Worst book you've ever read?

[CommunistLegoBloc]

Inspired by the film thread, what's the worst book you've read?

I think mine was The Miniaturist purely because it was SO hyped. It was completely overwritten, ridiculous, boring, and you'd think for that amount the author got paid, she'd have bothered to come up with an ending.

I think it was one of the 'Survivalist' books by Jerry Ahern. 190 odd pages of pulp gun porn with our right wing gun fetish hero blowing away endless hairy 'scum' in a post apocalyptic America. Vile shite. Badly written vile shite too.

I've also read a lot of self-published stuff I wouldn't wipe my arse with, even if there was nothing else around and you were paying me.

A Discovery of witches trilogy. After watching the very short but gripping first series adaptation on tv I thought, "Wow, this looks fab!" So I read book one. It was okay. A little pretentious when the author kept harping on about studying at Oxford and whatever but the fantastical story showed promise. So I persevered with books 2 and 3. Big mistake. That author bloody loves to hear herself lecture on academia and her take on literary historical figures. The storyline itself became a side note to her critique of playwrights and scholars from the 1500's and her showing off her own scholarly prowess. Shame she didn't even get that right, putting the Crown Jewels theft over 100 years out.

I can't even hear the words Bodleian library anymore without getting annoyed.

Sorry, it's actually All souls trilogy. A discovery of Witches was book one which started that crap off.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Satellite by Nick Lake - None of the sentences are capitalised, only proper names have capital letters through the whole book.
Catcher in the Rye - OMG stop whining and sort your fucking life out!
The Man with the Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-Yi - Such a long Book for so little plot. I forced myself to finish it, to see if anything happened by the end, and found it did not.

We are all completely beside ourselves. I persevered because I was nearly at the end of my annual reading challenge. In hindsight, I think I’d rather have failed! Just could not see the point of it.

Anything which relies on an unreliable narrator for suspense.

Part I - lots of weird things happen, how intriguing.
Part II - everything in Part I was bollocks because the narrator was depressed/delusional/on drugs/a fantasist.

It's the modern equivalent of 'then I woke up and it was all a dream'.

Oh the unreliable narrator is so.....overused now isn't it?

Can't believe that someone said 'Beloved'...I have read and Re read that book and think it's brilliant. ..

It just shows how personal it is...what one person thinks is amazing will leave another cold. ..

Have to agree 'Cloud Atlas' was more or less unreadable.

And those John Irving books like a prayer for Owen Meany, the Cider House Rules.....dreadful guff.

Oh the unreliable narrator is so.....overused now isn't it?

It certainly is. It's just an excuse for lazy plotting and 'clickbait' marketing because any sequence of events, however seemingly impossible can be explained by - duh! - actually, this didn't happen at all.

The unreliable narrator thing is good if it's done well and genuinely shocks you, We Need To Talk About Kevin was like that for me.

Behind Closed Doors by BA Paris. Utter garbage.

Life of Pi (couldn’t get past the first 50 pages, spent the whole film muttering “just eat him”).
The Goldfinch, tedious beyond belief.
Wolf Hall, sooooooo sloooooooow
And my all time non-favourite Jane Eyre, boring self-righteous woman with the hidden depths of a small pebble. If only she had caught what ever her friend died of at the beginning the book would have been much improved.

I absolutely loved The Goldfinch!

I quite enjoyed the miniaturist but my copy seemed to be missing the last few chapters, I mean surely it should have had an actual ending?

Ordinary People.

It was just crap

The Time Traveller's Wife
50 Shades
Moby Dick (I enjoyed the first third but it went downhill fast!)

Some of my favourite books are listed by other people on this thread though!

I loved the Goldfinch, Cloud Atlas, Life of Pi and Eleanor Oliphant!

I found We Need to Talk about Kevin a real slog- hated the narrator, but something kept me going with that one and I was so glad I did. The end was so shocking (when it was released and not well known), although the hints are there all along, I think it was too wrapped up in hating the narrator.

Never heard of My Little Darling and now sincerely wishing I still hadn't. No danger of me making the mistake of picking that up. Two books were abuse was handled marvelously, I thought, were the Blind Assassin and Fall on Your Knees. The implication is, so haunting, graphic details is just gratuitous and dubious IMO.

Lots of books I like on here - eg The Road, all the Donna Tartt books.

I have never been able to get past the first 4 or 5 chapters of 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'. It's just so derivative. I really want to like it, mainly because it's good to have a common interest with DS1, who loves Harry Potter, but no. I've tried!

I noticed a couple of posters had flung a book they hated across the room. I hope it wasn't the Kindle version

Oh I couldn't get past the first few chapters of HP.
Baggy and vague plots...atrocious dialogue. ..no characterisations...creepy as fuck story lines....
Still she must have done something right as she is now a multi millionaire...
Even my children begged me to stop reading it to them. They were 7.

I did not enjoy The Binding. Found it depressing and I couldn’t wait to get to the ending. However, well hyped.
Also, I think it was called The Long Road. It was a Booker prize contender about a Prisoner of war held by theJapanese. It was unbearably miserable and related the continuous traumas and horrific happenings at the time. It really got me down.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. I'd seen it on a few 'best fantasy novels' lists and it sounded like it would really be my kind of thing but God it was hard going, I hate giving up on books but I don't think I even got half way with it!

I loved Cloud Atlas and the Time Traveller's Wife.

All of Louis de Bernieres' books have a section of gruesomeness in an otherwise good book which puts me off.

There are so many but my top 3 are Dr Zhivago - nothing much happens, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - utterly unbelievable bollocks. The worst of all is a book of short stories by Angela Carter that I had to read when I was in a book club. The are no words to express the level of dreadfulness it achieves. It was the reason I left the book club as it was the final terrible book in several months of rubbish we were asked to read (one by Fern Briton was another horror we were given).

Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before. I barely got past the first chapter, it was so surreal and all over the place.

Last exit to Brooklyn. Oh dear god my eyes were bleeding