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

Don't get me started.

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

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

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

Need I say more?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reads better as The Unbearable Lightness of Barf.

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

The answers are 3 and 42, respectively.

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

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

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

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

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

if those are the worst, you really should read more

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

thankfully it was short.

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

i liked mansfield park

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

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

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

The Bell Jar

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

High Fidelity by Beezlebub Hornby.

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

there are more

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

> 'Dead Famous' by Ben Elton

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

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

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

Lies.

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

So many to chose from, mostly read at University:

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

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

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

Mayor of Casterbridge

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

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

wau

i.e. u mad

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

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

London Fields

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

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

Hardy is mad classic you fules.

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

It's a bag of shite?

good post, very informative^^^

I feel I engaged with the work.

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

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

JOSEPH ANDREWS henry fielding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

^^^ Correct

i don't finish bad books

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

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

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

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

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

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

I limped through DeLillo's Underworld.

Thought you were gonna go with Ada.

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

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