What are the worst books you've ever finished?

Zaph

We've all started books that have been so bad that we've thrown them away half way through, but what are the worst books you've actually persevered with to the end? I've got two that definitely qualify:

The Female Man by Joanna Russ - recommended to me by a guy in a bookshop I frequented years ago. All his other recommendations had been brilliant so I saw no reason why this shouldn't be. Turned out to be the most non-sensical load of drivel I've ever had the misfortune to read. The words "feminist science fiction" really should have made me think a bit longer before buying it.

Vernon God Little by D.B.C. Pierre - serves me right for breaking my own rule about never believing the hype about popular books. In fairness, it had all the makings of the sort of book I like, especially the element of quirkiness in the story. However, I found the book itself tedious and from about a third of the way in just couldn't wait to get to the end (I really hate giving up on books and I did hope it would get better). There wasn't a single character in the book I liked or cared about and I just found the whole Texan drawl thing in the language annoying. Just as well I'm not on the Booker Prize jury, I suppose.

funky penguin

Im sure the DaVinci Code will be on this list at numerous points.

For me its Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. I trudged through over 1000 pages of tripe. The action scenes were all that kept me reading, and they were few and far between.

RuggieBear

funky penguin wrote:

For me its Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. I trudged through over 1000 pages of tripe. The action scenes were all that kept me reading, and they were few and far between.

i actually really enjoyed Rainbow 6 but then i was stuck in logan airport for 10hrs....

Worst books i ever finished were the Lord of the Rings.....by god did i struggle through that ****e. 10 pages describing ****ing forests and a paragraph for a major bloody battle :eek:

OfflerCrocGod

Ulysses. What boring twaddle.

Manach

The Helliconia Trilogy series by Brian Aldiss. I bought all three having seen a very favorable review. It must have been the only positive review the series got. Dreary, depressive with violent swings of writting style.

impr0v

I entered this thread sure i'd be able to list plenty of books, but now i find i can't name any. Presumably I've wiped all memory of them, as up until recently I never gave up on a book, just persevered through it.

Fenster

Anything by Kevin J. Anderson. Its like McDonalds: You know its unhealthy, bland and unsatisfying, but you read it regardless.

jimi_t

I think some painful memories are being blocked as I'm coming up fairly blank but...

The Testament - John Gresham
The Female Eunuch - Germain Greer
LOTR - J.R.R Tolkien
Adrian Mole : Weapons of Mass Destruction - Sue Towsend

Whereas something I've finished 20+ times and will never tire of - The Salmon of Doubt and the HHGTTG series - Douglas Adams

Lafortezza

The Rule of Four, absolute shíte, there's another thread about it somewhere.

solo1

Im sure the DaVinci Code will be on this list at numerous points.

The DaVinci Code.

Pherekydes

The Last Precinct by Patricia Cornwell.

Sorry, Patsy, but that's the last of your books I'll ever read.

I tried reading LA Confidential, but couldn't finish it. (The one by James Ellroy)

mycroft

Slow coach wrote:

The Last Precinct by Patricia Cornwell.

Sorry, Patsy, but that's the last of your books I'll ever read.

I tried reading LA Confidential, but couldn't finish it. (The one by James Ellroy)

The only really awful books I've read cover to cover are because I've had to due to restraints (trapped in work/on a boat) or by school.

For exampe I read the DiVinci code while stuck in work for a weekend, but flung Angels and demons across the room after a chapter and a half.

LA Confidential requires some concentration and I love alot of James Ellroy books, I've read nearly all of them. However his earlier books are dreadful, the nuget of potential is in them, you can see where he's going, you just don't walk up the path, you take the short cut and pick up American Tabloid and get memrised by his prose.

I hated both Hard Times and Emma my leaving cert novels.

cashback

I always feel a compulsion to finish a book once i've started. it's terrible, I end up reading a lot of sh*t and wasting my time.
the last one I can think of is 'Rose Madder' by Stephen King. Not one of his finer efforts.
I also want to add Strong Motion by Jonathon Frantzen. Read it because of the hype about the Corrections but this is just crap. Full of obnoxious, boring characters.

Amz

The DaVinci Code.
The Hobbit.

Kazujo

I didn't actually finish it but the Hobbit turned me off Tolkien altogether, too many characters and detail

RuggieBear

mycroft wrote:

The only really awful books I've read cover to cover are because I've had to due to restraints (trapped in work/on a boat) or by school.

For exampe I read the DiVinci code while stuck in work for a weekend, but flung Angels and demons across the room after a chapter and a half.

LA Confidential requires some concentration and I love alot of James Ellroy books, I've read nearly all of them. However his earlier books are dreadful, the nuget of potential is in them, you can see where he's going, you just don't walk up the path, you take the short cut and pick up American Tabloid and get memrised by his prose.

I hated both Hard Times and Emma my leaving cert novels.

Oh...i'd forgotten my leaving cert novel.....Portrait of an artist as a young man....but i suppose i can't include it as i never could finish the pile of twoddle....think i got as far as "Moo-Cow" and gave up. Joyce, wat a ****ing chancer!

As for Elroy....LA confidential is a really superior book. I loved it. And i agree you can see his writing improve with each novel. Brown's requeum (his first novel, i think) is fantastic but is so rough and uneven that altho you can see the ideas you struggle with his thinking.

Never could finish the Hobbit either.....JRR Tolken is another chancer!

monkeyfudge

I read Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. Which was a great book. A really good example of a great science fiction novel.

Now, the problem I have with Clarke is that, while he has great ideas, he is really, really terrible at writing realistic characters, especially women. I think when he was writing Rendezvous with Rama he knew his limitations and the book was more about exploration and science than it was about the characters.

But then came the sequels: Rama II, Garden of Rama and Rama Revealed. With these he decided to team up with Gentry Lee, and together they thought they could pull together some really good character interaction.... ugh... it was horrible... You had three novels, each getting progressively longer, where the science fiction took a back seat to some really terrible family based drama... And I had to keep reading as I wanted to know what the big deal was with the Rama thing... imagine my disappointment when it turns out that

God is behind it all

What a bloody cop out!

Draupnir

The remains of the day. Argggh.

galactus

Peig

Keyzer

Hannibal - Absolute bolloxology...

simu

Some of the Jehovah's Witnesses' Bible exegeses. The creationist one was particularly amusing!

Trojan

Amz: how could you not like The Hobbit?! 1st book I ever read, still love it.

All of Dan Brown - they're all identical.

nesf

"The Crow Road" by Iain Banks

I'm a fan of his straight fiction work, but some of his books are just indecipherable collages of obscure scottish culture. It's a painful thing to read something so bad from an author that you like generally.

monkeyfudge

nesf wrote:

"The Crow Road" by Iain Banks

I'm a fan of his straight fiction work, but some of his books are just indecipherable collages of obscure scottish culture. It's a painful thing to read something so bad from an author that you like generally.

I thought that was about the best of his 'straight' fiction books. I really enjoyed it and Complicity. The last one I tried to read was The Business... now that was pretty terrible.

The BBC did a very good TV series based on The Crow Road.

growler

Clive Cussler , Atlantis Found

I'll never forgive him for stealing 5 hours of my life with this rubbish, again stuck on a plane so no choice but to persevere, damn you Cussler.

Valkyries , Paulo Coelho

thought the Alchemist was a vaguely entertaining story so foolishly bought another of his , hated ever second of it.


Jimmy the Hand, Raymond Feist

I'm a great fan of Feist's fantasy stuff , but this struck me as a total waste of good paper.

The Cryptographer, Tobias Hill

biggest pile of dung ever.

And those have all been in the last few months! :-(

nesf

monkeyfudge wrote:

I thought that was about the best of his 'straight' fiction books. I really enjoyed it and Complicity. The last one I tried to read was The Business... now that was pretty terrible.

The BBC did a very good TV series based on The Crow Road.

I'll be the first to say that his work does provoke different reactions in people. But then again, I've seen some of my favourite books already mentioned in this list, although to be honest I'm not a bit suprised.

Trojan

I liked The Valkyries

Rama series did tend to trail out - I don't think I've read the last one (or forgotten it entirely if I have).

mycroft

the cryptonomicon

It started well but then the last quarter is like a bunch o geeks, meets deliverance meets a tonne of gold. I read it with my jaw on the floor going, "just how bad can this get"

Total total waste of time.

RuggieBear

mycroft wrote:

the cryptonomicon

It started well but then the last quarter is like a bunch o geeks, meets deliverance meets a tonne of gold. I read it with my jaw on the floor going, "just how bad can this get"

Total total waste of time.

That's actually my fav book but...yeah the final quarter is ****ing pants...but i believe the rest of the book rescues the appalling finish...

mycroft

RuggieBear wrote:

That's actually my fav book but...yeah the final quarter is ****ing pants...but i believe the rest of the book rescues the appalling finish...

Thunderbirds couldn't save that book. I'm serious virgil, scott, tracey, even f*cking parker all of international rescue, not a chance.

RuggieBear

mycroft wrote:

Thunderbirds couldn't save that book. I'm serious virgil, scott, tracey, even f*cking parker all of international rescue, not a chance.

lol....tbh i read a few of his other works on the strength of Crypt. and Stephenson can't finish a book to save his life...they all just peter out unsatifactorly.

OfflerCrocGod

Kazujo wrote:

I didn't actually finish it but the Hobbit turned me off Tolkien altogether, too many characters and detail

WTF??? Were you 6 or something?? That's a kids book and I found it very easy to keep track of all the characters.

monkeyfudge wrote:

And I had to keep reading as I wanted to know what the big deal was with the Rama thing... imagine my disappointment when it turns out that

God is behind it all

What a bloody cop out!

Thanks for sparing me the bother of reading those trashy extra books I kept on meaning to finish the series because of the strenght of the first book....never got round to it. Thanks for warning me

timamansio

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen - long, boring and must have the most irritating characters in fiction. I don't know how I got through it but I did!

gnu

funky penguin wrote:

Im sure the DaVinci Code will be on this list at numerous points.

I know it's predictable, but for me it's The DaVinci Code. The worst thing is, I just felt I had to keep reading - I quite liked the story even though it was so seriously flawed. But it was so badly written that nearly every page got on my nerves.

funky penguin

sey eye eerga

solo1

I didn't actually finish it but the Hobbit turned me off Tolkien altogether, too many characters and detail

Er .. I'm not sure how to take that. I can understand anyone not liking The Hobbit, but because it had "too many characters and detail"? Jesus. Don't even try War and Peace.

MizzKattt

Confessions of an Ugly Step Sister by Gregory Maquire
This story was told from Cinderella's step sister's point of view. Maquire also wrote Mirror, Mirror and Wicked. These popular stories are written from an alternate character's point of view. Great idea, poor execution. The story drudged on and on about mundane details and left out plot development. Horrid.

matrim

The last 3 Robert Jordan books, mind numbingly boring.

I also absolutely hated Emma, so boring and annoying.

galactus

mycroft wrote:

the cryptonomicon

It started well but then the last quarter is like a bunch o geeks, meets deliverance meets a tonne of gold. I read it with my jaw on the floor going, "just how bad can this get"

Total total waste of time.

MAC user, eh?

Trojan

Ah, Robert Jordan. Book 10, Crossroads to Twilight: ~700 pages, which can be summarised as

Egwene led rebels to Tar Valon; got taken hostage

. And that's being generous.

More:

James Schellenberg online review wrote:

Crossroads of Twilight is a book where literally nothing happens, an astonishing feat considering how long it is; with this ability of writing an enormous book filled with nothing, Jordan could conceivably write an infinite set of books in the series.

mycroft

galactus wrote:

MAC user, eh?

G4 powerbook. Brent Sienna is my god.

The last 3 Robert Jordan books, mind numbingly boring.

It's the 3 part that's special. It's not like you read the first one and said "that was a total waste of time, but I'll give him one more chance" No you back twice more.

Velvet Vocals

Hippopotamus - Stephen Fry

This book is without a shadow of a doubt the worst book I've ever read! But I do love him, it's just a shame that this book sucked donkeys!!!!!

OY

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.... ho hum!

Sarky

Hard Times, Charles Dickens.

The one book that actually caused me physical pain to read. Boring characters, dull plot, and so morally righteous it made me sick. I realise it was written for a different era, but still, my god, the pain. Damn you, Leaving Cert '99, damn you for forcing this book upon me!

Shewhomustbe...

1st to die - James Patterson
The Diceman - Luke Rhinehart (just realised couldn't endure it enough to finish it)

mycroft

Sarky wrote:

Hard Times, Charles Dickens.

The one book that actually caused me physical pain to read. Boring characters, dull plot, and so morally righteous it made me sick. I realise it was written for a different era, but still, my god, the pain. Damn you, Leaving Cert '99, damn you for forcing this book upon me!

96. We need to start a support group.

My favourite english lit moment ever

97, repeat English.

Teacher,

"I watched a funny film last week "clueless""

Student
"yeah it's a modern day version of Emma*

*we're studying emma

Teacher
"No it's not"

Student
" yeah frank is frank churchill, only in this he's gay, character x in clueless equals character x in emma. character y in clueless equals character y in emma. character z in clueless equals character z in emma."

teacher
"Oh my god you're so right, Wow, I mean, god I mean, thats brillant, I never saw that, god, I mean wow. Thats brillant, wow, it works on so many levels.....

ten minutes later

oh i mean, wow, i mean jesus thats great"

Students
"we're going to fail"

Cathy

Maeve Binchy - Circle of Friends.
In fact, anything I've ever read by Maeve Binchy, I have regretted.

The Testament by John Grisham.

A weird book my sister got free with a magazine a week or two ago about a girl who goes back to being 16 again, only it's still the present day and she's just younger, and then she sleeps with the brother of the guy she's in love with when she's her real age. All very odd.

The Bible. The end was a bit of a let-down. And not enough car-chases.

Feenikusu

Lord of the Rings 1 and 2. I didn't finish the 3rd.
Love Lessons, Andorra, Sansibar, they were for school. Terrible.
And some other boring books I can't even remember...

galactus

Feenikusu wrote:

Lord of the Rings 1 and 2. I didn't finish the 3rd.

Same here. Thought The Hobbit is worth reading though.

mycroft

Feenikusu wrote:

Lord of the Rings 1 and 2. I didn't finish the 3rd.
Love Lessons, Andorra, Sansibar, they were for school. Terrible.
And some other boring books I can't even remember...

I tried re-reading them the christmas the first one came out, and gave up just after they left the shire. Turgid prose.

Feenikusu

mycroft wrote:

I tried re-reading them the christmas the first one came out, and gave up just after they left the shire. Turgid prose.

Yep. After the movies came out, nearly everyone says that the books are boring, even my friend, who was really addicted to the books. So I don't understand why the books were called soooo great before the movies came out. The story IS great, you can see that in the movies, but the books are...zZZZZ