There are books I started and did not finish that I do not remember. However, there a few that I finished but hated. The worst was:
Reverie - this was a lgbt book club thing in Libby. The protagonist was a whiny incapable teen that never redeemed themself. I kept thinking it would get better and it never did. Things resolved because magic, so poor/lazy writing.
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
The Pearl by John Steinbeck. Its technically a novella but still. Hated it.
Oh sad face. It is one of my favorite books and also think the movie is a piece of art.
Might be different for me today if I reread it but I just mean from my first and sustained reaction reading it that was how I felt at the time, but I was also quite young
Tom Sawyer. I don’t think i’d hate it as much if I read it today, but having to read it in middle school was a bitch
Hmm, maybe that’s why my English teacher assigned Huck Finn instead (which I remember liking).
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.
Is it just the (lead) character or do you think the book itself is also shit?
Everything about the book is just dull and frustrating.
I felt the same way (spoilers for whoever hasn’t read it). The protagonist just kept encountering significant people where it seems like there’s going to be a struggle to overcome, leading to character development and newfound maturity, but no. He just moves on to another scene instead and they’re not seen again. It was just annoying.
The teacher that feels he’s not living up to his potential? The private school friends that he hangs out with but often finds frustrating? The childhood friend who he shares unexplored romantic tension with? The nuns whose meals he pays for despite having dwindling funds? The prostitute he just wants to have a conversation with? Her pimp, who attacks him? The potentially rapist family friend? For pretty much all of them a relevant conflict is initiated just for him to leave it unresolved, probably after labeling them a phony.
The only exception is his sister, who he sees like two or three times. And then the final conflict at the end is like: “Hey sorry for taking your birthday money so I could keep wandering around these past couple of days instead of talking to our rich parents.” “That’s ok, I forgive you. You’re my brother and I love you. But I worry about you sometimes.” “Yeah anyway, I’m bitter about the world so I kinda want to disappear into the wilderness.” “Please don’t do that.” “Ok I won’t.”
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.
I did read it up until about halfway through the last book, thinking that it would eventually get better while it instead just got worse. Decided that the whole thing had been a complete waste of time besides maybe giving me a greater appreciation for the fact that the real world was less of a slog
Ooh, if you want waste of time read the Alvin Maker series. Oh but I think he wrote another one since I read them (not that I’m willing to give it the chance to change my opinion).
You’re saying that the book couldve been an essay?
I don’t think it would’ve made a very good essay either
Ooo, I was trying to think of what to answer in this thread and you just reminded me of another Orson Scott Card book, Empire.
Absolute trash. Prior to that I had read all of the Ender and Bean series and loved them. Didn’t know much about Card personally, but picked up this book because it was supposed to be tied in with a video game I was looking forward too.
Reading this book is how I found out what a shitty person he really is. It was basically all him hitting you over the head with his shitty fascist ideology while jerking off to a bunch of military porn like a dollar store version of Tom Clancy. I never did play the game.
Worst book I’ve quit is Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. What a horrible book!
Worst I’ve finished is Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, immediately followed by Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I’ll throw in a special mention for The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby. All terrible books that I finished only because they were required reading in school.
As much as I loved many of Stephensen’s books, I could not get into Anathem.
Huh. I loved Seveneves.
Same. Loved the world building over millenia. I was hoping to see another book each on the miner people, the Navy men, and the spacefarers who went out into the wilds after water.
My older sister hated it, she wants stories about characters and not the world-building. She compares the pages on moving through 3D space with small jet thrusts to the pages of whale info in Moby Dick.
It’s a book I recommend with caveats. Not everyone is going to like it. Lesson learned, as much as I liked Snow Crash and Anathem too, I won’t recommend them to her. And moving beyond Stephenson, I’m confident she would immolate Canticle for Leibowitz halfway through.
I tend to quit books if I don’t find them very good. One I did finish that I fucking hated was The Girl on the Train. All of the characters were fucking insufferable.
I thought the film was good.
a novelization of one of my favorite video games
I suffered through it because I love the franchise so much and it wasn’t that long but holy shit, I was the writing quality of a grade schooler but with added unnecessary and gross romance between two children.
The book of a thousand nights and a night. Went in knowing it was the original inspiration for Aladdin. Was not prepared for a litany if short stories about sex and racism
The Great Gatsby.
I’ve read a lot of books, but that one I literally remember nothing about. Not a quote, not a character, not the plot… All I remember is the cover was some weird abstract art piece with creepy eyes, my brain purged everything else about it book. Probably for my own sanity.
The Tarot of the Bohemians.
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.
Wait until you get to chapterhouse!
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.
I read the first four dune books this year and I think they all suffer from the same problem, that is they have interesting characters, original lore, great world building, but nothing interesting happens until the very ending of the book. They all felt like a slog to get through to me.
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 two prequels to foundation are awesome, don’t miss them.
Don’t read the prequels by Brin and Bear, they are not only awful but also steer the lore into really dumb place which i’m pretty sure was not intended by Asimov. Though to be honest the two prequels by Asimov are also much worse than the main series.
I mean, none of that is true, and Herbert stated he had parts of Messiah and Children written before Dune was even finished.
In the forward to Heretics of Dune: “Parts of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune were written before Dune was completed. They fleshed out more in the writing, but the essential story remained intact.”
A sequel to Dune (1965), it was originally serialized in Galaxy magazine in 1969, and then published by Putnam the same year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_Messiah
I forget where the rushed admission and poor quality was blamed on the periodical and premature release, but am certain that is somewhere out there.
Parts of theserialized story were fleshed out and became Dune.
The bible. Set aside any religious connotations and just look at it as a piece of literature: it’s terrible.
Ayn Rand’s fountainhead, by a fat mile. I was young and didn’t know better
I listened to Atlas Shrugged as an audio book and it was ok at best. One massive criticism of communism and how it doesn’t work but suggested anarchist society as the solution. Weird rape-y sex scene in the middle also. Should have stuck with the social criticism instead of anarco capitalism utopia stuff and it’d have been good.
God, me too. I thought I was too dumb to “get it”.
