The Worst Story/Book You Ever Read ?

Anyone got nominations for the worst story/book they ever read?

Kantarii said:

Anyone got nominations for the worst story/book they ever read?

Click to expand...

I think the original Dracula has to be right up there on a Worst of All Time list. I was so disappointed when I finally read it. It's totally incoherent and doesn't have much internal consistency. It also reeks of faint misogyny and "foreigners coming for our women!"

Kantarii said:

Anyone got nominations for the worst story/book they ever read?

Click to expand...

Finished? Or abandoned?

I'd have to nominate FSOG.

I literally could not read for more than 2 pages.

I never made it all the way through Pickwick Papers. Maybe I could as an adult but as a young teen when I tried it, it was just too heavy going for me.

Farrar's Eric, or Little by Little:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric,_or,_Little_by_Little

One of the first Victorian morality stories for children it spawned dozens of worse imitations.

Pamela by Samuel Richardson and Shamela by Henry Fielding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela;_or,_Virtue_Rewarded

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Apology_for_the_Life_of_Mrs._Shamela_Andrews

Pamela is a virtuous servant girl defending her honour; Shamela is Fielding's parody of Pamela telling that she is actually a whore.

They are difficult to read because of the format - a series of letters.

Kantarii said:

Anyone got nominations for the worst story/book they ever read?

Click to expand...

Discounting all those unreadable 19th century novels, I tried the Ghormenghast series by Mervyn Peake and just gave up. Awful books. Unreadable.

Probably going to bug a few people but the whole Game of Thrones series. They just drag and drag and drag and they're full of so much filler. I kind of like the overall story but it's so padded out that I just skim thru them looking for the odd scene that's interesting.

The Dune series followons - anything after Dune, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune was just so sucky. Hated them. Loved Dune tho, Frank Herbert was just amazing with that one. I read and re-read that one so many times when I first came across it. But all the sequels and prequels were so disappointing.

As for absolute worst, there's some awful awful awfully written books out there. I'll stick to the ones above to narrow the field down a bit.

ChloeTzang said:

I tried the Ghormenghast series by Mervyn Peake and just gave up. Awful books. Unreadable.

Click to expand...

Well there you go, just shows that people's taste is so, so different. I think Peake' s Gormenghast novels are some of the best gothic fantasy ever written. For me, they are infinitely superior to Tolkein et.al.

Someone bags Dracula, too - what?

I wonder what your fave novels are? I'm guessing they might be in my unreadable category... but that doesn't make them awful books - just books I don't like.

The Number of The Beast by Robert Heinlein; smugly flatulent, incomprehensibly self referential, pompous and didactic, and dull, dull, dull - I gave up half way through, as I was still no wiser at that point than when I started. As a cure for insomnia, this is a good recommendation.

Can't say I agree with the choices of Dracula, Pickwick, or Ghormenghast, although they are admittedly hard-going sometimes, and I will admit a love of gothic novels, including the worst one ever written, 'Varney the Vampire or The feast of Blood', which is in a category of its own when it comes to utter dross, but it's addictive, and so definitively bad it's a work of art, as is the 1830 novel 'Paul Clifford', with its genre-defining opening line: 'It was a dark and stormy night...'

FSOG lasted about 20 minutes before my wife chucked it in the furnace, ditto the Anne Rice collection I bought her as a joke, and we tried to read 'Twilight', but half-way through I started going through puberty again so that went in the furnace as well.

beachbum1958 said:

The Number of The Beast by Robert Heinlein; smugly flatulent, incomprehensibly self referential, pompous and didactic, and dull, dull, dull - I gave up half way through, as I was still no wiser at that point than when I started. As a cure for insomnia, this is a good recommendation.

Can't say I agree with the choices of Dracula, Pickwick, or Ghormenghast, although they are admittedly hard-going sometimes, and I will admit a love of gothic novels, including the worst one ever written, 'Varney the Vampire or The feast of Blood', which is in a category of its own when it comes to utter dross, but it's addictive, and so definitively bad it's a work of art, as is the 1830 novel 'Paul Clifford', with its genre-defining opening line: 'It was a dark and stormy night...'

FSOG lasted about 20 minutes before my wife chucked it in the furnace, ditto the Anne Rice collection I bought her as a joke, and we tried to read 'Twilight', but half-way through I started going through puberty again so that went in the furnace as well.

Click to expand...

I couldn't stand the Twilight movies so there was no need for me to even consider getting the books to read other than maybe having an alternative to toilet paper around the house. Kant

The Northwest Passage, back in high school. A perfectly horrible story of horrible people suffering horribly. Worse yet, when my son got to tenth grade it was still required reading!

I could not read Siddhartha for a 7th grade assignment. I got maybe 40 pages in during the two weeks given to read it.

I do have to agree with the above statements about GOT, it does drone on and on, but then so do the majority of High Fantasy series. I do enjoy the series however, excellent character building, grand story, but for the love of god, get to the point.

I started the Divergent series, got through the first book, and realized I did not care. Didn't even start book two. I have watched all of the movies currently out with my wife, but I still really don't give a shit.

Wheel of time is another epic high fantasy series that just lost me about 3 books in.

Zoo by James Patterson. Bad concept, bad writing, bad plot, how much more can I say?

20 minutes is a looooong time...

beachbum1958 said:

FSOG lasted about 20 minutes before my wife chucked it in the furnace, ditto the Anne Rice collection I bought her as a joke, and we tried to read 'Twilight', but half-way through I started going through puberty again so that went in the furnace as well.

Click to expand...

beachbum1958 said:

FSOG lasted about 20 minutes before my wife chucked it in the furnace, ditto the Anne Rice collection I bought her as a joke, and we tried to read 'Twilight', but half-way through I started going through puberty again so that went in the furnace as well.

Click to expand...

omg, the Anne Rice erotica books. They're so bad! The first few pages were sort of interesting to me in a "I never read anything like this before" sort of way. After that, it seems to be all spankings? I don't know. I gave up and ended up chucking the books.

The excerpts I've had the misfortune to read of Twilight and FSOG are enough for me. And I can absolutely believe that Game of Thrones is half filler. A friend of mine warned me about those books. I feel like I dodged a bullet by not getting into them.

Jay321 said:

I could not read Siddhartha for a 7th grade assignment. I got maybe 40 pages in during the two weeks given to read it.

I do have to agree with the above statements about GOT, it does drone on and on, but then so do the majority of High Fantasy series. I do enjoy the series however, excellent character building, grand story, but for the love of god, get to the point.

I started the Divergent series, got through the first book, and realized I did not care. Didn't even start book two. I have watched all of the movies currently out with my wife, but I still really don't give a shit.

Wheel of time is another epic high fantasy series that just lost me about 3 books in.

Zoo by James Patterson. Bad concept, bad writing, bad plot, how much more can I say?

Click to expand...

I actually read the Divergent series by Veronica Roth before I watched the movies. I thought they did a great interpretation from book to movie, but the movies went even further than the books. I can't even read the series now again if I wanted to because the movies were so much better.

The Great Australian Novel?

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson was a set text for many Australian schoolchildren up to the 1960s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortunes_of_Richard_Mahony

I had to study it and I am pleased to say that decades later I have forgotten all of it - which is what I wanted to do at the time I was studying it.

electricblue66 said:

Well there you go, just shows that people's taste is so, so different. I think Peake' s Gormenghast novels are some of the best gothic fantasy ever written. For me, they are infinitely superior to Tolkein et.al.

Someone bags Dracula, too - what?

I wonder what your fave novels are? I'm guessing they might be in my unreadable category... but that doesn't make them awful books - just books I don't like.

Click to expand...

And Tolkein I love (well, Lord of the Rings anyhow). Just goes to show, doesn't it.

Fave novels? I have to admit to a fatal weakness for Georgette Heyer's regency romances. I love those books. I have every single one of them and I've read some of them so many times they're in pieces, but even after I've bought a replacement I can't bear to part with my old copy. Silly, I know.

Aside from Heyer, I think my all time fave would be "Shibumi" by Trevanian. The first time I read that book, I was just blown away. Loved it. Have 3 copies now. my old in pieces paperback, newer but also in pieces paperback and then I gave up and bought a hardback copy and that's still in one piece!!!

Carnal_Flower said:

I'd have to nominate FSOG.

I literally could not read for more than 2 pages.

Click to expand...

Kantarii said:

I couldn't stand the Twilight movies so there was no need for me to even consider getting the books to read other than maybe having an alternative to toilet paper around the house. Kant

Click to expand...

Sooo... The Twilight books hooked me. I lost full nights of sleep reading them, and I'm brave enough to admit that when Jacob's half of Breaking Dawn ended, I literally gasped.

Also, I agree that FSoG is one of the worst written books to ever make a shitload of money. Ana's dialogue alone is enough to disqualify it from being actual literature.
But I've read it at least three times.

I was a computer programmer and I read many a manual that seemed to have been written in Chinese and translated to English by some idiot who read neither language.

R. Richard said:

I was a computer programmer and I read many a manual that seemed to have been written in Chinese and translated to English by some idiot who read neither language.

Click to expand...

The worst translation and manual is English As She Is Spoke:

http://www.exclassics.com/espoke/espkpdf.pdf

I'm going to toss one out there that for horror fans might be a head scratcher

Off Season. Jack Ketchum. I think this thing may have become a sort of franchise because when I just quickly googled it to make sure I had the author right, I noticed a lot of of things related to it.

This book has a cult following, down as some sort of no limits masterpiece. What it was was senseless torture porn with even more non nonsensical sex thrown in. It was the written version of all those really bad over the top splatter gore movies.

It was the type of book that had the foot come off the gas a few times it would have fallen under scary/creepy/disturbing...instead its flooring it to the point you're rolling your eyes and going 'we get it" and you cna feel the fake pigs blood splattering around you.

Ketchum's 'plot' had so many holes in it that even though I was sixteen when I read it I was like wait, what, how....seriously? Oh, come on. I reread part of it once when I was much older to see if it was an age thing-done that with a few books- I thought even lower of it at 30.

Ketchum was definitely the kid who tortured bugs and perhaps small animals and had fantasies of torturing cool kids because he went way to far to say "see how really really cool I am?"

he had another book, girl next door. Same thing, plot could have been decent but so over the top you tossed it aside. The Nazi's didn't torture people like this in real life

When I read horror I look at the author and think 'surly dark soul who can put it to paper' ala Clive Barker for sure, or look at me poser. Ketchum is the latter.

The majority of that post was actually taken from a review I did of it for a little micro published horror fanzine a friend of mine had going in the late eighties. I think the 'print run' was 25-30 copieso

If the first paragraph doesn't captivate me, I know I'm going to struggle reading a book in its entirety, but I do make the effort as I believe that all authors have something to say. However, I've been struggling to finish a book I started almost a year ago and I'm not blaming the author, but myself.

"A Brief History of Time."

Physics is interesting and Hawking's book was written in a language that even those not interested in physics can understand. So why can't I understand what he wrote? lololol

kcRollins said:

If the first paragraph doesn't captivate me, I know I'm going to struggle reading a book in its entirety, but I do make the effort as I believe that all authors have something to say. However, I've been struggling to finish a book I started almost a year ago and I'm not blaming the author, but myself.

"A Brief History of Time."

Physics is interesting and Hawking's book was written in a language that even those not interested in physics can understand. So why can't I understand what he wrote? lololol

Click to expand...

I wish I could be like that, okay this first page sucked, or even first chapter. Instead even with bad books I seem to get this OCD like drive I should finish it. Maybe its just masochism.

If the book is bad, it's unmemorable.

Zeb_Carter said:

If the book is bad, it's unmemorable.

Click to expand...

That's a damn good point, there. Kant