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Worst book you've ever read

Queen Bee by goodness knows who. I forget the author's name right now, and I can't be bothered to find out where I misplaced the book. Either way, this book was one of my worst reads ever after Twilight. As a reader, I am more keen on looking at the vocabulary of the author as well as the variance in grammatical structures. Twilight had limited vocabulary, but its structure seemed okay to me. Queen Bee was simply horrible.

I'm not familiar with American culture, however, so it's hard to say if there's any value in the content. The story tells of some really vicious backstabbing characters who essentially spend the entire story backstabbing each other. There was hardly any real suspense, honestly, since I was just reading it and guessing correctly how things would unfold. That, and the ending was one epic face palm for me.

The book's quite full of sex scenes though. Guess that's the only value in the book for me >.> But even that won't changed the fact that this is the worst book I've read.
 
Body Rides by Richard Laymon. And the weird thing is, he has a lot of books that I really enjoy.... like In the Dark.
 
The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum
Sherlock Holmes - they are very hard to get into for me


I can't think of any more but will update when I can remember
 
iCE.v2 said:
The Stranger by Albert Camus - Reason: I didn't particularly enjoy reading half developed thoughts (even if their briefness was to create a sense of apathy) and after reading all the emotionless inner thinking of the main character (there was little actual dialog) it all ends in his martyrdom to glorify his undertones of atheism. Most pointless book I've ever read.
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I completely agree with this comment. I had to spend 6 weeks focusing on this book in my Senior year of high school and I was so pissed I had to write a paper on existentialism. One kid turned in a paper that just said "nothing" in the middle of the page. It was awesome. I would burn that book if I could find it.
 
Walden by Henry David Thoreau hands down is the worst thing I ever (tried to) read. I think it was my sophomore year of high school and I just couldn't get through any of it. My mom sat down with me to help me. She read aloud and within 5 minutes I was having to wake her up, it had put us both to sleep.

gallandof said:
another really bad book was the sword of shannara by Terry Brooks, I love all his other stories, but his original Sword sucked, it was a complete rip of LOTR and didnt bring anything new. although I love his newer books and series.
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I enjoyed the Sword, but it was also one of the first fantasy books I read. I think I was 11 or 12 when I read it in the late 80s. I enjoyed the entire series up until The Druid of Shanara, that was total troll spittle. I think I read part of one book after that and then was done.
 
I wouldn't necessarily say they are the worst books I've read but at the moment I'm on the 3rd of the "50 shades" trilogy and to be honest I've not rated them at all.
They were so hyped and are not my type of book at all but I read them because everyone was raving about them, and people are referring to them as porn, but I think they are boring and tame. I've only carried on reading cos the first ends so abrupt that it's like reading half a book, I had to read the 2nd cos it was like ???? when it ended. But the 3rd is totally boring me now.
 
Ethan Frome, Beowulf... and of those english Lit books that you have to read wikis to even understand what the story is about.

But apart from that, Harry Potter series.
I feel like the stories are so badly put together.
Characters all get killed off, new characters suddenly appear, new magic items suddenly become important, and the whole conflict between the bag guy and harry didnt even sound convincing.
 
^
The only thing about Harry Potter... (spoilers)
I have to point a finger to, is the stupid will Voldemort has to kill the kid. Sometimes it gets on my nerves. Other than that, my favorirte books, probably.

Twilight.
Yes, I read, I was 15 back then. And I loved it when I read them. Never when Breaking Dawn came out, I quit, because it was so unbearably badly written, that not even I could read it without feeling an extraneous shame about her and the book characters. Until I finally gave up, took a big breath, and realized that those books were clearly shit. I only liked them because I was feeling like trash and characters made me feel "aww!", but then I just couldn't keep reading it.
Too trashy.
 
If you've ever read Faulkner you know that his sentences are longer than the Nile filled with about fifty stupid similes and metaphors describing the most mundane features in the scene in such excruciating detail that you begin to think that sitting on a Spanish Inquisition rack, the splintery wood poking and scraping you in the back like a bed of nails while the chains pull your shoulders out of their sockets more efficiently than a fat man pulls chicken bones apart might be a better use of your time, which runs very slowly, as slow as honey outside in a cold January morning, or the plot of one of his novels.
 
Probably an unpopular choice, but Catcher in the Rye.

It was relatively well written, but I totally couldn't sympathise with the main character and hated him by the end of the book.
 
Holy Bible - It's both the best and worst book I ever read. Lots of good advice for people who can grasp the concept of analogy. Lots of scary stuff that I hope I never see. And the begats... :rolleyes:
 
50 shades of grey.
I'm pretty sure that if I started a drinking game where everyone had to drink a shot every time "oh my" was in the book we'd all die from alcohol poisoning.
 
OMG it's The Memory Palace of Mateo Ricci. Yes, it's as bad as it sounds. Runner up is Travels in the Congo. Had to to read both for book critiques in a world history course. Then in ANOTHER course, the professor was talking about how awful this book was and that he'd had classes critique it. I was like "Um, hel-lo, I was there." He thought it was funny. I told him he should totally give me an "A" in this course just on the principle of putting up with those books in the other course. Geesh.
 
i can't believe nobody mention the Da Vinci Code by dan brown. it has got to be up there with the worst book ever written. i can't believe it was on the best sellers list for so long. the story is actually interesting, but man that writting by dan brown has just got to go. probably the worst story teller ever. stay away from anything by dan brown unless you like wasting your time.
 
Has anyone mentioned this thread yet?

I mean, I'm answering a bunch of troll-ish posts with another troll-ish one, but FFS sake-- the Bible? Nice political statement there.

Moby Dick? I just finished reading it, as a matter of fact, and while I learned a heck of a lot that I never really wanted to know about the whaling industry, there was a lot of good literature packed into that book. Shakespearean, even.

No, I'm not a fan of the 17th and 18th century habit of going on and on about nothing, but that book was much less tedious than say, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

I will agree that Stephen King should have stuck to short stories. It gave me temporal whiplash. The Stand started out good, then after the second or third chapter segued into an entirely different, and fairly crappy story about good versus evil. The guy really needs to find a religion or something.

I know everyone likes to bag on Harry Potter. The story in an of itself was decent, it's just that the writing is bad. Not that Rowling was ever encouraged to tweak it up or anything-- the publishers were in as much hurry to get the manuscript as she was to generate it.

I tried to read Catcher in the Rye... just couldn't do it. I guess I was spoiled by reading Brian Jacques' Redwall books (good lord, please stop with the describing the food every fifth page!).
 
UrsusVIIILXXXVII said:
Any recent Steven King book. I'm half tempted to even preemptivly throw his upcoming sequel to The Shining. The last book I somewhat enjoyed of his was Cell though apart from the idea of a sound broadcast through cellphones turning people into zombies is unique, every other portion of the story is as if he just forgot he wrote The Stand. It almost feels like he's run out of ideas and is just writing what worked in the past.

I may be in a small minority with this opinion but I didn't much care for The Catcher in the Rye. The stream of consciousness style was well executed but I just didn't care much for the actual story.
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I agree here. I adored the Dark Tower, and Cell, and everything before. But lately? Garbage. WOuld love a movie version of Cell.

To me, it wasn't "The Stand... BUT WITH CELL PHONES". It was just a rehash of any zombie movie.

Worst book I've ever read? Hard to pick just one. I managed to trudge my way through the first chapter and a half of Twilight before I quit. New record of how quickly I quit. Therefore, Twilight.
 
keatingschick said:
I wouldn't necessarily say they are the worst books I've read but at the moment I'm on the 3rd of the "50 shades" trilogy and to be honest I've not rated them at all.
They were so hyped and are not my type of book at all but I read them because everyone was raving about them, and people are referring to them as porn, but I think they are boring and tame. I've only carried on reading cos the first ends so abrupt that it's like reading half a book, I had to read the 2nd cos it was like ???? when it ended. But the 3rd is totally boring me now.
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opalfrog said:
50 shades of grey.
I'm pretty sure that if I started a drinking game where everyone had to drink a shot every time "oh my" was in the book we'd all die from alcohol poisoning.
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Knowing that 50 Shades started as a Twilight fan fiction explains a lot. I haven't read any Twilight, but now I know why 50 Shades is popular and terrible at the same time (and I'm not complaining about the sex, either). I am no literary critic by any stretch of the imagination (I hated every lit class I ever took; I'm left brained through and through and have no patience for art) but I felt like I had a PhD in English by the time I got through 50 Shades of Grey and had formed my mental list of reasons why it's terrible.
 
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