Subject: Worst Book Ever
Posted by: Legola12
Date: Apr 12 04
What is the worst book you have ever read?
I have read two- "Silas Marner" (sorry if I'm offending you if you liked it. I thought it was so weird) and that children's book "The Giving Tree". I about cried when I read that one. If you've never heard of it, you're blessed.
Your thoughts??
Posted by: Legola12
Date: Apr 12 04
What is the worst book you have ever read?
I have read two- "Silas Marner" (sorry if I'm offending you if you liked it. I thought it was so weird) and that children's book "The Giving Tree". I about cried when I read that one. If you've never heard of it, you're blessed.
Your thoughts??
285 replies. On page 13 of 15 pages. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
CoolerThanU13
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Billy Budd Reply #241. Jul 29 11, 11:10 AM |
Mariamir
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I think David Copperfield is awful. (Please don't take offense, I could NEVER finish the sections about Mr. Macawber.) And two, any of Jane Austen's books except Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Reply #242. Jan 09 12, 6:17 PM |
paulmallon 
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anything by James Patterson Reply #243. Jan 10 12, 2:37 PM |
redshould
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Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. My goodness, there's a book which would take the smile of anyone's face. Starts out bleak, sad and depressing and it's then downhill all the way from there. I kept reading it thinking that it must be one brief moment of light or happiness, but no... It still makes me feel deadly sad many years later. Reply #244. Mar 02 12, 12:18 PM |
mikeeagle1
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It took me forever to get through "The Time Traveler's Wife." "Moby Dick" was painful, too. Reply #245. Mar 09 12, 2:43 PM |
| Yarabokin
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"Eat Them Alive" a horror novel by a guy called Pierce Nace. I can't think of one good thing about it-apart from the...no wait. I actually can't think of one good thing. Reply #246. Sep 10 14, 11:29 AM |
daver852
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The last book I started that I simply could not finish was Samuel Butler's "The Way of All Flesh." It is just incredibly dull, and I found none of the characters interesting enough to care what happened to them. Reply #247. Sep 10 14, 4:25 PM |
MiraJane
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1. Tale of Two Cities. I found incredibly boring, only read first third and half of the second third when I had to suffer through it in 10th grade English. The real joke is friends read the entire book, studied it, got Cliff notes to help them understand it. On the 100 question test on it, I got three wrong, one from section two, and two from the last section. Not bad. I also got the highest mark in the class. 2. Red Badge of Courage. This was slogged through in the 7th grade. I remember there was one passage about being in a mud ditch, wet and miserable. That's how I felt reading that book, bogged down in a mud ditch and miserable. It's also the only thing I remember from the book. Reply #248. Sep 10 14, 7:11 PM |
saturnchick23
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Gone Girl was pretty awful. From my college days, I remember Winesburg, Ohio and Heart of Darkness being very painful experiences. Reply #249. Sep 10 14, 9:38 PM |
MikeMaster99
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Thank you saturnchick, I thought I was the only one not to see the brilliance of 'Gone Girl'. I persevered to the end, but felt no empathy at all to either of the main characters. I'm still wondering what crime I committed for which the punishment was to read Dosteyevsky's novel. The storyline was interesting and the downward spiral of Raskolnikov was well characterised, but the turgidity of the prose! As someone earlier mentioned about Thomas Hardy, why use 10 words when 10,000 will suffice :-) On the other hand, I actually really enjoyed War and Peace (apart for the essay on history at the end - it's written by the winners, I get it!) and Anna Karenina. Reply #250. Sep 10 14, 9:51 PM |
| MiraJane
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Others I have remembered but wish I could forget: Spoon River, Our Town, Awakening. Reply #251. Sep 10 14, 10:25 PM |
Mommakat
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Anything by James A. Michener. Long winded and boring! Reply #252. Sep 11 14, 3:41 AM |
| alpinesquill
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"Perfume: The Story of a Murderer", Patrick Süskind. From wikipedia: After the passion wears off, the people look around and feel slightly disgusted and embarrassed for having just eaten a human being, but they have an overwhelming internal sense of happiness. They are "uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love." (quote) I read the above book until the end but I disliked it, almost for the same reasons I disliked "The Witches of Eastwick" (John Updike). Both novels seemed too "dirty" or cruel to me. That kind of violence I dislike, because it is blended with eroticism. I did not finish the second. Interesting fact: the first was written in 1985 and the second in 1984. From my teen years I recall the utterly boring "Ship of Fools" (Katherine Anne Porter), which I read when I was 14-15. Reply #253. Oct 23 14, 7:21 PM |
rockinsteve
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I wouldn't call it the worst ever, but I think the most OVERRATED book ever is The Catcher In The Rye. I tried to read it, could only make it half the way through. I just lost interest and could not stand the whiny attitude of Holden Caulfield. If you've never read this book, don't bother. You won't be missing much. Reply #254. Oct 23 14, 8:35 PM |
| MiraJane
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The cheesy novel I got last week isn't worth finishing. Nonetheless, about a third of the way thru, I skipped to the end of the book. It wasn't worth the $1.00 I spent for it from the library damaged book sale. Reply #255. Oct 23 14, 8:46 PM |
brm50diboll
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Atlas Shrugged. I'm politically fairly conservative, so I expected to enjoy it. But it's way too long, unrealistic, and full of long rants by one-dimensional, completely predictable characters. Sure, I favor free markets, but that doesn't mean only CEOs have any intelligence. The book is full of straw men. Reply #256. Nov 08 14, 12:37 PM |
HairyBear
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This is one of the more entertaining threads in funtrivia. I read all 260 posts and laughed at several of the descriptions. Although there are very few of the books mentioned that I would rate highly, I'm surprised to see 1984 and Animal Farm pop up so often. I thought they were better than average. And while I haven't read Great Expectations, I did see the movie and it didn't seem all that much worse than any other Dickens novel (and truly I hate them all). Two I do disagree strongly with are The Gulag Archipelago, that was incredibly gripping, all the more so because it's all factual, and Atlas Shrugged. One can skip John Galt's 100 page speech about 3/4 of the way through as just a rehash of the previous part of the book, but otherwise, as a conservative at least, Atlas Shrugged was so good, it turned me on physically. I wished at the time I read it that Ayn Rand had stopped 1/3 of the way through because then the book would have had a happy ending, but then she wouldn't have gotten to the point she was trying to make. Worst book is a difficult topic because so much of what is considered dime store novel material is so bad that few people ever read it, and quickly forget it. Among the classics, I have to say War & Peace, I've mentioned elsewhere that it took me 25 years to finish it; LOTR, couldn't get past the first chapter or two; The Heart of Midlothian by Sir Walter Scott, can't understand a word of it; Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright. If you don't know that last, it's what's called a lipogram, a 50,000 word novel that never uses the letter "e". He pulled it off, the letter "e" does not appear in the book (per Wikipedia, the printer apparently added four words with the letter "e", but they were not in the manuscript), but what a horrible thing to try to read. He did it by writing almost entirely in the present tense. Reply #257. Nov 09 14, 5:22 PM |
| rockinsteve
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The worst book by Stephen King, IMHO, is From A Buick 8. I'm a big fan of Mr. King's work but this one was NOT good. If you've never read it, don't waste your time on this piece of cr.... fiction! Reply #258. Nov 29 14, 11:26 PM |
| DeepHistory
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A book I did not like, although largely considered a classic, was "To Kill a Mockingbird". I just found it horrible! DeepHistory. Reply #259. Mar 03 15, 10:14 AM |
george48
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I, too have read through the entire thread, and have to agree that just because a book is labelled a classic doesn't make it so. I have been disappointed by so many books classified as such, that I simply tune out any one's description of such. That being said, the one book I found so unimaginably boring that I couldn't finish it was The Diary Of A Country Parson by a James Woodforde. It was reading a grocery list,Bah! Reply #260. Mar 03 15, 3:35 PM |
285 replies. On page 13 of 15 pages. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
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