i kinda wanna say atomic habits. the concepts it presents are functional but it presents them in an extermly forgettable and uninteresting way.
It’s probably “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”. If you’re interested in any personal finance book, there is already nothing to learn.
“Meteor” by Dan Brown (could be a different name in the original language). It was the first time I read something that was bad. Up until then book were cool and fun and interesting. It was a puzzling experience.
Edit: it’s called “Deception Point” in the original.
Anything by David Foster Wallace. Smug, preachy stream of consciousness garbage that is then annotated to oblivion by more stream of consciousness smug preachiness.
I couldn’t get through the DaVinci code, it had such a weird writing style and format if I remember right
The Bible
When I was an undergraduate, a friend of mine wrote a book review of the bible for the student newspaper.
The opening sentence was: “Not since Naked Lunch has such a boring book been saved by the constant barrage of sadomasochistic homosexual pornography.”
Yep. Bible. Pretentious, boring and way too much first - person stuff.
I wonder how many just check out when they get to the list of begats
the begats ain’t so bad, it’s only a couple short bits in the first book, as i recall, which is otherwise one of the best books that i read, with lots of relatively interesting short stories. the worst part in the early first books that i read in their entirety would have to be in exodus, where god spends ages going on and on to moses about the precise details of his dream tent. it feels like it goes on for a hundred pages, and then, a few chapters later, he does it all again.
Best-selling work of fiction amirite
I don’t know if this counts, but when I was about 13I was very excited to find an enormous book in my favorite genre at the time, Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard.
It was the first book I ever put down in disgust without finishing. In the almost half-century since then, there are under a dozen that I haven’t finished. Shows you just how bad it is.
I read all of Mission Earth. All 12(?) volumes. I couldn’t possibly say why - I hated it.
I would love to hear more about this. Those books are SO long
Well, I think I figured out by book nine that it was never going to get any better, but by that point there were only three books to go and they weren’t exactly difficult reads. Maybe I was hate-reading. “Will you continue failing to meet my expectations L. Ron Hubbard, you miserable cunt? I bet you will.”
And I have a tendency to think that any satire is brilliant and biting and I’m just not worldly enough to get it.
As a young teen scifi nerd I enjoyed the world, and tech he built in that book. I read the 600+ pages pretty quick. I think I was too young to critique it as a literary work.
The movie was absolute garbage.I tried reading his “Mission Earth” series. I did not finish the series; I managed about two and a half books before I realized that I wasn’t obligated to finish it just because I’d started.
Oh man, I really enjoyed Battlefield Earth. And the movie. What turned you off?
Even as a 13-year-old, I could see gaping holes in the plot and inconsistencies. The aliens were hardly alien.
Even more so, I could see that the writing was clumsy and the dialogue was stilted. I could see how the writer was developing the story, and so I was not pulled into it at all. I was actually thinking to myself that I could write something like this. And I was 13!
I haven’t seen the movie, but from the sounds of it many of the problems with the book are also on screen.
The bible. Inconsistent, unethical, and immoral.
Tried a few times and can never get past the first few chapters.
LOL. Try the Quran, it has the same characters and same stories but written in a way that makes much more natural reading
Thanks, but no thanks. :)
I haven’t read the entire book, but I’ve read like 10 pages of Fifty Shades of Grey when my then-girlfriend was reading it. Besides the story and subject matter, the writing itself is horrible.
First 10 pages was probably the bulk of the story; the rest was just email replies.
Never read it, just some parts here and there because a girlfriend was reading it and it was hilarious LOL The descriptions are supposed to be sexy or alluring or god knows what but they are so cringey! It took me a bit to understand that my friend was reading it seriously.
that’s an easy one, Atlas Shrugged
That is, still, to this day, the only book I could not finish.
Got about 2/3rds of the way through it and violently set it down. I love books too much to set it on fire, but I wanted to. It was the worst pile of shit I’ve ever read in my life. Completely divorced from reality.
And she died penniless and depending on the support of the same social services that she demonized in her book to convince people that capitalist leaders are paragons of humanity and the rest of us are just peons.
It’s the cliche answer for good reason. I think I appreciated it better than most people who hate it, and I still barely finished it for class. All the clumsy symbolism and retro-futuristic sci-fi schlock was right up my alley. The premise about rich terrorists absconding with all of the fucking money… not so much. The whole third act is just Ayn Rand’s vengeance fantasy about killing everyone who ever failed to agree with her hard enough. I was skimming through by that point, and still had to double-take and re-read where her derision toward “looters” included farmers.
My final paper roundly calling it a bloated screed by a mediocre author largely criticized it on its own terms and still turned vicious. John Galt is is among the worst monsters in literature because he wouldn’t feel satisfied having his name carved into the face of the moon in recognition of everything solved with his infinite energy glitch. Any mere worker acting as Rand insisted they should died in the apocalypse her tradwife-cosplaying nobility deliberately caused. It is a bad story about bad people told badly by a bad person, and the worst part is that it’s so fucking boring.
That said, we watched the black and white adaptation of The Fountainhead mid-semester, and it kinda works. Big surprise that the woman who hired an editor purely to check for typos had a more cogent opinion about authorship than she did about economics or human interaction. Probably helps that the movie’s over in two hours. Definitely helps that Gary Cooper can get it.
I was far too young to read Animal Farm. I thought it was going to be like Charlotte’s Web. I did not have any of the historical or political context for the metaphor. It just made me angry.
Left Behind. I’m probably a huge idiot for not realizing for the entire thing without knowing before hand what the context was, but I read it with the idea that it was some kind of apocalyptic sci-fi, and then only in the very last few pages of the book did it finally hit me in the face that it was religious doomsday bullshit. I do have to compliment it for the storytelling and world setting, but holy shit was I disappointed with the end direction 🤦
You should see the movie. It stars nic cage and he did it as a favor to a friend. It’s fucking awful. funny thing though, my story is identical to yours. Had no idea until it was too late lol.
I didn’t finish the last couple books, but I did enjoy it fully knowing the subject matter was about Revelations. I mostly read it as a kid and re-read for a bit as an adult. I did not grow up in a religious household. There was a point though where the books went a little too off the rails, and I gave up.
Ready Player One
The cringe is massive with that one.
The entire thing is the author wanking himself silly over his knowledge of pop culture references from his childhood. Some of it reads like it was written by a 14 year old who isn’t all that into books.
The bit about the gaming suit that wanks the user off but also means you’re exercising so you get fit from wearing it was honestly one of the cringiest things I’ve ever read. If I thought the author was capable of the level of self reflection required, I’d have thought writing that part of the book was him acknowledging that the book is literally a work of literary masturbation.
It should have received the same response as The Room; a bad book only made into a cult classic by the people laughing at it.
I enjoyed Ready Player One at the time even though some of it was just ridiculous. Re-enacting Ferris Buellers Day Off for example.
Armada, Cline’s next book was awful. So many references on every page, I stopped reading. I remember a line that was something like, “my mum wouldn’t let me past, like Gandelf in the mines of Moria.” Sheesh! Let it go!
I fully read Ready Player Two but the guy has no story telling abilities. Every time the main character encounters a problem, e.g. I need a level 49 sword to get past this problem, but there’s no way to get one, it was always solved with the same solution, “oh, I own the game and all Admins have level 1000 swords because we do!”
I think I reached my limit when he managed to shove in a Shaun of the Dead reference just because he mentioned a cricket bat!
Wizard’s First Rule by Terry
BrooksGoodkind. I suffered through the whole thing because I was young enough that I thought that’s what you should do when you’ve started a book, but I was also old enough to know that it was very bad. I’ve heard many people say they read it as teens and loved it, but I assure you, it does not hold up.In the later books they accidentally open a portal to the part of the world where there are communists and for a while afterwards Richard finds himself unable to eat cheese as penance for all the communists he’s killing but then he realizes that communists are so evil it’s ok to kill them so he can eat cheese again
I don’t know if it’s the absolute worst I ever read but the parts I read were pretty bad. At some point I was like “What kinda Ayn Rand bullshit is this?” and quit reading. It turns out that he was a Ayn Rand make-super-improbable-and-convoluted-examples-in-my-fictional-fantasy-world-to-justify-terrible-political-views school of writing type guy.
It’s probably not the worst for me either but it’s easily the first thing I think of. Really left a bad taste I guess.
I read a bunch of those books because my roommate was in love with them. It established an idea of a writing flaw in my mind that I called “The Heirachy of Cool”. Basically the guy practically has an established character list of who is the coolest. Whichever character in any given scene is at the top of the hierarchy is mythically awesome. They have their shit together, they are functionally correct in their reasoning, they lead armies, they pull off grand maneuvers, they escape danger whatever…
But anyone below them in the Heirachy turn into complete morons who serve as foils to make the people above them seem more awesome whenever they share page time together. These characters seem to have accute amnesia about stuff that canonically happened very recently (in previous books) so they can complicate things for the hierarchy above, they usually make poor decisions due to crisises of faith in people above them in the hierarchy… But because that hierarchy is infallible it’s predictable. Less cool never is proven right over more cool.
… Until that same character is suddenly alone and they go from being mid of the hierarchy to the top and all of a sudden they have iron wills and super competence…
Once I caught onto that pattern it became intolerable to continue.
Remember when Richard defeated the evils of socialism without his magic by pulling himself up by his bootstraps really really hard by (without practice or training) carving a really really good statue and all the lazy worthless slacker librulls were like dang, I love capitalism now, and then everyone looked directly into the metaphorical camera and said “Communism: Don’t let it happen to you”?
To be honest no… Because I think I violently expunged it from my memory and mind as my brain probably interpreted it as some kind of threat to my cells.
That was the beginning of the end for me. I think by the time I got to that part the series had already been going downhill but I remember that being a really sharp turning point.
I tried to press on a little further. The introduction of the straw man nation with the innocent child king who’s only existence was to be blown the fuck out by the brilliance of objectivism is when I finally decided I just couldn’t go on.
Funniest part of that was that Terry Goodkind clearly did not know anything about socialist realism
What I remember most vividly from that series is how absolutely bone-chilling everything about the Confessors were. You could absolutely have a really cool and interesting fantasy series in which they’re the main villains, but Terry Goodkind’s political views just wouldn’t allow it.
Or even just digging into their internal struggles due to the inherent loneliness that their powers creates. Instead we got a wierd post period sex blowjob to Richard role playing as his brother or something stupid that I can’t remember
Glad I’ve blocked that out
On a somewhat lower pedestal: Eragon. What a hugely derivative poorly written piece of crap. I’ve run D&D campaigns with better dialogue and pacing than that.
Oh yes I agree! And I’m a huge dragon fan, so it was extremely disappointing. That one I gave up on after maybe 50 pages. I couldn’t get past the prose. So I didn’t even get to the heavily recycled tropes, but I did see the movie once and they were plenty obvious from that.
I got to “Barges? BARGES? We don’t need no steenking BARGES” and threw the book away
Wizards First Rule is Goodkind not Brooks, Brooks wrote Shanarra
Ack thank you, I mix them up even though I’ve never read Brooks, who seems to be better loved.
I’d rate them about the same, personally. Though Brooks is at least just derivative and juvenile; Goodkind gets increasingly self indulgent.
Damn I legit liked this book, one of my top series. I just enjoyed the magic system, the antagonists, and the over the top nature. I might just have bad taste though lol.
Me too, friend.
After ruminating on it though, everything I liked was just lifted from better works.
Leatherclad red-themed group of women who enjoy causing pain and are able to negate men’s magic? Red ajah.
What other examples are there?I for sure see the links between SoT and Wheel of Time. I started seeing a lot of things lifted after reading both. But I still find myself liking both for different reasons. I dunno, I’ve accepted that I do like some things that are generally viewed as “bad” and I’ve come to terms with it haha.
Yeah but some things are bad because they are deliberately trying to make you bad too
Maybe. But I think it matters of entertainment it’s not as evil as that. Sure engaging with bad media might fuel them to repeat that behavior, but IMO if it harms no one it’s not an issue. Like for example I’ve read the SoT series a few times and I’m not a Marxist or what have you.
Ahh I think you’ve misunderstood.
He’s a raging, obnoxious capitalist who thinks poor people are poor because they don’t try.Haha that’s how much I missed it I guess. Well I do appreciate you clarifying that, I never got a good, concise answer about what people we’re hating on it for.
