Worst Book Ever?

[Wifetheif]

Let's have a little fun. List the worst book you ever read. The genre doesn't matter. It can be self-published or commercial. All that matters is that it is dreadful!

My nominee in the self-published road is "Antigua: the Land of Faries, Wizards and Heroes"
-- NO dialogue or chapter breaks, repetition, hundreds (yes hundreds) of named characters most of which have no bearing on the plot and virtually EVERY sentence ends in an exclamation mark -- even when the characters are whispering!

Runner up: "Moon People" for a long time the lowest-rated book on Amazon. Has many of the flaws as "Antigua." Horribly written, laugh-inducing, YET it is light years ahead of the first book in terms of readability.

Commercially published: Just about any of Ernest Cline's three novels will do but "Armada" stands out as his dreckiest. Basically a re-write of "The Last Starfighter" for dummies. Our lead character turns out to be the literal savior of the universe whose biggest problem is dealing with "Having an insanely hot mom." (Direct quote) Unbelievably amateurish this has to be read to be believed. Possibly written by a barely literate cliche bot.

 

[NC_Coastal]

Let's have a little fun. List the worst book you ever read. The genre doesn't matter. It can be self-published or commercial. All that matters is that it is dreadful!

My nominee in the self-published road is "Antigua: the Land of Faries, Wizards and Heroes"
-- NO dialogue or chapter breaks, repetition, hundreds (yes hundreds) of named characters most of which have no bearing on the plot and virtually EVERY sentence ends in an exclamation mark -- even when the characters are whispering!

Runner up: "Moon People" for a long time the lowest-rated book on Amazon. Has many of the flaws as "Antigua." Horribly written, laugh-inducing, YET it is light years ahead of the first book in terms of readability.

Commercially published: Just about any of Ernest Cline's three novels will do but "Armada" stands out as his dreckiest. Basically a re-write of "The Last Starfighter" for dummies. Our lead character turns out to be the literal savior of the universe whose biggest problem is dealing with "Having an insanely hot mom." (Direct quote) Unbelievably amateurish this has to be read to be believed. Possibly written by a barely literate cliche bot.

Leatherstocking Tales by James Fennimore Cooper. Twain shredded it. I was an English major, obviously.

 

[Winter_Fare]

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk by a long lead.

 

[oggbashan]

A book I had in my secondhand bookshop for several years.

It was an official USSR publication from the 1920s - in Russian of course - and it was 250 pages on 'How to use a tractor on a collective farm'.

I couldn't read it. I couldn't sell it. One long time customer who had a Russian Degree borrowed it for a few days.

Her verdict?

The author had NEVER seen a tractor. The whole book was quotations from official USSR guidelines on the Marxist/Leninist philosophy about how great collective farms were and that they were going to modernise agricultural production in the USSR. The word 'tractor' appeared about five times in the whole text. What a tractor could do and how it could be used? Nothing. No pictures, no diagrams.


The only tractors that were imported to the USSR were Fordsons, and because the USSR was short of foreign currency there might have been four of five in the whole USSR - claimed by the party hierarchy for use on their own properties. No collective farm actually had any tractors and were unlikely to get any.


The book was in mint condition because very few people had actually read it.

Eventually, I sold it to another Russian speaker because when he started reading it he couldn't stop laughing...

 

[SimonDoom]

It's an online novella rather than a "book," but The Eye of Argon is, without question, the worst piece of fiction I've ever read. It's comically terrible. It was written by 16 year old Jim Theis in 1970, and it has acquired cult status for its awfulness. One can find it online for free without too much trouble. Somehow, it actually was published, in the Ozark Science Fiction Association fanzine. I recommend taking a look. It has to be read to be believed.

 

[SimonDoom]

As far as a full published book is concerned, the one that springs to mind as incredibly terrible is Terror on Planet Ionus, by Allen Adler, a mid-50s cheesy science fiction "thriller," which has every bad cliche one could imagine from a mid-50s science fiction story. I read it as a kid. I think I picked it up at somebody's yard sale. Gosh that was bad.

 

[SamScribble]

If I read it to the end, it clearly wasn't the worst book ever. But there have been plenty of books that I have abandoned after just a few pages.

 

[gordo12]

I'm going to nominate Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I read up to the point the long rant started and after reading about 30 pages, counted the rest that the rant contained. It was a lot. Put it away and never finished it.

I had the impression throughout that it was words, just being written for the sake of more words!

 

[lovecraft68]

Unlike Sam, I used to read bad books all the way to the end. Maybe it was some form of OCD, or maybe I just enjoyed reading so much in my younger years I still liked the experience, or was a masochist.

All around worst, Stephen King's Desperation, which was tied into another clunker called the regulators, but Desperation was so bad I never picked up the other one. Maybe I feel so strongly about it because of how good his other work was, but this thing was just all over the place, a flat out train wreck of WTF?

I've read some bad horror novels from no name authors because I'd read anything horror, but nothing ever left me feeling so "I'll never get that time back" like that one.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Picking on self-pub feels like punching down, so I'm going to confine myself to successful trad-published books. I won't name names of living authors, though some of these might be obvious.

Also going to confine myself to fiction, because if I start talking about some of the badly-written textbooks I've suffered through, I might give away much too much. As SamScribble notes, most of us don't finish or maybe even start the real "worst books", so you won't find "Mein Kampf" or similar works on my list.

Maybe the worst I've ever read is the long version of Bram Stoker's "Lair of the White Worm". The kindest thing I can say about this one is that the words are spelled correctly. It's revoltingly racist, ludicrously sexist ("So she's actually a shape-changing serpent monster, not a human woman at all, but since she's female we can still assume she behaves according to female stereotypes!"), outright nonsensical ("Yes, this is a trap... but by walking into it, we'll surprise her and seize the initiative!"), and the plot reads like somebody half-wrote two completely different stories then mashed the pages together and said "fuck it, good enough".

Hard to believe this one came from the same author as "Dracula". Do yourself a favour and watch the film instead. It's not great but it's fun and it avoids the awfulness of the book.

Runners-up, in no particular order:

Book 1: A princess, about to be captured by the Dark Lord, manages to send something of value into hiding. It's found by a backwoods farm boy living with his aunt and uncle. The weird old hermit living near the town trains him in sword-fighting and the mystic arts. What happened to his own father is a bit of a mystery, but it's starting to look suspiciously like he might be in with the Dark Lord.

...no, NOT a Star Wars novelisation, just recycled a large part of SW's plot. After that I think it moved on to Lord of the Rings.

Book 2: A 200-page story told in 600 pages. Maybe not a terrible book, but vastly overrated by its fan club. The author recycled a bunch of existing tropes that have been done earlier and better by others, and acquired a massive cheer squad of followers who've apparently never read any other book in the genre and think this author invented it from scratch. Suffering from "too big to be edited" syndrome.

Book 3: spends the first two-thirds of the book menacing the female characters with rape, then has one of them raped, then spends the last third tracking the male hero's angst about having lost his temper and killed the rapists. The woman who just got raped gets to console him through this, because his trauma about having become a killer is apparently more interesting to the author than her trauma about having been raped. And then as a reward for being a Nice Guy he gets to fuck her, because getting raped makes her realise how silly she was hanging on to her virginity all this time.

*barf*

Meanwhile, the setting is one of those fantasy ones where key parts of How The World Works have been massively changed... and the others just feel like Generic Fantasy Middle Ages Europe even though it would make *no sense* for it to be that way. Like if travelling outside cities is incredibly dangerous and hardly anybody does it, "bandit who lives outside cities preying on travellers" shouldn't actually be a thing.

Book 4: Pride and Prejudice "sequel" (book 2 in a 3-book series) which adds a whole lot of really tedious sex, a lot of "this was written by an American who did five minutes of research" anachronisms, and very little story. The only way the author knows to flag the Good Guys is to write them like 20th-century time travellers. One interesting character, a queer-coded doctor who is inseparable from his Good Male Friend... and then right at the end of the book he gets hastily hitched to a woman, as if the publisher had told the author "you need to make it clear he's NOT GAY".

 

[Bramblethorn]

It's an online novella rather than a "book," but The Eye of Argon is, without question, the worst piece of fiction I've ever read. It's comically terrible. It was written by 16 year old Jim Theis in 1970, and it has acquired cult status for its awfulness. One can find it online for free without too much trouble. Somehow, it actually was published, in the Ozark Science Fiction Association fanzine. I recommend taking a look. It has to be read to be believed.

I cut Theis some slack for the fact that he was sixteen, and that story does at least have heart. It's derivative as hell and has many technical failings but it feels enthusiastic and there's something to be said for that.

 

[lovecraft68]

Book 3: spends the first two-thirds of the book menacing the female characters with rape, then has one of them raped, then spends the last third tracking the male hero's angst about having lost his temper and killed the rapists. The woman who just got raped gets to console him through this, because his trauma about having become a killer is apparently more interesting to the author than her trauma about having been raped. And then as a reward for being a Nice Guy he gets to fuck her, because getting raped makes her realise how silly she was hanging on to her virginity all this time..

Sounds like the author should publish it here in installments in LW, seems like incel fodder for sure.

 

[Stillrandy]

I once forced myself to read Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" because I had seen the movie "Apocalypse Now" and had read it was based on Conrad's novel. Perhaps it was. But the book's themes were so grim, squalid, and full of hopelessness. Actually the movie was not much better (for me at any rate). Yuk!

 

[8letters]

The book that comes to mind for me is "Zero Day" by David Baldacci. I think I spent more time thinking on all of the implausibilities in the book than I did reading the book.

The hero is John Puller. John doesn't have much of a backstory. No friends, no love interests, no hobbies. One of the few things about we find out about him that he's the son of a famous two-star general, "one of the most beloved generals in army history". His dad "won a string of victories that are still studied today". And his dad won all of those victories in...Vietnam.

Puller investigates the shooting of a colonel and his family in a small town in West Virginia. Puller is sent out alone to investigate. As the bigger plot behind the murders is revealed, nothing about the plot makes sense. We find out that one day before his final trip to West Virginia, the colonel pulled his one-star general boss (both of whom work at the Pentagon) aside and told her that he has stumbled across a plot that was a huge threat to national security. But the colonel didn't tell her or anyone else anything else about the threat. I guess his calendar was too full to possibly save the country.

The biggie baddie has built a team of loyal assassins, so loyal that they kill themselves rather than let themselves be captured. At the end, we find out the biggie baddie is...some mid-level government bureaucrat who was worried about losing his job. No mention of how the bureaucrat recruited, paid for, and earned the total loyalty of his team of assassins. Maybe Craigslist?

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Worst book ever? Lemme see, what was the last thing I wrote?

 

[BarracudaSwordfish]

I'm going to nominate Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I read up to the point the long rant started and after reading about 30 pages, counted the rest that the rant contained. It was a lot. Put it away and never finished it.

I had the impression throughout that it was words, just being written for the sake of more words!

Luckily for me, I skipped the 'long rant'. 90 pages as I recall. Loved some of the imagery of the old station, probably based on Grand Central, but OMG, was that a grind to get through? I was young and knew nothing of the ideology behind it until much later. If I had known, I'd probably have left well alone.

As for my worst book, I loved Hitchhikers Guide, but I left Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency unfinished on a train with a note that whoever wanted to read this shit was welcome to it. Sorry, Douglas - lovely guy, you wrote an all time classic, I've searched out your grave in Highgate Cemetery and you played live with Pink Floyd, so due respect. But DGHDE was not good.

But I suppose my all time z-list has to be Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. I tried four times and never got past the scat part.

Then again, I doubt Rand, Adams and Pynchon would rate my tawdry little tales very highly and they all earned a lot more money from writing than the square root of eff all.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Sounds like the author should publish it here in installments in LW, seems like incel fodder for sure.

Weird thing is, that author calls himself a feminist. I've seen him defend those elements of the story because sexual violence is a RL problem and fiction should acknowledge that... but he just does it in such a heavy-handed way that makes it all about the guy. And he gets REALLY defensive when people criticise how he handled it.

The biggie baddie has built a team of loyal assassins, so loyal that they kill themselves rather than let themselves be captured. At the end, we find out the biggie baddie is...some mid-level government bureaucrat who was worried about losing his job. No mention of how the bureaucrat recruited, paid for, and earned the total loyalty of his team of assassins. Maybe Craigslist?

Gotta love it when the final reveal invalidates earlier parts of the story.

There was a very successful detective story that I mostly liked, but one bit always stuck in my throat. At the end of the story, it's revealed that the whole thing is actually a trap for the detective investigating the case - the killer had a grudge against him, and committed the murders to draw him in and make him vulnerable to attack. But in a city the size of NY, there's never any explanation for how the killer knew that this one detective he had a grudge against would be the one who ended up working the case.

 

[litfan10]

The worst book I ever read is largely based on failed expectations.

James Patterson's publicist raved about Zoo before it launched as the best book he ever wrote, he felt it was the most important book he'd ever written, and as a fan I was excited.

Zoo is a novel dealing with climate change being out of control and animals trying to take control back. Farfetched but I hoped in Patterson's hands it would work.

The packaging with the Advanced Reader Copy was out of this world. They touted this book as the best thing written in decades.

Nope. Not even close.

Patterson is a great story teller. He lost that in his urgency to get his message of 'we need to save the planet now.'. He preached far more than he told a story. Sadly in order to convey his point and forward the plot there were multiple inconsistencies and massive logic gaps.

It was just bad.

I'm sure Patterson feels horrible about my thoughts as he cashes his royalty checks.

 

[lovecraft68]

Weird thing is, that author calls himself a feminist. I've seen him defend those elements of the story because sexual violence is a RL problem and fiction should acknowledge that... but he just does it in such a heavy-handed way that makes it all about the guy. And he gets REALLY defensive when people criticise how he handled it.



Gotta love it when the final reveal invalidates earlier parts of the story.

Joss Whedon also claimed to be a feminist until his wife outed him for all his infidelity and taking advantage of young actresses, then claimed it was them, they were "aggressive and needy"

Pink Orchid event brought some of them out here. Running around the thread all "yay girl power". They forget that people have read their rants and their stories.

Its the issue with any cause, you have sincere people at the core, then the religion style posers who hop on so they can act self righteous and spew hate at people against said cause because their hate is okay. In the case of feminism its an act so they can try to get laid.

In the end they're the ones who are the reason the causes exist in the first place.

 

[Rustyoznail]

The Day of the Triffids...

Dull. So dull. I try to finish every book I start, and boy, there have been some truly awful ones.

I had to read TDOTT at high school in the '70s and I read over the chapters where they were collecting blind women three times before I realised what I had done. I've been told if I had persevered, it got better. I wasn't willing to take that chance.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Something of Gor. I read it to see if the Gor books were as bad as I'd heard.
It was.

The other that stands out was called From Where I Sit, being marketed in local bookshop as the author was from my home town.
It was basically 200 pages of the sort of rants sent I to the Daily Mail for their letters column (tabloid paper that likes to think it's better than that, hugely right-wing, constantly ranting about immigrants and benefit scroungers and gays, and finding shocking terrible scandals that they can tell you all the detail of ). I stopped counting after about the twentieth use of "I'm not a racist, but", only the word racist had been misspelled as 'rascist' every single time. I dumped it in the recycling rather than the charity shop.

Triffids doesn't get much better - Wyndham's other novels and especially short stories are much better.

Dirk Gently is great, though - less laboured humour than HHGttG, and a plot that makes some sense. And not one but two excellent TV series based on it (the faithful UK one and the American one which oddly made it work)

 

[Wifetheif]

Book 3: spends the first two-thirds of the book menacing the female characters with rape, then has one of them raped, then spends the last third tracking the male hero's angst about having lost his temper and killed the rapists. The woman who just got raped gets to console him through this, because his trauma about having become a killer is apparently more interesting to the author than her trauma about having been raped. And then as a reward for being a Nice Guy he gets to fuck her, because getting raped makes her realise how silly she was hanging on to her virginity all this time.

I know just what series you are talking about! Talk about not aging well. I had a co-worker who thought this series was one of the best he had ever read. Harry is one of my best friends but his taste in literature is LOUSY!

And I agree about the "Eye of Argon" it IS terrible BUT it was written by a sixteen-year-old and was his first stab at fiction. Because of that, I give it a lot of slack. It's shame that Jim Theis was the target of so much taunting that he vowed to never write again. He might never have become a great writer but he had the potential to be a decent one. Unfortunately, the world never got to find out.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Something of Gor. I read it to see if the Gor books were as bad as I'd heard.
It was.

The only Gor novel I've read is the first one, which isn't too bad - basic pulp adventure, a little bit of the "capture the princess" bit but not hugely so. I understand the series takes a hard turn towards mdom/fsub slavery fetish content not long after that.

I did read one of his other ones, a book of sexual fantasy scenarios, and there was a lot of cringe there. Guy spends a couple of paragraphs describing something like "abducted by desert tribesmen" as a fantasy, and then three pages of footnotes earnestly giving his sociological opinions about them.

The author is/was a professor of philosophy, at Queens IIRC. I wonder what his classes were like.

I liked Day of the Triffids, but it's not a fast-moving book and I can see how it might not be everybody's thing. I read very quickly, so it's rare that I find a book too slow-moving to be enjoyable.

 

[Wifetheif]

Something of Gor. I read it to see if the Gor books were as bad as I'd heard.
It was.

The general consensus is that the first four or so Gor books are actually not bad. They are by no stretch of the imagination "good" but as sort of randy Edgar Rice Burroughs aping pulp novels, they pass the test. At around book five or six, they become really bad with bad sex and bad writing.
On the other hand, there is "Warrior Within" series by Sharon Green where a modern woman from the future has to go on an undercover mission to a planet of barbarians. Even though these books were written by a woman, there is very little difference between them and the Gor novels. Our heroine is roughly stripped, roughly used, and treated like a thing. At one point the barbarian BEATS OUR HEROINE WITH A ROD and she rationalizes it away as him just being a barbarian and not knowing any better! Imagine a man writing that!

 

[shakna]

The worst book I ever read was gifted to me by a friend, "The Definitive Modern Translation of Bram Stoker's Dracula", which I think had exactly one print run for reasons that will become obvious momentarily. (If it wasn't from the misspelling of the author's name...)

This is an exact, character-for-character, quote from the book. The letter casing, symbols, and so on, are exactly quoted.

oh teh terrible fight who i had to sleep is ofen late bane of insomna or th pain of sleep feAr and with such n unknown horror for how holy saint'd are some ppl each life has no fear no deaths which sleep is a blessing that comes at ??? and sweet dreams but nothing will bring