What's the worst book you've ever read (all the way to the end)?

Don't get me started.

Though actually I read a book about ten years ago which i think was vanity published by a local author who had given a copy to the local library. The plot involved a really hard criminal escaping from rpison and somehow hiding out in a cave in Cornwall which led to a Lost World type cavern of dinosaurs. It was laughably poor, and even kids - who might have got off on the hackneyed second hand sense of wonder, would have been annoyed by the constant profanities and lack of intelligent dialogue spurted from the mouth of this hardened criminal.

The love interest was a brilliant and beautiful scientist by the way who I imagined looked a bit like Gabrielle Drake. I only read it all cos I was stuck in a train outside Croyden.

The Fungus is one of the most inept and yet imaginative and disgusting books I have ever read. Recomended for chapter 4 where a woman is eaten by here own thrush, and Chapter 5 when a man blows up due to too much yeast in his beer. The climax at the top of the giant mushroom on top of the Post Off ice Tower is more ridiculous than you can imagine. But terrifically enjoyable for all its faults.

Need I say more?

Imagine my disappointment, then, when by the end of the first chapter they'd been unable to dig a tunnel due to being just kids and without any digging equipment but had managed to dig up some ancient roman pottery. The rest of the book appeared to be about the pottery (to be honest I didn't actually read it all the way through - it might have got good again after that, but I doubt it).

I was really, really annoyed at that - the back cover blurb made out that it was going to be all about these kids running through these secret tunnels and having underground battles with their enemies and that. But the author felt that reality had to intrude and he/she ruined a really funny and great idea. Bah.

I note that the hardcover has the subtitle "The uncooling of America", which is pretty clunky, but advances in clunk technology allows the paperback to be titled "Culture Jam: How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge - and Why We Must"

I expect the worst book I've ever read all the way to the end is that same David Eddings ("The Seeress Of Kell" oh why do i remember this) but I think at the time I liked it. ahem. all those years months ago.

My english teacher (who honestly loved Eddings) recommended it.

I thought Martin Amis's 'Money' was really more repulsive than anything else I've read, although obv. "better written" than Eddings &c...

I used to write a lot of book reviews, so ploughed through loads of three-volume fantasy quest epics in the grand tradition of Tolkien, and loads of those were really terrible, but thankfully I have managed to forget any specific appalling examples. I have kept a copy of Janet Morris's The Golden Sword for the occasional pleasure of reading out the opening sentences of chapter 1 to amazed listeners.

In terms of books I didn't have any duty to read, I'm tempted to cite Salman Rushdie's 'The Ground Beneath Her Feet'. I wouldn't normally finish anything do dreadful and annoying, but the best of his previous work built him enough credit that I persevered, and there was a kind of car-crash-style fascination in what unspeakable nonsense about music would come next.

That was my experience also. Although there was the time I found a copy of The Turner Diaries (notorious novel in which racists succeed in establishing a whites-only theocracy in North America), and considered buying it to add to my collection of utopian and dystopian books.

But the Adventures of Pete and Pete did a pretty good episode like this.

(re: The Rotter's Club, I remember being quite taken aback with all this stuff about the UK I had absolutely no idea about whatsoever, I mean UNIONS & all this STUFF & that - Thatcher having the same effect on the UK as, say, Rogernomics/Ruthanasia did on NZ re : cutting off historical etc? dunno. & the book itself I cannot recall.)

Reads better as The Unbearable Lightness of Barf.

I'm tempted to put Michael Moore 'Stupid White Men' on the list but that's more just one that totally failed to live up to my expectations (all the reviews I'd read said it was *funny*).
I cant stand Douglas Coupland or Julie Burchill either, but I havent ever finished anything they've written. I seem to remember throwing down Generation X in a rage.

The answers are 3 and 42, respectively.

I thought that book was fantastic. What didn't you like about it?

* Except the shagging at the end

i would also say atlas shrugged, but i could only get to page 600 before throwing the damn thing against the wall.

OTM. Coe has a habit of writing books that start well and progressively suck more and more and end so suckily that you want to track down the fucker and beat the living crap out of him.

About Martin Amis - I love Money but I've never really managed London Fields. But The Information seemed similar and I didn't like that much. I decided I wasn't a fan any more when I finished it, which was a bit of an apostasy for me.

Worst book I've read... book I read recently that comes to mind is The Straw Men by someone Smith. Very poor changes in narrative, contrived plot, constantly "cheating" the reader for dramatic effect. All the bad things.

if i'd finished "Art and Lies" it would have qualified for this thread. pretentious batshit.

I thought I posted this before but maybe it was another thread, but "wintering: a novel of sylvian plath" by, uh, whoever the fuck wrote it. I actually didn't read this, my wife did, but I felt as though I suffered through it since she kept reading the most offensively pretentious parts out loud to me just for reassurance that it was crap. As if the title (a novel "of"? oh please) wasn't clue enough.

The worst book I ever read was Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson, one of the first american novels. Cheesy crap.

i have read this book, it is all of which he speaks and more good god no really it's awful no really back off, hands raised you're doing this for yourselves.
On a lit tip I've never read a heaney anthology without wanting to shake him by the lapels and scream LET ME GUESS, THIS POEM'S ABOUT THE FUCKING TROUBLES, ISN'T IT?
Heaney: No, it's about frogs
Me: (taps big stick pointedly)]
Heaney: No really, it's about the troubles you see the frogs are grenades waiting to be detonated by the struggle and oh god I only have one key and that's e minor isn't it. But, you see, frogs, struggles. It's about frogs, really. Frogs.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41E15JK99SL._AA240_.jpg

His space operas are trashy fun, though.

Ayn Rand for the win for me

("The Fountainhead")

The Good Soldier -- Ford Madox Ford

(and I adore the modernists)

A friend of mine down here just recently admitted to loving Atlas Shrugged, reading it all the way through the end. I heaved a big sigh to myself.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Ugh. Hey, could you dumb that down a little--oh, and add some smarm, please. Thanks. I'll go gouge out my eyes now.
-- adam (adam), Saturday, 14 June 2003 22:01 (4 years ago) Link

Mark Danielewski - House of Leaves
-- miloauckerman (miloauckerman), Sunday, 15 June 2003 18:44 (4 years ago) Link

both these otm

glamorama

Mansfield Park.

http://nedraggett.wordpress.com/2007/11/26/nanowrimo-and-the-torments-of-his-dreams-in-reflection/

Oh my god I hate Mansfield Park so much, and it's not even the worst book I've ever read because I've read a lot of crap.

maybe The Hotel New Hampshire

tie

Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks

http://www.amazon.com/Freaky-Dancin-Bez/dp/0330481975/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200513598&sr=8-1

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Y0RDM5F6L._SS500_.jpg

Feast of Love by Charles Baxter for a Contemporary American Fiction course. Unbearable.

I still think I hate Bridget Jones the most, not only because it is awful on its own terms but also because it has spawned so much irritating chick lit.

No wait, fucking MotherKind by Jayne Anne Phillips for the same course. Except I don't think I could actually make it to the end for that one.

If you actually read all that, and what, you're a patient guy.

the celestine prophecy

the bible

I have just read the wrongest scene in a fantasy book ever written.

a contender

some crap by jean genet that my "bohemian" friend lent me

a separate peace by john knowles

second vote for The Celestine Prophecy

Dune

Still hate The Fountainhead, but I think Interview with the Vampire was even worse. A Separate Peace was more a disappointment than an atrocity.

whoever said A Passage to India upthread = batshit.

A Passage to India is wonderful!

BTW, I read Interview with the Vampire out loud with a friend. All the way through, overnight. That's how addictively, hilariously awful it was.

Dune def a contender, also Interview with the Vampire

OMG XPOST

Bad books by major writers should be its own category:

Saul Bellow - The Dean's December, Ravelstein
D.H. Lawrence - The Plumed Serpent
Ian McEwan - Amsterdam

I think it was Douglas Coupland's Shampoo Planet. When I was a kid, it was Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary. I wrote a lot of parodies of it for a few years. It started my general hatred for epistolary novels, which leads me to say the worst book might be Pamela, but it is 1. too grueling an ordeal to not finish with some pride of at least having tackled the damn thing and 2. completely bonkers, unlike the other two.

Others include The Book of Mormon and even worse, the early Mormon prophecy & rule compendium The Doctrine and Covenants, and channeled-entity book Seth Speaks.

The first three Dune books aren't so bad, but the last three are some of the most terrible things ever written.

Yes Camrock, such was my perseverance I made it all the way to the fourth, and they just got worse and worse. Why did I do it? To this day I do not know. I was a stubborn 14 year old, I suppose, determined to finish what I'd started. To be fair, I think there were vignettes in each of the books that were extremely powerful, and that kept me going through the long plains of dust in between.

I was in the same boat moley, it was more of an honor thing than an enjoyment thing. Like Fear Factor but with dead brain cells.

Wild Animus. Good grief what a POS. Some of you SF people might remember all these kids giving it away free on street corners around Fall '04 (yeah I have no idea). I was out there for work and had some down time, but couldn't really leave the office. Finally got bored enough to actually read it. It was basically some dot com cowboy's hippie "search for truth" wet dream. From what I remember. Ugh.

There was this children's book I read when I was about 11 that started off excellently but very quickly degenerated into dull bollocks - at the outset it looked like it was going to be an enjoyably silly, light-hearted fantasy, about these kids who were planning to dig an immense maze of secret tunnels under their local park. After reading the first couple of pages in the library, I checked it out and excitedly took it home to continue reading.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when by the end of the first chapter they'd been unable to dig a tunnel due to being just kids and without any digging equipment but had managed to dig up some ancient roman pottery. The rest of the book appeared to be about the pottery (to be honest I didn't actually read it all the way through - it might have got good again after that, but I doubt it).

HAHAHAHAHA this is like my experience w/a third of the books I read growing up!

I read some book as a kid that had some kids trying to exorcise a cat that REALLY SCARED me. Plus it was really boring and grim. I think it was called The Witches of Worm (Worm was the cat IIRC).

Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I feel sad admitting I've even read it.

OMG this is so fucking true.

Oh, A Child Called It might be included here. I mean, the kid had a sad life and described it well. But 1. I think it makes people think child abuse is only like really "child abuse" if it entails starving your son and then essentially trying to gas him to death and forcing him to eat dog food, when it is usually a lot more (comparatively) subtle but still problematic and 2. Its popularity seemed to have the same appeal as a true crime novel, this really voyeuristic thing that does not affect change but is kind of like rotten.com for the Oprah set. That is a thing that makes me uncomfortable about modern society.

i liked the good soldier by ford but it was kind of pointless. it has some good prose, though.

Don't laugh at me but my mum wanted 'Dead Famous' by Ben Elton for Christmas one year so I got it and read it before I gave it to her, and my God, I knew Elton has gone to the polar opposite of 'funny' and I thought I had read some bad books in my time, but this still managed to shock and astound me as to its sheer pointless crap bollocks piece of shit existence. AGRHGHRGHHH.

i tried starting to read Dune over the weekend and i could NOT do it

the 10 page glossary that started the book was pretty discouraging, for one

Bad books by major writers should be its own category:

Saul Bellow - The Dean's December, Ravelstein
D.H. Lawrence - The Plumed Serpent
Ian McEwan - Amsterdam

Memoria de mis putas tristes.

Oh, Gabopaws.

Mr Nice by Howard Marks - if you can't sell weed properly your an idiot
Stoned by Andrew Loog Oldham - nice pants, twat

sorry trousers

your an idiot

Nobodys perfect.

I wanted to say "The Celestine Prophecy", but I stopped with about 40 pages left. I just couldn't handle it. I should finish it, just out of spite.

IIRC, it got even more patently ridiculous and bad toward the end. Utter, utter nonsense. And worse: badly written utter nonsense.

Usually my answer to this is Ishmael by Daniel Quinn - essays disguised as a crap novel about a talking gorilla, but it's been several years since I read it and I can't even remember what his stupid stupid arguments were.

The worst book I've read recently, or at least the one that left the worst taste in my mouth, was Youth by J. M. Coetzee. Just seemed like ugliness without a point.

Why do you hate The Good Soldier, remy?

Oh, I just found the florid prose offputting, and the payoff poor compensation for the purpleness of the style.

bahahahaha someone was trying to get me to read Ishmael bcz it was 'mindblowing' (bad sign) and I successfully put it off. I knew it would be some new agey claptrap, but 2/3 of the reason I wanted not to was I hate gorillas so, so much.

I liked Ishmael when I was seventeen. It seemed, um, profound. If that isn't reason enough to put somebody off, I don't know what is.

Other good books I hate: Vanity Fair, Lord Jim

For school: Sexual Abuse of Males. It's a textbook, the author is good, but the subject matter is quite grim. Not for school: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (threw it across the room, then returned it) and Superstud by Paul Feig. Feig gets credit for Freaks and Geeks, but this was really not a good book.

Worst in the past few years by generally good writers are Shipwreck by Louis Begley and The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster.

Hannibal by Thomas Harris. Laughably silly and fitfully boring with it.

Dune is awesome, but you kind of have to have the "nerd gene" to enjoy it

If you want to nominate Dune you need to have never read any comics or Stephen King books, for consistency.

Now I kind of want to read Ishmael.

As a kid, I would read pretty much anything I could get my hands on. Unfortunately this meant that I read, at one point, a novelization of The Last Action Hero

I can't believe noone's mentioned The Da Vinci Code. Was I the only one dumb enough to read that the whole way through?

Hahaha, me too S, which is why I read a novelization of "Hook" and my dad's self-help books as "Seven Habits..." and "Never Be Nervous Again."

'killer on the road' aka 'silent terror' by james ellroy is also a contender - totally unpleasant even by the unpleasant standards of "first-person serial killer fiction". like "american psycho" minus the satire and vague big statements in its place. added bonus: unintentional hilarity when our serial killer narrator meets up with another like-minded psycho!

I made it all the way to the end of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series a decade or two back. Seven books of it! What the hell was I thinking?

heartbreaking work might be it

Hannibal by Thomas Harris. Laughably silly and fitfully boring with it.

Oh god YES. What a crap book. First half was tolerable but the rest was utter shite.

my ex-girlfriend's dad ('uncle tom') enthused to me about hannibal during a three hour car trip and then gave me a special hardcover edition for christmas that i had to read and pretend i loved.

Can I nominate the Harry Potter series as if it was a single book, or do I have to pick one?

if those are the worst, you really should read more

I can't believe noone's mentioned The Da Vinci Code Alchemist. Was I the only one dumb enough to read that the whole way through?

thankfully it was short.

others would be:
Douglas Copeland - Girlfriend in a Coma
Arthur Herzog - IQ 83
Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake
The Bell Jar
Life of Pi

i liked mansfield park

Holiday read, i.e. nothing else left to (other book being read by g/f)

Some book about someone who's best friend was a punk, became a TV chef, was totally obnoxious,umm... I have binned the title in my mind. The only realistic bit was when the first guy's wife had a baby andnever swore once during the birth (against type),but just kept saying "gosh" and "oh my" sort of stuff.

Not good enough for "Everything's a pound" clearance.

The Bell Jar

:-((( That's like... depressing.

High Fidelity by Beezlebub Hornby.

Life of Pi seconded.
Saul Bellow seconded, but for Augie March - too slow and boring,though intresting.

there are more

Kahlil Gibran's "The Prophet". File next to "The Alchemist" and "Jonathan Livingston Seagull".

> 'Dead Famous' by Ben Elton

Popcorn was terrible, topical satire, natural born killers vs big brother. very cheap cash-in.

'Well Remembered Days: Eoin O'Cellaigh's Memoirs of a Twentieth-century Irish Catholic' by Arthur Mathews was also terrible. father ted writer, recommended by john peel. terrible.

Life's waaaaay too short to be reading shitty books.

Lies.

I kinda like the Seagull book and the bits of Kahlil Gibran that I've read. It's the peeps that take them seriously that drag 'em down.

So many to chose from, mostly read at University:

** I read one of JF Cooper's Deerslayer books (Last of the Mohicans, I think) for my American Literature course at Sussex University. Turgid prose, horrible politics, awful.

** Popcorn, obviously (also read for a University course, on "The Popular Thriller"). And I'd better add LA Confidential (gibberish) and Hound of the Baskervilles (dull), from the same course.

** EVERY FUCKING NOVEL BY ALICE WALKER (except The Color Purple, which's ok), once again read for my American Lit final year thesis. (We had the choice of Walker or Hemingway for our final year thesis. I chose Walker 'cause she's marginally less dull.)

Mayor of Casterbridge

Either 'A Store is Born' by Jasper Carrot or 'Saturday' by Ian McEwan. I resent the latter more.

Saul Bellow seconded, but for Augie March - too slow and boring,though intresting.

wau

i.e. u mad

Popcorn is okay. Not outstanding of course, but a fun read. I mean, what standards are you guys using?

http://assets4.pitchforkmedia.com/images/image/16839.standards.gif

London Fields

I was assigned The Mayor of Casterbridge to read for GCSEs at one school, for A-Levels at another, and then once more at University for luck. I actually kind of enjoyed it the final time 'round.

Literally "dying of shame" in a nineteenth century novel = quite classic.

Hardy is mad classic you fules.

wow. what *specifically* is bad about 'a heartbreaking work...' ?

It's a bag of shite?

good post, very informative^^^

I feel I engaged with the work.

Nothing wrong with making things up per se - see e.g. "Florence"'s Life Of Thomas Hardy - but you have to be good and consistent at it. Unfortunately Mr Eggers' writings are credibility-tickling without any compensatory rib-tickling component.

The first thing that comes to mind is Asimov's Murder at the ABA, but the real answer is probably a few dozen of the Doc Savage books I used to be nuts about.

JOSEPH ANDREWS henry fielding.

'A most bawdy encounter in which Mr Smythe and the tavern owner...'
oh get fucked.

You rep for Dave Cunting Eggers and dis Henry Fielding?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

The Crimson Petal and the White, I Was Dora Suarez, and NYC Babylon.

Philip Roth's Plot Against America. I like some of his other books quite a bit, especially Patrimony, but seriously, that was such a goddamn waste of time.

I quite liked You Shall Know Our Velocity. Never read Heartbreaking Work though.
I don't know what my answer to this would be. Something by Julian Barnes or Ian McEwan maybe.

I found the extended intro with all the footnotes and stuff in Heartbreaking Work pretty funny, but the rest was wank.

no no ive never read eggers i were just asking what the problem with it was as ive read nothing but waffle about how good it is.

i've never read anything decent about why people don't like it except LOL ITS BLOODY SHITE, ETC

For a start he should leave the internal self-dialogue stuff to Hemingway.

It's a book for people who don't like books!

OMG Joseph Andrews is my favorite novel that isn't sci-fi or by Daniel Pinkwater. I mean it is way fucking good and funny. IMO

^^^ Correct

i don't finish bad books

I have to finish a book, no matter how bad it is. I just have this sick curiosity as to how it is going to turn out that I can't ignore even if the book is going to bore and/or annoy me.

i have not, nor do i ever hope to surpass Digger by Joseph Flynn

I've learned not to read bad books to the end, but it's hard not to when it was enthusiastically pressed upon you by a friend, or even worse, given as a gift with a similarly enthusiastic endorsement.

Thinking back to the era when this happened to me more often, I recall having finished Bridges of Madison County and Love Story. They were plenty bad. I have probably blocked all memory of the actual worst book from my mind.

when i was about 15 my sister had some book written by the actor ethan hawke, about a guy who has a steamy affair with some artist he meets and then it ends. it was terrible. i can't be sure the main character was an actor called like elton hank, it may have been marginally less glaring than that, but not much.

it had a lot of discussion of how hot it is in texas which i suppose was meant to resonate with all the sex.

I limped through DeLillo's Underworld.

Thought you were gonna go with Ada.

college g/f made me read "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" so, that

most terrible books I will put down before I get to the end cuz c'mon why bother