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Worst book you ever read?
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Lessien
It's what I do that defines me
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Eldest by Christopher Paolini. What made it so bad?
Well, let's start with the setting. Instead of stepping out of the box, Paolini just used the standard quasi-medieval European setting and the standard races of perfect elves, cave-loving dwarves, and humans. Now, the humans wouldn't have been bad if they hadn't been portrayed as 'digressing,' and if the elves hadn't been portrayed as an ideal race (uber smart, uber powerful agnostic vegitarian hermits).
Now the plot. Paolini used the standard Adventure Fantasy Formula--young farmhand finds out he has a magical past and/or gains extreme power, then has to travel all over creation to gain more power and defeat the supreme bad guy. 'Nuff said.
Now for the characters. They're rip-offs! Not just of Tolkien, but also of Star Wars! Why don't we just call Eragon "Luke," Brom "Obi-Wan," Arya "Leia," Galbatorix "Palpatine," Morzan "Anakin," and Oromis "Yoda?" Gr.
I'm glad I didn't buy the book, becuase it wouldn't fit in with my collection. Why? Because it's a collection of literature worth reading!
Well, let's start with the setting. Instead of stepping out of the box, Paolini just used the standard quasi-medieval European setting and the standard races of perfect elves, cave-loving dwarves, and humans. Now, the humans wouldn't have been bad if they hadn't been portrayed as 'digressing,' and if the elves hadn't been portrayed as an ideal race (uber smart, uber powerful agnostic vegitarian hermits).
Now the plot. Paolini used the standard Adventure Fantasy Formula--young farmhand finds out he has a magical past and/or gains extreme power, then has to travel all over creation to gain more power and defeat the supreme bad guy. 'Nuff said.
Now for the characters. They're rip-offs! Not just of Tolkien, but also of Star Wars! Why don't we just call Eragon "Luke," Brom "Obi-Wan," Arya "Leia," Galbatorix "Palpatine," Morzan "Anakin," and Oromis "Yoda?" Gr.
I'm glad I didn't buy the book, becuase it wouldn't fit in with my collection. Why? Because it's a collection of literature worth reading!
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For me, it would have to be This Body by Laurel Doud.
This book starts with a fascinating premise--a middle aged woman dies from the stress in her life, then one year later finds herself in a young and beautiful body on the bathroom floor of an apartment she has never seen before, reviving from a drug overdose.
She somehow is a lot less confused than I would be, and instead of trying to figure out what has happened or going to a doctor to see if she has gone insane, she just goes about the business of living the life of the woman whose body she now inhabits. It's like coming back from the dead in someone else's body is not an unusual or horrifying event!
The only thing that arouses any curosity in her is in finding out who this body belongs to so she can try to be just like her so no one will suspect she isn't the same person. Weird, huh?
So what makes it so bad?
The characters are dysfunctional, not only in their lives, but as characters in a novel. They don't act like real people (brothers don't really accidentally sleep with their own sisters then go about their lives as if nothing happened), they don't think like real people, and they don't speak like real people. It's totally artificial, even when she is thinking to herself, it sounds false.
The family unit colludes to persist in the delusion that they are the fairies from A Midsummer's Night Dream; even the children are named after character from the play, the parents require the kids to act out scenes from the play and keep in character even when they aren't doing the play, and everyone acts like this is normal and desirable. Even the adult children, instead of saying, "This is lame," go along with passion.
In the end, instead of giving the dead woman another chance at the life she wanted or to erase her regrets, she just allows herself to be degraded to the point where she is a caricature of vulgarity. There ends up being no point for her resurrection.
And no point to the book.
This book starts with a fascinating premise--a middle aged woman dies from the stress in her life, then one year later finds herself in a young and beautiful body on the bathroom floor of an apartment she has never seen before, reviving from a drug overdose.
She somehow is a lot less confused than I would be, and instead of trying to figure out what has happened or going to a doctor to see if she has gone insane, she just goes about the business of living the life of the woman whose body she now inhabits. It's like coming back from the dead in someone else's body is not an unusual or horrifying event!
The only thing that arouses any curosity in her is in finding out who this body belongs to so she can try to be just like her so no one will suspect she isn't the same person. Weird, huh?
So what makes it so bad?
The characters are dysfunctional, not only in their lives, but as characters in a novel. They don't act like real people (brothers don't really accidentally sleep with their own sisters then go about their lives as if nothing happened), they don't think like real people, and they don't speak like real people. It's totally artificial, even when she is thinking to herself, it sounds false.
The family unit colludes to persist in the delusion that they are the fairies from A Midsummer's Night Dream; even the children are named after character from the play, the parents require the kids to act out scenes from the play and keep in character even when they aren't doing the play, and everyone acts like this is normal and desirable. Even the adult children, instead of saying, "This is lame," go along with passion.
In the end, instead of giving the dead woman another chance at the life she wanted or to erase her regrets, she just allows herself to be degraded to the point where she is a caricature of vulgarity. There ends up being no point for her resurrection.
And no point to the book.
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elf_lady_9
the book loving Elven Calvinist
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wow, i've read a lot of bad books(fortunately i've read way more good books ), so it's tough to pick one worst one. i guess one of the worst series i've ever read is the His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman. Now don't get me wrong, these books are well written, or at least i thought so when i got sucked in by them when i was a freshman, and they are extremely interesting. the writing style is not why i think they are so horrible.
even though i was fascinated by the books when i was reading them, i kinda had a feeling like something was wrong with them. there are some books that just leave a "bad taste in my mouth" to use a slightly mixed metaphor, and these were definitely those kind.
i'm ashamed to admit this, but once i get started reading something interesting, i have a hard time stopping even if it bothers my conscience, so i kept reading. i continued reading through the twisted descriptions of young children being tortured and killed in inhumane experiments to separate them from their daemons, the little animal type things that are part of them; the through the skewed references to Adam and Eve and the cynical representation of the church, which i excused to myself as being ok because the book is set in an alternate universe; and the sick sexually tinged parts (absolutely inappropriate for a children's book) between Lydia's mom and dad, both of whom are absolutely despicable and morally bankrupt characters, even thought they are not the "bad guys" of the book. after a week or so of wading through all this slush, i finally stopped reading the books (after i had finished the second of the trilogy) when a guy in my class who saw me reading it told me what happens at the end of the series; namely that the two main characters, Will and Lydia, end up killing God, or at least the god-character in that alternate universe. that was the final straw; my conscience bugged me so much that i couldn't keep reading.
a couple years later, when i was a junior, my dad was listening to Focus on the Family Radio, and Chuck Colsen came on talking about fantasy books. he started talking about the His Dark Material series, and i was shocked by what he said. Philip Pullman, the author of the books, is a fervent atheist who hates the very mention of God. as a result, he also passionately hates both C.S. Lewis and his childrens' series the Chronicles of Narnia. He considers them to be, in his own words "one of the most ugly and poisonous things i have ever read, with no shortage of nauseating drivel." He thinks that Narnia is blatent Christian propaganda, and so he decided to create a series of his own to combat it, a series instead promoting atheism, the His Dark Materials trilogy, in which the main theme is mortals overthrowing a cruel, unjust, tyranical god who sits up in the sky making everybody's lives miserable for the fun of it, which is obviously Pullman's idea of what the Christian God is . the main characters, Will and Lydia, are reincarntations or something of Adam and Eve, who this time get to make another choice, and instead of merely disobeying god, they get to overthrow him so they can have a Republic of Heaven where everybody gets to do what they want without a god bossing them around, apparently.
when i heard this on the radio, and then read about it more in the book "The Soul of the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe", i was absolutely disgusted and i felt sick that i had ever even read any of them at all. i had known the books were really weird and not very edifying, but i didn't really get what was going on, so i hadn't realized that it was as horrible as that. if i had known about Pullman and what he was trying to do, and what the point of those books was, i never would have read them, no matter how interesting they were. i'm still embarassed that i didn't realize what he was getting at. :o
anyways, now that i've vented...that's why they were the worst books i've ever read.
), so it's tough to pick one worst one. i guess one of the worst series i've ever read is the His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman. Now don't get me wrong, these books are well written, or at least i thought so when i got sucked in by them when i was a freshman, and they are extremely interesting. the writing style is not why i think they are so horrible. even though i was fascinated by the books when i was reading them, i kinda had a feeling like something was wrong with them. there are some books that just leave a "bad taste in my mouth" to use a slightly mixed metaphor, and these were definitely those kind.
i'm ashamed to admit this, but once i get started reading something interesting, i have a hard time stopping even if it bothers my conscience, so i kept reading. i continued reading through the twisted descriptions of young children being tortured and killed in inhumane experiments to separate them from their daemons, the little animal type things that are part of them; the through the skewed references to Adam and Eve and the cynical representation of the church, which i excused to myself as being ok because the book is set in an alternate universe; and the sick sexually tinged parts (absolutely inappropriate for a children's book) between Lydia's mom and dad, both of whom are absolutely despicable and morally bankrupt characters, even thought they are not the "bad guys" of the book. after a week or so of wading through all this slush, i finally stopped reading the books (after i had finished the second of the trilogy) when a guy in my class who saw me reading it told me what happens at the end of the series; namely that the two main characters, Will and Lydia, end up killing God, or at least the god-character in that alternate universe. that was the final straw; my conscience bugged me so much that i couldn't keep reading.
a couple years later, when i was a junior, my dad was listening to Focus on the Family Radio, and Chuck Colsen came on talking about fantasy books. he started talking about the His Dark Material series, and i was shocked by what he said. Philip Pullman, the author of the books, is a fervent atheist who hates the very mention of God. as a result, he also passionately hates both C.S. Lewis and his childrens' series the Chronicles of Narnia. He considers them to be, in his own words "one of the most ugly and poisonous things i have ever read, with no shortage of nauseating drivel." He thinks that Narnia is blatent Christian propaganda, and so he decided to create a series of his own to combat it, a series instead promoting atheism, the His Dark Materials trilogy, in which the main theme is mortals overthrowing a cruel, unjust, tyranical god who sits up in the sky making everybody's lives miserable for the fun of it, which is obviously Pullman's idea of what the Christian God is . the main characters, Will and Lydia, are reincarntations or something of Adam and Eve, who this time get to make another choice, and instead of merely disobeying god, they get to overthrow him so they can have a Republic of Heaven where everybody gets to do what they want without a god bossing them around, apparently.
when i heard this on the radio, and then read about it more in the book "The Soul of the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe", i was absolutely disgusted and i felt sick that i had ever even read any of them at all. i had known the books were really weird and not very edifying, but i didn't really get what was going on, so i hadn't realized that it was as horrible as that. if i had known about Pullman and what he was trying to do, and what the point of those books was, i never would have read them, no matter how interesting they were. i'm still embarassed that i didn't realize what he was getting at. :o
anyways, now that i've vented...that's why they were the worst books i've ever read.
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sister_maynard
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Dragonsdawn, by Donita K. Paul. It was a disgustingly sappy load of drivel and I want the time I wasted on it back. The book was marketed strictly as fantasy, but it was just a bucket of boring evangelizing with a thin coating of fantasy in the form of a few ornamental dragons. The plot had been several million times before and I couldn't find a single original scrap in the whole thing. I enjoy and respect good Christian fiction, but that pile of rubbish put the plot so far behind the "Jesus is awesome" message that I would have had more fun reading an analysis of Leviticus. When a book can't be enjoyed without liking the evangelism (the Chronicles of Narnia don't fit this category because Lewis is brilliant), it ought to be marketed as Christian fiction.
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GrinningDwarf
Just a humble servant
It was so bad I don't even remember the title. It was an early Star Trek novel, and it was so bad that it had Sulu acting in really bad stereotypical Asian manners and even had overt ethnic slurs (I think the author even referred to Sulu as "an inscrutable Oriental".
Bad, bad book!!
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soblessed53
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I read inside the flaps or better yet reviews before I decide to read a book,so to get a lousy one,is very rare. The most recent one I remember was while on my children's fantasy book kick and it was George MacDonald's "At The Back Of The North Wind". I stopped reading it after about 75 pages and returned it to the library. It seemed absolutely pointless,no plot and was going nowhere! I loved his "Princess And The Goblin" and "The Princess And Curdie", so I was totally surprised by how incredibly boring this book was!
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Nienor
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I read that series when I was in Middle School, and I remember the ending of the third book making me uncomfortable. But I'd like to pick them up again to try and pick out some of Pullman's pointswow, i've read a lot of bad books(fortunately i've read way more good books
even though i was fascinated by the books when i was reading them, i kinda had a feeling like something was wrong with them. there are some books that just leave a "bad taste in my mouth" to use a slightly mixed metaphor, and these were definitely those kind.
i'm ashamed to admit this, but once i get started reading something interesting, i have a hard time stopping even if it bothers my conscience, so i kept reading. i continued reading through the twisted descriptions of young children being tortured and killed in inhumane experiments to separate them from their daemons, the little animal type things that are part of them; the through the skewed references to Adam and Eve and the cynical representation of the church, which i excused to myself as being ok because the book is set in an alternate universe; and the sick sexually tinged parts (absolutely inappropriate for a children's book) between Lydia's mom and dad, both of whom are absolutely despicable and morally bankrupt characters, even thought they are not the "bad guys" of the book. after a week or so of wading through all this slush, i finally stopped reading the books (after i had finished the second of the trilogy) when a guy in my class who saw me reading it told me what happens at the end of the series; namely that the two main characters, Will and Lydia, end up killing God, or at least the god-character in that alternate universe. that was the final straw; my conscience bugged me so much that i couldn't keep reading.
a couple years later, when i was a junior, my dad was listening to Focus on the Family Radio, and Chuck Colsen came on talking about fantasy books. he started talking about the His Dark Material series, and i was shocked by what he said. Philip Pullman, the author of the books, is a fervent atheist who hates the very mention of God. as a result, he also passionately hates both C.S. Lewis and his childrens' series the Chronicles of Narnia. He considers them to be, in his own words "one of the most ugly and poisonous things i have ever read, with no shortage of nauseating drivel." He thinks that Narnia is blatent Christian propaganda, and so he decided to create a series of his own to combat it, a series instead promoting atheism, the His Dark Materials trilogy, in which the main theme is mortals overthrowing a cruel, unjust, tyranical god who sits up in the sky making everybody's lives miserable for the fun of it, which is obviously Pullman's idea of what the Christian God is . the main characters, Will and Lydia, are reincarntations or something of Adam and Eve, who this time get to make another choice, and instead of merely disobeying god, they get to overthrow him so they can have a Republic of Heaven where everybody gets to do what they want without a god bossing them around, apparently.
when i heard this on the radio, and then read about it more in the book "The Soul of the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe", i was absolutely disgusted and i felt sick that i had ever even read any of them at all. i had known the books were really weird and not very edifying, but i didn't really get what was going on, so i hadn't realized that it was as horrible as that. if i had known about Pullman and what he was trying to do, and what the point of those books was, i never would have read them, no matter how interesting they were. i'm still embarassed that i didn't realize what he was getting at. :o
I don't know what mine would be. I usually don't finish books I don't enjoy, unless they're required. But I can't think of any books I've read in school that I really disliked.
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The First Christmas is awful along the same lines as At the Back of the Northwind.
A few chapters in, I just abandoned the book. I had been offering them at my book giveaways, but it was so bad I pulled them all and traded them for something else. I bought them off the "clearance" shelf, which should have been a big hint, and only one kid took one at any of the giveaways, and he brought it back the next month to trade it for something else!
Live and learn, huh?
A few chapters in, I just abandoned the book. I had been offering them at my book giveaways, but it was so bad I pulled them all and traded them for something else. I bought them off the "clearance" shelf, which should have been a big hint, and only one kid took one at any of the giveaways, and he brought it back the next month to trade it for something else!
Live and learn, huh?
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E
ElijahFalling
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Sphere by Micheal Crichton was horrible. All his books are crapola, but this one was by far the worst. It ends the exact same way all his books do (the scientific/technological endeavor ends up going awry and at the end they blow everything up and decide not to pursue the endeavor) only in this one it was much more corny and badly written. Yep, don't waste your time with this one.
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ModernDaySpyridon
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elf_lady_9
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Wuthering Heights
I know, I know, it's a classic....but man I hated that book.
I do too!! i can't believe i forgot to mention Wuthering Heights! I loathe it utterly!!
it's a horrible miserable book about terrible things happening to selfish, cruel people who you can't even feel sorry for because they're so awful!
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Beautiful Fireball
Tomorrow is another day
Dante's Inferno
not that I don't realize the literary value in it, but when you're a juniour is high school, and put if off until two days before its a lot to handle. i would never recommend reading that book on such a short time span and still trying to understand it and write a paper about it. I still hate to think about it
not that I don't realize the literary value in it, but when you're a juniour is high school, and put if off until two days before its a lot to handle. i would never recommend reading that book on such a short time span and still trying to understand it and write a paper about it. I still hate to think about it
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Paddington
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Wuthering Heights
I think it's a good story idea, but the writing style is awful. I hated how it was narrated not in 3rd person and not in 1st by one of the people actually IN the relationship, but by a bystander. You don't get the same emotion. Plus Heathcliff is too moody and Cathy is too dramatic. Conclusion: Irritating characters made worse by irritating naration.
I think it's a good story idea, but the writing style is awful. I hated how it was narrated not in 3rd person and not in 1st by one of the people actually IN the relationship, but by a bystander. You don't get the same emotion. Plus Heathcliff is too moody and Cathy is too dramatic. Conclusion: Irritating characters made worse by irritating naration.
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ModernDaySpyridon
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Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
What a lame excuse for a book...
The characters were flat, the dialoge was a pitiful excuse for Mr. Brown to shoehorn page after page of psuedo-history into a plot so thin and insipid it makes Nancy Drew look like Dostoyevski.
IT doesn't matter if you are a Christian or not...this book was LAME.
What a lame excuse for a book...
The characters were flat, the dialoge was a pitiful excuse for Mr. Brown to shoehorn page after page of psuedo-history into a plot so thin and insipid it makes Nancy Drew look like Dostoyevski.
IT doesn't matter if you are a Christian or not...this book was LAME.
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Lessien
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At the risk of angering others on here.....
I HATED the Left Behind books. Sure, the first one was all right. The second one wasn't bad, either. But they took WAY too many liberties while interpreting Revelation. Yes, I know it's a very interesting book, and I know parts of it are symbolic. But it's one of those books about future events that I think should just be left alone until those events come to pass. Why? Well, you know how everyone is saying that The Da Vinci Code is horrible, distorts history, and people shouldn't actually believe it? Same with Left Behind. It's fiction and shouldn't be taken seriously.
Also, why so many of them? After they got to #5, I started saying "When will this ever END?!"--and I wasn't even twelve yet! And now they're FINALLY done with the series--all twelve of them!--and they're starting ANOTHER one?! Come ON, people! At first I thought they just really wanted to reach people, inform them of End-Times events. Then I thought they were just really fascinated with Revelation. Now I'm beginning to suspect that they're just trying to make money.
I HATED the Left Behind books. Sure, the first one was all right. The second one wasn't bad, either. But they took WAY too many liberties while interpreting Revelation. Yes, I know it's a very interesting book, and I know parts of it are symbolic. But it's one of those books about future events that I think should just be left alone until those events come to pass. Why? Well, you know how everyone is saying that The Da Vinci Code is horrible, distorts history, and people shouldn't actually believe it? Same with Left Behind. It's fiction and shouldn't be taken seriously.
Also, why so many of them? After they got to #5, I started saying "When will this ever END?!"--and I wasn't even twelve yet! And now they're FINALLY done with the series--all twelve of them!--and they're starting ANOTHER one?! Come ON, people! At first I thought they just really wanted to reach people, inform them of End-Times events. Then I thought they were just really fascinated with Revelation. Now I'm beginning to suspect that they're just trying to make money.
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soblessed53
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At the risk of angering others on here.....
I HATED the Left Behind books. Sure, the first one was all right. The second one wasn't bad, either. But they took WAY too many liberties while interpreting Revelation. Yes, I know it's a very interesting book, and I know parts of it are symbolic. But it's one of those books about future events that I think should just be left alone until those events come to pass. Why? Well, you know how everyone is saying that The Da Vinci Code is horrible, distorts history, and people shouldn't actually believe it? Same with Left Behind. It's fiction and shouldn't be taken seriously.
Also, why so many of them? After they got to #5, I started saying "When will this ever END?!"--and I wasn't even twelve yet! And now they're FINALLY done with the series--all twelve of them!--and they're starting ANOTHER one?! Come ON, people! At first I thought they just really wanted to reach people, inform them of End-Times events. Then I thought they were just really fascinated with Revelation. Now I'm beginning to suspect that they're just trying to make money.
My daughter and I thought they were a blast to read,and we read them(all 12) together though we are in 2 different states. Of course we knew they are fiction,and to my understanding they are not portrayed as anything else.
However,you have a point about this new series,and I have no intention of starting it. BTW neither of us "bought" the books,we got them from our libraries,LOL!
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