You got it - what is the worst book (in any genre) that you have ever read (and why!)

In general, I don't like anything by Robert Heinlein or Michael Moorcock (excpet for Gloriana) - go ahead and flame away, it's MY opinion and it coats me in asbestos. :p

As for specific, individual books, for me little tops "The Traveling Vampire Show" by Richard Laymon or the three Flat Earth novels by Tanith Lee. The former is a drab piece of juvenile junk that puts the characters into some potentially-interesting situations, then cops out with lame actions that bring no real resolution. The latter detailed events by completely unlikeable, irredeemable characters with almost no connection between them. I got to the point that I simply didn't care about what happened here, and I threw it out - this crap wasn't even worth donating to a library.

Then there's "Moon Music" by Faye Kellerman. It was a fascinating detective novel with a great set of characters that was spoiled by a really silly ending.

Actually when I read a book I don't like I just put it aside and not read it.

Now which I read and don't like is: Baldur's Gate the novel :(

Blech that was a stinker :mad:

I think Athans' Baldur's Gate takes the cake as the worst novel of all time that I've read. Not just in the fantasy genre, but among all the novels I've read.

I've a mind to say the words "Robert Salvatore" in this post, but I'm considering trying his books again.

Krondor Series by Feist.

Writing a book based on a videogame is a bad idea.

Uh, Faragon . . . he wrote the books long before he helped write the video game. BTW, are you talking about the same series (Magician: Apprentice, Magician: Master, a Darkness at Sethanon, and Silverthorn)? If so, I hardly think they qualify as the worst books.

No, I'm talking about these books:

Krondor: The Betrayal
Krondor: The Assasins
Krondor: The Tear of the Gods.

Wether he wrote them before or after the game, it sure reads like he ripped it straight from the game. He's written far better stuff (Referring to the Riftwar Series)

The worst book I've ever read so far was Pamela or virtue rewarded! oh my goodness never had to read such a stupid book in my entire live!! (I had to read it for school!)

The next in line would be WOT 6-8! Jordan finished up and don't stretch it any further because of the money you can make!!

@ Faragon - my bad. I didn't think much of those books either. (I still wouldn't put them as worst ever though. I couldn't plow through the Helliconia series by Brian Aldiss with a two foot wide shovel. Those are the only books I own that I was simply unable to read from sheer boredom. It went something like this: page 56, zzzz, try again at page 56, zzzz -- repeat a dozen times and crash.)

The Silent Blade, what a snore. Also POR:ROMD the book, that was just pathetic. 'Oh no, we're nice drow, we'll let you pass' :rolleyes:

Pawns & Symbols-deathly dull Star Trek
The Hobbit-the rest of his books were great, but this one really annoyed me.
Baldur's Gate-I put this one in my fireplace

The Old English verision of Lord of the Rings, I can understand one in ten words, Lord of the flies, and To kill a mockingbird.

For me it has to Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope. It's hailed as great social comedy and a classic of English Literature but I just found it utter rubbish. I read the whole thing solely so I'd be able to tell people how bad it was without being fobbed off with the 'ah yes but you didn't read it all' counter argument.

In an attempt to show how unfunny it was, I bookmarked all the pages that had something funny on them. There were three bookmarks in the whole novel. One of those was along the lines of a baby saying 'cooo ccaa gga gaaggaaa' or something, so not really that funny. For years afterwards I used to be able to quote the 3 page numbers of the funny sections.

What made it worse was the author seems to have a chip on his shoulder about Dickens. He keeps putting in snide comments to try and make fun about Dickens characatures (as opposed to characters) with lines something like 'As I'm sure the earnest Mr Dickens would say....' The problem being that Dickens can be funny when he wants to be, Trollope seems unable.

Still, there was one positive outcome, whenever I see anyhting unfunny pretending to be so, I can describe it as 'utter Trollope.'

Actually there was another...... 'Danny Yates Must Die' by Stephen Walker. I picked this up in an airpport as it looked quite promising. Again, sadly it was written by someone who thinks that being weird is the same as being funny. Utter rubbish that I read to the end as I had nothing else to do and kept hoping it must get better. I was intrigued to see how badley the plot would be concluded (I wasn't dissapointed). To find the Author's name I had to look it up on Amazon. Scarily it gets some good reviews there but I prefer the one that describes it as 'puerile nonsense with no semblance of a plot.' Couldn't have said it better myself.

Demon awakens by R.A Salvatore is horrible.

Mills and Boon...they're gross!

Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein

The first part of the book was pretty good, but when they left Jubal and joined the circus, I found the book extremely annoying. I tried to finish it, but finally gave up.

Who has seen the wind by W.O Mitchell.
A book about wheat, wind, and more wheat.

[ January 14, 2003, 16:43: Message edited by: Thorin ]

I think the worst book I've read would be the Sea of Swords by R.A. Salvatore. Even though th Dark Elf and Icewind Dale books were great, this one is just crap. I mean come on, five people attacking a stronghold full of Ogres, half-ogres and pirates, and they don't have any problems! And, even though there has been no mentioning of healing potions in any previous Drizzt book now they find one just in time to save Drizzt. The book is horrible!

Terry Brookes' "Sword of Shannara". It is not the worst book that I have read, but it is certainly the most annoying since it is a copy of Lord of the Rings.

Everything by Dean R. Koontz or Stephen King.

Spine of the world by R.A. Salvatore...

that was pure crap. now I'm readin Servant of the shard and it's very interesting with Artemis Entreri and the drows but, a story about Wulfgar, who cares?

Nabokov's Lolita. I suppose it was a "good" book in the sense that it's certainly powerful, but I was physically sick reading it and had nightmares for weeks afterward. I forced myself to read it because it is considered one of the "great" works in our culture and I felt like a philistine for hating it so much. I just can't understand people who talk about it being a "love story". I didn't see that at all. I would call it a horror novel.

The Sabrina books. They aren't even funny, are repeated all the time and are just stupid.

Sprite:What was the horrible thing about
'Lolita' then? I am a little thing from a small country and I don't know kabonkers.

Anyone read Diablo's novel Bartuc something?
It is the worst book i've ever read.

So many bad books ... I just try to delete them from my mind.

I really hated the Soul-Forge Books by Weis & Hickman. No real chemisty in the characters.

I really hated "The Pillars of Creation" by Terry Goodkind. I'm a huge fan of the Sword of Truth books, but this one hardly had the main people in it, and was a huge disappointment.

ACT! for Dummies was a waste of money ... but I kinda guessed it would be ;)

Eze,
Lolita is concerned with an older mans attraction to a much (read illegal) younger girl.

It's called (rough translation): "Canoes and small waves". I read it beacuse it's part of a good collection of books about the seven capital (is that correct?) sins, of wich I liked most of the books, except for this one, the worst book I ever read...

I agree with Tal, "Baldur's Gate" and "Baldur's Gate II:SoA" by Phil Athans almost made me give up reading (not really, but you get the point).
Randall Wallace's books are starting to bug me too, since he's an obsessive melodramatist.
I don't much like anything by Troy Denning either, since he *always* kills off the wrong characters.
Elaine Cunningham's drow books are also, IMO, quite bad, simply because she humanizes the drow way too much.
Oh, and "1984", that book was incredibly dull.

Of the books I actually finished, my least favorite is "The Two Towers."

:evil: The worst book(s) I have ever read are the Rhapsody trilogy by Elizabeth Haydon. At first it was pretty good, but the characters kept doing things that were out-of-charcter and so useless and stupid that even after the 50 pages she would write to explain the brainless acts, you still had no idea why it happened, or how it could happen. :bang:

By far the worst book I ever read was the book about Sturm from the meetings sextet in dragonlance. That book was absolute crap in every sense of the word. (I have fortunately managed to purge its title from my memory. Outside of that, most of the DL books not my Weis and Hickman tend to the horrible, but not much else struck me as that bad (although Weis and Hickman's new series comes close).

"The ghost of thomas Kemp", just terrible. I had to read it three times for english. The story sucks, the characters are dull and the ending is pathetic

Luthyen's game by Salvatore (don't know the name exactly)
maybe it was just the translation, but names stolen from JRRT, damna ad bestias...

And Number of the Beast by Heinlein was pretty bad too...

[ January 31, 2003, 17:35: Message edited by: ArrynMorgerim ]

I thought Friday was much worse than Number of the Beast (not that that book was very good, mind you).

Anything by Salvatore. Drizzt is not so much a ranger as he is a mega-ninja.

Never heard of a mega-ninja? I hadn't either, pal. I hadn't either.

The Elminster series. They have a super wizard(Elminster) who does absolutely nothing about his family in the first book and get worse from there. Also they skip to much time.

For books i had to read for my university degree, "Mauve Desert" and "Ana Historic". These two books are, bar none, the biggest pieces of crap I've ever encountered. Pretension, stupidity, cupidity, density, and unintellibility to the nth degree. My degree cost me in $$, but it also surely cost me in brain cells, about 2 million of which died during the course of reading these two books.

For fantasy, Lyndon Hardy's "Master of the Five Magics" had a really fascinating idea, that this guy just bored to death. He managed two sequels, and I managed to plow through about 30 pages of the second one before throwing in the towel. A definite "do not read."

Everything by Salvatore.

I won't start essaying about the uh... /bothersome/ Drizzt, only the laziest haven't expressed their thoughts about him by now, and the reasons are understandable.

Still, I hate everything the man writes because he treats the reader as if he was a complete moron. I mean- he exaggarates all the time, and sticks in those annoying expressions like: "The horrifying idea" and such.

Man, would you be so kind and PRESENT this idea and then leave it to ME to judge how horrifying- if at all- it is?

Yes, I know I'm... er... not as successful as a writer in comparsion to Salvatore so probably I shouldn't go teaching him how to write. Still, I can't read anything by him. Sorry.

Interesting assessment. I've never read Salvatore, but your description is almost identical to my reaction to Lovecraft. He's supposed to be the master of horror, but his stuff never even gets me NERVOUS, let alone horrified. He spends too much time telling me how horrified I'm supposed to be and not enough time having actually scary things happen. :sleep:

Rallymama, you have a point about Lovecraft. I even agree. But keep in mind that the man was breaking new ground. If you look at some early experimenters with the novel form of writing, you'll see that they, too, were a little on the clumsy side (people like Daniel Defoe, the guy who wrote "Pamela", the 19 century Brontes, Horace Walpole). All classic, all clumsy and ineffective by today's standards.

As for Salvatore, for his target audience (8-16 is my guess) he's fine. He lost me when he spoke of Drizzt thrusting with a scimitar. How the %&*^ do you THRUST with a curved blade? I mean, theoretically the move is possible but the person so doing wouldn't last very bloody long.

[ February 08, 2003, 16:17: Message edited by: Depaara ]

The Icewind Dale books by Salvatore and the first Shannara thing.

MfG

[Please see the forum rules on the prohibiton of use of signatures.] -Tal

[ February 23, 2003, 20:48: Message edited by: Taluntain ]

Any of that Mills and Boon crap

The salvadore books defineltly, the first two books were really good but the moment you abandon action, comedy and wonder for deep drama (Buffy, Angel, Xena, Farscape) you tend to annoy the people who bought your books in the first place.

Baldur's Gate. IMO the worst thing ever put to paper.

Probably the worst book I have ever read is either Mirkheim by Poul Anderson or the two Baldur's Gate books.

Personally the Sword Of Shannara books annoyed the crap out of me. He used the same plot-line over and over.
Ooh...there's a huge evil...main character must fetch such and such an item to stop it meanwhile discovering that they can do magic.
I'm still not sure how he's managed to publish so many in the same series. I'm kind of curious to read something else he's written to see if it too has the same plot, but I don't really care that much.

Brook's recent books that are set in our world but with demons and knights that fight them are pretty good. Alot better than his Shannara books.

thanks for the info, I'll look into those. :)