/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22390410]

What's the worst book you've ever read?

[Anonymous No.22390426]

>>22390410
Neuromancer

[Anonymous No.22390435]

>>22390410
Call of the Crocodile

[Anonymous No.22390454]

>>22390410
Sphere

[Anonymous No.22390496]

>>22390410
I don't remember the name, but I've been trying to for years. It was so bad that my mind has locked me out of it.

This is what I kind of remember:

There's a reporter speaking with a prisoner who has a wild story about how he ended up in jail after being convicted with murdering tons of people, or something similar. He tells a different story, though. The story was this into Africa tale about this group of brits strip mining the Congo via slave labor. They eventually find these underground tunnels, and the tunnels lead to an underground city. The people in that city, who are pale white and strong as shit, get violent and want to kill humanity. They have the power to do so, apparently, despite being stuck underground. The prisoner explodes the tunnels, saving humanity.

However, it turns out he made it all up to get out of a jail sentence.
>mfw when I read hundreds of pages for the equivalent of "it was the protagonist's dream"

[Anonymous No.22390507]

I got a kobo in 2009 but couldn't afford any books. I went online to download free ones and didn't know how to find real books. Ended up with a lot of weird self published stuff.
One story was about a man who dies and is a ghost and goees about, invisible, watching the town. It was very boring and then the ghost went into the brain of a horse in a stable and there was an intensely long ramr about how the ghost realises horses are better than people because they don't hide the fact they shit. It was very long and rambling and preachy. It was bad enough to make 13 year old me cringe which was saying a lot because my friends and i were still pretending to be vampires at that age.

[Anonymous No.22390508]

>>22390410
that nicholas sparks novel about the time travel mailbox

[Anonymous No.22390516]

>>22390410
I hate books where the plot is that god has a plan for you and living correctly means finding what you were put on earth to do and then doing it. Half the time the character literally speaks to god. It's pretty self indulgent.

[Anonymous No.22390518]

>>22390410
Some were worse, but I was very disappointed by Fight Club as a young teen.

[Anonymous No.22390814]

>>22390410
unironically don quixote and moby dick on shared last place

[Anonymous No.22391412]

>>22390410

paradise lost, on the road, the divine comedy, the illiad, the silmarillion.

[Anonymous No.22391423]

>>22390410
Why would you keep reading a whole book that you don't like? I have trouble finishing books I do like. I haven't even finished my favorite book (Don Quixote).

[Anonymous No.22391424]

>>22390410
I don't read actually.

[Anonymous No.22391445]

>>22391424
Average /lit/ poster

[Anonymous No.22391452]

>>22390410
The worst that I finished was Crossroads of Twilight. I'm bad when it comes to sunk cost fallacy.

[Anonymous No.22391463]

>>22390496
The Descent By Jeff Long

[Anonymous No.22391465]

>>22390410
Had tomread this piece of shit for school. If I don't like a book, I usually just return it to the library, or put it down if I've obtained it some other way.

[Anonymous No.22391472]

>>22391412
good bait, he's your (((you)))

[Anonymous No.22391473]

>>22391452
Despite how slow and pointless it was, I was so invested in the characters and world at that point that I just absorbed everything. Shadow Rising and the Sanderson-written books felt harder to finish imo.

>>22390426
It's not often that I'll actively try to like a book and be unable to; neuromancer is one of those few. I've tried on a few occasions and it's just written like shit.

[Anonymous No.22391503]

>>22390410
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

It was embarassingly corny and I resent that my English teacher assigned it.

[Anonymous No.22391524]

>>22390516
Based Alchemist hater.
>DUDE the treasure you seek was back at the start of the journey all along
>DUDE if you follow your dreams everything will just work
>DUDE just like become a sandstorm

[Anonymous No.22391602]

The Catcher in the Rye
Leaving Las Vegas
Moby Dick

[Anonymous No.22391610]

>>22390410
the worst for me were Gravity's Rainbow, CL49, Neuromancer, The Discovery of Heaven,

[Anonymous No.22391612]

>>22390516
this book

[Anonymous No.22391640]

>>22390410
it's a toss-up between The Boy In The Striped Pajamas (possibly the most idiotic narrative on the Holocaust next to Life Is Beautiful (1994)) and Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which may be the worst attempt at YA diversification I've ever read

[Anonymous No.22391657]

negative space by b r yeager.
Laziest book I've ever read. I refuse to even capitalize its name or the name of its author.

[Anonymous No.22391670]

Quran

[Anonymous No.22391671]

>>22391602
>Moby Dick

Bait

[Anonymous No.22391673]

>>22390410
I wanted to say The Bible to be edgy but I just can't do it. Its pretty good sometimes.

[Anonymous No.22391688]

>>22390814
Fuck you

[Anonymous No.22391692]

>>22391673
Not literature

[Anonymous No.22391698]

>>22390410
The Human Stain, Philip Roth

[Anonymous No.22391829]

>>22391463
Very similar idea about the underground people, but based on the synopsis I found it isn't the same book. This one took place entirely in Africa

[Anonymous No.22391936]

>>22391829
it's almost entirely the same plot, are you sure you're not just misremembering the location it took place in?!

[Anonymous No.22391942]

Solenoid

[Anonymous No.22391968]

>>22391424
Based

[Anonymous No.22392168]

>>22391692
How the fuck is the Bible not literature?

[Anonymous No.22392181]

>>22392168
It's a book at best.

[Anonymous No.22392242]

Dune. At least trite pulp-fiction isekai stays in its lane of mediocrity, while Dune and its lobotomite fans insist that it is the some great work of literature. With its retarded worlduilding and nonsensical superpowers dune and its influence are better left forgotten.

[Anonymous No.22392499]

Frankenstein

[Anonymous No.22392512]

>>22390410
I read it out of sheer curiosity, the worst mistake of my life.

[Anonymous No.22392567]

>>22390410
Nectar in a Sieve

It's about an indian chick who lives in a shit hut and starves her children to death then dies in poverty as a begger and is jelous of her hot neighbor and revels in her aging. Also the british saved india from being poor shit hut retards.

[Anonymous No.22392612]

>>22390410
Atlas Shrugged

[Anonymous No.22392625]

[Anonymous No.22392669]

>>22392612
Got filtered by this about 1/3 the way through when I was 15, started reading it because I saw it on a tv show ironically.
Finished it when I was older probably around 20 but didn’t start from the beginning just jumped off from where I remembered.
I don’t hate it but it is heavy handed and drawn out.

[Anonymous No.22392690]

The Assasin's Apprentice series by Robin Hobb.

[Anonymous No.22392693]

>>22391424
>Father, to tell you the truth...

[Anonymous No.22392701]

it was a magic the gathering trilogy i read when i was in middle school. the main characters were some sorcerer and his hermaphroditic love interest. each book in the trilogy was written by a different author. even being in middle school, i knew it was truly awful.

[Anonymous No.22392712]

The Alchemist
The End of Mr. Y by I think Scarlett Thomas? That one absolute fucking trash, it was assigned for an undergrad English course

[Anonymous No.22392724]

American Psycho: funny sometimes, mostly a slog of a read, dropped
Confederacy of Dunces: shit prose and not funny, (PBUH), dropped
The Sun Also Rises: blandest most dryest prose, muh iceberg, i now hate Hemingway

[Anonymous No.22392756]

>>22392701
What were your favorite MTG books? I enjoyed the Ravnica trilogy.

[Anonymous No.22392808]

>>22392756

those were the first and only mtg books i have read. i'm not interested in fantasy novels anymore, but even if i were i probably wouldn't pick up another mtg book.

[Anonymous No.22393085]

Without question Gravity’s Rainbow

[Anonymous No.22393180]

i don't remember the name of the book but it was set in ancient rome with the main character being some scrawny kid named Quintus that volunteers to become a gladiator, despite most gladiators having been criminals that were forced into the occupation as punishment. he then undergoes a sort of shonen transformation arc throughout the book and becomes the sickest, most badass gladiator with zero character flaws and humongous muscles.
i had to read it for latin class in highschool and my bitch teacher kept gushing about how good the book was; she was later fired and convicted for raping a male student. i fucking hated that bitch

[Anonymous No.22393190]

>>22391640
I remember theres a bulimic girl in the true diary and its the most banal and unrealistic depiction he couldve possibly made. as a bulimic myself i was very offended

[Anonymous No.22393196]

The Koran by Mahomet, edited by Abd al Malik.

[Anonymous No.22393202]

>>22390410
L'Academie. The F. Gardner excerpts I've seen are worse but at least they're unintentionally funny. The only good thing about reading Waldun was shit posting and looking for subtext that confirms the HH.

[Anonymous No.22393594]

>>22392512
This is genuinely a terrible book; It’s also the worst book I’ve ever read. It’s “My Immortal” but if it wasn’t any fun to read.
Rancid.

[Anonymous No.22395264]

>>22390410
Tolkien’s works suck a lot and I try not to ever read shit literature so I’ll say him.

[Anonymous No.22395305]

>>22390435
>call of the crocodile
That's some gay faggot shit right there

[Anonymous No.22395365]

>>22392612
/thread

[Anonymous No.22395388]

[Anonymous No.22395400]

>>22390410

[Anonymous No.22395410]

>>22390516
It was a great book. Uplifting ending. Gets undeserved hate from seething incels on /lit/

[Anonymous No.22395426]

>>22390410
Probably The Idiot by Dost. It was dreadfully boring and I tried twice. Read about 200 pages both times and now it's just sitting on my shelf collecting dust. Maybe other's here found more value in it than me?

[Anonymous No.22395429]

Atom Bomb Angel, by Peter James.

[Anonymous No.22395430]

>>22395426
Try watching the Kurosawa film

[Anonymous No.22395449]

Babicka by Bozena Nemcova. Forced to read it in elementary school, almost ruined reading for me

[Anonymous No.22395454]

>>22395430
I can't watch movies. They bore me to death. Books are fine for some reason

[Anonymous No.22395497]

>>22390410
On the road

[Anonymous No.22395507]

>>22391412
Real, all of these are overrated

[Anonymous No.22395513]

>>22395388
Not possible, this is the GOAT

[Anonymous No.22395535]

>>22390410
Negotiating Rights. I am trying to make it disappear.

[Anonymous No.22395681]

the people in this thread saying The Alchemist is the worst have obviously never read this

[Anonymous No.22395739]

>>22390507
>It was bad enough to make 13 year old me cringe which was saying a lot because my friends and i were still pretending to be vampires at that age.
kek

[Anonymous No.22395751]

[Anonymous No.22395757]

>>22390507
do u remember the name of it

i really wanna read that

[Anonymous No.22395786]

>>22390410
If novelisations count, the one for the movie Ultraviolet is terrible in a way that isn't even ironically funny. Just a joyless nonsensical drag.

If they don't, my answer is Heartstone, by C.J Sansom, a mystery/detective story set in 16th century England that has one of the worst and least satisfying conclusions I have ever read to a mystery novel at the end of a long and exasperating plot I persevered with in the hopes of a good resolution to the mystery. When I got to the end I was actually irl angry. There are many books that I didn't finish which might well be worse but they at least have the decency to let you know they'll be awful by the end of the first chapter, if not page.

[Anonymous No.22395863]

>>22392612
Rands kooky politics aside, her books sound like they have interesting plots at least?

[Anonymous No.22395881]

Quran
TKAMB (assigned)
Anne Frank's Dad's Diary (assigned)
Sapiens (dropped after going was this shit written by a kike *checks author* ohhhh)
On The Road (dropped)

[Anonymous No.22396008]

>>22390426
Hard agree. This and Pattern Recognition were a fucking chore to read. Gibson can't write.

[Anonymous No.22396076]

>>22395881
What don't you like about On the Road?

[Anonymous No.22396109]

>>22390410
Either The Catcher in the Rye or The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
It's hard to tell definitively which one of the two is the worst because each of them is an unfathomable bottom of a cesspit in its own unique way.

[Anonymous No.22396177]

Justine by De Sade.

[Anonymous No.22396235]

>>22395430
literally has lost footage

[Anonymous No.22396272]

>>22390410
Moby Dick. It was just one long wank.

[Anonymous No.22396307]

Entirety of white man bad slop that was forced down my throat back in school.

[Anonymous No.22396309]

>>22390410
Finesse (Radioactive Tales of Love)

[Anonymous No.22396334]

>>22390410
not a response to your question but your image

[Anonymous No.22396428]

>>22390410
>no kafka itt
The Trial
pure slog

[Anonymous No.22396472]

This is unreadable trash and I say it as someone with a pretty high tolerance for fantasy mediocrity

[Anonymous No.22396532]

>>22390516
Was about to post that.

[Anonymous No.22396551]

>>22390410
"graceling". Because blindly picking book with sword-lady went well when it was throne of glass.
It's a total failure of a book. It has stupid pronouns-in-twitter-bio politics, and I assume this is the only reason some wokerista publisher could overlook its shittiness. I only got 30 pages in, and for the last half of that I was only staying to watch the trainwreck. It has no creativity, the mental imagery it showed was bland, the main character gets introduced as ""ooh wow she kills peopel with zero effort wowe so cool" and is a "graceling" which is authorspeak for "stfu she's just magic at this shit", who wants to overthrow all the kings (who are obviously unjust). She and simp-friend have made the "council" (anti-bad-person league) who fight evil people (everybody in power) who are all really weak, really stupid and evil for no reason.

Everything is so shittingly obviously lazy, even if I were politically retarded I'd still hate this book. It has a map, but it has 7 kingdoms; 6 are copy-paste same-size kingdoms with one city each, called "[King name] City". The westmost one is "wester" and the east "estill", south and north are also slurred cardinal directions, the middle one is "middluns", FFS. There's one island kingdom too, which is good-person-land.

[Anonymous No.22396562]

>>22392724
>Confederacy of Dunces: shit prose and not funny, (PBUH), dropped
For the sake of humanity’s future, I hope you are sterile.

[Anonymous No.22396717]

>>22390410
pseudoscientific technocratic leftist WEF propaganda.

[Anonymous No.22396731]

>>22396717
Ah, the same guy that boasted how pandemics, wars and mass starvation won't happen in the 21st century because UN and WHO have
get ready
P R O C E D U R E S

[Anonymous No.22396803]

>>22396551
it boggles my mind that graceling triggered your autism yet throne of glass did not

[Anonymous No.22396900]

>>22395863
I'll agree, the plot is very interesting when written down in a summary. But I feel the characters that drive the plots are such rough, predictable archetypes to convey Rands heavy-handed moralizing that it takes out of the experience. I've only ever read Atlas Shrugged, so Fountainhead may be different, but I don't believe it. I think Atlas Shrugged could be a great book and its politics much more effective conveyed if it was simply written better.

[Anonymous No.22397087]

probably hannibal rising

in general i don't read bad books. i know enough to know if something will be absolute shit. and if i read something that i had suspected wouldn't be absolute shit, but which then turned out to be absolute shit, i would simply just stop reading it

hannibal rising is a special case because i was invested in the books from loving the show and they were very easy to read on a pleb level. and the first two books are genuinely incredibly good. taut well written thrillers with great characters

the third book, hannibal is pretty bad but still enjoyable. they take the character of hannibal lector who was a great side character who was this unknowable weird sophisticated psycho and just make him front and center the main guy. by now he's flanderised into an immortal genius rather than just a creepy suave guy who happened to be a serial killer but it's still neat and grotesque and enjoyable even though you have to give up any suspension of disbelief

but the fourth book is just fucking terrible and actively shits on everything that went before. it's the weakest, shittest, backstory for the one guy who absolutely did not need a backstory and it makes him kind of a good guy! look at his motives. it fucking destroys the idea of this guy as a sophisticated dude who happens to be evil by giving him a banal motive. and it's also really terribly written
i hear the guy only wrote it to spite people who wanted to adapt it and it shows
awful, awful book

[Anonymous No.22397277]

>>22391936
>it's almost entirely the same plot
I read it years ago and just leafed through the book and no, it definitely isn't