Worst book you've ever read?

Nyarlathotep said:


Ugh, I read that one too and I remember thinking much the same thing. It was too bad too, because I generally like both authors seperately. Together though, they wrote absolute carp.
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Its funny, for years I didnt discuss that book as I thought I had some strange learning disability that only surfaced when reading Victorian historical fiction. I finally broached the subject with a friend of mine that turned out to have thought the same thing. We thought of forming a support group! :D
 
Let's make it: the worst book I was supposed to read.

Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood.


Absolute paranoid nonsense, pseudoscience, a total misunderstanding of technology and economics, nothing but odd political musings. Every sentence I read (as I skipped 20 pages at a time) was pure bull.

Luckily, the thing about Comparative Literature class is that you can skip the lectures, only show up to every other required discussion section, and state the right communist opinions to your TA and in your essays.... and they don't know if you're really a conservative who is pretending to be an angry radical marxist revolutionary.

I have no idea what that book was about, but I passed fine and dandy anyway!
 
a_unique_person said:


Gee, is that guy still hanging around KV books. What did happen to him?
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If I remember right, Kilgore ended sitting around a campfire with friends, roasting hot dogs and laughing. It was along those lines, and cool in its own way.
 
Nyarlathotep said:


I never read 'Eaters of the Dead' but I saw 'The 13th Warrior" which was, as I recall, based on the book. I know that books are usually better than movies based on them, how did '13th Warrior" Compare?
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It's the same for the most part. It's more obvious in the book that it's the "real" story of Beowulf. With the Neandertals taking the place of Grendel and his mom.
 
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou.
 
this is the worst!

None of you has truly died and gone to literary Hell until you've read The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho.

That little bit of tripe is the most boring, repetitive, simplistic, confused, insipid piece of pseudo-spiritual dreck ever put to paper. I dare any of you to read it remain sane!
 
The Satanic Verses.

If the ayatollahs hadn't gone and fatwad all over the place, it would have been ignored and faded away into the nothing it deserved. Rushdie should write them a thank-you note for all the publicity he got.

did
 
The worst novel I read was "Conan the Gladiator" by Leonard Carpenter.

I looked at reviews of the book on Amazon.com and conan.com and I found out that I'm not the only person with a very low opinion of it.

I'm glad it wasn't the first Conan novel I read, because if it was, I would have never read one again.
 
BPSCG said:
I tried reading Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" when I was in college and we were all on the "2001" kick. It struck me as raving gibberish even though it was apparently in English. A few weeks ago I mentioned it to a friend and was relieved when he said he'd also found it incomprehensible. And all these years I thought I was intellectually stunted.

Had to read something by Richard Wagner once upon a time. Vast tedious stretches interrupted by pages and pages of stuff you could go crazy trying to understand, even though it was apparently in English. His music can be pretty tedious to the neophyte, also, but it has long stretches of unimaginably beautiful passages (listen to the last twenty minutes or so of "Die Walkure"), interspersed with sex and violence, so you can listen to it repeatedly and finally end up enjoying the whole thing. Too bad his philosophy doesn't have more sex and violence, 'cuz maybe then I'd try rereading it and I could figure out what the hell he was talking about
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I haven't heard much of Wagner's music but lately I have taken a liking to the music of Richard Strauss, whose music was greatly influenced by Wagner's. He said he was "struck by the lightning of Wagner."

I've been listening to two of his tone poems, those being "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" and "Don Juan" and they're mindblowing stuff.

Laurence Rosenthal was told to imitate Richard Strauss' music when he did the soundtrack for "Clash of the Titans." He definitely succeeded in capturing the style.
 
American said:
Let's make it: the worst book I was supposed to read.

Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood.


Absolute paranoid nonsense, pseudoscience, a total misunderstanding of technology and economics, nothing but odd political musings. Every sentence I read (as I skipped 20 pages at a time) was pure bull.

Luckily, the thing about Comparative Literature class is that you can skip the lectures, only show up to every other required discussion section, and state the right communist opinions to your TA and in your essays.... and they don't know if you're really a conservative who is pretending to be an angry radical marxist revolutionary.

I have no idea what that book was about, but I passed fine and dandy anyway!
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You missed something, 'mercan, it was about your own dreams for your country...

Trolling more, I see.
 
I'm trying to come up with one "worst" here.

Perhaps one of the "Flux and Anchor" series by Chalker, or one of Peter F. Hamilton's possession novels, or "Red Leaves" (the short story by Faulkner), or "The Eyre Affair" by Fford, or the clackers one by Gibson (I forget the name, I tossed the book. I never toss a book, but I tossed that one, I cared as little for the book as the characters), or, hmmm.... that horrid socialist tract my college history prof. made us read (it got me started on understanding rhetorical fallacies and excesses though, it was an inadvertant textbook on the subject), or the psych book written by the psych prof, the one that cost twice as much as all the other books that semester and hadn't a single shred of falsifiability in it, or ...

You know, I can't just pick one. Oh, but I liked 'Jhereg' by Brust, and most of the rest of the series, too. :p
 
When Nietzche Wept (sp?) by Irving Yallom. This things is just so positive it has something important to say, but it's really just more Updikean twaddle about a middle-aged man contemplating adultery. It would make a good lifetime movie, and I hope no one figures that's a compliment
 
Worst sci-fi/fantasy ever, huh? Apparently you've never read anything by Robert King. It's kind of like the Eye of Argon, exept with less descriptions.

I can't believe I finished entire series by Robert King...probaby the only reason I read those is because I played Magic...and stopped shortly after. The books are that bad.

Edit: Actually, I'm reading the Eye of Argon now...and I finished the first chapter easily, but the second... :rolleyes: What's with him and the word "Lustfully"? 'The vines glowed lustfully.'

What the hell?
 
Just remembered another one I had to read for a class. "Iron John" I think it's the book that started the whole "men's movement" where guys go out in the woods and cry about how women keep them from being men. Big babies. If you want to grow a beard, grow a frickin' beard. Women aren't stopping you from being men! Get over it! I read part of it for a folklore class. I didn't know the class was going to turn into a psycho-sexual politics class. I dropped it.
 
The Bible. I saw that it was the best selling book of all time, and I know lots of people who have told me how great it is, but I had a very hard time getting through it. Oh, yeah, it starts out well enough, setting a nice little "alternate universe" scenario, but it just goes downhill from there. I mean, who the frick cares about who begat who and how long they lived? Really, most of these guys don't even figure in the story.

Some of the fables are mildly interesting. That bit with parting the Red Sea had a certain flair, but then the guy tells us not to boil goats. What's that all about?

The whole second half of the book is about this loser who won't fight against authority and apparently just likes to pontificate on lofty stuff. Hell they tell the exact same story at least FOUR TIMES! Come on, dudes, we got it the first time.

However the last chapter is truly surreal. All kinds of weird stuff happening and prophecies and the like. I think the guy wrote this chapter while doing acid. Cool.:cool:
 
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