Books

Confederacy of Dunces. Awful, awful, awful.

Eat Pray Love

The only book I’ve thrown across a room.

I found Snookie's Gorilla Beach for 50 cents at GoodWill in college. In a show of poor judgment, i valued a good train wreck more than my laundry change. It came home with me. It is so hilariously terrible, and my friends and I had such a good time doing dramatic readings that it's earned an eternal place of dishonor on my shelf.

Forrest Gump

If I hadn't taken it out of the library, "Women Talking" is the worst one of recent memory.

50 shades. Pure garbage.

I read "The Power of Now" this year. It has a few decent moments but I literally laughed at how ridiculous so much of it was. I can't believe how popular it is

Celestine Prophecy

Jacob’s Room by Woolf. It’s not so much that it’s so awful, but years ago, I tore my hair out reading it for two months. I hated that book, but I needed to get through it. Annotated with the margins all fucked up.

It’s such a thin book, but it has survived many moves. I hated it so much that I need to keep it.

Disclosure: I love Virginia Woolf. I just hated that one book. Maybe if I read it again, I’d feel ok about it.

Armada by Ernest Cline. Good god that book is a steaming pile of shit. Every now and then I see it on my book shelf and I just shake my head

My old English teacher wrote a bunch of incredibly junky sci fi action books. They literally read like a 12 year old wrote a 'badass' set of books after binging Spawn comics and playing Gears of War for fifteen hours.

They sit proudly on my shelf and still get a re-read like any good slop I want to kill a few braincells with.

The Combat-K series by Andy Remic if anyone's interested.

(He sadly passed away of cancer last year. Seemed like a brilliant bloke to grab a pint with despite his loose grasp of plot and character. Haven't read his final works but the reviews suggest he got better.)

I absolutely hated The Power by Naomi Alderman. Two-dimensional plot and characterisation, terrible dialogue, and a kind of revenge-porn zeal in its depictions of female violence towards men.

As a guy I thought it oddly insulting to women to posit that, given the power, they'd almost immediately sink to the level of the worst male abusers in their use of it. As a human it struck me as a really depressing portrait of our essential nature.

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There's a guy on Instagram that my friend and I randomly found and started following. He wrote a book. We bought it.

It's so bad. It's just so bad. It's not going anywhere. I'll cherish it forever.

I have a few: a wonderful old tome on eugenics. A 80’s book on “a man’s guide to sex” (which is hysterical), and a few self published books from family members. My now grown niece still cringes hard at her Elven Priestess story her dad had published.

I keep every book I read, this year, I have 2 books that fit your description:

• Legendborn by Tracy Deonn
• Someone Like Me by M.R.Carey

Both are just absolute messes of fiction. Poorly thought out and paced plots, terrible characters, and all of the nuance of a brick through a window. Both were book club picks, and whilst I hated every second of reading them, tearing them apart in the meeting was very cathartic.

none, i refuse to keep them in my home. “and then there were none” by agatha christie was so insanely bad imo that i wrote on the inner cover “this is one of the worst books ive ever read” and put it in a little library. i was too kind honestly. i should’ve thrown it in the dumpster.

The Sword of Shanara. How Terry Brooks turned that book into a writing career I'll never understand.

Ready Player One

Most I've ever hated a book

I'm mostly a library guy, check them out then return them. I don't even have many of my favorites on my bookshelf, let alone something I didn't like.

The Maidens by Alex Michaelides.

It's just absolutely shite from start to finish.

I’m sorry, I’m really really so sorry, but Verity by Colleen Hoover. My coworker recommended it to me and I liked it for a bit but then it ended and there’s no resolution, and there were some parts I felt were so stupid I had to put it down and stop reading. And 90% of it they’re just having sex. It was garbage. But you know what? I’d read it again lmao

Jaws by Peter Benchley

I want to add Samuel R. Delany's Hogg but that's maybe too awful for a different reason than writing quality

Let me Introduce you to TOYS by James Patterson and the actual author, Neil McMahon. If you're a struggling writer who thinks their manuscript is just not good enough to ever be published, I encourage you to go to your local used bookstore or Goodwill and just randomly open a page to this steaming pile of words.

It wants to be hot shit on a silver platter. It's actually a cold turd on a paper plate. It wants to be a futuristic James Bond, but it can't even manage to be Bill Cosby's Leonard, Part Six

Just open a random page, read a couple of paragraphs, and be inspired that some asshole wrote it, some asshole edited it, and some asshole published it.

It is just god-awful. I love it so much.

Wicked. How they managed to dig the good idea hiding amongst the endless pages of the author’s self indulgent waffle to write the musical is beyond me.

I have one that is four books by different authors, printed in like the 1930s. It’s called, “This is My Best.” If that’s the case, then these dudes did not go far.

I have a copy of “Ghost” by John Ringo, which has the dark distinction of being the only book that was ever “too much” for me.

I bought it with the intention of turning “Oh John Ringo, No!” into a drinking game. But no amount of liquor could get me through the sheer grossness of that book.

“..without a single redeeming quality, other than that it finally ends.” Is incredible writing on your part.

It's not on my shelf but I will pick it up second hand the first chance I get... Battlefield Earth.

Lol I also hated Jude the obscure

I have Bryan Washington’s Memorial, and I have often thought about putting it in a little library around town, but I don’t want somebody else to have to read it.

I thought I'd peaked when I was given some fundimentalist Christian books on the duty of a wife to her husband. Then I found a book written by a pastor boasting about his conversions, with the word 'divine revelations' underlined and bolded everytime he mentioned it. I'm not sure he saw his parishioners as human.

Probably the old man and the sea. I get that it’s a classic and that a lot of people love it, but to me it’s just an old man talking to himself for 50 pages.

I have first edition hardcover copies of the first 3 ACOTAR books. The ones with the pretty covers. From ages 15-17 I was obsessed with SJM. Luckily I grew up, and got rid of TOG, but my copy of ACOWAR is signed and personalized to me, so I guess I’ll cherish it forever 🙃

Atlas Shrugged

I don't, but I enjoy knowing that good art is as ubiquitous as "bad" art and if the worst book worst can make is, so can I.

Couple friends of mine pass "Imzadi" back and forth as a game. Like, A will go visit B and leave it in the bathroom under some towels. The B will go camping with A and hide it under his spare tire in the trunk. It's been going on for decades. It's such a terrible book, but it's a great game!

My mother made me take my grandmother to the cinema to see the movie of that. Jesus was that awful. I was maybe 15. There was the scene where the kids died and there were three sex scenes. She fell asleep and was snoring through the third loudly enough that people turned around to give pointed looks. No way was I waking her up though.

My folks have a copy of The Third Reicht, a history of N@zi Germany during those unfortunate years. It dates back to one of their university history courses. I'm sure it's academically interesting, but the spine and cover have a giant swastika. I think I'm off topic from your question, OP, but it's tangentially relevant in that the cover/spine is awful but it's been on the shelf for decades. I visited them recently and spun it around cuz my bro's kids don't need to see that shit.

Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller. I think I read 7 pages and I was horrified. In those 7 pages Henry smoke, drank, smoke weed, had unprotected sex with random women in back alleys, and managed to cram twenty swear words in a ten word sentence.