What are the worst books you've ever finished?

OfflerCrocGod

Kazujo wrote:

I didn't actually finish it but the Hobbit turned me off Tolkien altogether, too many characters and detail

WTF??? Were you 6 or something?? That's a kids book and I found it very easy to keep track of all the characters.

monkeyfudge wrote:

And I had to keep reading as I wanted to know what the big deal was with the Rama thing... imagine my disappointment when it turns out that

God is behind it all

What a bloody cop out!

Thanks for sparing me the bother of reading those trashy extra books I kept on meaning to finish the series because of the strenght of the first book....never got round to it. Thanks for warning me

timamansio

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen - long, boring and must have the most irritating characters in fiction. I don't know how I got through it but I did!

gnu

funky penguin wrote:

Im sure the DaVinci Code will be on this list at numerous points.

I know it's predictable, but for me it's The DaVinci Code. The worst thing is, I just felt I had to keep reading - I quite liked the story even though it was so seriously flawed. But it was so badly written that nearly every page got on my nerves.

funky penguin

sey eye eerga

solo1

I didn't actually finish it but the Hobbit turned me off Tolkien altogether, too many characters and detail

Er .. I'm not sure how to take that. I can understand anyone not liking The Hobbit, but because it had "too many characters and detail"? Jesus. Don't even try War and Peace.

MizzKattt

Confessions of an Ugly Step Sister by Gregory Maquire
This story was told from Cinderella's step sister's point of view. Maquire also wrote Mirror, Mirror and Wicked. These popular stories are written from an alternate character's point of view. Great idea, poor execution. The story drudged on and on about mundane details and left out plot development. Horrid.

matrim

The last 3 Robert Jordan books, mind numbingly boring.

I also absolutely hated Emma, so boring and annoying.

galactus

mycroft wrote:

the cryptonomicon

It started well but then the last quarter is like a bunch o geeks, meets deliverance meets a tonne of gold. I read it with my jaw on the floor going, "just how bad can this get"

Total total waste of time.

MAC user, eh?

Trojan

Ah, Robert Jordan. Book 10, Crossroads to Twilight: ~700 pages, which can be summarised as

Egwene led rebels to Tar Valon; got taken hostage

. And that's being generous.

More:

James Schellenberg online review wrote:

Crossroads of Twilight is a book where literally nothing happens, an astonishing feat considering how long it is; with this ability of writing an enormous book filled with nothing, Jordan could conceivably write an infinite set of books in the series.

mycroft

galactus wrote:

MAC user, eh?

G4 powerbook. Brent Sienna is my god.

The last 3 Robert Jordan books, mind numbingly boring.

It's the 3 part that's special. It's not like you read the first one and said "that was a total waste of time, but I'll give him one more chance" No you back twice more.

Velvet Vocals

Hippopotamus - Stephen Fry

This book is without a shadow of a doubt the worst book I've ever read! But I do love him, it's just a shame that this book sucked donkeys!!!!!

OY

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.... ho hum!

Sarky

Hard Times, Charles Dickens.

The one book that actually caused me physical pain to read. Boring characters, dull plot, and so morally righteous it made me sick. I realise it was written for a different era, but still, my god, the pain. Damn you, Leaving Cert '99, damn you for forcing this book upon me!

Shewhomustbe...

1st to die - James Patterson
The Diceman - Luke Rhinehart (just realised couldn't endure it enough to finish it)

mycroft

Sarky wrote:

Hard Times, Charles Dickens.

The one book that actually caused me physical pain to read. Boring characters, dull plot, and so morally righteous it made me sick. I realise it was written for a different era, but still, my god, the pain. Damn you, Leaving Cert '99, damn you for forcing this book upon me!

96. We need to start a support group.

My favourite english lit moment ever

97, repeat English.

Teacher,

"I watched a funny film last week "clueless""

Student
"yeah it's a modern day version of Emma*

*we're studying emma

Teacher
"No it's not"

Student
" yeah frank is frank churchill, only in this he's gay, character x in clueless equals character x in emma. character y in clueless equals character y in emma. character z in clueless equals character z in emma."

teacher
"Oh my god you're so right, Wow, I mean, god I mean, thats brillant, I never saw that, god, I mean wow. Thats brillant, wow, it works on so many levels.....

ten minutes later

oh i mean, wow, i mean jesus thats great"

Students
"we're going to fail"

Cathy

Maeve Binchy - Circle of Friends.
In fact, anything I've ever read by Maeve Binchy, I have regretted.

The Testament by John Grisham.

A weird book my sister got free with a magazine a week or two ago about a girl who goes back to being 16 again, only it's still the present day and she's just younger, and then she sleeps with the brother of the guy she's in love with when she's her real age. All very odd.

The Bible. The end was a bit of a let-down. And not enough car-chases.

Feenikusu

Lord of the Rings 1 and 2. I didn't finish the 3rd.
Love Lessons, Andorra, Sansibar, they were for school. Terrible.
And some other boring books I can't even remember...

galactus

Feenikusu wrote:

Lord of the Rings 1 and 2. I didn't finish the 3rd.

Same here. Thought The Hobbit is worth reading though.

mycroft

Feenikusu wrote:

Lord of the Rings 1 and 2. I didn't finish the 3rd.
Love Lessons, Andorra, Sansibar, they were for school. Terrible.
And some other boring books I can't even remember...

I tried re-reading them the christmas the first one came out, and gave up just after they left the shire. Turgid prose.

Feenikusu

mycroft wrote:

I tried re-reading them the christmas the first one came out, and gave up just after they left the shire. Turgid prose.

Yep. After the movies came out, nearly everyone says that the books are boring, even my friend, who was really addicted to the books. So I don't understand why the books were called soooo great before the movies came out. The story IS great, you can see that in the movies, but the books are...zZZZZ

ExOffender

The Da Vinci Code - obvious but OMFG so badly written. When the protagonist was described as 'Harrison Ford in a tweed jacket...' I actually laughed. Y'see Ford wears tweed jackets. Uh-huh. At the start of every Indiana Jones movie. Wait a minute...

The Cold Six Thousand - James Ellroy

ExOffender read LA Confidential. Liked. Read earlier Ellroy stuff. Liked less. Read Cold Six Thousand. Couldn't understand why. Every sentence. Had to be made. Up of five words or. Less even to the point. Where. It became. Unreadable.

The Last Don - Mario Puzo

It's about an ageing Mafia don who wants his family to go straight, and to make sure his children are provided for after he's gone. But there are balances of power, old obligations, and the fact that this is just a lame retread of The Godfather to contend with... cliche-riddled muck. Puzo is clearly a one-trick pony's head. Arf arf.

mycroft

ExOffender wrote:

The Cold Six Thousand - James Ellroy

ExOffender read LA Confidential. Liked. Read earlier Ellroy stuff. Liked less. Read Cold Six Thousand. Couldn't understand why. Every sentence. Had to be made. Up of five words or. Less even to the point. Where. It became. Unreadable.
.

Seriously. Stop what you are doing. Go pick up american tabloid (the prequel), read it cover to cover. Read the cold six thousand. Re read both. Again and again and again. I've read both in total four or five times over the past 3 years. They're sublime. I read them the wrong way around (I luv having a girlfriend who runs a second hand book shop, I could put in requests and get them delievered) And then re-read both over and over. Just staggeringly good. I would read out great sections to my girlfriend in bed (no I don't deserve her.) Look I'm going to go read american tabloid right now, thats how excited I got thinking about it.

The Last Don - Mario Puzo

Thats the godfather pt 3 btw.

Yep. After the movies came out, nearly everyone says that the books are boring, even my friend, who was really addicted to the books. So I don't understand why the books were called soooo great before the movies came out. The story IS great, you can see that in the movies, but the books are...zZZZZ

There's that alledged quote from the inklings that I love.

JR Tolkien starts to read his new short story

CS lewis. "Jesus christ not another story about elfs"

jmcc

Peig:
Put me off Irish books for life almost. Just because that fsckhead DeValera saw an Ireland that never existed for most people in it, they put it on the LC syllabus.

Wuthering Heights
I remember having to do this whingeing, moronic, 19th century chic lit for the leaving. Didn't they publish anything good in the 19th century?

Da Vinci Code:
Code? More like spot the goddamned zeitgeist cliche. So bad that you have to read it for the errors.

Arthur Clarke:
Great ideas but lousy execution. Politically correct one dimensional goody-goody characters.

Tom Clancy:
Good early stuff but when the cold war finished it was a bit of a blow.

Godfather - The Missing Years (?):
This wasn't Puzo's work. It was some absolute tosser who won a competition to write the sequel. No way was it as good as any of Puzo's work and the characters were almost as wooden as Clarke's.

Regards...jmcc

ExOffender

mycroft wrote:

Seriously. Stop what you are doing. Go pick up american tabloid

I might read AT, but if. It's. In. That. Style. Again. Well, I just won't be able to go through it again. It's like being back in English class, 'reading' books aloud, one page one student. That was agony.

I like Ellroy's voice and the characters are excellent. It's literally nothing more than the prose style itself that's put me off. I like economic expression, I like stripped-down, but there's stripped-down and there's the point where you might as well print it out as a series of binary functions.

pork99

jmcc wrote:

Peig:
Put me off Irish books for life almost. Just because that fsckhead DeValera saw an Ireland that never existed for most people in it, they put it on the LC syllabus.

Please someone tell me this 250 page sleeping pill is longer on the syllabus

jmcc wrote:

Peig:
Didn't they publish anything good in the 19th century?

Yes but mostly in France and Russia; Gogol, Flaubert etc

galactus

pork99 wrote:

Please someone tell me this 250 page sleeping pill is longer on the syllabus

After losing (or possibly throwing away) my copy of Peig during my LC I needed a replacement.

Got a 2nd hand copy. At the end of the first chapter were the lines:
"Is she dead yet?"

Anselmo

Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks was fairly painful, especially cos I had liked Birdsong

and as for Emma, well I couldn't bring myself to finish it, but still did the LC question on it! good ol' LC '96

byte

Turbulent Priests - Colin Bateman

Maybe it's just me but I hated that book.

ExOffender

Ha! I bought that in an airport once and couldn't even bring myself to read it!

fibbo

Last Light by Andy McNab