bad writing.
What’s the absolute worst book you’ve ever read?
I’ll tell you mine:
Meg, by Steve Alten.
It’s the only book I’ve ever physically thrown into the garbage. It’s about a Megalodon super-shark that swims around and eats people and small watercraft, until the hero (a Gary Stu if I’ve ever read one) drives a mini-submarine down the shark’s maw, gets out of the sub while inside the shark, and then proceeds to cut its heart out with a tooth specimen he had collected earlier.
I remember yelling “Oh, come on!” before closing the book, walking over to the kitchen, and sending it on its ballistic arc towards the trash can.
The book was subtitled “A Novel of Deep Terror“, which turned out to be a correct claim.
Shockingly enough, it has three and a half stars at Amazon, but reading through all the one-star reviews is a lot more amusing than reading the novel itself, I promise.
May 22, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Oh kewl! I’ll have to go buy one!
juuuust kidding.
May 22, 2008 at 3:52 pm
“The Citadel” by Kevin Randle, one of the co-authors of “UFO Crash at Roswell”. I used to listen to Art Bell frequently, and he was a regular guest on the show. I stumbled across this, his first “fiction” novel in a used book store, so I picked it up. I honestly don’t remember much about it, I don’t think I made it more than a chapter or two into it before I threw it down in disgust. Still have it though. Can’t bring myself to let go of any book.
Not the worst by any means, but I remember hearing the controversy about the movie adaptation of “Sahara” and how he supposedly wanted his name taken off of it, it was so bad. I saw the movie. Didn’t think it was that godawful, so I decided to read the book. Turgid and ham-handed are two adjectives that come to mind. Makes the “Mac Bolan” books look like they were written by Nabakov.
Joe
May 22, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Heh, I actually read that one, when I was much younger. My father happened to have it his somewhat large collections of books. I don’t think he bought it; he got a bunch of paperbacks from a friend, and I think that one was included.
Can’t remember much about it, except at the time I thought it wasn’t great, which meant it had to of sucked pretty bad since I lacked a discerning judgment at the time.
Honestly, I can’t think of any really horrible books I’ve read, because I typically put them down and try to forget they ever existed.
I’d have to say the most painful one that I remember, though, was Moby Dick. I simply could not reach the end of that book without wanting to throw it at something. The story arc was fairly decent, but Melville kept interrupting it with long, boring spiels about how noble whalers were, and lengthy taxonomic descriptions of various whale species.
The latter wouldn’t have been too bad, had I been reading a biology text, anyway, but it completely disrupted the story line so thoroughly that it was difficult to read through. There’s a damn good reason Melville didn’t sell many books until after he died.
There were a couple of other books I put down because the language used was simply too much of a pain to read through at the time (a direct translation of Homer’s Iliad comes to mind), but other than that, I can’t think of any that I didn’t like because of poor writing. There were a couple of books such as The Black Pearl, Old Man and the Sea and The Great Gatsby I didn’t like simply because I don’t like the genre, but not because the writers were complete hacks.
May 22, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Oops….my first paragraph was referring to Meg, not to anything in the second post. Not sure if I made that clear enough.
May 22, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Honestly, I can’t say for sure.
The reason is partly because almost all my reading is nonfiction and thus, I’m used to dry facts but mostly because at the first sign of suckidge, I toss it. Unlike my wife, who is a voracious reader, it just takes me too long to read a book in it’s entirety and thus, I have no mercy if I’m not enjoying it.
The worst actual writing I’ve encountered is probably a couple of unpublished memoirs I have from WWI and WWII vets. They never pretend to be writers, just getting their experiences down on paper, so I can forgive that.
Turkish Prawn
http://foxandmaus.wordpress.com/
May 22, 2008 at 7:15 pm
Catcher in the Rye (Salinger) - foul, tedious stream of consciousness from a deranged pubescent.
May 22, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Road to Damascus by John Ringo and Linda Evans, being stubborn and goal oriented, I finished even though there wasn’t a single character that I liked or acted like a real person.
May 23, 2008 at 12:17 am
I don’t know which book is the WORST, but the first book I was unable to finish is “Algonquin - The Story of a Great Dog”, by Dion Henderson. I was horrified as a child that I simply could not finish this book, no matter how many times I started it!
May 23, 2008 at 12:48 am
I can’t remember the last bad book i’ve read- i tend to not read it in the first place. I can tell you the worst movie, tho. “Session 9″. I should have been deterred by David Caruso’s presence. I wanted 2 hours of my life back.
May 23, 2008 at 6:28 am
Whoa! “Meg” is one of the worst books ever. I read that a couple of years ago. To this day, I can’t tell you exactly why I read it all the way to the end. I’ve always had a thign for sharks so that must be it.
What was worse than the Gary Stu aspect, in my opinion, was the fact that someone ( a relative maybe) must have told Alten his protagonist needed a flaw. So I think (I’m not proud that I remember this) Alten made him ‘psychologically’ scarred from a botched submersible test and afraid of the water.In a shark book, another guy afraid of the water! Although, I could be wrong about that. I read a lot of fiction and non-fiction about sharks and they tend to attract SCUBA instructors/’authors’ who want to be Peter Benchely.
Good call for worst book ever.
May 23, 2008 at 6:34 am
Oh! I almost forgot. There’s the movie in pre-production…
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0450459/
May 23, 2008 at 8:08 am
I know you asked for the worst, but I have several that vie for that title: “Persuasion,” by Jane Austen; “The Moonstone,” by Wilkie Collins; and “Moby Dick,” by Herman Melville (a GREAT story, but told via some of the most leaden prose I’ve ever had the misfortune to read [I really like "Billy Budd" though]). Those are the top ones, but there are a number of others.
I used to slug through bad books, but as I’ve aged, I find I’m much less likely to do so. Maybe it’s because I’ll hit the half-century mark late next year that I’m less patient with a poorly-written book.
Oh, BTW, I just thought of a non-fiction book that really sucks: “Fast and Fancy Revolver Shooting,” by Ed McGivern. I’m sure it has a lot of good information in it, but I only read about a third of it before stopping. It sits still on my bookshelf, patiently waiting for me to pick it up again, but I don’t know if that will ever happen. If some motivated writer/editor would work on it, it might become a good instructional book. But in its present form, it’s nearly unreadable.
May 23, 2008 at 11:22 am
The most recent read that just made me want to gag was The Bear and the Dragon by Tom Clancy. I was a dedicated Clancy fan for a long time, even despite the weakness of Debt of Honor, but The Bear and the Dragon was just terrible writing.
The book was full of errors that were either missed or ignored by editors. It was repetitive, with the same little pet phrases repeated over and over again, and it was preachy beyond what was normal in a Clancy book. The dialogue was weak and hard to follow, thanks to one of the editing errors that annoyed me the most — improper returns and indentations to indicate a change of speaker. There were several conversations where I had to actually go back, count through the changes, and figure out that a new speaker had been indicated where there was no change.
Overall, I think this was the book in which I was most disappointed. I’ve read some genuine crap (The Boomer Bible got thrown in the trash because it was pointlessly and deliberately offensive), but the suggestions that Clancy had been using a ghost writer or had dispensed with editors altogether were hard to refute based on the quality of the book.
May 23, 2008 at 1:20 pm
There are 2 books I was totally unable to finish in high school. One has already been mentioned here: Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye.” I’ll just say “ditto” to what theflatwhite said. The other was “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century” by Barbara Tuchman. This may be a useful, engrossing book for a grad student in history (or an obsessed amateur), but for an 11th grader (at least this one), it was impossible. I may have made it halfway through, and that was better than par according to the teacher. Our second semester assignment, though, was far more enjoyable: “The Armada” (Mattingly).
Since then, I’ve mostly finished what I’ve started with a few exceptions.
May 23, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Don Quixote… I got 6 pages in and put it down.
May 23, 2008 at 11:07 pm
“A Clockwork Orange” is, I believe, the only book I’ve ever started and been unable to finish. Just too much effort for minimal reward.
May 24, 2008 at 12:37 am
Worst I ever read? “The Wheel of Time” series. I kept hearing great things, and managed to get 3 or 4 books in before picking them all up in my arms and throwing them away.
Why wait so long? “Oh, it gets better when you get a few books in!” BS. They weren’t better, they were the same.. The same book, over and over and over.
May 25, 2008 at 3:08 am
“Ask the Dust”. Required reading for a college class. Which I dropped after reading the book. If you’re going to be teaching English, please try to include a book that actually acknowledges the concept of grammar. Given today’s lack of writing skills, why pick the poorest example you can find? Yes, I know it was probably an “artistic decision”. Doesn’t mean it was smart.
In a nutshell, it’s about a struggling writer who just can’t make it in anything. At all.
May 26, 2008 at 9:16 pm
That’s a no-brainer. It’s the only children’s book I’ve ever tossed in the garbage after reading it just once to my kids.
“The Rainbow Fish” by Marcus Pfister
I’ll let the eight pages of 1-star reviews at Amazon speak for themselves.
May 27, 2008 at 7:48 am
[...] Marko asks: What’s the absolute worst book you’ve ever read? [...]
May 27, 2008 at 9:17 am
Books I’ve physically thrown in the garbage? Easy and only one time deliberately: The “Invasion Earth” series by L. Ron Hubbard. Not that Battlefield Earth was much of an improvement. Thankfully, I had inherited the books from a friend who said, “Here, see if you can get into these. I couldn’t.”. He was right. Both of us were pleased they wound up in the trash.
May 30, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Pretty much anything Steven King ever wrote. “The Tommyknockers” sealed it though. I finished it just to see how bad it could get. I was not disappointed.
Russ