i kinda wanna say atomic habits. the concepts it presents are functional but it presents them in an extermly forgettable and uninteresting way.
The Bible
When I was an undergraduate, a friend of mine wrote a book review of the bible for the student newspaper.
The opening sentence was: "Not since Naked Lunch has such a boring book been saved by the constant barrage of sadomasochistic homosexual pornography."
I don't know if this counts, but when I was about 13I was very excited to find an enormous book in my favorite genre at the time, Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard.
It was the first book I ever put down in disgust without finishing. In the almost half-century since then, there are under a dozen that I haven't finished. Shows you just how bad it is.
I haven't read the entire book, but I've read like 10 pages of Fifty Shades of Grey when my then-girlfriend was reading it. Besides the story and subject matter, the writing itself is horrible.
Left Behind. I'm probably a huge idiot for not realizing for the entire thing without knowing before hand what the context was, but I read it with the idea that it was some kind of apocalyptic sci-fi, and then only in the very last few pages of the book did it finally hit me in the face that it was religious doomsday bullshit. I do have to compliment it for the storytelling and world setting, but holy shit was I disappointed with the end direction 🤦
You should see the movie. It stars nic cage and he did it as a favor to a friend. It's fucking awful. funny thing though, my story is identical to yours. Had no idea until it was too late lol.
I was far too young to read Animal Farm. I thought it was going to be like Charlotte's Web. I did not have any of the historical or political context for the metaphor. It just made me angry.
Wizard’s First Rule by Terry ~~Brooks~~Goodkind. I suffered through the whole thing because I was young enough that I thought that’s what you should do when you’ve started a book, but I was also old enough to know that it was very bad. I’ve heard many people say they read it as teens and loved it, but I assure you, it does not hold up.
In the later books they accidentally open a portal to the part of the world where there are communists and for a while afterwards Richard finds himself unable to eat cheese as penance for all the communists he's killing but then he realizes that communists are so evil it's ok to kill them so he can eat cheese again
I don’t know if it’s the absolute worst I ever read but the parts I read were pretty bad. At some point I was like “What kinda Ayn Rand bullshit is this?” and quit reading. It turns out that he was a Ayn Rand make-super-improbable-and-convoluted-examples-in-my-fictional-fantasy-world-to-justify-terrible-political-views school of writing type guy.
I read a bunch of those books because my roommate was in love with them. It established an idea of a writing flaw in my mind that I called "The Heirachy of Cool". Basically the guy practically has an established character list of who is the coolest. Whichever character in any given scene is at the top of the hierarchy is mythically awesome. They have their shit together, they are functionally correct in their reasoning, they lead armies, they pull off grand maneuvers, they escape danger whatever...
But anyone below them in the Heirachy turn into complete morons who serve as foils to make the people above them seem more awesome whenever they share page time together. These characters seem to have accute amnesia about stuff that canonically happened very recently (in previous books) so they can complicate things for the hierarchy above, they usually make poor decisions due to crisises of faith in people above them in the hierarchy... But because that hierarchy is infallible it's predictable. Less cool never is proven right over more cool.
... Until that same character is suddenly alone and they go from being mid of the hierarchy to the top and all of a sudden they have iron wills and super competence...
Once I caught onto that pattern it became intolerable to continue.
The Silmarillion.
Probably the only book I excitedly pushed myself to read, but just couldn't.
The Silmarillion is one of my favourite books, but I totally get this. Unless you’re really into Tolkien’s world as well as this style of book it’s not a fun read.
That was actually my favorite Tolkien book. He was a terrible fiction writer with an excellent story to tell... but when he was writing non-fiction style in the Silmarillion he was really in his element... and/or the posthumous editing was top notch.
I can't really remember of all time, but recently I started reading Dune: Messiah, and I had to stop reading it was so bad. I might be in the minority but the tonal shifts, changes in character attitudes, and jumping right into these assassination plots, all of it just came out weird and misplaced. Definitely did not slap with even 1/4th the power of Dune.
Herbert didn't want to continue Dune and was pressured to write a follow up. It was an era when most science fiction was still published in periodicals. The first half of Messiah are the results that were then compiled into the start. It is like a really shitty draft. Everyone experiences the same thing. I put it down for quite a while too. If you can make it to the second half, it will become one you can't put down, like the first. It does setup well for what is to come. After I got back into Messiah, I read all the way to the end of the entire series, even the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson stuff. Those last two are not like Frank's writings, but are their own thing and still more readable than the first half of Messiah. IMO the first half of Messiah is a great example of what happens when Art takes a back seat to an anxious banking type mentality. Bankers make terrible artists and advisors.
GEoD is IMO the best book in the series as it eviscerates many cultural norms and deep assumptions like fascist altruism, eternal boredom, the coexistence of misogyny and feminism, manipulation that is both brutal and kind, and if an alien can be human. It even infers the question of potential delusional prescience in my opinion. It will make you think about the motivation of leaders and what you may endure because of their vision of a future.
Hell yeah this is great to hear, thank you. I'll have to open it back up and try again. Then its time to read the Foundation.
"The Cat Who Walked through Walls" by Robert Heinlein...
Now Heinlein is usually kind of obnoxiously sexist so having a book that opens with what appears to be an actual female character with not just more personality than a playboy magazine centerfold, but what seems like big dick energy action heroesque swagger felt FRESH. Strong start as you get this hyper competent husband and wife team quiping their way through adventures in the backwoods hillbilly country of Earth's moon with their pet bonsai tree to stop a nefarious plot with some promised dimensional McGuffin.
Book stalls out in the middle as they end up in like... A swinger commune. They introduce a huge number of characters all at once alongside this whole poly romantic political dynamic and start mulling over the planning stage of what seems like a complicated heist plot. Feels a lot like a sex party version of the Council of Elrond with each of these characters having complex individual dramas they are in the middle of resolving...
Aaaand smash cut. None of those characters mattered. We are with the protagonist, the heist plan failed spectacularly off stage and we are now in his final dying moments where we realized that cool wife / super spy set him up to fail like a chump at this very moment for... reasons? I dunno, Bitches amirite?
First time I ever finished a book and threw it angrily into the nearest wall.
I feel that a lot with Heinlein. Starts good with an interesting premise, becomes weirdly sexual, and the ending leaves you wondering whether the premise even mattered.
The bible. Set aside any religious connotations and just look at it as a piece of literature: it's terrible.
Catcher in the Rye. I try it again every couple of years just to see if I can relate to it, and nope - it's still just as stupid as the first time I read it.
Canonical answer is The Homecoming Saga by Orson Scott Card, since it turns out that if the good guys have a mind controlling god computer that's always right on their side it gets really hard to have meaningful conflict.
You didn't make it past the first book??
Lucky.
DISCLAIMER: Orson Scott Card is a bad person and I have since gotten rid of my collection and tell everyone not to support him because he uses his platform to hurt marginalised groups of people for religious reasons.
Now, I would argue that you're skipping over a lot of interesting stuff.
The Overseer (mind-controlling satellite robot) was built by humans to keep rewriting human brains so they would perpetually forget how to invent the wheel until they proved that they'd evolved beyond their barbaric nature and would not go on to invent the nuclear bomb. The satellite then dies of old age millions of years later because humans are just kind of shitty. The book ends with the main character's family hopping onto an Ark rocket back to Earth aaand... Hundreds of years have passed and all the characters you've invested in emotionally are long dead, here's some bat furries I guess.
Some pretty cool ideas in there, despite who it was written by.
Now, the worst thing I have ever read was also by Orson Scott Card and I refuse to speak about it.
Stephen King's It
Great story, but the writing was exceedingly dull, apart from the first chapter. I even tried getting through it via audiobook and still only made it halfway through. It's just a chore.
I'm sure I've read worse but one that stands out as making me question the time I put into reading it is Out of the Dark by David Weber. I go into it expecting a military sci fi, and for the vast majority of the book that's what you get - aliens invade Earth and plucky humans resist etc etc. The aliens however have more reserves and air superiority so are slowly winning as the end of the book approaches, at which point you expect the main characters to pull a rabbit out of the hat and do something different. Except that's not what happens.
spoiler
What actually happens is that Count Dracula appears out of (almost) nowhere and flies with a bunch of vampires up to the alien spaceships to kill the aliens, winning the battle for Earth.
I was definitely not satisfied with this ending, even if there was some foreshadowing earlier in the book that made sense after knowing this was a possibility in this universe.
Mein Kampf. I read it when i was still a succdem, expecting some genius rant that converted people en masse to nazism. Instead it was barely coherent disgusting racist drivel. I guess this book didn't make anyone into nazi, it just given nazis what they would like to read. This and the fact nazi state bought huge amounts of it to distribute, making Hitler richest writer in Germany.
The Alchemist and Song of Achilles are some popular books that I thought were mediocre. Probably not the worst book I've ever read though.
That probably goes to Sean Hannity's Conservative Victory that my grandma gave me when I was 12.
True slop. Fuck Sean Hannity.
the Piers Anthony novelization of the movie Total Recall. it's very bad!
I haven't read that, but his original novel Firefly is the only book I ever threw away instead of adding it to my collection shelves or trading it back to the used book store. It's horrifically gross. One of the main characters is shown in a flashback enthusiastically participating in her rape as a five year old. Anthony is a problematic writer already, but this was way worse than I could have guessed.
Moby Dick is the book I hated the most. Just the worst slog that i remember making it through.
bit of a cheat but 120 Days of Sodom
The one redeeming part is the guy who fucks a horse and it gives birth to a half man half horse and then the fucks that
the rest is descriptions of pedophilia, coprophagy and torturing children to death.
It's been quite a while since I've read it, so this may not be a fair assessment. But, I fucking hated The Catcher in the Rye. I wasn't even required to read it for school or anything, I just did. Perhaps I just found Holden to be insufferable. I think that was the point, but it did not make it a particularly enjoyable or insightful read at all, save for the overwhelming supertext of DO NOT BE LIKE THIS GUY. The part where he hires a prostitute and just cries in front of her really stuck in my mind. That was when it really sunk in for me that someone read this book and decided that Holden's views were so accurate that he had to go shoot John Lennon with a gun for being phony. Almost unbelievable.
The sookie stackhouse books that got turned into true blood have such a fun premise but are appallingly written. A friend and I used to play the audiobooks at parties for laughs.
The first 5 or so of Trump's books. No meaningful lessons in business to be had. Just him bragging about people he knew, people he'd screwed over, how good he thought he was at pretty much everything. How he got back at anyone who crossed him. Insufferable. I knew he was one of the worst people ever before he even mentioned getting into politics.
And in those 5 books, he probably name-dropped every New York socialite he ever met. It's consistent with his whole image of self-worth and needing to look and feel important. You know who he didn't mention? Someone we've seen him with in several photos? Who he definitely would have mentioned if there wasn't a reason not to? Jeffrey Epstein.
I have to ask what possessed you to not give up after the first couple
50 Shades… terrible writing and the sex was boring AF. The books were recommended to me. I couldn’t get through the first one. Time I’ll never get back.
War and Peace. Heard so many good things about it. Despite everything, went in not having super high expectations.
The whole book turned out like a reality tv show. All the characters had some petty drama that they blew out of proportion. Hundreds of pages where nothing really happens, people just complain or bad mouth other characters.
I had to stop half way through.
Ayn Rand's fountainhead, by a fat mile. I was young and didn't know better
I gave up on Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close after one chapter. No wonder neurotypicals think autistics are just insufferable nobs.
I was assigned Ethan Frome in a high school lit class and to this day I think it is one of the worst books to assign to emotional, angsty, experience-limited teens.
I also don't understand why Romeo and Juliet is the go-to Shakespeare work that we default to.
How do we handle complex romantic relationships? Suicide / attempted suicide, of course! Just what every teen needs to hear /s
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