the worst novels you have ever finished

yes, finished. or at least read 3/4 of. there are zillions, probably, that i gave up on after a few pages.

like drinking bad wine life is too short! once you get out of school, anyway.

withoutu question, Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go."

around the same time (and not a novel but...) Alexander Masters' "Stuart: A Life Backwards" i loathed, although not as much as the Ishiguro.

without!

Warner, These Demented Lands
Barnes, Nightwood
Barker, Five Miles From Outer Hope
Ellis, Less Than Zero
Carter, Wise Children
Lawrence, Women In Love
Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Amis, Yellow Dog
Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh
Amis, London Fields
Banville, The Book of Evidence
Banville, Ghosts
Banville, Athena
Smith, White Teeth

what about Tracer Hand's nominations? that's what the world needs now !!

American Psycho

A Confederacy of Dunces

Banville, The Book of Evidence
Banville, Ghosts
Banville, Athena

you could've given up after two. one and a half, even.

The Alchemist aaaaaahh hahahahaha

"closer" by dennis cooper has crowded out all my other contenders for the moment.

anthem

Oh, I know - THE LORD OF THE RINGS !!

― the pinefox, Wednesday, 24 June 2009 12:29 (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

"anthem" is a novella but it certainly deserves whatever scorn it gets

Patrick Suskind - Perfume

what's the defn of novella?

i might use google

thomas covenant shite. 6 of them, more fool me.

HA

A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel.

n e thing by rushdie

i am suspicious at the distinction between a novelette and a novella frankly

Also, can't believe I finished more than two Keroauc novels. lol teenagers.

"Shutter Island" by Dennis Lehane

i liked shutter island -- but definitely in camp, qualified, mass-market kind of way.

Da Vinci Code

There are some awesome books on this thread, makes me sad. Confederacy of Dunces, Gravity's Rainbow, and Perfume are all amazing. Just reread CoD for the third or fourth time a couple of weeks ago.

Should you find yourself stranded in Iowa for a day or so, with access to only one paperback with which to idle away the hours, I hope for your sake that it is not a copy of James Patterson's Kiss the Girls. I have nothing against genre fiction & can get into a good pulp thriller but yikes what a turgid shitheap (600+ pages if I recall correctly).

ugh, couldn't stand CoD, that awful character, whole thing devoid of charm or wit or even sense.

but it was 'clever'

The Iron Tower Trilogy by Dennis McKiernan. The most egregious Tolkien rip-off ever.

I couldn't finish Confederacy of Dunces but love Neon Bible.

Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

can we take these as nominations for a worst novel ever poll?

I hated V. so much it wasn't even funny; we're talking close to The Jungle levels of out-and-out loathing.

I used to have the bookworm's compunction of feeling compelled to finish every book I started. Not anymore.

I second A Confederacy of Dunces and will add Pride & Prejudice and Everything is Illuminated.

muriel spark, the ballad of peckham rye. superior (in attitude not quality) and pointless.

Middlemarch
Independent People

Middlemarch at least has the decency to be worthless from start to finish. Independent People started to pick up in the middle just as i was beginning to give up and then punished me for my optimism by being even more terrible and miserable in the second half.

The Lovely Bones, maybe?

If books you had to read for coursework etc count, then Hard Times is a terrible, terrible introduction to Dickens.

YOU WANNA FUCK WITH MY MAN GEORGE ELIOT YOU SPEAK TO ME, SPIRALLI

I got no idea what the answer is to this, btw. Something genre that I read as a kid, some fantasy shit prolly. Shaun Hutson is too unbelievably awesome to count as really bad I think.

Middlemarch is a tedious gossip column dragged out to preposterous lengths and Eliot is the Candace Bushnell of the 19th century.

thatssexist.gif

Some awesome wtf posts here.

Everything is Illuminated is the worst i've finished recently. starts ok but just jaw-droppingly bad by the end.

i have very few nominations because i just tend to stop reading. (i do not have this compulsion about needing to finish any book i start. no way. the book's obligations are to me, not the other way round.) anthem is bad, for sure. i guess of school-mandated reading, i pretty much hated 1984 -- thought it was way too long and bludgeoned its perfectly sensible and obvious points into the ground. but i like animal farm -- orwell should have stuck with talking pigs. (to be fair, i like orwell's essays too.)

I will add to the Confederacy of Dunces hatred.

Also really ended up hating The Bonfire of the Vanities.

If books you had to read for coursework etc count, then Hard Times is a terrible, terrible introduction to Dickens.

Aww, Hard Times is my favourite Chuck D. I think. Focussed and scathing.

a prayer for owen meany is not very good, but don't tell my wife i said that. it's the only irving i've read, and is likely to stay that way.

(i love confederacy of dunces -- or did in college. i don't know if it would hold up now, don't want to spoil my affection for it by rereading.)

oh, tom wolfe: a man in full is a very, very silly book. first 70-80 pages have some good stuff, and then it goes completely off the rails.

So wait, Pinefox, you actually finished Gravity's Rainbow despite hating it? Does that signify excessive optimism or just pigheadheadness?

Mine were all shitty yoof novels I bought in my early 20s on the advice of reviews in the Face. Christopher Brookmyre's Quite Ugly One Morning was appalling but I think Stuart Browne's Dangerous Parking was even worse. Since then, I've refused to read any book in which the hero is a fantasy version of the narrator who breaks the rules, gets laid an improbable amount, ostentatiously drops the names of bands he likes and does tonz of drugz.

vanity fair

Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full. Why did I bother?

Love Hard Times too but yes it's not the most Dickensian book in the world.

a prayer for owen meany is not very good

^^Yes, this was also a complete chore to get through. Something or other about a hand grenade.

worst novel I was ever assigned to read in a lit course: Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

Aww, Hard Times is my favourite Chuck D. I think

Love Hard Times too

bear in mind that there's probably no small amount of resentment there at being forced to read it.

still, i aced an exam question by successfully arguing that gradgrind was the most moral character. lol secondary school.

I will add to the Confederacy of Dunces hatred.

Ditto. Though I only read a few pages. One of the few books I didn't finish. I also didn't finish Zen and the Art of whateverthefuckitwascalled. My friend said I probably didn't "get it." Lamest retort/defense ever.

don't understand how you can hate a book after only reading a few pages

the world according to garp seemed okay 15/16 years ago but every time I think about it it annoys me. Novels are generally so bad I don't finish any of them anymore.

I hated Sister Carrie after about ten pages, TBH

you all have a lot of opinions, about books, eh

withoutu question, Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go."

I salute your endurance, I couldn't get half way in that.

I hated Sister Carrie after about ten pages, TBH

Give it another chance – this is expertly paced. I read the whole thing in one 24-hr stretch during a hurricane.

i still have it -- and i liked financier/titan.

Hard Times is the one where the villain joins the circus in blackface, right? What's not to love?

(^^^its been a while since i read it so this could be totally the wrong book i am thinking of.)

DH Lawrence, The Rainbow & Women in Love, both for A-level English.

my antonia by someone i forgot

Lawrence probably has the highest concentration of beautiful, affecting passages and flat-out dreck in 20th century English lit.

i think most really bad and hated books i have read were for school, which is such a shame and why i hated reading until i was 18

worst for school was "The Nigger of Narcissus" by Joseph Conrad; I remember hating it but I don't remember why

Willa Cather

yeah willa cather

don't understand how you can hate a book after only reading a few pages

I know. A friend had recommended it, saying it was so funny, but after five pages I just gave up.

Okay, guys, I have actually read Bridget Jones' Diary. It is EVEN WORSE THAN YOU COULD POSSIBLY HAVE IMAGINED. I think I win this thread.

As a Philip K Dick completist I'd have say Vulcan's Hammer and The Crack In Space, unfortunately. Maybe drug-fuelled rampage novels should be considered as a separate genre from "proper" novels?

drug-fuelled rampage novels should be considered as a separate genre from "proper" novels?

I've been trying to ignore all my fantasy indulgences, as i don't consider them 'proper', even though my no 1 pick was fantasy.

White Noise is definitely the most overrated novel I ever finished. The Great American Novel, yawn.

Oh man I fucking love White Noise. Novel about extreme terror of death = hi my life.

concrete jungle, maybe

Emily, I feel for you. Watched the movie and PUKED imaginary chunks of Germaine Greer all over the screen.

I love Confederacy of Dunces (I think that's 3 votes for and 7 against, if you're keeping score), even though I think it peters out at the end. I've read it twice.

Loathed Stephen King's The Gunslinger. Haven't read one of his since (can't even imagine reading more in that Dark Tower series.)

OK, if we're counting here's another vote for Confederacy of Dunces, although he could've lost the queeny gay character.

Sad to see all the John Irving hate on here, I had endless patience for his books when I was in my mid-teens, despite the length. Although I haven't touched them in years in case I get bored and disillusioned.

Definitely DH Lawrence

Read Lady Chatterly's Lover and HATED it. This boy said "no, no, read Sons and Lovers" - it was even freaking WORSE all the misogyny and tedium and self aggrandisation without even WTF anatomically impossible sex to balance it out.

American Psycho

― My name is Kenny! (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, June 24, 2009 7:31 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

A Confederacy of Dunces

― ledge, Wednesday, June 24, 2009 7:31 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

LOL These are two of my favorite books.

Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

I haven't read it but wasn't there a movie version of this in the 80s that had some weird incest stuff going on?

i can imagine that john irving reads differently (and better) if you come to him as a teen. i read owen meany just a few years ago and spent most of my time rolling my eyes. some writers are just made for adolescence. (i've heard tom robbins is like this, but i never read him and now have no interest.)

x-post - Yeah, movie's kinda so-so. The incest scene is part of the novel.

"some writers are just made for adolescence."

I hated hated HATED Catcher in the Rye. I was probably way too old when I read it. I was in my 20s and it seemed something for a teenager. Apparently these days most teens share my opinion (that he's a bit of a whiner)

ENBB yeah there is a half-brother/sister thing goin on. zzzzzzzzzzzzz, cue the bears

xxxp

White Noise
Infinite Jest

I know these are popular faves but I thought they were both horribly mean-spirited, filled with unlikeable characters with only a very few exceptions, and almost completely devoid of the humor that most fans ascribe to them

the funny things is, for adult novelists who would totally be in the YA 14+ category if they didn't have so much weird fucking, tom robbins comes across to me as being less creepy than irving. I'd probably still enjoy a tom robbins novel. I strongly doubt I still have any patience for irving's epiphanies.

horribly mean-spirited, filled with unlikeable characters

you might just have put me off attempting infinite jest there.

I hated hated HATED Catcher in the Rye.

my dad sort of made me read catcher in the rye when i was 15. it was the right age and i liked it ok, but it already seemed a little dated. i'd already read s.e. hinton and she seemed more "real" to me. (i read raise high the roof beam later and liked it more.)

The Fountainhead
Last Rituals
Babbitt (going back to high school here)

And I really didn't like The Savage Detectives, but I felt like that was because I really wasn't getting it, not because it was bad.

Regarding Infinite Jest - I didn't think it was mean-spirited, I thought the author definitely empathized with all the characters...this is a big sticking point for me with novels, if I think an author is setting up characters to be mocked I hate it, but I thought this was a very compassionate book. In a weird way.

infinite jest has several likable characters. i have my problems with that book, but that's not one of them.

It's ironic that so many people who post consistently on ILX have a problem with unlikeable characters.

there's no accounting for taste, ledge, but i just resented the narrator in IJ for being such a smarmy know-it-all. one of the hazards of omniscience I guess

Oh god, I forgot Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land, talking of adolescent novels.

it always bugs me when first-person narrators turn out to know every tree, plant and bird species that forms the backdrop to their story.. natural descriptions are a beautiful way to ground a story and give it life and texture but c'mon man do you really know the difference between these different types of terns?

and basically, that's why i never read infinite jest.

(not to be nitpicky, but infinite jest is told in 3rd person, from multiple points of view.)

no i take that back -- it alternates between 1st and 3rd person.

there might even be 2nd person in there too, i don't remember.

i always thought of it as framed by a larger 3rd person omniscience, given the foot- and endnotes

haha i was going to post to make the third person point but (xpost) (s)

u pretentious motherfuckers, like you've never read a john saul or dean koontz book or the da vinci code

tbh if you thought infinite jest was lame i don't care but if you FINISHED IT whilst still thinking it was lame ... u know, there are many other books u could have productively been reading in that period of time! u are only hurting urself!

xpost

I guess the thing is that the genuine worst book you've read you've probly forgotten, I did say mine was probably some fantasy shit or a thriller or something I read when I was a teenager.

"these days most teens share my opinion (that he's a bit of a whiner)"

haha those teens are buncha phonies.

"my dad sort of made me read catcher in the rye when i was 15."

I'm perplexed any adult would push this on a kid to read; it's pretty unflattering to adult authority figures.
Or is it some passive aggressive way to tell kids 'stop whining or you'll be a holden'? What was your dad thinking?

"u pretentious motherfuckers, like you've never read a john saul or dean koontz book or the da vinci code"
Are they any good? I'm still working my way through Pet Sematary, which I think has a lot of the same 1st/3rd person ambiguity as infinite jest.

i finished it out of spite tbh

i hated catcher in the rye at 13 and again at 17 but liked it at 20

teens don't get it anymore bcz, you know, popular culture now exists for them

i've read a clancy, yeah that was bad. had a scene with the pope on skis.

lol glancing at my shelf I see Nick McDonell - "Twelve", read many years ago, but I remember it being not bad for what it was

Cannot think of an actual answer for this. Probably The Hobbit tbh.

xpost:
my dad had loved catcher in the rye as an alienated teen of the late '50s/early '60s, so i think he was just being dad-ly -- passing on something he loved to his son.

Man The Hobbit is fine for what it is - overwordy posh kids book that spawned some horrible horrible tribute acts.

LJ get out of my walls

Also, can't believe I finished more than two Keroauc novels. lol teenagers.

boo-urns! i dont get the kerouac hate on this board. 'on the road' is joyful. i would go for 'london fields'.
inane charachters and suffers from that irksome pretentiousness/preciousness/wilful obscurity a lot of modern english writers suffer from
see also: banville.

did anyone else find 'all the pretty horses' really boring? i dont think i finished that one.

lol I was about 10 and cannot remember a thing about it, maybe it isn't that bad

i loved 'all the pretty horses', read the border trilogy in a weekend only a few months ago.

"had a scene with the pope on skis."
wait this sounds awesome -- which one is this?

that's catcher in the rye

i'd love to hear really unsparing reviews of these books, in the spirit of pinefox's liveblogging of white teeth

pope on a slope

lol i should have stayed out of this thread.

Middlemarch is a tedious gossip column dragged out to preposterous lengths

how is an extended gossip column a bad thing? that's like all i ever want to read.

xpost yeah, pinefox hating books is one of my favorite ilx reads.

"had a scene with the pope on skis."
wait this sounds awesome -- which one is this?

― Philip Nunez, Wednesday, June 24, 2009 11:12 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that's catcher in the rye

― gabb 'bag (s1ocki), Wednesday, June 24, 2009 11:13 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the large-print edition

zadie smith - the autograph man
carl shuker - the lazy boys

wait this sounds awesome -- which one is this?

oh crap knows. read it in 1992 and it wasn't set on a submarine, that's all i can tell ya.

Popetriot Games?

Priest on the Piste

I read Firefox before the movie came out. Can't remember anything about it. Remember the movie being fucking awful, so the book was probably thereabouts.

it's yoru fault for reading a book based on a web browser

Louis Begley - Shipwreck

xpost

WHEN I WAS A KID ALLS WE HAD WAS 48K ZX SPECTRUMS AND YOU COULD KICK THEM IN THE STREET

i didn't like vanity fair either

Haven't read this, but is The Corrections a worst read novel candidate for anyone?

Also, can't believe I finished more than two Keroauc novels. lol teenagers.

boo-urns! i dont get the kerouac hate on this board. 'on the road' is joyful. i would go for 'london fields'.
inane charachters and suffers from that irksome pretentiousness/preciousness/wilful obscurity a lot of modern english writers suffer from
see also: banville.

did anyone else find 'all the pretty horses' really boring? i dont think i finished that one.

― Michael B, Wednesday, 24 June 2009 16:09 (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

On The Road is fine but Big Sur etc. are just drivel.

It's a toss up between the Twilight books, Angels & Demons, Bridges of Madison County, and some Heinlein crap (last one I ever read OR EVER WILL READ - tore it in half and threw it across the room when finished, age 20). Although this chicklit thing my mom pressed on me last year (Sunday List of Dreams? Something like that. GAH.) was also horrendously bad. These are great for long flights though, laughably bad, distracting, low commitment, disposable.

you all have a lot of opinions, about books, eh

Some that come quickly to mind:

Midnight's Children - Rushdie
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Marquez (finished twice!)
Love in the Time of Cholera - Marquez
A Disaffection - Kelman
A Man in Full - Wolfe
London Fields - Amis
Gormenghast - Peake
Titus Groan - Peake
The Sea - Banville
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen - Torday (not an entirely voluntary read)
The Road - McCarthy
No Country for Old Men - McCarthy
Alias Grace - Atwood

"One Hundred Years of Solitude - Marquez (finished twice!)"

??? Were you in a hostage situation? Stranded somewhere with nothing but Marquez? Trying to win a bet?

I kept going because I hoped something was going to click into place and suddenly I'd see what other people saw in Marquez. It's happened with other books/writers. Not a glimmer, but with perverse optimism I had another go a few years later. Still don't get it (I did think "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" was okayish, but that was short.)

The only one that comes to mind is called Parasites Like Us by Adam Johnson.

this is hard. but there are definitely a few contenders on here already, like Djuna Barnes' 'Nightwood,' which is just....i don't even know how to describe how much i hated that fucking book.

OH!!! A novella, perhaps the only Henry James I've ever hated: 'The Aspern Papers.' god fucking gag me.

I shd really recuse myself from this thread given the alarmingly high number of shitty genre novels I read.

Elizabeth Haydon's Rhapsody is one of the dumbest fucking things ever written, though. Kushiel's Dart managed to redeem itself by the end by moving away from being really disgusting S&M torture pr0n and turning into a political espionage tale but that doesn't really excuse all of the flaying and hot poker play that leads up to that trasnsformation.

this is hard. but there are definitely a few contenders on here already, like Djuna Barnes' 'Nightwood,' which is just....i don't even know how to describe how much i hated that fucki

I tried rereading this a few years ago and definitely gagged. I can't believe T.S. Eliot wrote the introduction.

i had forgotten nightwood, good call

"We" by Zamyatin. I usually give up if I'm not enjoying the book, but this one I finished.

oh god nightwood

hah i own nightwood but i've never looked at it

Okay had never heard of Nightwood but reading the wiki and this thread I'm kind of intrigued.

I read it a long time ago but I swear there was (implied?) dog sex at some point. On the other hand, I could be making that up.

The dog has sex with T.S. Eliot.

i read nightwood in college. it was ok. i probably would like it less at this point in my life.

Ulysses is like 100% dog sex so no fear over here

oh man i stopped before the good parts

also "smellrump"

glamorama
red storm rising
some other sci-fi shit i can't be bothered to remember

a lot of awesome novels on this thread, y'all have managed to avoid the worst of the worst pretty well imo

Yeah so many of these are the "worst" of some of the best books ever written.

Why pick on easy targets?

There's no way as an adult I'm gonna devote time to something I don't think I'll like tho.

Going by these reading lists no one is ever going to venture near this book anyway but seriously, for the love of all that is good and holy, never ever ever ever ever read Digital Fortress by Dan Brown.

does a "slave narrative" count? Equiano's Travels suuuucks.

nightwood is a funny name

actually tbh i don't devote much thought to books that don't inspire me and usually if i'm not feeling something i bail long before i get a chance to form a fair opinion of the work as a whole.

oh that reminds me:

battlefield earth
the pelican brief

xxpost

Dude if that's Olaudah Equiano's book it's actually titled The Interesting Narrative of lololol

Peyton Amberg by Tama Janowitz

That's funny, there's a restaurant that just opened in Chicago called Nightwood, named after the book. I'd only vaguely heard of the book before, but it piqued my curiosity.

more like nightsoil

nightwish

nightdoggystyle

Seriously I have read 2 books by Shaun Hutson in which civilization - well, London - is menaced by a terrifying plague of flesh-eating slugs.

That sounds kind of awesome tbh.

That's what I said upthread, too awesomely bad to be bad.

I can't think of many things I've finished and really strongly disliked. There are a lot of things I finish despite thinking they're pretty bad -- e.g., every now and then I'm curious enough to read a new Coupland book, and those things just flat-out aren't good -- but they're rarely things I viscerally dislike or feel frustrated by. Usually just forgettable stuff, junk stuff, mediocre or undemanding stuff, etc., which actually can have its own charm in the reading, like watching a dumb movie.

If I force myself to finish Selected Works of T.S. Spivet it'll be that, but right now ... this will probably be taken as sacrilegious bomb-throwing by many here, but the Bolano I'm chopping through is probably one of the more disappointing/frustrating things I've read lately -- not so much in terms of being a "bad" novel, but in terms of expectations and the work/reward ratio of it. Probably the most concerted effort I've recently put into giving something a chance and finishing it out.

Totally unsurprised to see Banville appearing here a few times -- haha I would totally be naming him if I hadn't eventually instituted a "do not bother finishing (or buying any more) Banville, ever" rule

Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions -- loved the first 50-or-so pages, when it's just one guy going around the world trying to find some short films by a silent comic actor -- but then other characters show up and ugh.

The Book of Evidence is pretty good, but, boy, The Sea is bad in a way that only a decent to good novelist can be.

Yeah so many of these are the "worst" of some of the best books ever written.

I can't remember a lot of the popcorn books I've read (mainly murder mysteries, some fantasy), so I can't enter them, but most of them weren't actually bad! they just weren't particularly great or awful or memorable at all.

But now that I've been thinking about it more, I read Interview with the Vampire out loud with a friend, that was one of the worst books I've ever read. Gah. Awful.

would totally be naming him if I hadn't eventually instituted a "do not bother finishing (or buying any more) Banville, ever" rule

i have a similar rule for Stanley Elkin (though I loved The Franchiser)

It's hard to have any memorable hatred for a dumb book! Alfred's right, it takes a certain level of basic skill and ambition to really fail in an offensive, catastrophic, frustrating, memorable way. It also helps if the book really requires something of you, like care or attention or patience, and then still winds up pissing you off.

(Really, honestly not that different from film: most people's memorable worst lists wouldn't be populated by dumb action flicks, they'd be full of ambitiously horrible dramas.)

^^^OTM, my first instinct for 'least favourite film' is either A Perfect Storm, Apollo 13 or Punch-Drunk Love

What are the book equivalents of those films, and have I read them?

bright lights big city

My memorably worst film was "Failure to Launch," which really wasn't ambitious. At all. In any way. It just sucked.

my worst film was... CITIZEN KANE

i think worst lists should encompass anything that's a piece of shit, regardless of its pretensions!

r u all impressed by my casual dismissal of such a sacred cow

the worst film ever made: CASABLANCA

yes i went there

shitizen kane
cacablanca

the plodfather

plop fiction

well look I've seen stuff like The Hottie And The Nottie and obviously it is a worse film than the others, but I don't deem it worthy of any sort of interesting discussion, so I wouldn't qualify it as a "worst film"

actually wtf am I talking about, neither Apollo 13 nor A Perfect Storm are interesting in any way, they are just offensively boring, at least THATN is desperately amusing and jawdroppingly abysmal

Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions

i didn't hate this, but i didn't like it. thought it was unconvincing in all sorts of ways. unfortunately, it's the only auster novel i've read (i've liked some short stories), and it's putting me off of reading more even though i own the new york trilogy and have had it recommended to me.

worst book: the holy bible by God

apollo 13: zero gravity vomiting
a perfect storm: contains a line where a forecaster intones, "this could be....the perfect storm."

the only other thing i remember from these films is marky mark floating in the middle of the ocean

i dont remember that scene in apollo 13

there was a urine spray iirc and they were all 'the constellation urine' and how we lolled

there is nothing so magical and wondrous as frozen pellets of urine being shot into space

oh god please don't let this have turned into a film and/or pun thread

I'm trying to think of a really bad novel I've finished! If anybody else has read Twelve, is it rubbish?

more like twerrible

I think the one that angered me the most was probably Beloved. I like several of her other books, but that book is just shitty

omg Twelve made me want to vom-vom all over the place.

Also, the Wiki on Nightwood, while piquing interest, also says, "The novel, like many of its time, is essentially plotless." i am fine with plotlessness, but this sums up Nightwood pretty damn well, imho.

and btw, i read it just a couple of months ago.

Morrison's best novel is 'Song of Solomon,' imho.

Beloved is creepy more than anything else

All the Thomas Harris Hannibal Lecter books. I really liked them at the time, but I'm certain now that they were shit.

Morrison's best novel is 'Song of Solomon,' imho.

otm, but i think beloved is pretty great too.

I actually once read "Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parody" cover to cover, but I cannot, repeat cannot, justify its nomination here. Not a novel.

I never read Beloved but another class at school did and they were mostly against it

if theres one group of people whose opinions i thoroughly trust its british students

i for one trust the pinefox's opinion as well

I am imagining "DOWN WITH BELOVED" placards

"No SCHOOLTEACHER can make me read Beloved"

morrisonned

"The only Morrison in MY 'SWEET HOME' is Jim"

Oprah likes it,
so there Britain

omg I just said this shouldn't be a pun thread, I'm sorry

Yeah, stop lowering the Toni.

I came around on Beloved; I tried to read it at age 12 and was like "uh, waht" but then later in college I actually read it and went "oh wait, this is awesome".

i liked it when i read it but it's the only Morrison i've read

yah i am a huge Sula and Song Of Solomon stan, but just hated Beloved. Dan is making me think about giving it another try tho

of course that might put me in the "oh hey i hated this and read it twice" camp

don't understand how you can hate a book after only reading a few pages

― Mr. Que, Wednesday, June 24, 2009 8:39 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

Try harder!

I haven't read Nightwood, but Barnes' "Paprika Johnson" is on of my favorite stories of the last few years.

Try harder!

it's so easy to laugh it's so easy to hate
it takes strength to be gentle and kind

---T.S. Eliot (or some other British dude)

"seriously I have read 2 books by Shaun Hutson in which civilization - well, London - is menaced by a terrifying plague of flesh-eating slugs." — i was aware of one of these (it's called SLUGS.) there's another?

Breeding Ground is the first sequel and I think there might be at least one more?

http://www.shaunhutson.com/index.htm

I thought Hutson was completely dope as a teenager, he's the Ramones to James Herbert's Dave Clark Five.

Different Slugs

Didn't finish but I made it over halfway through Atlas Shrugged. I spent at least 350 pages just going "I can't believe this is in penguin modern classics"

jesus loads of bad ones. I remember as a kid of about 14 I read some book my sister had that was written by ETHAN HAWKE, it was fucking terrible, about some really wanky pretentious relationship a dude has and he's all "oh no" and has a breakdown after getting dumped by this "intoxicating feverish woman" interspersed with these anecdotes me of those days in Texas where the sun never stopped shining, working at the filling station with Dad, obv a metaphor as lumpen as an anvil...it was fucking terrible.

(must read again sometime soon)

HEAT=LOVE/SEX

The thing about Slugs is guys, that because slugs are creatures not noted for their speed or predatory skillz every gruesome death in the books has to revolve around somebody unsuspectingly opening a door behind which they've piled themselves, or being too busy shagging to notice the slugs creeping up on them.

roth "the dying animal"

ETHAN HAWKE makes me sad to be human tbh

OK, I will cop to reading his first book but I didn't actually think it was that bad! I've definitely read worse.

haha I was not reading attentively enough and I was like "c'mon, Ethan Frome is not about that AT ALL"

lol

too busy shagging to notice the slugs creeping up on them

as ideas for interesting fiction go, there's very little that's not wrong about this

oh yeah i read Mick Foley's book, Tietam Brown. Wasn't terrible but woulda rather he wrote a story about Socko. He writes better than Chuck Pahalauahahuniauk for what it's worth.
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/sports_sportsstuff/images/2008/04/30/foleysocko.jpg

you people are so crazy. beloved is great.

nope

Yeah it is.

if a couple dudes on the internet AND l0u1s jagg3rs classmates say it sucks, it sucks, OK??

lol sorry but it's true

at least its not as bad as.... ULYSSSES

Fuck all y'all bitches.

also lolz at nightwood. i was questioned about it for my oral exams and i sort of couldn't believe it. i was like, really, why do you hate me, advisors?

ulyssssses is totally overrated

so obvious t.s. eliot loved it because he thought it was so hard no one but him got it.

nightwood is a book that only college professors and quiet high school girls like ime

also fuck ts eliot

i would like to meet one of these quiet high school girls; otherwise i don't believe it.

true story, my girlfriend was one of those girls

okay well she is obvs v smart and would be excellent at grad school; i meant no offense!

actually i dont think she ever finished nightwood but she was reading it when she started college so it spent a year prominently placed on her bookshelf

also william s burroughs

i think we have a copy in our apartment

nightwood fucking suuuuuuuuuuuuucks

HS I am so sorry you had to endure that. My condolences.

this is the first day i ever heard of nightwood

i think every dude in here has heard of "night wood" u feel me guys

had to explain to my son what morning wood is the other day

oh a lesbian novel called nightwood

Harbl, I only read it because I had to for a class I read in college. Be glad you've never heard of it tbh.

calling it a lesbian novel makes it sound so much more interesting than it is.

Yeah, I was going to say something to that effect too.

class I "took" in college rather

i still have my copy from some crappy Jazz Age lit class i took 23 years ago - i never throw books out.

yeah i still have my copy, too. it's not even like i hated it; it was just a surreal reading experience. i understood maybe 10% of it, even on a sentence level.

it's really short, 170 pages - and it is pretty funny iirc

i should have just talked about the phenomenon of night wood when asked about it.

what was the worst book assigned in college

I think the class I had to read it for was "Irish-American Writers". Is that possible? Weird.

xpost

Didn't really feel Thomas Hardy's poetry.

And I like William Blake but a lot of him is hard work.

:( i love hardy's poetry.

ha, ENBB, I actually thought you were using "read" as the verb for being in a class in that old-fashioned British way (you know like "he attended university, where he read classics"), and was wondering about your education

you know a book i was assigned in college that i hated that i did actually finish was written on the body.

xxpost

Well I was an even more doctrinaire Modernist back then, I'd be more likely to enjoy it now. Love him as a novelist.

hahaha i guessed that about that book xp

i mean that it is hated by people of good taste

that makes sense. i don't really understand the 20th century.

Ha, Nabisco, after I corrected that I realized I could have left it as it was and pretended it was intentional but no, it was just a typo.

OMG bitch, william blake is the bomb

the poisonwood (FUCKING) bible
all the pretty (FUCKING) horses

harbl have you read it? i uncharitably decided while reading it that jeanette winterson would be insufferable in person.

Agree about Blake but srsly something like Urizen is like 18th century Timecube.

kinda amazed so many people finish reading things they hate. I mean, if its not required reading and the writing/style/content irritate you, why bother?

yeah, i really disliked 'all the pretty horses' - how typical of mccarthy's work is it?

no it is one of those books that people who annoy me a lot irl seem to really like so i never read it. that's how i make decisions. also really ugly cover. i don't even know what that book is about!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YEeVY4MJhM

i think in general i only finish books i hate when they're assigned and often not even then, but with written on the body, i hated it in that way where it consumed me and i had to keep reading it to experience being pissed off again and again. kind of like the way my dad watches fox news. or you watch the wire, maybe, Shakey?

kinda amazed so many people finish reading things they hate. I mean, if its not required reading and the writing/style/content irritate you, why bother?

― Suckanoosik Chamber of Commerce (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, June 24, 2009 3:38 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ha aren't you the dude who watched two seasons of the wire despite not liking it?

xpost :(

re: jeanette winterson -- how many of you had profs who assigned readings of stories by their friends? (not that my prof was pals with Mick Foley, which would've been AWESOME)

"despite a well-publicized loathing of science fiction"

see this is what i mean. fuck you, jeannette winterson!

man you guys are stupid. I like the Wire. I do not think its better than the Sopranos, nor do I think its the best television series ever.

I run hot and cold with Jeanette Winterson, almost paragraph by paragraph. Love the parts I love, hate the parts I hate.

The ones I thought of here that I finished (Shipwreck, The Book of Illusions) started out well but stumbled badly and never recovered.

I finished Shutter Island because it was short and fast and I wanted to make sure the "twist" was as obvious as I thought it was. It had all these quotes from critics from big newspapers on the back so I kept hoping it would surprise me but it never did.

SMC - I wrote as much in the other thread but - I really can't finish books I hate. When I have done so it usually was because it was required reading.

I do know people who have to finish anything they start reading no matter how much they hate it. Weirdos.

sorry that sounded bitchy, I don't think you guys are actually stupid.

x-post

xxxxxpost

Yeah, I was going to point out that she is a bit insufferable but then I thought "show don't tell".

I do know people who have to finish anything they start reading no matter how much they hate it. Weirdos.

yeah see this seems like kinda pathological behavior to me

i was kidding, Shakey! not about written on the body, though. fuck that book.

i think i just don't like the 20th century either. or the 21st century probably

you know a book i was assigned in college that i hated that i did actually finish was written on the body.

omg me too, in grad school -- I think it didn't come to mind here because I like some other Winterson okay

xpost - sometimes you dislike things in an educational way, and want to finish and really think about the experience of dislike; sometimes you dislike things in a way that's interesting enough that you think maybe it'll turn around and you'll start to see something valuable about the experience; sometimes the badness is so surprising to you that you sort of want to see where it goes next; sometimes you dislike something but just plain want to find out how the story resolves anyway

also its kinda easier to passively sit through TV shows that are maybe not so great - reading requires a good deal more effort and concentration, devoting that to something you hate seems like serious masochism

18th and 20th are my 2 favourite centuries I think, arts-wise.

i didn't take any literature classes in college but one of my law school classes the prof seriously assigned grisham's king of torts and i finished it but i thought i would die

scanning my bookshelves and very few clunkers, i'm pretty good at sensing what i will like. one that sticks out - willa cather - death comes for the archbishop - was kinda terrible

u guys lay off willa cather; i'll cry.

I've skimmed a bit of Grisham because my dad's a fan and he seems like an absolutely terrible writer.

i never read death comes for the archbishop, tho.

I don't think I've read anything by cather - not even My Antonia!

one of my entries on this thread was my antonia :(

if you ever want to try her out, but not commit to a novel, i recommend "Paul's Case."

xpost harbl, i know! tears! but you like old goriot, so...

aye said Mansfield Park, on another thread by mistake, but I must recant because I have remembered I have read The Street Lawyer by John Grisham.

my harblonia

what's that one book written by that one woman who killed herself or something

sometimes you dislike something but just plain want to find out how the story resolves anyway

^^ this happens to me all the fucking time; wikipedia is the best for letting me read plot summaries so i dont have to bother

the cover was black or something

willa cather is not a favorite of mine but her books are more interesting lesbian novels than nightwood imo

the awakening

the bell jar?
xpost

Chopin

I like The Awakening.

under the skin by michael faber

yeah, i really disliked 'all the pretty horses' - how typical of mccarthy's work is it?

It's the one before the publication of No Country for Old Men that most resembles an airport novelette.

we should have a thread on authors you've never read but are committed to disliking and then i would submit: cormac mccarthy.

think eggers would win that in a walk

oh I would have a lot to contribute to that one

yeah that is like every author for me ;_;

i always thought i wouldn't like philip roth but i read goodbye, columbus a few months ago and liked it, but i guess that's "easy" roth

Palahniuk! Zero interest in actually reading anything, seems like a total douchebag

actually agree with you there

david sedaris
david foster wallace
david "dave" eggers

oh yeah palahniuk

lol dan brown lol

i guess i read a tiny bit of house of leaves, but that mark danielewski or whatever his last name is would go on my list.

one of my best buds just defended his thesis...on Palahniuk.

im trying not hate authors anymore, cuz i always end up meeting people who are way smarter than me who dig them, and then i feel like the idiot, this happened to me with sartre recently, though i should say, so far most people who i think are really smart hate cormac mccarthy

Which deserves its own thread: "Movies and books your buddies love that you think suck"

you are a good one, max. i am old and filled with bile, though.

xpost

Well really a lot of Roth is not particularly "harder" than Goodbye, Columbus or those early stories -- he's generally a pretty readable guy!

(Have I ever told a story on here about a Roth lecture where someone asked him a very academic/interpretive question about The Plot Against America and his answer was the most boneheadedly mechanical thing possible?)

i'm ok with people smarter than me liking something i am not interested in

yeah, me too

david sedaris
david foster wallace
david "dave" eggers

second all of these (I think I did read some Sedaris in a bathroom once or something)

ooh, sedaris is the answer

xpost - i thought the later roth stuff gets very meta, which is not something i like in lit (on the other hand, on ilx.....)

lol horseshoe really its not about being like a nice person or "open" in some kind of zen-derrida dorkwaddery, i just dont want to look stupid

I will totally rep for McCarthy btw, if for nothing other than the Blood Meridien which is an amazing piece of work, up there with the best of American historical fiction

The only Palahniuk I've read is Lullaby which is awesome solely because the lead character keeps accidentally wishing people to death.

you know dorkwaddery is a word that just doesn't get used enough

Roth's answer was something like that too many people are looking at the scoreboard instead of the ballgame.

Lets put your books up against these folks's ones.

i'm ok with people smarter than me liking something i am not interested in

― harbl, Wednesday, June 24, 2009 5:01 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i dont care about this, i just care if i open my big mouth about sartre or like cormac mccarthy or whoever and then get sonned by some godly intelligence

thread needs more british authors imo

and now i recall that i have read a Ben Elton novel

haha no, Roth's answer was like a cheer-worthy explanation of how you make a plot -- wait, let me search for this

oh yeah i don't mean going on like "these people suck at writing and are not talented" i just mean like blah, who cares about them xp

fwiw I will loudly and frequently denigrate ppl who go on and on in breathless tones about how amazing Pynchon is because srsly fuck Pynchon

The one I was thinking of was:

“Suppose you and I went up to the ballpark together, and there’s a guy next to us with his kid. And he was saying to his kid, ‘Now, what I want you to do is watch the scoreboard. Stop watching the field. Just watch what happens when the numbers change on the scoreboard. Isn’t that great? Now, do you see what just happened up there? Did you see what happened? Why did that happen?’ And you say, ‘That guy is crazy.’ But the kid imbibes it and he goes home and he’s asked, ‘How was the game?’ And he says, ‘Great! The scoreboard changed thirty-two times and Daddy said last game it changed only fourteen times and the home team last time changed more times than the other team. It was really great! We had hot dogs and we stood up at one point to stretch and we went home.’

“Is that politicizing the game? Is that theorizing the game? No, it’s having not the foggiest idea in the world what [the game] is.”

I am totally reading loads of Pynchon at some point not far from now in my life

Have fun reading something shit that is obtuse in the name of being clever and fucking offensive to boot!

I've enjoyed some Pynchon but don't get the tongue-bath he gets from literary/academic circles. Same with Roth, except I have not actually enjoyed any of the Roth stuff I've read (couldn't even get past the first 30 pages of Portnoy's Complaint)

"Palahniuk! Zero interest in actually reading anything, seems like a total douchebag"
his writing's pretty terrible but what prompts the douchebag charge? dbaggy jacket photo?

the worst book I had to read for school that I hated (that I finished): Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson.

Clarissa by Samuel Richardson would win if I'd bothered to finish it.

at least charlotte temple has, like, two-page long chapters.

his writing's pretty terrible but what prompts the douchebag charge? dbaggy jacket photo?

Interviews. Choice of subject matter.

rabid fanboys

wow Shakey you are so totally the last person I would have expected to dislike Portnoy's, but maybe that's exactly why you do

eh I try not to judge artists by their audience

x-post

Fight Club was good, I've decided not to tarnish my impression of him by reading nothing else he's written.

one of my best buds just defended his thesis...on Palahniuk.

did he literally defend it? like from an angry mob with torches n shit?

wow Shakey you are so totally the last person I would have expected to dislike Portnoy's, but maybe that's exactly why you do

I am not a contrarian by nature I just found the character and his "dilemma" obnoxious

we should have a thread on authors you've never read but are committed to disliking and then i would submit: cormac mccarthy.

there's tons of good reasons to dislike mccarthy -- artistically, morally and otherwise. even in the two books i love -- suttree and blood meridian -- there were moments when i was like "oh shut up." (many more of those moments in suttree, but it's a longer book and the writing is much more freewheeling.) but man the best stuff in them more than compensates. it is very manly-manly stuff and i don't know that many women who are big mccarthy fans. (altho my mom liked the road. and so did my friend julie, who resisted reading any mccarthy for years on general principle.)

(btw i'm not smarter than max, so, fwiw.)

none of us are smarter than, max

Can't find the Roth thing I thought I had talked about, but here you go:

(CONTAINS PLOT-AGAINST-AMERICA SPOILERS)

Roth goes uptown to do a Q&A with 30/40 people from my school about The Plot Against America. At some point someone asks a long interpretive question about the scene where the kid is locked into a bathroom and his neighbor's mother is trying to help him get out. Like, hey, this scene sticks out and feels like it was put there for a reason, like it's trying to communicate something -- how does this connect in terms of metaphors about being "trapped," or about insider-ness versus outsider-ness with regard to the place of immigrant Jews in WWII-era America, yadda yadda yadda.

Oh, says Philip Roth, well here's the thing. I got to the end of the book, where the mother dies. And I thought to myself, you know, this character's death will have a lot more impact if she's appeared in the book before. So I wrote a scene where she helps the kid get out of the bathroom. That way, when she dies, you remember who she is, and feel bad about it.

oh i remember that, that was cool

I may have talked about this before, but one thing I now appreciate about Roth is that he's one of few people who are willing to talk about writing on a really practical level, rather than making it all come off a bit mystical and airy. He came up to Columbia to talk to a couple classes after The Plot Against America, and in one of them someone was trying to ask after the thematic purpose of that scene where the kid's locked in the bathroom, and the neighbor's mother is trying to help him get out -- like is this meant to be about captivity and freedom? an ineffectual savior? And Roth's mindblowing answer was basically that he'd gotten to the end, where the mother dies, and then -- he said it like this was really clever -- realized that her death would have more impact if she'd actually been in a scene before. I'm still amazed by that answer.
Other thing that weirded me out: I was trying to ask him about the "collaborator" roles in that book, like how he saw them on a spectrum from just villainous to maybe deluded and used, and his answer was more or less "Oh, they're just bad people. They're the bad guys."

I dunno, it's possible he just thought we were all really stupid? (The real amazement of the thing was that after the class, my friend David approached, made friends with, and apparently now occasionally hangs out with Roth.)

― nabisco (nabisco), Tuesday, January 23, 2007 11:34 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

what's wrong w/ his answer

(it's from G00blar's ask me about philip roth thread)

better than "I was drunk"

nm read the op

Ian Banks - Dead Air
Don Delillo - Cosmopolis
Toby Litt - DeadKidSongs

nothing's "wrong" with his answer to the bathroom one, I thought it was totally cheerworthy to say a scene is in there for such a plain mechanical obvious reason, the kind of thing too basic for most writers to acknowledge. (the "they're just bad guys" answer struck me as lamely incurious and black-and-white, though; that one made me wonder if he was talking down to us.)

it also sound like the kind of answer an author who is sort of suspicious of academic lit crit gives when asked about his own work--not that he didn't mean it, but it sounds sort of deliberately deflating of critical presumptions.

Danielewski, House of Leaves. Read it in one night, too. Kept thinking it might get better. Was wrong.

Oh no, I bought Nightwood fairly recently, haven't read it yet.

nightwood is a funny name

Haha, there really ought to be a show called Leavis & Butthead where they sit around snickering at this stuff.

(I think the thing with the Roth answer is that most people would phrase it differently, like "I thought we deserved to see more of this character" or "after I reached the part where she died, I felt like I wanted to do more to explore who this character really was," whereas he was just like "oh, it was meant to be important when she died, so I figured I should put her in the book somewhere and stuff.")

Bartheshead xp

terrible

"and now i recall that i have read a Ben Elton novel"
is this the one that looks like a bucket of popcorn on the cover? yah that was pretty bad. wonder if a young ones novel would be awesome or terrible.

No, it was "Gridlock". About how cars are destroying the planet, man.

oh fuck me, i read a ben elton novel, "stark". also environmentally themed.

Also I sort of love both of those Roth answers.

oh hey, a governor's-wife quote from the GOP thread just reminded me of one:

I believe Enduring Love is primarily a commitment and an act of will

sure was for me, if you know what I'm saying

oh i've also read that!

apparently i love shit books.

lol i haven't read anything but Atonement, but that one would definitely work for this thread.

are hugh laurie's books any better than elton's?

will defend atonement

ugh atonement SUCKS

yeah it does. i am with you on Bleak House, though, LJ.

bleak house was awesome, i just couldn't finish it

it's my fault

I listened to Enduring Love on an eight-hour drive to Minnesota, thoroughly enjoyed it.

are hugh laurie's books any better than elton's?

Don't see any way they could be worse. For starters, they won't have Ben Elton's smug fucking face on them.

Bleak House is great but it's probably even better if you don't finish it.

I think I read an Anne McCaffrey novel once, a Sweet Valley High book, and some Dune-series book when I was twelve. I can't recall finishing an awful novel since around then. The only crappy novel I remember starting reading and not finishing as an adult was that Dave Eggers' Velocity one.

several Paul Auster novels belong on this list, including the most recent one, "Man in the Dark", but also "Book of Illusions" and "Oracle Night". For some reason I keep reading his books hoping he'll nail it again.

Just remembered Douglas Coupland's JPod. So bad that I decided the only reason I liked Generation X and Microserfs was that I was young and didn't know any better. After reading it I felt like no one who'd handed that piece of shit to his publisher with a straight face could ever have been a good writer.

I also found Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions so piss-poor that I had to go back and reread James Wood's rave in the New Yorker looking for evidence that he was either drunk of concussed when he wrote it. I've read many bad books with the occasional amazing sentence but My Revolutions doesn't feature a single one. (See also: characters you care about, useful political insights, convincing plot developments)

I should learn my lesson. I've read books that are a slog (Blood Meridian) but obviously bold and interesting and worth persevering with but I've never read one which was banal and annoying until halfway through and then suddenly brilliant.

i read atonement on holiday in cyprus which probably made it more evocative and/or affecting but it really does play quite an intelligent game with the reader's expectations and desires, if the reader buys into it as a straight-up human drama, with the net result that the reader (well, me) *really* cares about the characters and then has the rug cruelly, cruelly whipped out from underneath them

helped that lol cambridge english graduates get hot and horny under the english sun = yeah plz me too

and then has the rug cruelly, cruelly whipped out from underneath them

moronically, eighth grade english-class-ily

xp Dorian - oh yeah, I read Generation X - that wasn't very good. I remember it being better than the Eggers book, but maybe because I was younger.

look i wasn't really in engage-brain mode, being sun-baked and generally not with it, and the meta twist was total sadface oh-em-gee how could you mr mcewan thayrz was a love that would last eternities

it was my chick-lit moment, you might say

anyway i got over it

fwiw would not, not, not write academically about atonement

wraa bleak house

fwiw I will loudly and frequently denigrate ppl who go on and on in breathless tones about how amazing Pynchon is because srsly fuck Pynchon

― get money fuck witches (HI DERE), Wednesday, June 24, 2009 9:05 PM (1 hour ago)

uhoh

Crying of Lot 49 is pretty amazing if you ask me

i remember reading lot 49 and feeling dyslexic because the sentences refused to resolve into any kind of narrative. like reading cut-up text that wasn't actually cut up. is it worth trying again? I remember it was pretty short.

I read V. and will never ever again pick up a Pynchon book. Fuck him.

just realised that it is 'wwaa' not 'wraa', and that i am an illiterate low-life

ha i thought you were just making an enthusiastic noise!

dude dan how could you not get into a book about alien lizard people trying to enslave the human race?

Had it actually been about about alien lizard people trying to enslave the human race and not about hallucinating itinerant scumfucking NYC society douches and their racist acquaintences, I would have enjoyed reading it.

"hallucinating itinerant scumfucking NYC society douches and their racist acquaintences"
i believe this is exactly the form alien lizard people will choose as their earth guises.

they're all at kill whitey parties

Rule #7 of how to find a great book -

does robert englund eat a rat in it? then it is a great book

case closed

Glad to see lots of others hated 'Nightwood' too.

Stephen King's 'Cell' (got as a present) made me really angry with its vast craptitude, but luckily I read it in such a way that it still looked pristine and was able to swap it in a Borders for something worthwhile.

Jeanette Winterson's 'Power Book' was awful.

Amis' 'Yellow Dog' was startling in its badness (I used to like his stuff a lot when I was young, but now suspect nothing other than 'Experience' would still stand up).

Virginia Woolf's 'The Waves' is probably the most intensely irritating bit of pretentiousness I could imagine.

Whoever it was upthread saying Jeanette Winterson seems like she must be an awful person from her writing is totally OTM. She once nominated her own work for a prize she was judging as, in her opinion, nothing else written in the modern world came close to it. And yeah, she writes awful science-fiction while pretending it's not science-fiction and saying how much she hates science-fiction.

winterson is probably my entry for 'worst authors you have never read'

i liked both jpod and cell! though i certainly don't think that either's not awful

Left Behind is mine. Perplexingly atrocious. Even if you were a Christian (or whatever sect they're playing to) I don't see how the glaring illogical mess of it is pardonable.

if i don't like a book within the first 50 pages i don't have the patience to slog through it, but novels from school:
howards end and passage to india - really really irritated by these two
things fall apart - so grim and alienating

recently read eggers' velocity and was so so so disappointed - started off really promising, and just totally sunk itself. will also agree with poster upthread who hated jpod - i read all the way to something like 25 pages from the end and then just put it down.

I just remembered that I read "Confessions of a Shopaholic" right to the end. Ugh.

also: lolz dan, i don't remember it all but pretty sure i enjoyed 'digital fortress' - i liked all of dan brown's books!

i finished james salter's A Sport and a Pastime despite finding it intensely annoying

uck, yes. line by line his stuff is nice, but after a while i want something to happen. i hate saying his stuff is too subtle for me because it makes me feel stupid, but, well.

When I was in highschool (or junior high?) I read Magic the Gathering: Arena. Nothing since has been quite as trashy or quite as bad.

I also tend to give up books if I can imagine listing them in a "worst novels you have ever finished" thread in the future.

I guess I'll go with Saul Bellow's Dangling Man.

I think I've written this on ILX before, but when I was a kid I'd read anything.

Unfortunately this included the novelisation of Last Action Hero. Twice. I've still not seen the film! Can anyone beat that?

probably something i was forced to read in school

I remember Mandee telling a story about reading the novelization of Gremlins 2: The New Batch but that sounds kind of amazing imho.

When I was in 4th grade we had a novelization of the Jurassic Park film in the classroom. Not the original Crichton book. An adaptation of the film.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. I once read:

Jeffrey Archer, As the Crow Flies

straight through?

When I was in 4th grade we had a novelization of the Jurassic Park film in the classroom. Not the original Crichton book. An adaptation of the film.

see also: Bram Stoker's Dracula, the movie novelization

one of the worst novels I ever finished was this book we had to read in grade five about a girl and a pinball machine. I must've disliked it a lot because I don't remember anything else about it, although now I'm sort of curious to know what it was.

Man the hatred for Nightwood is strange. Been re-reading it this morning and enjoying the flow - maybe its not any sort of classic (although its never 'graduated' to that really), but it seems a fine post-WWI novel.

Guess its unfortunate that Jeanette W wrote an essay for its re-issue.

I still wanna chase the version on Dalkey - apparently TS Eliot was a tad too radical in the cutting room but its def reading ok in its 150 page version.

yeah I love that book

but mainly because the main character reminded me of someone I knew (regrettably)

When I was in 4th grade we had a novelization of the Jurassic Park film in the classroom. Not the original Crichton book. An adaptation of the film.

― Mordy, Thursday, June 25, 2009 12:47 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

I think I own and have read this

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21uHws04y0L._SL500_AA160_.jpg

I spent most of junior high and high school reading through class, and while some of the HS English classrooms had the occasional surprise (I don't think I ever returned Gravity's Rainbow to my 9th grade teacher) it was mostly a mix of the stodgy old canon and books they thought would Appeal To The Youngsters. Combined with adolescent me's boredom and craving for stimulus of any kind, I read SO. MUCH. SHIT. Most of it unmemorable, except for I think the third Dune book, which is unforgettable because it contains the most hilariously overwrought euphemism for "erection" in the history of the English language.

Oh, and I read that Magic: the Gathering book too. It was early enough that they didn't really have an overarching story or "brand identity" going on so they just hired some hack to pump out a violent, sleazy trash-fantasy quickie.

ooh I thought of one. Michael Moorcock's "Time of the Hawklords" - its about Hawkwind! They are rocking out in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, battling to save the earth from the squares and their horrible techno-military-bureaucracy. Even though it is written by one of my favorite authors and features one of my favorite bands it is just so half-assedly constructed and poorly executed, really kinda indefensible as a novel, even a trashy sci-fi novel. The best thing about is the chapter titles.

lol wut

Auster and Winterson, and certainly Joyce Carol Oates and David Mamet, are kind of like Prince, in that they may be responsible for some of the worst things I've ever read, but it's part of publishing frequently, and they've written some of the best as well.

http://pics.librarything.com/picsizes/59/97/5997e93d5d6fcdf59302f364677434d414f4541.jpg

Yeah, I'm a fan of Winterson's first couple of novels, but after that it doesn't really seem worth it.

Chuck Palahniuk - Diary
Chuck Palahniuk - Rant (quit reading 3/4 through)

black girl/white girl - joyce carol oates (trite, badly written shit. how did this woman ever get a book deal?)

Oh, I forgot Rescucitation of a Hanged Man--like Auster and Winterson, another example of a writer who kicks ass in top form and then...

i started reading that and just couldn't get beyond about 40 pages

Atonement--terrific opening section, about 100 pages or so, then awful, awful, AWFUL for the rest of the book. Soap opera, war, sub-Twilight Zone ending -- awful.

high fidelity is another ranking favorite for me

meaning uh favoritely awful i guess

Anthem is easily the worst piece of writing I was forced to read in school

it's also the only piece of writing I was forced to read in school that won me $30

oh oh oh, i remember a good one. when i was 13 or so, a girl i went to school with lent me a poppy z brite novel. i don't remember which one. i think i finished it. but it turned me off to weird goths forever.

i sorta enjoyed poppy z's courtney love book. but that's the only thing by her i ever read. (and it's possible i will just read anything about courtney love.)

Da Vinci Code.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

I felt like a housewife.

It was a curious phenomenon that TDVC reached such a supreme level of cultural saturation that even many who would not be caught dead w/ such tripe read it anyway, either out of peer pressure or just a general curiosity over what all the fuss was about. I read it. It was given to me as a gift & I'm down w/ a good mystery caper, but if anything, I was struck just by how tepid & mediocre it was. If anything, it was a book that deserved to be relegated to airport bargain bins & not the subject culture wars & their accompanying DVD documentaries. What a lucky hack bastard Dan Brown is. Even his name is boring.

I read about half of it before quitting in disgust, so I really can't include it in this thread. It was like a special-ed version of Foucault's Pendulum :(

Donna Tartt: The Little Friend

xpost: which, incidentally, is in the top 5 or so on my need-to-read list.

http://ec2.images-amazon.com/images/I/41MYR89YB6L._SL500_AA240_.jpg

digger? please

Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry

Fuck you, 11th grade English class.

black girl/white girl - joyce carol oates (trite, badly written shit. how did this woman ever get a book deal?)

i haven't read that one so I can't speak to it, but she is a really great short story writer (or was, once). it did seem that, from about 1980-1995, she published 15 books a month though.

As far as school books go, I hated this one we had in elementary school called My Name Is Davy. (I remember the title as My Name Is Joe, like the Ken Loach film, but amazon says otherwise.) I was sure it was written by a committee to go over common school subjects. And we spent around 6 months on it. I'm glad I can't remember any of it.

Came across this appreciation of Sons and Lovers and think feels like the thread to revive

https://harpers.org/archive/2017/11/flesh-and-blood-2/

boomers love Lawrence i guess

Some absolute dumbfuck opinions in this thread.

Looking for Alaska by John Green. I have to co-teach that piece of shit every year!

Michael Moorcock's "Time of the Hawklords" - its about Hawkwind! They are rocking out in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, battling to save the earth from the squares and their horrible techno-military-bureaucracy.

lol, I kinda want to read this now.

"For among the ruins of London, surrounded by the survivors of the recent holocaust, Hawkwind rock"

The worst novel I've finished this year: John Dickson Carr, The Blind Barber (1934).

I love most of Carr's mysteries from this period, but this shipboard whodunit as screwball comedy gets more tedious with every chapter. I wish I hadn't bothered. Sadly, it foreshadows the unfunny clowning that mars many of his later mysteries. Read The Hollow Man instead.

either

a teen horror novel about some 90s teenagers being possessed by the ghosts of murderous hippies

or

a thriller about a split personality killer in New Orleans where the other personality was the detective investigating the case, given to me by the barman at the hostel I was staying at in Budapest in 2003.

never read anything anywhere near as bad as either of these.

if we are talking literary fiction then Ian McEwan's "Saturday" probably.

Finished is a more a disqualifier than a qualifier for me here.

If this means like the worst shit that's supposed to be good, which the responses suggest it does, then I would say Stoner is a huge one for me in this regard.

Besides that I did like four years of creative writing class and a lot of the sacred cows of that world in recent years are terrible, voguish books that I didn't finish or never want to read again.

With some exceptions which surprised me the other way, as in the way they were hyped made me think they'd be shit but they were amazing, Rachel Cusk a big example of this.

xpost I responded with London Fields 15 years ago and I still stand by that

Gravity's Rainbow

Came across this appreciation of Sons and Lovers and think feels like the thread to revive

https://harpers.org/archive/2017/11/flesh-and-blood-2/

― xyzzzz__, Sunday, November 3, 2024 4:34 AM (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

boomers love Lawrence i guess

― badder living thru Kemistry (Noodle Vague)

This non-boomer still does, especially the poetry and the first quarter of S&L.

Spent most of my life only really reading classics and while that is far from ideal (good to support living authors and so on), it does mean I rarely ever stumbled upon something truly terrible...if nothing else there's always the social history aspect.

Been reading more contemporary authors since I moved to London, and joining a book club also made me come into contact with a lot of bad stuff. But the badness also kinda defused by the context, becomes more about "wonder what x will make of this" than the reading experience.

a little life
frankenstein
moby dick

only the first was genuinely atrocious the other 2 were just boring

The first that sprung to mind was Shusaku Endo's "Silence". I read the last page with my face firmly grimacing. Interesting that people are dissing "Never Let Me Go" upthread, that is one of three novels I intentionally threw away mid-way through reading, hated it so much.

Oftentimes a novel (or series) will be extremely good and then just end so badly, ruining the entire experience. I hate the ending of "1984", and His Dark Materials turns so bizarre, like Pullman said "fuck it I'm gonna take the deus ex machina from 'It' and rewrite it to get back at CS Lewis" or something.

I intensely disliked "2666", but that's more because I'm a Flaubert fanatic and I saw it more as a crappy facsimile than the homage I believe it was intended to be

"Moby Dick" rules, and the way it drifts toward its suddenly-breakneck conclusion is all-time, for me

Definitely finished worse but my mind insists the answer is One Perfect Day by Ira Levin because I hated it enough to review it

Everything is Whirling and Twirling! What Are You Reading this Summer 2023?

I hate the ending of "1984",

Why?

"Moby Dick" rules, and the way it drifts toward its suddenly-breakneck conclusion is all-time, for me.

Seconded. There's so much weird and funny stuff in it, as far from boring as you can get, unless you were forced to read it in high school maybe.

This non-boomer still does, especially the poetry and the first quarter of S&L.

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 3 November 2024 bookmarkflaglink

I liked a few of his short stories, and yeah an interesting poet without being up there with my favourites

For me its Mann's The Magic Mountain. I think I carried on thinking 'this is so my jam' but it was utter gruel. When I got to read Musil that's more what I was looking for, a similar set of ideas with the execution.

Not to say I don't enjoy Mann. Death in Venice is good, and I want to read Doctor Faustus as I want to see how he writes about music.

Some absolute dumbfuck opinions in this thread.

― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Sunday, 3 November 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Sad to report I can't unsee what I am reading on Middlemarch, having come across this thread again after spending a great month reading it two years or so ago.

Not sure if I finished it, but Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is bullshit, and I cannot stand him

Yeah, the Middlemarch crap is insane on this thread. As though the worst book they ever read was this genius thing as opposed to some bullshit thriller or airport horror novel.

I did regret slogging through all of Thomas Harris' Hannibal, after loving the first two Lector books. But the only novel I was truly pissed off at myself for finishing was The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova. It genuinely felt like a massive waste of time.

i tend to just not finish books that i don't like. i never finished any of the beatnik books i tried to force myself to like when i was a kid except for junkie and naked lunch.
i do remember not liking An American Tragedy. I just figured I should read some Dreiser but it was really boring.
i also remember not liking London Fields enough to never read another one of his books. also i hate the name Nicola in books. that name is only in British books though.
i read one chuck fight club book and it was terrible. so maybe that's the worst. i don't remember the title but a guy would step on little army men until they went into his foot. it was like a bad horror novel except it wasn't a horror novel.
also, that clive barker book about tiny people who live in a carpet? i remember being really relieved when i finished it. it was long!
i have definitely read sci-fi paperbacks that were not good and some were even terrible but they were the kind of not good where i would never remember their titles and usually they had like ONE interesting moment or idea.
oh, also, Bonfire of the Vanities. blah.

Obviously this is not the true answer because I'm sure I've read many worse books that I've since forgotten about, but man I hated Where the Crawdads Sing.

a little life
frankenstein
moby dick

all of these are incredible and very memorable!

so are The Magic Mountain, Middlemarch, 2666

agree with Lily Dale that Where the Crawdads Sing was bad

I was going to say I never read beyond the first 50 pages of a book I'm not enjoying so I've never finished a really bad book. But I see someone above mentioned the Dave Eggers book and yes I did somehow get through that and it was atrocious.

Always wild to me that Moby Dick has a rep as a stuffy boring slog, its so fun and readable, parts of it are virtually slapstick

Moby Dick is great, but there undeniably bits that are a bit of a slog...

I wish I hadn't bothered to finish the dumb Crawdads book

Tried Moby Dick twice and it is just not for me

I finished Atonement and wish I hadn't; I refuse to read anything by Ian McEwan ever again

Olga Tokarczuk is the 2018 Nobel Prize winner from Poland. I just finished her 2014 epic (1000 page) novel The Books of Jacob, about a Jewish self-made 'messiah' who wanders with his followers through Poland, the Balkans and Turkey in the mid 1700s. The Nobel committee considers it her magnum opus. It is overwhelming in its detail - the book has as many characters as War and Peace (and also characters with multiple monikers like in that book) and often veers from a discussion of deep philosophy to follow someone who has to do some gardening or something. It's insanely detailed and great, but also in the end kind of a slog

May have mentioned it before in this thread but a complete Stephen King ripoff about Boy Scouts stuck on an island being killed by creatures zombiefied by a biological weapon. So bad I’m not even going to Google to remind myself of the author/name.

I know the book you're talking about and was sort of half planning to read it one day. I think it's just called The Troop or something generic like that, something you can write in big block capitals on the paperback cover.

Why anyone ever wants to read that is a mystery to me. Like, here's a novel where a group of kids get killed one by one, in shitty prose. The end. If this sounds good to you, maybe you should be on a watchlist.

It sounds like something written as a glorified screenplay. It IS one way to sell a movie idea. I was a fan of Attack the Block. It could work.

Speaking of novel as film pitch, I read Tom Perotta's Little Children and that whole book was just a game of "who would be cast in the movie to play this character?". it was kinda shameless! and the book was not good.
I did enjoy the movie of Election and the show of The Leftovers, so, I do have two good things to say about Tom Perotta's scheme to sell his books to Hollywood.

Ian McEwan wrote one good book— The Child in Time— and other than that everything he has written has been garbage.

Frankenstein is an amazing book, shocked that anyone dislikes it tbh

xxxp - I didn’t know anything about it, it was on a list of recommendations for horror.

Actually online recommendations in general are dead to me. I read the first Red Rising and it’s the Hunger Games + sex/cussin? Books should have to warn you when they’re just YA plus sex.

I think The Cement Garden is the only McEwan book I ever read. I remember it being pretty fucked up.

I wish I hadn't seen this thread, because now I think I have to mention a very depressing book, as warning:
if you like Harry Crews, Charles Portis, Larry Brown, hell if you like Terry Southern, and think you might like Barry Hannah---or if you've read his coming-of-age debut, Geronimo Rex, and enjoyed it, as I did, long ago, likewise some of the short stories in his collection Airships---or under any other circumstances, beware of his Southern Gothic Gonzo novel Ray.
My copy is a Vintage Contemporary, with snazzy 80s design and awesome blurbs---mine would be, Racist, Sexist, And Not That Good At It: Utterly Slack Times Overdone.

The narrator (Ray)is a charmer, bustling between rehabs, as the author was at the time (which I knew from living too close to him in the same small town, Tuscaloosa, but didn't know he'd mined it for this book.)(he cleaned up his act well enough to get another teaching gig, at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, and wrote other books that I hope are better.)

There is one character, a little old man, who has begun to write little poems, which he shows to Ray, and they're good enough to show me a whole other side to Hannah----but he's not in there enough, and he's started writing poetry because his daughter has died, and the reason she (who used to send Ray nasty shots of herself having nasty sex with nasty men in Hot 'Lanta) has died is that she came back to Tuscaloosa and was shot while singing on stage, by a Southern Baptist preacher who was obsessed with her: just one of the little scenes-that-read-like inadequate recaps in this box of "chocolates."

McEwan has written many great books, and I’m kind of baffled by how people here are slagging him off. First Love, Last Rites is gorgeous. Black Dogs is an incredibly beautiful examination of what the end of the Cold War wrought

Station Eleven is pretty pointless

I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that I hate Geek Love, but it gets exasperating and really needed some fastidious editing. Her other novels are all much stronger

xxxp And there are giggly Tuscaloosa in-joeks, some of them awarding N-words, and scenes of cartoon sex, bad cartoons, and serious stuff just as bad, like eventually Ray reveals that he is a Damaged Veteran of Vietnam, replete with ersatz flashbacks---I'll shut up now.

i can't remember if i ever did read Ray. you'd think i'd remember. i was a fan of Airships and Geronimo Rex and a couple of the other story collections. but i read them so long ago i wouldn't know how dated they are now as far as race/sex/etc goes. i read so much wrong shit as far as american male writers goes i ended up taking it for granted back in the 80s. i don't take it for granted anymore. it sticks out like a sad thumb to me now.

i might not have read Ray, but i did read Joe, Norwood, and Candy. actually, i never finished Candy. Terry Southern one of those people better in theory to me. i'll betcha a lot of his stuff would read hella wrong now. par for the course back then.

Southern was arguably a better screenwriter than a novelist, but his late period novel Texas Summer is great

Rudy Wurlitzer is more of my kind of guy

10,000 Leagues Under The Sea. I am partial to Verne sometimes but i hate this one. whooshing around w a psychopath massacring random swathes of ocean life is too much “adventure” for me

*20,000 oops

i deducted 10k for annoying me

Where The Crawdads Sing is indeed bad, there's an example of a book club read I would never have picked up otherwise. Even more than Green Book it was a reminder that there's still lots of liberal people out there whose concept of race is stuck in Defiant Ones mode.

Worst book club selection was Charlotte Mendelson's The Exhibitionist, but I did not finish that.

the worst book club selection i've finished is all this could be different by sarah thankam mathews. irredeemable narrator somehow sustains friendships and experiences little to no conflict; all of the interesting parts of the book are skipped over

Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy, read for my English A Level, remains my most unhappy reading experience in terms of FORCING myself to finish something, the experience really was (for me, mr fussy fussy eater) akin to swallowing down an unpleasant meal for the sake of politeness. Have never gone back to Hardy, my loss I'm sure, but there's all these Donald Westlakes still to read...

I read 3/4 of Far from the Madding Crowd and then just stopped. It was endless and tedious. I'm sure it was a real humdinger in 1870-something.

I agree the opening of The Return of the Native is portentous in a WHOA NELLY THE HEATH way. The first chapter of The Mayor of Casterbridge, where the protagonist sells his wife and child, compensates.

I finish most of what I read so I have a lot, but I might just give the top rank to Gravity Rainbow

If this means like the worst shit that's supposed to be good, which the responses suggest it does, then I would say Stoner is a huge one for me in this regard.

I agree that Stoner is terrible, but Williams' Butcher's Crossing is really good, for some reason I read it after reading and disliking Stoner, but it's much, much better

augustus is also great. but i'm a williams fan, still adore stoner tho i really get why ppl hate it

Augustus is wonderful. Here's a challop: I prefer it to the very good Stoner.

But then I've a weakness for first-person narratives centered on serene, scheming emperors.

Stoner has beautiful writing, but my god is the use of the disability=evil trope frustrating

oh yeah there are many offensive things about stoner

unlike stoner, augustus features a supporting cast of three-dimensional human beings (especially the frustratingly brief glimpses we get from julia's perspective) but the epistolary form kinda requires that of him. butcher's crossing is kind of a crackling "how can this bad situation get worse, and then even worse than that, and also what humanity remains at this point???" western narrative, a crisply-executed feel-bad

1Q84

My problem with Stoner was the cliched scenes and dialogue just piled on top of each other. I can't remember them all now but I know one was literally the guys talking about a dead friend and saying shit like "oh boy if he could see us right now with our sad faces old Billy boy would damn near laugh his ass off, yes sir" etc etc etc

There was a lot of this sort of cliche and I eventually had to stop reading it.

It's a funny one as people keep recommending it to me also, and I have to awkwardly just be like ah yes must give it a try.

that was one of the books in a box of “to read” books that i shipped when we moved across the country in 2017– it was the only box that got lost in the mail, so i have never picked up another copy. there are enough books in the world.

i also read about 3/4 of Stoner and stopped. wasn't into it. it definitely didn't hit me like it hits some people.

i did think: well, maybe i have to read the whole thing to get the totality of...and i realized i didn't care if i got it. it made me want to watch The Browning Version again. the original movie with Michael Redgrave.

I feel like people, say in creative writing classes I've done, think that my vibe is something like Stoner cos I do like realism or whatever but it just goes to show that a book being good is the main metric, lol. Just couldn't get into it at all and it annoyed me. It's also sort of deadeningly "real", like very keenly and determinedly trying to say "this is life, life is this", whereas a lot of other stuff which feels sort of natural has much more going on than that, elements of madness or fabulism which do not always run contrary to something feeling real, idk. Imo.

I think the worst books I’ve read in recent years have wound up being a few forgettable genre fiction books that I culled from genre-specific best of the year lists. Sometimes one of these thrillers or sci-fi books will sound pretty fascinating, and then the premise is utterly failed by the dialogue or the characters and they wind up being not even memorably awful, but just absolute flatlines.

Ian McEwan wrote one good book— The Child in Time— and other than that everything he has written has been garbage.

I'm surprised I haven't already posted in here with Amsterdam. Though it's also a worstness entirely determined by the end. I recall mostly enjoying it in its inconsequential way, then towards the end glimpsing that he was setting up the dumbest ending ever and wondering if he was really going to go through with it, and indeed he did.

With Stoner I liked the writing but it's odd that a book with an evil disabled person, a frigid and distant wife stymieing our protagonist's ambition, a professor's revelatory sexual experience with a student, etc., has been chosen for a contemporary critical reappraisal.

Stoner's an elegant example of misery porn. A Little Life might be the worst offender. What a terrible novel, and when I say so people look at me like I need treatment.

that's kind of what i was getting at above. really bad genre books just tend to be inert. not even worth complaining about or remembering. they exist to feed the genre fan's insatiable desire for more books. and there is more bad/middling then there is good/great. but if you are REALLY a genre fan, you learn how to put up with the bad for some reason. you read them quick. not a good book. next! on to the next.

xxpost

i liked revolutionary road. and the easter parade. so, i guess i do like misery porn. maybe stoner wasn't miserable enough for me.

Desperate Characters one of my faves in that sub-genre of miserable cult favorites. what a book! and i love the movie too. that hardly ever happens. everyone should read that book if that haven't already. and see the movie.

I also feel like I read about Stoner for decades before I finally read it. So, maybe I hyped myself up with the hype for too long.

I never finished Something Happened either speaking of misery. I thought I would go back to it. That book is WAY more miserable than Stoner.

yeah I resented the way in which you were supposed to think that Stoner was some unrecognised genius/martyr figure/latter-day Jesus when to me he was taking advantage of his (under-written but perfect) student and was a passive-aggressive nightmare with his wife

Sometimes one of these thrillers or sci-fi books will sound pretty fascinating, and then the premise is utterly failed by the dialogue or the characters and they wind up being not even memorably awful, but just absolute flatlines.
― omar little, Monday, 4 November 2024 16:25 (seventeen minutes ago) link

I know this is not what you're talking about but this resonates hard w/my experience with the worst Phillip K Dick books I’ve read. I'll be drawn by the lure of some amazing mindbending premise, and then the first chapter introduces a blue collar protagonist named John Normalman whose wife is having an affair with his boss at the spaceship factory or whatever and I’m just like no, not for me thx.

(There are PKD books I really like but not the assembly-line quality of his laziest stuff.)

but even the not great PKD books will have some ideas/thing in them that make you say: how did he come up with that!? that's nuts!
he was good like that. like his bad writing hero van vogt. just really amazing imaginations on people who unfortunately had to write one book a week to pay their rent.

The later PKD books are a lot better on the prose front as he had time to edit them, rather than dashing off a first draft to some rip-off publisher. Avoid Vulcan's Hammer at all costs! (I seem to have said the same thing years ago upthread)

it's just amazing to me the number of acclaimed thrillers i'll come across and they're written in just the flattest way, with sub-Rowling levels of characterization and red herrings, i can't tell you how many books i've read where villainy is underscored by someone who licks their lips or eats food in a really appalling manner.

speaking of acclaimed thrillers that are trite, poorly written, and not thrilling, I'm still made at the WaPo reviewer or whoever it was who talked me into reading Ruth Ware's In a Dark, Dark Wood

tie between Stoner and White Noise. wrt the former I'm just obtuse and the latter felt contrived, though I liked Libra and about 3/4 of Underworld.

i've never really read thrillers. i only really read crime/detective and most crime writers are pretty good at what they do. i've never read cussler or clancy or follett or forsyth. i would also never read any war thriller. nazis and all that. not my thing. and i can imagine that there is some bad stuff within that. i would pick up books like The Day of the Jackal as a kid just to look at because i loved paperbacks from that era but they always looked so tedious. and long! i liked the covers though. same with westerns. there were so many western paperbacks in the 70s. and osmonds.
also, i quickly found that 9 out of 10 paperback horror novels not by stephen king were as dull as dirt and i could never get through them.

I haven't participated in this thread until now because it's been decades since I forced myself to finish a novel I disliked. If it was highly praised by multiple sources I'll keep going for about the first 100 pages, but if I can't get a handle on how to enjoy some aspect of it, it gets binned.

As with many others who posted already, Stoner provides a good example of this. The main character was given behaviors, but no personality. He was devoted to books, but they never affected him in any visible way. He was just such an empty sad sack I refused to submit myself to his intolerable mopery.

i loved White Noise in high school, which was the last time I read Delillo ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Haruki Murakami has basically become a joke. His non-fiction book on writing is self-serving bullshit that his Wikipedia article summarizes more succinctly.

His former translator Alfred Birnbaum has said that even if he was approached about working with him again, his recent output is so bad that he wouldn’t do it

De Lillo became a different writer in the 21st century, and I can’t say I like his post-Underworld works. He honestly peaked in the 70’s with Ratner’s Star and Amazons

That last DeLillo novel wasn’t the worst book I ever read, but…

delillo is one of those oh-how-the-mighty-have-fallen kinda guys. he was a GOD at one point. and i doubt anyone under the age of 60 reads him anymore unless they have to read white noise in school or something. maybe he got too self-conscious or began to believe his weighty philosopher hype. who knows. he could have pulled a mccarthy and written a sweet zombie book. or pulled a roth and written some crowd-pleasers. oh well. he's too old now. i remember thinking mao II was speedy and fun and then six long years later i didn't bother with underworld. it looked so tedious to me and i kinda hated the excerpt that was in the atlantic or harpers before the book came out. I liked The Names! And End Zone!
i didn't read Libra cuz i don't read jfk lit. i get the boomer ick from it.

he pulled a malick basically. they BOTH should have collaborated on a 90 minute zombie movie and gotten all that swaying wheat mumblecore out of their systems.

Underworld was one of the last oh-I-should-read-this-it's-good-for-me books I slogged through.

I read Libra recently and thought it was one of the best books I've ever read. Couldn't get into any of the others I've tried tho.

Libra is awesome, Falling Man is very much not, that's all I've read, squares with the fell-off narrative

If you love Oliver Stone's JFK and Mailer's Harlot's Ghost (the only novel of his I wouldn't toss in the fire), then Libra complements them -- and it came first.

I've never understood why anyone would spend their time reading Don DeLillo when they could be reading Robert Stone or Jim Harrison instead. No, you don't get the ponderous meditations on Our American Century, but you do get something closer to accurate observations of human males.

Libra doesn't do that, though: it's high-toned pulp with ooga-booga subtexts.

it might seem a bit 'cerebral' or whatever as a point of praise but libra has so much amazing meta thematic stuff about 'the plot' or 'creating a plot' as regards jfk and the writer creating a plot. it's total genius but not in a sterile way that you observe, it's like a living and breathing part of the novel and a perfect way of interpreting the story of the assassination.

xpost yeah agreed. it's quite a page-turner imo.

Haruki Murakami has basically become a joke. His non-fiction book on writing is self-serving bullshit that his Wikipedia article summarizes more succinctly.

His former translator Alfred Birnbaum has said that even if he was approached about working with him again, his recent output is so bad that he wouldn’t do it

Haruki is one of my least-favourite authors, and my friends keep recommending "oh yes but you should read [x] before you write him off" and as such I've almost-finished three of his books. I was twenty pages away from the end of A Wild Sheep Chase before I just stuffed it into a recycling bin instead of enduring it any longer. I can't hate too hard though, he inspired one of my favourite David Mitchell novels (number9dream) so it's fine. I'm still being told to read Kafka On The Shore, maybe I will, maybe I won't, idk

Robert Stone can be WAY ponderous. I only made it through one of this books and it was not great. I never wanted to read Jim Harrison for whatever reason. Or Andre Dubus. Hemingway fanboys.

fgti, i have studiously avoided Murakami based solely on the number of people who aren’t writers who love him.

Thought a lot of Murakami is rubbish also. I did read that Men Without Women a few years ago as a friend really recommended it in a certain context and I was curious based on their specific description. It had a few genuinely brilliant and really moving bits but then on the next three pages the same character would talk about the size of their penis or whatever.

His non-fiction book about the gassing of the Tokyo underground is really good tho imo.

xpost there was defo a time where he seemed to be everyone's favourite writer, like idk on a dating website or whatever.

Don Delillo at his best could be really light on his feet and fun to read but also super-smart. he was not hemingway. his 70s stuff is almost all worth reading. though his rock novel was not a fave of mine because rock novels are never a fave of mine. if he wrote a novel about a zombie jfk starting a rock band i would read it though. it could be a late career triumph!

my original answer for this thread was the wind-up bird chronicle actually. wasnt worth finishing but i did it

re: later delillo, i can't help but enjoy the body artist and cosmopolis but i get why ppl would bail post-underworld generally

yeah the rock novel just felt entirely dumb and inauthentic, like when some writers try and fail to understand sport or whatever.

xpost

was the main dude in the rock novel called... bucky wonderlick? i think that was it. jesus christ. like a children's comic.

The only Murakami I've ever read was A Wild Sheep Chase, which taught me that if I see the word "sheep" too many times in a row on a single page I will start laughing uncontrollably.

I didn't exactly dislike Underworld but the only part that stuck with me is that opening section about the baseball game, which I found totally thrilling & miles better than the rest of the book. I think it was even republished as a standalone novella iirc?

i've heard a few people say the same about that opening bit.

i liked the baseball bit but then peaced out when it moves to some jerk's life in phoenix. the only delillo novel i've attempted.

See, that was the part that turned me off to the whole thing. You're gonna make me read a hundred pages (or whatever) about a fucking baseball game (dullest of all sports)? Who the fuck are you, Nicholson Baker?

so funny. i reread Underworld, The Names, tried to read Libra, and White Noise in the past year and the only one I loved was Underworld. Didn't finish Libra it just did not click with me, and seemed incredibly boring and slow paced. White Noise did not hold up at all, seriously not good. lovely sentences but his characters are cartoon cut outs

Robert Stone’s books are incredibly overwritten at times, particularly Dog Soldiers, which I remember being very hard to follow

Yes, Murakami’s Underground is incredibly powerful. I remember reading it in maybe 2 sittings

it's more than twenty years since i read it but it prob permanently changed how i think about violent events of that nature.

Jim Harrison’s novella-length work is excellent. I love Revenge and Tony Scott’s film adaptation (the original 1990 cut)

I’m a Murakami fan but I wouldn’t recommend his books to very many people.

There is definitely a cut-off with Murakami. I loved Wild Sheep Chase, Dance Dance Dance, and the Birnbaum translations of Hear the Wind Sing/Pinball 1973

Jim Harrison’s novella-length work is excellent.

A Good Day To Die is one of my favorite books by anyone.

"I didn't exactly dislike Underworld but the only part that stuck with me is that opening section about the baseball game, which I found totally thrilling & miles better than the rest of the book. I think it was even republished as a standalone novella iirc?"

this is the part that i mentioned above that kept me from reading the book! it was in harpers or the atlantic before underworld came out. it was so tedious to me. the jackie gleason stuff....ehhhh...yeah, not my thing. i never would have finished that book.

Aimless nailed a lot of what I didn't like/couldn't articulate about Stoner. The fact that it got mentioned at all is heartening, in fact this entire thread is heartening. Nice to have our outsider opinions validated. For instance Stoner is so widely beloved - worshipped - that it's hard not to feel a little what's wrong with me? if you don't agree. Hey even for a self-confident opinion-dispenser like me.

I just read a novel by Michel Houellebecq - Whatever, his first - and kinda liked it. So there might be something wrong with me! Reading wise.

xxp Thats so funny Scott bc in my memory it definitely felt like your definition of Delillo at his best. I wonder if reading it as the table-setting intro to a long novel colored how I received it versus reading it as a standalone story in a magazine. Curious to revisit.

i will admit that ye olde baseball americana nostalgia makes my eyes glaze over (don't tell george will or bob costas on me) AND i have very little time for actual historical people in novels (don't tell e.l. doctorow on me).

but it was a LONG time ago that i read it obviously. maybe i have changed. and hearing people big up Libra almost makes me want to revisit that book a little. i think i just saw that book everywhere for so long (libra) - every sale table/remainder bin/thrift store - that i just got sick of seeing it. like seeing bonfire of the vanities everywhere. or the corrections.

having said that, i am a big ring lardner fan! go figure.

Recent posts about pulp appeal *and* meta interest (reminding me of jacket flap promise and textual fulfillment ov Colson Whitehead's tasty pulp art Zone One) has me wanting to read Libra at last, thanks yall. Will also finally check JIm Harrison.
Main thing I remember about Robert Stone's Hall of Mirrors, other than credibly creepy New Orleans old-ass-vibe-of-its-own, which has always seemed too Southern for Southern-ass me (not the music, but the Louisiana sociopolitical aspects---well, see also The Earl of Louisiana and The Lost German Slavegirl and other nonfiction) is the well-funded right-wing Texas radio superstation with the curated news (Paul Newman's film version was named for the station, WUSA.)
Read that and Dog Soldiers in the 70s, when "low-rent" succeeded Greene-derived "seedy" for such protagonists, very relatable at the time, and good character-appropriate melodrama too.
A Flag For Sunrise got to be totally inadequate (and much more, even insultingly, sub-Greene) vehicle re Reagan era wars in Central America, so I stopped reading Stone.

I'm still being told to read Kafka On The Shore, maybe I will, maybe I won't, idk

― Patti The Pone (flamboyant goon tie included)[

(spoilers ahead, but that's not the warning I meant: this is almost some Ray[ level shit, but it does have a few good bits--well, Ray had those xp little old man tidbits, so maybe about the same?)

Only one here I have read is Kafka On The Shore: also the title of a song that became legendary, the sole single (backed w instrumental version) of a girl who then disappeared. Fun w the 00s Uncut/Mojo-type idolatry, then a 15-year-old boy flees something with a Dad-like penumbra, deep into the boondocks, finds a big sister figure, whom he fucks in a moonlight flight, not settling for her handjobs, finds the Kafka chick, who turns out to be his mom, so he fucks her too. By this point, I'm rooting for the Dad-like penumbra to squash him. I won't spoil the ending though. Is Murukami always like this?

― dow, Tuesday, October 19, 2021 10:47 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Cats, jazz, spaghetti, characters who art writers or editors, weird sex shit

Yep, that’s him

― Legalize Suburban Benches (Raymond Cummings), Wednesday, October 20, 2021 12:14 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Are, not art

― Legalize Suburban Benches (Raymond Cummings), Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Robert Stone’s books are incredibly overwritten at times, particularly Dog Soldiers, which I remember being very hard to follow

Dog Soldiers is one of the rare times where I far preferred the watered-down Hollywood version *because* it was watered down. Too much of the novel felt like it was trying and failing to shock (the protagonist’s wife and daughter have disappeared and are in mortal danger but he’s still putting the moves on the babysitter! the two henchmen are actually jailhouse homosexuals and have sex while the protagonist is handcuffed to them!). And yes, the action sequences were hard to follow*, while the film's were great, and climax with one of the best shoot-outs of the decade that also doubles as a psychedelic light show.

*But then, I struggle to follow action scenes in books. I was disappointed by Red Harvest because most of the time I could never spatially figure out where each character was located in any given action scene and who was doing what to whom.

"Flowers In The Attic"

haha! classic!

that book freaked me out. but the covers freaked me out even more.

VC ANDREWS - Classic, Dud, Or Criminally Insane?

goon1's description of Dog Soldiers, incl. a lot of detail I don't remember, reminding me of koogs' link on Novelists No One Reads Anymore:

East Lynne is an 1861 English sensation novel by Ellen Wood, writing as Mrs. Henry Wood. A Victorian-era bestseller, it is remembered chiefly for its elaborate and implausible plot centering on infidelity and double identities

The sensation novel, also sensation fiction, was a literary genre of fiction that achieved peak popularity in Great Britain in between the early 1860s and mid to late 1890s,[1] centering taboo material shocking to its readers as a means of musing on contemporary social anxieties.

Its literary forebears included the melodramatic novels and the Newgate novels, which focused on tales woven around criminal biographies; it also drew on the Gothic, romance, as well as mass market genres...the sensation novelists commonly wrote stories that were allegorical and abstract; the abstract nature of the stories gave the authors room to explore scenarios that wrestled with the social anxieties[3] of the Victorian era. The loss of identity is seen in many sensation fiction stories because this was a common social anxiety; in Britain, there was an increased use in record keeping[4] and therefore people questioned the meaning and permanence of identity. The social anxiety regarding identity is reflected in novels such as The Woman in White and Lady Audley's Secret.[5]...Sensation novels were the precursor of pulp fiction, which were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 until around 1955.[8][9]

I just read a novel by Michel Houellebecq - Whatever, his first - and kinda liked it. So there might be something wrong with me! Reading wise.

Whatever is good! So is the Lovecraft book. Really do not read any further, though, he is a gifted author and writes beautifully but his books are toxic brainrot bullshit

I read The Elementary Particles (Atomised in the UK) and Platform but haven't even glanced at either one in over 20 years and have never been even slightly tempted to read more of his work.

Haha, DeLillo's The Body Artist came to mind when I opened this thread, then ctrl+f-ed his name...

Paul Auster's another one whose peak moments gripped me (love The Invention of Solitude), but then there was The Book of Illusions...

Robert Stone's CHILDREN OF LIGHT is the one of his I love, about a completely disastrous (fictional) attempt to make a movie of Kate Chopin's THE AWAKENING. Bleakly deadpan and funny.

Of Murakami I’ve only read Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and while they were both somewhat cute and affected, I really loved reading them

I completely forgot that I read A Flag For Sunrise! I remember nothing about it other than the nun. I did not like it. But it was not the worst thing that I have ever read.

I just finished listening to the audiobook of Twain’s Tom Sawyer (narrated by Nick Offerman! which made it better), and am now listening to Huckleberry Finn, considered to be one of the great books of all time. The audiobook is very effective in putting me to sleep, which I need right now

I read them both as a child and remember thinking they were kind of weird at the time. I know I should view them in knowledge of the era, but I still think they are just both very simplistic and retrograde, even for the time in which they were written. I’m looking forward to reading Percival Everett’s James, an update