Worst Novel You've COMPLETED

[Lucien21]

I barely made it through the movie, I can't imagine the book. King's pretty high up there on the stink-o-meter for me, so a lot of his stuff almost made this list. I remember barely making it through The Dark Half, back when that came out.

Strange.

If King is high on your stink-o-meter (which is fine, everyone to their own taste) why would you have read a lot of his stuff.

Makes no sense to keep reading an author you don't like. 

[Farrell]

Strange.

If King is high on your stink-o-meter (which is fine, everyone to their own taste) why would you have read a lot of his stuff.

Makes no sense to keep reading an author you don't like.  

In Matt's defense, Stephen King has written one out of every three books ever published.  

[Matt H.O.W.L.]

Strange.

If King is high on your stink-o-meter (which is fine, everyone to their own taste) why would you have read a lot of his stuff.

Let me set the stage: It was the end of the Reagan era. I was much younger then. This guy's books were very popular. He was responsible for The Shining, the first horror movie I ever saw that scared me. I wanted to like his stuff. I tried really hard. I did enjoy The Gunslinger quite a bit, and the werewolf novella, but didn't see how so many people thought It and other books were so good. I was just a kid, but I could see that the dialogue was stilted and weird. After a handful of books, I realized he wasn't for me. I was so green then, I thought I must not be reading them right or something. Took a few books and a little hard-won wisdom to realize he just didn't tickle my ivories. Hell, I'm such a sport I even gave Cell a couple hundred pages.

[Dotanuki]

I want to respond to this thread but I'm not sure if I meet the OP criteria. I tend not to finish books that bug me...

Books I've started & couldn't manage to finish for whatever reasons:

Infinite Jest

Naked Lunch...I keep telling myself I'll sit down and hash this one out someday. I feel like I have to, for some reason, since Burroughs has always appealed to me as a strange iconoclast celebrity. I like phrases from this book and others of his corpus ("word begets image and image is virus") but I can't seem to shove my way through a novel-format piece of his work. Burroughs, like Bukowski, plays better for me in poetry/short stories/the screenplay to "Barfly", etc.

A Game of Thrones: this one's back on my to-read list...indeed, this thread and the release of the HBO series make me want to examine the praise-mountain this book gets. Much of the "he's an answer to Tolkien" jabber I read online has put me right off of reading this thing for years. The fantasy stories I've enjoyed since Age 6...well, magical hijinks are often my favorite elements of this kind of storytelling so I'm not sure how a fantasy "War of the Roses" is going to play for me. I am cheered by reading an interview with the author about his appreciation of the "secondary world" idea, that he thinks his world should be a character in his stories; that idea always plays well with me. We'll see how it goes.

The Great Gatsby...ye gods, this was assigned reading in the 8th grade or something and I *&^%$ing couldn't stand the plot, characters or prose style from Page 3 or 5 or something. I agree with an above poster's friend re: the "wah, I'm rich!" vibe I got from the outset of this book.

There are others...eh, I treat entertainment-reading in an analogous manner re: the way I treat songs, musician demos, AV production reels, etc: I need to get hooked very early on or my fickle ass goes elsewhere. Non-fiction, philosophical essays, dissertations, etc...these things get more leeway from me than reading-for-fun.

[Matt H.O.W.L.]

Infinite Jest

I made it about 400 pages in. There were parts of it I was really enjoying and parts I was really not. I feel like I need to finish the sumbitch some time, but I don't plan on being bed-ridden any time soon (fingers crossed).

[JimN]

Naked Lunch...I keep telling myself I'll sit down and hash this one out someday. I feel like I have to, for some reason, since Burroughs has always appealed to me as a strange iconoclast celebrity. I like phrases from this book and others of his corpus ("word begets image and image is virus") but I can't seem to shove my way through a novel-format piece of his work. Burroughs, like Bukowski, plays better for me in poetry/short stories/the screenplay to "Barfly", etc.

I agree that Burroughs works better in small doses. Hey, if you can't make it through Naked Lunch but feel obligated to read one of his novels, try something like Junky or The Ticket That Exploded.

A Game of Thrones: this one's back on my to-read list...indeed, this thread and the release of the HBO series make me want to examine the praise-mountain this book gets. Much of the "he's an answer to Tolkien" jabber I read online has put me right off of reading this thing for years. The fantasy stories I've enjoyed since Age 6...well, magical hijinks are often my favorite elements of this kind of storytelling so I'm not sure how a fantasy "War of the Roses" is going to play for me. I am cheered by reading an interview with the author about his appreciation of the "secondary world" idea, that he thinks his world should be a character in his stories; that idea always plays well with me. We'll see how it goes.

I've been feeling like I should tackle this one too but just can't quite get interested.

By the way, for anyone seeking an interesting fantasy* series that isn't an unfinished mountain of pages, I highly recommend Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series. It's a superb read.

Jim

* Technically, it's science fiction but reads like fantasy.

[Jeppe]

By the way, for anyone seeking an interesting fantasy* series that isn't an unfinished mountain of pages, I highly recommend Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series. It's a superb read.

Seconded! 

[Ted Falconi]

Probably You Will Know Our Velocity or whatever it was called by Dave Eggers.

I did get the fancy 1st edition from McSweeney's though, so I was able to sell it for a good profit.

[Alejandroh]

I usually stop reading a book if I don't like them. Buuuttt. I love Orson Scott Card!

[the other mike]

A Game of Thrones: this one's back on my to-read list...indeed, this thread and the release of the HBO series make me want to examine the praise-mountain this book gets. Much of the "he's an answer to Tolkien" jabber I read online has put me right off of reading this thing for years. The fantasy stories I've enjoyed since Age 6...well, magical hijinks are often my favorite elements of this kind of storytelling so I'm not sure how a fantasy "War of the Roses" is going to play for me. I am cheered by reading an interview with the author about his appreciation of the "secondary world" idea, that he thinks his world should be a character in his stories; that idea always plays well with me. We'll see how it goes.

i think this is a case of the book's success working against it. i can totally see where you're coming from, but i urge you to look past the hype and enjoy the book on its own terms. at its very core, it reads like historical drama/historical fiction/war fiction but with an emphasis on character. nobody is all good, and nobody is totally bad. you get to LOVE these characters, warts and all. to me, i think its what sets it apart from other fantasy books.

i tell you, i am a quiet reader. but reading this series, i can't help but yell in surprise or curse in anger or laugh out loud. i become that annoying person yelling at the screen in a movie theatre. "don't go in there!",  "call the cops you dumb bitch!", "grab the knife!"...

-mike

[NeverWanderer (Joey Cruz)]

I dunno what this says about me as a reader, but I can't think of a single novel that I have read beginning to end, disliking it the whole way through.

I got close with one... a fantasy book called The Changeling War (I think). It mixed fantasy with modern day, which is a genre I've always loved, and had an endorsement by my favorite author of the time (R.A. Salvatore) on the cover... I learned a lot about the wording and context of pull-quotes with that one. I stuck with most of the book because I was WAITING for something worthwhile to happen, and then a couple chapters from the end, I realized it was going nowhere and stopped reading.

Only other book that's come close (StarDoc) was actually one of the best sci-fi novels I'd ever read until the very end, where the main character makes a profoundly stupid decision for the most ridiculous and uncharacteristic reasons because the writer decided to impose her own self-hating sexual fantasies on the story. It turned from an engrossing sci-fi mystery to a BAD romance novel. On a fucking dime.

Ugh.

Every time I think about that book I want to throw it across the room. Again.

Why you gotta make me remember that shit?

[NeverWanderer (Joey Cruz)]

A Game of Thrones: this one's back on my to-read list...indeed, this thread and the release of the HBO series make me want to examine the praise-mountain this book gets. Much of the "he's an answer to Tolkien" jabber I read online has put me right off of reading this thing for years. The fantasy stories I've enjoyed since Age 6...well, magical hijinks are often my favorite elements of this kind of storytelling so I'm not sure how a fantasy "War of the Roses" is going to play for me. I am cheered by reading an interview with the author about his appreciation of the "secondary world" idea, that he thinks his world should be a character in his stories; that idea always plays well with me. We'll see how it goes.

If it helps at all, my wife (who introduced me to the book) hated it the first time she read it. Absolutely despised. Then, a few years later, after hearing friends talk about it like the second coming, she decided to give it a shot again. Second time around, she was blown away and wouldn't stop bugging me about it until I read it too.

S'all about perspective, I guess.

[the other mike]

i thought of one!

one of the worst books i've read, from cover to cover is twilight. this was several months to a year before the first movie. my sister and i love vampire books and would trade recommendations often. she told me to read this book called twilight. she said she enjoyed it and that i should read it. well, i read it and i LOATHED it. it had no redeeming value what so ever. i can't imagine any horror fanatic, any romance fan or vampire fan liking this book, because its has niether horror, nor romance nor vampires. NOTHING happens. i read the goddam thing till the end, HOPING to see some action, ANY action. when the final confrontation happens, the point-of-view character GETS KNOCKED OUT and we don't GET TO SEE ANYTHING! ugh. i wanted to write an amazon review just to complain about the book and warn new readers, but then i found out how popular it was. i was too late.

-mike 

ps- i'm very happy for people who love the book. and i really don't mind the twi-hards, and i welcome all people of of all races, creeds and backgrounds into geek-dom. i just wish it were for better material. hopefully twilight will be the gateway drug that leads on to salem's lot and world war z... and so on.

[Jeppe]

The Bad Chemicals on Atlas Shrugged

[BurlIves]

I agree that Burroughs works better in small doses. Hey, if you can't make it through Naked Lunch but feel obligated to read one of his novels, try something like Junky or The Ticket That Exploded.

Interzone is a nice little catch-all that has some great short pieces.  I also really like the essay collection The Adding Machine.

And I definitely vouch for Gene Wolfe too. 

[Papercut]

I've been thinking about this lately. And I've come to the conclusion that I barely seem to finish books that I WANT to read, much less complete books that I find lacking.    At least at this point in my life.


So it brought me back to my schooling years to search for the elusive Completed Stinker and...yeesh, I guess I didn't finish books back then, either. 


Or maybe I was just lucky enough that I actually enjoyed, or at least didn't actively hate, the books I was told to read. Or perhaps they were so bad they've been struck from my brain.


Now that said, I do think there were books that weren't nearly as compelling for me....Jane Eyre and A Passage to India were both finely crafted novels, just not my cuppa. 

[Alejandroh]

I've been thinking about this lately. And I've come to the conclusion that I barely seem to finish books that I WANT to read, much less complete books that I find lacking.    At least at this point in my life.


So it brought me back to my schooling years to search for the elusive Completed Stinker and...yeesh, I guess I didn't finish books back then, either. 


Or maybe I was just lucky enough that I actually enjoyed, or at least didn't actively hate, the books I was told to read. Or perhaps they were so bad they've been struck from my brain.


Now that said, I do think there were books that weren't nearly as compelling for me....Jane Eyre and A Passage to India were both finely crafted novels, just not my cuppa. 

I was a crappy school reader when I was in high school. During senior year of high school I read barely any of the required reading. I know, I'm horrible right. My reading list that year was:

Mists of Avalon(it was alright)
Great Expectations(did not enjoy)
Jude The Obscure(did not enjoy)
The Oedipus Cycle(enjoyed)
Jane Eyre(meh)
Moby Dick(thought it was alright)
Wieland(couldn't get into it)
Waiting for Godot(despised)
The Sun also Rises(liked)
King Lear(loved)
Pride and Prejudice (couldn't stand)
Lolita (couldn't get into it)
The Kite Runner (read and liked)

I generally don't like being told and forced to read things for a grade, who'd a thunk it ya know.

[BillyZ]

Waiting for Godot(despised)

???????
Absolutely should be seen and not read, at least for someone's first exposure to it.  You need the patience of saint to get through reading it.

[Matt H.O.W.L.]

???????
Absolutely should be seen and not read, at least for someone's first exposure to it.  You need the patience of saint to get through reading it.

Yeah. It's not a novel.
I do love that play. I'm going to have to hunt down a copy of a good production now.

Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?
Estragon: Yes, let's go.
[they do not move]

[Alejandroh]

Yeah. It's not a novel.
I do love that play. I'm going to have to hunt down a copy of a good production now.

Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?
Estragon: Yes, let's go.
[they do not move]

I know it's not a novel lol. I just copied my reading list from that year. Heh. But I have seen Waiting for Godot, wasn't a big fan either.