What's the worst book you ever read?

[awelker]

dont ya just love books like that? (sarcasim if you didn't get it)

[Sofia]

I got it

[awelker]

i was hoping you did. i have a problem of being sarcstic all the time.

[Sofia]

i was hoping you did. i have a problem of being sarcstic all the time.

then I think I'm gonna like it here

[awelker]

i have a slight addiction to this site. Im on here a couple times a day.

[Sofia]

yeah....I'm starting to catch that bug

[awelker]

good

[Weave]

'The Baby Trail', it was awful x

[Michael]

I read The Old Man and the Sea and thought it was one of the most worthless books around. I got absolutely nothing out of the story and started to see why Hemingway couldn't have been a terribly happy man. But, I was in 5th grade.

I tend to do a good amount of research before I read a book so I usually know what I'm getting into. I haven't read a whole lot except for the last few months so I guess at this point I feel some sort of attachment to any book I read.

But still, I hate that Old Man and the Sea.

[awelker]

I read it in the ninth grade for my english class and i can remember hating it too. I thought that it was pointless.

[Weave]

I am still standing by 'The Baby Trail', the worse book ever, avoid at all costs. x

[ghazali]

Well, one of the worst books that I've ever read is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

This novel is ostensibly about a group of cloned children who are raised in a private British school for the sole purpose that their bodies could later be harvested for their vital organs, which, in turn, would be supplied to the people whose own such organs have become dysfunctional due to various diseases and illnesses.

When I discovered the plot of the book, I was delighted. I thought to myself, this book is about such a controversial and highly-charged subject: breeding humans so that their bodies could be cannibalized later. And not just humans, but cloned humans. Cloning itself is a topic that is crawling with potential social, moral, and religious issues.

But I have to sadly report that Mr. Ishiguro's novel is not about any of the above. In fact, having read the book from cover to cover, I am still not sure what the book is about. One of the biggest problems of Never Let Me Go is that it remains completely unfocused throughout its length.

Mr. Ishiguro meticulously describes the juvenile interactions and skirmishes and jealousies among the trio of friends at Hailsham but they are like the interactions any adolescents would have in their growing up together. These children who were raised without the loving and watchful gaze of parents, didn't just lose their parents like other orphans, but they never had any to begin with. These children never knew any siblings in life. And what's more, these children never set foot outside Hailsham. Let me repeat, till these children were in their teens, they had never ever seen or experienced the outside world directly. Despite leading very sheltered and even unnatural lives during their formative years, they seemed to come to terms with the real world seamlessly. Even a normal person who has spent a substantial amount of time inside a prison needs ample time and effort on his part to "de-institutionalize," but all these angles about the lives of the clones were never addressed by Mr. Ishiguro at all.

Mr. Ishiguro refuses to deal with the ethical, scientific, and social dimensions that are inherent in the practice of cloning. He refuses to deal with the personal anxieties of the clones as they might find themselves pariahs and social misfits in the world. Also, we are told that the people of the world in general were very uncomfortable discussing clones and the way they were raised. This issue is similar to the one about cruelty to animals involved in medical experiments; a thorny subject. Such cruelty is only tolerated due to its ultimate beneficial consequences to humans. But when these clones go out in the world, we are never told about their relationships with normal humans: did normal people look down upon them as children of a lesser god; did they regard them as martyrs who were sacrificing their bodies and eventually their lives for the good of mankind; did the people receive the clones warmly, or were they given the cold shoulder. Mr. Ishiguro again refuses to even acknowledge this aspect of the social lives of the clones.

He refuses to deal with the fact that by the time these clones were in their teens, they were fully aware that they were destined for a slow and painful death by way of surgical removal of their vital organs one after the other. And usually the fourth donation would either result in your painful death or a vegetative state of existence at best. Now these are not easy facts to live with. The gravity of this revelation and its consequences do not seem to perpetually loom over their lives as a shadow as one would expect.

The life of a clone after having discovered its purpose shouldn't be very different from that of a condemned man who has been sentenced to die. Even if he spends many long years on the death row waiting for the lethal injection, when the time arrives eventually, he wouldn't be expected to meet his death without debilitating fear and extreme anxiety, to put things mildly. But that is just what our clones seemed to do.

Moreover, we are never told about the possibility of a clone deciding not to go ahead with his donations. What if the clone simply ran away and disappeared in the world to lead a normal life. I mean, after all, Mr. Ishiguro has led us to believe that clones are just like normal people with the only difference that they can't reproduce. But that's all right, one could still lead a normal life without having any children. So why didn't they try?

Also, with the whole world clamouring for the much-needed human body parts, one would think that as soon as a clone reached maturity, his body would be cannibalized for his organs. Instead, they spend two years writing essays about their favourite subjects. And even after that, they spend years and years caring for other donor clones whereas any of the regular people could act as carers, particularly when Mr. Ishiguro makes it clear that the clones do not enjoy any intimate or rewarding relationships with each other.

The whole book was very flat and lacked any sensibility or emotional warmth. Towards the last ten pages or so, when Mr. Ishiguro tried to come up with a touching ending, he seemed to fall flat on his face. Tommy, one of the clones, describes to Kathy, that he feels as if both of them were flowing down a fast-moving river and trying to hold onto each other desperately. The analogy was so juvenile and so very melodramatic that Mr. Ishiguro's attempt to evoke any sympathy towards the clones failed miserably.

And what never stopped surprising me was Mr. Ishiguro's complete inability to write naturalistic dialogues. Every single line his characters uttered sounded phony and forced and unnatural and feeble. Everything sounded stilted and halting. If the word 'daft' was used once more, I had promised I'd shoot myself.

This novel is supposed to be a masterpiece of restraint and deeply-buried anguish....Well, the anguish must be buried very deep indeed. I looked real hard but could never find it. Mr. Ishiguro devotes pages and pages to memories which are so trivial and mundane, the reader can’t help but become exasperated quickly. Thousands of words are spent on silly episodes like losing a favourite cassette tape, helping to calm down a good friend down after his classmates play a trick on him, pondering the origins of a friend’s new pencil case, and so on.

This book was an insult to my intellect and my literary sense. It wasted a week of my life. Mr. Ishiguro, please let me go....please let me go and read something interesting and intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging. A directionless, pointless, and emotionless book about nothing, really.

[Dori]

Welcome, Ghazali. Nice first post! I'll make sure to avoid that book .

[ghazali]

Dori, thank you for your kind words about my debut post.

If you ever want to pick up an intelligent novel about cloning, you should read Kevin Guilfoile's Cast of Shadows.

As soon as I finished Never Let Me Go (last month), I was so appalled by it that I decided to read another novel about cloning which dealt with the subject with some intelligence and heart. I picked up Cast of Shadows by Kevin Guilfoile. Now, Cast of Shadows is supposed to be your run-of-the-mill murder mystery, a trashy crime thriller. But as it turned out, the kind of emotional wallop it packed, the stylish prose, and the fiendishly clever plot, Mr. Ishiguro would never be able to come up with if he lived a thousand years.

While this forum is not the place to review Cast of Shadows but, for the sake of comparison with Ishiguro's book, I am going to very briefly recount the plot of 'Cast of Shadows:'

It is about a doctor who clones children for couples who are unable to have their own. The doctor's teenaged daughter is murdered and the police are unable to apprehend the murderer. The doctor decides to clone a child from the DNA left behind by the killer so that when the child reaches maturity, the doctor would be able to look into the face of the killer of his daughter and then hunt him down.

Although I could not find any passages in Never Let Me Go that I could term as my favourite, instead, I would quote a couple from 'Cast of Shadows:'

Here is the first line from the novel when the doctor discovers that his daughter has been brutally raped and murdered:

"This wasn't grief he felt. Grief is born. Grief matures. Grief passes. Despair, on the other hand, which arrives in an instant, ferments into depression."

Here is another excerpt; at one point of time, the doctor's wife asks him that why has he never considered cloning their daughter after her murder. This is what the doctor had to say:

"To people who knew the original, the cloned child wouldn't be real at all. To them, she's a doppelganger. A smudged copy. A ghost with no memory. Would our daughter be the same without that scar across her knuckles? The one she got learning to ride a bike? If she had fillings in different teeth? If she were a swimmer instead of a setter? Afraid of heights instead of spiders? If she liked English better than math? I know....that all these years there is still this absence, and the desire to fill it with something can be overwhelming. But to certain people clones can be like projections of the originals - abstract figures, actors on film, a cast of shadows. If we had another little girl walking around this house inside a shell that looked like our daughter, wouldn't that only make the void blacker?"

[Linda]

i liked The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro which he wrote long before he recently wrote Never Let Me Go. he one the Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day, so i kno i'm not the only one who enjoyed it. I think the novels he wrote earlier in his writing career are better than his most recent ones