What are the worst books you've ever finished?

Cathy

Really? I love that book.

Doper Than U

Cathy wrote:

Really? I love that book.

I hated that stupid whore. I know that was the point. So it worked. But I know people as devious and nasty as that, so reading about it was very irritating. I don't deny that it was a "good book", just that I hated it so very thoroughly. I want those hours of my life back.

Capt'n Midnight

Just saw another one in a second hand bookstore today - I think it was called Silent Killer - totally implausible plot about a submarine in the cold war - it was to land troops in Norway to stop the "evil empire" and only suceeded because the Yanks nuked a soviet sub and the russians were only using conventional weapons :rolleyes:

Flight of the old dog - the russians are building a star wars type defense system so the americans bomb it. ie. the plot depends on an unprovoked act of war..

Battlefield earth - in a league of it's own , every scientologist should be made read it several times.

impr0v

So many people listing multiple Dan Brown offences including DVC. If you read his most famous work and didn't like it, why go and buy any others?

Capt'n Midnight

impr0v wrote:

So many people listing multiple Dan Brown offences including DVC. If you read his most famous work and didn't like it, why go and buy any others?

Someone else bought them, in my case it was reading material in a foreign country - deception point still sticks out as the worst so far.

there are some truly awful SciFi books like -
Bruno Lip****z and the Disciples of Dogma by J Robert King

RuggieBear

being having trouble sleeping recently, so i bought myself brown's "digital fortess" on cd to listen to in bed....i'm asleep within 10 mins. Have now listened to the opening chapter about 5 times....tis boring dry wankology...perfect for making you nod off

pwd

Keano_sli wrote:

Choke by that guy that wrote "Fight Club" and some ****e I read a couple of months ago by Dean Koontz, can't even remember the name.

I liked Choke a lot.
Chuck Palahnuik.
Isn't that the one where the guy starts building the temple in his back garden?
My favourite, and certainly the most optimistic, of his first four novels.
I have Diary for months now and haven't got past the first few chapters. It didn't engage me. Must give it another try soon.

pwd

zaph wrote:

Agree with you on How to be Good, that was awful stuff. The end was even worse than the rest of the book, it was just kinda pointless.

I liked that book a lot too, although I know a lot of people really didn't. Don't remember the ending, but it made me laugh a fair bit. He takes the piss out of certain types of people very effectively in it, I thought. Probably wouldn't appeal much if you were lucky enough not to have encountered the sorts (or if you are one)

pwd

Trojan wrote:

Oh, honourable mention to Goodkinds "Sword of Time" series ... err, I mean "Sword of Truth" of course.

I thought they were decent. Got a bit repetitive or stale a few books in, but some quality in them.
If you are suggesting that the series is derivative from the wheel of time by robert jordan, then i'd have to disagree. Neither presents the most original plots or ideas in the world, and that is ok in both cases because it is the way they handle them that gives the books their indvidual flavours.
I found The Wheel of Time got a bit repetitive around book 7 too. Thinking back there a lot more images and characters come to mind from those books than goodkind's though. Although I read Goodkind's more recently. The only image that stayed with me from his books was the protagonist's monster friend. I think maybe the reason I stopped reading the books was because he split from the hero didn't he?

pwd

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.

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

Arthur C Clarke does not have lousy execution or politically correct goodsy goody characters. Are you sure you didn't read one of this children's books or something? He shows fantastic imagination and exceptional skills at communicating it vividly. Stephen Donaldson is probably the only one who can transport the reader more effectively than Clarke, and to such wonderful places.
Yet Clarke keeps most of his ideas reasonably realistic and scientically valid and has come up time and time again with insight into where technology is taking us.
Characterisation is secondrary to setting and ideas in his books, in my opinion, as is plot. I've found his characters believable and sympathetic, just not as interesting as their surroundings. They are certainly not goody goody or politically correct. The ones that seem like they are can be sexually repressed, and this leads them to some extremely un-goody-goody and politically incorrect behaviour. I'm thinking specifically of the military officers in some of the Rama books, and in Cradle.


Wuthering Heights has real quality in it too, but at least I can see why people mightn't like it. The main characters are somewhat overstated, to say the least. There's something a little repulsive about it. The book has inspired many lovelorn young men to masochistic deeds of devotion to silly little bitches I'm sure over the years. It's like something a teenage girl would fantasise if she was totally away with the fairies. Unfortunately the girl in this case had buckets of literary talent.

pwd

IO thought the following books were all good too:

The Diceman
The Crow Road
The Hobbit!?
Hannibal
LOTR

The Crow Road is straight fiction i thought. He's written far odder things than that. Try reading the bridge or inversions or song of stone. Actually don't avoid them totally because you would hat them and get Wim I mean Whit, Espedair St and all the culture books instead.

theCzar

i didn't really like 2001 space odyssey, it was interesting conceptually, but not very well written, and the characters were a little dull.... except HAL, he was the best.

RuggieBear

pwd wrote:

IO thought the following books were all good too:

The Diceman
The Crow Road
The Hobbit!?
Hannibal
LOTR

Hannibal is up there as one of the worst books i've ever read....to me it totally comprimised the character of Hannibal and made him the ****ing hero.imo the wrong thing to do....

Capt'n Midnight

RuggieBear wrote:

Hannibal is up there as one of the worst books i've ever read....to me it totally comprimised the character of Hannibal and made him the ****ing hero.imo the wrong thing to do....

It's bad alright, not a patch on Red Dragon. But still better than anything by Archer.

pwd

RuggieBear wrote:

Hannibal is up there as one of the worst books i've ever read....to me it totally comprimised the character of Hannibal and made him the ****ing hero.imo the wrong thing to do....

heh. I read hannibal before his other books, so to me Red Dragon was the book that seemed inconsistent.

RuggieBear

pwd wrote:

heh. I read hannibal before his other books, so to me Red Dragon was the book that seemed inconsistent.

lol....didn't think of that perspective

Scruff

Piers Anthony's "The Source of Magic". Worst fantasy novel i ever read. took me 2 years to trawl through it.

cecilwinthorpe

"The grass is singing" and "Death and nightingales" are two rubbish books that i had to study for the leaving. i cant remember the author for either of em but stay well away from them both

pwd

Books that don't engage my interest I usually put down. Two books by good authors which I thought were rubbish though are
Keep the Aspidistra Flying by Orwell
And
Dead Air by Iain Banks.
And that wasn't even truly crap, just the political commentary seemed hackneyed and trite. but maybe it was aimed at Americans or something who mightn't have heard it before.

Branoic

Oh, i thought of a new one. The Reality Dysfunction by Peter Hamilton. Gah! I can't believe I actually finished it. I should have thrown in the towel when i first thought of doing so about 100 pages in.

Some of the ideas were good, but the writing was appalling, the pacing was crap, the characters were two dimensional shallow and unlikeable, the women were all the same (eg, two tits and a pair of legs that will invariabley get screwed in a totally meaningless non-erotic way by the dashing young hero) and there were far far far too many characters to keep track of because there was no emotional depth to them at all, they were just other names you had to try and remember.

Drivel. If Hamilton is indeed the saviour of British Sci-fi that the back of the book claimed, i dearly wish it had stayed un-saved.

theCzar

sorry to bring up old threads, but it's a good thread and I've just finished the worst book I've ever finished, and what kept me reading was that I'd have a book worthy of this thread.

Clive Cussler: The Golden Buddha. It's the most ridiculous adventure story ever whose penchant for overkill is matched only by it's disregard for the facts of world politics for the sake of it's pathetic story.

phew, how therapeutic

arrietty

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden.

The. Worst. Book. Ever.

Branoic

Thats odd. My gf just finished that book and she said it was the.best.book.ever, in her opinion

Franky Boy

Dan brown - Da Vinci Code.

arrietty

Branoic wrote:

Thats odd. My gf just finished that book and she said it was the.best.book.ever, in her opinion

Yeah. It's a divisive one. Everyone else seems to love it. I detest it.

Another book I hated that everyone told me I would love was The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Ye gods. Atrocious.

zаph

The bible. urgh.

Unit00

Diary by Chuck Palahnuik was quite poor (His first three are his best)
A "book" called I Heart Lord Buddha. An piece of trash
I didn't understand Ratners Star by Don Delillio. Though his other novels are brillant

theCzar

z&#1072 wrote: »

The bible. urgh.

Talk about a preachy book, sheesh, everyones a sinner. Not this guy though

lacuna

Unit00 wrote:

Diary by Chuck Palahnuik was quite poor (His first three are his best)

I tried to get into that but I couldn't. I'm still planning on trying again, sometime, maybe...

Anyway about a year ago or so, I read "P.S. I love you". I worked in a bookshop at the time and on a particularly quiet day I decided to see what all the fuss was about. It was needless to say atrocious. I read it in 2 days. I don't know why I finished it but I did want to be able to discuss it with customers. It was so popular, it flew off the shelves. For the life of me I don't know how people read that sort of drivel.

Johnny Storm

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.

Pretty good book, IMHO.