Asklemmy

The Bible

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.

The bible. Inconsistent, unethical, and immoral.

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.

that's an easy one, Atlas Shrugged

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 🤦

Ready Player One

The cringe is massive with that one.

Wizard’s First Rule by Terry ~~Brooks~~Goodkind. 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.

The Silmarillion.
Probably the only book I excitedly pushed myself to read, but just couldn't.

"The Cat Who Walked through Walls" by Robert Heinlein...

Now Heinlein is usually kind of obnoxiously sexist so having a book that opens with what appears to be an actual female character with not just more personality than a playboy magazine centerfold, but what seems like big dick energy action heroesque swagger felt FRESH. Strong start as you get this hyper competent husband and wife team quiping their way through adventures in the backwoods hillbilly country of Earth's moon with their pet bonsai tree to stop a nefarious plot with some promised dimensional McGuffin.

Book stalls out in the middle as they end up in like... A swinger commune. They introduce a huge number of characters all at once alongside this whole poly romantic political dynamic and start mulling over the planning stage of what seems like a complicated heist plot. Feels a lot like a sex party version of the Council of Elrond with each of these characters having complex individual dramas they are in the middle of resolving...

Aaaand smash cut. None of those characters mattered. We are with the protagonist, the heist plan failed spectacularly off stage and we are now in his final dying moments where we realized that cool wife / super spy set him up to fail like a chump at this very moment for... reasons? I dunno, Bitches amirite?

First time I ever finished a book and threw it angrily into the nearest wall.

I can't really remember of all time, but recently I started reading Dune: Messiah, and I had to stop reading it was so bad. I might be in the minority but the tonal shifts, changes in character attitudes, and jumping right into these assassination plots, all of it just came out weird and misplaced. Definitely did not slap with even 1/4th the power of Dune.

An introduction to organic chemistry

The bible. Set aside any religious connotations and just look at it as a piece of literature: it's terrible.

Catcher in the Rye. I try it again every couple of years just to see if I can relate to it, and nope - it's still just as stupid as the first time I read it.

Canonical answer is The Homecoming Saga by Orson Scott Card, since it turns out that if the good guys have a mind controlling god computer that's always right on their side it gets really hard to have meaningful conflict.

Mein Kampf. I read it when i was still a succdem, expecting some genius rant that converted people en masse to nazism. Instead it was barely coherent disgusting racist drivel. I guess this book didn't make anyone into nazi, it just given nazis what they would like to read. This and the fact nazi state bought huge amounts of it to distribute, making Hitler richest writer in Germany.

Stephen King's It

Great story, but the writing was exceedingly dull, apart from the first chapter. I even tried getting through it via audiobook and still only made it halfway through. It's just a chore.

I'm sure I've read worse but one that stands out as making me question the time I put into reading it is Out of the Dark by David Weber. I go into it expecting a military sci fi, and for the vast majority of the book that's what you get - aliens invade Earth and plucky humans resist etc etc. The aliens however have more reserves and air superiority so are slowly winning as the end of the book approaches, at which point you expect the main characters to pull a rabbit out of the hat and do something different. Except that's not what happens.

I was definitely not satisfied with this ending, even if there was some foreshadowing earlier in the book that made sense after knowing this was a possibility in this universe.

The Alchemist and Song of Achilles are some popular books that I thought were mediocre. Probably not the worst book I've ever read though.

That probably goes to Sean Hannity's Conservative Victory that my grandma gave me when I was 12.

True slop. Fuck Sean Hannity.

Moby Dick is the book I hated the most. Just the worst slog that i remember making it through.

the Piers Anthony novelization of the movie Total Recall. it's very bad!

It's been quite a while since I've read it, so this may not be a fair assessment. But, I fucking hated The Catcher in the Rye. I wasn't even required to read it for school or anything, I just did. Perhaps I just found Holden to be insufferable. I think that was the point, but it did not make it a particularly enjoyable or insightful read at all, save for the overwhelming supertext of DO NOT BE LIKE THIS GUY. The part where he hires a prostitute and just cries in front of her really stuck in my mind. That was when it really sunk in for me that someone read this book and decided that Holden's views were so accurate that he had to go shoot John Lennon with a gun for being phony. Almost unbelievable.

The first 5 or so of Trump's books. No meaningful lessons in business to be had. Just him bragging about people he knew, people he'd screwed over, how good he thought he was at pretty much everything. How he got back at anyone who crossed him. Insufferable. I knew he was one of the worst people ever before he even mentioned getting into politics.

And in those 5 books, he probably name-dropped every New York socialite he ever met. It's consistent with his whole image of self-worth and needing to look and feel important. You know who he didn't mention? Someone we've seen him with in several photos? Who he definitely would have mentioned if there wasn't a reason not to? Jeffrey Epstein.

The sookie stackhouse books that got turned into true blood have such a fun premise but are appallingly written. A friend and I used to play the audiobooks at parties for laughs.

Three Body Problem.

bit of a cheat but 120 Days of Sodom

The one redeeming part is the guy who fucks a horse and it gives birth to a half man half horse and then the fucks that

the rest is descriptions of pedophilia, coprophagy and torturing children to death.

The worst book I've ever read has to be 1984. The book is excellent, but did not do good things for me so it goes down as the worst

I gave up on Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close after one chapter. No wonder neurotypicals think autistics are just insufferable nobs.

50 Shades… terrible writing and the sex was boring AF. The books were recommended to me. I couldn’t get through the first one. Time I’ll never get back.

War and Peace. Heard so many good things about it. Despite everything, went in not having super high expectations.

The whole book turned out like a reality tv show. All the characters had some petty drama that they blew out of proportion. Hundreds of pages where nothing really happens, people just complain or bad mouth other characters.

I had to stop half way through.

Ayn Rand's fountainhead, by a fat mile. I was young and didn't know better

Mine is "the catcher in the rye".

The main character is insufferable and not enough bad things happened to him to make it worth reading the book.

I was assigned Ethan Frome in a high school lit class and to this day I think it is one of the worst books to assign to emotional, angsty, experience-limited teens.

I also don't understand why Romeo and Juliet is the go-to Shakespeare work that we default to.

How do we handle complex romantic relationships? Suicide / attempted suicide, of course! Just what every teen needs to hear /s

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. If you could distill pure insufferable smugness into a liquid, this was him squirting it into your mouth while you’re not paying attention and laughing at you while you sputter and gag.