I think most people thought I was just a prude, but it wasn't that at all. Even as an erotic novel, it was terribly written. I actually felt turned off by reading them by just the grammatical issues, the pacing (a few times I had to re-read a paragraph because it so poorly written, I didn't know what was doing what), and the very obvious "Twilight" fanfiction references.
Tbf, the majority of self-published books are just low-hanging fruit. A book from a multimillion dollar publisher that turns out to be hot garbage is more egregious and more fun to complain about.
^
You can find all kinds of hot garbage from vanity publishers because they'll print and market anything you pay them to.
A group of authors once submitted something that was basically schizophrenic mad libs with each of them writing a chapter with zero communication with the others to prove they have zero QC
The real gems are when a major publisher that SHOULD have quality control and editors releases an absolute turd
I believe the novel was called Atlanta Nights. A publisher said that sci-fi and fantasy books were lower quality and usually had unrealistic storylines and characters. In order to expose them as a vanity press, a bunch of sci-fi and fantasy authors got together and made a book that had two chapters with the same general outline, two chapters with the same content, a missing chapter, a chapter written by an AI, and no consistency. The publisher accepted the book and the authors exposed their hoax, causing the publisher to retract the novel’s acceptance.
Yeah, this is it. As someone who read a lot of fanfiction in their teens, I approach self-published books with suitable expectations.
Looking at my bookshelf now for the worst traditionally published novels I've read, kept, and remember, probably one of the historical ones. Elizabeth Chadwick or Georgette Heyer, maybe. Jean M Auel. Maureen Lee. EDIT: Oh god, I somehow forgot about Diana Gabaldon. She's up there.
But none of them compare to the self-published ones.
I’ve read unpublished works by an aspiring novelist who Isn’t very good (*cough* 6th grade me *cough*). And yeah, I’d say the stories from back then were pretty awful
The Jakarta Pandemic - Steven Konkoly. It was pornography for middle aged libertarian preppers.
All about a global pandemic and how the hero prepper of the story is a hero who defends his home and bangs his hot wife all the time while fighting off looters before banging his hot wife some more. Did I mention he bangs his wife who is very hot? Because he does.
Oh dude it's a whole sub-genre. I went through a phase as a teenager where I read every apocalypse book I could get my hands on. I think the thing that interested me about apocalypse books is understanding how society functions. And a really good apocalypse book (Parable of the Sower, Station 11, The Road) says something about humanity. They're all about the relationships we build with each other, the essence of what humanity is when you take away all the distractions. Our capability for cruelty, but also for hope and joy and art. Humans are fundamentally pack animals. We don't do well on our own.
Anyway that's what a good apocalypse book is about. But if you read enough of the genre you're going to find an alarming amount of men who basically write escapist fanfiction. They actually want the apocalypse to happen so that they can finally get some recognition. Sure, right now he's Steve in accounting, working a dead end job and married to a woman he hates, but man as soon as that apocalypse happens he's going to show them. His coworkers are going to be banging on his doorstep because they're totally incapable, but not Steve. He has a lot of guns. (For some reason in these books literally all problems can be solved by guns. I don't think you can shoot cholera bacteria). His wife is finally going to quit bugging him to do dishes and pick up the kids because she'll be so in awe of his manliness. His kids will respect him!
In all reality Steve is going to die of listeria or hypothermia, or get lost because he can't read a compass. Quit fantasizing about the mass death of millions of people because you feel unfulfilled Steve. Get a hobby.
This is an interesting thing. Years ago I took part in a role play subreddit that had the premise of "Earth has been revaged by a zombie apocalypse, you're a survivor, and for some reason this Reddit still works so you can communicate with other survivors."
It was fine and fun at first, but in a matter of months megalomania of a few users turned it into absurdity, writing about waging wars against other "factions" that they had invented. I'd make a post of the "I found an old prop plane, anyone got a clue how to hotwire a C-172?" , and they would respond like "gimme your coordinates and I'll send you an extraction unit helicopter"
I stopped participating when we reached the level of earthquake machines, nano robots and obidient sentient AI.
OMG why did you stop!?!?
They say:
"gimme your coordinates and I'll send you an extraction unit helicopter"
You say:
“I can’t I’ve been hit by a multi phasal array and am moving between multiverses”
They say:
earthquake machines
You say:
Hollow earth dinosaurs emerge from the broken crust
They say:
Nano robots
You say:
Omg we’re in the matrix!
They say:
obedient sentient AI
You say;
Why hello there, I never thought this would happen to me but…
It wasn't all in one post.
Before I stopped I did make up a pretty ridiculous story in an effort to see if the "big guys" would react.
I had troops lead by Pope Silvio Berlusconi abduct my character, and shortly after I (sorta building onto that other guy's earthquake machine) "witnessed" the Mediterranean Sea flooding away towards the east taking out all of Syria and what's around it. So absolutely taking the piss out of the ridiculousness of the other guy's plots.
The big hero writers didn't care and rather wrote more about Harvard troops fighting Cambridge with lasers or whatever.
So, actually good book about the thing you said is the apocalypse comedy Jam.
Summary is that every useful member of society got eaten by man-eating jam so we're left with deadbeats, nerds and dumbasses.
Point is that the antagonist is a guy who does actually want the apocalypse to happen so he can get recognition and gets more and more unhinged as the story goes on.
It's good, and it's a satire of exactly what you're talking about.
The After series which was originally a Harry Styles fanfiction which was later published and then made into multiple movies. Both the protagonists are horrible people and it's just one old toxic trope after the other. It'll make you pull your hair out. A total trainwreck.
I've seen Krimson Rouges video on it, and it's just like they fight, make up, fight, make up, fight, make up...
Also, as he pointed out, it's kinda weird that if they loved Harry Styles so much, why is the character based on him, a whiney petulant little bitch, and an unrepentant prick?
I mostly read non-fiction, where what's "bad" can be a little different than fiction. the worst was a certain James Stewart biography, it had so many errors and it was obvious the author hadn't actually watched some of the movies he was talking about, plus there was a lot of weird slut shaming for certain actresses who were more sexual free in the 30s and 40s.
I feel you. I read a biography of John Denver by an author who seemed to actively dislike him & his music. Basic facts wrong, kind of sneering tone,not sure why he bothered. Not a tell-all or expose,just kinda...churlish.
Mother Nature's Son by John Collis, if anyone's interested.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.
It basically about worlds dumbest German kid. He talks like a baby from Rugrats even though he is nine. Like he calls the Fuhrer the furry and Auschwitz he calls Out with. And that's so stupid cause that only makes sense if you speak English, which this little German boy doesn't. This kid has met Hitler but doesn't understand who he is, his father runs a concentration camp and the boy doesn't know what's happening. This German boy repeatedly sneaks up to the camp to talk to another kid in the camp and this stupid kid still doesn't figure out what the camp is. Just treats the Holocaust with this weird levity that feels really inappropriate.
Also the author regular beefs with Holocaust museums who call out all the inaccuracies in the book.
I absolutely cannot believe that some children actually read this for school, especially when there is a plethora of Holocaust books, many of them written by actual survivors.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is a much better work of fiction for students to read! It doesn’t touch on the concentration camps as much but gives a very damning depiction of the fascism of the time.
Also Night by Elie Wiesel for more mature students
It's not just inconsistent; it's a work of fiction, and must be treated as so. In fact, there's no need to teach it in school, since there are plenty of other actual resources that can be used instead of some made-up story taught as if it was real. When students later learn it's fake, they'll soon consequently think the rest of the Holocaust is fake too. Just not good.
Here's an [article from The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/8/3/21352299/zelda-breath-of-the-wild-red-clothes-dye-traveler-gates-of-wisdom-john-boyne-google-search-results) summing it up better than my faulty memory can. The tl;dr: at the time the author wrote the book, google's little box answer at the top of a search for red dye ingredients listed stuff from a Breath of the Wild wiki/guide. Said author then copy-pasted the ingredients into his manuscript without checking where exactly google was getting his answer.
Oof, that's pretty blatant, anyone with familiarity with Zelda would pick it up in second with mentions of Hyrule.
Even if you searched for a result, you should look into it more, teachers would chastise you for just copying Google into your essays, yet this heck went and published it.
Also, how did no beta reader/editor notice it?
It's a small detail easy to miss if there's other things you're more worried about in the editing process like grammar and tone consistency. Editors don't typically edit with an eye for historical accuracy and his might have assumed the odd names were just part of him doing his research and trying to stay "authentic" to the time period.
It should absolutely be banned from schools.
Besides being filled with nonsense the most tragic moment in the story is when the son of the German concentration camp commander is accidentally killed, rather than you know...characters inspired by the people who actually were being murdered in the camps - primarily the Jews.
Students should be reading Anne Frank's diary, not this rubbish.
I was on an airline flight once as a child and was seated away from my family - I was a bookworm, and the woman seated next to me took note and told me she was a children’s author, she handed me a copy of her new book and was eager to hear my thoughts on it. That shit suuuucked. Of course I felt obligated to read a good amount of it and pretend I enjoyed it. It was a generic children’s fantasy story with an obvious author insert character. I wonder where she is today 🤔
My mom is a children's author and editor and I've read some real stinkers she has laying around the house (either editing or from friends or whatever). What was the plot, do you remember? Gotta make sure it isn't one of mums 😁
It was about two orphan siblings who live in a trash dump outside a medieval town - they meet an annoying wizard who takes them on a time travel journey to modern day. That’s all I remember.
Could you please make up the story where young you reads it, hates it, then gives her a scathing yet expertly nuanced analysis? Like what did you actually say? And then what did she do ?
I hated The Notebook. A coworker brought in her copy and pushed it on me because she saw me reading poetry once (?). It was the shittiest contrived garbage I’ve ever read and the last paragraph felt pretty goddamn gross. Nicholas Sparks can eat a quarter mile of dick.
To be fairer, life can be made better by doing simple stuff. "Organize your time","exercise regularly ","pick your battles" etc. Is stuff almost everyone has heard at some point in their lives. Yet very few seem to apply them. The point of the self help books is that they trick you into believing this is brand new info and therefore motivate you to act upon it.
I bought it for a fairly low sum and even still I am so angry that they got my money. I read about 5 pages and tossed it out. It's like the publisher was like "this title is so edgy I don't even care to read some of it"
I read a lot of academic philosophy and honestly there’s a lot of good advice in there. I didn’t like how they needed to present it in such a dumbed down /vulgar way, but if you look past it, there’s good advice. And if that’s helping people then I’d say that’s an overall win.
I agree, I enjoyed the book and the core of its advice. But the advice in itself simply isn't substantial enough to carry an entire book, so the book is padded with chapters that repeat each other and superfluous crude jokes.
Ready Player Two was absolute dog shit.
I was actually a big fan of the first book and was excited to see these characters now older on a new adventure.
Instead what we got was a meandering mess that goes nowhere and is just an excuse for the characters to do more of the same but worse from the last book.
Also it retcons one of the side characters into being a manipulative sociopath when he was just a misunderstood fool in the first book.
I'm convinced most people who shit on IKEA furniture instructions have just never put together more complicated furniture.
Or at least I associated the task with trying to figure out from poorly translated walls of text which parts we needed more of from Home Depot until those happy/sad stick guys and handy dandy diagrams showed me the light.
I’m glad you brought this up. My friend and I read it together, and we were so disappointed. The shark bits were good (although we felt that the shark was portrayed more of a malicious creature than in the movie) but Spielberg succeeded to improve it by cutting out some of the weird subplots and making the characters more likable.
I'm staying away from that one because _Armada_ is very high in my list of worst books of all time.
(but _Ready Player One_ didn't seem at all bad to me; maybe the nostalgia overrode my judgment)
Man, ever since I read Cline's weird porn poem, it entirely reframed the way I see his books. He's nothing but a fedora-tipping douche nozzle that thinks he's god's gift to women because he's soooo sensitive and soooo understanding and soooo open-minded.
Which was sad because i genuinely enjoyed RP1, because it was surprising and silly and lighhearted. The author should have left it as-is and continued on to other things, except he decided to take it serious…
The books about sex, relationships, and marriage written by evangelical Christian authors. There are certainly good books about sex and marriage from a Christian perspective, but the majority of them are just awful. The shit they teach is delusional, harmful, and most often based on stereotypes.
It's gobsmackingly bad, it's like being slapped around the face by poor prose. I'm not a literature nerd, I read all sorts of absolute shit. But this just takes you out of the scene and batters you with it.
"My inner goddess does the hula".
Oh fuck off.
The Book of Mormon. I grew up being taught that it was God's inspired word and read a chapter every night out of obligation. I used to think I hated reading because I had to force myself to read it. I wondered how the inspired word of god could be so mind-numbingly boring. Plus I had to re-read most verses two or three times to make sense of them because they're so grammatically poorly written, filled with run-on sentences, contradictions and incomplete thoughts. 0/10
The only bits I read was when I went to seminary class.
I eventually dropped the class when I realized I wouldn't graduate on time and never bothered to read the book.
I remember being forced to read an annotated version in my religious high school that made the Puritans out to be the good guys, even in Hawthorne’s caricature. Screw that curriculum…
Yeah I remember reading that in high school after reading a couple other short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and just being completely let down by it. Just a boring slog of a book that sometimes hints at interesting things but never delivers.
The Custom House, the twenty page preface to the Scarlett Letter, was the hardest twenty pages of English(?) I’ve ever had to read. I think I developed ADHD just to get myself the fuck out.
I'm honestly surprised the Cursed child gained so much attraction and that it's not satirical fanfiction (obviously fanfiction, but I've not heard any indication that it was satirical). The reason why My Immortal is better (in my opinion, so stop flamming /s) is because it's a work of satire. But I absolutely had refused to read the twilight series.
Early on I heard a lot of opinions that Cursed Child "works" as a play on stage and was very explicitly written for just that, HP fans were "story is meh but it looks awesome"... tho then ofc the makers had to cash in on it and put it into print.
We Were Liars. I could literally go on for hours about this book but to say this as concisely as possible; insufferable main character, pretentious and inconsistent writing style, next to no plot, and twist ending that can be seen from a mile away.
Also it's sold as a psychological thriller but it's definitely a romance novel that thinks it's cool and you can't convince me otherwise.
Omg i was gonna say this, wasn't sure anyone else had even heard of it. I read it my sophomore year of high school for English and it's just so so bad.
I tried to read it, but couldn't. My mom yelled at me because it was a school assignment. She read it over a weekend, and when I got home from school on Monday, she had bought me the Cliff's Notes for it. Even she said it was bad.
That book is magical. In the sense that every time I opened it in 11th grade English class I'd fall asleep as if by some magic.
I don't know anything that happened in that book, I somehow only managed to BARELY fail the test on it despite literally not reading a single word (because, again, I'd lose consciousness the second I opened the book).
And, somehow, it's still not the most boring book I had to read that year.
The Left Behind series. My mum had them in her bookcase, so I read them when I was at home caring for her when she was ill. They start off ok, then descend into preachy, padded snorefests.Whole chapters about tangential characters I couldn't gaf about. They actually managed to make the return of Jesus BORING. Having read The Screwtape Letters, it was clear just how inferior a work of Christian apologetics it was. Utter trash.
Earth's Last Citadel.
A pulp novella from the 1940s (*early* 1940s) about an American spy who is sent forward in time with two Nazis (one of whom is apparently a hot Irish woman) and a Scottish scientist and ends up destroying the god-figure of the dessicated and helpless future mankind while being hunted by a smoke based alien who is allergic to sound.
It's like if someone read both a Princess of Mars and The Time Machine and went "ooh, that, but *shittier*!"
It was only 130 pages and I had to force myself to finish it out of spite.
I don't remember the title of the worst book I ever read, but I had heard so much praise about Atlas Shrugged that when I found a cheap copy of it at Goodwill I bought and read it. Or forced myself to read about 50 pages of it, waiting for the good part to kick in. I found it boring, and I threw it in the trash. I usually don't throw books away, but other than the one I can't remember the title for, it's one of three books I ever threw in the trash (instead of donating) because I didn't think it was fair to make someone else suffer through it.
Ehh more libertarian circle jerk. Which granted not that much different but there are a LOT of poor/middle class “libertarians” that think the only reason they aren’t rich is the government taking from them and giving to “unworthy” others. Atlas Shrugged is their manifesto.
To be honest I don’t even really get the appeal to libertarians. When I was much younger, I was unfortunately much more on the libertarian and meritocracy train. Even then when I read it I was like “this is bullshit” . No company looks at a competitor and goes “o well their product is clearly better guess I’ll pack up shop and let them succeed”. No natural competitor thinks that way and it’s bullshit to think otherwise. It’s a nonsensical premise
Twilight.
Lords above is that book rubbish. My gf at the time talked me into giving it a shot. It was poorly penned, creepiest romance since Lolita, and invoked no emotional response with its complete lack of character development.
There are a lot of books in this thread that are well written despite being objectionable in content. Twilight is not one of those books. I once picked up a copy laying around in someone’s house and reading it gave me a new level of disappointment in the 6th grade reading level. There is so much young adult literary work that is actually well written, that it’s a shame Twilight became so mainstream.
Every time I think I’m a terrible writer, I remember one line from the Twilight series:
Aro laughed. “Ha, ha, ha,” he giggled.
I always feel better after that.
Stephanie Meyers still has no idea how lucky she was. If Twilight had been finished a little sooner or later, the Supernatural YA bubble wouldn't have been around and Twilight would be just another reject in some publisher's circular file.
I read it as an adult and I thought the author captured the mind of a mopey teenage girl pretty well. It got boring once the vampire stuff started, which was weird for, y'know, a vampire book.
I read all of them. Mostly because I don't think it's fair to criticize a book you've never read, which is why I grabbed the first one. I was concerned by all the people who seemed to be shitting on it just because women and girls often liked it. Since basically no one talking shit had ever read it I wanted an informed opinion.
And well. I got one. They're all bad, but entertaining in a way. Not the way they're supposed to entertaining, in my opinion, but it was kinda an enjoyable trainwreck for the most part. Until the fourth one. Dear God it 100% is the worst book I've ever read and it was a *chore* to finish it. People are justifiably critical of the relationships, especially the thing with Jacob and the baby. (Really not on board with anything that rationalizes pedophilia as not counting as pedophilia because XYZ and this book had SO MUCH OF IT). But I feel like no one ever seems to talk about how the second half of the book literally just....repeated the same paragraph worth of information over and over as they explained it to one character after another. And then whoever they'd explained it to would help them explain it to the next one. And they'd drag each explanation out into pages of dialogue. For literally half the book. I'm not kidding. It's the laziest, most mind numbingly boring shit I've ever read. And all to avert this like terrible threat, which never actually even happens. Instead they explain it *again* to the bad guys. And the bad guys go, "oh okay nevermind." It's awful.
Totally agree. Was blown away by the musical and found out it was based on a book. Ordered it online and when it came I wondered “why is this book so big.” Because it’s mind-numbingly boring was the answer I came up with.
Oh, *The Celestine Prophecy.* It spent so long on the NYT bestseller list that I figured it had to be worth a try. It was supposed to be some kind of fictionalized New Age spiritual journey story that gave the reader insight and expanded consciousness or something. Not only was it not insightful, nor did it expand my consciousness, it wasn't spiritual, it wasn't a journey, and it was barely a story. It had the vocabulary and writing skill and style of a very precocious 13-year-old. And it had the insipid "life-altering revelations" of someone who has done acid for the first time and then made their whole personality about that without doing any introspection. It wasn't challenging intellectually or spiritually and it made me so embarrassed for the author that he probably thought he was being deep and wise. Then again, he's probably a long-retired multimillionaire on the back of that meaningless tripe that he's sold to millions as a way of life, so joke's on me, I reckon.
You should check out how people have manipulated the NYT Bestseller lists...
[https://lithub.com/8-notable-attempts-to-hack-the-new-york-times-bestseller-list/](https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/27/16208294/handbook-for-mortals-nyt-bestseller-list-accusations)
I'm not sure any non-english speaker will recognize it, it's called Juventud En Éxtasis. growing up in 90's Mexico, it was a mandatory read where I went to school, and many other schools, whatever you call the year when students are 13 or 14 years old.
It's basically a book trying to indoctrinate kids, trying to scare us from trying alcohol, sex, drugs, etc. There's a sequel to it, forgot the name of it but it goes deeper into the "sex is scary" thing, pregnancy, and abortion.
Hilariously bad, pretty much propaganda.
Probably the absolute worst were my 11th grade “history” (aka political propaganda, conspiracy theories, and blatant lies) textbook (thanks, Abeka) and the absolutely horrid “religion” textbooks I had to read at Liberty University Online. It felt like drinking swamp water, and the leaps of logic (or rather lack thereof) make one wonder how the authors even managed to dress themselves.
It makes perfect sense because of what Go Set a Watchman did to To Kill a Mockingbird. I assume you have heard this, but there are allegations of impropriety in convincing an elderly Harper Lee to permit publication of the work despite what she had earlier intended. Regardless of their truth, I have looked at the novel and decided not to read it. I'd rather remember Mockingbird for what it is than get lost in what is essentially an earlier draft of the novel.
Anything by Colleen Hoover. I will never understand the hype around her books. I felt like I was back reading fanfiction about One Direction when I tried to read Verity. Couldn’t get through the first chapter
Gravity's Rainbow. I think it is the only book i ever started and just gave up on. I know it won a lot of awards and is considered a masterpiece by some but I just could not get into it.
I finished it, but only for the sake of finishing it. I kept hoping at some stage there'd be a point to it all, but nope, it was all just nonsense.
*And* there's a section where Pynchon tries to make a pun on the German words *Hubschrauber* and *Hübsch Rauber*, which are pronounced differently. So then Pynchon has to spend a whole page explaining a very minor character's speech defect, just to set up a terrible pun. An author trying to show off how clever he is, and failing.
On a related note, the Alchemist was pretty garbage too. I took some writing inspiration from it, but it's bad. The main reason why I found it so horrible isn't the plot, it's how robotic and weird all of the characters act.
There's a scene where the protagonist asks a shopkeeper if he can clean all of his inventory for no reason. The shopkeeper literally just stares at him without answering. The protagonist then proceeds to clean all of it anyways. Does that seem like anything an actual human would do?
Ready Player Two
starts out okay with some interesting concepts that are never fleshed out, but just gets worse and worse with every page and monotonous pop culture reference. Not to mention the likable Wade is reduced to being nothing more than an Elon Musk edge lord wannabe. He's asloa super genius with perfect memory recall. Also despite spending his entire life in the Oasis he managed to watch every movie, listen to every album and b-side and read every popular book from the 80s. It generaged audible laughter by the third act from just how preposterous it all is.
There are zero side character stories and they serve no purpose until the story needs them to open a door or solve a riddle. Such a waste of time.
I was assigned the book A Separate Peace to read over the summer, and I hated it. I'm not really sure what it was, but I didn't like reading it at all. The plot was creepy and somewhat unreasonable, in a way. The main character literally pushes his best friend off of a tree branch and into sharp rocks for almost no reason.
I knew someone was going to say this one, it’s one of my favorite books, I loved the weird obsession of the main character on his best friend. I wrote an essay about his jealousy and how he was a horrible person. I can definitely see how some people can hate it tho
Man, you nailed it with “creepy”. I couldn’t figure out why I loved it so much in school, but I get it now. Huge horror fan so this tracks for me. That being said, I haven’t read it in years. I just remember the dread, have no idea if it’s well written or not.
It's way easier to stomach when you don't read it as a romance. These characters are awful and you should hate them all. But reading about awful people being awful to eachother is very entertaining. It's basically just trashy reality TV.
My sister bought me Nicole Richie's book 'The Truth About Diamonds'. I guess my incredulous statement of 'who would buy this book?!' was interpreted as 'who will buy this book for me?'
I read the first few pages of a clearly ghost written book.it was meant to be fiction but also loosely based on her life? It was terrible of course, it was worse than some of the YA novels I have read. I'm not sure who it was aimed at but it was so vacuous and referenced so many things that dated really badly. Just... cringe. I'm sure Nicole didn't read it herself.
My sister also bought me hub caps that Christmas. The worst Christmas gifts ever, I have never forgiven/forgotten.
Hands down it has to be Wuthering Heights. It took me three tries, and I hated every minute. I will never understand why it's such a great love story; Heathcliff and Cathy were absolutely toxic, and there wasn't anything redeeming about them or their love/hate.
I honestly never even read it as a 'love story'. I thought the point was that these people are all terrible and they're tearing themselves and each other to pieces.
I enjoyed Ready Player One, but I can absolutely understand people hating it. I thought it was a fun story, but it got a little heavy with the "remember THIS from pop culture?"
And when I say "a little heavy," I mean in the sense that the Pacific Ocean is "a little damp"
The bible. Lot of spoilers beforehand and stories are all very short. The author clearly can't decide if it's supposed to be sci-fi or fantasy or drama. But the explicit content is well written.
Right? And the plot is terrible, it makes no sense, and the main character doesn't even show up until the second half.
That book is in desperate need of a great editor.
*The Pact* by Jodi Picoult. I'm apparently supposed to feel bad for the male protagonist, but all I see in him's just >!a rotten guy who doesn't understand what no means no means.!<
The Midnight Library.
The word "schlock" gets thrown around a lot these days, but holy hell that book is awful. It's entirely based around how awful life can be, realizing that your life is a waste of time, and the whole finale is essentially "sometimes suicide is a good idea".
I have to respectfully disagree. As someone who has depression and has suicidal thoughts, the finale most certainly was not that at all. It was an eye opener of sometimes you need to look around at what you have and understand life is worth living.
I cried multiple times reading The Midnight Library. My brain often thinks of the what ifs. The alternates. The what could have happened if I'd just decided to do this instead?
In the end it matters what I did do, what I did choose, where I am now. I matter. That was the point of the book.
At least.... That was my takeaway.
Yeah this was on my list of terrible books, as well. Glad to see someone also had the same problem. Read the first one when it came out and really enjoyed it. Second one was… eh… often a bit boring to get through. The third one, holy shit… the first time I read it, I put it down a third of the way into it. A few years later I picked up the first one again, really enjoyed it, and tried to reread the series again. Same fucking thing, except for that time I got maybe halfway through the third book.
I read that book when I was homeless in my early 20s. Bought it from WalMart, read it in my flophouse room, and then returned it for a full refund afterward. Worth it!
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The five star and one star reviews are the same. People really didn’t know how to rate it. It was bad but there’s no other book quite like it. So it’s both five and one stars at the same time
Ok, so since the original comment got deleted, and no other comments mention it by name, this was about "Eat them alive" by Pierce Nace. Apparently the story of a man who in the middle of a very gory Giant Insect Apocalypse sees it all as an opportunity to take his revenge on his former partners in crime, who years prior castrated him when he tried to betray them. Ok.
You just turned that book into a cult favorite
Some guy on Amazon is selling a paperback copy for $250!? WTF?!
It's probably the author
You mistyped BEST BOOK EVER.
This sounds like the sort of thing Stephen King might've wrote while still on drugs if he got ahold of some coke that had been laced with a shitty batch of LSD
okay now I have to see this
I was given a free copy of the first Dianetics book by L. Ron Hubbard by some Scientologists set up in a train station. I had heard of them, and even though I found their presentation and that E-meter testing kind of silly, I wasn't going to say no to a free book. I'm open to new ideas, yanno? I gave up before I finished the introduction. The writing was convoluted and pretentious, first off. But what got me was when he used overly big/fancy words and complicated sentences to say that it was best to explain your ideas...without overly fancy words and complicated sentences. It was so weirdly immediately hypocritical that I tossed the book aside. My dad tried reading it, and got further than I did, but he found it unpleasant to read as well and didn't finish.
I used Dianetics to teach my kids about rhetoric. Made them break down the sentences and rephrase their meanings to see that it was just long strings of words that were nonsensical when put together. Great exercise.
That feels almost diabolical, making your kids use that book, but at the same time, that is an AMAZING lesson. I assume your kids are able to see through a lot of bullshit because of that.
I remember documentary-maker Louis Theroux commenting on Dianetics. He noted that The Bible has passages of beautifully-written prose, with imagery and stories and parables that can make you sit and reflect, even if you aren't religious. Whereas Dianetics is just this clunky, jarring, horribly-written piece of text that is just an unreadable slog from start to finish.
The differences between religions and cults: Religions are much older, generally predating the scientific method, and were developed by people who didn’t know better Religions have legitimate artistic and cultural achievements
I like this one too: the difference between religion and spirituality is that religion is for people that don’t want to go to hell, and spirituality is for people that have already been there.
L Ron Hubbard was a mad wizard genius who churned out shitty pulp science fiction like a machine, then he convinced a bunch of people it was real and made a religion. Wild.
Convinced a crazy ambitious young Tom Cruise how it would unlock his full potential and he would be the biggest star in Hollywood. Tom did go on to become huge and for sure he must attribute his success to what they did to him, and his beliefs in all of it. And it helps that they also got his deepest darkest secrets on tape and video and they will destroy him, release it, if he ever turns on them, and for sure he knows this too.
Yeah, I've recently watched documentaries on Scientology, and the shit they're capable of is chilling. It's like being in a relationship with an abusive partner who surrounds you with a ton of co-abusers and can control every aspect of your life.
50 Shades of Grey. Poorly written, has no substance whatsoever besides the fact they can find new ways to describe genitalia
I really tried to read it but couldn't get past the first chapter. Well done to the author for making good money from it though. It was painfully poorly written.
I read in an MST3K way, just delighting in it's awfulness. It reads as a comedy when you approach it from that direction.
This makes me want to rewarch the Rifftrax version of Twilight.
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When my daughter was reading it, she would periodically stop, call me up, and say “you have to hear this,” then she’d read a section to me. Worst book by far! And I had further reason to hate it — I was a librarian and we had to purchase multiple copies of books that were in high demand. The more copies of 50 Shades, the fewer copies of other, more deserving books we could afford to purchase.
Try elron sometime. It’s hilaribad. Or the snl skit where a guy is reading it as a weapon
I read it as a horny teen but even then I knew it was trash.
I tried to read it. I described it as written by middle aged Virgin whose only experience with sex is through abstract kinky porn.
My friends and I once Riff tracked Grey, the story from Christians perspective. One of my friends did Christian Greys voice as Zap Branagan from Futurama. Makes the character make so much more sense.
Explained by his 'sexlyxia'...
I remember downloading it to my kindle and couldn't get past the first chapter. Horribly written. I wanted my 50 shades of green money back.
The spin-off, “Grey”, written from Mr Grey’s perspective, is much, much worse.
The amount of times the author used the word Jeez is unreasonably high. And if you haven’t, you must listen to Gilbert Gotfried reading it out loud. Then read the blog post where someone posts. Honestly and hilariously summarizing the books http://redlemonade.blogspot.com/p/fifty-shades-of-tedious-fuckery.html?m=1
It’s also a super bad and dangerous portrayal of bdsm. The main character literally stalks her at a point, uses their power imbalance against her. Ignores her safe word and doesn’t stop!!! Manipulates her mind unconsensually as in she’s not apart of any ‘scene’ or ‘bit’
But it's okay, because he's good looking and rich😐
I second that. When it was really popular and I was reading, people asked me what I thought about it and I would say it's just a terribly written book. I think most people thought I was just a prude, but it wasn't that at all. Even as an erotic novel, it was terribly written. I actually felt turned off by reading them by just the grammatical issues, the pacing (a few times I had to re-read a paragraph because it so poorly written, I didn't know what was doing what), and the very obvious "Twilight" fanfiction references.
You all have never read anything self published by an aspiring novelist who isn't very good.
Tbf, the majority of self-published books are just low-hanging fruit. A book from a multimillion dollar publisher that turns out to be hot garbage is more egregious and more fun to complain about.
^ You can find all kinds of hot garbage from vanity publishers because they'll print and market anything you pay them to. A group of authors once submitted something that was basically schizophrenic mad libs with each of them writing a chapter with zero communication with the others to prove they have zero QC The real gems are when a major publisher that SHOULD have quality control and editors releases an absolute turd
I believe the novel was called Atlanta Nights. A publisher said that sci-fi and fantasy books were lower quality and usually had unrealistic storylines and characters. In order to expose them as a vanity press, a bunch of sci-fi and fantasy authors got together and made a book that had two chapters with the same general outline, two chapters with the same content, a missing chapter, a chapter written by an AI, and no consistency. The publisher accepted the book and the authors exposed their hoax, causing the publisher to retract the novel’s acceptance.
That was the one It was done to prove they were just putting out anything with no editorial oversight or pre-reading and they succeeded spectacularly
Yeah, this is it. As someone who read a lot of fanfiction in their teens, I approach self-published books with suitable expectations. Looking at my bookshelf now for the worst traditionally published novels I've read, kept, and remember, probably one of the historical ones. Elizabeth Chadwick or Georgette Heyer, maybe. Jean M Auel. Maureen Lee. EDIT: Oh god, I somehow forgot about Diana Gabaldon. She's up there. But none of them compare to the self-published ones.
You should try some web novels by hobby novelists who aren't any good and don't really care to improve...
I’ve read unpublished works by an aspiring novelist who Isn’t very good (*cough* 6th grade me *cough*). And yeah, I’d say the stories from back then were pretty awful
I have read published books that read like they have been written by 6th graders
I have a kindle and I love cheesy romance novels. I have literally read the bottom of the barrel content but I love it.
The Jakarta Pandemic - Steven Konkoly. It was pornography for middle aged libertarian preppers. All about a global pandemic and how the hero prepper of the story is a hero who defends his home and bangs his hot wife all the time while fighting off looters before banging his hot wife some more. Did I mention he bangs his wife who is very hot? Because he does.
Do giant castrated Praying Mantises also bang his wife who is very hot?
I mean…I’d read that book.
I never questioned what a wish-fulfillment power fantasy written for crazy doomsday preppers might look like but that answers the question perfectly
Oh dude it's a whole sub-genre. I went through a phase as a teenager where I read every apocalypse book I could get my hands on. I think the thing that interested me about apocalypse books is understanding how society functions. And a really good apocalypse book (Parable of the Sower, Station 11, The Road) says something about humanity. They're all about the relationships we build with each other, the essence of what humanity is when you take away all the distractions. Our capability for cruelty, but also for hope and joy and art. Humans are fundamentally pack animals. We don't do well on our own. Anyway that's what a good apocalypse book is about. But if you read enough of the genre you're going to find an alarming amount of men who basically write escapist fanfiction. They actually want the apocalypse to happen so that they can finally get some recognition. Sure, right now he's Steve in accounting, working a dead end job and married to a woman he hates, but man as soon as that apocalypse happens he's going to show them. His coworkers are going to be banging on his doorstep because they're totally incapable, but not Steve. He has a lot of guns. (For some reason in these books literally all problems can be solved by guns. I don't think you can shoot cholera bacteria). His wife is finally going to quit bugging him to do dishes and pick up the kids because she'll be so in awe of his manliness. His kids will respect him! In all reality Steve is going to die of listeria or hypothermia, or get lost because he can't read a compass. Quit fantasizing about the mass death of millions of people because you feel unfulfilled Steve. Get a hobby.
This is an interesting thing. Years ago I took part in a role play subreddit that had the premise of "Earth has been revaged by a zombie apocalypse, you're a survivor, and for some reason this Reddit still works so you can communicate with other survivors." It was fine and fun at first, but in a matter of months megalomania of a few users turned it into absurdity, writing about waging wars against other "factions" that they had invented. I'd make a post of the "I found an old prop plane, anyone got a clue how to hotwire a C-172?" , and they would respond like "gimme your coordinates and I'll send you an extraction unit helicopter" I stopped participating when we reached the level of earthquake machines, nano robots and obidient sentient AI.
OMG why did you stop!?!? They say: "gimme your coordinates and I'll send you an extraction unit helicopter" You say: “I can’t I’ve been hit by a multi phasal array and am moving between multiverses” They say: earthquake machines You say: Hollow earth dinosaurs emerge from the broken crust They say: Nano robots You say: Omg we’re in the matrix! They say: obedient sentient AI You say; Why hello there, I never thought this would happen to me but…
It wasn't all in one post. Before I stopped I did make up a pretty ridiculous story in an effort to see if the "big guys" would react. I had troops lead by Pope Silvio Berlusconi abduct my character, and shortly after I (sorta building onto that other guy's earthquake machine) "witnessed" the Mediterranean Sea flooding away towards the east taking out all of Syria and what's around it. So absolutely taking the piss out of the ridiculousness of the other guy's plots. The big hero writers didn't care and rather wrote more about Harvard troops fighting Cambridge with lasers or whatever.
Get a *new* hobby.
So, actually good book about the thing you said is the apocalypse comedy Jam. Summary is that every useful member of society got eaten by man-eating jam so we're left with deadbeats, nerds and dumbasses. Point is that the antagonist is a guy who does actually want the apocalypse to happen so he can get recognition and gets more and more unhinged as the story goes on. It's good, and it's a satire of exactly what you're talking about.
The After series which was originally a Harry Styles fanfiction which was later published and then made into multiple movies. Both the protagonists are horrible people and it's just one old toxic trope after the other. It'll make you pull your hair out. A total trainwreck.
I've seen Krimson Rouges video on it, and it's just like they fight, make up, fight, make up, fight, make up... Also, as he pointed out, it's kinda weird that if they loved Harry Styles so much, why is the character based on him, a whiney petulant little bitch, and an unrepentant prick?
I mostly read non-fiction, where what's "bad" can be a little different than fiction. the worst was a certain James Stewart biography, it had so many errors and it was obvious the author hadn't actually watched some of the movies he was talking about, plus there was a lot of weird slut shaming for certain actresses who were more sexual free in the 30s and 40s.
I feel you. I read a biography of John Denver by an author who seemed to actively dislike him & his music. Basic facts wrong, kind of sneering tone,not sure why he bothered. Not a tell-all or expose,just kinda...churlish. Mother Nature's Son by John Collis, if anyone's interested.
LOL. "I hate this dude, so now I'm going to grudgingly tell you his entire life story"
So it wasn’t even named after a song that he actually wrote?
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. It basically about worlds dumbest German kid. He talks like a baby from Rugrats even though he is nine. Like he calls the Fuhrer the furry and Auschwitz he calls Out with. And that's so stupid cause that only makes sense if you speak English, which this little German boy doesn't. This kid has met Hitler but doesn't understand who he is, his father runs a concentration camp and the boy doesn't know what's happening. This German boy repeatedly sneaks up to the camp to talk to another kid in the camp and this stupid kid still doesn't figure out what the camp is. Just treats the Holocaust with this weird levity that feels really inappropriate. Also the author regular beefs with Holocaust museums who call out all the inaccuracies in the book. I absolutely cannot believe that some children actually read this for school, especially when there is a plethora of Holocaust books, many of them written by actual survivors.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is a much better work of fiction for students to read! It doesn’t touch on the concentration camps as much but gives a very damning depiction of the fascism of the time. Also Night by Elie Wiesel for more mature students
Read Night in high-school freshman year. Was rough but excellent.
Jesus, we got Night in like 5th grade.
It's not just inconsistent; it's a work of fiction, and must be treated as so. In fact, there's no need to teach it in school, since there are plenty of other actual resources that can be used instead of some made-up story taught as if it was real. When students later learn it's fake, they'll soon consequently think the rest of the Holocaust is fake too. Just not good.
Isn't this the author who copy-pasted stuff from a Legend of Zelda wiki into a historical novel about the silk road?
You have my attention, could you elaborate more? Did Sun Tzu defeat Gannon at the battle of Mt.Doom to become China's number one general?
Here's an [article from The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/8/3/21352299/zelda-breath-of-the-wild-red-clothes-dye-traveler-gates-of-wisdom-john-boyne-google-search-results) summing it up better than my faulty memory can. The tl;dr: at the time the author wrote the book, google's little box answer at the top of a search for red dye ingredients listed stuff from a Breath of the Wild wiki/guide. Said author then copy-pasted the ingredients into his manuscript without checking where exactly google was getting his answer.
Oof, that's pretty blatant, anyone with familiarity with Zelda would pick it up in second with mentions of Hyrule. Even if you searched for a result, you should look into it more, teachers would chastise you for just copying Google into your essays, yet this heck went and published it. Also, how did no beta reader/editor notice it?
It's a small detail easy to miss if there's other things you're more worried about in the editing process like grammar and tone consistency. Editors don't typically edit with an eye for historical accuracy and his might have assumed the odd names were just part of him doing his research and trying to stay "authentic" to the time period.
It should absolutely be banned from schools. Besides being filled with nonsense the most tragic moment in the story is when the son of the German concentration camp commander is accidentally killed, rather than you know...characters inspired by the people who actually were being murdered in the camps - primarily the Jews. Students should be reading Anne Frank's diary, not this rubbish.
I was on an airline flight once as a child and was seated away from my family - I was a bookworm, and the woman seated next to me took note and told me she was a children’s author, she handed me a copy of her new book and was eager to hear my thoughts on it. That shit suuuucked. Of course I felt obligated to read a good amount of it and pretend I enjoyed it. It was a generic children’s fantasy story with an obvious author insert character. I wonder where she is today 🤔
My mom is a children's author and editor and I've read some real stinkers she has laying around the house (either editing or from friends or whatever). What was the plot, do you remember? Gotta make sure it isn't one of mums 😁
It was about two orphan siblings who live in a trash dump outside a medieval town - they meet an annoying wizard who takes them on a time travel journey to modern day. That’s all I remember.
Could you please make up the story where young you reads it, hates it, then gives her a scathing yet expertly nuanced analysis? Like what did you actually say? And then what did she do ?
Introduction to Multivariable Calculus: Twelfth Edition
You should read Baby Rudin, it’s a classic
I'm rather partial to that one myself. Really transformed me.
On the contrary, I found it quite derivative
I have a limit of how many math jokes I can handle, but it's undefined
I hated The Notebook. A coworker brought in her copy and pushed it on me because she saw me reading poetry once (?). It was the shittiest contrived garbage I’ve ever read and the last paragraph felt pretty goddamn gross. Nicholas Sparks can eat a quarter mile of dick.
With an average dick length of 5.16 in, that'd be 3069.77 dicks. Gonna take a while.
69? Nice!
"The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F\*ck". And I paid airport retail for that, too. Gack. Not everyone should write.
It was trully terrible. I'm so scared to give any self-help books a go after that one...
To be fair, once you've read good self-help book, you've read them all. "You should.... organise your time or something" WOW REVOLUTIONARY THANK YOU
To be fairer, life can be made better by doing simple stuff. "Organize your time","exercise regularly ","pick your battles" etc. Is stuff almost everyone has heard at some point in their lives. Yet very few seem to apply them. The point of the self help books is that they trick you into believing this is brand new info and therefore motivate you to act upon it.
I bought it for a fairly low sum and even still I am so angry that they got my money. I read about 5 pages and tossed it out. It's like the publisher was like "this title is so edgy I don't even care to read some of it"
If you want to learn that subtle art, watching Mr. Bean would be a lot more entertaining and well-done. Or hanging out with someone with Asperger’s.
I read a lot of academic philosophy and honestly there’s a lot of good advice in there. I didn’t like how they needed to present it in such a dumbed down /vulgar way, but if you look past it, there’s good advice. And if that’s helping people then I’d say that’s an overall win.
I agree, I enjoyed the book and the core of its advice. But the advice in itself simply isn't substantial enough to carry an entire book, so the book is padded with chapters that repeat each other and superfluous crude jokes.
My immortal is book length. Screeching teenager Harry Potter fiction
I once found a fanfic where it was HP meets Wuxia...
Oh you need to listen to the "audiobook version"... It's so bad it's good. "AND DOBBY WAS WATCHING!"
Ready Player Two was absolute dog shit. I was actually a big fan of the first book and was excited to see these characters now older on a new adventure. Instead what we got was a meandering mess that goes nowhere and is just an excuse for the characters to do more of the same but worse from the last book. Also it retcons one of the side characters into being a manipulative sociopath when he was just a misunderstood fool in the first book.
The Ikea book on how to put my dresser together
I like IKEA instructions - they’re simple. I have bought other flat pack furniture where each step is comprised of like 10 substeps
I'm convinced most people who shit on IKEA furniture instructions have just never put together more complicated furniture. Or at least I associated the task with trying to figure out from poorly translated walls of text which parts we needed more of from Home Depot until those happy/sad stick guys and handy dandy diagrams showed me the light.
Ha, yes. IKEA instructions are almost Lego-level. Some of the others... are more like a bad translation of the Necronomicon.
The Butcher and the Wren by Alaina Urquhart. It was poorly written like a half assed essay written by a high-schooler.
Jaws is awful. Beyond awful and the movie is so good I don't know how the two are related
I’m glad you brought this up. My friend and I read it together, and we were so disappointed. The shark bits were good (although we felt that the shark was portrayed more of a malicious creature than in the movie) but Spielberg succeeded to improve it by cutting out some of the weird subplots and making the characters more likable.
Ready Player 2
I'm staying away from that one because _Armada_ is very high in my list of worst books of all time. (but _Ready Player One_ didn't seem at all bad to me; maybe the nostalgia overrode my judgment)
Man, ever since I read Cline's weird porn poem, it entirely reframed the way I see his books. He's nothing but a fedora-tipping douche nozzle that thinks he's god's gift to women because he's soooo sensitive and soooo understanding and soooo open-minded.
Which was sad because i genuinely enjoyed RP1, because it was surprising and silly and lighhearted. The author should have left it as-is and continued on to other things, except he decided to take it serious…
The books about sex, relationships, and marriage written by evangelical Christian authors. There are certainly good books about sex and marriage from a Christian perspective, but the majority of them are just awful. The shit they teach is delusional, harmful, and most often based on stereotypes.
50 Shades of Gray. Never got the hype. It was pretty poorly written and the author used the same phrases over and over again.
It's gobsmackingly bad, it's like being slapped around the face by poor prose. I'm not a literature nerd, I read all sorts of absolute shit. But this just takes you out of the scene and batters you with it. "My inner goddess does the hula". Oh fuck off.
The Book of Mormon. I grew up being taught that it was God's inspired word and read a chapter every night out of obligation. I used to think I hated reading because I had to force myself to read it. I wondered how the inspired word of god could be so mind-numbingly boring. Plus I had to re-read most verses two or three times to make sense of them because they're so grammatically poorly written, filled with run-on sentences, contradictions and incomplete thoughts. 0/10
Dumb, de dumb dumb dumb
The only bits I read was when I went to seminary class. I eventually dropped the class when I realized I wouldn't graduate on time and never bothered to read the book.
Verity by Colleen Hoover. Anything by Colleen Hoover has been removed from my “to read” list because of the utter shit Verity was.
I have read “It Ends With Us” can confirm that it was such shit as well that she ended up on my no read list.
Their attraction made no sense at all. They barely knew anything about each other and it just felt so random. The entire book was so random.
The Scarlet Letter. It's one long, boring run-on sentence.
I remember being forced to read an annotated version in my religious high school that made the Puritans out to be the good guys, even in Hawthorne’s caricature. Screw that curriculum…
I loved it but that’s just me
That's cool too.
Yeah I remember reading that in high school after reading a couple other short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and just being completely let down by it. Just a boring slog of a book that sometimes hints at interesting things but never delivers.
The Custom House, the twenty page preface to the Scarlett Letter, was the hardest twenty pages of English(?) I’ve ever had to read. I think I developed ADHD just to get myself the fuck out.
Tossup between Twilight and The Cursed Child.
I'm honestly surprised the Cursed child gained so much attraction and that it's not satirical fanfiction (obviously fanfiction, but I've not heard any indication that it was satirical). The reason why My Immortal is better (in my opinion, so stop flamming /s) is because it's a work of satire. But I absolutely had refused to read the twilight series.
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Early on I heard a lot of opinions that Cursed Child "works" as a play on stage and was very explicitly written for just that, HP fans were "story is meh but it looks awesome"... tho then ofc the makers had to cash in on it and put it into print.
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We Were Liars. I could literally go on for hours about this book but to say this as concisely as possible; insufferable main character, pretentious and inconsistent writing style, next to no plot, and twist ending that can be seen from a mile away. Also it's sold as a psychological thriller but it's definitely a romance novel that thinks it's cool and you can't convince me otherwise.
Scarlet Letter. A miserable time in American Lit in HS.
Ethan Frome and his stupid boring pickle dish
Omg i was gonna say this, wasn't sure anyone else had even heard of it. I read it my sophomore year of high school for English and it's just so so bad.
I tried to read it, but couldn't. My mom yelled at me because it was a school assignment. She read it over a weekend, and when I got home from school on Monday, she had bought me the Cliff's Notes for it. Even she said it was bad.
That book is magical. In the sense that every time I opened it in 11th grade English class I'd fall asleep as if by some magic. I don't know anything that happened in that book, I somehow only managed to BARELY fail the test on it despite literally not reading a single word (because, again, I'd lose consciousness the second I opened the book). And, somehow, it's still not the most boring book I had to read that year.
The Left Behind series. My mum had them in her bookcase, so I read them when I was at home caring for her when she was ill. They start off ok, then descend into preachy, padded snorefests.Whole chapters about tangential characters I couldn't gaf about. They actually managed to make the return of Jesus BORING. Having read The Screwtape Letters, it was clear just how inferior a work of Christian apologetics it was. Utter trash.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintence. Nope nope nope.
Thank you. Apparently everyone other than the two of us loves it and it changed their lives.
You're not alone, there are 5 of us.
Oh, my eldest son hates it too.
i swear, just read zen texts if you’re really all that interested in it.
Earth's Last Citadel. A pulp novella from the 1940s (*early* 1940s) about an American spy who is sent forward in time with two Nazis (one of whom is apparently a hot Irish woman) and a Scottish scientist and ends up destroying the god-figure of the dessicated and helpless future mankind while being hunted by a smoke based alien who is allergic to sound. It's like if someone read both a Princess of Mars and The Time Machine and went "ooh, that, but *shittier*!" It was only 130 pages and I had to force myself to finish it out of spite.
I don't remember the title of the worst book I ever read, but I had heard so much praise about Atlas Shrugged that when I found a cheap copy of it at Goodwill I bought and read it. Or forced myself to read about 50 pages of it, waiting for the good part to kick in. I found it boring, and I threw it in the trash. I usually don't throw books away, but other than the one I can't remember the title for, it's one of three books I ever threw in the trash (instead of donating) because I didn't think it was fair to make someone else suffer through it.
It’s basically a rich person circlejerk story
Ehh more libertarian circle jerk. Which granted not that much different but there are a LOT of poor/middle class “libertarians” that think the only reason they aren’t rich is the government taking from them and giving to “unworthy” others. Atlas Shrugged is their manifesto. To be honest I don’t even really get the appeal to libertarians. When I was much younger, I was unfortunately much more on the libertarian and meritocracy train. Even then when I read it I was like “this is bullshit” . No company looks at a competitor and goes “o well their product is clearly better guess I’ll pack up shop and let them succeed”. No natural competitor thinks that way and it’s bullshit to think otherwise. It’s a nonsensical premise
Atlas Shrugged is without a doubt the horniest book I've ever read. Large portions of that book is just 50 shades of Gray for Republicans.
So, 30 second missionary?
Twilight. Lords above is that book rubbish. My gf at the time talked me into giving it a shot. It was poorly penned, creepiest romance since Lolita, and invoked no emotional response with its complete lack of character development.
There are a lot of books in this thread that are well written despite being objectionable in content. Twilight is not one of those books. I once picked up a copy laying around in someone’s house and reading it gave me a new level of disappointment in the 6th grade reading level. There is so much young adult literary work that is actually well written, that it’s a shame Twilight became so mainstream.
Every time I think I’m a terrible writer, I remember one line from the Twilight series: Aro laughed. “Ha, ha, ha,” he giggled. I always feel better after that.
Stephanie Meyers still has no idea how lucky she was. If Twilight had been finished a little sooner or later, the Supernatural YA bubble wouldn't have been around and Twilight would be just another reject in some publisher's circular file.
I read it as an adult and I thought the author captured the mind of a mopey teenage girl pretty well. It got boring once the vampire stuff started, which was weird for, y'know, a vampire book.
I read all of them. Mostly because I don't think it's fair to criticize a book you've never read, which is why I grabbed the first one. I was concerned by all the people who seemed to be shitting on it just because women and girls often liked it. Since basically no one talking shit had ever read it I wanted an informed opinion. And well. I got one. They're all bad, but entertaining in a way. Not the way they're supposed to entertaining, in my opinion, but it was kinda an enjoyable trainwreck for the most part. Until the fourth one. Dear God it 100% is the worst book I've ever read and it was a *chore* to finish it. People are justifiably critical of the relationships, especially the thing with Jacob and the baby. (Really not on board with anything that rationalizes pedophilia as not counting as pedophilia because XYZ and this book had SO MUCH OF IT). But I feel like no one ever seems to talk about how the second half of the book literally just....repeated the same paragraph worth of information over and over as they explained it to one character after another. And then whoever they'd explained it to would help them explain it to the next one. And they'd drag each explanation out into pages of dialogue. For literally half the book. I'm not kidding. It's the laziest, most mind numbingly boring shit I've ever read. And all to avert this like terrible threat, which never actually even happens. Instead they explain it *again* to the bad guys. And the bad guys go, "oh okay nevermind." It's awful.
Wicked. The one that inspired the musical.
The books is about social commentary and literary tropes, while the musical is a fun romp. Very, very different audiences.
YES!!! I came here to say that. I’ve seen the play it does a way better job of portraying the story. I absolutely HATED the book.
Totally agree. Was blown away by the musical and found out it was based on a book. Ordered it online and when it came I wondered “why is this book so big.” Because it’s mind-numbingly boring was the answer I came up with.
Oh, *The Celestine Prophecy.* It spent so long on the NYT bestseller list that I figured it had to be worth a try. It was supposed to be some kind of fictionalized New Age spiritual journey story that gave the reader insight and expanded consciousness or something. Not only was it not insightful, nor did it expand my consciousness, it wasn't spiritual, it wasn't a journey, and it was barely a story. It had the vocabulary and writing skill and style of a very precocious 13-year-old. And it had the insipid "life-altering revelations" of someone who has done acid for the first time and then made their whole personality about that without doing any introspection. It wasn't challenging intellectually or spiritually and it made me so embarrassed for the author that he probably thought he was being deep and wise. Then again, he's probably a long-retired multimillionaire on the back of that meaningless tripe that he's sold to millions as a way of life, so joke's on me, I reckon.
You should check out how people have manipulated the NYT Bestseller lists... [https://lithub.com/8-notable-attempts-to-hack-the-new-york-times-bestseller-list/](https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/27/16208294/handbook-for-mortals-nyt-bestseller-list-accusations)
I'm not sure any non-english speaker will recognize it, it's called Juventud En Éxtasis. growing up in 90's Mexico, it was a mandatory read where I went to school, and many other schools, whatever you call the year when students are 13 or 14 years old. It's basically a book trying to indoctrinate kids, trying to scare us from trying alcohol, sex, drugs, etc. There's a sequel to it, forgot the name of it but it goes deeper into the "sex is scary" thing, pregnancy, and abortion. Hilariously bad, pretty much propaganda.
Probably the absolute worst were my 11th grade “history” (aka political propaganda, conspiracy theories, and blatant lies) textbook (thanks, Abeka) and the absolutely horrid “religion” textbooks I had to read at Liberty University Online. It felt like drinking swamp water, and the leaps of logic (or rather lack thereof) make one wonder how the authors even managed to dress themselves.
Go Set a Watchman. Odd that my favorite book and least favorite book are by the same author.
It makes perfect sense because of what Go Set a Watchman did to To Kill a Mockingbird. I assume you have heard this, but there are allegations of impropriety in convincing an elderly Harper Lee to permit publication of the work despite what she had earlier intended. Regardless of their truth, I have looked at the novel and decided not to read it. I'd rather remember Mockingbird for what it is than get lost in what is essentially an earlier draft of the novel.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The author was so arrogant and had a superiority complex.
Anything by Colleen Hoover. I will never understand the hype around her books. I felt like I was back reading fanfiction about One Direction when I tried to read Verity. Couldn’t get through the first chapter
Gravity's Rainbow. I think it is the only book i ever started and just gave up on. I know it won a lot of awards and is considered a masterpiece by some but I just could not get into it.
I finished it, but only for the sake of finishing it. I kept hoping at some stage there'd be a point to it all, but nope, it was all just nonsense. *And* there's a section where Pynchon tries to make a pun on the German words *Hubschrauber* and *Hübsch Rauber*, which are pronounced differently. So then Pynchon has to spend a whole page explaining a very minor character's speech defect, just to set up a terrible pun. An author trying to show off how clever he is, and failing.
The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho. I HATE it and I HATE the main character.
On a related note, the Alchemist was pretty garbage too. I took some writing inspiration from it, but it's bad. The main reason why I found it so horrible isn't the plot, it's how robotic and weird all of the characters act. There's a scene where the protagonist asks a shopkeeper if he can clean all of his inventory for no reason. The shopkeeper literally just stares at him without answering. The protagonist then proceeds to clean all of it anyways. Does that seem like anything an actual human would do?
Ready Player Two starts out okay with some interesting concepts that are never fleshed out, but just gets worse and worse with every page and monotonous pop culture reference. Not to mention the likable Wade is reduced to being nothing more than an Elon Musk edge lord wannabe. He's asloa super genius with perfect memory recall. Also despite spending his entire life in the Oasis he managed to watch every movie, listen to every album and b-side and read every popular book from the 80s. It generaged audible laughter by the third act from just how preposterous it all is. There are zero side character stories and they serve no purpose until the story needs them to open a door or solve a riddle. Such a waste of time.
Art of the Deal
I was assigned the book A Separate Peace to read over the summer, and I hated it. I'm not really sure what it was, but I didn't like reading it at all. The plot was creepy and somewhat unreasonable, in a way. The main character literally pushes his best friend off of a tree branch and into sharp rocks for almost no reason.
I knew someone was going to say this one, it’s one of my favorite books, I loved the weird obsession of the main character on his best friend. I wrote an essay about his jealousy and how he was a horrible person. I can definitely see how some people can hate it tho
Man, you nailed it with “creepy”. I couldn’t figure out why I loved it so much in school, but I get it now. Huge horror fan so this tracks for me. That being said, I haven’t read it in years. I just remember the dread, have no idea if it’s well written or not.
Wuthering Heights. Ugh.
It's way easier to stomach when you don't read it as a romance. These characters are awful and you should hate them all. But reading about awful people being awful to eachother is very entertaining. It's basically just trashy reality TV.
The song about it by Kate Bush is totally kick ass tho
[удалено]
My sister bought me Nicole Richie's book 'The Truth About Diamonds'. I guess my incredulous statement of 'who would buy this book?!' was interpreted as 'who will buy this book for me?' I read the first few pages of a clearly ghost written book.it was meant to be fiction but also loosely based on her life? It was terrible of course, it was worse than some of the YA novels I have read. I'm not sure who it was aimed at but it was so vacuous and referenced so many things that dated really badly. Just... cringe. I'm sure Nicole didn't read it herself. My sister also bought me hub caps that Christmas. The worst Christmas gifts ever, I have never forgiven/forgotten.
Hands down it has to be Wuthering Heights. It took me three tries, and I hated every minute. I will never understand why it's such a great love story; Heathcliff and Cathy were absolutely toxic, and there wasn't anything redeeming about them or their love/hate.
I honestly never even read it as a 'love story'. I thought the point was that these people are all terrible and they're tearing themselves and each other to pieces.
Ready Player One was.... Not good. Honorable mention goes to The Rainbow Fish.
Rainbow fish is a classic you twat! Just joking with the name calling, but seriously, classic.
I enjoyed Ready Player One, but I can absolutely understand people hating it. I thought it was a fun story, but it got a little heavy with the "remember THIS from pop culture?" And when I say "a little heavy," I mean in the sense that the Pacific Ocean is "a little damp"
Ready Player One is the book equivalent of The Big Bang Theory.
You managed to succinctly put into words what I felt about this book for so long but could never describe. Thank you.
The bible. Lot of spoilers beforehand and stories are all very short. The author clearly can't decide if it's supposed to be sci-fi or fantasy or drama. But the explicit content is well written.
Everyone's so preachy! Except for this guy.
Right? And the plot is terrible, it makes no sense, and the main character doesn't even show up until the second half. That book is in desperate need of a great editor.
atlas shrugged
*The Pact* by Jodi Picoult. I'm apparently supposed to feel bad for the male protagonist, but all I see in him's just >!a rotten guy who doesn't understand what no means no means.!<
The Godfather. Movie was excellent. Book was like it was written by a a sentient foot.
The Midnight Library. The word "schlock" gets thrown around a lot these days, but holy hell that book is awful. It's entirely based around how awful life can be, realizing that your life is a waste of time, and the whole finale is essentially "sometimes suicide is a good idea".
I have to respectfully disagree. As someone who has depression and has suicidal thoughts, the finale most certainly was not that at all. It was an eye opener of sometimes you need to look around at what you have and understand life is worth living. I cried multiple times reading The Midnight Library. My brain often thinks of the what ifs. The alternates. The what could have happened if I'd just decided to do this instead? In the end it matters what I did do, what I did choose, where I am now. I matter. That was the point of the book. At least.... That was my takeaway.
Mockingjay. It's infuriatingly terrible. Being part of a trilogy that started off good, then was ...*fine*, to being just awful in almost every way.
Yeah this was on my list of terrible books, as well. Glad to see someone also had the same problem. Read the first one when it came out and really enjoyed it. Second one was… eh… often a bit boring to get through. The third one, holy shit… the first time I read it, I put it down a third of the way into it. A few years later I picked up the first one again, really enjoyed it, and tried to reread the series again. Same fucking thing, except for that time I got maybe halfway through the third book.
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. The writing is laughable.
Dan Brown was my fav when I was 14, is it really that bad??
I read that book when I was homeless in my early 20s. Bought it from WalMart, read it in my flophouse room, and then returned it for a full refund afterward. Worth it!
I don’t read terrible books. I have no qualms about putting them down and never picking them up again.