To ask about the worst book you have ever read.

[Whereisthecoffee]

Title says it all really. What book or books have you absolutely hated and why?

Marabou stork nightmares (Irvine Welsh)
am still haunted by it...just too graphic and horrible for me!

when I'm rich I'm gonna pay someone to read a chapter ahead of me and warn me of any gruesome/disturbing bits so i can skip them. I'm a bit wet, I know! but books bother me far more than films, once you've read it, you can't unread it, and the pictures in your head are always more vivid than a film.

and yeah, the whole 50 shades thing was just DIRE, so badly written!

The miniaturist. Wish I hadn't bothered!

Mo Hayder the treatment, genuinely disturbing. Not the kind of book I normally read so I’ve no idea why I read it and would happily erase it from my memory.

Fifty shades

Life of pi

American psycho, total effort

Girl on a train

The binding chair

Night Chills by Dean Koontz. A horrible book. It is the only one of his I couldn't finish.

The Miniaturist. I'm still cross that I kept going with it in the vain hope something interesting would happen.

In the 1970s some crap by Jilly Cooper either "Polo" or "Riders". She's describing a sex scene and writes: "Her head went back and forwards like a meningitis victim" WTF? Threw it straight in the bin.

Eleanor Oliphant was pretty dire. I gave up on it as I couldnt justify putting myself through it any longer.

Also read "The Crimson Petal and the White" on a colleague's glowing recommendation. Fuck me, that was an awful book. Terribly written, unbelievable, cliche-laden dreadfulness. All the characters were horrible. I hated it.

X post with UnalliterativeGeorge. We may be the only two. Everyone else I know who's read it raves about it. I can't understand why.

Oh Dear Sylvia by Dawn French, couldn’t get past chapter 3 bloody awful.

A Little Life.
I spent far too much of my life bothering to read it :(

The Alchemist. Utter garbage

Go set a watchman, hugely disappointing after to kill a mockingbird

Cloud Atlas

The last Harry Potter. Awful, and went on and on and on and on and on. I can’t believe I finished it - I must be very tenacious.

50 shades! Her lip biting and the repeated use of 'inexorably' made me sick!

The Essex Serpent. I was so looking forward to it, and it was pants.

I agree about Eleanor oliphant! I picked it at the airport I think and did actually read the whole thing but it was just badly written and none of the characters sounded realistic. Waste of time.

50 Shades was the most appalling piece of literature I have ever come across.

I hate and love 1984 by George Orwell.

The Wise Woman by Philippa Gregory. I usually love her books, but this was just full of creepy witchcraft/voodoo/sex scenes and made me feel really uncomfortable. I finished it, but I'm not sure how, or why!

On Beauty by Zadie Smith. I hated all the characters; they seemed so smug.
Also The Unconsoled By Kashuo Ishiguru. I had to re-start it after a few pages as I couldn't understand what was going on, and I was none the wiser after the second attempt.

Another vote for the miniaturist, I loved the blurb about it, could have been such a creepy book! Someone ought to rewrite it

Agree about the goldfinch, it was highly recommended to me so I stuck with it and height it was really disappointing.

Also I thought The girl on the train was really badly written, didn’t finish that one.

I hated Poisonwood Bible.

Some tripe called The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart....there was a 2nd book but the first was such steaming shite that I couldn’t. Also 50 shades, I read two pages amdvrealised it was utter tripe.