What is the worst book you've ever read?

Post Reply New Topic

I agree about the textbooks. Most of them are more effective than any sleeping pill on the market. They are also wildly inaccurate and, in some cases, riddled with spelling errors and atrocious sentence structure.

I didn't really read Eragon, but I did listen to an audio book of it, and it is indeed quite bad.

Not really sure what the worst book I read was, 'cause I can't really remember all the books I've read.

"Siddhartha" and "The Joy Luck Club". They are both absolutely terrible. I had to read them for school.

Haunted, by Chuck Palanhiuk.

It's a collection of short stories that will try to make you hurl,
especially the first story.

Lordie. I hate Amy Tan. She oozes middlebrow soft-feminism from every pore.

You should read The Glass Bead Game if you want to see what it looks like when Herman Hesse writes well. The man was actually a genius, but I'll be damned if anyone who reads Siddhartha can tell.

Henry James is another author guaranteed to make my eyelids snap shut. His writing is the most ponderous I have ever read.

The very worst books I ever read, to say the truth, are the ones they tell you to read in first grade. I've lost count onhow many versions of "Godilocks and the three bears" I've had to read.

Have you read Goldilocks and the Three Tigers from Calvin and Hobbes? The tigers eat her.

Really? That version must be the only one I haven't read. Sounds interesting.

The worst book I can remember reading is "The Viking Funeral" by Steven J. Cannell. The text on the back made it sound so much better than it was. What sounded like a mystery turned out to be some crime/drug/cops story. If I had known the author was a TV writer, perhaps I would have been more suspicious.

I have to say, I absolutely loathed "The Great Gatsby." But some people love it so it must have its merits--can't call it the worst, I guess....

I'm finding Ken Jennings' book, Brainiac, to be a bit of a slog. He can be condescending and downright insulting in places. I do like the trivia tidbits at the end of each chapter, although I know most of the answers and have learned very little that's new.

Really? I planned on buying that from Amazon. It looked like something i'd really enjoy. Thank you for warning me. It was recommended to me by Amazon after purchasing the book 15,003 Answers: The Ultimate Trivia Encyclopedia by Stanley Newman and Hal Fittapaldi (a great book I wholeheartedly recommend).

My least favorite book was "Don't Know Much About History" which is the only book i've ever read that talks DOWN to the reader. I really didn't need it, but i'm a history buff and I decided to check it out at the library.

Neuromancer by William Gibson - I usually like stories with a futuristic setting and interesting creations of hypothetical technology, but there was a point in this book at which I no longer understood what was going at all, and I had little to no interest in the main character.

Imajica by Clive Barker - I like Clive Barker's writing style and surreal imagery, but this is a book I really, really disliked. Overrated, overly long, hatemongering crap posing as feminism. Anything that focuses on a "war of the sexes" theme is something I either exchange for store credit at a used bookstore or simply allow to gather dust until the day that people realize they should stop hating on each other.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steve Erikson - Some parts of these books were absolutely epic, but for the most part all the characters pretty much acted the same way the whole way through, and, despite various interesting made-up histories and societies the various intertwining stories themselves were boring and written in a way that admittedly didn't make as much sense as they could have.

Candide by Voltaire - Voltaire's wit really isn't something that seems to have lasted through the ages, unfortunately.

Before Women Had Wings by Connie May Fowler - A laughably bad Oprah's book club selection. A little redneck girl's daddy is a failed country musician who gets drunk and beats her mommy. Her mommy gets drunk and beats the little girl, who only wants to be given toys and candy. The day is saved by a wise old woman who lives nearby.
A plot summary is enough to show how awful this book is.

Funny you should say that, but my dad is a classic Chinese literature fan, of things like Journey to the West, Romance of Three Kingdoms, etc. He considers Tolkien to be a poor ripoff of the Chinese classics.

Doc Strange,

I don't want to dissuade you from getting the book. Maybe you will like it. I may have been in a bad mood. It was slow in the beginning, but is getting better.