Worst Book You've Ever Read

I read many brilliant books - and then there's a few that are so mind-numbingly awful that I feel like I wasted my mental energy reading them.

For now, I'm going to say The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis. It was a short read of transcendental... nothing.

PS: Don't say Harry Potter, Eragon, or Twilight. Everybody's heard those a million times before.

I don't read bad books. I set them down and back away slowly.

But seriously...I dunno. I've never really read a book I walked that I've walked away from with nothing.

Ishmael. Its about a monkey (that talks) that tells the world how mankind is viewed from another perspective (Stranger in a Strange Land??) a whole bunch of philosophical fluff, basically.

I'm tempted to say Lord of the Rings. I mean, the narrative is so boring that I just don't know how anyone can actually like those books. Then again, the story is sublime. Tolkien is a bit like Stan Lee. They are both pretty bad writers, but their creativity just blows you away. They can come up with great ideas and stories, but just don't know how to put them down on the page. So... I would say Lord of the Rings, but it's not the worst thing in the world.

I haven't really read bad books. It's not like movies where you go to the movies not knowing anything about it, and have to sit through it. If I don't like it, I just put it down. And I only read books that I'm pretty sure I'm going to like. I don't buy whatever I get my hands on. The only thing I actually remember reading all the way, and then say: "That was terrible," was the fifth Harry Potter book. I thought that was, honestly, really bad.

But since I've been forbidden to say that also, well... I don't know.

My first book I ever wrote.

It was horrendous, really, very bad.

However I hear the writer is very good looking so that makes up for it.


XD

I'm tempted to say Lord of the Rings.

ARGHHHHHHHHHHH!

Take it back!

EDIT: Sorry, just recovered.

I have to say Eragon.... *shivers* Characters are flat, bad author and it's like reading Star Wars... in Middle-Earth.

Twilight.

Oh, don't say that?

Then The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. An interesting concept, but very poorly executed.

Oh, and An American Childhood by Anne Something-or-other. Intensely boring. Intensely.

-:pirate3:

Eragon...Wait, we can't say that?

OK, uh...hmm...uh...

Wow...I think Eragon is the only BAD book I've read.

I'm sorry for saying no HP, Twilight and Eragon, but haven't you people already gotten it out of your system? It's universal knowledge that many readers greatly dislike those books. There's threads on it, forums on it... sigh. Sorry, I KNOW you people read other books, haha.

I agree with Lord of the Rings. It was dull, and I don't even know I managed to read it all. Sometimes I wonder if it would be less boring if it was read aloud?

Now that you mention it, Lord of the Rings is a great book... but really, there's a lot of:

"You must set out on a great quest! But first, let me tell you about my elven ancestors..."

It's kind of a pain.

Artemis Fowl by Eion Colfer (The beginning was too confusing)

Old Yeller by Fred Gipson (Way too sad and it bored me halfway through)

Twilight.

(I'm sick of hearing about it and I heard that although the characters were captiviating or something, her actual writing was horrible so I'd probably get annoyed anyway.)

I'm tempted to say Lord of the Rings.

(I love LOTR but that's mainly because my dad does too and it's kind of been drilled into me, whether I like it or not.)

There are a lot of basically unheard-of authors that somehow managed to fall under my radar as a twelve-year-old-ish.
One was Anne Cassidy. At one time, I had all her books and each were truly attrocious. It was all: he said, she said, she did this, this happened. Just awfully written to the point of tedium. The worst? Probably 'Baby Blues' about a teenage pregnancy that really goes nowhere.
There have been others. Like 'Red Tears' by Joanna Kenrick(?) which was a long-winded, badly-written story about some girl who cuts herself to make herself feel powerful. It would have been all right as a short story but it was about 200-pages. Completely dragged.

I don't think I've ever read anything truly bad. Besides Eragon, which I disliked simply because the style reminds me of my own before I studied any writing at all. (Meaning he wrote it like a fourteen-year-old twerp.)

Usually, if I come across something that sucks, I give up on it and forget about it. I've read a lot of good stuff to make up for it.

Although there was that one book. I forget what it's called, but it's about a gay guy who meets a gay ghost, sleeps with said gay ghost, and proceeds to solve the mystery about the gay ghost's death. Nothing against homosexuals - it was a good plot, but the sex stuff was a) too much for a YA novel and b) rather creepy - how do you have sex with a ghost, anyways?

Moby Dick and The Silmarillion.

The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory. I'm serious. Worst thing I've ever read. I got it for Christmas.

I don't like memoirs, for the most part, which is probably why I don't read them. I read The Color of Water by James McBride for a summer reading assignment and I thought it was terrible. Other people thought I had no soul because I said that. But honestly. It was terrible.

And basically all teen lit I've ever read, with a handful of exceptions. But teen lit is sort of defined by its own awful-ness.

Ishmael. Its about a monkey (that talks) that tells the world how mankind is viewed from another perspective (Stranger in a Strange Land??) a whole bunch of philosophical fluff, basically.

I loved Ishmael...it's thought-provoking. I think I might have even liked My Ishmael better...it's sort of a parallel story, about another person--a twelve-year-old girl--visiting Ishmael.