Books

I have a second edition Uncle Remus I got from my grandmother.

I would heavily consider a decorative copy of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I’ll never ever read another book of hers but I’d own a purely for display copy of that one.

The Second Sleep by Robert Harris. Absolute dog shite

I think you'd enjoy Crow Caller on YouTube. They read bad books and make obnoxiously long videos about them. Quite possibly my favorite person on the platform.

I own several books that fit this category. Atlas Shrugged. Economics in One Lesson by Hazlitt. I like trying to read stuff from other viewpoints. I haven't gotten to Atlas Shrugged yet.(I plan to read the ~70 page speech towards the end of the book). I read like 40 pages of Hazlitt and stopped cuz it was garbage.

At the start of this year at a library book fair I bought a copy of the Social Animal by David Brooks. After reading a few pages I went online and did a little reading about the book. I then threw it in my recycling bin. It was too bad to keep on my shelf.

A Little Life. I hate that book. Hate it. There is a play version that is somehow worse. It’s like an expanded universe of pure shit.

Blood Canticle - Anne Rice (what's an editor. I don't need one of those).

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown.

Throne of the Fallen - Kerri Maniscalco.

​

These three books are gold standard best-selling-but-godawful-writing novels.

I’ll put my copy of Jude the Obscure up with yours

I hated The Sorrows of Young Werther but it might still be a good book

The Alchemist is so bad, it does not deserve a place on my shelf. And it does not have one.

All the Twilight ones

A friend of mine wrote a book, and it took them three years of hard work, travelling to locations to scout out, workshopping pieces, etc. I was so proud of them, and I instantly bought that book.

Oof. It's a trainwreck. Reads a bit like teen fan fic... I'll never say anything to them, and it's gonna live on my bookcase forever.

Tender is the Flesh. It’s not a “bad” novel but I opposed it greatly on principle

Gotta be Atlas Shrugged

Manual of the Warrior of Light by Paulo Coehlo. I read a couple of books by him like between 2014 and 2018. I remember The Alchemist and The Zahir to just name two. A dear friend of mine told me that in her opinion I embody a Warrior of Light as in I would embody the philosophy given in that book. So I eventually got that book and... oh my why do some people hold this as a sort of bible? I don't know. I was so disappointed. The copy I had was really pretty too, but the content... I think I gave it away some time ago but I might get it again just for my personal story and who knows maybe I'll change my mind about it.

Ulysses

The alchemist

The Binti Trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor was assigned reading for the AP lit and comp class I took in my senior year of high school. It’s received such high praise from so many decorated authors, and I was excited to read it when it was assigned to me. I really wanted to love it but the book was god awful. What hurt the most was that the ideas within were spectacular, like the different alien species, Binti’s culture and the dynamics of her home planet, space ships that are actually living entities and so on, but those ideas were executed miserably. The writing just wasn’t good, the story made no sense. Every conversation my class had about the book was a “Binti bash session,” as we called them. One of my classmates even ripped up his copy of the book and burned some of the pages to display as part of a class project later on in the year.

I'm a splatterpunk, psych thriller, horror, gothic, gore etc fan and I bought a second hand copy of tender is the flesh, I flicked through it and found the pushiness of the veganism allegory a bit too much. Also have the 13 reasons why book, just because I stumbled across it in a thrift store and thought it was funny. I also have all six of the fifty shades books, and The Mister, another title by EL James, AND Fifty Sheds of Grey, a parody joke book that doesn't have much to do with the franchise. Never read any of them, just found it funny. It's become a bit of an inside joke for me to collect any and all pieces of the fifty shades lore material.

The Celestine Prophesy

Awful books go to the Little Corner Library asap.

Nope. I feel exactly the same about good old Jude. I nearly threw it across the room after I finished it.

I have a mental image of you encasing the book in a box labeled “worst book ever written” with a red spotlight on it. Hilarious!

Her by Harriet Lane. Although I don't own it, so it doesn't have a space on my shelf. It also has an abysmally low rating on Goodreads: 2.7.

Ulysses by James Joyce. Unreadable garbage.

When I was in the 10th grade, i read a book called “Bufflehead Sisters,” and it remains, to this day, the worst book I’ve ever read. From time to time I’ll go online to see if other people agree, but this book has not a single 1-star review on Amazon, and it baffles me. Horribly written…

Modelland and Empress Teresa are some of the most cringe books I've heard of

Oh, to be able to wax lyrical about Wild Animus, the self published behemoth by Rich Shapiro, a man with too much disposable income. It’s strange, it’s overwrought, the prose is so purple that it’s florescent. And my copy was free, which was still too expensive. Your main character, our “hero,” Sam, dies in the first chapter, and throughout the rest of the story, you are treated to Berkeley drug culture in the 70’s written from the point of view of someone who didn’t experience it, rampant misogyny, and Sam slowly discovering that he should be one with the mountain goats, nay! He IS a mountain goat trapped in human form! Complete fever dream written as a hallucination. And you’re asking just how bad is the writing? Well…

"He drew the towels away. Through the resolving blur, he saw hair divided in the middle of her crown, a pyramid of high forehead, and cheeks bounded by sickle-shaped locks that pricked her chin. Her eyes were blue, fixed on him with the gravest stare he'd ever seen. He waited for her to bow her head, to turn, to laugh - but she didn't flinch. What made those great gulfs of eyes? And how could she invite a stranger to fathom them? Sam gazed deeper, imagining he saw the bottoms of rugged canyons in her eyes, the dark foundation of a different world. A hidden joy flickered in the depths, burning amid a consuming sorrow, and as he focused on that brightness, it blazed up, hopeful. Without thinking, his heart went out to her. There was no foundation here, only the desperate longing for one, more solid and lasting than the world she knew."

This terrible book will never leave my bookshelf. I can’t subject anyone else to it.

The Lovely Bones. Read half of the book about a year when it was released due to all the hype. Ended up throwing it across the room in disgust. Nothing poetic or beautiful about it. 💯 trash.

Easy, Diary of an Oxygen Thief

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

I can appreciate its importance for the gothic genre but wtf was that

Every so often I look over at my copy of Divergent and think, "How the fuck did such an unoriginal, horribly written first draft blatantly riding the success of Hunger Games end up being turned into a trilogy and a movie series?"

But hey, who am I, right?

Jude the Obscure defence squad rise! furiously hurls pig organs and Latin books

I actually totally get why Hardy isn't universally popular, he has an offkey sense of humour and is more than a bit ridiculous in places, Jude not exempted.

But it's mostly an endearing ridiculous IMO. And he just writes characters and relationships I've not found anywhere else. Jude isn't just about class, but how the world won't tolerate people who don't conform in various ways - Jude and Sue are both utter weirdos and I love them for it. And the sexual incompatibility is so sensitively written, without shaming either character - I really can't think of another book that's managed to pull that off so well, even today. (I couldn't stand On Chesil Beach).

it’s not an awful book but for some reason I’ve purchased like four separate copies of The Great Gatsby even though I didn’t like it very much. it’s well-written, but I finished it wishing I liked it more. I guess subconsciously I feel like I’m disappointing one of my favorite English teachers, who loved it.

Ready player one

The Bible. What a pile of piffle. The Old Testament in particular is freaky deaky. It should have been heavily edited, so it made some sense. Or the original cut stuff reinserted back into the book - mad shit with dragons in, and that. It contains pretty much every "ism" and prejudice there is. I've never known any book contradict itself so often. There's virtually no good jokes in it. The final 'Revelations' is obviously the work of a diseased brain.
In conclusion, I'm not a fan. Stick it on the shelf of shame, alternatively use it for bog roll.

I hate Nicholas Sparks so much. My colleagues at the library knew this, bought me a copy of “The Notebook” as a going away gift, and all personalized it. I will always keep it.

The Big Secret by David Icke.

The original space lizards control the world conspiracy theory. Great conversation starter.

The Glass Menagerie

Do I keep it because I can appreciate the writing? Yes. Did I hate every single second I spent reading that play? Yes.

The stranger

It's on kindle, so not on my shelf per se, but I have a book called Smooth Talking For Guys. I don't even remember where I found it. It's an awful PUA-reminiscent manual about how to "confidently talk to women", but it's presented as a series of set conversations that you could employ when the right situation arises. It's hilariously bad. For example, here is a real one:

Her: I need a pen.
You: [hand her a pen]
Her: Thanks!
You: [tell a story about a pen]

Cosmic Banditos by Allan Weisbacker.

Confederacy of Dunces. I gave it away a few years ago when I moved. It is someone else’s problem now

Not a masochist so No.

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. I don't think it's the worst book ever. It has some bright spots, but it was a book I read several times thinking that a book by the Fight Club guy must have some deeper meaning. It doesn't, but it is poorly paced, sometimes incoherent, tedious edge-lord nonsense.