The worst book/story your ever read.

[Zanderinfal]

A New Kind Of Dreaming.

My god is this book predictable. It's one of those books that's boring 95% of the time because you can see every plot point coming from a mile away, with the rare exception. It's damn near painful to read due to the terrible pacing and the unlikable characters. It blows me away that a story so perfectly terrible is used in schools specifically to study off of.

 

[BurningWyvern90]

I read Dante's Commedia. The only interesting bit is the first third concerning the Inferno. We move to Purgatory after that, and finally Paradise, which is ethereal and boring as hell. Interestingly enough I knew a lot of the people stuck in hell, but not one single person mentioned in either Purgatory or Paradise. And neither get the picturesque descriptions we get from hell. It's just air-walking and mentioning this and that saint.

Purgatory isn't that bad. It still has a lot of interesting punishments and odd places. It's Paradise that gets tedious.

Ha, Paradise gets tedious. Ain't that the truth though?

Anyway, I agree; I enjoyed Inferno, but the other two were very 'meh'. Not bad, just 'meh'.

There has only been one book that I have read, finished, and completely loathed and that's A Separate Peace by John Knowles. I can't describe how utterly boring and terrible it was. We watched the movie for it, too, because I had to read it for 10th grade English. I would have rather slammed my head against my desk for 6 hours straight.

 

[Alssadar]

Don Quixote: It really isn't that funny. Lasted 100 pages until I got bored.

You mock the great Don Quixote of La Mancha, the Knight of both Rueful Countenance and of the Lion? The gallant knight who has defended both the honor and beauty of the Dulcinea Del Toboso from the foolishness of his fellow man? The nigh-holy being of perfection, worth the title of Knight-Errant so much as Roland and Amadeus of Gaul? Champion of God's will on Earth, and the Kingdom of Spain? The fear of Heathens and Heretics, and the aid of all widows, children, and kings of God's world?
For such mocking is reserved for such a bitter squire of some beaten lord, who knows he cannot match with the glorious wit, skill, and piety of the great Quixote, nor equal his squire Sancho, although not as pious or noble as his master, still serves as an exemplar to his kind, and will be awarded many a title for his actions
(This is the serious part)
The hilarity in Don Quixote doesn't come from jokes: it's the pure silliness of the situations of what Chivalry forces him to do. I'll admit, it is rather dry and drawn out for large periods, but it is ridiculous at points. Like how Dorotea pretends to be a princess of a fictional kingdom in order to stop Don Quixote from starving himself to death for his lady (for whom he's never seen), and, when she meets some people she used to know, and they don't treat her like a lady, Don Quixote tries to kill them. Of course, the tavern breaks out in a gigantic brawl, and, after a couple minutes of scuffling, Don Quixote settles the fight by becoming a third party and saying that both sides were acting childish with their petty squabbles and fellow Christians should not fight amongst themselves.
(OT response)
Personally, I disliked Frankenstein. There was no humor and it liked to ramble about precipices instead of saying "I went to Switzerland" (or Germany, I forget). Sure, the themes about mankind's creation of life was good an all, but Frankenstein could've just avoided it for creating a wife for the monster. He just bitches out and gets everyone he loves killed because he couldn't abandon his morals to see what was necessary to make the monster, his creation--his child--happy, because he was disgusted and ethically conflicted with both himself and the creature.
My biggest issue is that I am a big fan of science, as in mankind has a power over itself to see what it was denied and then take control of, as mankind's destiny is to see itself spread to where it never dreamed and to accomplish the impossible. For we are humanity, look upon our works and tremble.

 

[TheRightToArmBears]

-The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. UGH. This was so boring. That's all there is to say. That and the last few pages were just needless padding, but still as dreary as what preceded it.

Huh, that's one of my very favourite books. That said, even I admit it tails off towards the end.


I can't really think off the top of my head, but a lot of Michael Crichton's later books are pretty bollocks. It's the same 'new technology goes wrong due to greed and/or ignorance' format rolled out again and again with increasingly unlikeable characters.

 

[Keiichi Morisato]

I hated ichigo 100% and urusei yatsutora, I honestly cant understand why both are so popular. I found the mainc haracter in ichigo 100% insufferable (and I have a high tolerance for insufferable protagonists) and I hate Lum in urusei yatsutora, there was little to no character development, and all she did was beat up on the main character.

 

[DefunctTheory]

Well, it's time to make everyone angry.

While I've probably read worse, I can't recall them at this time. Therefore, I give the crown of worst read of my life to...

'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.'

I like the story, don't get me wrong. But the writing is absolute gibberish, and even if I hadn't read about Philip Dick before hand, I think I would have begged him for a schizophrenic on my own. Just... everything is HORRIBLE.

Ech.

As for the people complaining about the Comedy, I'd like to argue against it... but I know I can't.

Damn it.

 

[bomber567]

The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I had to read it during my junior year of high school, and I despised every fucking second of it. Just to be clear, I usually like these old classics as long as I can understand why they are respected and what the author was trying to accomplish (and I have a tendency of liking books that other people think are tedious, such as The Odyssey and Dante's Inferno). But The Scarlet Letter...Hawthorne's writing lacks any form of subtlety, as I felt his symbolism and messages were very clumsy and heavy handed, as I get the feeling that he didn't expect readers to understand their meaning unless getting hit over the head repeatedly with exposition. In addition, his writing is extremely dry and the pacing is way too slow. I just ended up hating all of the characters by the end, and getting through every page became a chore to the point that I kind of wanted my brain to aneurysm itself to save me from reading another word of the damn thing. My point is, fuck you Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Also, to some of the other posters, lay off of Charles Dickens, he's awesome!

 

[KoudelkaMorgan]

There are bad books that I was FORCED to read in school and then there are books I sought out myself and found them to be terrible.

Of the former, one stands out prominently. A Farewell to Arms. Absolute garbage. I was not alone in my opinion, for only about 2 people in my English class actually finished AFtA, and as a placation our teacher brought in and showed the movie version of it. We didn't actually make through the entire film, so it was pretty pointless.

We were still tested on it, and I don't recall anyone doing well or caring. I know that sounds more like a failing on our part as students, but we genuinely resented being made to read such tripe.

I can't speak for them all, but I for one actually enjoyed the bulk of our required readings. In fact I would say that I liked ALL of them aside from that one. Of what I can remember, I enjoyed:

The Odyssey
The Catcher in the Rye
Of Mice and Men
Ethan Frome
Romeo & Juliet
Hamlet
Othello
The Crucible
The Outsider
Night

And those were added to the hundred plus books I chose to read of my own volition. My point is that I'm a bibliophile, and you will never get me to touch another Ernest Hemmingway book.

Now of that latter group of books, one book in particular stands out as being one that I was supremely interested in, started off quite good, but quickly became an exercise in cultivating patience and forcing myself to continue reading just for the sake of overcoming the ordeal it presented.

I'm talking about The Silmarillion, aka the bible of Middle Earth. I see people in this thread saying that LotR turned them off for being too wordy. That is not a sentiment I really ever shared, but if I did, I would probably get a nosebleed trying to muddle through The Silmarillion.

Its the most boring thing I've ever read aside from A Farewell to Arms, but given its sheer LENGTH it actually proves more of a mindnumbing endeavor.

The tragic thing is, the actual events being told in it are pretty epic. Its just that it padded with hundreds of pages between those events detailing...everything. I mean it would make a really kick ass movie if they took the coolest parts and skipped over all the filler, like they do with Bible stories.

 

[Norithics]

This absolutely has to go to TickTock by Dean Koontz. He writes the fiction equivalent of popcorn movies, but he can be incredibly hit or miss, and TickTock was so bad that he basically apologized for it later. It was like he was on opiates the whole time, taking two books and sort of splicing them together in a terrible fever dream.

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

Iron Angel and God of Clocks by Alan Campbell were both pretty god awfully bad. It was made doubly so by the fact the preceding novel Scar Night and the novella Lye Street were both quite good. That's what happens when video game writers try to write novels though.

 

[Mark Rhodes]

The Bible, fucking boring and hateful.

(But only half troll)

 

[chukrum47]

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. I had to read it for my high-school's freshman English class. I really tried, but I just could not get through it. Sparknotes FTW!

...Although I did end up with a solid A on the paper and the test about the book so I must of have done something right aha.

 

[Billy D Williams]

Also, the end of Huckleberry Finn. What the hell was that?

That NEVER! FUCKING! HAPPENED!

Seriously, fuck every page after page 184. It was FANTASTIC before those last pages, but then... I don't even want to relive that.

Anyhow, Their Eyes Where Watching God. Fucking boring as shit, and the protagonist is completely unrelatable unless your a desperate woman who had half her brain removed from birth.

 

[AD-Stu]

I was gonna say The Da Vinci Code but then I remembered I read an even worse piece of garbage by Dan Brown, the name of which I don't rightly recall - it came in a three-pack with Angels and Demons and Da Vinci and they were all I had for entertainment on a flight from London to Australia so yeah, I read them. Ugh.

The book in question he dragged out the final five minutes of the book's "climax" for what felt like four chapters, so it was all I could bring myself to do to skim all the way to the end, literally reading three or four words on each page as they flew by and assuming that I'd gotten the gist from that. It seemed I had.

I don't think there was quite as much author insertion in this one as there was in Angels / Da Vinci but his horrible style and smug gittishness still shone through to make it a truly painful reading experience. Damn you long haul flights!

 

[Fijiman]

IGNORE THIS POST. Too many fucking tabs open. Am I right? Ya'll know how it is...

Yeah, I know how it is. Got like ten tabs open right now myself. Can get confusing.

OT: I want to say Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities, and Lord of the Flies, but there are reasons I didn't like those. For Great Expectations it was because we skipped around the book too damn much while reading it in class so I couldn't enjoy it. For the other two it was because I had a horrible teacher while reading those who had us doing far too much bullshit analyzing and other crap which made me hate the books. I might decide to pick up the books at some point in the distant future, but for now there's no way in hell I could ever try reading them again.

 

[Mossberg Shotty]

The Outsider

Are you sure you don't mean 'The Outsiders' with an 's' by S.E. Hinton? Because that was a requirement for my education as well. The only other story I can think of that goes by that name is 'The Outsider' by H.P. Lovecraft. While it was also a decent story, I doubt it was on any curriculum.

OT: This makes things a bit awkward, because my least favorite story is by Lovecraft. He's my favorite author, and he wrote the story I mentioned above, but 'The Call of Cthulhu' was just awful. I haven't read the entire mythos, but that first entry was just so horrible, bland and inconsistent. It managed to make a story about cosmic horrors boring.

 

[Kolby Jack]

I don't read very often, but I had assigned reading in school like most other people. Generally I found I liked most of the books I read, except for one: Lord of the Flies.

It's fucking garbage. I never cared for stories that showcase "man's inhumanity towards man" and NOTHING ELSE, and that's all the book does. Just a bunch of kids being complete assholes towards each other with only three exceptions: one kid who's nice but stupid and can't figure out any way to make peace with those who don't agree with him, one kid who's just a punk ***** who dies, and one kid who just goes nuts. For me to get invested in a story, I need to care about what happens to the characters. I couldn't relate to any of the characters in this book. It was just a total waste of time.

 

[KoudelkaMorgan]

Actually it was the Lovecraft Story 'The Outsider'

We also read The Raven, The Telltale Heart, and the Cask of Amon...whatever by Poe.

My fav Lovecraft stories would be

Nathicana
Dreams in the Witch House
The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward
The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath
At the Mountains of Madness
The Color out of Space
The Shadow Out of Time
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Dunwich Horror
The Thing on the Doorstep
The Silver Key

Actually the list of ones I really didn't like is smaller:

The Horror at Red Hook
The Statement of Randolph Carter
Unnameable
Imprisoned with the Pharaohs
Medusa's Coil (the very end just ruins an otherwise great story)

Which reminds me, there is an anthology called 'Ghosts by Gaslight' which I picked up some time ago. Its not Lovecraft, but a collection of stories that were recommended to those that liked Lovecraft.

I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Most of the stories are trash that would have been rejected from Weird Tales back in the 20's. A few were decent.

 

[Realitycrash]

Don Quixote: It really isn't that funny. Lasted 100 pages until I got bored.

You mock the great Don Quixote of La Mancha, the Knight of both Rueful Countenance and of the Lion? The gallant knight who has defended both the honor and beauty of the Dulcinea Del Toboso from the foolishness of his fellow man? The nigh-holy being of perfection, worth the title of Knight-Errant so much as Roland and Amadeus of Gaul? Champion of God's will on Earth, and the Kingdom of Spain? The fear of Heathens and Heretics, and the aid of all widows, children, and kings of God's world?
For such mocking is reserved for such a bitter squire of some beaten lord, who knows he cannot match with the glorious wit, skill, and piety of the great Quixote, nor equal his squire Sancho, although not as pious or noble as his master, still serves as an exemplar to his kind, and will be awarded many a title for his actions
(This is the serious part)
The hilarity in Don Quixote doesn't come from jokes: it's the pure silliness of the situations of what Chivalry forces him to do. I'll admit, it is rather dry and drawn out for large periods, but it is ridiculous at points. Like how Dorotea pretends to be a princess of a fictional kingdom in order to stop Don Quixote from starving himself to death for his lady (for whom he's never seen), and, when she meets some people she used to know, and they don't treat her like a lady, Don Quixote tries to kill them. Of course, the tavern breaks out in a gigantic brawl, and, after a couple minutes of scuffling, Don Quixote settles the fight by becoming a third party and saying that both sides were acting childish with their petty squabbles and fellow Christians should not fight amongst themselves.
(OT response)
Personally, I disliked Frankenstein. There was no humor and it liked to ramble about precipices instead of saying "I went to Switzerland" (or Germany, I forget). Sure, the themes about mankind's creation of life was good an all, but Frankenstein could've just avoided it for creating a wife for the monster. He just bitches out and gets everyone he loves killed because he couldn't abandon his morals to see what was necessary to make the monster, his creation--his child--happy, because he was disgusted and ethically conflicted with both himself and the creature.
My biggest issue is that I am a big fan of science, as in mankind has a power over itself to see what it was denied and then take control of, as mankind's destiny is to see itself spread to where it never dreamed and to accomplish the impossible. For we are humanity, look upon our works and tremble.

He doesn't want to create another unstoppable monster, though, because the monster is already murdering people left and right, and thus he doubts it sincerity that it will leave humanity alone when it has acquired a wife.

 

[jurnag12]

I'm tempted to say Eragon, but that had at least somewhat of an excuse in that Paolini was 16-17 when he wrote it as his first novel, and the fact that the editor clearly didn't give a shit. It was also midly entertaining at times (To exemplify the editor bit: 'Saphira descended upwards').

But the worst book I've read that I just got no enjoyment out of whatsoever is a Dutch book called De Kabbalist. Telling the story about some guy and his studies into the Jewish Kabbalah which is represented with a story that uses every grade on the scale of show and tell at the same time and does every single one of them horribly wrong.
We're constantly told how the characters are behaving in the most obvious way possibly without any possibly attempt at character depth, instead the author uses them more as one dimensional exposition-spewers to move along the story (Which gets completely absurd), making for a more boring cast and pacing than the middle books of the Wheel of Time.
It also doesn't help that the main character is an absolute Gary Stu with zero redeeming qualities.