/lit/ - Literature

The Opposing Shore by Gracq

>>22178462
Maximum Ride

>>22178462
At Last a Life by Paul David.

>>22178462
Quran then TKAMB then Anne Fakes Diary

>>22178462
Some shitty genre fiction that is out of circulation when I was in jail

Naked Lunch

>>22178462
Shadow and evil in fairy tales

>>22178466
>>22178479
>>22178485
>>22178547
>>22178556
I'll try them out

>>22178486
Already read all 3

>>22178511
Very informative anon

probably Ducks, Newburyport, but A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride was equally as terrible, just not as long

anything murakami
dont waste your time

>>22178462
A Theory of Justice

>>22178462
Julie Schumacher - The Shakespeare Requirement for an English class
imagine John Oliver SNL skit The Office lolsoquirky normalfag bullshit vapid humor turned up to 11

>>22178462
Unironically, Blood Meridian. It's the only book that I consider insufferable. DNF at page 300

>>22178462
1984 Just due to how much talk/praise there is for it when the book is completly dull and mostly uninteresting.

>WOW WE ARE LIKE UNDER SURVEILLANCE 24/7 DUDE!

>>22178737
After reading the description for Ducks, Newburyport I came to the conclusion that nothing insightful or rather truly poetically expressed could come from a monstrosity of prose (of that size, no less).

>>22178462
The Cockahole Company or something like that from Feldbakken. Pure degenerated commie trash

>>22178794
Okay, you might not have liked it, but that was the worst book you ever read?

>>22178462

All the way through? The Gundam novelization: Mobile Suit Gundam: Awakening, Escalation, Confrontation

Or possibly White Noise. Gundam was boring but White Noise got me angry

>>22178972
It really is among the worst to be honest. The
dialogue and the characters are horrible.

>>22178462
Six of crows, by Leigh Bardugo.

Atlas Shrugged.

Pure garbage.

>>22178462
I read a Candace Bushnell novel once. Probably a tie between that and Atlas Shrugged.

>>22178462
Cabal by Clive barker

The Bible... it was soooo bad you should totally read it :3

The Satanic Bible. A hate letter to Jesus by an upper middle class jewish hippie and his cognitive dissonance between his hate for the church and his own doctrine.

>>22178462
Worst one in English:
Fifty Shades of Grey
Worst one overall:
a volume of early stories by Karl May

>>22178462
harrasment arcitechture
its just the same edgy shitpost over and over

>>22178794
Filtered

>>22178462
Recently it was Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney.
>less effective retread of Conversations With Friends
The 2 MCs in BWWAY are pretty much carbon copies of those in CWF with a couple of traits cut from one and pasted into the other. As characters they're far less effective than they were before and their characterizations come across as shallow. It's also apparent that they're stand-ins for Rooney herself--this was likely so with CWF but at least they had some depth to them and were thereby more interesting.
>preaches to the reader
The book contains emails written from one MC to the other between each chapter; these basically boil down to Rooney pontificating her own opinions about random things to the audience. They do almost nothing by way of adding depth to any themes being explored and don't move the plot forward. They're mastabatory.
>poor depth of theme
The love interest of the mentally-ill writer is a superficial caricature of a working-class man. Rooney betrays the fact she has nothing to say about class and is stuck in the mindset of a myopic libtard. Basically, the writer character is financially established and the love interest is a gruff man (or at least Rooney tries to make him so) unaccustomed to partaking in the privileges the writer does. However, all Rooney has to say about such privileges is the writer taking a passe attitude toward them while having the love interest gawk at them with nothing much to say except for canned resentment (that isn't explored). It's like a cartoon, there is more than one scene where le famous young writer goes to a party being held by the friends of the working-class lover and they look her up on Wikipedia. It's literally just the same scene repeated for some reason and there isn't a change/growth in character being emphasized--it's quite obviously something that happened to Rooney that she felt was so interesting she had to include twice.
>token character traits
The fact the writer suffers from mental illness is a superficial character trait that doesn't play into plot and isn't examined at all (unlike with CWF which handled that aspect of the book with much more subtlety, giving the reader something to connect to and reflect on). Rooney also makes the working-class guy bisexual for some reason but, again, nothing is said about this and it doesn't really inform the plot let alone become something that interplays with the muddled themes Rooney is attempting to touch on.

/lit/ shit on Rooney at lot so I picked up CWF to see if she deserved it. It wasn't a great book but there were aspects to it that were enjoyable. I didn't intend to read another of her books but ended up with a copy of BWWAY by chance and everything negative /lit/ says about Rooney is justified by this book. It's like she's become the full embodiment of the persona they use to market her that tipped off people who post on this site. BWWAY is just terrible.

>>22178462
1Q84 is the only book I actually regret reading. Inverted World came close to regret, the idea has so much potential but he just rewrote Flatland with higher geometry and none of the charm. The Seven Madmen is probably the worst written book I have read, Arlt had no consistent style and relies on large blocks of exposition that are only loosely connected to the story, but he has moments of absolute greatness.
>>22178466
I love Gracq and kind of agree. I am convinced the real reason he refused the award is he felt he did not deserve it and went on to dedicate himself to deserving the recognition he got with The Opposing Shore.

>>22178462
the secret of the she-bear by marie cachet.
>spelling errors, grammatical errors, sentences that don't make any sense whatsoever, blatant misinformation and some of the weirdest analogies I've ever read.

1984
>a close second just because it's absolute dogwater. But at least it was edited properly

>>22178462
the man in the high castle. Just get to the ending and you'll see why

>>22178462
Prey by Michael Crichton
Utter contemptible dog shit

>>22178794
Although it's not the worst I've ever read, it's by far one of the most overrated books. The characters are almost one note and unlikable, even Winston, the evil government is a fucking caricature to the point it becomes counterproductive to the theme of the story, and the idea (I'm talking about newspeak) that you can remove a word like "freedom" and people will all of a sudden not be able to understand it is completely ludicrous.
The only reason people praise it so highly is because they read it in school and that they apply their high school knowledge to real life politics. It's absurd.

I don't know, anglo literature is always a hit or miss for me, usually a miss.

>>22179950
>anglo literature is always a hit or miss for me
What tradition is not? They all have loads of crap to sift through or are dead and ancient.

>>22178462
I have a misprinted copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles that drops the last chapter into a random place in the beginning of the book, repeats pages, skips pages, and has various other typos; does that count?

>>22178774
lol lmao, I'm considering not finishing it.
>the kid has survived yet another improbable situation

>>22178462
Lord Foul's Bane, book 1 of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

The protagonist is an unlikable psychopath with a downer self-pitying attitude. The fantasy world is a faded Xerox of high fantasy. The writing is terrible, trying to repetitively use every obscure word in the thesaurus to cover for the inability to tell a story. The plot is uninteresting and almost entirely Deus Ex Machina with puppet characters that exert no agency of their own. The characters have no depth, no personality, and no authentic psychology. They're just lifeless pawns dragged around a bland board, making moves a reader can't care about, pushed by the hand of an incompetent author. In fact, the defective psychological aspect of the gestalt makes the feeling of reading it so disturbing, I would slowly edge away from the narrator and split if this were being told orally.

It's the only book I've stopped reading and thrown in the trash can. I wouldn't want this crap finding its way to a used book store to waste someone else's time or accidentally be someone's introduction to fantasy.

The freakiest part was having it recommended to me as "life changing" by some dude in a used bookstore. I question how anyone could finish, let alone enjoy and find value in this torturous stream of drivel set to paper.

OP, you can do the world a favor and toss your copy after you finally tire of being passive-aggressively assaulted by the author.

>>22178462
the catcher in the rye, easily

The worst book I've ever finished was probably The Lone Ranger and Tanto Fist Fight in Heaven by renown racist and professional crybaby Sherman Alexie.

The worst book I enjoyed reading was probably the self published book "The Cools Brothers." Pic related.

Recently I read Nothing by Blackened Teeth and that's definitely a contender for worst book.

>>22178462
Morrissey's autobiography once he gets into the court case stuff

>>22179950
Try to get any leftist to say what a woman is and watch their brain melt. It’s not so far off

i hate the internet by Jarett Kobek
It's nothing more than a gutless twitter leftist whining over what they perceive to be injustices and the effects of social media/the internet. That'd already be loathsome to read, but the writing is fucking atrocious. It's so repetitive. Every concept or idea it attempts to talk about is first explained in a smarmy yet shallow manner. I'm guessing it's what "mansplaining" is like, but I don't believe the author meant to do some meta commentary through the writing style. It seems like he wants to be incisive with satire, but it just reads like a retarded kid's essay for their 7th grade history class. This is a literal excerpt:

>This type of software was called an application, but was better known by the colloquial name app. You could buy apps in the Apple App Store.

>In 2010, Apple had introduced a new product called the iPad.
>The iPad was an iPhone with a bigger screen and no ability to function as a cellular phone. The iPad was a tablet.
>It could run all of the apps that people used on their iPhones.

>Most apps were developed on the principle of the lowest common denominator, working off the general assumption that stupidity was the baseline of the human experience.
>If an app was developed with stupidity in mind, and if stupidity was the baseline of the human experience, then perhaps hundreds of thousands, if not millions, would download this app.
>Some apps cost money. Others were free and served advertisements. Apps were incredible growth opportunities. The burgeoning mobile market was creating hundreds, if not thousands, of new businesses around the Bay Area. Each of them needed funding.

And another:

>She was approaching the end of her socially acceptable sex life. She was a woman in a society that hated women.
>Men could fuck well into their seventies without anyone blinking an eye. Women past a certain age were allowed to fuck but only as long as they adopted certain names of war.
>Like: MILF. Like: cougar.
>MILF was an Internet acronym for Mother I'd Like to Fuck
>A cougar was an older women with sexual interests in younger men.
>Both terms categorize a woman's sexuality by its explicit relationship to men. Both terms suggest that an older woman's virility exists only as a tutoring device to school younger men in the art of lovemaking. Both terms contextualize an older woman's sexuality based on her willingness to offer men a taste of the cupcake and/or the pastry.
>It was the same old intolerable bullshit dressed in a red pleather skirt.
>But, really, are there any sexual colloquialisms for women that don't embed some intolerable bullshit about men?

>>22178462
Love in the Big City.

>>22178794
>>22179795
What is it with all these retards hating on 1984? Is it just contrarian pseuds LARPing that they can dunk on an accessible book or libtards triggered by how easy it is to make parallels to globohomo? If it's the former, just shut up because no one will ever be as impressed with you as you yourself are. If it's the latter, the book clearly expresses socio-political currents that are omnipresent regardless of a particular ideology--they're universal so instead of sperging about conservatives making fun of you for legislating "her penis" maybe you should become a better reader.

>>22179420
Filtration system is working well, i see.

Of books I've read recently, probably The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I was kind of expecting a goyslop thriller going into but it was so cringe and not competently written at all even in the genre sense. You're better off just watching the movie.

Also A Little Life but I knew what I was getting into with that one and I don't regret reading it just because of how absurd/memorabe it is.

>>22180360
What didn't you like about this one? Haven't read it but I thought Blindness was pretty good.

>>22178462
Stoner

Lessons in Chemistry

>>22178462
My own short stories.

>>22178462
It's well written in the sense it absolutely accomplished what it set out to do, but it is physically difficult to continue reading.

>>22179455
filtered

>>22180566
i only wish i had been filtered earlier
better yet before even reading the first sentence of the book

>>22178774
Filtered.

>>22178462
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

>>22178774
I'm almost done reading it and I've enjoyed it pretty well but I've basically met real life counterparts to the all the characters and I get what Judge Holden is saying usually. The book is a bit depressing but other than that idk.

>>22179647
>>22178466

What’s wrong with Julien Gracq? I was/am looking forward to reading him.

>>22178462
The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

Horrible translation, horrible dialog, horrible characters, horrible plot, scientific concepts the author either doesn't understand, or can't be bothered to explain so uses footnotes.

Hard to believe this is worse than The Three Body Problem.

>>22180642
His early work is, not sure what the right word is, misguided? He had the skill but his style seemed a childish imitation of style. Perhaps his sort of surrealism just does not agree with me, I love his later work.

>>22180547
Writing bad literature is still better than not writing at all. You can improve by doing the first, for sure you can't by doing the second.

Nothing but Blackened Teeth, by Cassandra Khaw.

I'm still shell-shocked by how utterly retarded and lousy this book is. I've read bad, but this should've come with a single dose packet of Bayer. It's just so goddamn awful. This book was a great lesson in being humbled though. You see, I thought I was invincible. I've picked up several blind buys in my time and I never got bit somehow. I've always enjoyed what I bought on a whim. This time...this time, I got bit.

The Spy Who Loved Me (James Bond #9)

>>22180628
This is the first high school English book I faked reading

>>22179893
holy shit yes same
although i wouldn't say the worst because it's just one of a million similar shitty books in the same genre

>>22180063
>>22180063
>he's looking for realism in a cormac mccarthy novel.
You do realize that just because a book contains scientific terminology and graphic violence doesn't mean it can't be fantastical?

>>22180710
This was an “Employee Pick” at my local bookstore and I was actually astonished at how bad it was. At least it’s a one-sitting read.

>>22180716
Same, actually. It was in a special pick section when I found it. I really dislike playing the sexist card but holy fuck, they're truly just shilling this because it's a POC female author. You can tell. There's absolutely nothing to this book.

>>22179419
Me and my buddies were trying to help one of our friends better his life by losing weight and shit, and we found a copy of this in his bag and made him throw it in a public trashcan or we’d beat him up. He unironically got back into being Catholic like a year after this kek

The Bees by Laline Paull: plot points reoccur multiple times without any pay off, I felt I was treated like an idiot by the author. I eventually gave up half way through.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi: an entirely new plot point is introduced as a retcon in the last chapter and to explain it, the author literally has a character that says "it would take too long to explain, so I won't bother". Thats YOU that doesn't want to explain it, the author. Fucking hack.

18Q4 by Haruki Murakami: just don't get the hype with this guy, if you like Japanese literature you'd be better off reading Kobo Abe or Natsume Soseki. If you want weird, just read Kafka. He's a two-bit impression of Kafka anyway.

Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig: spoonfed anti-depressive thought rhetoric that comes across as patronising and definitely not what you want to hear if you're depressed/suicidal.

>>22180528
Seriously?

Bump

>>22179950
>>22178794
Butthurt lefty

>>22178746
Any recs?

>>22178462
The Blood Song series. I was a teenager and my unrefined nose still smelled dogshit on every page.

>>22178462
I am an avid defender of free speech and I oppose book burning as a whole, but the worst book I've ever read was something I picked up earlier this year, and is the first and only book I've ever read that I would consider "dangerous". I genuinely don't feel comfortable mentioning its existence to anybody because of how awful and manipulative it is, being essentially an act of mental warfare by a "cognitive scientist". For that reason, I will give you my 2nd and 3rd worst reads, respectively:

The Communist Manifesto by some loser NEET
The Second Sex by some roastie pedophile

>>22178462
My short stories.

>>22178794
this lmao. basically everything the mainstream right likes is trash but muh 1984 is the worst. boring, on the nose, bad writing and so on... and as i've mentioned the "fans" make it so much worse, its like harry potter for conservatives
>dude its like in 1984 with the gobermint oppression!!

>>22181969
Care to share?

>>22178462
Accelerando, Charles Stross.
It was painful to read on a purely mechanical level, the whole thing read like a 3rd grader put it together.

>>22178462
coelho

>>22180710
Came here to say this. I'm surprised it doesn't get more shit for the sheer gulf in quality between its amazing cover and prose so bad that words fail to describe it. I'd call it dogshit, but that's an insult to dogshit. Shit's a landmine anywhere that houses books.

>>22180469
The problem with 1984 isn't political or ideological. It's just a shitty book. Bad characters. Bad dialogue. A boring slog. The idea was solid, while the execution was shit.

Monkey Wrench Gang, every character is insufferable and the plot is ridiculously stupid.
Only boomers and retards who think george carlin is funny can like this absolute trash

>Den of Lions by Terry Anderson
Terry Anderson is a dumbass journalist that was held hostage for six years by angry Muslims in Lebanon. This book is his memoir, and unfortunately, offers no value, except to make money for the author.

>>22180505
>What didn't you like about this one? Haven't read it but I thought Blindness was pretty good.
It's been a couple of decades but I remember that its kafkian wannabe pretentiousness got me incredibly bored, made me hate Saramago, and lead me to never read him again. Never have and never will.

> The Motivation Myth by Mattison Grey and Jonathan Manske

I had to read this waste of time as part of a mandatory book club at work. I read 30 pages then started looking for another job.

>>22181956
>"cognitive scientist"

>>22182748
I don't get it

>>22178462
Twilight is pretty ghastly, I've only read the first book. Though it could have been interesting with the vampire politicking, and if the MC wasn't stupidly infatuated with Edward, and instead was using him to gain immortality.

>>22178462
Eragon

>>22178462
The house on Mango street. Although some of you gentlemen may enjoy the chapter where clowns gangrape the loli.

>>22182859

>>22182634
>contrarian pseuds LARPing that they can dunk on an accessible book
Got it.

>>22178479
Oh god don’t remind me about that series. There’s nothing quite like a YA novel with a female protagonist written by a middle-aged man.

By literary metric I would say Harry Potter. Then perhaps some Daniel Silva's books. I do like them though. Not high literature but great to pass the time.
For the average /lit/ poster rage, 100 years of solitude and Berlin Alexanderplatz are the most boring books I've ever read. Could not even finish the latter. I was 20 at that time and more focused on XIX century french and russian authors though, so perhaps I could give it another shot.

>>22179950
>The characters are almost one note and unlikable, even Winston
They're not. Winston has an arc of awakening from a flat existence to find meaning/purpose only to be tortured to the point of betraying the woman responsible for it. I think you're just a shitty reader.
>the evil government is a fucking caricature to the point it becomes counterproductive
Like how Kim Jong-il made 18 hole-in-ones his first time golfing or when Putin scored 12 goals in a KHL exhibition game a few years ago? Nothing in the book is as absurd as examples from reality I can go on listing if you want me to.
>the idea (I'm talking about newspeak) that you can remove a word like "freedom" and people will all of a sudden not be able to understand it
"Hope and change" wins a Nobel Peace Prize for a president who escalated war and failed to hold Big Finance ("too big to fail") accountable for bankrupting middle America. He also renewed the USA PATRIOT Act which is specifically about sidestepping constitutional rights and allowing liberty to be taken with liberty. "Alternative facts" to suit your spin. Also, the "her penis" meme. You complaint the point Orwell made when it comes to politics and the use of language is too blunt and then you accidentally admit you're filtered by it.
>The only reason people praise it so highly is because they read it in school and that they apply their high school knowledge to real life politics.
When I was in high school an English teacher I liked lamented to me that a bunch of students said Fahrenheit 451 couldn't happen because people would never burn books. You're the type of idiot he was warning me about.

The reason people like the book is because it brings to light insights that should rightfully be obvious but aren't. What's more, it does this via an extremely accessible and straightforward narrative. Pseuds like yourself think contrarianism is a stand-in for thoughtfulness and mistake accessibility and being simplistic for the same thing. Unsurprisingly for us but ironically on your part, you're always the most obviously filtered by it.

Probably outing myself as an /mlp/ crossboarder, but Fallout Equestria is pretty damn terrible.

>>22183110
What is this drivel

Fight Club. Fucking putrid garbage from start to finish

Crash by Ballard.

It’s like a grade schooler trying to write the filthiest stuff they can think of to gross out their classmates. Classic case of trying to hard resulting in pure dullness. Ballard even admitted he only wrote it to be an edgelord.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull

I had to read it for school. Such a boring fucking book. The best thing about it is that it's short so you can read it quickly.

>>22178462
Beyond Freedom & Dignity
Trust me you’ll hate it too

The Netenyahus by Joshua Cohen. I'm not falling for the Fitzcaraldo meme again.

The Iliad. I got filtered by the description of the boats.

Fathers and Sons by Turgenev. Maybe the prose is better in Russian.

The Volcano by Susan Sontag. Bitch couldn't write for shit. There's only one memorable passage that concerns some statue in a garden. The rest was drivel.

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh. Miserable.

>>22180628
Filtered by yams.