Worst Book Ever?

[Wifetheif]

"Fifty Shades of Grey" is abominable. However, when I criticized E.L. James here, I was assailed. The claim was that James had "the chops" i.e. success and wealth from her writing and therefore could not be attacked. I found that hilarious. "The Room" has made a TON of money -- but NOT because it is in ANY WAY good! There is plenty of "lightning in a bottle" authors whose sales far outpace their quality or talent. For what it's worth E.L. James's "The Mister" may actually be worse than "Fifty Shades" as it tries (and fails) to sexualize a victim of human trafficking! Naturally, to achieve this her heroine is in her mid-twenties, yet somehow still a virgin, she is also a piano-playing prodigy and has synesthesia! Our male protagonist is a dim-witted English lord who is first turned on by spying on the female protagonist's granny panties while she is cleaning his apartment. He also utters the immortal line, "It was music to my dick!" -- I dare say that one will not find a stupider, less sexy line in the entire corpus of Literotica.com unless the piece was intended as a parody. The lengths that James goes through to make her heroine a somehow pure victim of human traffickers, yet still "ready for action" with a womanizing clueless lord with more money than brain cells borders on the offensive. The book is as sexy as a bilge pump.
"Fifty Shades" had a "better" structure because it was fan fiction and James had a template to follow. Left to her own devices, she is beyond hopeless.

 

[gunhilltrain]

"Fifty Shades of Grey" is abominable. However, when I criticized E.L. James here, I was assailed. The claim was that James had "the chops" i.e. success and wealth from her writing and therefore could not be attacked. I found that hilarious. "The Room" has made a TON of money -- but NOT because it is in ANY WAY good! There is plenty of "lightning in a bottle" authors whose sales far outpace their quality or talent. For what it's worth E.L. James's "The Mister" may actually be worse than "Fifty Shades" as it tries (and fails) to sexualize a victim of human trafficking! Naturally, to achieve this her heroine is in her mid-twenties, yet somehow still a virgin, she is also a piano-playing prodigy and has synesthesia! Our male protagonist is a dim-witted English lord who is first turned on by spying on the female protagonist's granny panties while she is cleaning his apartment. He also utters the immortal line, "It was music to my dick!" -- I dare say that one will not find a stupider, less sexy line in the entire corpus of Literotica.com unless the piece was intended as a parody. The lengths that James goes through to make her heroine a somehow pure victim of human traffickers, yet still "ready for action" with a womanizing clueless lord with more money than brain cells borders on the offensive. The book is as sexy as a bilge pump.
"Fifty Shades" had a "better" structure because it was fan fiction and James had a template to follow. Left to her own devices, she is beyond hopeless.

I never knew that Fifty Shades of Grey had any connection to the Twilight Saga books. Well, I haven't read any of those either. There are no vampires in James's books (at least I don't think so) so how did she make those into fan fiction?

 

[EdwardsOtherSide]

"Fifty Shades of Grey" is abominable. However, when I criticized E.L. James here, I was assailed. The claim was that James had "the chops" i.e. success and wealth from her writing and therefore could not be attacked. I found that hilarious. "The Room" has made a TON of money -- but NOT because it is in ANY WAY good!...

"Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.“ - P.T. Barnum (allegedly)

 

[Salacious_Scribe]

NO dialogue or chapter breaks,
EVERY sentence ends in an exclamation mark -- even when the characters are whispering!

"Isn't whispering dialogue," he whispered in confusion.

 

[Salacious_Scribe]

LOTR, read the trilogy twice. Boring as fuck

Moby Dick. How can you make high sea adventure a snooze fest.

Treasure Island. A FUCKING DREAM!

Hardy Boys Dead on Target. Killed a main character with a car bomb. WTF?

War 2020. Good story, but it hits a little to close on WW3 US vs Russia.

 

[Salacious_Scribe]

I've never read "the worst book ever" but I have gotten into some challenging reads.

For Whom the Bell Tolls and Moby Dick to name a few.

I forgot Bell, one of the few I never finished. I'm not familiar with the history of that area/era and figured that was why I couldnt follow it.

 

[jehoram]

I remember reading something by Steinbeck -- can't remember whether it was "The Pearl" or "The Red Pony." It was such a downer that I threw the book across the room when I finished it. (Granted, I was going through a bad patch in my life at the time.)

But just because I hated it doesn't mean it was a bad book.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I remember reading something by Steinbeck -- can't remember whether it was "The Pearl" or "The Red Pony." It was such a downer that I threw the book across the room when I finished it. (Granted, I was going through a bad patch in my life at the time.)

But just because I hated it doesn't mean it was a bad book.

I think I did read the book once, but one of the worst movies I ever saw was the film version of Cannery Row (1982). I also had the bad luck to see it in a now-closed Brooklyn theater called the Fortway, which had a very unforgiving audience. I'm not sure why they even were there. I suspect some of the guys had been talked into it by their girlfriends. In any case, after a while they became quite vocal in their displeasure.

Fortway Theater

 

[Bramblethorn]

"Fifty Shades of Grey" is abominable. However, when I criticized E.L. James here, I was assailed. The claim was that James had "the chops" i.e. success and wealth from her writing and therefore could not be attacked. I found that hilarious.

There's plenty to criticise in 50SoG, and I agree that commercial success is a poor indicator of quality. But there were times when some of the criticism felt like it wasn't solely about bad writing. There's a tendency from some folk to trash any media seen as for women, and I definitely got that vibe from some of the "mommy porn" responses to 50SoG. There are plenty of big-name male authors out there writing bad sex and unhealthy relationships who don't draw the same hostility that 50SoG did.

I never knew that Fifty Shades of Grey had any connection to the Twilight Saga books. Well, I haven't read any of those either. There are no vampires in James's books (at least I don't think so) so how did she make those into fan fiction?

Fanfic often reinvents characters. It's not unusual for fanfic authors to take characters from a supernatural/fantasy setting and reimagine them as humans in a more mundane world. James Kirk is captain of the football team and his college roommate Spock is a nerdy science student; together they hire a van from Enterprise Rent-A-Car and go on a road trip. Meanwhile, their classmates Frodo and Sam try to complete a group assignment after the other seven members of their group got sidetracked.

There's an entire genre of stories that run on "what if these characters were just ordinary humans hanging out in a coffee shop - how would they interact?"

In 50SoG, the ancient powerful vampire becomes a powerful billionaire.

 

[PennameWombat]

I never knew that Fifty Shades of Grey had any connection to the Twilight Saga books. Well, I haven't read any of those either. There are no vampires in James's books (at least I don't think so) so how did she make those into fan fiction?

As I understand it, she was writing quite a bit of Twilight fan fiction. Someone (possibly her husband, a professional screenwriter) suggested she had a ‘story’ somewhere in there, change the characters and… 50 Shades of Grey. Other than the fact that fanfic writers ship characters all the time, I don’t know how the BDSM (well, her ridiculous interpretation of the BDSM) got in there. Then again, I sampled some LoTR fanfic that had… well, after the second gang rape of Gandalf by a pack of male Orcs (Sauron had regained the Ring, won the war, killed most of the Fellowship but Gandalf was a prisoner), I backed out and rinsed my eye balls for about a half hour. So maybe James’s use of BDSM isn’t unusual for fanfic. It’s not something I spend much time reading.

 

[PennameWombat]

So do software engineers have to know algebra?

Depends. I spent much of my programming career doing software that didn’t care.

But I also spent time working with researchers from universities and US national labs writing software to simulate nuclear explosions, massive fluid dynamics and so on, using massively parallel supercomputers. Those required me to dredge up much of the math I’d done as a student.

You’ve not lived until you have to answer the question, “My job is running across 400 systems, but it’s running slower than it should be. Why?”[1]

[1] A memory DIMM on one of the systems had failed, thus, that system only had half the RAM it should’ve had. We’d exquisitely tuned the job to fill the RAM on each node so it would never touch the disk storage once it had loaded. But that system was paging to disk, thus, slowing down things due to communication across systems for the calculations.

 

[PennameWombat]

Not sure if anyone is following, but a You tuber I subscribe to releases periodic updates on how Martin is not even halfway through the second to the last book because he's too busy talking about himself and taking on other projects. At his age, health and obvious inability to finish what he started, the HBO ending will be the only ending anyone will get. And I'm fine with that because the trash material and its base who tries to claim its anything but shock value, torture porn, and rape porn got the exact ending they deserved.

Yes, my pettiness knows no limits, and I fully embrace that.

I have a collapsed answer on Quora more or less saying the same thing, but not even as direct as you state it. Simply that he ain’t finishing it because he’s more interested in other shit and he’d stated in one interview he doesn’t want anyone else finishing it. Also, the two authors who are James S. A. Corey (The Expanse), have been involved with Martin for years in various ways, and have clearly stated he doesn’t use coauthors for GoT.

The fandom doesn’t seem to take that well.

 

[PennameWombat]

The Turner diaries. It was one of very few books banned by the local Library. It is a neo-Nazi dystopian novel written by neo-Nazi for neo-Nazi. I kept reading it because of the shear amount of effort I had to go through to get my hands on a copy.

It is hard to pick just one thing wrong with it but the doublethink needed to follow the plot is something. It like; all the Mexicans are too lazy to get jobs-they just want handouts, also all the Mexicans are stealing our jobs because they will work 14 hour a day for less money-they are too prideful to take handouts.

The whole thing just goes on like that, page after page after page. It was like the book form of a train wreak, it was hard to look away.

The Turner Diaries is something of a cult favorite among certain extreme far-right groups. The "Day of the Rope" refers to a day (in 1993, still in the far future then) when white "race traitors" are publicly executed in Southern California. I've seen photos of "The Day of the Rope" graffiti in Los Angeles.

The Turner Diaries is indeed incredibly poorly written. But I disagree at the double-think need. In it, Jews are evil, blacks are shiftless criminals but Jews exploit them to harass white people, and any other non-white is simply subhuman. Per the above, whites who don’t hate others are race traitors who deserve the same fate as the various subhumans. There’s no subtlety in the book.

It might count as the ‘worst’ book because of the uncomfortably large number of people, as demonstrated by the last few years, but as far back as the Oklahoma City bombing, who take it not as literature but as an instruction manual.

I’ve also heard there are a few different versions, but the one I managed to track down had an epilogue that actually chilled me. The author described “sterilizing” a “quarter of the Earth’s surface“ (China, India, Southeast Asia). Because, well, the people there weren’t white people and they were annoying to white people… The language was… frightening, in the banality of the description, the ‘shrug’ at the ‘necessity’ and the clear implication no one would think differently. And that the book’s intended audience would shrug at such an act.

I’m a fan of apocalyptic fiction where, well, billions die. But this book reveled in the genocide.

 

[Agiel]

When I get a book and get half way through and think, really? wtf? is this shit serious? I jump to the last chapter, and if that doesn't resolve it sufficiently I read the second last chapter, and so on. There's been a couple of books (not many) where I've read backwards to where I was up to, before it made any fucking sense.

Try that, it's easier than jumping ahead a few chapters.

Why you would continue to read junk is beyond me. Even at my age (although old KeithD has a decade or so on me) life is too short to do that!

As I said in another comment prior to yours:

“I’ve never read a bad book because as soon as I’ve realised that I’m not enjoying it I’ve ditched it. I can’t remember any of them, title or author, because immediately afterwards I erased that information from my memory.

Why would anyone read, to the end, a book they weren’t enjoying? The belief it was somehow going to get better?”

 

[ElectricBlue]

As I said in another comment prior to yours:

“I’ve never read a bad book because as soon as I’ve realised that I’m not enjoying it I’ve ditched it. I can’t remember any of them, title or author, because immediately afterwards I erased that information from my memory.

Why would anyone read, to the end, a book they weren’t enjoying? The belief it was somehow going to get better?”

I only do it when the book has caught me enough to want to know the outcome, but not enough to persevere with the grind. It's like jumping a creek to get to the other side, rather than wading through the water.