ZDawgWhat was the worst book you’ve ever read?
hackerwackerThe Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
SanctusI 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.
𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆Herbert 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 two prequels to foundation are awesome, don’t miss them.
PolandIsAStateOfMindDon’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 worst in the 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.
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 the serialized story were fleshed out and became Dune.
ddittyI 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.
Wait until you get to chapterhouse!
[deleted] in lemmyMoby Dick is the book I hated the most. Just the worst slog that i remember making it through.
Noooo :( I love Moby Dick.
Granted I listened to the audiobook
I know there are a lot of people who love it for the same reasons I hated it, people have different tastes.
I love Lord of the Flies because it gets to the point!
I picked it up from the library years ago on a whim and surprisingly really enjoyed it.
Well, except maybe the multiple pages long chapter about varieties of whales. That was a bit much.
JackbyDevOh fucking hell, yes! How could I forget!? It’s so loooonnnngg. There’s a whole chapter that’s an encyclopedia of whales.
mwproductionsTwo chapters, IIRC.
JusticeForPorygonTom 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.”
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
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. If you could distill pure insufferable smugness into a liquid, this was him squirting it into your mouth while you’re not paying attention and laughing at you while you sputter and gag.
ThavronI 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.
First 10 pages was probably the bulk of the story; the rest was just email replies.
Never read it, just some parts here and there because a girlfriend was reading it and it was hilarious LOL The descriptions are supposed to be sexy or alluring or god knows what but they are so cringey! It took me a bit to understand that my friend was reading it seriously.
Wizard’s First Rule by Terry Brooks. 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.
It’s probably not the worst for me either but it’s easily the first thing I think of. Really left a bad taste I guess.
On a somewhat lower pedestal: Eragon. What a hugely derivative poorly written piece of crap. I’ve run D&D campaigns with better dialogue and pacing than that.
Oh yes I agree! And I’m a huge dragon fan, so it was extremely disappointing. That one I gave up on after maybe 50 pages. I couldn’t get past the prose. So I didn’t even get to the heavily recycled tropes, but I did see the movie once and they were plenty obvious from that.
caseyweedermanI got to “Barges? BARGES? We don’t need no steenking BARGES” and threw the book away
Wizards First Rule is Goodkind not Brooks, Brooks wrote Shanarra
Ack thank you, I mix them up even though I’ve never read Brooks, who seems to be better loved.
I’d rate them about the same, personally. Though Brooks is at least just derivative and juvenile; Goodkind gets increasingly self indulgent.
Damn I legit liked this book, one of my top series. I just enjoyed the magic system, the antagonists, and the over the top nature. I might just have bad taste though lol.
Me too, friend.
After ruminating on it though, everything I liked was just lifted from better works.
Leatherclad red-themed group of women who enjoy causing pain and are able to negate men’s magic? Red ajah.
What other examples are there?
After ruminating on it though, everything I liked was just lifted from better works.
Leatherclad red-themed group of women who enjoy causing pain and are able to negate men’s magic? Red ajah.
What other examples are there?
I for sure see the links between SoT and Wheel of Time. I started seeing a lot of things lifted after reading both. But I still find myself liking both for different reasons. I dunno, I’ve accepted that I do like some things that are generally viewed as “bad” and I’ve come to terms with it haha.
Yeah but some things are bad because they are deliberately trying to make you bad too
Maybe. But I think it matters of entertainment it’s not as evil as that. Sure engaging with bad media might fuel them to repeat that behavior, but IMO if it harms no one it’s not an issue. Like for example I’ve read the SoT series a few times and I’m not a Marxist or what have you.
Ahh I think you’ve misunderstood.
He’s a raging, obnoxious capitalist who thinks poor people are poor because they don’t try.
He’s a raging, obnoxious capitalist who thinks poor people are poor because they don’t try.
Haha that’s how much I missed it I guess. Well I do appreciate you clarifying that, I never got a good, concise answer about what people we’re hating on it for.
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.
Remember when Richard defeated the evils of socialism without his magic by pulling himself up by his bootstraps really really hard by (without practice or training) carving a really really good statue and all the lazy worthless slacker librulls were like dang, I love capitalism now, and then everyone looked directly into the metaphorical camera and said “Communism: Don’t let it happen to you”?
To be honest no… Because I think I violently expunged it from my memory and mind as my brain probably interpreted it as some kind of threat to my cells.
Funniest part of that was that Terry Goodkind clearly did not know anything about socialist realism
That was the beginning of the end for me. I think by the time I got to that part the series had already been going downhill but I remember that being a really sharp turning point.
I tried to press on a little further. The introduction of the straw man nation with the innocent child king who’s only existence was to be blown the fuck out by the brilliance of objectivism is when I finally decided I just couldn’t go on.
What I remember most vividly from that series is how absolutely bone-chilling everything about the Confessors were. You could absolutely have a really cool and interesting fantasy series in which they’re the main villains, but Terry Goodkind’s political views just wouldn’t allow it.
Or even just digging into their internal struggles due to the inherent loneliness that their powers creates. Instead we got a wierd post period sex blowjob to Richard role playing as his brother or something stupid that I can’t remember
Glad I’ve blocked that out
A book called The Night by a Venezuelan author.
I feel a bit bad saying this because there are definitely worse books but this one stuck with me as the premise sounded really interesting but the book was nothing like it.
There is a review on goodreads that sums it up pretty nicely.
Literature about literature, books about books, literature about books, books about literature, literature about literature, books about books, …
The Bible
Yep. Bible. Pretentious, boring and way too much first - person stuff.
Best-selling work of fiction amirite
whotookkarlI wonder how many just check out when they get to the list of begats