The Alchemist and Song of Achilles are some popular books that I thought were mediocre. Probably not the worst book I've ever read though.
That probably goes to Sean Hannity's Conservative Victory that my grandma gave me when I was 12.
True slop. Fuck Sean Hannity.
I enjoyed The Alchemist and The Zahir at the time, but in hindsight I think The Zahir was an elaborate cuckold fantasy. I think if I reread it I'd remember the rest of it but that's what it feels like thinking back over a decade later.
bit of a cheat but 120 Days of Sodom
The one redeeming part is the guy who fucks a horse and it gives birth to a half man half horse and then the fucks that
the rest is descriptions of pedophilia, coprophagy and torturing children to death.
The worst book I've ever read has to be 1984. The book is excellent, but did not do good things for me so it goes down as the worst
I gave up on Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close after one chapter. No wonder neurotypicals think autistics are just insufferable nobs.
Moby Dick is the book I hated the most. Just the worst slog that i remember making it through.
The sookie stackhouse books that got turned into true blood have such a fun premise but are appallingly written. A friend and I used to play the audiobooks at parties for laughs.
Mine is "the catcher in the rye".
The main character is insufferable and not enough bad things happened to him to make it worth reading the book.
A collection of short stories by Harlan Ellison.
It was an absolutely insufferable read. Specifically, his foreword between each story.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. If you could distill pure insufferable smugness into a liquid, this was him squirting it into your mouth while you’re not paying attention and laughing at you while you sputter and gag.
Game of thrones, for me. Made for a good basis for a show. Fucking terribly dull to read.
I hope you're joking.
Martin knows how to write people. He can create the most vile, repulsive, irredeemable characters known to man and then teaches them mercy, honour, and sacrifice by forcing them into situations where they have to question who they are.
He redeems the irredeemable, not only in the text, but also outside of it by merit of the sheer humanism he expresses in his works.
I learned a lot about humanity, mercy, and forgiveness just by reading his books. No other author has come close to reaching me in such ways.
A book called The Night by a Venezuelan author.
I feel a bit bad saying this because there are definitely worse books but this one stuck with me as the premise sounded really interesting but the book was nothing like it.
There is a review on goodreads that sums it up pretty nicely.
Literature about literature, books about books, literature about books, books about literature, literature about literature, books about books, ...
Worst book I've quit is Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. What a horrible book!
Worst I've finished is Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, immediately followed by Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I'll throw in a special mention for The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby. All terrible books that I finished only because they were required reading in school.
Huh. I loved Seveneves.
Same. Loved the world building over millenia. I was hoping to see another book each on the miner people, the Navy men, and the spacefarers who went out into the wilds after water.
My older sister hated it, she wants stories about characters and not the world-building. She compares the pages on moving through 3D space with small jet thrusts to the pages of whale info in Moby Dick.
It's a book I recommend with caveats. Not everyone is going to like it. Lesson learned, as much as I liked Snow Crash and Anathem too, I won't recommend them to her. And moving beyond Stephenson, I'm confident she would immolate Canticle for Leibowitz halfway through.
The old man and the sea. I learned to hate reading because of assigned books in school and this was the one that drove that hatred most. At times in my childhood I enjoyed reading a couple of novels, but assigned books absolutely destroyed any interest I had. Also having religious cult like parents that always had something stupid to say about reading had a major impact.
I tend to quit books if I don't find them very good. One I did finish that I fucking hated was The Girl on the Train. All of the characters were fucking insufferable.
I thought the film was good.
The Pearl by John Steinbeck. Its technically a novella but still. Hated it.
Oh sad face. It is one of my favorite books and also think the movie is a piece of art.
Might be different for me today if I reread it but I just mean from my first and sustained reaction reading it that was how I felt at the time, but I was also quite young
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