Wicked. My god that book was boring.

Your favorite book.

(Actually, it's The Scarlet Letter.)

Some of the earlier stuff we had to read in school was pretty horrible. I guess everybody knows what I'm talking about. Books written by educators about shit they think is relevant to kids without even having the slightest clue what the fuck they are writing about.

Well, in return some of the stuff we've read later was pretty neat.

Awful.

By far, Their Eyes Were Watching God. I didn't really give a shit about the plot (who the fuck cares about blacks in Florida circa 1920) and also thought that having to read ebonics in written form was painful. I don't remember how I got through it

>>22
I picked up the book thinking it'd be like John Gardner's Grendel. The godawful narration from Chapter 1 while hearing about the rest of the book from other people made me put it down. I hate the musical with a passion.

Other honorable mentions for shitty books:
The Peace books by John Knowles - Horrible, emo faggotry through the stories. You really want to punch Gene from the first book, and no one is likable in the second one.

Most Post-Modernism books are horrible. I tried to read one book from an author, but just when I was about to figure out the plot, there's a chapter where the author talks about money-cheese, random bullshit, and to add insult to injury he takes the story to another level. One of the few books that nearly made me throw it against a wall.

Anything that comes from the Black Library (Games Workshop's book publishing company) is horrible (especially anything from Nick Khyme or Ben Counter).

>>46
Literally (lol puns) the only thing I remember from Wicked: A guy getting kicked in the asshole and shitting himself. That, and something about a talking goat.

But yeah, I thought it would be like Grendel as well. But to read about the Wicked Witch getting involved in THE FUCKING POLITICAL LIVES OF TALKING ANIMALS was just retarded and god-awful boring.

For me, the worst book I ever read was The Great Gatsby. A book about superficial people who do superficial things, a book where people of the city only care about status and wealth, and actually caring about someone ends up bad for you. I just did not like the book at all. I hated many of the characters and I just hated the whole situation.

>>50
I haven't read it, but it sounds like it was less that the book was bad and more that you're a gigantic baby.

>>50

lrn2subtext

I read a book called The Bone People by Keri Hulme. She writes at huge length about the minute details of three characters' lives. There was one section about sixty pages long where the characters are trying to reel in a fish (cause the rid has the rod, and the adults are dicking about.) This is the only novel I have ever put down.

Despite the boring, I still feel it could have been a good read if the author had decided to edit about 300 pages out of it.

>>55
Sorry, the kid has the rod, although the author should have got rid of him.

>>52
fuck that pseudo-intellectual bullshit. It was a terrible book about shallow people doing shallow things.

>>23
I didn't mind the book, but analyzing it was really irritating.

For me, it's a toss up between The Chocolate War, Lord of the Flies, and The Giver.
The Chocolate War was a personal taste thing for me, I really hate social politics, and that book combined it with a Catholic high school and jocks. I've never been able to understand the appeal of that social territory.

Lord of the Flies was pretty much the same, except no holds barred. And the symbolism was a mindfuck.

The Giver I just hated the whole situation. That anybody could even imagine such a horrible society is bad enough, but for it to actually be considered a good enough idea to carry out is completely beyond me. The ending implies that they escape to the normal world (as opposed to some alternate universe or planet), and that kept me coming back to the question of how could any fragment of the normal world have allowed such a monstrosity to come into being in the first place?

Pic related- a project I did for The Giver back when I was a drawfag.

>>64
>fuck that pseudo-intellectual bullshit. It was a terrible book about shallow people doing shallow things.

And what was America like during the 1920s?

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

"A Walk in the Woods."

It's pretty much about some out-of-shape guy and his recovering alcoholic friend (also out of shape and an unfunny jackass) walking the Appalachian Trail.

It's like 1/3rds story, 1/3rds brochure and 1/3rds environmentalist bullshit.

And oh yeah, they never finish the Appalachian Trail. They're too fat.

>>73
this one was pretty fucking bad

>>64
so....you are actually 13 years old. I don't love The Great Gatsby, but its silly to gloss over a message in the book because of a gut reaction to the superficiality of the times. What you call "psuedo-intellectual bullshit" is indicative of reading at an advanced level.

>>89
My gut reaction was that it was a boring book about a social class I can't identify with. What I hated was the discussions that dissected it in class. I read for entertainment or interest, not to "slip into the authors shoes" and try to discern some divine message about the meaning of life.

Maybe I do have poor reading comprehension. Maybe I'm a product of sagging American education standards. Maybe I'm a lazy sack of shit with no goals in life. Would it make any difference? It's just, like, my opinion man.

>>92
If you want to be really technical about it, Vladimir Nabokov wrote in his essay about how to read (I can't remember the title) that you shouldn't use the book to learn anything, just to experience it. So...I guess he's on your side?

>>267
Me again. The essay is titled "Good Readers and Good Writers"

>>268

Nabokov is hardly the last word on how to read. Or write, for that matter. And I'm as much a fan of his as you are likely to find.

That said, I'm also rather ambivalent about Fitzgerald. "Shallow people doing shallow things" sums up Gatsby pretty well. Add "shallow authorial pontification."

The worst book I've ever read was a novelization of Gauntlet: Dark Legacy... I'm ashamed to even admit that I've read such a thing.

This was an issued reading book in middle school. I brought it home and read it with my family (We like to read together, we're a reading family) and my family agreed that this book was just awful. I don't know how many of you have read this, but it's nothing but flashbacks.

Apparantly this is/was a very popular book, and I'd like to assure you that I'm not trolling. (Not that you care.)

>>73
someone donated that to the goodwill where I work. I read the description on the back and noticed the author apparently got it published by winning an mtv contest or something. no wonder it sucked.

>>272

I remember having to read this, but I can't recall what it was about.

OMG the dante club was terrible! The worst one for me has got to be a book called "BOYS R US". It was a teen girl novel and I read it. I'm not proud of that by the way.... But I did like that the fat girl saves the day by peeing herself.

Some 'horror' book called Nemesis that was trying so hard to be Dean Kootz I could hear the fucking pages straining as I turned them. It turned out to be Babby's First Horror Thriller, full of unneeded sex, shitty writing and a fucked up plot with a crap ending.

I was mad.


>mfw that fucking book

the uglies
fucking shit

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand.

"Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha." Shite book for a shite English literature class.

The Miserable Ones - Some ppl will say it is one of the best ever written but personally after i was done with it, i had learn nothing, i wasnt feelin better or worst, it was just like nothing happened. So for me this book is like nothing.

>>294

It must be hard to enjoy books when you're barely literate.

>>267
I have a book titled, funnily enough, "How to Read a Book". You can find it on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Touchstone-book/dp/0671212095

It focuses primarily on reading for information (essays, manuals, non-entertainment works) and discusses tactics for analysis. The main premise of the book is that you, the reader, are carrying on a conversation with the author using the book as a proxy. Readers, for example, are encouraged to write questions and counter-arguments throughout the pages of the book as a response to what they are reading.

It's an interesting little manual. I'm not sure if it's tactics are valid for the type of books discussed in this thread, but it's worth picking up for other types of reading material.

>>296
I haven't read Les Miserables, but I suspect that at this point reading a work of historical fiction is like reading Shakespeare. Most people aren't going to get the most out of it without a lot of work.

>>294
I would suggest an experiment. Try reading Les Miserables again, but get a Cliff's Notes version first. Or better yet, look up the history of France between 1815 and 1832. You could even check out the Les Miserables page on Wikipedia. The book is historical fiction, so it's important to know the events that took place during that time period and why. These events inform many of the actions and attitudes of the characters within the book. Once you know the background, it might make for more interesting reading.

Literally the worst thing I have ever read in my life.

I hate that it was a cheap cash-in on the Lord of the Rings / Harry Potter fantasy craze of 2001

I hate that I fell for it at the time (I was 15 and getting into fantasy)

I hate that they agreed to publish 2 more books and tried to make a movie franchise out of it.

I've seen better written anime slashfic than this piece of crap.

Go Ask Alice

>>328
Wasn't that made into a movie for high-school kids? I remember it being something about a girl who fell into drugs and spent some time in a house with a crazy couple that would abuse them in exchange for drugs. Everyone in my middle school were put into an auditorium to watch that tripe.

I thought the girl was cute, though.

The Go Ask Alice movie was made back in the 70s and had William Shatner as the girl's dad. I think it was some sort of ABC afterschool special movie.

Swords of the Six.

I got it because the author was sitting in an airport where I had a layover and it had a dragon on the cover. So, sure, why not?

It's literally the worst thing I've ever read. There was hardly any structure -- the plot is awful, and all over the place. This guy just has absolutely no idea how to write.

Even worse, he tried to mesh some weird Christian shit into it, and it made zero sense. None whatsoever.

It's one thing for a book to be bad because of content, but this was honestly an incredibly poorly written piece of shit in every way.