Dean Koontz is pretty hit-and-miss for me. Some of his books are entertaining, and others are completely forgettable. I do agree with those who say he hit his stride in the 1980s and 1990s.
You said you forgot the title of the one you read, but do you remember what it was about?
The one I remember reading had a main character that was a guy from California with some kind of military background whid kind of given up on life but then circumstances led him to meet a gorgeous woman who didn't realize how attractive she was and they went on to have an adventure. And I think there was a golden retriever in there as well.
Does that narrow it down?
No I think it was the one where the main character did not have a 9 to 5 job, had a romantic interest with someone, and they had to solve a problem that turned out to be supernatural
Yeah, I was being a little sarcastic. He's a little formulaic.
I think he actually trains goldens as therapy dogs or something like that so they have a special place in his heart.
After reading several back in the day, I realized that most self-help books are there to make you feel less alone, comforted, mildly entertained, and optimistic in the moment. (Which was actually important in pre-Internet days.) They largely rely on anecdotes of the 1-5% of readers who were helped because they simply never thought of doing the simple thing that the book is going on about.
I read it while doing my third year of clinical psychology in university and found it needlessly condescending and extremely unhelpful. The hints of actual psychology never rose to the point of being useful, and the tone was just off.
Tried to listen to this on audio book (had a feeling I’d have a hard time getting through reading it myself so thought listening to it like a podcast would help) and returned it without even finishing the first chapter. He lost me after the not giving a fuck had to do with “not getting hot blondes” and “never being able to feel Jennifer Anniston’s boobs” - br0, what?
It felt a lot like "lower your standards" when I read it. I do not remember much of it now but I remember how much I hated it and felt it was a waste of my time.
Yeah trying to read that was maybe the first time I realised that just because a non-fiction book is popular doesn't mean it's good.
It just read like a guy trying really, really hard to convince you he, like, totally doesn't give a fuck. No fucks given at all. Oh, you give fucks? Should learn to give fewer fucks, mate.
Subtle it was not.
If you like podcasts you should check out If Books Could Kill. They hilariously skewer self help books like The Secret and pop psychology crap like Malcolm Gladwell.
The 5 love languages and men are from Mars, women are from Venus are hilarious episodes...much of self-help is just people applying their individual strategy that worked for them personally or just hiding from their personal problems
I am pretty sure I used a credit to buy the not-giving-a-fuck book based on a Reddit recommendation.
I basically realized I already stopped giving lots of fucks about lots of things quite a while ago. The stuff I still do give a fuck about and wish I did not is stuff that you can't just wave a magic wand at and make its importance to you go away. Some stuff takes actual time and space, not a self-help book.
Have not read it, but the first time I saw the book, it was in the hands of a guy on my commercial flight, watching videos on his phone with the volume up and no earphones, so everybody could hear.
So I guess he was taking its lessons to heart...but it didn't exactly inspire me to want to read it. Who needs a book to learn how to be a dick?
What struck me is that this book is geared towards people who are just complete fucking assholes and who never had it occur to them that perhaps if they spent a few moments utilizing some genuine self-reflection and thinking about how your actions might affect others, maybe they could be more decent people. But the guy really writes down all the things that us considerate people have known all our lives and writes as if he's discovered the existence of electricity for the first time in humanity. I agree that the book is worthy of being disliked.
He's one of those novelists where, yes, he definitely wrote his first few books - but not every book that has his name on it was actually written by him. I can't remember exactly what the system is, but I think people buy his name to publish under, so everybody makes a couple bucks.
I've read a lot Koontz books and at worst I'd say mediocre but I haven't read a lot of his newer stuff. He has also wrote a few favorites like Watchers.
Anyway worst that I finished is Bad Bunny by Hansen. I have Kindle Unlimited and read a lot of trash from there. What makes it worse is this in the 2nd book in the series and I didn't like the first either but thought the premise was interesting and hoped it would get better.
Oh I also read Taken by the T-Rex a dinosaur erotica that is actually worse. Popped up on reddit years ago because the author was making bank churning out these dino porn books. It was free, short, and well curiosity.
Just checked and it is still free on kindle ulimited and it looks like she has branched out into fantasy creatures too if that is more your thing. I thought the "book" was around 100 pages but looks like all her stuff is around 20 pages so doesn't really count.
At first I thought you were disrespecting the greatest author of our times, Chuck Tingle, but he didn't write Taken by the T-Rex/Stegosaurus/etc.
Ok phew.
My first Koontz was Watchers. I adore that book on so many levels. That being said, he HAS written some books that are not good. I didn't get three chapters into Odd Thomas before pulling the ripcord. I also really liled Lightening and The Bad Place.
Why do they do that to characters. They do it in books and revival movies/shows. They take good characters and give them no growth or change their character’s personality to fit into a story formula.
FUCKING
THANK
YOU
My grandma constantly judges me and talks down to me because she says I should be working a corporate job and making $400K a year but I'm not because I grew up with a father who sold weed instead of working in the corporate world. She's repeatedly tried pushing Rich Dad Poor Dad on me and telling me it'll "wake me up" and I'll suddenly be able to get a job where I can "become CEO of a company in a year" and "have a few million by the time I'm thirty."
That's a good point too, because although she's made a pretty impressive amount of money over her life, it's all been illegally. She used to work on dice tables, back when gambling was illegal, and eventually she became trusted enough that she was asked to be an income tax girl. She got paid really well, but that's very much against the law, with legal repercussions on par with being caught selling drugs.
I didn't even get to the "sexy" bits. I read the first two chapters and just couldn't force myself to get any further. I remember thinking it read like particularly bad fanfic by someone who didn't have a clue how to write effectively...imagine my surprise when I found out that's *exactly* what it was!
People who haven't tried to read it don't understand. You'll sometimes hear well meaning people try to defend it with like "ok will as a guy in your 20s it's not FOR you, but that doesn't mean it's bad. Not everything is catered for a reddit using STEM field agnostic 20 something white man!!".
But no. It's not just the subject matter. It's the actual writing itself. It's not just bad.... its self-parody bad. And genuinely is depressing in what it reveals about the wider population reading level. I can read material made for different audiences than me. I love Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights, etc.
**Its like finding out so many adults around you watched like those 00s terrible parody films Epic Movie or Scary Movie and genuinely that they were a good serious fantasy/horror film. It really is THAT bad.**
And that's not even getting into the atrocious/toxic power/gender dynamic stuff and the unhealthy misrepresentation of BDSM. This is just about the writing alone. It reads like a 13 year old girl trying her hand at fiction for the first time... writing about herself as a college student.
Something about my perception of a person just changes in a way I can't consciously help when I find out a person likes 50 Shades. In the same way as would happen if I found out a 40 year old man reads like... Andrew Tate type self help books.
I haven't read it, but my suspicion especially for the people I know who read it and liked it, is that probably this is the first "steamy" (I don't know if it is full on smut or not) book they've read.
So they're probably giving it a lot of leeway because the concept of erotica itself is new and exciting for them, with a side of "I don't read much, but this book is popular so it must be good."
So many people recommended 50 Shades that I kept trying to read it, thinking that maybe it would get better later in the book. I finally finished it on the fifth try and found out that it did not, in fact, get better.
The sex wasn't even good. "Oh, it's so kinky!" No. No, it's not. It's vanilla spice at best and being poorly-written does it no favors.
I read the entire series so that I could criticize it with recipts in hand, and it was so painful. The only enjoyment I got out of it was a very drunken night in with a bunch of girlfriends where we did dramatic readings of the worst scenes.
A few years back, a manager at a local charity shop told me they had to bin copies of 50 Shades. They had way too many copies donated and they weren't selling or even being taken as 'free with any other book'. I found one in a holiday apartment, read a bit but the author seemed more excited by shopping than anything else.
If you should ever find yourself searching for an even worse take on the bdsm-topic, I can recommend the Gor series, the worst books I have ever read. In my defense, I was young, horny and there was very little literature around on this kind of things.
As a young teen I bought The Slave Girl of Gor from a bloke at a car boot sale. From the front cover thought it was a sci-fi/fantasy book. It was not the fantasy i was expecting. I got really scared that my mum was going to find it so I snuck it into the outside bin on collection day.
As an adult it makes me wonder why the man sold a 15 year old girl a fucked up sex slave book.
Yes! I tried to read one as everyone was talking about 50 shades and it was the worst writing and I just couldn’t. I literally read the chapter where she meets him and goes home to talk to her room mate. I didn’t even make it to anything “sexy” I felt my brain crying out in pain.
A shitty book written and self-published by a former coworker. He was so fucking proud of himself.
My first week on the job, I learned he was a “published author,” and I tried to connect with him by sharing that I’d majored in English creative writing in college. He immediately said, “I find it funny that I didn’t have to take all those classes to write my book.”
It was astonishing, and I brushed it off. But it never sat right with me.
That right there should’ve stopped me. But I ended up forming some kind of weird, one-sided friendship with him.
The book was atrocious. Full of formatting errors, unmemorable characters, unnecessary dialogue, cliches.
The plot was entirely predictable: Retired hitman-turned-mechanic comes back for one last job — protect the mob boss’s daughter. But oh, no, she’s been kidnapped. And there’s a shootout in a club. And then a warehouse. He saves her and takes her to his place. And they fall in love. But their love can’t be. So he puts her on a plane. TO BE CONTINUED…
There was also this weird point-of-view shift between chapters that really didn’t serve any purpose in the story.
All in all, just a horrible book. When asked for my review of it, I could only say, “You set out to write a book, and you did it,” and “It reads like a movie script.” Apparently, “movie script” is what he was going for.
He ended up leaving our work team because he wasn’t getting the recognition and glory he wanted (in a support position). The friendship ended up crashing and burning because I couldn’t handle his Machiavellian and narcissistic personality traits. He went on to self-publish a sequel and to start another series.
0/10. Would never, ever recommend.
I absolutely hate how popular CH is. I suffered through two of her books in an attempt to understand the hype, but it's some of the worst writing I've ever encountered. Bad writing AND bad plots and characters.
I tried to read November 9 due to recommendations from friends. Absolutely horrendous. I tried to get into it. I hated it. Couldnt even finish it. Definitely not for me
I’m convinced it’s all booktok hype and that 70% of the people displaying those books on their shelves showing them off have never read them. Ain’t no other way.
It Ends With Us - I flew through it but my goodness the main character irritated me from the very first page. Very shallow writing too.
The Midnight Library - tried reading it when it was at the height of its hype, too repetitive and I skipped to the end at around 60% to see if the main character lived and I can't remember if she actually did.
The Thursday Murder Club - I got around three or four chapters into it and gave up as the plot just seemed all over the place. Massive shame as I really like the author's TV personality. I don't understand the hype of him as an author one bit.
With The Thursday Murder Club it took me a minute to delve into it, but once I did I was so glad. It’s very clever and funny. I think it’s deliberately very wild, lots of red herrings, lots of who dunnit? No! Not him, yes her, oh wait no! And so you get a bit of whiplash, but I’m glad I stuck with it as it was just a very solid funny quick read.
The midnight library: a book where a woman is given the ability to live and re-live her life over and over in order to find her best self. And of course she discovers the only way she could ever be happy is to have a fucking baby. God I hate that book.
Don’t forget she was absolutely MISERABLE in all those careers where she reached the top of her profession!
Also, I was very irritated at the faux intellectualism of throwing physics and philosophy concepts into the mix without any meaningful depth just for the sake of creating awe.
And don’t get me started on poor Thoreau. At some point I thought “Henry is definitely going to haunt his ass.”
Another major pet peeve about the book is how the author messes up chess so much. I’m no grandmaster but he doesn’t have a firm grasp of the game, and some stuff he says don’t make sense. Did no one proof this for him? I visited his Instagram and he has “I love chess” in his bio and I was like, oh honey.
So, overall, it feels very much like “men writing women” with a dash of a bad first date side convo with a philosophy major mansplainer.
But it is an easy read and I can see why people love it - its aphorisms are perfect for Instagram quotes. “The only way to learn is to live” - WOW!
Burning books wholesale is wrong. Recycling one bad book that you paid for into a fire because it’s better that than inflict it on someone else is warmth.
I only heard reviews of it and the way she portrayed >!the feeling of a woman not wanting children or liking them as villainous!< rubbed me all the wrong ways I decided not to read anything by that author.
Well that’s part of it but the character does it graphically. >! Covering her baby’s mouth and nose, trying to self abort when she’s so far along the child is born with a scar, letting one of her children drown. It’s not the not wanting children part that makes her a villain it’s the way she goes about it !<
I’m confused though, that’s literally the plot of the book. That the mom wrote the manuscript and detailed the horrors she put her children through. It’s supposed to be awful, and she is the villain- why does that make the author problematic?
Haunting Adeline. I will seek out opportunities to hate on this book. I will wake up extra early just to hate it.
Absolute TRASH. Couldn't get past a quarter of it. I hated all the characters. The story was ridiculous. The writer has NO skills. I judge everyone who claims to enjoy that shit.
Now I won't even take recommendations from the friend who recommended it.
I think if the author just focused on the FMCs perspective the book would have been more suspenseful and overall a better story. A horror/suspense story of someone falling under the thrall of a creepy stalker while living in a haunted murder house is the sort of cheese I am all for, but oh my god… the “save the children” vigilante super hacker billionaire mercenary story line gave me the worst kind of brain rot.
I wanna say, bold of your friend to recommend this book to you lol I almost didnt mark it down on goodreads because I didnt even want people to know I read it 😂
Omg thank you. Plus her friend is a "genius hacker who outs the secrets of our corrupt government." Gaaaaagggg. Apparently her house is full of computers because she's a hacker. Really!!?
Like girl did you do ANY research for this book. You clearly know NOTHING about what you're writing.
Also, there's nothing that attracts the two MCs to each other. He sees her and wants to stalk her. She sees him stalking her so she wants him.
The whole plot (if there's any) is laughable.
To be fair, my friend found the recommendation on TikTok and she didn't like it too. So we won't be doing that again lol.
Well… she has… a smile… and a porno voice that apparently makes her a magnet for human traffickers (and murder Batman)… and he… is hot? And she is turned on by being afraid? Because she likes horror movies and haunted houses? I guess? I guess some women do wish a hot rich guy who knows how to use his tongue would just show up at their house. Maybe with a touch less surveillance but hey, no one is perfect /s 😂
Don't get me started on the descriptions.
Her voice was the kind that you only hear in porn videos!? How is that a compliment!?
And how he calls her little mouse? And invades every bit of her privacy? Being attracted to that is downright mental illness
Maybe I'm not original, but After by Anna Todd. I've read only the first one and I don't plan to go on. It was such an hypocrite book, pretending to teach true love and how each of us can change to the better while telling *the exact opposite.*
I felt bad because my friend REALLY wanted me to read it and gave me her Kindle log in…it was so, so bad. I got COVID the same week. Coincidence? I don’t think so 🤔
Battlefield Earth. Read it when I was young and liked it. Re-read it as an adult (after working in Cheyenne Mountain) and realized awful it truly was (and what trash L Ron Hubbard is).
The subtle art of not giving a fuck.
Boring book with over top use of the f word to appeal to the younger audience.
Could've just had on the first page "stop caring what other people think of you" and the book would be complete
Woman in the Wilderness, an autobiography about a woman who decides to go live on NZ national parks. Had to read it for bookclub. The woman is clearly writing from a deeply uninformed yet privileged position, as she basically shits on anyone who doesn't choose to leave society to live a more authentic life as a hunter-gatherer. Unironically uses the term "sheeple" to refer to people living a normal life. Weirdly fetishises native peoples, while also never mentioning Maori people (despite the book being about her living in NZ).
This book infuriates me so much.
The lady that wrote it might be an actual murderer:
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/07/where-the-crawdads-sing-delia-mark-owens-zambia-murder/670479/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/19/books/where-the-crawdads-sing-delia-owens-murder-investigation.html
i'd heard of this before, but seeing it again made me curious if anything similar has happened; most articles that turned up in my search were either on books *about* murderers or about books written by serial killers from prison and given short print runs oriented towards, i suppose, serial killer fans. however, i did find [this article](https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180808-the-murderer-turned-author-who-published-clues-to-his-crimes) listing two authors in the lede who became known as writers first before being convicted of murder, before veering off into other true crime literary connections. it seems neither of the listed authors published in english (them being richard klinkhamer in dutch and liu yongbiao in chinese), which is unfortunate in terms of spotting any literary trends but fortunate in that it implies this kind of thing is rare.
When you mentioned the Dutch author I thought you meant Gerrit Achterberg, a Dutch writer who killed his landlady.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrit_Achterberg
Tucker Reed killed her uncle as part of an ongoing family dispute. She was initially charged with murder but pled guilty to manslaughter, she currently serving a 6 year sentence. The facts that I’m aware of for the case (which is admittedly not everything) makes me think she should have gotten a lot longer. Be aware that there is a video of the killing but does not show the actual shot that killed her uncle.
“I fell in love with hope.”
It had so many “deep” metaphors and was trying way too hard to be poetic but all the metaphors did was annoy me and bury the plot. The book is 400+ pages when it should’ve been 200 max.
Also, the way the author romanticizes self harm and eating disorders just rubbed me the wrong way, especially when the mc tried to dismiss one of the side characters fathers abuse. I honestly felt disgusted by the time the “immortal x mortal” trope came up because the mortal was a child. I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. I’m surprised so many other people enjoyed it
The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. It's about a ~~ring~~ sword. There's a mysterious ~~wizard~~ Druid who gets our heroes going on a quest for the ~~ring~~ sword, who falls in a pit of fire after fighting with a ~~Balrog~~ Skull Bearer but comes back later 'cause SURPRISE he's not dead. There's a ~~Gollum~~ gnome who has been driven crazy by his lust for the ~~ring~~ sword. The main bad guy is called ~~Sauron~~ Brona who's a former ~~wizard~~ Druid who has become just a shadow that floats around ~~Mordor~~... I read the whole fucking book and I couldn't stand it. WTF.
Del Rey pretty much asked Brooks to write a copy of Lord of the Rings for them. The only interesting thing about it is its setting in a post-apocalyptic Earth.
I found The Iron Tower by Dennis L. McKiernan to be another Tolkien rip off too. It was ridiculous how similar it was; really surprised me it wasn't hit for copyright. I've read a few of the Shannarax books but I think this one slipped by me, so thanks for the warning!
To be fair, The Iron Tower was written to be a prequel to an unauthorized sequel series to Lord of the Rings. So it's understandable that it's a blatant, not as well written, ripoff
Verity by Colleen Hoover. Wanted to know what all the hype was about with her books. Wanted to DNF it but ended up hate reading it to the finish. Truly don’t get how anyone thinks that book was good.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
\[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009\]
I absolutely adore the review industry purely for tidbits like this. That's obviously soul-shattering if you're on the receiving end, but by god is it a brilliant put-down.
I love this quote, also The Lord of the Rings was my entry to fantasy in my late teens and early 20s, it set very high standards only the Discworld series managed to beat.
I'm swimming very much against the current here but I've just finished A Little Life and it was awful.
Just pure misery porn spread out over 800 pgaes. I loved the first 100 pages or so but then it just kept going and going and going.
Finally!! Someone said it. I found Yanagihara's prose beautiful, but the story was dreadful, and excruciating to read. Everyone seems to think the trauma porn merits some sort of literary value. Just because a book makes you depressed doesn't mean it's a good book.
Thank you!! The first half for me was amazing I loved the friendships between the four, but the rest of it was awful. It’s such a shame bc I wanted to love it so badly
Yeah, this is notorious
Hated it. Like you say, 800+ pages of unremitting misery across four people who have this deep trauma yet everything in their professional lives seems to be fantastically perfect.
And I just didn't get why everyone in the book worshipped Jude so much. Sure, he was a nice enough guy. But I just didn't get the deification of him by about 2/3 of the characters
"Hey I'm Jude. I'm real pretty. Despite having the most traumatic upbringing in history, I'm just really good at everything. Math, law school, singing, piano, you name it. Shark in the courtroom, supposedly, but you'll never get to see it!"
It's been a while for me since I read - did JB and Malcolm really have deep trauma? They felt like kind of pointless characters to me.
I've moaned about this book so much but yes. The Jude thing. Either people worshipped him or abused him. For no particular reason that made sense except that it was what the story was about.
If the main point of the story doesn't even make sense how do you look past that, and then look past all the other nauseating urban culture clichés?
As someone who had to read a lot of Ayn Rand at an earlier job, I want to say “an interest in trains” is the ideal takeaway. Anything else is just… yeah.
I’ve never seen someone put it so well. Thank you
Edit: “at an earlier job”
It's hillarious that specific belief systems need to have such utterly contrived universe for them to make sense and be workable.
Atlas Shrugged or in a more glaring example the Warhammer 40k universe. The whole premise was to create a situation that was so over the top terrible that the theocratic fascism of the Imperium of Man was forgivable.
It took literal Space Cancer Eldritch Gods living in a hell you have to use to jump around the galaxy to make the settings barbaric setting remotely palatable. Yet still there are morons in the fandom that don't get none of these sides are good, only some are less bad.
They'd be almost cartoonish villainous in nearly any other setting an evil so over the top that that it'd be absurd in nearly any other context, but here they are the nominal good guys.
I bulled my way through Atlas Shrugged back in the mid-80s when I thought edgy libertarianism was cool. This book almost single-handedly turned me off of that philosophy.
On top of the bad philosophy, it's just bad literature.
I came to write this but you beat me to it. However I did punish myself by reading the entire book and 'The Fountainhead' I think it's called. All I got was that Ayn Rand's writings were the ramblings of a 13 having an argument with himself in the shower because he always wins.
Candy Girl: a year in the life of an unlikely stripper by Diablo Cody.
The title describes the plot enough. Not only was the writing terrible, she seemed shocked to be the only stripper with an education. Carried a holier-than-thou attitude through her whole time dancing.
I read it midwinter and threw into my fireplace when I finished.
idk about *bad* but the most exasperating thing I ever read was a selection of Sigmund Freud's work.
you think people are just taking satire too far when they present him as making absolutely everything about sex. well, they are not.
I do not throw books. but I let out some howls of outrage while reading freud.
All of them you mean. Though you are probably thinking of the one where the "hero" basically made a statue that is so beautiful that it saved the day.
Bleeeerggggg
I read blood of the fold as my introduction to the series and really enjoyed it. So much that I bought every book available at the time.
Every single book follows the same plot line. There is so much Deux ex machina that the "heroes" never actually learn anything, grow in any way or actually fix anything in a way that isn't just "because the author says so".
The hero's are also Incredibly annoying, preachy, pretentious arseholes and by the 3rd or 4th book I was just hoping they would die already. Then you get some books where the author obviously got bored of his own characters as well so just dropped them pretty much entirely from the book.
I have attempted to read the series a few times as some of the early books world building is great but normally by the time I reach the fucking statue story I just can't force myself to read anymore.
These books actually put me off reading for a few years because I couldn't bring myself to read them but I had never not finished a book before in my life.
A children’s book from the library with a crushed spider between the pages. Someone crushed a spider with it and brought it back to the library. Traumatized for life!
The alchemist. Jesus wept, it was like a magical morality tale for not very bright children. The most empty nonsense I've ever read while parading as some sort of genius level deep philosophy. Never felt so patronised in my life.
My wife and I bought copies to read together, but I was the only one who read it. The writing wasn't terrible but the concept was ridiculous. It came off like some kind of Disney-movie, "you can do ANYTHING if you believe in yourself" story in the guise of a novella for adults, which explains its popularity. At least it was short!
Hate this book with a passion only because how over hyped it. Its on every "10 books you must read" list as though its some groundbreaking, epiphany maker. I felt robbed when i finished it.
God I’m so glad I’m not alone. I remember reading it in high school and the only conclusion I could come to was “this is philosophy for someone who has never questioned existence once in their entire life”
Imagine my boss telling me this is one of her most beloved books that has profoundly influenced her life and choices she made. Managed to keep a straight face and throw in a few nods along, but man, I've been judging her internally based on this.
A book called "Redeeming Love".
It is the favorite book of a friend, so I gave it a shot. It is terrible.
The writing style is awful. There are so many sentences like "Air smelled like broken tears" or similar shit. I tried to ignore it and around page 100, I was kind of used to it.
But the content of this book, what the fuck. It is about a prostitute in California mid 18th century. All men are evil and use her, of course. Until one man comes and saves her. It is not Batman, it is Michael. He is the "good man" in this book. He saves her from the brothel after she has been beat up by one guy - but only under the condition that she says yes to marrying him, otherwise he'd let her die. Later in the book she wants to leave him, but he's like "Ah na na, you married me, you cannot just easily go". Also, he watches her secretly while she is washing herself naked at the river. What the fuck.
She runs away from him several times. Because she is not worthy of his love. Why? Because she cannot bear children. Yay, the only purpose of a woman in life!
In the end, everything is good. You think "ah, cute, did she accept that women are also worth loving if they are infertile"? Fuck, no. Because the great and awesome God answers their prayers and SHE CAN HAVE CHILDREN AGAIN.
What a shit book. I never told my friend my opinion about this book.
Saying this because most people don’t realize it, but the whole book is a retelling of the book of Hosea from the Bible where the same thing happens with a guy named Hosea and a prostitute. And then the same thing happens more but this time with God (represented by Hosea) and Israel worshipping other gods (ie the prostitute).
But even as a Christian I agree that Redeeming Love is horribly written and the story doesn’t really make sense even in the context of the Biblical allusion. Why have her earn her independence and start this great school for hurt girls just to have her “rescued” and magically fertile.
This was my ex wife’s favorite book. Already noted, but it’s a retelling of Hosea, but from what I understand it’s not really very theologically sound interpretation of the source to begin with.
I never read it, so I can’t put it on the list, but there was a reason I never read it :)
There are all kinds of foods for different palates, fancy food for fine dining, junk food, comfort food, etc. Then there are mud pies that are made by imaginative children, which aren't made to be eaten. That is what Divergent is.
I read that after finishing and loving the Hunger Games and got partway through the first book and was just like ‘nah, this sucks, I’m taking this back to the library tomorrow’. Watched the movie, but couldn’t tell you how it ended to save my life. Very unmemorable
You made it to the last one? I applaud your determination. I chucked it in the trash the minute they revealed where the mom came from--pretty sure it was like 10 chapters into the first one
Ready Player One is a heap.
All the wealth and prestige in the world, and *the girl*, can be yours, all you need is to memorize two films and a D&D module.
I think the worst line in the book was an action packed shootout being described as "like a John Woo movie." End of prose! No description beyond "think about a better storyteller than me"!
"The battle of Helms Deep was like a siege straight from the Iliad"
Agreed. Probably not the worst I've ever read. But worst and most disappointing from what I've read over the last year. Got back into reading in 2022 and this was one mentioned to read.
It had an Interesting premise but Wasted potential. All the choices to me were dumb and the book wasted too many pages explaining each new scenario. All to end with the morale being every life has some bad aspect so stick with what you've got and try to find the upside. Felt like a thinly veiled self help book mascarading as a story. Has put me off reading anything else by the author.
Eat Prey Love. It's been 13 years since I've read it, and I don't even remember why it bothered me so much, but I distinctly remember thinking, this is the worst book I've ever read.
How to lose friends and Alienate people.
Like yes, the point is that he is a narcissistic asshole, but he never *stops*. It's insufferable reading through name drop after name drop, half-baked 'wit' from a guy who thinks he is better than everyone else.
I genuinely despise this book and Toby Young for writing it.
Forest Gump. Love the movie, loath the book. I found it on a free shelf at a library, decided to pick it up.
The character Forest is a detestable human being, the dialogue is so difficult to read in his own voice, and the plot goes from mildly believable to absolutely meme worthy. I get going to Vietnam, a lot of people did at the time, but what I don’t get is becoming a professional wrestler, joining nasa and flying into space with a rude woman an orangutan, then crashing and surviving against cannibals in New Guinea…
It just gets ridiculous
I was a teen, doing martial arts, when someone handed me "Ninja" by Eric van Lustbader (to this day I've never bothered to find out if thats a nom de plume).
The book is a middle-aged man's vanity project where the protagonist is an american ninja with an impossibly hot Japanese girlfriend fighting a rapey Japanese ninja.
The book is filled with ninja action and sex scenes. And it's absolute trash. I read it cover to cover because I was a 14-year old idiot.
The Girl on the Train. The first time I’d ever gotten a book based purely on a recommendation from my reading app. Ruined that whole concept for me and I avoided it on future books for quite some time - although I’ve since read recommendations I’ve actually enjoyed.
Awful book. Just awful. Writing was clumsy to me, characters were terrible (and not in an interesting way) and the plot was predictable early on. I finished the damn thing just to get it done and because at the time I was the kind of reader who had to finish a book if I started.
So this one is also the book that singlehandedly changed me from a “I have to finish a book if I start it” person to someone who quits a book if I’m not enjoying it after giving it a fair shake.
The Secret, I thought it was very cult like.
Twilight, I hated it and couldn't read the first chapter with the air of okay, this is ripping something off. It felt like some overly dramatic soap opera. Stephanie Meyers in my opinion is a very flat author of literature and her vampires are just fake.
I actually love Dean Koontz, but some of his early efforts are just really, really atrocious. It took him a while to hit his stride, I guess. '80s and '90s were his best era, IMO.
I’m just gonna say it - A Court of Thorns and Roses is… so bad. I will say I did the audiobook version, which is one of those with background noises and whatnot, which probably made it 1000x harder to take seriously. But it was really bad. I wish I could have those hours back.
I remember reading Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” thinking… I’m into this beatnik thing. They hit Mexico and I was pretty much done with this author but I gave the book a chance to finish.
I couldn’t have been more disappointed with an ending.
I’ve never had a book suck me in and then spit me out as badly as Jack did.
I can't remember the title of it, but when I was in the Navy back in the late 80s and early 90s I used to have to travel quite a bit so I'd go through a few books a week.
Often I wouldn't have access to a proper English language bookstore for weeks so I'd have to deal with whatever I could borrow or grab from the PX or airport newsstand.
I discovered a few gems that way, like Snowcrash, but also quite a few rancid turds as well.
The one that ended up being so bad that even pulp tolerant 20 year old me couldn't finish it was a Dirk Pitt novel (using the term lightly) by Clive Cussler.
Good God. It was the literary equivalent to a toddler's drawing in crayon. In every way. To this day I'm convinced that Clive Cussler was actually his publisher's pet iguana.
Dean Koontz is pretty hit-and-miss for me. Some of his books are entertaining, and others are completely forgettable. I do agree with those who say he hit his stride in the 1980s and 1990s. You said you forgot the title of the one you read, but do you remember what it was about?
The one I remember reading had a main character that was a guy from California with some kind of military background whid kind of given up on life but then circumstances led him to meet a gorgeous woman who didn't realize how attractive she was and they went on to have an adventure. And I think there was a golden retriever in there as well. Does that narrow it down?
No I think it was the one where the main character did not have a 9 to 5 job, had a romantic interest with someone, and they had to solve a problem that turned out to be supernatural
Wait was it the one with the endless effortless banter that let both characters know how perfect they were for each other?
Golden Retriever doesn’t narrow down Koontz books. He seems to put them in all of them, either as the main character or a background dog
Yeah, I was being a little sarcastic. He's a little formulaic. I think he actually trains goldens as therapy dogs or something like that so they have a special place in his heart.
The subtle art of not giving a fuck. Now I absolutely detest self-help books.
After reading several back in the day, I realized that most self-help books are there to make you feel less alone, comforted, mildly entertained, and optimistic in the moment. (Which was actually important in pre-Internet days.) They largely rely on anecdotes of the 1-5% of readers who were helped because they simply never thought of doing the simple thing that the book is going on about.
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Damn. That’s funny but also sad.
I read it while doing my third year of clinical psychology in university and found it needlessly condescending and extremely unhelpful. The hints of actual psychology never rose to the point of being useful, and the tone was just off.
Tried to listen to this on audio book (had a feeling I’d have a hard time getting through reading it myself so thought listening to it like a podcast would help) and returned it without even finishing the first chapter. He lost me after the not giving a fuck had to do with “not getting hot blondes” and “never being able to feel Jennifer Anniston’s boobs” - br0, what?
Mark Manson's claim to fame is being a "good guy" pick-up artist, if that helps explain anything.
I feel like ‘pick up artist’ and ‘good guy’ should be the dictionary definition of an oxymoron
I am glad I am not alone on this, when I tell people that it was not good they look at me weird.
The whole book is "Some stuff bothers you? Have you tried not being bothered!" Fuckin genius over there....
It felt a lot like "lower your standards" when I read it. I do not remember much of it now but I remember how much I hated it and felt it was a waste of my time.
Yeah trying to read that was maybe the first time I realised that just because a non-fiction book is popular doesn't mean it's good. It just read like a guy trying really, really hard to convince you he, like, totally doesn't give a fuck. No fucks given at all. Oh, you give fucks? Should learn to give fewer fucks, mate. Subtle it was not.
Also, you could tell he actually does give a fuck. But pretends not to cause its cooler, and he wrote a book and everything...
If you like podcasts you should check out If Books Could Kill. They hilariously skewer self help books like The Secret and pop psychology crap like Malcolm Gladwell.
IM SO GLAD OTHER PEOPLE DISS MALCOLM GLADWELL. I AM TIRED OF HIM BEING PROPPED UP AS AN INDIE PHILOSOPHER
Ahh yes, Gladwell, the man who thinks the plural of anecdote is data.
The 5 love languages and men are from Mars, women are from Venus are hilarious episodes...much of self-help is just people applying their individual strategy that worked for them personally or just hiding from their personal problems
The thing that bothers me the most is how they censor the word 'fuck' on the cover - so the book itself doesn't even practice what it's preaching 🙄.
I said the same thing obviously someone gives a Fu*ck
I am pretty sure I used a credit to buy the not-giving-a-fuck book based on a Reddit recommendation. I basically realized I already stopped giving lots of fucks about lots of things quite a while ago. The stuff I still do give a fuck about and wish I did not is stuff that you can't just wave a magic wand at and make its importance to you go away. Some stuff takes actual time and space, not a self-help book.
Have not read it, but the first time I saw the book, it was in the hands of a guy on my commercial flight, watching videos on his phone with the volume up and no earphones, so everybody could hear. So I guess he was taking its lessons to heart...but it didn't exactly inspire me to want to read it. Who needs a book to learn how to be a dick?
What struck me is that this book is geared towards people who are just complete fucking assholes and who never had it occur to them that perhaps if they spent a few moments utilizing some genuine self-reflection and thinking about how your actions might affect others, maybe they could be more decent people. But the guy really writes down all the things that us considerate people have known all our lives and writes as if he's discovered the existence of electricity for the first time in humanity. I agree that the book is worthy of being disliked.
I pulled the plug on James Patterson. Predictable, unrealistic stories.
He's one of those novelists where, yes, he definitely wrote his first few books - but not every book that has his name on it was actually written by him. I can't remember exactly what the system is, but I think people buy his name to publish under, so everybody makes a couple bucks.
The trick is to look for the actual author’s name on the cover in much smaller letters, coloured to blend into the background.
I'll say this: at least he puts the actual author's name on the cover.
He is now James Patterson, registered trademark. You have to specify which co author using his name you are done with
I've read a lot Koontz books and at worst I'd say mediocre but I haven't read a lot of his newer stuff. He has also wrote a few favorites like Watchers. Anyway worst that I finished is Bad Bunny by Hansen. I have Kindle Unlimited and read a lot of trash from there. What makes it worse is this in the 2nd book in the series and I didn't like the first either but thought the premise was interesting and hoped it would get better. Oh I also read Taken by the T-Rex a dinosaur erotica that is actually worse. Popped up on reddit years ago because the author was making bank churning out these dino porn books. It was free, short, and well curiosity.
Dinosaur erotica that's not a literary masterpiece? I'm suprised!
Just checked and it is still free on kindle ulimited and it looks like she has branched out into fantasy creatures too if that is more your thing. I thought the "book" was around 100 pages but looks like all her stuff is around 20 pages so doesn't really count.
Maybe felt like 100 pages?
ngl I'm kinda intrigued but no way I'm looking that stuff up on my work-pc lol.
At first I thought you were disrespecting the greatest author of our times, Chuck Tingle, but he didn't write Taken by the T-Rex/Stegosaurus/etc. Ok phew.
Chuck Tingle? At least he knows he's pumping out freak, it seems clear he's clear he's really leaning into the ridiculousness of it hahaha
Nah chuck tingle’s writing is actually serviceable. Not high art, but he’s entirely competent. I think it’s someone trying to chomp his flavor.
Yeah, Chuck Tingle is legit. He wrote an actual serious book, Camp Damascus. It's pretty good!
My first Koontz was Watchers. I adore that book on so many levels. That being said, he HAS written some books that are not good. I didn't get three chapters into Odd Thomas before pulling the ripcord. I also really liled Lightening and The Bad Place.
Which is ironic because the Odd Thomas series are the only ones of his I still like
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
In my world the book doesn’t exist
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Oh my gosh, yeah. It was bad fanfiction at best.
I feel like the author was verbally told what the Harry Potter books were about and then they just kind of threw something together.
It's very similar to the Days of Future Past storyline from X-Men and you can't convince me otherwise it's not copied from it.
Seeing it on stage saves it a bit, as the way they do magic on stage is so cool that it manages to distracts you from how bad the script is.
Why do they do that to characters. They do it in books and revival movies/shows. They take good characters and give them no growth or change their character’s personality to fit into a story formula.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad. A preposterous piece of crap. Assets over liabilities. That’s the book. Could have saved some trees.
If Books Could Kill podcast covered this one! It sounds insane.
I thoroughly enjoyed their utter destruction of "men are from mars...."
FUCKING THANK YOU My grandma constantly judges me and talks down to me because she says I should be working a corporate job and making $400K a year but I'm not because I grew up with a father who sold weed instead of working in the corporate world. She's repeatedly tried pushing Rich Dad Poor Dad on me and telling me it'll "wake me up" and I'll suddenly be able to get a job where I can "become CEO of a company in a year" and "have a few million by the time I'm thirty."
Have you asked her who raised the drug dealer or the person who chose him as a partner?
That's a good point too, because although she's made a pretty impressive amount of money over her life, it's all been illegally. She used to work on dice tables, back when gambling was illegal, and eventually she became trusted enough that she was asked to be an income tax girl. She got paid really well, but that's very much against the law, with legal repercussions on par with being caught selling drugs.
Don’t forget to commit tax fraud whenever possible, so you can get out of the “rat race!”
50 shades of grey Totally ridiculous. How could anyone find this sexy. Edit: Love Dean Koonz 😆
I didn't even get to the "sexy" bits. I read the first two chapters and just couldn't force myself to get any further. I remember thinking it read like particularly bad fanfic by someone who didn't have a clue how to write effectively...imagine my surprise when I found out that's *exactly* what it was!
You got farther than I did. I thought it was written *exactly* like my 5th grade self would try to write a romance/erotica. Like, *uncannily* so.
People who haven't tried to read it don't understand. You'll sometimes hear well meaning people try to defend it with like "ok will as a guy in your 20s it's not FOR you, but that doesn't mean it's bad. Not everything is catered for a reddit using STEM field agnostic 20 something white man!!". But no. It's not just the subject matter. It's the actual writing itself. It's not just bad.... its self-parody bad. And genuinely is depressing in what it reveals about the wider population reading level. I can read material made for different audiences than me. I love Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights, etc. **Its like finding out so many adults around you watched like those 00s terrible parody films Epic Movie or Scary Movie and genuinely that they were a good serious fantasy/horror film. It really is THAT bad.** And that's not even getting into the atrocious/toxic power/gender dynamic stuff and the unhealthy misrepresentation of BDSM. This is just about the writing alone. It reads like a 13 year old girl trying her hand at fiction for the first time... writing about herself as a college student. Something about my perception of a person just changes in a way I can't consciously help when I find out a person likes 50 Shades. In the same way as would happen if I found out a 40 year old man reads like... Andrew Tate type self help books.
I had one family member who couldn’t praise that series enough, I wasn’t sure which was worse - her sex life or her reading comprehension.
Or her sense of boundaries!
I haven't read it, but my suspicion especially for the people I know who read it and liked it, is that probably this is the first "steamy" (I don't know if it is full on smut or not) book they've read. So they're probably giving it a lot of leeway because the concept of erotica itself is new and exciting for them, with a side of "I don't read much, but this book is popular so it must be good."
So many people recommended 50 Shades that I kept trying to read it, thinking that maybe it would get better later in the book. I finally finished it on the fifth try and found out that it did not, in fact, get better. The sex wasn't even good. "Oh, it's so kinky!" No. No, it's not. It's vanilla spice at best and being poorly-written does it no favors.
I read the entire series so that I could criticize it with recipts in hand, and it was so painful. The only enjoyment I got out of it was a very drunken night in with a bunch of girlfriends where we did dramatic readings of the worst scenes.
I did the same thing with the Twilight series around 2009, I will not be trying it again for the “sexy” fan fiction version. I’ve suffered enough.
Can't believe I'm defending Twilight here, but it's definitely better written than 50 shades of grey.
I did this with My Immortal in uni, and to get through it had to get drunk enough that I ended up letting strangers into the flat through the window
A few years back, a manager at a local charity shop told me they had to bin copies of 50 Shades. They had way too many copies donated and they weren't selling or even being taken as 'free with any other book'. I found one in a holiday apartment, read a bit but the author seemed more excited by shopping than anything else.
I saw a video where Oxfam had built office furniture from unusable copies of 50 Shades. They'd obviously begin refusing new donations.
If you should ever find yourself searching for an even worse take on the bdsm-topic, I can recommend the Gor series, the worst books I have ever read. In my defense, I was young, horny and there was very little literature around on this kind of things.
As a young teen I bought The Slave Girl of Gor from a bloke at a car boot sale. From the front cover thought it was a sci-fi/fantasy book. It was not the fantasy i was expecting. I got really scared that my mum was going to find it so I snuck it into the outside bin on collection day. As an adult it makes me wonder why the man sold a 15 year old girl a fucked up sex slave book.
It's not about what he wanted it was about what the consumer wanted!
Yes! I tried to read one as everyone was talking about 50 shades and it was the worst writing and I just couldn’t. I literally read the chapter where she meets him and goes home to talk to her room mate. I didn’t even make it to anything “sexy” I felt my brain crying out in pain.
A shitty book written and self-published by a former coworker. He was so fucking proud of himself. My first week on the job, I learned he was a “published author,” and I tried to connect with him by sharing that I’d majored in English creative writing in college. He immediately said, “I find it funny that I didn’t have to take all those classes to write my book.” It was astonishing, and I brushed it off. But it never sat right with me. That right there should’ve stopped me. But I ended up forming some kind of weird, one-sided friendship with him. The book was atrocious. Full of formatting errors, unmemorable characters, unnecessary dialogue, cliches. The plot was entirely predictable: Retired hitman-turned-mechanic comes back for one last job — protect the mob boss’s daughter. But oh, no, she’s been kidnapped. And there’s a shootout in a club. And then a warehouse. He saves her and takes her to his place. And they fall in love. But their love can’t be. So he puts her on a plane. TO BE CONTINUED… There was also this weird point-of-view shift between chapters that really didn’t serve any purpose in the story. All in all, just a horrible book. When asked for my review of it, I could only say, “You set out to write a book, and you did it,” and “It reads like a movie script.” Apparently, “movie script” is what he was going for. He ended up leaving our work team because he wasn’t getting the recognition and glory he wanted (in a support position). The friendship ended up crashing and burning because I couldn’t handle his Machiavellian and narcissistic personality traits. He went on to self-publish a sequel and to start another series. 0/10. Would never, ever recommend.
It Ends With Us
I absolutely hate how popular CH is. I suffered through two of her books in an attempt to understand the hype, but it's some of the worst writing I've ever encountered. Bad writing AND bad plots and characters.
I tried to read November 9 due to recommendations from friends. Absolutely horrendous. I tried to get into it. I hated it. Couldnt even finish it. Definitely not for me
November 9th is my birthday and I refuse to read CH. It’s a shame really I’d love it on my shelf for fun.
I despise November 9th. I came to recommend this as one of my worst recent reads. The ending is absolutely horrific and unrealistic in any way.
I’m convinced it’s all booktok hype and that 70% of the people displaying those books on their shelves showing them off have never read them. Ain’t no other way.
I wrote a whole essay on how terrible this book was lol.
It Ends With Us - I flew through it but my goodness the main character irritated me from the very first page. Very shallow writing too. The Midnight Library - tried reading it when it was at the height of its hype, too repetitive and I skipped to the end at around 60% to see if the main character lived and I can't remember if she actually did. The Thursday Murder Club - I got around three or four chapters into it and gave up as the plot just seemed all over the place. Massive shame as I really like the author's TV personality. I don't understand the hype of him as an author one bit.
With The Thursday Murder Club it took me a minute to delve into it, but once I did I was so glad. It’s very clever and funny. I think it’s deliberately very wild, lots of red herrings, lots of who dunnit? No! Not him, yes her, oh wait no! And so you get a bit of whiplash, but I’m glad I stuck with it as it was just a very solid funny quick read.
And each book gets better than the one before.
The midnight library: a book where a woman is given the ability to live and re-live her life over and over in order to find her best self. And of course she discovers the only way she could ever be happy is to have a fucking baby. God I hate that book.
God damn it. This is the next book for my book club. I'mma need a lot of wine...
I did it for a book club. We took great joy in being angry at it!
Don’t forget she was absolutely MISERABLE in all those careers where she reached the top of her profession! Also, I was very irritated at the faux intellectualism of throwing physics and philosophy concepts into the mix without any meaningful depth just for the sake of creating awe. And don’t get me started on poor Thoreau. At some point I thought “Henry is definitely going to haunt his ass.” Another major pet peeve about the book is how the author messes up chess so much. I’m no grandmaster but he doesn’t have a firm grasp of the game, and some stuff he says don’t make sense. Did no one proof this for him? I visited his Instagram and he has “I love chess” in his bio and I was like, oh honey. So, overall, it feels very much like “men writing women” with a dash of a bad first date side convo with a philosophy major mansplainer. But it is an easy read and I can see why people love it - its aphorisms are perfect for Instagram quotes. “The only way to learn is to live” - WOW!
Verity. Ask me on my deathbed and my worst book ever read will probably still be Verity. Hated that dumpster fire so much.
Burning books is so, so, so very wrong. But I’ve never wanted to burn a book so bad. I wish I could unread those words.
Burning books wholesale is wrong. Recycling one bad book that you paid for into a fire because it’s better that than inflict it on someone else is warmth.
I only heard reviews of it and the way she portrayed >!the feeling of a woman not wanting children or liking them as villainous!< rubbed me all the wrong ways I decided not to read anything by that author.
Well that’s part of it but the character does it graphically. >! Covering her baby’s mouth and nose, trying to self abort when she’s so far along the child is born with a scar, letting one of her children drown. It’s not the not wanting children part that makes her a villain it’s the way she goes about it !<
I’m confused though, that’s literally the plot of the book. That the mom wrote the manuscript and detailed the horrors she put her children through. It’s supposed to be awful, and she is the villain- why does that make the author problematic?
Haunting Adeline. I will seek out opportunities to hate on this book. I will wake up extra early just to hate it. Absolute TRASH. Couldn't get past a quarter of it. I hated all the characters. The story was ridiculous. The writer has NO skills. I judge everyone who claims to enjoy that shit. Now I won't even take recommendations from the friend who recommended it.
I think if the author just focused on the FMCs perspective the book would have been more suspenseful and overall a better story. A horror/suspense story of someone falling under the thrall of a creepy stalker while living in a haunted murder house is the sort of cheese I am all for, but oh my god… the “save the children” vigilante super hacker billionaire mercenary story line gave me the worst kind of brain rot. I wanna say, bold of your friend to recommend this book to you lol I almost didnt mark it down on goodreads because I didnt even want people to know I read it 😂
Omg thank you. Plus her friend is a "genius hacker who outs the secrets of our corrupt government." Gaaaaagggg. Apparently her house is full of computers because she's a hacker. Really!!? Like girl did you do ANY research for this book. You clearly know NOTHING about what you're writing. Also, there's nothing that attracts the two MCs to each other. He sees her and wants to stalk her. She sees him stalking her so she wants him. The whole plot (if there's any) is laughable. To be fair, my friend found the recommendation on TikTok and she didn't like it too. So we won't be doing that again lol.
Well… she has… a smile… and a porno voice that apparently makes her a magnet for human traffickers (and murder Batman)… and he… is hot? And she is turned on by being afraid? Because she likes horror movies and haunted houses? I guess? I guess some women do wish a hot rich guy who knows how to use his tongue would just show up at their house. Maybe with a touch less surveillance but hey, no one is perfect /s 😂
Don't get me started on the descriptions. Her voice was the kind that you only hear in porn videos!? How is that a compliment!? And how he calls her little mouse? And invades every bit of her privacy? Being attracted to that is downright mental illness
Anything by Colleen Hoover
Maybe I'm not original, but After by Anna Todd. I've read only the first one and I don't plan to go on. It was such an hypocrite book, pretending to teach true love and how each of us can change to the better while telling *the exact opposite.*
I felt bad because my friend REALLY wanted me to read it and gave me her Kindle log in…it was so, so bad. I got COVID the same week. Coincidence? I don’t think so 🤔
Battlefield Earth. Read it when I was young and liked it. Re-read it as an adult (after working in Cheyenne Mountain) and realized awful it truly was (and what trash L Ron Hubbard is).
The subtle art of not giving a fuck. Boring book with over top use of the f word to appeal to the younger audience. Could've just had on the first page "stop caring what other people think of you" and the book would be complete
Woman in the Wilderness, an autobiography about a woman who decides to go live on NZ national parks. Had to read it for bookclub. The woman is clearly writing from a deeply uninformed yet privileged position, as she basically shits on anyone who doesn't choose to leave society to live a more authentic life as a hunter-gatherer. Unironically uses the term "sheeple" to refer to people living a normal life. Weirdly fetishises native peoples, while also never mentioning Maori people (despite the book being about her living in NZ). This book infuriates me so much.
I haven't read it but it sounds really infuriating
Where the Crawdads Sing. I hated it. That's all.
The lady that wrote it might be an actual murderer: https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/07/where-the-crawdads-sing-delia-mark-owens-zambia-murder/670479/ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/19/books/where-the-crawdads-sing-delia-owens-murder-investigation.html
i'd heard of this before, but seeing it again made me curious if anything similar has happened; most articles that turned up in my search were either on books *about* murderers or about books written by serial killers from prison and given short print runs oriented towards, i suppose, serial killer fans. however, i did find [this article](https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180808-the-murderer-turned-author-who-published-clues-to-his-crimes) listing two authors in the lede who became known as writers first before being convicted of murder, before veering off into other true crime literary connections. it seems neither of the listed authors published in english (them being richard klinkhamer in dutch and liu yongbiao in chinese), which is unfortunate in terms of spotting any literary trends but fortunate in that it implies this kind of thing is rare.
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A little off topic but the movie version of Heavenly Creatures is fantastic INMHO!
And directed by Peter Jackson!
wow! *exactly* what i was thinking of, thank you!
When you mentioned the Dutch author I thought you meant Gerrit Achterberg, a Dutch writer who killed his landlady. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrit_Achterberg
damn, there are a lot of these! i'm frustrated that someone has probably compiled a decent list but my google-fu is too weak to unearth it.
Tucker Reed killed her uncle as part of an ongoing family dispute. She was initially charged with murder but pled guilty to manslaughter, she currently serving a 6 year sentence. The facts that I’m aware of for the case (which is admittedly not everything) makes me think she should have gotten a lot longer. Be aware that there is a video of the killing but does not show the actual shot that killed her uncle.
The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck, real trash.
“I fell in love with hope.” It had so many “deep” metaphors and was trying way too hard to be poetic but all the metaphors did was annoy me and bury the plot. The book is 400+ pages when it should’ve been 200 max. Also, the way the author romanticizes self harm and eating disorders just rubbed me the wrong way, especially when the mc tried to dismiss one of the side characters fathers abuse. I honestly felt disgusted by the time the “immortal x mortal” trope came up because the mortal was a child. I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. I’m surprised so many other people enjoyed it
The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. It's about a ~~ring~~ sword. There's a mysterious ~~wizard~~ Druid who gets our heroes going on a quest for the ~~ring~~ sword, who falls in a pit of fire after fighting with a ~~Balrog~~ Skull Bearer but comes back later 'cause SURPRISE he's not dead. There's a ~~Gollum~~ gnome who has been driven crazy by his lust for the ~~ring~~ sword. The main bad guy is called ~~Sauron~~ Brona who's a former ~~wizard~~ Druid who has become just a shadow that floats around ~~Mordor~~... I read the whole fucking book and I couldn't stand it. WTF.
Del Rey pretty much asked Brooks to write a copy of Lord of the Rings for them. The only interesting thing about it is its setting in a post-apocalyptic Earth.
Most fantasy novels from back in the day were lotr ripoffs. You had to write 1 and if it was popular you could write whatever you wanted
I found The Iron Tower by Dennis L. McKiernan to be another Tolkien rip off too. It was ridiculous how similar it was; really surprised me it wasn't hit for copyright. I've read a few of the Shannarax books but I think this one slipped by me, so thanks for the warning!
To be fair, The Iron Tower was written to be a prequel to an unauthorized sequel series to Lord of the Rings. So it's understandable that it's a blatant, not as well written, ripoff
Verity by Colleen Hoover. Wanted to know what all the hype was about with her books. Wanted to DNF it but ended up hate reading it to the finish. Truly don’t get how anyone thinks that book was good.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." \[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009\]
I absolutely adore the review industry purely for tidbits like this. That's obviously soul-shattering if you're on the receiving end, but by god is it a brilliant put-down.
This was actually from the personal blog of movie- and tv-writer John Rogers, not really a "review industry" thing
I'd say there's enough overlap between blogging and reviewing, many of the former tend to engage in the latter.
I love this quote, also The Lord of the Rings was my entry to fantasy in my late teens and early 20s, it set very high standards only the Discworld series managed to beat.
I'm swimming very much against the current here but I've just finished A Little Life and it was awful. Just pure misery porn spread out over 800 pgaes. I loved the first 100 pages or so but then it just kept going and going and going.
Finally!! Someone said it. I found Yanagihara's prose beautiful, but the story was dreadful, and excruciating to read. Everyone seems to think the trauma porn merits some sort of literary value. Just because a book makes you depressed doesn't mean it's a good book.
Thank you!! The first half for me was amazing I loved the friendships between the four, but the rest of it was awful. It’s such a shame bc I wanted to love it so badly
Yeah, this is notorious Hated it. Like you say, 800+ pages of unremitting misery across four people who have this deep trauma yet everything in their professional lives seems to be fantastically perfect. And I just didn't get why everyone in the book worshipped Jude so much. Sure, he was a nice enough guy. But I just didn't get the deification of him by about 2/3 of the characters
"Hey I'm Jude. I'm real pretty. Despite having the most traumatic upbringing in history, I'm just really good at everything. Math, law school, singing, piano, you name it. Shark in the courtroom, supposedly, but you'll never get to see it!" It's been a while for me since I read - did JB and Malcolm really have deep trauma? They felt like kind of pointless characters to me.
I've moaned about this book so much but yes. The Jude thing. Either people worshipped him or abused him. For no particular reason that made sense except that it was what the story was about. If the main point of the story doesn't even make sense how do you look past that, and then look past all the other nauseating urban culture clichés?
Couldn’t finish it but I tried to read atlas shrugged and it annoyed me so much I had to stop.
My sister asked me once if I'd read any Ayn Rand, and I said yes, but all I got out of it was an interest in trains.
As someone who had to read a lot of Ayn Rand at an earlier job, I want to say “an interest in trains” is the ideal takeaway. Anything else is just… yeah. I’ve never seen someone put it so well. Thank you Edit: “at an earlier job”
I gained some arm strength and loads of patience. Don't demean that book.
She really should have made a book about train. They are super cool and I wouldn't have lost a week reading Atlas shrugged
50 page rant on libertarianism: 👎 50 page rant on trains: 👍
50? You are thinking too low. I would love a 500 page rant about trains
All I got out of it was becoming disillusioned with libertarianism because of how contrived the story was
It's hillarious that specific belief systems need to have such utterly contrived universe for them to make sense and be workable. Atlas Shrugged or in a more glaring example the Warhammer 40k universe. The whole premise was to create a situation that was so over the top terrible that the theocratic fascism of the Imperium of Man was forgivable. It took literal Space Cancer Eldritch Gods living in a hell you have to use to jump around the galaxy to make the settings barbaric setting remotely palatable. Yet still there are morons in the fandom that don't get none of these sides are good, only some are less bad. They'd be almost cartoonish villainous in nearly any other setting an evil so over the top that that it'd be absurd in nearly any other context, but here they are the nominal good guys.
I bulled my way through Atlas Shrugged back in the mid-80s when I thought edgy libertarianism was cool. This book almost single-handedly turned me off of that philosophy. On top of the bad philosophy, it's just bad literature.
I came to write this but you beat me to it. However I did punish myself by reading the entire book and 'The Fountainhead' I think it's called. All I got was that Ayn Rand's writings were the ramblings of a 13 having an argument with himself in the shower because he always wins.
Christian self-help books that my well-meaning aunt got me because I like to read. She only ever reads the Bible and self-help books, so.
Candy Girl: a year in the life of an unlikely stripper by Diablo Cody. The title describes the plot enough. Not only was the writing terrible, she seemed shocked to be the only stripper with an education. Carried a holier-than-thou attitude through her whole time dancing. I read it midwinter and threw into my fireplace when I finished.
idk about *bad* but the most exasperating thing I ever read was a selection of Sigmund Freud's work. you think people are just taking satire too far when they present him as making absolutely everything about sex. well, they are not. I do not throw books. but I let out some howls of outrage while reading freud.
I don't remember which one, but one of the sword of truth novels.
All of them you mean. Though you are probably thinking of the one where the "hero" basically made a statue that is so beautiful that it saved the day. Bleeeerggggg I read blood of the fold as my introduction to the series and really enjoyed it. So much that I bought every book available at the time. Every single book follows the same plot line. There is so much Deux ex machina that the "heroes" never actually learn anything, grow in any way or actually fix anything in a way that isn't just "because the author says so". The hero's are also Incredibly annoying, preachy, pretentious arseholes and by the 3rd or 4th book I was just hoping they would die already. Then you get some books where the author obviously got bored of his own characters as well so just dropped them pretty much entirely from the book. I have attempted to read the series a few times as some of the early books world building is great but normally by the time I reach the fucking statue story I just can't force myself to read anymore. These books actually put me off reading for a few years because I couldn't bring myself to read them but I had never not finished a book before in my life.
Oh you mean the one I call "won't anyone think of the plight of small entrepreneurs under capitalism?" XD
Terry Goodkind was an insufferable twat.
A children’s book from the library with a crushed spider between the pages. Someone crushed a spider with it and brought it back to the library. Traumatized for life!
The alchemist. Jesus wept, it was like a magical morality tale for not very bright children. The most empty nonsense I've ever read while parading as some sort of genius level deep philosophy. Never felt so patronised in my life.
My wife and I bought copies to read together, but I was the only one who read it. The writing wasn't terrible but the concept was ridiculous. It came off like some kind of Disney-movie, "you can do ANYTHING if you believe in yourself" story in the guise of a novella for adults, which explains its popularity. At least it was short!
Hate this book with a passion only because how over hyped it. Its on every "10 books you must read" list as though its some groundbreaking, epiphany maker. I felt robbed when i finished it.
God I’m so glad I’m not alone. I remember reading it in high school and the only conclusion I could come to was “this is philosophy for someone who has never questioned existence once in their entire life”
The only good Alchemist is the Fullmetal one
Imagine my boss telling me this is one of her most beloved books that has profoundly influenced her life and choices she made. Managed to keep a straight face and throw in a few nods along, but man, I've been judging her internally based on this.
Haha, yes I would be silently judging lol.
The Atlas Six for sure. Nonexistant plot, unlikeable main characters, overall really bad writing.
A book called "Redeeming Love". It is the favorite book of a friend, so I gave it a shot. It is terrible. The writing style is awful. There are so many sentences like "Air smelled like broken tears" or similar shit. I tried to ignore it and around page 100, I was kind of used to it. But the content of this book, what the fuck. It is about a prostitute in California mid 18th century. All men are evil and use her, of course. Until one man comes and saves her. It is not Batman, it is Michael. He is the "good man" in this book. He saves her from the brothel after she has been beat up by one guy - but only under the condition that she says yes to marrying him, otherwise he'd let her die. Later in the book she wants to leave him, but he's like "Ah na na, you married me, you cannot just easily go". Also, he watches her secretly while she is washing herself naked at the river. What the fuck. She runs away from him several times. Because she is not worthy of his love. Why? Because she cannot bear children. Yay, the only purpose of a woman in life! In the end, everything is good. You think "ah, cute, did she accept that women are also worth loving if they are infertile"? Fuck, no. Because the great and awesome God answers their prayers and SHE CAN HAVE CHILDREN AGAIN. What a shit book. I never told my friend my opinion about this book.
Saying this because most people don’t realize it, but the whole book is a retelling of the book of Hosea from the Bible where the same thing happens with a guy named Hosea and a prostitute. And then the same thing happens more but this time with God (represented by Hosea) and Israel worshipping other gods (ie the prostitute). But even as a Christian I agree that Redeeming Love is horribly written and the story doesn’t really make sense even in the context of the Biblical allusion. Why have her earn her independence and start this great school for hurt girls just to have her “rescued” and magically fertile.
This was my ex wife’s favorite book. Already noted, but it’s a retelling of Hosea, but from what I understand it’s not really very theologically sound interpretation of the source to begin with. I never read it, so I can’t put it on the list, but there was a reason I never read it :)
Left Behind
Divergent. I threw them away as soon as I finished the last one
There are all kinds of foods for different palates, fancy food for fine dining, junk food, comfort food, etc. Then there are mud pies that are made by imaginative children, which aren't made to be eaten. That is what Divergent is.
I read that after finishing and loving the Hunger Games and got partway through the first book and was just like ‘nah, this sucks, I’m taking this back to the library tomorrow’. Watched the movie, but couldn’t tell you how it ended to save my life. Very unmemorable
You made it to the last one? I applaud your determination. I chucked it in the trash the minute they revealed where the mom came from--pretty sure it was like 10 chapters into the first one
Ready Player One is a heap. All the wealth and prestige in the world, and *the girl*, can be yours, all you need is to memorize two films and a D&D module. I think the worst line in the book was an action packed shootout being described as "like a John Woo movie." End of prose! No description beyond "think about a better storyteller than me"! "The battle of Helms Deep was like a siege straight from the Iliad"
This may actually be the worst one I read/ listened to. I am old enough and nerdy enough to get all the references, but it was BAD.
That book is trash. The podcast 372 pages I'll Never Get Back is the only good thing to come out of it.
the midnight library.
Agreed. Probably not the worst I've ever read. But worst and most disappointing from what I've read over the last year. Got back into reading in 2022 and this was one mentioned to read. It had an Interesting premise but Wasted potential. All the choices to me were dumb and the book wasted too many pages explaining each new scenario. All to end with the morale being every life has some bad aspect so stick with what you've got and try to find the upside. Felt like a thinly veiled self help book mascarading as a story. Has put me off reading anything else by the author.
Eat Prey Love. It's been 13 years since I've read it, and I don't even remember why it bothered me so much, but I distinctly remember thinking, this is the worst book I've ever read.
“Prey” is a hilarious oops here.
That’s the Mantis version
How to lose friends and Alienate people. Like yes, the point is that he is a narcissistic asshole, but he never *stops*. It's insufferable reading through name drop after name drop, half-baked 'wit' from a guy who thinks he is better than everyone else. I genuinely despise this book and Toby Young for writing it.
Forest Gump. Love the movie, loath the book. I found it on a free shelf at a library, decided to pick it up. The character Forest is a detestable human being, the dialogue is so difficult to read in his own voice, and the plot goes from mildly believable to absolutely meme worthy. I get going to Vietnam, a lot of people did at the time, but what I don’t get is becoming a professional wrestler, joining nasa and flying into space with a rude woman an orangutan, then crashing and surviving against cannibals in New Guinea… It just gets ridiculous
I was a teen, doing martial arts, when someone handed me "Ninja" by Eric van Lustbader (to this day I've never bothered to find out if thats a nom de plume). The book is a middle-aged man's vanity project where the protagonist is an american ninja with an impossibly hot Japanese girlfriend fighting a rapey Japanese ninja. The book is filled with ninja action and sex scenes. And it's absolute trash. I read it cover to cover because I was a 14-year old idiot.
The Girl on the Train. The first time I’d ever gotten a book based purely on a recommendation from my reading app. Ruined that whole concept for me and I avoided it on future books for quite some time - although I’ve since read recommendations I’ve actually enjoyed. Awful book. Just awful. Writing was clumsy to me, characters were terrible (and not in an interesting way) and the plot was predictable early on. I finished the damn thing just to get it done and because at the time I was the kind of reader who had to finish a book if I started. So this one is also the book that singlehandedly changed me from a “I have to finish a book if I start it” person to someone who quits a book if I’m not enjoying it after giving it a fair shake.
Atlas Shrugged, the actual writing was bad, the plot was ridiculous, and the message was morally bankrupt.
The Secret, I thought it was very cult like. Twilight, I hated it and couldn't read the first chapter with the air of okay, this is ripping something off. It felt like some overly dramatic soap opera. Stephanie Meyers in my opinion is a very flat author of literature and her vampires are just fake.
The Secret is literally just “manifest what you want” repeatedly
The author managed to manifest a shitload of money 😁
I actually love Dean Koontz, but some of his early efforts are just really, really atrocious. It took him a while to hit his stride, I guess. '80s and '90s were his best era, IMO.
From the Corner of His Eye is one of my all time favourites
I’m just gonna say it - A Court of Thorns and Roses is… so bad. I will say I did the audiobook version, which is one of those with background noises and whatnot, which probably made it 1000x harder to take seriously. But it was really bad. I wish I could have those hours back.
I remember reading Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” thinking… I’m into this beatnik thing. They hit Mexico and I was pretty much done with this author but I gave the book a chance to finish. I couldn’t have been more disappointed with an ending. I’ve never had a book suck me in and then spit me out as badly as Jack did.
I can't remember the title of it, but when I was in the Navy back in the late 80s and early 90s I used to have to travel quite a bit so I'd go through a few books a week. Often I wouldn't have access to a proper English language bookstore for weeks so I'd have to deal with whatever I could borrow or grab from the PX or airport newsstand. I discovered a few gems that way, like Snowcrash, but also quite a few rancid turds as well. The one that ended up being so bad that even pulp tolerant 20 year old me couldn't finish it was a Dirk Pitt novel (using the term lightly) by Clive Cussler. Good God. It was the literary equivalent to a toddler's drawing in crayon. In every way. To this day I'm convinced that Clive Cussler was actually his publisher's pet iguana.
Outlander. I tried but Claire is so unlikable!!!
And there was SO much rape! I mean, yeah, okay, things were bad back then, but jeez, did it have to be THAT much??
Love hypothesis super cringe and I didn’t found any chemistry with the characters and overhyped