Books

The Guest List by Lucy Foley. It’s a thriller book

Bloody overrated book. I don’t get the hype at all. There’s a lot, I mean a lot better thriller books out there.

This book feels like you eating a fast food. No quality at all

I thought Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus was insufferable

Twilight.

When I went through my Twilight phase those were the first "serious" books I read (before I used to read kids' books or not even read at all) and thanks to them I got to know about Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Emily Brontë and eventually I got to read MUCH better books than those written by Stephenie Meyer.

I have Tipper Gore's Raising PG Kids in an X Rated Society on my bookshelf. Picked it up for free out of some donation box as a teenager because I thought it was hilarious.

It used to sit next Satanism: The Seduction of America's Youth by Bob Larson but that got lost somewhere in the wanderings of my adult years.

Fun stuff except that the zealots are still at it.

I agree 100% with your assessment. No book is more awful than Jude the Obscure.

Although the books are friend of mine wrote are very, very bad. They are supposed to be legal thrillers, but have no plots to speak of and don’t get me started on the poorly written dialogue, grammatical errors and misspellings. I think he is up to three books now and I have tried my best but haven’t been able to finish any of them.

I have a lot of the Brian Herbert and & Kevin J Anderson books they pretend are part of Dune.

I have to say they are entertaining from how much fun I had dissecting just how terrible they are.

I mean they have Paul run away and join the circus as a kid.

Also they somehow manage to get progressively worse.

The Sundowners. Jesus wept over his already plain Jewish shawl.

A Desert Called Peace by Tom Kratman (Space Marine!). It was gifted to me as a joke a while back and it is, without question, the worst book I have ever read. The background is that human colonists settle a far off planet through a wormhole, the colonists become detached from Earth (which is under the control of the liberal, paedophile UN) and proceed to go through all of Earth history (because the author believes history is cyclical or something?).

The plot is that 9/11 (in Space!) happens, killing the main character (a blatant self insert)'s wife. He then proceeds to go on a roaring rampage of revenge, building a mercenary army and turning the middle east (in Space!) to glass and basically genociding muslims (spelled Moslems for some reason).

https://www.reddit.com/r/badscificovers/comments/f277b7/a_desert_called_peace_by_tom_kratman/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

A link to a post discussing the cover

Seven Steps to Biblical SEXcess. It's worse than it sounds. The background is just as bad.

So someone at my church got this book and it was so bad that it became the gag gift that kept being passed around. Each person who received the book would add notes, highlight passages, etc. It includes insights such as advising women that their girly bits smell nasty and men don't like that.

The real curse of the book? Each person who received it got pregnant within the year. We had a surprise pregnancy within the month.

Iris Chang, Rape of Nanking

I loved Jude the Obscure! :(

Gwendy's Final Task by Stephen King & Richard Chizmar is the worst book I've read so far and the only reason I still have it is to have the whole trilogy complete and as a reminder of how much it cost me (in my country books are becoming MORE expensive all the time)

I love King with all my heart but that book was horrendous

I don't have any. I hate the Hunger Games so much I gave them away as soon as possible.

I'm about to finish Jude the Obscure today actually. I really don't understand why people say it's so depressing, maybe something in the final pages will change my mind. I've been in a reading slump and am just going to power through this book.

I keep an international edition of A Little Life on my shelf because the British edition has such a cool-looking spine (it's NYC fire escapes), but I absolutely despised the book. I guess I hated it so much I also keep a copy around to remind myself to keep an eye on it so it doesn't get to anyone else.

Wild Animus

I recently donated a grouping of Brandon Sanderson books is been gifted. I’ve been slowly distancing myself from fantasy in general, but even when I was full into it, I could not stomach Sanderson. It just reads like a CW version of fantasy.

In the early 2000s I read Loop Group by Larry McMurtry and it was so bad I felt certain that either he didn’t really write it or he turned in the first draft.

The Silent Patient.

But no way in hell am I putting that diarrhea gargle in my shelf.

I hated The Alchemist so much that I refuse to donate it and pass that absolute trash along to some poor unsuspecting person, but it feels bad to throw away a book.

I started cutting out pages to use as scrap paper when I do art stuff, so that’s going to be its fate.

Love Can Build A Bridge. But I love celebrity autobiographies, so it's a love/hate keep on the shelf thing.

The Girl On The Train

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. Not a positive experience and I really like pynchon’s writing.

Counterpoint: anybody keep a bad book because (a) you don't want to sell it because then someone else might get it and be "hurt" by it or (b) you can't destroy books, even if they are terrible?

Jeffrey archer books 😭💀

Crime and Punishment

A superbly written book, which is exactly the problem. The awfulness is what happens to the victims - their murder. I found it so upsetting, because it was described so well.

I will finish it one day. But not yet. I was recently bereaved and can’t take it at the moment.

My Middle School Diary. Cringe when I look back at it.

the electric monocle

My copy of Infinite Jest serves as a literal doorstop in my house. No regrets.

No books I determine to be awful stay on my shelf. I sell it or donate it.

That Bible, right between the Elder Edda and Ovid.

Wild Animus. I recommend it to everybody.

I wish I remembered the title and name of the "author" but it was a friend of a friend who had self published a book and offered to sign it for me. I never did get a copy but I read an excerpt online. I think it was about a guy and a girl who were running away from some guys who wanted to hurt them... there were also random "love poems". The book was a spelling and grammatical mess. It made no sense, went nowhere and the characters names kept changing.

Not on an actual bookshelf and not a real book, per se, but I have kept a copy of "the Eye of Argon" by Jim Theiss on my computer. It is right there, along with my book and short stories.

I do not think you can write much worse than that.

Moby Dick. Finished and kept just for ability to say "hey, look at that book. It is the worst book ever"

Baldur’s Gate by Philip Athens. Classic game. The book version of Manos Hands of Fate.

As a younger man I visited Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.

It started pouring rain in the afternoon so we ducked into a bookstore to try and wait it out, and also to browse around.

There was an author in the store that day, promoting her new book. A kindly old southern lady who was being completely ignored by everyone. Being a Canadian with a heavily ingrained sense of politeness, I stopped by her stand to pick up one of her books and read the back, I just felt bad that here she was with a book she poured her heart and soul into, and everyone was ignoring her. It was a sort of ghost story mystery thing. The author chatted with me a bit, then signed a copy for me, and I bought it. It looked from the outside like it could be a decent read, but I would not have bought it if I hadn't been trying to be nice to the author.

Years later I can't even remember the title, but I do remember Just how much it sucked.

First off, regular typos and grammatical mistakes. Secondly, all the sins of a crappy author. Weird sex stuff, non-sequiters, plot points that made no sense, weird contrivances. It was just bad.

On our drive back to Canada I read probably a quarter of it before deciding it was a terrible mistake to buy a copy.

I love Jude the Obscure. That book turned me into a long time reader of classics and Thomas Hardy is my god.

Unpopular opinion, but I can’t stand The Great Gatsby. Really though, most nihilist books aren’t my cup of tea.

Sons and Lovers, by DH Lawrence.

Basically a treatise on hating women.

Heart of Darkness

I really stuggled with Blood Meridian. While I won`t call it a "bad" book by any standard, I have tried twice and loss interst very quickly because of the rambling writting style andjust can`t follow it!

I gave into the hype and read it end with us. NAHH.

OMG same. I had to read Jude the Obscure for college and I despised it. Normally I love most of the classics but Jude is just melodramatic schlock. I'm convinced that the only reason it was popular in its day is because soap operas didn't exist yet.

"Because we are too menny" - I literally laugh about this line because it's so absurd. Like, had Hardy never met an actual child?

The Doloriad by Missouri Williams. I was promised a female revenge fantasy dystopian book with interesting explorations of what a matriarchy might look like and which didn't shy away from the depravity a post apocalyptic world may bring.

It was just depravity. It made me feel sick. Incest, no decent world building at all, characters all made me sick and were basically animals with no human thought. No delving into the workings of the post apocalyptic world.

The only reason it's on my shelf is because I can't bear to give it away to someone in fear they'll think I'm a complete weirdo.

A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch. I forgot to bring reading material for a weekend away and it was the only thing on a bookshelf at a B&B that wasn't a mystery or airport book. The only awful thing about Jude the Obscure is the ending. I agree about Far from the Madding Crowd being damn good.

I had to read Jude the Obscure for a college class during my undergrad, and I don’t remember a single word of it. Not one. lol BUT I remember hating it

House of Leaves

Where the Crawdads Sing

I forget the name of the book. But hear me out.

It's about a super cool spy who lives in a super cool apartment opposite a single mom (but she's widowed so it's okay), and she puts Jordan Peterson quotes around the house for her young son to read.

The most insanely obvious wish fulfilment I have ever read.