Worst Book or Book series you have ever read.

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thenoblitt

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the house on mango street, it is just so completely god awful, puts me in a bad mood everytime i think about it
 

Drops a Sweet Katana

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Midgeamoo said:
Lord of the Flies.
Oh gawd, no wonder people my age are turned off literature when they had to read THAT in their last year of secondary school. Also I can't believe I used to like Anthony Horowitz' 'Alex Ryder' series when I younger. (Stormbreaker, Point blanc etc.)

I kinda like the Eragon series, it's not written perfectly but the world/story are really quite impressive.
I wouldn't say it's the worst for me, but I definitely don't think I'll be reading it again anytime soon.
 

Corporal Yakob

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Nov 28, 2009
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Rhubarb by Craig Silvey.

My God-Emperor.

That book was, without a doubt, the most atrociously written pile of crap I have ever been forced to read. Terrible grammer, not one even mildly interesting character, a cliched and rubbish plot and simply disgusting scene descripitions with the worst being the detailed recounting of an old man masterbating about his dead wife. I implore all who read this to find all the copies of the book they can and burn them. BURN THEM ALL.
 

Chatato

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Dec 19, 2010
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Greek Ransom By Michael Malaghan.
I got it when I was in hospital for a couple of days (I didn't read it then) The plot line is... Stupid at best, the end is such a cop-out and the kids in it well half the time they are child genius' and the other half they would have to be classifiably retarded, the writing style makes me angry it's like they've gotten a good writer and then got a 3rd grader to write all the actions sequences complete with inappropriate use of grammar and all.

The Most Annoying books to read however would have to be the first two books in The Laws Of Magic series because Audrey is so Damn Awkward and such a Dick around girls and he always gets so close solving recurring problems in the books and then well it screws up and he's back to first base it's like watching auditions for video dating services it's so bad but you always go back and watch some more just to laugh, but hey the second book has dinosaurs so all is forgiven.
 

theevilsanta

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JoeThree said:
I want to say Twilight and Left Behind, but they were both so terrible they were entertaining. I'll admit it, I absolutely lost it when I got to the "vampire Baseball" chapter.

I think the absolute worst book series I've ever read and really could get ZERO enjoyment from was Sword of Truth. The characters are Mary/Gary Stus at best, and can never do wrong, yet their actions and decisions are often contradictory to previous statements or decisions the characters have made. The author is a pretentious, smug douche (look up a picture of Terry Goodkind real quick on Google image search if you think I'm joking, that should be enough), and everything is so contrived it's practically painful. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it's the literary equivilant of Manos - something so bad, it surpasses "so bad it's good" territory and falls BACK into normal bad... only worse.

Wheel of Time and Harry Potter are fine series', and I think people are hating on them here mostly because they're so damn popular. When it comes to WoT, around book 8 Robert Jordan really started mucking things up, and while it appeared he was started to get things back on track, we'll never know for certain if he would have been able to mend the series. However, the two most recent books, penned by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan passed away, have been really enjoyable and a lot more in spirit with the beginning of the series. I can't say I don't understand people not enjoying the series, but to say it's the worst is a bit much. The same kinda goes for Potter - it started out really fun, and turned sour. The last 3 books (at least to me) turned a whimsical, fun series into something bland and boring.

I also really hated To Kill a Mockingbird in high school. I'm not going to go too deep into it, but the style was so boring I would have rather watched the ink on the pages dry than read the actual words they formed... and it would have probably been a less tedious process to boot. What sucks is that the message itself is fine, but the style is so damn drab it's like trying to wade through quicksand, and before anyone plays the "well you're just too dumb to appreciate big/classic books" card, I've read plenty of other classic novels and enjoyed the hell out of them. Moby Dick remains, to this day, one of my favorite peices of literature.
I agreed with a lot of what you said, so I'll respond to you with some conversation.

I was recommended Twilight back when book 1 was the only one out. I read the first chapter like three times but could never get over the flowery prose. Left Behind was awesome though, when I was younger. I'll never forget Cameron surviving that plane crash and the fucking blade that was one atom thick.

I agree that Goodkind's SoT series was terrible, though I only read the first book. Richard was so perfect in all ways it made me think Goodkind was a closet homosexual. The plot was boring. The "romance" was fixed with a deus ex machina. And the last third of the book was bizarre sexual torture. That's cool for fetish literature but for a conventional fantasy lover, I didn't get into it.

I could never get past the first WoT books. The setting and overall story interested me, but the characters we followed were so boring my eyes bled. The only interesting relationship was between Moiraine and Al'Lan. I get that Jordan has a few "big ideas" he wants to explore in the books, but his immediate story and characters were just so damn boring.

Harry Potter was immensely readable. The characters went in weird directions in the end and the whole resurrection thing was bizarre, but overall each book had a fun, exciting adventure. Harry's downfall into a whiny ***** in book five was a good step for his character development, imo.

I'm not sure how you can praise Moby Dick and criticize To Kill a Mockingbird (for its blandness) in the same paragraph. TKaM is a very tight novel - everything written is necessary and important to the story. Moby Dick as hundreds of pages of asinine information. Of course I love both.
 

Aedrial

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Jun 24, 2009
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The Chronicles of Narnia. Mainly because of the blatantly placed religious marketing. Oh and 'I'm not scared'. The characters were just plain stupid.

Echer123 said:
4173 said:
Ethan Frome


It took me 0.5 seconds to come up with that answer, I'm so certain.
I have to read that over the summer for AP English, what's so bad about it?
It's not actually bad, I read it for Literature class last term.. My only issue was that Frome's wife could have been less of a whiny *****.
 

Subbies

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Dec 11, 2010
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OH oh I know the answer to this one! "The curious incident of the dog during the night time" (I had to read it for school, it was awful).
 
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soulblade06 said:
For a young adult series, I really liked the Artemis Fowl books. In my opinion, the series should have ended with The Lost Tribe (sure, it had little to do with the rest of the series, but it sticks out in my memory a whole lot more than any of the other ones and, in my opinion, did a nice job of wrapping up the series even if the book before it did the same thing).


Then Eoin Colfer wrote The Time Paradox. What a horrible book.
Not only does it end on the third biggest cliffhanger of all time (the all-powerful villain that moments earlier was ready to take over the world vanishes without a trace), but it's endlessly confusing.

The mom's sick and it turns out that she has a magic disease that can only be cured with the brain fluid of a species of lemur that would be extinct except for the one that Artemis's mom bought for the heck of it (because that's just what rich people do). Whoops, Artemis sold the lemur in question. A long time ago. As in before the first book. Luckily for them, they happen to know an imp that can send them back in time. Then there's some nonsense about Holly suddenly greiving over the mom she lost even before the first book but never thought about until now and an organization dedicated to eradicating all "useless" species on the planet, which is just a front for Opal to gain the MacGuffin lemur's brain fluid to give herself UNLIMITED COSMIC POWER!!!!

They get the lemur, come back to the future, but guess what: Opal already has UNLIMITED COSMIC POWER!!!! Big showdown happens, some people get locked in barrels of life-sucking goo and others kill themselves trying to save Artemis (or nearly, anyway. It is a young-adult book after all). Then Artemis runs to the solar plane he'd prepared earlier and leads Opal into a trap based on a Checkov's Leviathan mentioned earlier in the story.

I know that's a lot of spoilers, but trust me: you don't want to read it. I think another book got written, but I really don't want to bother reading it just to see how they resolve this mess.
They don't. I read the new one and....meh. Every now and than Colfer spends 3 pages explaining shit no one wants to hear, the plot is bad (and confusing), some of the characters that luckily get killed of at the end made me want to kill myself, and the ending is just UTTER AND COMPLETE SHIT.

I liked everything untill the time paradox, don't know why i bothered reading the new one.
 

ChildishLegacy

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Apr 16, 2010
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Frieswiththat said:
Midgeamoo said:
Lord of the Flies.
Oh gawd, no wonder people my age are turned off literature when they had to read THAT in their last year of secondary school. Also I can't believe I used to like Anthony Horowitz' 'Alex Ryder' series when I younger. (Stormbreaker, Point blanc etc.)

I kinda like the Eragon series, it's not written perfectly but the world/story are really quite impressive.
I wouldn't say it's the worst for me, but I definitely don't think I'll be reading it again anytime soon.
People here don't seem to have read the series, just Eragon. The guy was a new writer at the time and Eragon wasn't really all that great. Eldest got better and Brisingr was pretty damn good.
 

wetfart

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Jul 11, 2010
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Waiting for Godot. Technically it's a play but I did read it for school. It's 100 pages of nothing happening. And the worst part was, after I read it I had to read it again the next year in English class!

Dune also qualifies. I usually give a book 100 pages to get me interested. I think I made it to about 150 before I looked at how far I had to go and just shut the book forever. I just couldn't get into it.
 

Giantpanda602

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The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan. Seriously, his first series was ok because it was interesting and different, but the entire thing where the twins act like they hate each other but really love each other is so cliche and annoying. It also never stops. I couldn't bring myself to get halfway through this book. Also, nobody cares about Egyptian mythology.
 

Lukeje

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cefm said:
The Brothers Karamazov stands out to me as singularly terrible. Bad writing, bad story, bad characters, bad translation, LONG, and has the distinction of being by a world-famous and celebrated author, and everyone's heard of it. Well it's terrible. Un-readable. Fit for keeping the fireplace lit and that's about it.
(Emphasis my own).

...have you considered trying a different translation? It's not like there is only one.

My choice is a book given to me by a friend (actually with the caveat that it was shit, but that its trashiness was endearing). That book was Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind. What really confuses me is that some people seem to revere the series that begins with this book as their favourite fantasy series.
 

Sovvolf

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Mar 23, 2009
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Ho christ have I read some bad books in my time... We used to have a cabinet in the front room that was full of books my mum had collected over time. Mainly very, very trashy romance novels some really bad horror and some... I'm not sure what genre they belong to but they were awful. You guys think Twilight's bad? You haven't seen (read) shit. I've read bad books, least Twilight goes into so bad its laughable territory and as the stigma with it. When I went in to read Twilight, I knew it was going to be utter garbage... These books though? Yikes.

Sadly I can't for the life of me remember the names of many of them. Probably the whole "So bland, not important" thing. Though to be more recent, I read a book a while back that could best be described as a trashy Tom Clancy rip off. God, good, good god was it boooooring. One of the few books I just put down after like chapter four and just though "Screw it". Maybe the book gets good later on, maybe it turns into a best selling novel. However the first four chapters were so bad I just simply wasn't playing ball. The book was called On Dangerous Grounds by Jack Higgins. Pretty much if you crossed Patriot Games with the movie the Jackal..

Ho I also read my first and very last biography book. The Gu'vner a book about Lenny Mclean the bare-knuckle boxer, I got about four chapters into this one before putting it right down. Basically the book was Lenny talking about how much of an hard ************ he his and how no one was going to mess with him... all that sort of stuff. No thanks. Seriously no thanks.

Also another I've read called "Worlds hardest bastard" by the wife of one of the Kray twins. Not sure if that counts as biography but it basically consisted of her interviewing criminals and having them talk about how hard they are. Again no thanks. Specially when most of their reasons for them being supposedly hard is stuff like "I shot someone, then robbed them" or "I stabbed someone" yep... apparently shooting, stabbing and running people over in cars makes you hard. Not buying it, your not hard, your scum with a gun.

So yeah I've read some awful books in my time.
 

rutger5000

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Oct 19, 2010
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Honestly: The Dutch version of Lord of the rings. It might have been the transelator, but the writting sucked. But I think it's just mostly Tolkiens fault, the guy just couldn't write.
 

Drops a Sweet Katana

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May 27, 2009
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Midgeamoo said:
Frieswiththat said:
Midgeamoo said:
Lord of the Flies.
Oh gawd, no wonder people my age are turned off literature when they had to read THAT in their last year of secondary school. Also I can't believe I used to like Anthony Horowitz' 'Alex Ryder' series when I younger. (Stormbreaker, Point blanc etc.)

I kinda like the Eragon series, it's not written perfectly but the world/story are really quite impressive.
I wouldn't say it's the worst for me, but I definitely don't think I'll be reading it again anytime soon.
People here don't seem to have read the series, just Eragon. The guy was a new writer at the time and Eragon wasn't really all that great. Eldest got better and Brisingr was pretty damn good.
Oops! I was just referring to Lord of the Flies. I didn't actually see the rest of the post before I wrote it :/. Whoops!
 

Utrechet

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Oct 14, 2010
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Giants in the Earth

A family moves out west during the Western expansion in American history. They then set up the farm and the book catalogs their time. Every. Day.

Important events in the book:
- ...

Scenes of notability:
- A woman goes insane and locks herself in a trunk (not a car). She's also pregnant at the time.



Honestly, they just sit around and do nothing. It's a book about people farming for crying out loud.
 

lSHaDoW-FoXl

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Jul 17, 2008
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Mogworld.

Nah, I'm just kidding. I never read it. (but I want to, just to see how our dear Yahtzee fares as a writer) You know, I am a very, very fussy reader. If I don't find something that interests me chances are I won't go past the first two chapters. Worst books I ever read? Probably not that bad since I just can't seem to get into books too easily. I mean, I love reading. I finished the last harry potter book in just one sitting. So instead of posting 'my most hated book' I'll simply do the opposite - post books I love that left a bad taste. I feel it would be unfair to pick a 'worst book I ever read' if I never even got past the first chapter.

Firewing -

Kenneth Oppel was one of my favourite authors back when I was younger. He's the author of silverwing series. And you know, I loved all three books. . . until I got to the last chapter of the third book. Dick move book, dick move.

Redwall (The entire F*cking series)

A series I love so much I hate it, I hate it with a passion. Even to this day I still read those books (currently doing Mattimeo!) because I barely consider it a 'kids book'. The biggest problem I have with these books is the over simplified sides and how the villains (The very interesting characters that I love the most)always die horrible deaths.

Those two books aside I suppose now that I think about it I actually can think of around three books that I hated. The only problem is I forgot their names.
 

Lionsfan

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Jan 29, 2010
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Twilight, I lost a bet with this girl and since she knew how much I disliked it on principle she made me read the whole series, and she gave me quizzes on it to make sure I had read it.....it was horrible.

Other than that I would have to say the Inheritance Cycle, the way that Paolini writes just pisses me off, especially his perfect elves who can do no wrong.