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What book is so awful that it deserves a space on your shelf just for being so awful? (alien.top)

submitted 9 months ago by michelleinbal@alien.top to c/books@metacritics.zone

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For me, it's Jude the Obscure. That book is easily the worst book I have ever read, without a single redeeming quality, other than that it finally ends. I only finished it because Far from the Madding Crowd was so damn good.

But really, Jude is the gold standard of awful books, in my opinion.

What's your so-awful-it-deserves-shelf-space book, if you have one?

Or am I just weird?

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[–] JGorgon@alien.top 1 points 9 months ago

Moslem is the spelling you'll find in older books. I'm not sure when or why Muslim replaced it. Obviously neither's fully accurate because you're transliterating an Arabic word into the Latin alphabet. No idea why a modern author would choose that spelling, but I suspect the answer has to do with Islamophobic reasons.

...in any case, the idea that history all transpires the same way, on a planet with its own landmasses, native flora and fauna etc., is hilarious. How would, say, Columbus settling America work? Was there a Black Death? How? And how could history play out the same way if there wasn't? And why would a spacefaring people decide to just abandon all their knowledge and start history over again, anyway? And why would things only diverge when 9/11 happened? And...and how did Caesar, Napoleon etc. still get born? And if they weren't, how did history turn out the same?