Worst thing you've ever read

[Dienekes]

Hello folks, pretty simple but odd request. I have a love of watching really terrible movies and poking fun at them. I'm curious if the same can be done with books, and was wondering if anyone had any good recommendation for terrible pieces of literature.

Now when I thought about this, really one series came into mind for me: Terry Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule series in which the protagonist are almost impossibly stupid, probably evil, and they face such horrible things like the dreaded "chicken that is not a chicken." All taken deadly seriously.

So I was wondering if there were any books you know of or read that were so bad they hurt your brain or made you burst out laughing, unintentionally. For board purposes let's keep these fictional and none-political or religious please.

[Dumbledore lives]

Well I didn't read very much of it but in a bookstore I read the first page or so of the Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood book and burst out laughing. Excluding fanfic I think it was the worst written thing I've read, but I tend to avoid romances and other typically crappy written genres as a whole, so I'm not too good of a judge.

[Eakin]

Google the Eye of Argon. It's amazing in its terribleness

[Fri]

The worst book I ever bought is Celestine Propechy, a new age self-help book disguised as an adventure novel. In hindsight, it might not actually be that bad, if you're into those. But there's two things that made me really hate it. One, the premise sounds cool, and I've been pumped for the adventure, only to find it actually be new agey self help book in the line of... you know, Secret and such? Second, the translation is so... not bad but... flat. Every single character sounds the same, and pout the same mumbo jumbo in the same way, all through the book. I'm just assuming that in the original, they'll at least speak in different tones or something.

[Lateral]

Google the Eye of Argon. It's amazing in its terribleness

Seriously, I have to second this. By the time I was done with the first paragraph, I was going, "This is utter dreck." By the time I had finished the first two lines of dialogue, I was ready to tear my eyes out.

By the time I finished the first fight scene, I nearly lost all faith in humanity and had to watch three straight episodes of My Little Pony to even begin the long, long road to recovery. I'm still haunted by the memories... *fetal position*

I... might be exaggerating just a bit, but it really is that bad. Spelling errors, purple prose so thick it's basically Tyrian, the worst use of in medias res I've ever seen, and everything about it manages to be both impenetrably dense and yet completely lacking substance. Go get some hard liquor and take a look.

[Surfing HalfOrc]

The Unsuspecting Mage. Seriously, it's horrible!

It was a "Free eBook" on some webpage, so I downloaded it for my phone (I have the Kindle App) I couldn't get past the first chapter it was so bad.

Then I went to look at the reviews. They were either One Stars, or Five Stars. It became obvious that almost ALL the Five Star reviews were written by the Author Himself, since they all had the same stilted writing style... He also tried to rebut the negative reviews. Some of the Five Stars might have been written by his wife or kids, but outside of a very small, and possibly easily impressed or possibly reviewers that were being held hostage, nobody liked the story.

It was like watching a train wreck. Horrible, but so hard to turn away from.

There were some notes a few months ago saying the book has been revised and rereleased, but I don't know.

[thubby]

it's hard to find a really bad book that's still legible.

[Lord Raziere]

Seriously, I have to second this. By the time I was done with the first paragraph, I was going, "This is utter dreck." By the time I had finished the first two lines of dialogue, I was ready to tear my eyes out.

By the time I finished the first fight scene, I nearly lost all faith in humanity and had to watch three straight episodes of My Little Pony to even begin the long, long road to recovery. I'm still haunted by the memories... *fetal position*

I... might be exaggerating just a bit, but it really is that bad. Spelling errors, purple prose so thick it's basically Tyrian, the worst use of in medias res I've ever seen, and everything about it manages to be both impenetrably dense and yet completely lacking substance. Go get some hard liquor and take a look.

your right.

that is the least understandable thing I ever read.

easily forgettable then. if I can't understand it, might as well not remember it.

[Inglenook]

I'm assuming fanfic doesn't count?

To get the obvious choice out of the way: I thought Twilight was incredibly poorly done on a variety of levels (characters, dialogue, vocabulary, etc.). But it was at least coherent.

I read Dr Dale's Zombie Dictionary recently and it was so so so bad—unfunny dad humor, overly long, and extremely repetitive.

There's one Dan Brown novel about the possibility of alien life existing in the arctic, or something? The climax took place on a sinking/exploding oil rig BUILT OVER A MAELSTROM FILLED WITH VORACIOUS SHARKS. My eyes hadn't rolled that much since my last demonic possession.

[Manga Shoggoth]

A friend of mine lent me two, both qualify for "Worst thing I have ever read".

The first was a slim paperback called "A Woman in Space". Think Mills and Boon (including the cover...) meets Sci Fi...

...Almost...

...Actually, not at all. The "science" - such that it was - was awful and inconsistent. The writing was... bad. The characterisation was worse - and horribly sexist to boot. Then, about two-thirds of the way through the story we hit the sex scenes, at which point the level of writing hit juvenile.

Then there was "Quinton". His mother picked this up from a hotel in Scotland. It was self-published by the author (who was a member of the family who ran the hotel, so she even got a signed copy).

The artwork on the cover gave an impression of the delights to come. Dominating the cover was the front view of the hero (I assume ) mounting his steed. At least, I hope he was riding his steed, but the expression on his steed's face made that... questionable. To the top left was a tabeau of a virgin sacrifice, which hinted at at least something interesting happening in the story.

Undaunted, I ploughed in. And it was a vary hard furrow - two long forewords, in character (as it were), which painted the novel as the first book in a gripping series about the growth of a galactic empire from a simple agricultural planet. At least, I think that was what they were about.

Then, eventually we hit the story. The hier to some small kingdom is kidnapped (but, the text immediately assured us, would return to regain his kingdom). This took about two chapters in which the most interesting characters were the aforesaid mounts. And they only got one paragraph.

After four chapters I gave up. The author was incapable of creating narrative tension, let alone maintaining it. It read like someone who has read "Dune", liked the idea, but lacked the talent.

And the virgin sacrifice? My friend (who somehow managed to complete the book) assures me that even that was completely uninteresting. And didn't even involve a sacrifice.

[Man on Fire]

There was one SF book I read as a kid. The cover was promising - it featured scary monster in the forest. What I got was bizarre science fiction with many interesting ideas but narration way to convoluded to follow, plot terrily slow ( I stopped reading halfway through and I don't think it even got into kidnapping of main character's father, promised on the blurb) and some balls-out insane ideas, like "the more people dissagree with each other, the bigger friends they are".

[Mauve Shirt]

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

[The_Admiral]

Not in English but any Malay book I got for my literature section for school.

So Meniti Kaca, wait that was okay.

Pahlawan Pasir Salak was long and had run off sentences galore.

Papa... (Akhirnya kau tewas jua!) too was dull and long the two ingredients of a horrible book.

Little fact. Nobody read the second two books.

[Sith_Happens]

Does fanfic count? Because one time for fun in my freshman dorm about ten of us got together and had one person do a "dramatic reading" of My Immortal. Never have I laughed so hard while simultaneously having so much of me die inside.

[thorgrim29]

I've read some pretty terrible manga (or maybe the translation was just horrible)... Other then that, I think books from Maupassant are awful. Especially "Le Horla". I understand he was basically inventing fantasy and all, but it's a confusing, weirdly written and stilted mess. "Boule de Suif" was also really bad. It's the story of a coach ride from a town to another. Most of the passengers are rich and respected citizens who stupidly forgot to bring food, the other is a fat prostitute (hence the title, but that sort of thing was attractive back then) who has tons of food. So everyone likes her until she has to do something for the good of the group and then they shun her. It's so boring.
La Venus d'ille, from he same period, suffers from much of the same.

[SynissterSyster]

I have read Wizard's First Rule and I loved the series so I gues YMMV on some books. LIke for me I felt "The DaVinci Code" Was just meh. One page chapters just didn't cut it for me. I understand the appeal but still. I work in a library so I see a Huge amount of books that make me go wtf. For as much hate as it gets "Twilight" isn't a bad read when you realize it is a sappy romance.

[Dienekes]

Google the Eye of Argon. It's amazing in its terribleness

Good pick and one I have unfortunately already read. Also there's a better version you can find online (through TvTropes is where I got it) that is the full original manuscript. I would link to it, but it has some art that would be inappropriate. Crappy. Yet still inappropriate.

Does fanfic count? Because one time for fun in my freshman dorm about ten of us got together and had one person do a "dramatic reading" of My Immortal. Never have I laughed so hard while simultaneously having so much of me die inside.

I would rather stay away from fanfiction, unless you have one that is so terrible it can be compared with My Immortal.

Also, I've read My Immortal, probably the only fanfic I've read that I've actually enjoyed.

Any way thanks everyone for the suggestions so far, and keep them coming.

To Synisster, I know The Wizard's First Rule has a fan following, and I hope you don't feel insulted but I thought after the 2nd book it became terrible. I need to ask though, how did you not laugh yourself silly at the chicken that is not a chicken line? Or when the female girl has her army attack an opposing army in the middle of the night, glowing, and naked, in the middle of winter?

Also thorgrim languages are my Achilles heel. I've tried to learn 5 of them now, and have astoundingly failed at all but English. So I don't think I could really read Boule de Suif

[Gnoman]

Anything written by Dan Brown. Seriously, about halfway through the Da Vinci Code, my brain got fed up with the stupid and made me throw the book into the fire. Fortunately, it was free.

[Pokonic]

Well, I say that we should try to avoid fics that would end up in TV Tropes Troll Fic pile (or the sort of badly-spelled piles of crap) to focus on the ones with truly bad writing.

[Weezer]

I'd say the Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I'll ignore any of the political message, to avoid transgressing the forum rules, but besides that it's full of one dimensional cardboard cut out characters, utterly horrific pop-philosophy (not to mention an unspeakably bad misinterpretation of Nietzsche), and a depiction of rape as good, proper and justified. Ugh.

[Lord Seth]

Then I went to look at the reviews. They were either One Stars, or Five Stars. It became obvious that almost ALL the Five Star reviews were written by the Author Himself, since they all had the same stilted writing style... He also tried to rebut the negative reviews. Some of the Five Stars might have been written by his wife or kids, but outside of a very small, and possibly easily impressed or possibly reviewers that were being held hostage, nobody liked the story.

Number of reviews for each number of stars on Amazon.com:
5 stars: 38
4 stars: 27
3 stars: 19
2 stars: 30
1 star: 49

Only about half of the reviews are 1 star or 5 stars.

I'm assuming fanfic doesn't count?

To get the obvious choice out of the way: I thought Twilight was incredibly poorly done on a variety of levels (characters, dialogue, vocabulary, etc.). But it was at least coherent.

If Twilight is the worst thing someone's read, I'm guessing they've only read really good stuff. To this day I don't understand why people care about Twilight one way or the other...it's one of the most astoundingly mediocre things I've ever seen.

Does fanfic count? Because one time for fun in my freshman dorm about ten of us got together and had one person do a "dramatic reading" of My Immortal. Never have I laughed so hard while simultaneously having so much of me die inside.

I don't know why it'd make you die inside, My Immortal is hilarious (though I do think it kind of got too incoherent towards the end). It's not quite as good as Light and Dark: The Adventures of Dark Yagami, but it's still pretty entertaining.

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

I disagree.

[Aotrs Commander]

Probably the worst thing I've forced myself to read was a sci-fantasy novel I'd borrowed, out of the library, I think, one holiday, based on the blurn at the back. About some girl, finding a dragon (which were some sort of robot ships or something), and going to some magical academt or something (I forget). It was utterly dreadful, and the only reason I forced myself through it was because I was on holiday and didn't have much other reading material. I don't remember much, only that it got a bit strange and that there was quite a lot of slightly creepy (well, to me anyway) sexual stuff. The one odd thing I remember, because it just struck as so wierd, was something about a dragonfly/insectoid girl stripping off at one point (because it was like the fantasy equivilent of American college and spring break or something) and it mentioning she had giant nipples. To which I thought... "The Frag." It was that sort of book.

I suspect I remember so little because I've consciously rejected the memory of it...

And why I tend not to read sci-fantasy anymore (as that was the worst of the samples I have encountered, but almost always the sci-fantasy books I read were pretty much drivel.)

[Togath]

The worst book I've ever read is probably "the demon king", the author seemed to from time to time forget things such as grievous injuries that had happened to the characters, a good example is the evil king guy character; at one point he gets stabbed(with an overly long description lasting about 1-2 pages, and that's just the description of him being stabbed, not the description of the knife fight) and one chapter later(1-2 pages after) he gets up after being very clearly dead and shouts for the guards to catch the main character(which is somewhat redundant, as he was described as being basically a mary sue wizard who could kill someone very easily with magic), soon after that he randomly finds out whop the main character's mother and younger sister are and proceeds to torch their house and slowly burn them to death(at which point i nearly through the book into a pond, and I don't mean that sarcastically) then the hero....fails to do anything about the burning house, soon after he decides to go back to the ruins of his house for some reason(after having spontaneously been unconscious for three weeks) and what follows that is a chapter consisting of the most disgusting descriptions I've ever read, then he starts riffling through the burnt corpses of his mother and younger sister to take a possession of each of theirs to remember them by, then he spontaneously decides he needs to become a wizard, then the book ends. The biggest problem with the book is that most other authors would have just summed up it's plot in a page or two long prologue(and it could very easily have fit into a 1-2 page prologue), in addition, the book as full to the brim with over used clichés.

[Maxios]

A Traitor in the Mist. Also known as: the book I wrote when I was nine, and was in talks to get published for a brief period of time (I'm retty sure this was because this was because the publishing people finally read the book and saw just how crappy it was).
I posted some of the worst lines in Random Banter a couple weeks ago.

Aside from that, when I was in the fourth grade; eons ago, my teacher used to read books to the class. The first Harry Potter, Where the Red Fern Grows, etc. Anyway, there was this book called the Babysitting Wars or something like that. She read it for a grand total of a week and a half when she realized every student in the class hated it.
The book was written for young (8-12) girls and was about a babysitter whose clints were stolen by a rival babysitter, but then (from what I remember from the back of the book) "They decide to work out their differences and become best friends).
The thing is, even the girls in the class hated it. As I recall, a few students took the time to "rest their eyes" (read as: nap), a few were absent-mindingly looking at their desks at the various spots, and a few were reading their own books under their table.
I spent a large portion of the time coming up with an over-complicated scheme the heroine of the tale could have used to gain the clients back, humiliate her rival, and come out on top with even more work.

[TheLaughingMan]

If Twilight is the worst thing someone's read, I'm guessing they've only read really good stuff. To this day I don't understand why people care about Twilight one way or the other...it's one of the most astoundingly mediocre things I've ever seen.

It's just so bland. At least most bad writing has the decency of at least being comedic. Twilight just... is.

[Genosaurer]

Return of the Native. I am a voracious reader typically able to go through a 400 page book in around a day and enjoy a variety of genres; this is the only novel I was literally unable to force myself to finish. I believe it is the worst thing to have ever been put into writing in the English language, and I suspect that the only thing preventing it from being weaponized is the Hague Conventions.

[Lord Seth]

It's just so bland. At least most bad writing has the decency of at least being comedic. Twilight just... is.

Well yeah, which is exactly what makes it not bad. It's just a slightly below average book that deserves neither praise nor scorn. All Twilight deserves, in my mind, is a great big "meh."

[Katana_Geldar]

I'd say the Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I'll ignore any of the political message, to avoid transgressing the forum rules, but besides that it's full of one dimensional cardboard cut out characters, utterly horrific pop-philosophy (not to mention an unspeakably bad misinterpretation of Nietzsche), and a depiction of rape as good, proper and justified. Ugh.

Maybe Atlas Shrugged too, but I just read that because I liked watching the world unravel. It's oddly satisfying.

[erikun]

The Beasts of Valhalla by George C. Chesbro. I've read bad, I've read boring, I've read terrible pulp romantic drek, and I still give it to this book hands-down. The entire book reads like a bad Dan Brown novel, although it makes Dan Brown look like a well-researched genius. I've even read titles like The Historian, and while that one isn't very good, its problems lie primarily on being a slow-paced suspense that simply draws things out too long.

The Beasts of Valhalla, however, is just poorly written. It tries to pass itself off as psudo-scientific, but absolutely everything in the book stands out as ridiculous. Little to no characterization, and poorly awkward dialogue (from what I remember). And to top the whole thing off, what buildup the book did manage to build up was complete tossed out with the reasoning that

Spoiler

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Hypothermia reverses genetic mutations. No, really.

You should be thanking me for digging through my closet to even look up the title of the book again; I've tried my best to forget as much as I can.

I would rather stay away from fanfiction, unless you have one that is so terrible it can be compared with My Immortal.

My Inner Life, a dramatic reading (Author's Notes, part one)

[Dr.Epic]

The only thing that comes to mind is a work of another student in a creative writing class. I can't really go into the details of the work because it was very graphic, but let's just say it was X-Men meets one of the films the Cinema Snob reviews.