Worst book you ever read?

[Malthus]

Mine would probably be Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. Just dreadfully bad in every way - boring, silly, pretentious, badly written. Worse than Jonathan Livingston Seagull. 

It is about a telepathic gorilla that teaches us that civilization is bad and wrong. 

[The Brain]

While I normally finish books I've started to read I do stop reading if they are really bad. Books are more boring than movies in this regard.

[MadImmortalMan]

Pretension seems to be a common theme when discussing bad books.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbe6zAjqOhY

[Josephus]

Too many to list.

Luckily, when they were not mandatory for school reasons, I simply throw them in a  corner.
Several so-called "masterpieces" I've found unreadable: Crime and Punishment;Ulysses; almost every theatre piece I've read rather than attended to the play; others I don't recall right now.

I'm crawling through War and Peace right now, if the pace doesn't change in the next 20 pages I'm ready to throw away this one too.

L.

Crime and Punishment is my fave book of all time. 

War and Peace I read once and liked but will never pick up again.

[Arvoreen]

Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography  -- required reading for 9th grade English....I could not get through more than 2-3 pages at a time without falling asleep...

And I'll second Tess of D'urbervilles

[crazy canuck]

War and Peace I read once and liked but will never pick up again.

Agreed.  Its not one of those books you come back to every few years...

I like Crime and Punishment.  Wouldn't put it in my all time favourite categorie though.


Worst book I have read - Any of the Dune books written by the Son.  But I have an odd compulsion to read them all the same.

[dps]

Probably the 8th book in the Mission Earth decology.  The whole series is pretty bad, and just gets worse as it goes forward.  I've never read the 9th and 10th books, and I'm not sure how I made it thru the first 8.

[Pedrito]

Too many to list.

Luckily, when they were not mandatory for school reasons, I simply throw them in a  corner.
Several so-called "masterpieces" I've found unreadable: Crime and Punishment;Ulysses; almost every theatre piece I've read rather than attended to the play; others I don't recall right now.

I'm crawling through War and Peace right now, if the pace doesn't change in the next 20 pages I'm ready to throw away this one too.

L.

Crime and Punishment is my fave book of all time. 

War and Peace I read once and liked but will never pick up again.

Yeah that wasn't probably the worst book i've  tried to read, but I simply couldn't force myself to continue after some 200 pages.
Russian authors aren't my cup of tea it seems.

L.

[Josephus]

Too many to list.

Luckily, when they were not mandatory for school reasons, I simply throw them in a  corner.
Several so-called "masterpieces" I've found unreadable: Crime and Punishment;Ulysses; almost every theatre piece I've read rather than attended to the play; others I don't recall right now.

I'm crawling through War and Peace right now, if the pace doesn't change in the next 20 pages I'm ready to throw away this one too.

L.

Crime and Punishment is my fave book of all time. 

War and Peace I read once and liked but will never pick up again.

Yeah that wasn't probably the worst book i've  tried to read, but I simply couldn't force myself to continue after some 200 pages.
Russian authors aren't my cup of tea it seems.

L.

it is wordy but it's quite good actually. Some good battle scenes later on and even Nappy himself has a cameo.

[Ideologue]

It's probably not the worst book I ever read, since it is I guess considered an important work (and I've read my share of objectively crappy fantasy and sci fi novels), but the book I despised reading was Tess of the D'Ubervilles.  It just went on and on, and I had to force myself to read each page.

Yeah, that shit was pretty terrible.

The worst book I remember reading in the last ten years or so was The Awakening.  You'd think a novel about a Louisana woman breaking free of her marriage and fucking a bunch of guys would be more exciting, but you would be more than a little wrong.

[Ideologue]

Mine would probably be Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. Just dreadfully bad in every way - boring, silly, pretentious, badly written. Worse than Jonathan Livingston Seagull. 

It is about a telepathic gorilla that teaches us that civilization is bad and wrong.

Are you sure this wasn't a Flash comic?

[viper37]

Pretty self-explanatory. 

Some Star Wars book, Crystal Star, I believe.  Horrible.

Mein Kampf was boring, took me a while to read, but it was a good experience, still, as I needed material for a school work.

[Razgovory]

While I normally finish books I've started to read I do stop reading if they are really bad. Books are more boring than movies in this regard.

Same here.  I don't consider books I didn't finish "read".  For instance I tried to read a book called Riddley Walker.  It's written in this weird phonetic argot which really tripped me up.  Never finished it.

[Habbaku]

I'm going to have to second Mein Kampf.  That was a chore, at best...

[Ed Anger]

I liked the ending.