What is the worst book you've ever read?

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I feel so much better about never getting past chapter 1 and chapter 3 respectively of Moby Dick and Don Quixote (and yes, I have been trying for over 10 yrs...just never bored enough)

Can I add, The Dice Man, Luke Rhinehart..(um gender politics probably), also the worst of Terry Pratchett's books is definately Pyramids (just nothing about it is good...)

Oh and everything ever by Anne Rice. Aside from the offensive outbreaks of pedophilia, cringemaking cliched descriptive passages (yes, I have nearly wet myself laughing at one of the *sex scenes*), and the increasingly deranged plots I personally blame her for the appallling sight of Tom Cruise in a frizzled blonde wig. Oh and her alter ego smut books are terrible too.

I also found "the Dante club" by Matthew Pearl hard going as well.

Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' was atrocious reading. So was local Barbecue King/Confederate Apologist Maurice Bessinger's rather pissy little epistle entitled 'Defending My Heritage'.

FWIW, 'Defending My Heritage' basically recounts the glory days of his life, as he built his Barbecue restaurant business from the 50's,through the 60's where he hired thugs to ensure that his business didn't become racially integrated, to his early 70's gubernatorial campaign where he ran for 'White Rights', to the 80's when he built his business further and got east coast (US) distribution for his product only to lose most of his business when the news got out that he supported the belief that black people were better off under slavery. --The book is his account, and espouses quite a bit of his personal philosophy.

I forgot another couple of awful ones, if nothing else it might save some people the pain of reading them
Imposture, by Benjamin Markovits...I remember finding Polidori's suicide a massive relief, mainly as it meant the end of the book....
and
Darkmans by Nicola Barker...over 800 pages to go nowhere- makes Imajica seem refreshngly concise...yes. That bad. On the subject of Clive Barker, Mister B, Gone, why?

Oh and Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel. I'm not a fan of "look at my awful life, far worse than yours" school of biography at the best of times...

The time ships by Stephen Baxter. Meant to be a sequal to the Wells' time machine but held almost no relation to it.

Sweet Valley High. My mother actually got me a set of these books one year for Christmas when I was in my teens, and it was possibly the worst present I'd ever received that wasn't a prank gift from my brother. I was pretty good at showing what I did and didn't like to read, so how my mother got the idea I would want a book series about a bunch of brain-dead adolescents in a high school is beyond me! The real school I was going to was bad enough.

Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. While the story is a great idea, Brown's writing was apparently never edited, but rushed into print ASAP. In my opinion, the book was simply an apologetic to Freemasonry (to which Brown was "honoured" to have received an invitation to join) while simultaneously describing the (Freemasonic) villain's actions and behaviors in ways that resembled a cheap melodrama. Even filmmaker Ron Howard shelved plans in 2013 to adapt the book into the third installment of the Robert Langdon series, and skip ahead to Brown's most recent Langdon novel, Inferno.