Worst book you've ever read?

[slow horse]

Or tried to read, but gave up.


View: https://youtu.be/6MqDvdQX5oM

(I haven't actually read that one – for all I know it could be magnificent. But I'm guessing not.)

 

[presta]

Alas Poor Darwin, by Hilary & Steven Rose.

It's just one long what's-bad-is-false, what's-good-is-true argument, like arguing "I can't afford insurance, therefore lightening doesn't have the power to set the house on fire", or "Santa makes children happy therefore he must be real". Crackers.

 

[SpokeyDokey]

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance.

Utter codswallop, but a 'must read' for a mid-teens boy back in the 70's.

 

[si_c]

Anything by Dan Brown.

The Harry Potter series is also pretty awful. And I don't mean the stories which are fairly derivative and unimaginative for anyone familiar with the fantasy genre, but the actual writing is fairly dreadful, I tried to read the first one, and got about a chapter in before I returned it to it's owner. About as much progress as I made on the Davinci Code to be honest.

 

[Dogtrousers]

Probably a sports (auto)biography. I get them for Chrismas sometimes. Occasionally, just occasionally, they are good (Brian Moore, Nicole Cooke) but mostly they are just tedious ghost written pap.

 

[MontyVeda]

I'm not a big reader so have put down more books than I've finished. I can't recall the author but one book that bored me senseless was The Road and the movie version i think starred Viggo Mortensen. Christ it was boring; trudging through mud for page after page, nothing happening apart from hearing an occasional noise, finding a crisp packet (empty), moving on for several more pages then thinking an empty crisp packet might be useful, so they trudge back for half a chapter to find it, then trudge on for several more pages... blimey.

Being dyslexic doesn't help as i read at about a quarter of the speed of most people, which only added to the drudgery of this 'gripping' thriller. I gave up in the end.

 

[ColinJ]

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance.

Utter codswallop, but a 'must read' for a mid-teens boy back in the 70's.

I read it back then. By the end of it I couldn't work out if it was the author who was mad, me, or both of us!

Anything by Dan Brown.

Ha ha - I was discussing him with a pal on a ride recently.

I read a Dan Brown novel in hospital in 2012. I can't remember which book it was. It passed the time, but I wasn't really impressed.

The book built up to a shattering climax, but then... there was another long final chapter.

I kept thinking that something even worse was going to be revealed, but it wasn't! It was more 'John had been traumatised by seeing Jake decapitated and after that lost interest in whippet racing. He took up yoga instead. Elena had flashbacks to watching the twins burn, so she always carried a small fire extinguisher on shopping trips, just in case. What happened to Ian was beyond words, so I won't bother telling you what happened to him. Sally had fortunately overslept on the morning of the slaughter at the church so she missed the whole thing but she still felt bad about it, could not live with the guilt, and eventually went mad after eating 750 magic mushrooms in one sitting'.

It would be like having the original final scene of Psycho 30 minutes before the end of the movie, and then having people sitting around drinking coffee and discussing how unfortunate the whole thing had been!

I came to the conclusion that Brown had promised the publishers a certain number of pages but had run out of ideas with 20-30 pages left to write!

 

[wiggydiggy]

Probably a sports (auto)biography. I get them for Chrismas sometimes. Occasionally, just occasionally, they are good (Brian Moore, Nicole Cooke) but mostly they are just tedious ghost written pap.

Ric Flair's (Wrestler) autobiography was ghost written and consisted of him just carny lying throughout the book. I wasn't expecting him to be 100% truthfull but its blatently a cash grab on his part, luckily only I borrowed it so harm done!

 

[si_c]

I came to the conclusion that Brown had promised the publishers a certain number of pages but had run out of ideas with 20-30 pages left to write!

I fortunately never got that far, but it's entirely possible he couldn't work out how to turn off the word-salad generator and just submitted what he had. You'd probably have to work hard to convince me that he was real and not just an early version of an LLM. Especially given his later books apparently are the same book with different characters and locations.

Much like Ayn Rand he only has one story and just repackages it.

 

[Beebo]

Being dyslexic doesn't help as i read at about a quarter of the speed of most people, which only added to the drudgery of this 'gripping' thriller. I gave up in the end.

I can’t read comedy for the same reason.
The jokes just don’t hit properly

 

[TheDoctor]

Dune. I like science fiction as a rule, but that was just dire.

 

[lazybloke]

Anything by Dan Brown.

Hmm, i like his descriptions of real places; there's a lot of research effort in his books.

Reading them reminds me of my own travels to the same places, and somehow the fiction comes to life.

Was the same with Jonathan Gash's "Vatican Rip", which i read circa 1990 having not long spent a few days in Rome.

 

[figbat]

I thought I'd give a classic a go and tried 'Catch 22'. I'd wanted to read it for ages and then when I did it was awful. I gave up after a couple of chapters.

 

[MontyVeda]

I can’t read comedy for the same reason.
The jokes just don’t hit properly

I get that... I just couldn't get into Terry Pratchet, despite really wanting to.

Hitchhikers, on the other hand...

 

[MontyVeda]

Not a book, but any of my own short stories!

I love writing them and initially think they're great (sometimes)... but reading any of them six or twelve months later, utter garbage.