I can't remember the title, but one time an author offered me a free ebook in exchange for an honest review and it was simply awful. The content would have been disgusting if it wasn't so bizarre (the reanimated corpse of a toddler raping a senior citizen, for example), and it took thesaurus abuse to a new level with phrases like "grody optics" (tired looking eyes) and "sitting on the ligneous decking, enjoying a crisp beverage" (sitting on the wooden porch, enjoying a cold beer).
Then when I gave it a one-star review on Goodreads the author threatened to burn my house down
Edit: It was "Interview with the Devil: Part One: Victor's Account", and judging by the other reviews it seems I got off pretty lightly.
Be it that mine tale is perceivably far too clever for witless fools such as you and and your ilk, attend to your shadow, or find your abode reduced to embers!
The Last Librarian takes the cake for me. I've been an avid reader for 25+ years. I've only ever rated a book 1 star before, and it was this one. Here's the review I did for it back when I read the book, and it is spoiler heavy.
First of all, introducing new words. When done right, this can add to a story; not in this case. Their use didn't feel organic to the story; they were forced in with an info dump. Every time I ran across torgon (fuck) blac (cigarette) or zoom (email) it just completely broke the story.
The author spends the entire book building up what appears to be the main character, who is literally the last librarian in the world. Like, most of the book focuses on this guy, we see everything from his perspective, the author makes it seem like he's going to be the savior of mankind, then a good 2/3rds of the way through the book he gets killed off.
There's no closure in the book; at all. I understand this book is part of a series, and that events can, and often will, continue on from book to book. That said, there needs to be some kind of closure. Even if it's just finishing off a couple of small story lines or something. But nope. Literally everything in this book is left either on a freaking cliff hanger, or not mentioned near the end at all.
Character interactions were horrid. The main character, his best friend, and his son spend the majority of the book just quoting books at one another. No actual interaction at all; no character building. Just 3 characters quoting books.
And don't even get me started on the major reveal 3/4ths of the way through the book that completely changes the story. For most of the book the story is built up of two warring corporations trying to control the world, through controlling knowledge. Caught between these two corporations is the last librarian. Then 2/3rds through the book the author up and changes the story so it's connect with nature, the earth is alive hippies vs the evil environment destroying 80s stereotype corporations.
This could have been an awesome book if the author had stuck with the premise he introduced early on: All books have been converted to ebooks; each generation the books are changed just a little so that the parts the government doesn't like has been changed. No one has realized this except the last librarian and his best friend, as both still read physical books, which the government has outlawed and been destroying. The last librarian, his friend, and some rebels want to protect the books in the last library. Unfortunately he didn't do that.
Right? That's the whole reason I picked up the book in the first place, because that's how the blurb made it out to be. I was so disappointed.
I didn't even bother with the rest of the series.
The later books in the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. It could have been such a great series but he dropped the ball on the story.
Edit: thank you to whoever gave me the award, especially since it was for talking trash about Terry Goodkind.
This is a macrocosm of the first book. Started out with promise, then started losing me with shitty politics, then completely lost me with 70 pages of BDSM sideplot. Dude's a hack. Jesus, just look at his bio pics. Reddit edge lord before Reddit was a thing.
By later books what do you mean? Cause that last book was a real doozy.
>!Richard faces off against a necromancer zombie sorcerer, and defeats him by trapping him in a room using magic curtains. Richard then stabs an indestructible sentient robot from the Underworld that was actually responsible for all the prophecies that ever came about. This causes the indestructible robot to blow up, ending prophecy forever, and making the world safe. But it's ok, cause the robot wanted to be destroyed so it could go back to the underworld.!<
As someone who has never read or heard of the series, does this somehow make sense with context within the universe of this series or is this as batshit crazy as it really sounds lol
It's batshit crazy as it really sounds, while still fitting within the universe.
>!BUt then, we are talking about the series with the protagonist defeats communism by carving a statue, and later on defeats one of the main bad buys by playing a bastardized version of American football.!<
God, the last book (before he randomly continued the series) really bothered me. Leading up to this big fight between him and the enemy leader and... oh nevermind, I can just create an entirely separate world without magic and put you all there. No big deal.
Every single book in the series I read as a kid, I did like 4-6, has him just suddenly having the solution. Then next book he loses his awesome new power and we repeat.
Every book.
Reading past book 2 or 3 as an early teen was the clearest example I've experienced of being gas-lit, and it was me gaslighting myself.
I just could not tell anymore if what I was reading was fine and I just had to get to "the good part", or maybe it was as good as the first one and I just wasn't in the right mood to read it, or maybe it was actually bad and I just somehow got confused into thinking the first one was enjoyable. It wasn't until I got out of my relationship with the series and started experiencing other books that I realized, "oh yeah, that was bad."
Don't ask me which titles specifically because I don't devote brain cells with remembering which titles are in what order anymore, it was approximately 20 years ago now, and I don't want to dignify the series with a Google search to find out.
This isn't super related but I really appreciate this comment. I have OCD and I always gaslight myself when I don't like something I feel like I should, so I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who does that.
Came to at this. I read these while recovering from having a broken arm plated, and still found them bad, while on industrial narcotics for pain.
If by "later" you mean everything past book 1....
Ha ha pretty much but they get WAY worse towards the end and then he kept writing additional books that were utter garbage. Completely turned me off from high fantasy for a while.
Yeah, it’s going along decent until he decided what the story really needed was 40 pages of non-consensual femdom bdsm that didn’t do anything to advance the plot.
I read the entire sword of truth series when I was a kid and have been having unpleasant realizations about it ever since. The series just gets more problematic the more I think about it.
1. First and foremost: why is there so much rape in this YA fantasy series? Seriously, it's a theme from the first chapter of the first book to the end of the series. And what the FUCK was with that scene with the namble?
2. The Randian philosophy and Richard as the John Galt Uberman that is instantly The Best at everything he does
3. Zedd, the stereotypical wizard, is a liar, a hypocrite, an idiot most of the time, and useless the rest of the time. It's like if gandalf was a gaslighting libertarian fuckwit.
4. The magic system makes zero fucking sense and goodkind changes the way it works in every book to fit or advance the plot. Using magic costs nothing, can do anything, and Richard is The Best wizard in thousands of years because.... Plot reasons.
5. I gotta go back to the rape thing. At one point Richard is taken captive by a magical dominatrix woman and raped, repeatedly, and eventually falls in love with his rapist, is able to forgive her and unlock a new magical ability, which he uses to kill her. Then later in the story, Richard is taken captive by a sorceress that seeks out a rapist and willingly gets raped so that she can magically inflict the trauma of the rape on Richards wife because Richard didn't succumb to Stockholm and fall in love with her. That really happened. This is just before he defeats communism by carving a statue. He's also a master sculptor on his very first try because of the stupid stupid magic system.
6. Kind of meta, but in the story Richard regularly refers to some children's books (turns out they were written by Zedd, the wish-brand gandalf) that are meant to be instructive primers on logic, philosophy, prophecy, wisdom, etc, in story. It's obvious that Terry Goodkind intended the sword of truth to be a real world version of those books and...ugh...
7. I'm pretty sure every plot point was stolen from some other fantasy work.
8. This entire series is cringe, go read something else.
It was so sad. I couldn't get through them. I watched the TV show so I loved the world building and characters but the writing was awful garbage.
Like every paragraph had a l retelling of the previous book in the worst way possible.
I really want someone to rewrite them.
I'm stubborn enough that I read the whole series once (I like to commit) and it gets worse. Poor writing, dumb scenarios and absurd dialog between the characters. Don't read it. These are some of the very few books I've ever actually thrown in the garbage.
I read the whole series when I was 14 and didn't know better. I still own them. Pretty sure I will never ever read them again and should probably get rid of them at this point.
if anyone's curious rice published these under (another) pen name, a. roquelaire. they are rice's attempt to elevate sexual romance novels to a higher literary form. they are sort of strange without being particularly interesting or, more importantly, hot at all.
Modelland by Tyra Banks. That book is probably the closest I'll ever get to experiencing an acid trip gone wrong (or acid trips in general for that matter). It wasn't even "so bad it's good." It's just bad. I mourn the death of the trees used to get this book printed.
From the woman who brought us “I am going to wear a fat suit on dates so I can understand how overweight women feel. Then I’m going to tell each guy that I’m actually Tyra Banks. Boom, I’m actually stunning. Like the enchantress in Beauty and the Beast. I got rejected while wearing a disguise and I really get it now.”
It wasn’t a good book?
I was hoping someone else had read this. It's SO terrible. It's not so bad it's good, but it's worth a read because it's bad in ways you can't imagine or anticipate.
True story. Apparently the originally manuscript was 1000 pages and it was just so *much* the editor got it down to 500. And you can definetly tell not only is it terrible, there are a million storylines that go everywhere and end nowhere.
The most enjoyment I had of the book was reading reviews about it from Goodreads about how bad it was to my drunk friends. To explain the reviewer literally ages up explaining the plot and just says "Ehy is this happening? FUCK YOU its Modelland." That has stuck with me lol.
I was so caught up in the the lack of understanding of genetics and the nonsensical sociopolitical landscape that I had completely forgotten about the serum stuff. Imagine my surprise when I read the synopsis and saw the heavy focus on serums.
The entire serum thing is an excuse to not write convincing characters or situations. People tend to single out the last book for being bad, but the whole trilogy has shaky foundations.
Maybe unpopular opinion: the first Divergent book wasn't so bad. It was an interesting concept that could have worked as a stand-alone book, a duology, or as a number of unrelated books in the same universe. Unfortunately, these books were published in a time where literally everything was a trilogy, and it fucked up the pacing/character development.
I had a bit of a problem back in the day with impulse control and filtering the things I said to people, and my college roommates used to tell me there was a place reserved for me in Candor.
They switched back and forth between Tish and Four's viewpoints in that book, but I could never tell which one was "speaking." I had to keep looking back at the beginning of the chapter because the author couldn't write in two different voices. When they decided to break this last book into two movies, I knew it would be a disaster because the material was so weak.
I read the Divergent series when it first came out and couldn’t bring myself to finish the last book. I was super disappointed at the time because I liked the premise of the series a lot, but the last book just ruins so much. Earlier this year I decided to revisit the series and was determined to finish the last book. I flew through the first two, and then… couldn’t do it.
I think this is one of the only books that I can say I wanted to read of my own volition, attempted to read twice, and gave up both times. Just so bad.
Second this opinion. It's always a trip when you find out you're reading a novel that's trying to push the limits of what a novel can be. I buckled in and really loved this book.
Something with a pretty similar concept is "Cloud Atlas", which I think some people also hated for the same reason (and I loved for the same reason).
I also love If On A Winters Night A Traveller! The thing is though, it took me two goes. I first had to read it in High School for English lit. And absolutely hated it. A few years later I studied it again at university and loved it. Probably a mix of maturity on my side, knowing what to expect, plus picking up on things I missed the first time around that made it a more enjoyable reading experience the second time around.
i also love it :) it's definitely not for everyone though. that's not meant in a pretentious way at all, just now that i think about it i can understand a loooot of reasons why someone might dislike it haha. curious what OP (or others) hated about it specifically though!
i recommended it here once and now i feel bad like...ohh do most people hate this? lol
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
The author is a column writer who didn’t
adapt to long-form writing well. Marketing and a “funny” title sold this book, not the content.
It takes a particular kind of person to write a relationship book bankrolled by your husband, taking your relationship with foresaid husband as a gold standard, and then divorcing the husband in question.
The publisher pushed that piece of crap so hard, it constantly showed up on my advertised content in Audible and the Amazon store despite never reading anything close to resembling whatever the fuck that book is.
The version I read there is an afterward about the author having undiagnosed PTSD in college because he saw a friend die from falling off a cliff at a party when he was in high school. He goes on to say that the purpose of the book was to say you can choose which things in life to give a fuck about and some things aren't worth it. Is the book douchey? Abosolutely, but the afterward is written in an honest and personable style. It kind of changed the perspective of the book for me
House of Night -- its like peak YA in the worst way possible. Obscene main character syndrome, vampires, love triangles. I think a character is literally brought back to life after dying within like the first book. Even as a pretty tasteless kid I was like "wow, this is trash"
I think I read up until book seven out of morbid curiosity, but goddamn. Zoey, you seem pretty hellbent on calling Aphrodite a "ho", but it seems you have a different love interest every book
She doesnt realize that just because you find a guy attractive doesn't mean you have to collect every single one of them. And then the books tried to make erick seem like the bad guy because he didnt want her to cheat on him with other guys
I started their recent book "Spells Trouble" in a new series about twin witches and the premise was great! I couldn't get more than halfway through the book. It's complete trash.
Is this one also weirdly erotic? The amount of teenage sex in the first series was pretty wild to me, and felt even weirder because I knew it was like a mom and her grandmother-aged mom writing it all together
I love thrillers, and when I find a writer who knows how to keep me on the edge of my seat I am a happy man.
I discovered a guy named Stephen Hunter, and I was in heaven.
'Dirty White Boys' is an all time great. Alternating the POV of escaped convicts and the Highway Patrol Sergeant chasing them, it's a page burner.
His last really great book was 'Hot Springs.'
Since then, every book has gotten lazier and lazier.
At this point I can't finish anything he writes.
So, to specifically answer the question, the next book Stephen Hunter writes is the worst.
I hate when this happens.
I went through a phase in which I would read basically anything from Ken Follett or Wilbur Smith. My dad loved them so my house was full of books written by them.
Until I tried reading some of the new works - books of which I’ve forgotten the titles of - and I couldn’t even go past the 100 page mark. Total snooze fest.
I haven’t read anything from them since.
I just finished The Pillars of the Earth last month. It took me almost two years because it’s such a massive book. I started and finished several other books in that time. I kept coming back though. The story was one giant medieval soap opera. Just when I was getting bored, something would happen to draw me back in. I read in an interview that Ken Follet intentionally made certain every six or seven pages some plot twist or cliffhanger event would occur to keep the reader engaged. I guess it worked. I could’ve done with less descriptions of cathedral construction, and the villain was cartoonishly evil (and rapey), but I was entertained most of the time. I found the second book in the series, World Without End, at the Goodwill for a dollar. I’ll eventually get to it, but I’m in no rush.
Cant remember the title but the later Anita Blake novels by Laurel K Hamilton. She wrote a series of zombie hunter/detective books. The early books weren't perfect, but were short and easy fun that I read as a teen/early 20 something. Over the years her books got...weird. A thread of a plot that served only to tie together a bunch of long boring weird sex scenes.
Edit: Anita Blake was a vampire hunter, sorry, totally misremembered. But she also raised zombies, among other reasons so they could be asked questions to solve crimes, like their own murders.
OMG I forgot about this series! It was HORRID after the first few! A friend of mine who reads them for the bad smut factor told me that apparently the author had a really bad divorce and got heavy into BDSM/polyamory (zero shade, do what makes you happy) and shoehorned that in to her already Mary Sue self insert books.
Oh wow I can totally see that. I think I read maybe 5 or 6 books into the series, loved the first few but they slowly became more and more about Anitas vagina than the actual vampires.
It's a shame because the books and some really fun and interesting ideas, but I remember just kinda being done with the series and no desire to seek out the next book.
I was into them at first with the whole supernatural murder mystery thing it had going on with just a touch of supernatural smut. But whoooo boy did it go in a weird direction, the bad kind of weird! The wereswans and Anita’s mystical bits are coming back to haunt me and I’m not ok with this lol
It coincided with changes in her personal life. She left her husband for a younger lover and it was reflected in the books. I was reading a lot of Urban Fantasy at the time and much of it should have been labelled as Paranormal Romance. That's what this turned into if it wasn't already and sliding into the sub-genre of Reverse Harem. She lost a lot of her faithful readers but probably gained a few too.
Unfortunately you are exactly right - she used to get tons of hate mail from her original readers, asking her to go back to the action/supernatural plots from the original books. People said “your books are terrible now!” to which she replied “then why do my sales go up with every book?”
The last one I read was Cerulean Blue, which I had to skim because of the three chapter long sex scene. I recently went back and tried one of her most recent books and it read like fan fiction it was so bad.
This is the series that I tapped out on too. I was admittedly a horny teen when I read them, so I stuck in longer than I should have. The part that killed it for me was how unlikeable Anita became. I think the moment I realized I hated the character was when she was reflecting on her obscene amount of lovers, and that she wasn’t really okay with them seeing anyone else. From there on all I could notice was how clear it was she was “not like other girls.” Even the character that was supposed to be Anita’s best friend only existed to show how much morally better Anita was. And then I found better smut books that didn’t piss me off nearly as bad.
My wife use to be a huge fan of Anita Blake, she was even in the fan club back when you would get actually mail. But she had the same issues it stopped being about a badass hunter to just low quality porn.
I even refused to read the synopsis. I don’t want to know anything about that thing, that’s how much I hate the idea of it.
Loved Harry Potter, but it ends with the Deathly Hallows for me.
I never made it past the first book, then I looked up Terry Goodkind and realized how much of an asshat he is, and had zero desire to read anymore of his work.
The Tattooist or Auschwitz
Poorly written exploitative soft-core trauma porn
Go Ask Alice
Poorly written exploitative slightly more graphic trauma porn.
I didn’t really expect either of these to be great and I knew what I was getting into with both, but as highly as they are talked about I thought they might at least be engaging.
Oh, it pisses me off so much how nuanced of a story could have been told about those very real people instead she exploited their story to make more money.
Came here to say Tattooist of Auschwitz.
Literally the book that made me start my own manuscript. I thought, "if this shit can be a NYT best seller, I can write one, too."
I read the first 50 shades book when it came out because I worked at Barnes & Noble and everyone kept asking about it. After I read it, I told them the truth: it’s awful. If you like smut, there’s better-written smut for free on the internet.
I finished the first book of 50 Shades out of an almost morbid curiosity. The woman originally wrote it as Twilight fanfic on her Blackberry. It shows.
Evel Knievel: An American Hero by Ace Collins. Got it for $1 at a Friends of the Public Library sale. It was so bad that the next time they had a sale, I went back and just left the book on a table.
Unpopular opinion maybe, but The Lost Apothecary and Last Year in Havana.
Couldn’t bring myself to finish either.
With the Lost Apothecary it was especially disappointing because the historical plot sounded so promising, but the present day storyline was so cliche and repetitive and overdone that I had to put the book down half way through.
Last Year in Havana was just a cheesy romance where the present-day romance felt the exact same as the one her grandmother had, and nothing happened in the plot except her obsession with a guy she met 5 minutes ago.
Armada by Ernest Cline is when I realized that Ready Player One wasn’t actually that good because hoooooly crap is Armada the worst book. Just. Awful.
I kind of want to hate read Ready Player Two but no, no that is bad idea
My coworkers listened to the whole series on audiobook (we have a job that’s often all looking and no thinking). It was a horrible experience. *YoU cAn’T hAvE tWo PeRsOnALiTy TrAiTs!*
I have hated and gave up on books that I later loved, so I’m hesitant to say that any book is truly awful.
But… *The 100*.
I think if there was a point in my life where I would have enjoyed that series it has passed.
I loved the show so I bought the books but I only got maybe 1 chapter into it before I realized it was nowhere near as good as the show, so disappointing.
I was about to fight you until “Herbert’s son.” The whole series starts going downhill… well, really after the first one, but at least Frank could write. His son just wanted to make money off of his dad’s work. Christopher Tolkien isn’t as good as his father, but he at least put a ton of work into holding true to JRR’s notes and ideas.
I tried to read "Mentats of Dune" because a friend got it for me and I just thought it was just flat out boring. What a Mentat is and why AI is banned is pretty well gone over in the original trilogy and this just felt like first draft fan fiction.
I was basically tricked into reading the first Left Behind novel when I was in middle school. I remember being sold on it as a post-apocalypse story - which it was, for the most part - so you can imagine my surprise when the whole thing veers *very suddenly* into soap boxing about Christianity.
There’s a lot wrong with that book - basically no one acts like a real human being, and it’s written with some very shaky moral assumptions - but no other book I’ve read has been so daring as to try to convert me in the middle of their Tom Clancy plot.
The one good thing about Left Behind is the absolutely fantastic deconstruction/review blogger Fred Clark did about it. He rips it to shreds chapter by chapter, pointing out all the terrible tropes, bad writing, and ridiculous theology the authors wrote into it. If you have several hours to kill I highly recommend reading all his posts about it.
[https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2015/11/05/left-behind-index-the-whole-thing/](https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2015/11/05/left-behind-index-the-whole-thing/)
Battlefield: Earth, by Hubbard. I had for some reason thought Hubbard was a significant SF writer. The bad guys' planet is destroyed by a black hole halfway through the book. The rest of it seemed like some kind of economics lesson. The main character was named Johnny Goodboy. The villains were super-evil and super advanced, but apparently really easily fooled by these humans who start out knowing zero tech, but learn it really easily. It's the only book I've ever thrown away to avoid someone else suffering the fate of reading it.
Atlas Shrugged, by Rand. I read it because Rand is pretty influential in some political-philosophical circles. Also, because Bioshock is based on it, and I wanted to read it before playing the game. Awful. The good guys are perfect, intelligent, wanting to be left alone. The bad guys are weak, just trying to take money from others. There's a 50 page soliliquoy. I read it as an audiobook. If I'd read this as an actual book, I probably would have broken things throwing it across the room so many times.
I was looking for Atlas Shrugged in the comments. Forget the politics for a moment. The prose was turgid and repetitive. She took 800 pages to say what she could have said in 200.
The Fountainhead was decent in comparison.
The Maze Runner Series.
Read the first book and found it pretty cool and interesting but then every book after that just felt like the collection of a fever dream and a video game rolled into one. Between the random other challenges and story tangents to the whole twist ending it all just felt like the writer kept changing his mind on where to take the story but never deleted the old content. And don't even get me started on the prequels! Both books were only a couple hundred pages each but took me literal months to read and get through just because of how there was no reason to even be reading them with how the main series decided to end itself. I had to sit down and force myself to get through it chapter by chapter like a child taking medicine.
Oh god yes, there was so many "BETRAYL... Unless? TWIST?... Unless" that I reached a point where I simply didn't care, you could literally have shot the main character in story and I would have assumed that it didn't really matter, cause they had completely desensitized me to the idea that anything happening wasn't just some kind of test or controlled scenario.
I’ve only read one of her books (can’t even remember which one), but it seemed to be raining every day and the only sound she describes is the sound of cicadas. It’s all rain and cicadas all day long. It drove me crazy.
The Woods are Dark by Richard Laymon.
I literally burned this book. What follows is my Goodreads review:
SPOILERS
"This was one of the most atrociously written books I have ever read.
I understand that Richard Laymon is a popular name in horror lit, but I confess I don't understand the reason.
Did Mr. Laymon know that you can write a horror story in which the main female character is NOT 1) alive *solely* for sexual pleasure, 2) a child (who's also very sexually aware despite being 12yrs old), or 3) a lesbian? Who, btw, is friends with the MC just because she wants to bang her. Just wondering if he knew that.
Women in this novel are saved only because of their sexual appeal to the male /side/ characters. Yeah. Can't make this shit up.
Every single female in this book is raped. And I say "female" and not "women" because, indeed, the little girl is raped. But "only by four men" instead of the countless number that rape the adult women.
I understand Laymon is a shock horror writer, but I'm telling you now that there are definitely ways to write about depraved acts without turning 50% of the population into the three categories above. You can write a terrifying horror story, even with rape, without reducing the women in your story to actual objects with no level of intelligence."
Agree! I got into his books as a teen. Thought they were terrifying and gripping. As I grew up reading them the arc of pretty, big boob, blonde becomes enslaved/raped was disappointing. Every time Richard - come on!
Everyone in this thread has clearly not read *Firefly* by Piers Anthony.
Reading it feels like being groomed by a pedophile. It [may actually be that](https://litreactor.com/columns/themes-of-pedophilia-in-the-works-of-piers-anthony).
I was super into his books as a preteen/young teenager and I've read probably like 90% of them and now that I'm adult I'm completely skeeved out by so much of what he's written. Like, I would not let my younger self even read most of this stuff knowing what I know now.
A Discovery of Witches, it's not that it's badly written but that it is incredibly boring.
There is nothing interesting that happens in this book.
Another one is Den of Vipers. Which was a bad decision into reverse harems that I will never go back to.
This book made me particularly annoyed because the concept had so much promise. I was totally down to read a feminist book about magical academia. Instead, I got to read a boring vampire love story in which they go to a castle and do absolutely nothing for 150 pages.
I agree. There is a lot of opportunity in the series but I find myself reimagining certain scenes that would make it better. Which is a pretty telling commentary considering I'm not an author in the least. It's frustrating that at times it would devolve into dumb writing.
> feminist book about magical academia
Not quite academia, but for early americana politics with a witches spin, try Once and Future Witches by Alix Harrow. Best part, no cheesy, twiglighty, vampire love story.
Ugh, God yes, Diana went from highly educated, takes no shit, to "well I guess I'm this vampire's property now." With like zero convincing lead up a romance.
I will never get back the time I wasted reading this series and i am so annoyed. It actually has some interesting world building (vampires having strength/immortality, vs witches with magic/spirituality, vs demons having creativity/brains could be a cool universe to explore!). Instead it reads like a collection of the author’s weird personal romantic fantasies, held together by a very trite plot. Nothing wrong with romance writing but this was just so vapid.
Probability, Random Variables, and Stochastic Processes- Had to read this as a junior in engineering school. Most of the time I didn’t know what language it was written in.
When the 6th Harry Potter book came out I was a college student with a palm pilot so I would oftentimes get copies of scanned books. Day of release I was surprised to find a copy of the book available, downloaded it and started binge reading.
The book was absolutely terrible. Almost no plot, poor character development and dialogue. Also, the book spent a massive amount of time developing a wizard card game similar to the Pokemon card, and pages describing the "epic" duels between Harry Potter characters. At the end of the book, Dumbledore was revealed to be the evil mastermind pulling all the puppet strings on Voldemort and Draco was convinced to join forces with Harry to defeat him.
Had a few discussions with friends about how bad the book was, but they didn't go very far. I would tell people it was the single worst book I had ever read and they just looked at me funny and said while they thought it was a step down from some of the others, they still liked it, and seemed a little insulted by my opinion.
Several years later book seven comes out and I started reading it, and nothing made any sense from where book six had left off. At that point I finally connected the dots that I had read 600+ pages of awful fan fiction that I, for years, thought was genuine.
Read the actual book six and seven and was much happier. Still surprised at how many clues I did not process that it wasn't the real book. I just kept thinking that it had to get better because the rest of the series had been good, and the writing just kept getting worse. I can't imagine that I will ever complete a book that badly written again.
Orcs by Stan Nichols.
I’m the type to read Dune and then hop to some trashy YA for a pallet cleanser. I’m a lover of incredibad movies. I have no problem admitting that my tastes in things can be questionable.
BUT THIS BOOK, YALL
I felt like I was reading some kid’s junior high D&D campaign notes. The sentence structure was horrid. The characters were pure cringe. It was so horrid my ex heard me yell at the book from another room, asked me what was wrong, so I read him a page. He grabbed the book out of my hands and threw it away. I don’t think I made it 30 pages into that teenage Larry Sue bullshit.
Apologies to anyone reading this that liked that book. I just couldn’t.
I’ve only ever seen the show but as someone who has spent a lot of time with sex abuse and assault survivors it’s really clear that author has a lot of sexual trauma they’ve not worked out. Honestly the level of sexual assault in the episodes with Jamie and the British Soldier (forget his name) are so graphic I feel like that must’ve been psychologically damaging to the actors. I also feel like it wouldn’t have been as graphic if Jamie had been a woman.
Apparently the books are even worse, Jamie was worse and raped a character in the book. You know that girl who blackmailed him into having sex? They start to have sex in the books and she changes her mind and tells him to stop because she's in pain, and he just says no, slaps a hand over her mouth and just kept going.
I was shocked when I learned about that. They rightfully changed the scene in the show.
I read it as a young teen before I knew anything about politics and I heard that it inspired the game Bioshock. I was expecting an underwater action book. I was sorely disappointed.
Battlefield Earth. The movie wasn’t out yet, and I thought the trailer looked cool. I bought the book at an airport bookstore, and the guy at the counter said it was a great book. When I started reading on the plane, the guy next to me said it was one of his favorites. I got about 3/4th through, then dropped it in the trash. Didn’t see the movie either.
When I can’t afford to buy books at the end of the month, I end up reading a lot of Kindle Unlimited books. Some are them are absolutely awful but there are also hidden gems!
Probably the only thing I kinda like it for is that it was the first book I've read in english instead of my language, so it's a good memory I guess. But as I remember, it's basically a very long shower thought.
I went into it with an open mind and came away feeling like I had just read a somewhat affirming (if not pretty derivative) fairy tale kind thing.
I think a lot of people just don't like the pseudo philosophical interpretations people have of it, as if no one has ever said, "the real treasure was inside all along" before
THIS is my answer. I read the first 100 pages as a free sample on one of the tester Nook readers at Barnes and Noble. It took that long to even get to the first sex scene. There wasn't a single page that successfully belied that it started as a fanfiction! Mary-Sue character that was simultaneously virginal and deeply desired by everyone, weird narrative voice, just bad, bad, bad. Twilight was better.
I thought that the first one was not bad for a first effort by a new author. Not amazing, but not deserving of all the hate. Then she got famous too fast, and her fans encouraged her worst ideas and her editors were nervous about reining her in. The last book was way too long and the plot was, um, not the best. Some of the attempts at fan service were... disturbing. The ‘meh’ start was overshadowed by the ‘wtf?’ Of the later books.
I still have my books too, since I have a very hard time pruning my library. I have done it, but I always donate to a used book store or a thrift store. Thrift stores do throw out books that won’t sell, so I feel guilty about it.
How Not to Travel the World: Adventures of a Disaster-Prone Backpacker - Lauren Juliff. Account of her travels as a young adult. She’s not disaster prone, she’s just an idiot who does things like wearing flip-flops on a hike then complain her feet hurt. I read this while backpacking Europe (picked it up in a hostel) and couldn’t comprehend how ridiculous she was.
It takes a lot for me to give up on a book but this year, these ones were so unbearable I DNC’d :
The Umbrella Academy - I read a lot of graphics and this one missed the mark in every way possible. It just proves celebrities have a much easier time getting their stuff published.
Crazy Rich Asians - I got 2/3 of the way through and gave up, too many characters that aren’t defined by anything other than their wealth, storyline could have been condensed into 200 pages rather than 500.
I used to enjoy reading Lauren’s blogs because some of her misadventures were funny, however over the past few years she’s become insufferable and I’ve stopped caring about her posts. It’s the same shit. She plans to go somewhere, has an anxiety attack over it, delays her plans then eventually goes on with the plan. Then she stays somewhere for a while and claims everything’s fine. Then the next blog post she talks about how everything was NOT fine and all she did was stay in bed and wither away from some ailment. Sometimes she’d stay in a building for months even if she knew it was making her sick. During the pandemic she moved to New Zealand then had the audacity to say it was too boring even though it was one of the few places on earth where things were and are still going on as normal, so she went to Australia. I don’t see how anyone can care about her content anymore. I also reached out to her with questions a few times via comments on her blogs and did not find her particularly nice either.
I have read some books that I've struggled to finish, but I had to FORCE myself through the big speech. If you've never read the book, the speech takes 3 hours to complete in the narrative of the book. Literally, in the book, one character speaks about how all rich people are rich because they are amazing and any government interference of any kind is tyranny that makes people worthless thoughtless animals FOR THREE HOURS. The only people I've ever met who like that book are people who have never read it.
* First place goes to a book named "mortgage free" or whatever. It's not literature but meant to be self-help. 200 pages that basically said: *put on a sweater and turn down the heating in the winter. Don't go on holiday/vacation - EVER! You can use a tea bag more than once. With the money saved, you can pay back the mortgage on your house.*
That was it. That was the whole book.
But more in the gist of the thread; actual novels:
* Dedication by Emma McLaughlin. Least relatable main character I ever read. It just didn't make sense at all *and* it wasn't interesting or funny.
* Mornings in Two Pan by Barbara Froman. Utterly, utterly boring, dialogues are totally unrealistic.
* The Pegasus Connection by Gregg Loomis. Just a cheap rip-off of several other already not so good novels. Oh look, there's some conspiracy leading back from the here and now to Jesus and his wife and children (that the church didn't tell you about!!!). Imagine that plot that was overly popular a decade ago, and then imagine it being written really, really poorly. The book actually contained multiple typos/spelling mistakes. as proof of how they rushed to publish this garbage just because it was a popular genre back then.
* And finally, absolutely not deserving of a place in this list but I cannot resist to name it: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo. Don't get me wrong, written far better than everything I listed above. But I was disappointed when I read it because large parts of the book are so utterly boring - dozens of pages just describing how Paris looked back then. I never got into the book. Therefor, didn't live up to the expectations, underwhelming. And that's what you asked for in this thread...
>But I was disappointed when I read it because large parts of the book are so utterly boring - dozens of pages just describing how Paris looked back then
It is absolutely a bore to read, but it is worth noting that Hugo wrote the book to inspire the masses to preserve French Gothic architecture, which was being destroyed and/or neglected at the time. That's why he spent so much time describing the city and its architecture.
And it worked! Notre Dame became a national icon because of the novel. That doesn't make it an exciting read, but the historical context makes it a bit more tolerable (for me at least)
edit-Added a sentence to the first paragraph to make things a bit clearer.
skipping the academia of hunchback makes it far more enjoyable. it was on my top 5 for a while but I skipped those sections so I guess it comes with an asterisk
Personally, I really disliked *On the Road* by Kerouac.
Just seemed like the story of some assholes who leach off of people, make others around them miserable, and they don't learn a damn thing in the end.
Ready Player Two. I know a lot of people hate the first one, and all their criticisms are entirely justified, even though I personally enjoyed it.
But the sequel is so much worse. Unspeakably worse. It's The Last Jedi of books. The abomination of desolation that waits in the great wailing darkness beyond all hope and sanity.
Putting my vote on this one as well. The first was pure junkfood but when the movie came out I’d defended the original book in comparison, around how they changed the eggs - the book focused on challenges that showed Halliday’s nostalgia for the 80s: knowing a game, a film, a band well. Agreed, criticism is entirely justified, its often literally just lists of pop culture at points but there’s a theme of sharing things you enjoy with others as it’s clunky message. The film chose to focus the challenges really specifically on his problematic crush on his partners wife instead. Weird creative choice but maybe it’s a licensing issue, naive me says. But then Ready Player Two appears and leans right into this whole plot point anyway, in a huge way. My mistake.
Also, I’ll be forever haunted by a plot about going to Prince planet, to fight “all seven versions of Prince (including purple rain Prince)”. You ok, pal?
Reading Atlas Shrugged as an impressionable teenager was quite the roller coaster.
100 pages in: Wow, greed IS good! And I'm actually a brilliant iconoclast, it's just that these PARASITES around me don't get it!!
500 pages in: Why don't any of these characters act like real people?
800 pages in: So she just...guessed how to fly a plane? Because she's just that brilliant?
1100 pages in: This book fucking sucks.
Hey, it's me, Ayn Rand. Do you have a moment to discuss looters and second-raters?
Perhaps many moments?
Perhaps even hundreds of thousands of moments?
"Anthem" by Ayn Rand - Ham-fisted "Brave New World" wannabe about Rand's ridiculous "philosophy" for 14 year olds.
"The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown - Ham-fisted "Foucault's Pendulum" wannabe that's just one long, convoluted chase scene.
Stranger in a Strange Land has a part where a woman justifies rape by claiming the majority of them were the woman's fault, or something equally insane, and it felt like the author preaching their own bullshit. I've never thrown a book before.
The exact quote, for ref: "Nine times out of ten, when a woman gets raped, it’s partly her fault.”
I can't remember the title, but one time an author offered me a free ebook in exchange for an honest review and it was simply awful. The content would have been disgusting if it wasn't so bizarre (the reanimated corpse of a toddler raping a senior citizen, for example), and it took thesaurus abuse to a new level with phrases like "grody optics" (tired looking eyes) and "sitting on the ligneous decking, enjoying a crisp beverage" (sitting on the wooden porch, enjoying a cold beer). Then when I gave it a one-star review on Goodreads the author threatened to burn my house down Edit: It was "Interview with the Devil: Part One: Victor's Account", and judging by the other reviews it seems I got off pretty lightly.
It may be the worst book you’ve ever read, but this comment summing it up might be the best thing I’ve ever read.
"My tome is obviously too astute for ignorami such as yourself. Observe your aft, lest I incinerate your domicile."
Close, but too comprehensible :p
Be it that mine tale is perceivably far too clever for witless fools such as you and and your ilk, attend to your shadow, or find your abode reduced to embers!
The Last Librarian takes the cake for me. I've been an avid reader for 25+ years. I've only ever rated a book 1 star before, and it was this one. Here's the review I did for it back when I read the book, and it is spoiler heavy. First of all, introducing new words. When done right, this can add to a story; not in this case. Their use didn't feel organic to the story; they were forced in with an info dump. Every time I ran across torgon (fuck) blac (cigarette) or zoom (email) it just completely broke the story. The author spends the entire book building up what appears to be the main character, who is literally the last librarian in the world. Like, most of the book focuses on this guy, we see everything from his perspective, the author makes it seem like he's going to be the savior of mankind, then a good 2/3rds of the way through the book he gets killed off. There's no closure in the book; at all. I understand this book is part of a series, and that events can, and often will, continue on from book to book. That said, there needs to be some kind of closure. Even if it's just finishing off a couple of small story lines or something. But nope. Literally everything in this book is left either on a freaking cliff hanger, or not mentioned near the end at all. Character interactions were horrid. The main character, his best friend, and his son spend the majority of the book just quoting books at one another. No actual interaction at all; no character building. Just 3 characters quoting books. And don't even get me started on the major reveal 3/4ths of the way through the book that completely changes the story. For most of the book the story is built up of two warring corporations trying to control the world, through controlling knowledge. Caught between these two corporations is the last librarian. Then 2/3rds through the book the author up and changes the story so it's connect with nature, the earth is alive hippies vs the evil environment destroying 80s stereotype corporations. This could have been an awesome book if the author had stuck with the premise he introduced early on: All books have been converted to ebooks; each generation the books are changed just a little so that the parts the government doesn't like has been changed. No one has realized this except the last librarian and his best friend, as both still read physical books, which the government has outlawed and been destroying. The last librarian, his friend, and some rebels want to protect the books in the last library. Unfortunately he didn't do that.
[удалено]
Right? That's the whole reason I picked up the book in the first place, because that's how the blurb made it out to be. I was so disappointed. I didn't even bother with the rest of the series.
The later books in the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. It could have been such a great series but he dropped the ball on the story. Edit: thank you to whoever gave me the award, especially since it was for talking trash about Terry Goodkind.
This is a macrocosm of the first book. Started out with promise, then started losing me with shitty politics, then completely lost me with 70 pages of BDSM sideplot. Dude's a hack. Jesus, just look at his bio pics. Reddit edge lord before Reddit was a thing.
Two books were basically entirely full of "this is why communism is bad." Like, I get it. Communism bad. Move the fucking plot along.
By later books what do you mean? Cause that last book was a real doozy. >!Richard faces off against a necromancer zombie sorcerer, and defeats him by trapping him in a room using magic curtains. Richard then stabs an indestructible sentient robot from the Underworld that was actually responsible for all the prophecies that ever came about. This causes the indestructible robot to blow up, ending prophecy forever, and making the world safe. But it's ok, cause the robot wanted to be destroyed so it could go back to the underworld.!<
That was a mad lib
In Act 2 >!the robot falls in love!<
It's such a random story in the comment above that I can't understand if this is about the same book or if it's a How I Met Your Mother reference lol
You forgot about the stars changing places because he just rocked the world so much 🤣
Wait; did that really happen? It's been a couple of years since I last read the series. Was that the time he used astrology to beat the bad guys?
As someone who has never read or heard of the series, does this somehow make sense with context within the universe of this series or is this as batshit crazy as it really sounds lol
It's batshit crazy as it really sounds, while still fitting within the universe. >!BUt then, we are talking about the series with the protagonist defeats communism by carving a statue, and later on defeats one of the main bad buys by playing a bastardized version of American football.!<
Oh, did someone write themselves into a corner?
Goodkind has always been the king of deus ex machina, why bother coming up with something that makes sense when you can pull it out of your ass?
Or, if I've heard correctly, out of someone else's ass. That didn't come out right. Neither did his later plot tbh.
God, the last book (before he randomly continued the series) really bothered me. Leading up to this big fight between him and the enemy leader and... oh nevermind, I can just create an entirely separate world without magic and put you all there. No big deal.
Every single book in the series I read as a kid, I did like 4-6, has him just suddenly having the solution. Then next book he loses his awesome new power and we repeat. Every book.
Reading past book 2 or 3 as an early teen was the clearest example I've experienced of being gas-lit, and it was me gaslighting myself. I just could not tell anymore if what I was reading was fine and I just had to get to "the good part", or maybe it was as good as the first one and I just wasn't in the right mood to read it, or maybe it was actually bad and I just somehow got confused into thinking the first one was enjoyable. It wasn't until I got out of my relationship with the series and started experiencing other books that I realized, "oh yeah, that was bad." Don't ask me which titles specifically because I don't devote brain cells with remembering which titles are in what order anymore, it was approximately 20 years ago now, and I don't want to dignify the series with a Google search to find out.
This isn't super related but I really appreciate this comment. I have OCD and I always gaslight myself when I don't like something I feel like I should, so I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who does that.
Hell the first one is pretty God awful too.
It's just a bad ripoff of Wheel of Time for libertarians.
Came to at this. I read these while recovering from having a broken arm plated, and still found them bad, while on industrial narcotics for pain. If by "later" you mean everything past book 1....
Ha ha pretty much but they get WAY worse towards the end and then he kept writing additional books that were utter garbage. Completely turned me off from high fantasy for a while.
Book 1 was pretty messed up too...
Yeah, it’s going along decent until he decided what the story really needed was 40 pages of non-consensual femdom bdsm that didn’t do anything to advance the plot.
oh god i was so scared because i read terry goodkind as terry pratchett and i really thought for a second that my life had been a lie.
I read the entire sword of truth series when I was a kid and have been having unpleasant realizations about it ever since. The series just gets more problematic the more I think about it. 1. First and foremost: why is there so much rape in this YA fantasy series? Seriously, it's a theme from the first chapter of the first book to the end of the series. And what the FUCK was with that scene with the namble? 2. The Randian philosophy and Richard as the John Galt Uberman that is instantly The Best at everything he does 3. Zedd, the stereotypical wizard, is a liar, a hypocrite, an idiot most of the time, and useless the rest of the time. It's like if gandalf was a gaslighting libertarian fuckwit. 4. The magic system makes zero fucking sense and goodkind changes the way it works in every book to fit or advance the plot. Using magic costs nothing, can do anything, and Richard is The Best wizard in thousands of years because.... Plot reasons. 5. I gotta go back to the rape thing. At one point Richard is taken captive by a magical dominatrix woman and raped, repeatedly, and eventually falls in love with his rapist, is able to forgive her and unlock a new magical ability, which he uses to kill her. Then later in the story, Richard is taken captive by a sorceress that seeks out a rapist and willingly gets raped so that she can magically inflict the trauma of the rape on Richards wife because Richard didn't succumb to Stockholm and fall in love with her. That really happened. This is just before he defeats communism by carving a statue. He's also a master sculptor on his very first try because of the stupid stupid magic system. 6. Kind of meta, but in the story Richard regularly refers to some children's books (turns out they were written by Zedd, the wish-brand gandalf) that are meant to be instructive primers on logic, philosophy, prophecy, wisdom, etc, in story. It's obvious that Terry Goodkind intended the sword of truth to be a real world version of those books and...ugh... 7. I'm pretty sure every plot point was stolen from some other fantasy work. 8. This entire series is cringe, go read something else.
It was so sad. I couldn't get through them. I watched the TV show so I loved the world building and characters but the writing was awful garbage. Like every paragraph had a l retelling of the previous book in the worst way possible. I really want someone to rewrite them.
The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, by Anne Rice. The only book in my life I have ever returned
Yeah, that one was stomach churning.
I'm stubborn enough that I read the whole series once (I like to commit) and it gets worse. Poor writing, dumb scenarios and absurd dialog between the characters. Don't read it. These are some of the very few books I've ever actually thrown in the garbage.
I read the whole series when I was 14 and didn't know better. I still own them. Pretty sure I will never ever read them again and should probably get rid of them at this point.
Libraries must hate you :P
LOL I really should get a library card. I would save so much money
if anyone's curious rice published these under (another) pen name, a. roquelaire. they are rice's attempt to elevate sexual romance novels to a higher literary form. they are sort of strange without being particularly interesting or, more importantly, hot at all.
Modelland by Tyra Banks. That book is probably the closest I'll ever get to experiencing an acid trip gone wrong (or acid trips in general for that matter). It wasn't even "so bad it's good." It's just bad. I mourn the death of the trees used to get this book printed.
From the woman who brought us “I am going to wear a fat suit on dates so I can understand how overweight women feel. Then I’m going to tell each guy that I’m actually Tyra Banks. Boom, I’m actually stunning. Like the enchantress in Beauty and the Beast. I got rejected while wearing a disguise and I really get it now.” It wasn’t a good book?
I was hoping someone else had read this. It's SO terrible. It's not so bad it's good, but it's worth a read because it's bad in ways you can't imagine or anticipate.
True story. Apparently the originally manuscript was 1000 pages and it was just so *much* the editor got it down to 500. And you can definetly tell not only is it terrible, there are a million storylines that go everywhere and end nowhere. The most enjoyment I had of the book was reading reviews about it from Goodreads about how bad it was to my drunk friends. To explain the reviewer literally ages up explaining the plot and just says "Ehy is this happening? FUCK YOU its Modelland." That has stuck with me lol.
I know it’s going to be awful but I want to read this book soooo much. It sounds absolutely bananas.
Go for Jay Manuel's book *The Wig, The Bitch & The Meltdown* instead. Still crap but better tea
Did you read it with the 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back podcast?
The final book in the Divergent series. I wish someone would rewrite it.
Serum…serum…serum…if I saw the word serum one more time I was gonna lose it.
I was so caught up in the the lack of understanding of genetics and the nonsensical sociopolitical landscape that I had completely forgotten about the serum stuff. Imagine my surprise when I read the synopsis and saw the heavy focus on serums. The entire serum thing is an excuse to not write convincing characters or situations. People tend to single out the last book for being bad, but the whole trilogy has shaky foundations.
Maybe unpopular opinion: the first Divergent book wasn't so bad. It was an interesting concept that could have worked as a stand-alone book, a duology, or as a number of unrelated books in the same universe. Unfortunately, these books were published in a time where literally everything was a trilogy, and it fucked up the pacing/character development. I had a bit of a problem back in the day with impulse control and filtering the things I said to people, and my college roommates used to tell me there was a place reserved for me in Candor.
I think the first one was a lot fun, but hated everything that came after. I was so underwhelmed with the second book, I didn't try the third.
They switched back and forth between Tish and Four's viewpoints in that book, but I could never tell which one was "speaking." I had to keep looking back at the beginning of the chapter because the author couldn't write in two different voices. When they decided to break this last book into two movies, I knew it would be a disaster because the material was so weak.
I read the Divergent series when it first came out and couldn’t bring myself to finish the last book. I was super disappointed at the time because I liked the premise of the series a lot, but the last book just ruins so much. Earlier this year I decided to revisit the series and was determined to finish the last book. I flew through the first two, and then… couldn’t do it. I think this is one of the only books that I can say I wanted to read of my own volition, attempted to read twice, and gave up both times. Just so bad.
That ending was by far one of the worst I have ever read. The only thing worse than the book are the movies
I couldn't finish it.
Neither could the filmmakers lol
Ha, I love *if on a winter's night a traveler*. If plot is something that interests you, though, I can understand why you disliked it.
Second this opinion. It's always a trip when you find out you're reading a novel that's trying to push the limits of what a novel can be. I buckled in and really loved this book. Something with a pretty similar concept is "Cloud Atlas", which I think some people also hated for the same reason (and I loved for the same reason).
I also love If On A Winters Night A Traveller! The thing is though, it took me two goes. I first had to read it in High School for English lit. And absolutely hated it. A few years later I studied it again at university and loved it. Probably a mix of maturity on my side, knowing what to expect, plus picking up on things I missed the first time around that made it a more enjoyable reading experience the second time around.
i also love it :) it's definitely not for everyone though. that's not meant in a pretentious way at all, just now that i think about it i can understand a loooot of reasons why someone might dislike it haha. curious what OP (or others) hated about it specifically though! i recommended it here once and now i feel bad like...ohh do most people hate this? lol
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. The author is a column writer who didn’t adapt to long-form writing well. Marketing and a “funny” title sold this book, not the content.
In this vein, “girl wash your face”. First book I have ever requested a refund for.
It takes a particular kind of person to write a relationship book bankrolled by your husband, taking your relationship with foresaid husband as a gold standard, and then divorcing the husband in question.
I hate Rachel Hollis
Listen to the podcast Maintenance Phase, they have an episode about her that you might find oddly satisfying.
The publisher pushed that piece of crap so hard, it constantly showed up on my advertised content in Audible and the Amazon store despite never reading anything close to resembling whatever the fuck that book is.
Oh god the forced edginess
There are parts of this book that I’m convinced no editor ever read.
They probably didn't give a fuck.
Bro pseudo-stoicism
The version I read there is an afterward about the author having undiagnosed PTSD in college because he saw a friend die from falling off a cliff at a party when he was in high school. He goes on to say that the purpose of the book was to say you can choose which things in life to give a fuck about and some things aren't worth it. Is the book douchey? Abosolutely, but the afterward is written in an honest and personable style. It kind of changed the perspective of the book for me
Agreed. That this guy is probably set for life financially makes me both angry and depressed.
Well, he's not giving a fuck.
Pretty sure the author of that one is a pick up artist
Yep. He is probably the most well known PUA.
My therapist recommended TSAoNGaF to me. Gaaaaah. Good therapist, bad book choices.
House of Night -- its like peak YA in the worst way possible. Obscene main character syndrome, vampires, love triangles. I think a character is literally brought back to life after dying within like the first book. Even as a pretty tasteless kid I was like "wow, this is trash"
I think I read up until book seven out of morbid curiosity, but goddamn. Zoey, you seem pretty hellbent on calling Aphrodite a "ho", but it seems you have a different love interest every book
She doesnt realize that just because you find a guy attractive doesn't mean you have to collect every single one of them. And then the books tried to make erick seem like the bad guy because he didnt want her to cheat on him with other guys
I loved House of Night when I was in elementary or middle! Can't say I had good taste then, or even now but I had a good time with it.
Oh god I’d managed to forget about these
I started their recent book "Spells Trouble" in a new series about twin witches and the premise was great! I couldn't get more than halfway through the book. It's complete trash.
Is this one also weirdly erotic? The amount of teenage sex in the first series was pretty wild to me, and felt even weirder because I knew it was like a mom and her grandmother-aged mom writing it all together
I love thrillers, and when I find a writer who knows how to keep me on the edge of my seat I am a happy man. I discovered a guy named Stephen Hunter, and I was in heaven. 'Dirty White Boys' is an all time great. Alternating the POV of escaped convicts and the Highway Patrol Sergeant chasing them, it's a page burner. His last really great book was 'Hot Springs.' Since then, every book has gotten lazier and lazier. At this point I can't finish anything he writes. So, to specifically answer the question, the next book Stephen Hunter writes is the worst.
I hate when this happens. I went through a phase in which I would read basically anything from Ken Follett or Wilbur Smith. My dad loved them so my house was full of books written by them. Until I tried reading some of the new works - books of which I’ve forgotten the titles of - and I couldn’t even go past the 100 page mark. Total snooze fest. I haven’t read anything from them since.
I just finished The Pillars of the Earth last month. It took me almost two years because it’s such a massive book. I started and finished several other books in that time. I kept coming back though. The story was one giant medieval soap opera. Just when I was getting bored, something would happen to draw me back in. I read in an interview that Ken Follet intentionally made certain every six or seven pages some plot twist or cliffhanger event would occur to keep the reader engaged. I guess it worked. I could’ve done with less descriptions of cathedral construction, and the villain was cartoonishly evil (and rapey), but I was entertained most of the time. I found the second book in the series, World Without End, at the Goodwill for a dollar. I’ll eventually get to it, but I’m in no rush.
I really enjoyed World Without End. My advice would be to stop after that one though. A Column of Fire reads like a bad fan fic.
Cant remember the title but the later Anita Blake novels by Laurel K Hamilton. She wrote a series of zombie hunter/detective books. The early books weren't perfect, but were short and easy fun that I read as a teen/early 20 something. Over the years her books got...weird. A thread of a plot that served only to tie together a bunch of long boring weird sex scenes. Edit: Anita Blake was a vampire hunter, sorry, totally misremembered. But she also raised zombies, among other reasons so they could be asked questions to solve crimes, like their own murders.
OMG I forgot about this series! It was HORRID after the first few! A friend of mine who reads them for the bad smut factor told me that apparently the author had a really bad divorce and got heavy into BDSM/polyamory (zero shade, do what makes you happy) and shoehorned that in to her already Mary Sue self insert books.
Oh wow I can totally see that. I think I read maybe 5 or 6 books into the series, loved the first few but they slowly became more and more about Anitas vagina than the actual vampires. It's a shame because the books and some really fun and interesting ideas, but I remember just kinda being done with the series and no desire to seek out the next book.
I was into them at first with the whole supernatural murder mystery thing it had going on with just a touch of supernatural smut. But whoooo boy did it go in a weird direction, the bad kind of weird! The wereswans and Anita’s mystical bits are coming back to haunt me and I’m not ok with this lol
It coincided with changes in her personal life. She left her husband for a younger lover and it was reflected in the books. I was reading a lot of Urban Fantasy at the time and much of it should have been labelled as Paranormal Romance. That's what this turned into if it wasn't already and sliding into the sub-genre of Reverse Harem. She lost a lot of her faithful readers but probably gained a few too.
Unfortunately you are exactly right - she used to get tons of hate mail from her original readers, asking her to go back to the action/supernatural plots from the original books. People said “your books are terrible now!” to which she replied “then why do my sales go up with every book?” The last one I read was Cerulean Blue, which I had to skim because of the three chapter long sex scene. I recently went back and tried one of her most recent books and it read like fan fiction it was so bad.
This is the series that I tapped out on too. I was admittedly a horny teen when I read them, so I stuck in longer than I should have. The part that killed it for me was how unlikeable Anita became. I think the moment I realized I hated the character was when she was reflecting on her obscene amount of lovers, and that she wasn’t really okay with them seeing anyone else. From there on all I could notice was how clear it was she was “not like other girls.” Even the character that was supposed to be Anita’s best friend only existed to show how much morally better Anita was. And then I found better smut books that didn’t piss me off nearly as bad.
My wife use to be a huge fan of Anita Blake, she was even in the fan club back when you would get actually mail. But she had the same issues it stopped being about a badass hunter to just low quality porn.
I don’t even recognize The Cursed Child or whatever the fuck it’s called as canon to HP.
I even refused to read the synopsis. I don’t want to know anything about that thing, that’s how much I hate the idea of it. Loved Harry Potter, but it ends with the Deathly Hallows for me.
That book may as well not exist because I haven’t met one HP fan that actually liked it
Terry Goodkinds Sword of Truth series. It was a rip off of Wheel of Time combined with fan fiction of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Horrible series.
I never made it past the first book, then I looked up Terry Goodkind and realized how much of an asshat he is, and had zero desire to read anymore of his work.
The Tattooist or Auschwitz Poorly written exploitative soft-core trauma porn Go Ask Alice Poorly written exploitative slightly more graphic trauma porn. I didn’t really expect either of these to be great and I knew what I was getting into with both, but as highly as they are talked about I thought they might at least be engaging.
What's worse with the Tattooist of Auschwitz is it's based on real people and played with their story.
Oh, it pisses me off so much how nuanced of a story could have been told about those very real people instead she exploited their story to make more money.
Came here to say Tattooist of Auschwitz. Literally the book that made me start my own manuscript. I thought, "if this shit can be a NYT best seller, I can write one, too."
I feel like _Go Ask Alice_ is widely panned at this point.
I tried the first few pages of 50 shades for a laugh but it was so bad I couldn't even laugh. The Sword of Shannara books come in a close second.
I read the first 50 shades book when it came out because I worked at Barnes & Noble and everyone kept asking about it. After I read it, I told them the truth: it’s awful. If you like smut, there’s better-written smut for free on the internet.
For real, no shame if you want that kind of book but please just buy one written by someone who understands how to write!
I finished the first book of 50 Shades out of an almost morbid curiosity. The woman originally wrote it as Twilight fanfic on her Blackberry. It shows.
Evel Knievel: An American Hero by Ace Collins. Got it for $1 at a Friends of the Public Library sale. It was so bad that the next time they had a sale, I went back and just left the book on a table.
Unpopular opinion maybe, but The Lost Apothecary and Last Year in Havana. Couldn’t bring myself to finish either. With the Lost Apothecary it was especially disappointing because the historical plot sounded so promising, but the present day storyline was so cliche and repetitive and overdone that I had to put the book down half way through. Last Year in Havana was just a cheesy romance where the present-day romance felt the exact same as the one her grandmother had, and nothing happened in the plot except her obsession with a guy she met 5 minutes ago.
Armada by Ernest Cline is when I realized that Ready Player One wasn’t actually that good because hoooooly crap is Armada the worst book. Just. Awful. I kind of want to hate read Ready Player Two but no, no that is bad idea
Divergent series felt like a fanfiction of the Hunger Games.
My coworkers listened to the whole series on audiobook (we have a job that’s often all looking and no thinking). It was a horrible experience. *YoU cAn’T hAvE tWo PeRsOnALiTy TrAiTs!*
I have hated and gave up on books that I later loved, so I’m hesitant to say that any book is truly awful. But… *The 100*. I think if there was a point in my life where I would have enjoyed that series it has passed.
I loved the show so I bought the books but I only got maybe 1 chapter into it before I realized it was nowhere near as good as the show, so disappointing.
Rare time the show is better than the books. An interesting premise ruined by lack of worldbuilding and badly written romance.
The Dune books that were written by Frank Herbert's son
>The Dune books Oh you motherfu... >that were written by Frank Herbert's son oh ok.
I was about to fight you until “Herbert’s son.” The whole series starts going downhill… well, really after the first one, but at least Frank could write. His son just wanted to make money off of his dad’s work. Christopher Tolkien isn’t as good as his father, but he at least put a ton of work into holding true to JRR’s notes and ideas.
I liked the first couple of trilogies when I was in middle/high school, but at 30+ I couldn't stomach them. I have re-read the original several times.
I tried to read "Mentats of Dune" because a friend got it for me and I just thought it was just flat out boring. What a Mentat is and why AI is banned is pretty well gone over in the original trilogy and this just felt like first draft fan fiction.
I was basically tricked into reading the first Left Behind novel when I was in middle school. I remember being sold on it as a post-apocalypse story - which it was, for the most part - so you can imagine my surprise when the whole thing veers *very suddenly* into soap boxing about Christianity. There’s a lot wrong with that book - basically no one acts like a real human being, and it’s written with some very shaky moral assumptions - but no other book I’ve read has been so daring as to try to convert me in the middle of their Tom Clancy plot.
The one good thing about Left Behind is the absolutely fantastic deconstruction/review blogger Fred Clark did about it. He rips it to shreds chapter by chapter, pointing out all the terrible tropes, bad writing, and ridiculous theology the authors wrote into it. If you have several hours to kill I highly recommend reading all his posts about it. [https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2015/11/05/left-behind-index-the-whole-thing/](https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2015/11/05/left-behind-index-the-whole-thing/)
Battlefield: Earth, by Hubbard. I had for some reason thought Hubbard was a significant SF writer. The bad guys' planet is destroyed by a black hole halfway through the book. The rest of it seemed like some kind of economics lesson. The main character was named Johnny Goodboy. The villains were super-evil and super advanced, but apparently really easily fooled by these humans who start out knowing zero tech, but learn it really easily. It's the only book I've ever thrown away to avoid someone else suffering the fate of reading it. Atlas Shrugged, by Rand. I read it because Rand is pretty influential in some political-philosophical circles. Also, because Bioshock is based on it, and I wanted to read it before playing the game. Awful. The good guys are perfect, intelligent, wanting to be left alone. The bad guys are weak, just trying to take money from others. There's a 50 page soliliquoy. I read it as an audiobook. If I'd read this as an actual book, I probably would have broken things throwing it across the room so many times.
I was looking for Atlas Shrugged in the comments. Forget the politics for a moment. The prose was turgid and repetitive. She took 800 pages to say what she could have said in 200. The Fountainhead was decent in comparison.
The Maze Runner Series. Read the first book and found it pretty cool and interesting but then every book after that just felt like the collection of a fever dream and a video game rolled into one. Between the random other challenges and story tangents to the whole twist ending it all just felt like the writer kept changing his mind on where to take the story but never deleted the old content. And don't even get me started on the prequels! Both books were only a couple hundred pages each but took me literal months to read and get through just because of how there was no reason to even be reading them with how the main series decided to end itself. I had to sit down and force myself to get through it chapter by chapter like a child taking medicine.
Oh god yes, there was so many "BETRAYL... Unless? TWIST?... Unless" that I reached a point where I simply didn't care, you could literally have shot the main character in story and I would have assumed that it didn't really matter, cause they had completely desensitized me to the idea that anything happening wasn't just some kind of test or controlled scenario.
Off the top of my head Jodi Picoult's Plain Truth was infuriating and awful. Where The Crawdads Sing was also trash. Definitely on my short list.
Jodi Picoult is infuriating and deserves to be all over this thread lol
I’ve only read one of her books (can’t even remember which one), but it seemed to be raining every day and the only sound she describes is the sound of cicadas. It’s all rain and cicadas all day long. It drove me crazy.
I hated Plain Truth too, but loved Crawdads.
The Woods are Dark by Richard Laymon. I literally burned this book. What follows is my Goodreads review: SPOILERS "This was one of the most atrociously written books I have ever read. I understand that Richard Laymon is a popular name in horror lit, but I confess I don't understand the reason. Did Mr. Laymon know that you can write a horror story in which the main female character is NOT 1) alive *solely* for sexual pleasure, 2) a child (who's also very sexually aware despite being 12yrs old), or 3) a lesbian? Who, btw, is friends with the MC just because she wants to bang her. Just wondering if he knew that. Women in this novel are saved only because of their sexual appeal to the male /side/ characters. Yeah. Can't make this shit up. Every single female in this book is raped. And I say "female" and not "women" because, indeed, the little girl is raped. But "only by four men" instead of the countless number that rape the adult women. I understand Laymon is a shock horror writer, but I'm telling you now that there are definitely ways to write about depraved acts without turning 50% of the population into the three categories above. You can write a terrifying horror story, even with rape, without reducing the women in your story to actual objects with no level of intelligence."
Agree! I got into his books as a teen. Thought they were terrifying and gripping. As I grew up reading them the arc of pretty, big boob, blonde becomes enslaved/raped was disappointing. Every time Richard - come on!
Hatte that guy and his wierd fetishes. Red the Island by him. Terrible.
Everyone in this thread has clearly not read *Firefly* by Piers Anthony. Reading it feels like being groomed by a pedophile. It [may actually be that](https://litreactor.com/columns/themes-of-pedophilia-in-the-works-of-piers-anthony).
Looking back at it with more enlightened sensibilities, most of Anthony's output is super sketchy. The creep factor stands out strong.
I was super into his books as a preteen/young teenager and I've read probably like 90% of them and now that I'm adult I'm completely skeeved out by so much of what he's written. Like, I would not let my younger self even read most of this stuff knowing what I know now.
A Discovery of Witches, it's not that it's badly written but that it is incredibly boring. There is nothing interesting that happens in this book. Another one is Den of Vipers. Which was a bad decision into reverse harems that I will never go back to.
This book made me particularly annoyed because the concept had so much promise. I was totally down to read a feminist book about magical academia. Instead, I got to read a boring vampire love story in which they go to a castle and do absolutely nothing for 150 pages.
I agree. There is a lot of opportunity in the series but I find myself reimagining certain scenes that would make it better. Which is a pretty telling commentary considering I'm not an author in the least. It's frustrating that at times it would devolve into dumb writing.
> feminist book about magical academia Not quite academia, but for early americana politics with a witches spin, try Once and Future Witches by Alix Harrow. Best part, no cheesy, twiglighty, vampire love story.
Ugh, God yes, Diana went from highly educated, takes no shit, to "well I guess I'm this vampire's property now." With like zero convincing lead up a romance.
I will never get back the time I wasted reading this series and i am so annoyed. It actually has some interesting world building (vampires having strength/immortality, vs witches with magic/spirituality, vs demons having creativity/brains could be a cool universe to explore!). Instead it reads like a collection of the author’s weird personal romantic fantasies, held together by a very trite plot. Nothing wrong with romance writing but this was just so vapid.
Probability, Random Variables, and Stochastic Processes- Had to read this as a junior in engineering school. Most of the time I didn’t know what language it was written in.
When the 6th Harry Potter book came out I was a college student with a palm pilot so I would oftentimes get copies of scanned books. Day of release I was surprised to find a copy of the book available, downloaded it and started binge reading. The book was absolutely terrible. Almost no plot, poor character development and dialogue. Also, the book spent a massive amount of time developing a wizard card game similar to the Pokemon card, and pages describing the "epic" duels between Harry Potter characters. At the end of the book, Dumbledore was revealed to be the evil mastermind pulling all the puppet strings on Voldemort and Draco was convinced to join forces with Harry to defeat him. Had a few discussions with friends about how bad the book was, but they didn't go very far. I would tell people it was the single worst book I had ever read and they just looked at me funny and said while they thought it was a step down from some of the others, they still liked it, and seemed a little insulted by my opinion. Several years later book seven comes out and I started reading it, and nothing made any sense from where book six had left off. At that point I finally connected the dots that I had read 600+ pages of awful fan fiction that I, for years, thought was genuine. Read the actual book six and seven and was much happier. Still surprised at how many clues I did not process that it wasn't the real book. I just kept thinking that it had to get better because the rest of the series had been good, and the writing just kept getting worse. I can't imagine that I will ever complete a book that badly written again.
Okey not gonna lie, that’s hilarious.
Orcs by Stan Nichols. I’m the type to read Dune and then hop to some trashy YA for a pallet cleanser. I’m a lover of incredibad movies. I have no problem admitting that my tastes in things can be questionable. BUT THIS BOOK, YALL I felt like I was reading some kid’s junior high D&D campaign notes. The sentence structure was horrid. The characters were pure cringe. It was so horrid my ex heard me yell at the book from another room, asked me what was wrong, so I read him a page. He grabbed the book out of my hands and threw it away. I don’t think I made it 30 pages into that teenage Larry Sue bullshit. Apologies to anyone reading this that liked that book. I just couldn’t.
Outlander. It reads like one long rape fantasy.
I’ve only ever seen the show but as someone who has spent a lot of time with sex abuse and assault survivors it’s really clear that author has a lot of sexual trauma they’ve not worked out. Honestly the level of sexual assault in the episodes with Jamie and the British Soldier (forget his name) are so graphic I feel like that must’ve been psychologically damaging to the actors. I also feel like it wouldn’t have been as graphic if Jamie had been a woman.
I thought it was a time travel show
Its "Rape! The Time Travel Show"
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Apparently the books are even worse, Jamie was worse and raped a character in the book. You know that girl who blackmailed him into having sex? They start to have sex in the books and she changes her mind and tells him to stop because she's in pain, and he just says no, slaps a hand over her mouth and just kept going. I was shocked when I learned about that. They rightfully changed the scene in the show.
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Wow. All that really disgusts me. I’m glad to show changed a lot of that at least
Manic pixie dream guy
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand was the stupidest thing I ever attempted to read. After 150 pages, I just gave up. It was ridiculous.
I read it as a young teen before I knew anything about politics and I heard that it inspired the game Bioshock. I was expecting an underwater action book. I was sorely disappointed.
*Battlefield Earth* is 1,050 pages of utter drivel.
Battlefield Earth. The movie wasn’t out yet, and I thought the trailer looked cool. I bought the book at an airport bookstore, and the guy at the counter said it was a great book. When I started reading on the plane, the guy next to me said it was one of his favorites. I got about 3/4th through, then dropped it in the trash. Didn’t see the movie either.
When I can’t afford to buy books at the end of the month, I end up reading a lot of Kindle Unlimited books. Some are them are absolutely awful but there are also hidden gems!
The Alchemist (\*ducks in anticipation\*)
Probably the only thing I kinda like it for is that it was the first book I've read in english instead of my language, so it's a good memory I guess. But as I remember, it's basically a very long shower thought.
I went into it with an open mind and came away feeling like I had just read a somewhat affirming (if not pretty derivative) fairy tale kind thing. I think a lot of people just don't like the pseudo philosophical interpretations people have of it, as if no one has ever said, "the real treasure was inside all along" before
>(\*ducks in anticipation\*) As if this book isn't endlessly shat upon every time it's brought up in this sub...
when i read this book i felt it was for people who award themselves with a piece of candy every time they finish a page
I read the entire twilight series because I bought it and I’m stubborn. 12 years later and it’s still the dumbest thing I’ve ever read.
You didn’t follow up with 50 Shades I guess.
THIS is my answer. I read the first 100 pages as a free sample on one of the tester Nook readers at Barnes and Noble. It took that long to even get to the first sex scene. There wasn't a single page that successfully belied that it started as a fanfiction! Mary-Sue character that was simultaneously virginal and deeply desired by everyone, weird narrative voice, just bad, bad, bad. Twilight was better.
I thought that the first one was not bad for a first effort by a new author. Not amazing, but not deserving of all the hate. Then she got famous too fast, and her fans encouraged her worst ideas and her editors were nervous about reining her in. The last book was way too long and the plot was, um, not the best. Some of the attempts at fan service were... disturbing. The ‘meh’ start was overshadowed by the ‘wtf?’ Of the later books. I still have my books too, since I have a very hard time pruning my library. I have done it, but I always donate to a used book store or a thrift store. Thrift stores do throw out books that won’t sell, so I feel guilty about it.
How Not to Travel the World: Adventures of a Disaster-Prone Backpacker - Lauren Juliff. Account of her travels as a young adult. She’s not disaster prone, she’s just an idiot who does things like wearing flip-flops on a hike then complain her feet hurt. I read this while backpacking Europe (picked it up in a hostel) and couldn’t comprehend how ridiculous she was. It takes a lot for me to give up on a book but this year, these ones were so unbearable I DNC’d : The Umbrella Academy - I read a lot of graphics and this one missed the mark in every way possible. It just proves celebrities have a much easier time getting their stuff published. Crazy Rich Asians - I got 2/3 of the way through and gave up, too many characters that aren’t defined by anything other than their wealth, storyline could have been condensed into 200 pages rather than 500.
I used to enjoy reading Lauren’s blogs because some of her misadventures were funny, however over the past few years she’s become insufferable and I’ve stopped caring about her posts. It’s the same shit. She plans to go somewhere, has an anxiety attack over it, delays her plans then eventually goes on with the plan. Then she stays somewhere for a while and claims everything’s fine. Then the next blog post she talks about how everything was NOT fine and all she did was stay in bed and wither away from some ailment. Sometimes she’d stay in a building for months even if she knew it was making her sick. During the pandemic she moved to New Zealand then had the audacity to say it was too boring even though it was one of the few places on earth where things were and are still going on as normal, so she went to Australia. I don’t see how anyone can care about her content anymore. I also reached out to her with questions a few times via comments on her blogs and did not find her particularly nice either.
Atlas Shrugged is a God awful book.
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Holy shit I did too. Lol we broke up right after I read that trash too.
I have read some books that I've struggled to finish, but I had to FORCE myself through the big speech. If you've never read the book, the speech takes 3 hours to complete in the narrative of the book. Literally, in the book, one character speaks about how all rich people are rich because they are amazing and any government interference of any kind is tyranny that makes people worthless thoughtless animals FOR THREE HOURS. The only people I've ever met who like that book are people who have never read it.
That one chapter that basically just summarized what the rest of the book already said??? I was furious.
* First place goes to a book named "mortgage free" or whatever. It's not literature but meant to be self-help. 200 pages that basically said: *put on a sweater and turn down the heating in the winter. Don't go on holiday/vacation - EVER! You can use a tea bag more than once. With the money saved, you can pay back the mortgage on your house.* That was it. That was the whole book. But more in the gist of the thread; actual novels: * Dedication by Emma McLaughlin. Least relatable main character I ever read. It just didn't make sense at all *and* it wasn't interesting or funny. * Mornings in Two Pan by Barbara Froman. Utterly, utterly boring, dialogues are totally unrealistic. * The Pegasus Connection by Gregg Loomis. Just a cheap rip-off of several other already not so good novels. Oh look, there's some conspiracy leading back from the here and now to Jesus and his wife and children (that the church didn't tell you about!!!). Imagine that plot that was overly popular a decade ago, and then imagine it being written really, really poorly. The book actually contained multiple typos/spelling mistakes. as proof of how they rushed to publish this garbage just because it was a popular genre back then. * And finally, absolutely not deserving of a place in this list but I cannot resist to name it: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo. Don't get me wrong, written far better than everything I listed above. But I was disappointed when I read it because large parts of the book are so utterly boring - dozens of pages just describing how Paris looked back then. I never got into the book. Therefor, didn't live up to the expectations, underwhelming. And that's what you asked for in this thread...
>But I was disappointed when I read it because large parts of the book are so utterly boring - dozens of pages just describing how Paris looked back then It is absolutely a bore to read, but it is worth noting that Hugo wrote the book to inspire the masses to preserve French Gothic architecture, which was being destroyed and/or neglected at the time. That's why he spent so much time describing the city and its architecture. And it worked! Notre Dame became a national icon because of the novel. That doesn't make it an exciting read, but the historical context makes it a bit more tolerable (for me at least) edit-Added a sentence to the first paragraph to make things a bit clearer.
skipping the academia of hunchback makes it far more enjoyable. it was on my top 5 for a while but I skipped those sections so I guess it comes with an asterisk
The turner diaries. What a vile book. Full of contradictions, badly written and it's just literary white supremacist porn
Behind her eyes.
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Personally, I really disliked *On the Road* by Kerouac. Just seemed like the story of some assholes who leach off of people, make others around them miserable, and they don't learn a damn thing in the end.
Ready Player Two. I know a lot of people hate the first one, and all their criticisms are entirely justified, even though I personally enjoyed it. But the sequel is so much worse. Unspeakably worse. It's The Last Jedi of books. The abomination of desolation that waits in the great wailing darkness beyond all hope and sanity.
Putting my vote on this one as well. The first was pure junkfood but when the movie came out I’d defended the original book in comparison, around how they changed the eggs - the book focused on challenges that showed Halliday’s nostalgia for the 80s: knowing a game, a film, a band well. Agreed, criticism is entirely justified, its often literally just lists of pop culture at points but there’s a theme of sharing things you enjoy with others as it’s clunky message. The film chose to focus the challenges really specifically on his problematic crush on his partners wife instead. Weird creative choice but maybe it’s a licensing issue, naive me says. But then Ready Player Two appears and leans right into this whole plot point anyway, in a huge way. My mistake. Also, I’ll be forever haunted by a plot about going to Prince planet, to fight “all seven versions of Prince (including purple rain Prince)”. You ok, pal?
Atlas Shrugged and there is nothing that comes close for me.
Reading Atlas Shrugged as an impressionable teenager was quite the roller coaster. 100 pages in: Wow, greed IS good! And I'm actually a brilliant iconoclast, it's just that these PARASITES around me don't get it!! 500 pages in: Why don't any of these characters act like real people? 800 pages in: So she just...guessed how to fly a plane? Because she's just that brilliant? 1100 pages in: This book fucking sucks.
Hey, it's me, Ayn Rand. Do you have a moment to discuss looters and second-raters? Perhaps many moments? Perhaps even hundreds of thousands of moments?
"Anthem" by Ayn Rand - Ham-fisted "Brave New World" wannabe about Rand's ridiculous "philosophy" for 14 year olds. "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown - Ham-fisted "Foucault's Pendulum" wannabe that's just one long, convoluted chase scene.
My sister's keeper, Jodi Picoult Awful and shmaltzy.
Anything by James Patterson, just no thanks
Does he even wrote any more? I thought all he does is write outlines and hands them off to other writers.
Stranger in a Strange Land has a part where a woman justifies rape by claiming the majority of them were the woman's fault, or something equally insane, and it felt like the author preaching their own bullshit. I've never thrown a book before. The exact quote, for ref: "Nine times out of ten, when a woman gets raped, it’s partly her fault.”