What's the worst book you ever read?

[Amagine]

I read the classic Alice in Wonderland story. It made absolutely no sense to me. My head was pounding after I read it. The author was probably smoking some opium or something

[Rebeccaej]

I read the classic Alice in Wonderland story. It made absolutely no sense to me. My head was pounding after I read it. The author was probably smoking some opium or something

Worse--he was a mathematician. He saw the world weirdly.

For me: the first book I read here, Solaris Seethes. Every level of it, from the initial premise, to the character and setting development are cliche, the science is wrong, the writing quality is terrible, and it has no ending or resolution. Terrible from top to bottom.

[K-McD]

One book I hated from school: The Giver. It wasn't anything personal. It was just the fact that I had to read it three years in a row for school. First it was sixth grade, then once for my first year of middle school, and then again when I transferred to another school. By the third year, I only opened the book once to get quotes for the final essay. Other than that, I answered all the questions from memory and only missed one (and it was subjective, so I'm still counting that as a win). Still, I did like it the first few times I read it, so probably not the worst.

What I did hate on its own merits was the Fifty Shades trilogy. A friend of mine read it because, after not looking at anything about the book, he assumed it was about an abused woman struggling to get free of her abusive boyfriend. He told me how awful it was, so I borrowed his books to see if it really was that bad, and it was even worse than he thought.
The love interest is abusive, a rapist, a liar, a cheater, a stalker, and frequently breaks the law. More than that, the books are just so poorly thought out and written that it makes the characters look even worse. James' lack of understanding about the American legal system means that he commits a very, very large number of crimes during the course of the story. Plus, there's one point where Grey's helicopter is supposedly sabotaged and crashes, but the story he tells about it is so completely stupid that it's more plausible to think that he wanted to fake an accident to punish Ana for not telling him what his birthday gift was. And that would not be out of character at all, given that he wants to beat her for not letting him finger her in front of his parents. He doesn't actually end up beating her, because she manages to plead him down to just a rape. Oh, and he wants to beat and rape her because she looks like his mother. I don't care if the author tried to claim that it wasn't true; he outright stated that he thought she was like his mother.

The protagonist is a complete moron who somehow gets even more shallow as the story goes on. I don't care if the author says she has a 4.0 GPA: I have no idea how she didn't fail her thesis given the complete lack of understanding about Tess of the d'Urbervilles she has. I also have no idea how she managed to learn nothing about sex given that sexuality and women's issues are fundamental parts of a classic literature course. And, for someone who claims not to care about rich things, she certainly seems to see the pricetag before anything else. Not to mention the time when she comes across a lesbian couple and is completely baffled about how to talk to them because she doesn't know what to talk about other than men.

There is also a fundamental lack of understanding of BDSM throughout the story. BDSM is about consent and boundaries. They frequently trample on each other's boundaries (him more than her, but she still shouldn't be touching him if it upsets him that much). Ana states that she doesn't want certain things done to her, and he insists that he do them anyway, no negotiation. He gives her safewords, but never actually understands that she knows what they are. (For the uninitiated, they're how people signal that they want to stop and that they're withdrawing their consent for the activity. Continuing after the safeword means that the activity crosses over into abuse, because consent is the difference between BDSM and abuse.) Want to know something completely stupid? There's an incident at the end of the first book where Ana pushes her limits and absolutely hates it. When they talk at the beginning of the second, he tells her that she should have safeworded (she's shocked to realize that she could ask him to stop at any time), and he asks her how he can trust her if she doesn't use the safeword. Fast forward to the third book, and she does use the safeword for the first and only time. He takes it as a personal offense that she does and later uses it as an example of why he can't trust her. Funny how both doing and not doing the activity are both terrible things that she has to make up for. It's almost like he wants to find fault with everything she does so he has an excuse to beat and rape her. Oh, wait, Ana states outright that he's doing that on purpose in order to do so, and yet doesn't realize that the relationship is abusive!

This is only covering the surface. I could say so much more about how this book is terrible, starting from the inherent sexism, middling at the ethics of publishing your fanfic through the loophole of doing nothing more than changing the names (someone ran the books through a text comparison with the fanfic, Master of the Universe, and there is only an 11% difference), and ending in the fact that the author just can't write. I seriously do not understand why anyone likes this story. It's not BDSM porn; it's rape and abuse porn that exploits BDSM. It doesn't even acknowledge what it is, either. The author has berated survivors of rape and abuse for stating that the book is like their experiences. And even if people do want to read rape porn, there are plenty of other, better stories out there to read. It's not like it's the first pseudo-BDSM story published by a woman (despite what the media said); The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, written by Anne Rice in the 1970s, was pretty similar in terms of consent and it actually had good prose because despite all her other failings, she can actually put sentences together in a nice way.
This trilogy is horrible on so many different ways and I hate it. If I'd owned my own copy of the trilogy, I would have burned it. That wouldn't have made me feel any better, but that's what it deserves.

[Rebeccaej]

What I did hate on its own merits was the Fifty Shades trilogy...

I think the author has said outright that what fascinated her was the idea of a "dom" seducing somebody who WASN'T INTO BDSM and ensnaring them. That is, she knowingly wrote a book where the draw is that the sexual aggressor manipulates and overpowers the will of his target.

And honestly? I'm ok with that as a concept. Just call it what it is. If it had been marketed as a dark erotica about rape and abuse, I'd be ok about that.

That's a niche market, though, and wouldn't sell very well. So...they just took the rape and abuse porn and slapped a "romance" label on it. There's the problem.

Cliff Pervocracy put it really well. Where those books cross the line is in describing Ana's reactions. It's one thing to write about how sexy somebody's stern glare is, and how hot it is when he takes control. It's something else entirely to write about how the woman's first instinct when he enters the room is to check where the exits are--and to then imply that's a perfectly fine, normal stage of healthy, consensual relationships.

[innocentdemand]

Has anyone read the Maradonia Saga books? Perhaps the drama over these died down back in the early part of this decade. I read through the preview pages of the first one and my goodness, it was terrible. The author has major issues with keeping her ego in check, too, because she issues take-down notices to any person who criticizes her books too harshly.

[sarahmarlowe]

I didn't even have to pause to consider my answer. Norman Conquest 2066 by J.T. McIntosh. Oh, my. My, my, my. It was bad. I love science fiction, and this one was obviously set in the future, so that attracted me to the book. And, I taught about the 1066 Battle of Hastings, so I thought this might be a great combination. Nope. I got the Kindle Edition, and I was ticked that I couldn't even turn the book in for used credit somewhere. I couldn't follow the plot, the characters ran together, and I just stayed lost. Waste of time.

[Kajol Dadhania]

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. It is probably not the worst one but I was so disappointed and miffed with the end of the book, it felt like a huge waste of time.

[Bridgette C 2]

I recently read a fair book but I can't say it's a good book. Unfortunately, I can't tell it hehehe.

[Cwilde13]

I think the worst book I ever read was Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. I had heard such good things about it, but did not enjoy it in the slightest.

[Jolaade Idowu]

The worst book I remember I ever read was The Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi.

[Scott Fling]

Harry Potter...yea sorry i couldn't read it. maybe i have a thing about going against the grain. but i tried reading it like in elementary school...and let me tell u there was no magic.

[Kaylyn_Marie]

It had to be a tie between On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong and November 9 by Colleen Hoover.

Ocean's novel was entirely too descriptive and the plot felt like it went absolutely nowhere. I don't care what color, size, and material a sitting bench is. It was entirely too much.

November 9th was just a train wreck. I really hated how problematic the main male character was and the overall message was heinous. It upset me to think of young readers enjoying the premise and thinking men like that are normal and situations like the one presented in the book are okay. It also had one of my least favorite tropes.

[Kaylyn_Marie]

I can't agree with this post more! Any time Fifty Shades comes up I launch into a rant about how it is problematic and unrepresentative of the BDSM community. BDSM is based on trust and boundaries to make sure both parties are enjoying themselves. Fifty Shades really portrayed BDSM as a toxic abusive relationship and made it seem okay and "sexy".

One book I hated from school: The Giver. It wasn't anything personal. It was just the fact that I had to read it three years in a row for school. First it was sixth grade, then once for my first year of middle school, and then again when I transferred to another school. By the third year, I only opened the book once to get quotes for the final essay. Other than that, I answered all the questions from memory and only missed one (and it was subjective, so I'm still counting that as a win). Still, I did like it the first few times I read it, so probably not the worst.

What I did hate on its own merits was the Fifty Shades trilogy. A friend of mine read it because, after not looking at anything about the book, he assumed it was about an abused woman struggling to get free of her abusive boyfriend. He told me how awful it was, so I borrowed his books to see if it really was that bad, and it was even worse than he thought.
The love interest is abusive, a rapist, a liar, a cheater, a stalker, and frequently breaks the law. More than that, the books are just so poorly thought out and written that it makes the characters look even worse. James' lack of understanding about the American legal system means that he commits a very, very large number of crimes during the course of the story. Plus, there's one point where Grey's helicopter is supposedly sabotaged and crashes, but the story he tells about it is so completely stupid that it's more plausible to think that he wanted to fake an accident to punish Ana for not telling him what his birthday gift was. And that would not be out of character at all, given that he wants to beat her for not letting him finger her in front of his parents. He doesn't actually end up beating her, because she manages to plead him down to just a rape. Oh, and he wants to beat and rape her because she looks like his mother. I don't care if the author tried to claim that it wasn't true; he outright stated that he thought she was like his mother.

The protagonist is a complete moron who somehow gets even more shallow as the story goes on. I don't care if the author says she has a 4.0 GPA: I have no idea how she didn't fail her thesis given the complete lack of understanding about Tess of the d'Urbervilles she has. I also have no idea how she managed to learn nothing about sex given that sexuality and women's issues are fundamental parts of a classic literature course. And, for someone who claims not to care about rich things, she certainly seems to see the pricetag before anything else. Not to mention the time when she comes across a lesbian couple and is completely baffled about how to talk to them because she doesn't know what to talk about other than men.

There is also a fundamental lack of understanding of BDSM throughout the story. BDSM is about consent and boundaries. They frequently trample on each other's boundaries (him more than her, but she still shouldn't be touching him if it upsets him that much). Ana states that she doesn't want certain things done to her, and he insists that he do them anyway, no negotiation. He gives her safewords, but never actually understands that she knows what they are. (For the uninitiated, they're how people signal that they want to stop and that they're withdrawing their consent for the activity. Continuing after the safeword means that the activity crosses over into abuse, because consent is the difference between BDSM and abuse.) Want to know something completely stupid? There's an incident at the end of the first book where Ana pushes her limits and absolutely hates it. When they talk at the beginning of the second, he tells her that she should have safeworded (she's shocked to realize that she could ask him to stop at any time), and he asks her how he can trust her if she doesn't use the safeword. Fast forward to the third book, and she does use the safeword for the first and only time. He takes it as a personal offense that she does and later uses it as an example of why he can't trust her. Funny how both doing and not doing the activity are both terrible things that she has to make up for. It's almost like he wants to find fault with everything she does so he has an excuse to beat and rape her. Oh, wait, Ana states outright that he's doing that on purpose in order to do so, and yet doesn't realize that the relationship is abusive!

This is only covering the surface. I could say so much more about how this book is terrible, starting from the inherent sexism, middling at the ethics of publishing your fanfic through the loophole of doing nothing more than changing the names (someone ran the books through a text comparison with the fanfic, Master of the Universe, and there is only an 11% difference), and ending in the fact that the author just can't write. I seriously do not understand why anyone likes this story. It's not BDSM porn; it's rape and abuse porn that exploits BDSM. It doesn't even acknowledge what it is, either. The author has berated survivors of rape and abuse for stating that the book is like their experiences. And even if people do want to read rape porn, there are plenty of other, better stories out there to read. It's not like it's the first pseudo-BDSM story published by a woman (despite what the media said); The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, written by Anne Rice in the 1970s, was pretty similar in terms of consent and it actually had good prose because despite all her other failings, she can actually put sentences together in a nice way.
This trilogy is horrible on so many different ways and I hate it. If I'd owned my own copy of the trilogy, I would have burned it. That wouldn't have made me feel any better, but that's what it deserves.

[Xinbai Tai]

Friend Request by Laura Marshall.

I had watched a movie under the same name, and for some reason I was convinced that this book is the novel version of the said movie but I was wrong.

The suspense and thriller elements of this book were bland. I dislike the characters and plots; the writing style wasn't redeemable.

(And "Am I Your Daughter?" by Flow, the MC is so annoying!!!)