Worst thing you've ever read

[Ninjadeadbeard]

As for Dune, I stopped reading the series after finishing Children of Dune. I didn't hate it or anything, but I don't think I was in the mood to read about more of the weirder elements that had developed in that book. Then, after a couple years, I realized had forgotten just enough of the books that I'd have to reread them all if I wanted to continue with the rest of them, which I didn't feel like doing.

My favorite Dune book is the fourth one, God Emperor of Dune. The next one...was worse. A Huge timeskip without anyone stringing the whole thing together (sans one), plus (as has been said) that whole Space Jews plot that came outta nowhere and went nowhere fast, and a new and totally un-foreshadowed enemy who's entire modus operendi amounted to a petulant child's tantrum set on a multi-galactic scale.

The Miles Teg = The Flash stuff was odd, but somewhat acceptable, and probably the only good part aside from

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Duncan #89,824,788,594's total multi-lifetime-memory restoration. Yay karma!

which had its own squicky parts added for no reason other than squick. Just pretend there's four books and wish real hard for KJ Anderson and B Herbert to get bent.

[Goosefeather]

I have mixed feelings on His Dark Materials. I remember loving most of it, but the end left me confused. It was like "Okay, you have this brilliant, fantastic multiverse … and now they're killing God." It just seemed like Pullman was trying to be controversial for the sake of controversy by suddenly making the series into a dystheist Narnia. And I realize that the themes were sort of there throughout the entire trilogy, but it still felt jarring.

Of course, I haven't read them since I was like twelve, so it's very likely I might feel differently about it on a reread.

To be fair, the last Narnia book did throw subtlety completely out the window as well. When I first read the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the whole allegory thing shot straight over my head (mind you, I was about 7), but by the Last Battle, those themes could not have been more in-your-face.

[Inglenook]

Oh, for sure. I still feel odd about the Narnia series as well.

[Lord Seth]

I didn't like His Dark Materials. The Golden Compass was okay, but the next two books basically pulled a bait-and-switch on the audience by hijacking the plot in a completely different direction apparently just to lecture the audience. It felt almost like two different book series. I thought the ending was kind of lame as well.

To be fair, the last Narnia book did throw subtlety completely out the window as well. When I first read the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the whole allegory thing shot straight over my head (mind you, I was about 7), but by the Last Battle, those themes could not have been more in-your-face.

I disagree. The Last Battle was certainly the most blatant of the series, but it could easily have been a lot more in your face. It certainly didn't go anywhere near as far as His Dark Materials in terms of throwing it at you.

[Sith_Happens]

To be fair, the last Narnia book did throw subtlety completely out the window as well. When I first read the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the whole allegory thing shot straight over my head (mind you, I was about 7), but by the Last Battle, those themes could not have been more in-your-face.

Oh, for sure. I still feel odd about the Narnia series as well.

Funny, the last book was the only one I never got around to reading. The rest were okay.

As for my own "worst books I've ever (completely) read" list, from least to most horrible:

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The fourth Maximum Ride book (The Final Warning).

The first three entries in this are an awesome sci-fi action/drama/comedy trilogy about a group of teenage mutants trying to set up a semi-sane life for themselves while fighting off the sinister organization that created them. The fourth is a tacked-on author tract about global warming with a dull villain and a prominent, mediocre romance subplot.

Interestingly enough, while looking up the subtitle of the book (which I had forgotten) it seems that there have been another three entries in the series. Skimming the synopses they seem to be more along the lines of The Final Warning than of the first three books, so I think I'll pass on them.

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Deltora Quest.

Eight books (turns out there are two sequel series but I haven't touched them) that I read in half as many days, all of them wasted. It has about the least original fantasy plot I've ever read (to the point that I called the final "twist" halfway through the first chapter of the first book), with dreadful pacing and boring characters to boot. All of that I can forgive, given that I had nothing better to read at the time. What drove me crazy was that in eight books, not once did the heroes ACTUALLY SOLVE A SINGLE FREAKING PROBLEM THEMSELVES. Every single dilemma they ended up in, they got out of through some hamfisted coincidence or conveniently placed plot device. Seriously, these guys couldn't wipe their own arses without a deus ex machina to help them find the toilet paper.

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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

Where do I even start... The other two things only sucked from a narrative perspective; this, on the other hand, is one of the few things I've read that was just a bad book in every possible way.

Think of every story in any medium that plays off a low-functioning autistic child (or, in this case, teenager) for cheap drama, but with a worse writing style.

Now imagine that the story is written from the perspective of the autistic teenager, by an author who has no idea how to do that. Which basically amounts to having two pages of repetitive stream-of-consciousness and poorly-explained math proofs for every page of actual events, while having the poor kid be painfully unaware that in the course of ~230 pages he's just completely ruined his parents' lives, after already having been the reason they split up years before the start of the book.

Finally, imagine that you yourself have high-functioning Asperger's Syndrome and were pestered into reading this book by your mother because she thought it would somehow be "helpful." Needless to say I was NOT AMUSED.

[Ninjadeadbeard]

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

I had to read this for a literature class. Not amused either. Every reason of yours is dead-on, plus this: Regardless of the main character's mental/learning/whatever problems, he's still kind of a huge prick. He has absolutely no redeeming qualities aside from naivete, and that only gets so much sympathy from me.

Another book that needs to burn: The Scarlet Letter. Again, I love a lot of older fiction, but this thing is just...awful, front to back. Why does this exist?

[WyvernLord]

Chiming in for the purpose of agreeing with people.
At the time I was reading His Dark Materials my favorite past time was literally running around pretending to be a superhero. I still found the second and third books to be insanely obvious. Religion bad, stomp stomp. Stopping there because of board policy. And the first was a little too, whee look at the little girl go. HDM is the reason I have never used a prophesy in any of the games I run or characters I have played.

Narnia. I loved these books but I've read the ending and it messes with my enjoyment of the others. All of that and they die. And go to heaven, but not the people who couldn't give blind worship to a being that only comes in the span of decades if not centuries. And then only to a favored few. Anytime they come from earth they take over the lives of everyone else. No one else ever can take a priamary role without an earthling coming over and rescuing them. Or Aslan rescues them.

[willpell]

"Worst" would be a severe exagerration, but the most tepid piece of literature I can recall having ever read was the ten-book Belgariad and Malloreon series/es by David Eddings. It was reasonably pleasant description, but the whole thing is about how a prophecy gets fulfilled exactly as it was stated, and there's just no tension at all, and the scenery walkthrough is not nearly spectacular enough to make up for this.

The worst thing I can think of offhand which I've read (most anything truly awful I have doubless repressed) is the ending to Lyda Morehouse's "Archangel Protocol". It retroactively made me hate the rest of the book after I'd enjoyed it previously! What's worse is that I know Lyda distantly IRL (she's a person at conventions I used to go to, so "know" may be an exagerration, but I've spoken to her), and I don't think I can ever get along with her as a person again after knowing that she would write such a thing.

[factotum]

Ooh, speaking of lengthy slogs, how about Battlefield Earth? I read it in seventh grade at my dad's urging (he had the first edition copy, bless him), and it took me like two months to finish.

I actually quite enjoyed Battlefield Earth--science was ropey and John Goodboy Tyler did get quite annoying, but as turn-your-brain off entertainment it worked OK. Can't say I've gone out of my way to find any other L. Ron Hubbard books since, mind you...

[DaedalusMkV]

I nominate Nikolai Tolstoy's "The Coming of the King", simply because it's the only book I can remember actually struggling to get through. You think the Silmarillion is a bit dry? This has it beat...

Oh my, yes. I made it about a third of the way in before I realized that not only was I not enjoying it, but I couldn't actually remember anything that had happened or what the current plot point was. It was more like reading a dry research paper on Arthurian mythology than a novel, and the prose was so obtuse and purple that it could be very difficult to actually figure out what was going on. One of the few books I've ever just put down half-way through out of sheer, unrelenting boredom.

Probably the worst book I've ever read is... Uh, right, The Gates of Dawn by Robert Newcomb, the second in his relatively long-running "epic fantasy" series which will never be finished because even though Del Ray paid him for nine books in advance they were losing money on the printing costs for the later books. The first book in the series, The Fifth Sorceress, is a notoriously awful brick of a book which was near-universally panned and the target of numerous accusations of misogyny (accurately; all the villains were female, and in this setting female magic-users are genetically predisposed to evil and sexual deviancy). The second book was worse. It's the story of how the "young" (30 years old, but acts 13 and is repeatedly referred to as young) prince of some country that basically got destroyed in the first book fights his four-month-old son to prevent him from opening a gateway which will do vague but bad things. Over the course of the book he finds Twu Wuv (for the third time in two books), gets hit by the old "mwaha, I poisoned you and you'll need to do what I say to get the antidote" trick, nearly dies of no less than three different illnesses, discovers that he basically has an unlimited supply of magical abilities that might possibly activate at any given time and do anything (deus ex machina in a box), and then the villain's plan was revealed to be incapable of succeeding, rendering all of the events of the book pointless. I happily admit that I only read all the way through it because I was putting up scathing chapter summaries on a different forum as the result of a dare. The prose was purple to say the least, the characters were often one-dimensional cardboard cutouts with no rhyme or reason to their actions, nothing at all in the series made any sense whatsoever and the whole thing was filled with plot-holes. Bleck.

[Nifar]

Tolkien. Hands down worst I've ever read. It's so unrealistic.

Okay, now that I'm done trolling, the real "worst" depends on what standards we're using, and whether or not I can count fanfiction. If we can, and we're going by "most sick and depraved thing you've ever read", it'd be either "Rectified Anonymity", also know to Topless Roboteers as "The Pokemon Story", or "Sweet Apple Massacre".
If we're going by just vaguely awful, Twilight comes close, for a great number of reasons, as does Anita Blake and Catcher in the Rye, but ultimately Atlas Shrugged's complete lack of redeeming features wins out.
As far as "boring, long, and plodding", the award goes to the Wheel of Time. Which, last I checked, is still not over yet. The author is dead, and there's what, two more books left? Holy ****, why? This is a story that could have been told in, like, six. Tops. Jordan just had a ton of pointless bull**** in the books that, while it helped to establish scenes, characters, and the world in general, ultimately it was not needed, and got boring fast.

[Aidan305]

For terrible writing, any romance novel, especially one that involves the supernatural.

Try Kelly Armstrong's Women of the Other World series. It's actually good.


For me, the worst would be The Eye in the Pyramid, first book of the Illuminatus! trilogy. I'm usually able to read even badly written stuff, but this had me putting it down after only 30 pages of drivel and terrible writing.

Fnord.

[grimbold]

oh right
i forgot to hate on harry potter

i think that the tropes and characters are just horrific and exist only to help harry (who is an idiot IMO)

i guess it could be viewed as an ok series as best, but definitely not worthy of all it's attention

[Emmerask]

"Worst" would be a severe exagerration, but the most tepid piece of literature I can recall having ever read was the ten-book Belgariad and Malloreon series/es by David Eddings. It was reasonably pleasant description, but the whole thing is about how a prophecy gets fulfilled exactly as it was stated, and there's just no tension at all, and the scenery walkthrough is not nearly spectacular enough to make up for this.

Tastes differ, the Belgariad series would actually be in my top 20 best fantasy series

As far as "boring, long, and plodding", the award goes to the Wheel of Time. Which, last I checked, is still not over yet. The author is dead, and there's what, two more books left? Holy ****, why? This is a story that could have been told in, like, six. Tops. Jordan just had a ton of pointless bull**** in the books that, while it helped to establish scenes, characters, and the world in general, ultimately it was not needed, and got boring fast.

Well I kind of agree, the story really could have been told in maybe 4 or so books, my main problem however is that there are no likable women in the entire series, atleast I don´t remember any of them who I did not view with disgust... though now that Sanderson has taken over they did become a tad more likable and there is actually stuff happening but I really wouldn´t read the series again.

[Lord Seth]

And go to heaven, but not the people who couldn't give blind worship to a being that only comes in the span of decades if not centuries. And then only to a favored few.

Huh? I don't believe that's what happens.

[Inglenook]

I loved The Belgariad and Mallorean as a kid. When I reread it as an adult I realized how formulaic and schlocky it was, but then I learned that Eddings apparently did this on purpose, combining all the fantasy archetypes into one ridiculous, happy-go-lucky mess. Helped me enjoy it a lot more.

And as for the prophesy, it only came to pass because the characters involved chose to follow it through. I think there was a conversation shortly before or after the fight with Torak where Belgarath told Garion that he always had the choice to not go through with it (although to do so would result in a mad god ruling the world, of course).

[TheLaughingMan]

And go to heaven, but not the people who couldn't give blind worship to a being that only comes in the span of decades if not centuries. And then only to a favored few.

I'm not sure that the Narnians' worship of Aslan is quite "blind," seeing as he has not only sacrificed himself for their sake and came back, but has known access to the Narnian afterlife-equivalent and was personally witnessed by Narnia's first inhabitants as having created their whole freaking world in the first place, in addition to the isolated incidents of his saving their rear-ends. There aren't all that many reasons not to like the guy who continually saves your bacon, unless you're just being prideful or unreasonable.

Or Aslan rescues them.

???

So Aslan isn't allowed to help out his own prodigies now? Because usually, it's not a bad strategy to ask your setting's benevolent deity for help in a given struggle against evil. And seeing as how Narnia's villains are usually pretty powerful guys/gals, I'm not sure if much could be done on one's lonesome, especially given Narnia's usually docile residents.

EDIT: We're probably erring a bit too closely towards religious discussion, though, so perhaps it's best to just drop discussion. Ah, and here I was looking forward to a nice debate!

[Lateral]

I loved The Belgariad and Mallorean as a kid. When I reread it as an adult I realized how formulaic and schlocky it was, but then I learned that Eddings apparently did this on purpose, combining all the fantasy archetypes into one ridiculous, happy-go-lucky mess. Helped me enjoy it a lot more.

Yeah, this is pretty much how I read it the first time. It's not original, and the characters are standard, but it's... delicious, I'd say.

[PrometheusMFD]

EDIT: We're probably erring a bit too closely towards religious discussion, though, so perhaps it's best to just drop discussion. Ah, and here I was looking forward to a nice debate!

To be fair, The Chronicles of Narnia is probably the most heavy handed allegory in classic fantasy.
Not that that detracts from the story.

[WyvernLord]

~snip~

I did over state the problems I see. The last book struck a nerve in me when I read it. So there wouldn't have been much of a debate anyway.

[Hbgplayer]

1 9 8 4
Worst. Book. Ever!

[TheLaughingMan]

1 9 8 4
Worst. Book. Ever!

And then the internet burst into flames.

The End.

[Tvtyrant]

1 9 8 4
Worst. Book. Ever!

Agreed. I particularly love his conception of language as the arbitrator of thought.

[Lord Seth]

1 9 8 4
Worst. Book. Ever!

Are you joking?

[Sith_Happens]

Are you joking?

Of course he is isn't joking; 1984 has always been a wonderful horrible book, and we've always been at war with Eurasia Eastasia. If you need any further clarification, please do not hesitate to ask the first available representative at the Ministry of Love.

[Feytalist]

Ooh, speaking of lengthy slogs, how about Battlefield Earth? I read it in seventh grade at my dad's urging (he had the first edition copy, bless him), and it took me like two months to finish. Boringly perfect protagonist, comic book villains, and hundreds of pages devoted to crawling around in mine shafts or whatever.

I'm still inordinately proud that I managed to read the whole thing through.


I'll just add that the Dune series is still one of my favourites. Chapterhouse is a lot less convoluted than the rest, but I still feel it's a decent ending to the whole series.

We shall not speak of the prequels.


As for the Thomas Covenant series, I'd agree that it was meant to be dense and difficult to get into. It's still a great piece of literature.

[Telonius]

Another book that needs to burn: The Scarlet Letter. Again, I love a lot of older fiction, but this thing is just...awful, front to back. Why does this exist?

Hawthorne is one of my favorite authors. But Scarlet Letter ... it only made sense to me as a story of what guilt and denial will do to a person. It's my least favorite of his works, but I did get what he was trying to do. (Didn't hurt that I'm a child of adultery myself, and had been dealing with a lot of those sorts of emotions at the time I read it). You might enjoy "The Minister's Black Veil" a bit more. It's a short story of Hawthorne's, and deals with similar themes of self-imposed isolation. (And is also about 30 times better than Scarlet Letter).

[Grey Watcher]

As far as "boring, long, and plodding", the award goes to the Wheel of Time. Which, last I checked, is still not over yet. The author is dead, and there's what, two more books left? Holy ****, why? This is a story that could have been told in, like, six. Tops. Jordan just had a ton of pointless bull**** in the books that, while it helped to establish scenes, characters, and the world in general, ultimately it was not needed, and got boring fast.

Ugh. You had to go and remind me that that's a thing that exists. Now I'm depressed. My mother bought me those books as a birthday present one year. I don't think she's ever read them, but she probably figured I liked epic fantasy and at the time (aged 17 or 18 if I remember correctly), was a fairly easy critic of these things. After plodding through endlessly repetitive character development, reading the same SHOCKING REVELATIONS from like three different characters, a mind-numbingly dense maze of unnecessary plot twists shocking swerves, doomsday being always just around the corner but never actually getting any closer, all of it drenched in gallons of the most over-simplified, sexist view of the world, I finally gave up after 5 or 6 installments. They're still on the bookshelf in my room at my parents' house. I should probably donate them to the library or something, though I'd hate to inflict them on anyone else.

As for other terrible literary experiences this thread forced me to, unfortunately recall, I have three.

Two were reading for school. In grade school, had to do a book report and picked a bit of historical fiction set during the American Revolution. Seemed like an interesting premise, some of that period told through the eyes of a moderately ranked British army officer (the eponymous Major Andre). What followed was a long series of dull, plodding excuses as the narrator describes his own journey wandering behind enemy lines in disguise while trying, rather witlessly, to claim he was not a spy. I hated the book so much my report was like 2 weeks late and I got in trouble with my teacher. My mom actually read the book and agreed with me at that it was dense, stupid, and totally not worth it, but that I probably should've just sucked it up and finished my work on time anyway.

The other school assigned book was for summer reading during high school. Somewhere I got the idea that The Right Stuff would be an exciting read. When I got halfway through the book, I stopped holding out hope that "the good part" would ever come.

The last entry is another present from a loved one: in this case, a Christmas present from my fiance. He knows nothing about fantasy, and very little about fiction in general (he's a huge non-fiction buff), so he just picked something that had an interesting cover. Sadly, that was about the most interesting thing about it. I honestly can't remember much about it now, but there was a lot of poorly formulated stuff involving one character being the reincarnation of a long dead king, another wandering on the oceans and having a lot of adventures that ultimately had no bearing on any other part of the plot, and the general impression that there was a lot more going on in the writer's head than he ever put down on paper: missing exposition, connecting events, etc. I vaguely wondered if it was part of a longer series, as an explanation for why there were such huge gaps, but I couldn't find anything at the time.

Anyway, at the OP: If you're looking for bad literature to read and laugh at, I would not recommend any of these. They were each, in their way, painful to read and I'm sorry to even bring them up. Except, y'know, misery loves company, I guess.

[Hbgplayer]

Are you joking?

Not at all. I hated reading that foul book.
The only book/series of books that ranks lower than that is the Twilight books. Yes, I read them, trying to understand what all the hype was about and maybe, just maybe, be able to talk to a few girls about it. Worst. Decisoin. EVER!

Of course he is isn't joking; 1984 has always been a wonderful horrible book, and we've always been at war with Eurasia Eastasia. If you need any further clarification, please do not hesitate to ask the first available representative at the Ministry of Love.

Lol

[Lord Seth]

Not at all. I hated reading that foul book.

And...what makes it so "foul"?

I can understand not liking it, but I'm confused as to why someone would hate it with such magnitude.