the Piers Anthony novelization of the movie Total Recall. it's very bad!
I haven't read that, but his original novel Firefly is the only book I ever threw away instead of adding it to my collection shelves or trading it back to the used book store. It's horrifically gross. One of the main characters is shown in a flashback enthusiastically participating in her rape as a five year old. Anthony is a problematic writer already, but this was way worse than I could have guessed.
The Bible
When I was an undergraduate, a friend of mine wrote a book review of the bible for the student newspaper.
The opening sentence was: "Not since Naked Lunch has such a boring book been saved by the constant barrage of sadomasochistic homosexual pornography."
Yep. Bible. Pretentious, boring and way too much first - person stuff.
I've read so many it's hard to say but recently the Star Wars book about Phasma stands out (most of the books since Disney took over are not great). Also a series someone on Reddit recommended that turned out to be basically a guy writing down a game of Stellaris. I don't remember the name of it but it was awful.
Canonical answer is The Homecoming Saga by Orson Scott Card, since it turns out that if the good guys have a mind controlling god computer that's always right on their side it gets really hard to have meaningful conflict.
Left Behind. I'm probably a huge idiot for not realizing for the entire thing without knowing before hand what the context was, but I read it with the idea that it was some kind of apocalyptic sci-fi, and then only in the very last few pages of the book did it finally hit me in the face that it was religious doomsday bullshit. I do have to compliment it for the storytelling and world setting, but holy shit was I disappointed with the end direction 🤦
You should see the movie. It stars nic cage and he did it as a favor to a friend. It's fucking awful. funny thing though, my story is identical to yours. Had no idea until it was too late lol.
I was assigned Ethan Frome in a high school lit class and to this day I think it is one of the worst books to assign to emotional, angsty, experience-limited teens.
I also don't understand why Romeo and Juliet is the go-to Shakespeare work that we default to.
How do we handle complex romantic relationships? Suicide / attempted suicide, of course! Just what every teen needs to hear /s
Stephen King's It
Great story, but the writing was exceedingly dull, apart from the first chapter. I even tried getting through it via audiobook and still only made it halfway through. It's just a chore.
I don't get Stephen King. I've never read a thing by him that I thought warranted the accolades.
I like some of the films based on his books, but those are all punched up quite a bit.
I was far too young to read Animal Farm. I thought it was going to be like Charlotte's Web. I did not have any of the historical or political context for the metaphor. It just made me angry.
I haven't read the entire book, but I've read like 10 pages of Fifty Shades of Grey when my then-girlfriend was reading it. Besides the story and subject matter, the writing itself is horrible.
Never read it, just some parts here and there because a girlfriend was reading it and it was hilarious LOL The descriptions are supposed to be sexy or alluring or god knows what but they are so cringey! It took me a bit to understand that my friend was reading it seriously.
First 10 pages was probably the bulk of the story; the rest was just email replies.
The Silmarillion.
Probably the only book I excitedly pushed myself to read, but just couldn't.
That was actually my favorite Tolkien book. He was a terrible fiction writer with an excellent story to tell... but when he was writing non-fiction style in the Silmarillion he was really in his element... and/or the posthumous editing was top notch.
Wizard’s First Rule by Terry ~~Brooks~~Goodkind. I suffered through the whole thing because I was young enough that I thought that’s what you should do when you’ve started a book, but I was also old enough to know that it was very bad. I’ve heard many people say they read it as teens and loved it, but I assure you, it does not hold up.
I don’t know if it’s the absolute worst I ever read but the parts I read were pretty bad. At some point I was like “What kinda Ayn Rand bullshit is this?” and quit reading. It turns out that he was a Ayn Rand make-super-improbable-and-convoluted-examples-in-my-fictional-fantasy-world-to-justify-terrible-political-views school of writing type guy.
In the later books they accidentally open a portal to the part of the world where there are communists and for a while afterwards Richard finds himself unable to eat cheese as penance for all the communists he's killing but then he realizes that communists are so evil it's ok to kill them so he can eat cheese again
I can't really remember of all time, but recently I started reading Dune: Messiah, and I had to stop reading it was so bad. I might be in the minority but the tonal shifts, changes in character attitudes, and jumping right into these assassination plots, all of it just came out weird and misplaced. Definitely did not slap with even 1/4th the power of Dune.
Herbert didn't want to continue Dune and was pressured to write a follow up. It was an era when most science fiction was still published in periodicals. The first half of Messiah are the results that were then compiled into the start. It is like a really shitty draft. Everyone experiences the same thing. I put it down for quite a while too. If you can make it to the second half, it will become one you can't put down, like the first. It does setup well for what is to come. After I got back into Messiah, I read all the way to the end of the entire series, even the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson stuff. Those last two are not like Frank's writings, but are their own thing and still more readable than the first half of Messiah. IMO the first half of Messiah is a great example of what happens when Art takes a back seat to an anxious banking type mentality. Bankers make terrible artists and advisors.
GEoD is IMO the best book in the series as it eviscerates many cultural norms and deep assumptions like fascist altruism, eternal boredom, the coexistence of misogyny and feminism, manipulation that is both brutal and kind, and if an alien can be human. It even infers the question of potential delusional prescience in my opinion. It will make you think about the motivation of leaders and what you may endure because of their vision of a future.
The worst book I've ever read has to be 1984. The book is excellent, but did not do good things for me so it goes down as the worst
Did you ever contrast it with Brave New World? In many ways the latter is more disturbing since the masses are kept busy with frivolity to question their world.
Oh, interesting. I always see Huxley's later Island as the counter to his Brave New World. Interesting to place all three side by side.
I gave up on Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close after one chapter. No wonder neurotypicals think autistics are just insufferable nobs.
The Alchemist and Song of Achilles are some popular books that I thought were mediocre. Probably not the worst book I've ever read though.
That probably goes to Sean Hannity's Conservative Victory that my grandma gave me when I was 12.
True slop. Fuck Sean Hannity.
I enjoyed The Alchemist and The Zahir at the time, but in hindsight I think The Zahir was an elaborate cuckold fantasy. I think if I reread it I'd remember the rest of it but that's what it feels like thinking back over a decade later.
bit of a cheat but 120 Days of Sodom
The one redeeming part is the guy who fucks a horse and it gives birth to a half man half horse and then the fucks that
the rest is descriptions of pedophilia, coprophagy and torturing children to death.
Catcher in the Rye. I try it again every couple of years just to see if I can relate to it, and nope - it's still just as stupid as the first time I read it.
A collection of short stories by Harlan Ellison.
It was an absolutely insufferable read. Specifically, his foreword between each story.
"Repent Harlequin!"
He is an insufferable narcissistic nobhead, but his writing is punchy and definitely interesting.
The sookie stackhouse books that got turned into true blood have such a fun premise but are appallingly written. A friend and I used to play the audiobooks at parties for laughs.
Game of thrones, for me. Made for a good basis for a show. Fucking terribly dull to read.
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