Worst thing you've ever read

[The Glyphstone]

I'd say John Ringo's Paladin of Shadows/Kildar series (birth of the OH JOHN RINGO NO meme), but since even the author knows it's awful, and I went in expecting it to be awful, it become So Horrible It Couldn't Help But Be Hilarious.

[Lateral]

The Eye Of Argon at least has the merit of being so bad it's good. It has way more entertainment value than a merely mediocre book.

Mmm, I don't actually think it's really so bad it's good. It kind of goes past that hill entirely. Rather, my opinion on it is that it's one of the very, very few books that is so bad that it passes being good into being heinous, and goes so far into that area that it hits a wall of sheer hilarity. I can't think of a single other work of literature that reaches the second so-bad-it's-good marker.

What... words are not supposed to... how many thesarauses did it take to... AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Read. Now. Alcohol is advised.

[factotum]

Eddings' books do have good qualities (the snarky banter is always entertaining)

I sort of disagree there...yes, the snarky banter is entertaining, but I don't think it's a good quality of the books simply because *everybody* does it. If it were just the characters you'd expect to be snarky (Silk, say) doing it then it would be OK, but when it's everyone I find it feels forced.

[factotum]

Being a spaceship doesn't make a difference to that.

Actually, it does. Aircraft will have varying rates of fuel consumption because of local weather effects like wind and the like, which a spacecraft simply doesn't have to deal with (until the last little bit of the descent, which is a tiny part of the overall journey). As for 75kg not being much--the problem here is that this additional mass is having to be decelerated from whatever speed the spacecraft was dropped off at to zero relative at the planet's surface, and almost all of that extra fuel burn will be happening outside the planet's atmosphere; the faster the ship is going to start with, the more difference it makes, because kinetic energy varies with the square of the speed.

Don't get me wrong, your point about the spacecraft being a bit poorly secured if the girl was able to get in it in the first place is certainly valid, but I'm not sure the one about the extra mass being irrelevant is.

[McStabbington]

Hrm. If we're looking at literature, I'd say it's a tossup between Jaws and A Tale of Two Cities, albeit for completely different reasons. First of all, yes, I realize that there are many worse books out there; it's just that I've been canny enough to avoid those. The problem that I had with ATotC is purely based on the prose. Something about the writing of Englishmen in the 19th century lends itself to unduly dense phrasing that forces you to read it over and over again to understand. I didn't appreciate that. As for Jaws, it was poorly-plotted, with a lot of side stories that added nothing but pages.

If we're talking non-fiction, Ayn Rand's attempt at actual philosophy in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, although not because of the ideas presented so much as the manner of presentation. Philosophy books have a certain cadence to them, and a good one walks a reader through an argument step by step to show why a point must be correct. Rand . . . didn't do this. I can only assume that she just didn't realize how cursory she was being. And this problem cropped up enough that by the end of the first chapter, I had to return the book lest I physically destroy it.

[Avilan the Grey]

I don't think he said you *should*, but it is quite hard to believe you've never read anything worse than 1984 unless you've only read about 4 books in your life. (I'm not the biggest fan of 1984 myself, I hasten to add, but I've read much worse without having to go hunting for bad stuff deliberately!).

What are you talking about? "The Room" is hilarious.

Also, on a similar note, if Daredevil is the worst movie you've ever seen, then you haven't seen very many bad movies.

I don't read nearly as much as I used to; but part of it is to know when to stop. I genuinely loved the early Anita Blake books, but saw in Blue Moon where the series was heading and went cold turkey on it. My wife (who I only knew as a chat friend back then) continued two more books and got more than a little irritated over the fact that I was right, and she should have cut off at the same point.

It is the same with movies for me; I tend to not experience any really bad movies, because I tend to only watch movies I am pretty sure I would like. Life is too short to waste two hours on movies that most likely are not to your liking when you could spend them playing Mass Effect 2 or Diablo III...
We have a huge DVD collection; in fact one of my arguments every time the cable company calls and wants us to subscribe to dedicated movie channels is "we watch TOO MANY movies; by the time it is on the channel, we either have bought it, or don't want to see it".

[factotum]

I see where you're coming from, but I think it's nice to read or watch something outside your normal comfort zone occasionally--you might actually really enjoy it! Of course, there's the possibility it's utter tripe, but you can always stop watching (or reading) before the end if that's the case. The last time I can remember actually having done that is when I tried to watch the live action Inspector Gadget movie, mind you...

[Manga Shoggoth]

It doesn't have to be in English, right?

Dream of the Red Chamber. Boring novel, boring plot, boring characters, and epitomises the boring parts of boring Chinese soap operas. Freaking boring opening repeats itself for a couple boring iterations before it even gets into the boring story. Plus it was required reading in my (Chinese) high school. And to top it all off it is written in what passes for the ancient vernacular, making it less comprehensible.

So bad, in fact, that it gets a mention in one of Barry Hugharts Master Li and Number Ten Ox stories. Number Ten Ox isn't impressed either. This is the only reason I have heard of the title.

Even my 4-volume translation of Journey to the West wasn't that repetitive.

[Avilan the Grey]

I see where you're coming from, but I think it's nice to read or watch something outside your normal comfort zone occasionally--you might actually really enjoy it! Of course, there's the possibility it's utter tripe, but you can always stop watching (or reading) before the end if that's the case. The last time I can remember actually having done that is when I tried to watch the live action Inspector Gadget movie, mind you...

On the other hand, again... if I pick up a book, and the back blurb makes me go "bleh", I won't read it.

[Dienekes]

On the other hand, again... if I pick up a book, and the back blurb makes me go "bleh", I won't read it.

True, but admittedly my current favorite book series had a back blurb that made me go "meh" and I only picked it up months later because of a friends recommendation.

Of course "meh" isn't as bad as a "bleh" but they're in the same ballpark.

[Gnoman]

Actually, it does. Aircraft will have varying rates of fuel consumption because of local weather effects like wind and the like, which a spacecraft simply doesn't have to deal with (until the last little bit of the descent, which is a tiny part of the overall journey). As for 75kg not being much--the problem here is that this additional mass is having to be decelerated from whatever speed the spacecraft was dropped off at to zero relative at the planet's surface, and almost all of that extra fuel burn will be happening outside the planet's atmosphere; the faster the ship is going to start with, the more difference it makes, because kinetic energy varies with the square of the speed.

Don't get me wrong, your point about the spacecraft being a bit poorly secured if the girl was able to get in it in the first place is certainly valid, but I'm not sure the one about the extra mass being irrelevant is.

First, the aircraft I was referring to were military aircraft on patrol in formation with each other, flying literally through the same places. It was a fairly frequent phenomenon in the Pacific War. Second, you won't spend 90 percent of your deceleration time in the planet's atmosphere if you're flying a constant-boost ship. You'll have to spend just abnout as much time slowing down as you did speeding up, with maybe 10% of the effort being used to fight the gravity well at the end. Third, the author vastly exaggerated the effect that an extra person would actually make to fuel consumption. Even modern Earth-based craft, which are much smaller, so ~75kg would be a much more significant increase in mass, don't run on tolerances that tight, for good reason. From the description of the ship in the story, it's essentially putting an extra flea on a robin.

[molten_dragon]

I've got a few to add.

David Weber's Out of the Dark: The single worst book I've ever read. It's boring, overly descriptive, and the ending made me want to commit genocide.

Kevin J. Anderson's Saga of Seven Suns series: Reading this didn't fill me with rage the way some of these other books did. I just sort of stopped reading halfway through the series when I realized that I didn't give a rat's ass about any of the characters in the book or what happened to them. Mostly just boring.

Gail Martin's The Summoner: This isn't a book, this is a D&D campaign journal, and it's not even a well-written one. I've read better on this website.

Chris Evans's Iron Elves trilogy: This series felt like it started in the middle of another series. Nothing is explained, and you feel like you're missing out on a bunch of the plot. It's confusing, and the pacing is awful. The climax of the book is crammed into the last 15 pages or so.

Edit: Just thought of one more. Greg Egan's Incandescence. This is less of a novel than a physics textbook. It has absolutely no plot, and is essentially an account of a fictional species experimenting to determine the laws of orbital mechanics and relativity. The single most boring thing I've ever read.

[Squark]

While these aren't as bad as some examples, both The Awakening and The Great Gatsby hold a place as two of the books I read in high school that I liked the least.

The Great Gatsby... I'm not sure what the point was. Is it optimistic? Pessimistic? It just really was not that great, especially since it came right before better books.

The Awakening holds the dubious honor of being the only book to ever put me to sleep while reading it. It might hold a place in literature, but it takes a really, really dull read to do that. And it was midday, for the record.

[factotum]

Second, you won't spend 90 percent of your deceleration time in the planet's atmosphere if you're flying a constant-boost ship. You'll have to spend just abnout as much time slowing down as you did speeding up, with maybe 10% of the effort being used to fight the gravity well at the end.

Er, yes, that's exactly what I said, isn't it?

[Gnoman]

It is likely I misuderstood you. I thought you were suggesting that nearly all decelleration would happen in the gravity well, instead of the ship entering said well at a little under orbital speed and then fighting the pull, which is the only really practical way to do so.

[factotum]

I said most of the deceleration would take place outside the atmosphere and would thus not be affected by crosswinds and other weather phenomena that you referred to when talking about aircraft. The comment about gravity well was a few posts back, but thinking about it, I was probably wrong to even bring it up--the extra mass on the ship would affect the fuel consumption pretty equally no matter where in the flight they were, so long as the thrust levels remained the same.

[Gnoman]

Ah. Then the sole point of confusion is that the aircraft I was referring to were under identical aerodynamic conditions, meaning that crosswinds and the like played absolutely no part in the discrepancy. It's a bit off-track anyway, as I was simply trying to demonstrate that there is no way to give an engine performance tolerances tight enough that you can calculate fuel expenditure so precisely that even the mass of a single person causes the scenario to fail.

[factotum]

I think tolerances on rockets tend to be a lot tighter, simply because the more mass in fuel you carry, the more it takes to get the thing off the ground and into orbit--you don't want to have to put an extra hundred tons of fuel on board purely to compensate for fuel consumption issues in the engines!

Mind you, I'm surprised to hear that fuel consumption is so uncertain in modern-day jets...

[The Glyphstone]

I've got a few to add.

David Weber's Out of the Dark: The single worst book I've ever read. It's boring, overly descriptive, and the ending made me want to commit genocide.

I'm a cheerfully admitted MWW fanboy, so I had to go look this book up to see if it was just another of his usual creations. I found it on Wikipedia...

...holy crap, was the man drunk or something when he wrote it, and his editors even drunker when they approved it? That was the most absolutely awful thing I'd ever seen his name attached to, and I was only reading the Wiki plot summary.

[Lost Demiurge]

I'm a cheerfully admitted MWW fanboy, so I had to go look this book up to see if it was just another of his usual creations. I found it on Wikipedia...

...holy crap, was the man drunk or something when he wrote it, and his editors even drunker when they approved it? That was the most absolutely awful thing I'd ever seen his name attached to, and I was only reading the Wiki plot summary.

I don't know. I don't know what he was thinking. Weber was always a fun read for me before, but... Never again.

And the worst thing is that I bought it before knowing anything about it. The back cover blurb looked fun, and I figured "Hey, Weber is always good for a quick read."

NO.

I sold it to half price books, and got maybe $1.00 for the trade. It will never bring back my lost money or time or goodwill to Mr. Weber, but that's a dollar I will never again spend on his books. I don't care what else he's done, that book has scared me off of his work for life.

[The Glyphstone]

Well, at least your sacrifice has done me good - I know to never touch a copy of it, and thus avoid the further poisoning of his good name in my mind.

[Elfinor]

Worst series I remember reading to the conclusion: The Elder Gods by David Eddings. Constant repetition of 'falling back to the next defensive line' x 1000 followed by deus ex machina. Spoilered spoiler.

Spoiler

Show

The ending literally involved the new crop of gods going back in time to handwave away all the bad events of the previous books and even events before the series started just like it never happened, only better. Hooray

Worst book I remember quitting: A Sherrilyn Kenyon (I think?) novel, it was a supernatural romance. Total Pain.
Repeat the following over at least the first third of the book (I quit):
Him: Why is she being so nice to me even though I'm being such a jerk? No one has ever done this for me before...
Her: Even though he's such a jerk there's just something so irresistably sexy about him. There must be some kindness beneath his rough exterior...

I read an encyclopedia on her world (I don't think it was this novel's world, but they were stuck in a hut in a blizzard for the first third, so unsure) and found it interesting. So she writes better world-encyclopedias than novels, I suppose

Honorable Mention: His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman has killed my love for reading - I bought the books just over a year ago (because they've received good reviews) and IT HURTS. Lyra is on the verge of being a Mary Sue character (Lee Scorseby: If only I had a daughter that was half as good and pure as her!). Pullman constantly seems to be trotting out the line, 'You must obey me because I have the Knife/a gun and I am stronger than you' - never something more organic like a simple 'Do it or I'll shoot!'. I've gone from a couple of novels a week to taking over a year to get through this trilogy - almost done, I've gone too far to give up now

[Gnoman]

I think tolerances on rockets tend to be a lot tighter, simply because the more mass in fuel you carry, the more it takes to get the thing off the ground and into orbit--you don't want to have to put an extra hundred tons of fuel on board purely to compensate for fuel consumption issues in the engines!

Mind you, I'm surprised to hear that fuel consumption is so uncertain in modern-day jets...

Tighter. yes. Tighter to the point needed for The Cold Equations? Impossible. Even nuclear warheads, which are smaller (precision becomes exponentially difficult as the size of the object increases), and don't go under the constant stresses that an engine goes through (stress deforms parts, reducing efficiency), aren't quite that precise. You rarely hear about it in modern times because everyone includes a healthy safety margin in their fuel supply, though every few years you hear about an airliner that tried to cut costs and landed dry.

[Lord Seth]

I'm a cheerfully admitted MWW fanboy, so I had to go look this book up to see if it was just another of his usual creations. I found it on Wikipedia...

...holy crap, was the man drunk or something when he wrote it, and his editors even drunker when they approved it? That was the most absolutely awful thing I'd ever seen his name attached to, and I was only reading the Wiki plot summary.

What's so bad about the summary? I read through it, and outside of the ending which seemed like he was trying to answer "what's the most random thing I could possibly inject into this science fiction story?", the description didn't seem bad. Not anything amazing, but not bad.

[The Glyphstone]

What's so bad about the summary? I read through it, and outside of the ending which seemed like he was trying to answer "what's the most random thing I could possibly inject into this science fiction story?", the description didn't seem bad. Not anything amazing, but not bad.

That's pretty much it. The bit at the end is so incredibly random and off-the-wall, it retroactively goes back and corrupts the rest of the summary. There's also a bit of being able to see Weber's Plot Element Blender at work, so something deviating so greatly from his comfortable formula is extra shocking.