What is/are the worst book(s) you have read?

Question

Please provide title, author, and reason for your distaste.

Answer 1

Left Behind books. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Morbidly mentally disturbed religiosity.

Answer 2

House by Dekker and Perreti. Horrible book. About 350 pages of sentence fragments. All these people running around a maze in a basement and you cant keep track of who is where. And the surprise ending was a total joke. I knew it on like page 10. It was so bad that I finished it but I returned it to B and N and got my money back. Pax - C

Answer 3

Two books read in the past couple of months that I thought were really bad are:

C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity - Not good as Christian apologia, not good as much else either. The beginning unconvincingly proves for all time the existence of God and right away moves to why the existence of God immediately leads to the need to believe in arbitrary Christian doctrines and follow arbitrary guidelines for behavior. What is the evidence for any of this? Goofy metaphors that have nothing to do with what he's talking about ("man is, uh, like a lighthouse, and God is the light shining in..." or "Jesus is like a real man and I am like a tin soldier".... no. People are not those things. If you are going to write about these topics, do it with at least an attempt at being comprehensible.)

Norman Mailer - The Naked and the Dead - I'm probably predisposed to not liking literary naturalism, but Mailer takes that concept, and 700 pages later he'd been beating you over the head with it.. not just with mediocre prose but with dumb literary techniques (time machines, choruses).

They share the attributes of being badly written and being the subjects of lots and lots of undeserved praise.

Answer 4

Inkspell, by Cornelia F...[a.k.a The writer of "Dragon Rider" I got my username from Eragon fyi] Ughhh!! I can't stand it. Inkheart was pretty good but Inkspell just sucked. I can't believe it! There was action but it just wasn't right. It was just a confusing jumble of all these different characters and how they felt every single chapter. The author had to change narratives so many times I finally just stoped reading on Ch. 20. I thought it would get better, it got worse.

Answer 5

The worst book that I have ever read was 'Great Expectations' by Charles Dickens. It might have actually been good if I hadn't been forced to read twenty chapters a week over my Christmas vacation by a sadistic teacher who didn't actually understand half of the course material.

Anything by Sylvia Brown comes in a close second, though. I agree with The Old Dog. My mom is thoroughly convinced that she is real, and I think that she is just a glorified phone psychic.

Answer 6

Fear & Loathing in LasVegas by Hunter S.Thompson.

It maybe of literary merit but I felt like I was on the worse drug trip of a lifetime.
We Need to talk about Kevin, actually an interesting concept but I couldn't finish it because it was so disturbing.

Any Di Morrisey book, written to such a formula and a boring one with no depth at all.

Answer 7

Most of these I never finished, but ...
Harry Potter. For dumbed-down ten year olds.
The Bridges of Madison County. Pure slush.
The Shipping News by E Annie Proulx (prolix) - a warmed-up fairy tale in a hideous style.
The Golden man, by Victor Wolfgang von Hagen. Full of inexplicable errors such as 'They were on the Equator, so the Pole Star was right overhead'.

Answer 8

To the other side and back, by sylvia browne. or insight by sylvia browne. Never read such drivel in my life. What I don't understand is how my own mother could be hoodwinked into believing this charlatan! She actually believes the lies this female author is selling. Can't believe it.

Answer 9

I started to read the 1st Harry Potter years ago and it was so godawful I tossed it.