What is the worst book you've ever read?

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One for Sorrow, Two for Joy by Clive Woodall

Just thinking about it makes me angry. It was like something I would write.

My most hated:

- Billy Budd
- Silas Marner
- Machiavelli's 'The Prince'
- The Scarlet Letter
- Anything by Henry David Thoreau
- The Red Badge of Courage

*All were books I was forced to read in school and had to write a book report on. Melville's 'Billy Budd' was so awful I couldn't get through the first chapter & I ended up using cliff notes for that one.

Books I thought I would hate, but ended up liking:

- The Grapes of Wrath
- Anne of Green Gables
- Wuthering Heights
- Tolstoy's Anna Karenina & later, War and Peace
- Les Miserables
- The Celestine Prophecy
- The Lord of the Rings books
- The Nanny Diaries

Great Expectations. Why its considered a 'classic' I'll never know.

I despise Great Expectations. Predictable plot, one-dimensional characters with ridiculous names that are not funny, nothing interesting about the writing style. It's like a 1,000 page soap opera. Yuck.

Oh, and there's something about Nathaniel Hawthorne's writing style that I just can't stomach. I could never get through a single page of any of his books (although I did try!).

Gaaaaaah! You have insulted everything I believe in!

FYI, Great Expectations is roughly 600 pages long.

Yes, the plot is predictable. But viewed in the context of its time and the rest of the Dickens canon, it contains striking innovations. Unlike David Copperfield, an earlier Dickens hero, Pip comes to realize that he is NOT the hero of his own life, and that no one else is either. Of course the characters are one-dimensional; It's Dickens. But Pip is the most complex of his heroes: subservient and guilty, but also ambitious in the Victorian way, and finally, wise.

Some of us prefer the unexciting, crisp Dickens writing style. Some of us don't want to decode every sentence as we go along and piece together disjointed plots, like so many modern writers make one do.

I'm not going to make you say the names are funny, because everyone has their own sense of humor.

I'm sorry. It's just a matter of taste/perception. I like a lot of "flowery", wordy writing (like Lovecraft) and odd/confusing writing (Faulkner, Kafka, James Joyce) which some people strongly dislike. I mean, on my first day of high school English, I announced that I had read "The Sound and the Fury" over the summer and that it was by far the best book I had ever read. The teacher laughed out loud and said it was crazy for anyone, especially a 14-year-old to love that book.

I read Great Expectations during a time when I was reading everything I could find by Victor Hugo. Dickens and Hugo played similar innovative roles as 19th century romanticists who sympathized with people of all different "walks of life", but I greatly preferred Hugo's style. I like dense writing with a lot of intricately detailed descriptions and random tangents!

It's got a few bad raps and I would like to say that I didn't mind "Scarlet Letter."

worst book I ever read...
fictional:
grapes of wrath.

supposed non-fiction:
Communist Manifesto

Oh, that reminds me . . . I liked The Grapes of Wrath, but I hated The Red Pony. I found it to be depressing in a boring, pointless kind of way. But I was only 12 or so when I read it. Maybe it's the kind of book that only adults appreciate. Or people who really hate horses.

It's been a long while, but when I was in Uni, I had to read Kierkergard. Couldn't read it, skipped through it, and almost flunked the course.
For that matter, any overtly philosophical book.

Anything written by John Saul.
He keeps useing the same plot elements, Example: a troubled teen is presured by his/her peer group or abused by his/her parents resulting in split personalities which end up being the cause of the trouble in the story. It's an interesting idea if he hadn't used the same formula in about half of his books.

I didn't like Kierkegard either. Or Lacan. Or any of those intentionally confusing theorists. My professors said that at least one of them (Lacan??) wrote that way on purpose so that the readers would have to struggle to understand each sentence and therefore give more thought to the ideas. If that was true, it didn't have the desired effect on me; it just made me want to stop after the first paragraph.

Dracula by Bram Stoker was one of the worst books I ever read. Really slow paced and boring.

Yet another vote for the Scarlet Letter... and I had to read that in the same semester as Great Gatsby. Ya, I failed that class.

Grapes is okay, but it was definitely not Steinbeck's best (that would be East of Eden).

I have never read Marx. I really do not intend to anytime soon.

I've got three words for you . . .

Waiting for Godot.

'Nuff said.