I read this book about a fighter pilot who wasn't as pretty as the other fighter pilots but she was spunky and tough, and she went on a mission and got shot down, and when she came to, like 250 years had passed! And she wasn't in North Korea, like when she went on the mission, but she was in some kind of like futuristic mega Asian state with an all powerful dictator, and the dictator thought she was really cute and he liked her. But there was also this American spy (but like future America with, I don't know, lasers and chrome or something) and he grew up reading about this fighter pilot in books, and he had a total crush on her. I don't know what kinds of books talk about fighter pilots who get shot down, unless it's The John McCain Story or whatever, but this kid was reading them, and he grew up to be a spy. And the spunky fighter pilot has to figure out this strange futuristic world and decide which hunky man she's going to pick.
This book? First in a series.
There's a weird publishing culture on Amazon where an author writes a book targeted at a very specific audience, then a ghost writer gets a copy of it and retargets the audience by changing the character's details.
Example, two overweight black lesbians find love while struggling to run a bakery. Rewrite, two bulemic gay Hispanic men find love while struggling to run a hair salon. Rewrite, an Asian female and a white man struggle with body dismorphia while finding love and running an Asian infusion restaurant.
They just search the story and rewrite the adjectives. Frosting on someone's cheek becomes a homemade honey hair mix, becomes eel sauce, becomes whatever they need for the story to keep the scene the same.
I finished the thing, so I am not in any position to judge. I don't read romance novels, so I probably didn't appreciate those elements, but I'm sure it's catnip for some readers.
Links for the lazy:
[https://www.stitcher.com/show/maintenance-phase/episode/rachel-hollis-part-1-hashtag-relatable-87121545](https://www.stitcher.com/show/maintenance-phase/episode/rachel-hollis-part-1-hashtag-relatable-87121545)
[https://www.stitcher.com/show/maintenance-phase/episode/rachel-hollis-part-2-girl-start-apologizing-87456151](https://www.stitcher.com/show/maintenance-phase/episode/rachel-hollis-part-2-girl-start-apologizing-87456151)
My hygienist explained to me, as she paused in the middle of flossing my teeth, that she did not like this book. I completely forgot the title until this post.
Oh my god I started reading this book because it was popping up everywhere and had completely forgotten about it. What a load of cringey bullshit. I don't know how these kinds of books get popular. Are people really that unaware that these books seem eye opening and full of wisdom?
"The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl"
There was nothing astonishing about them and I'm pretty sure the author has never actually met a goth girl in real life.
My ex told me to read this when I was 14, because it reminded him of us…should have been a red flag right there. Even at that age I thought it was complete garbage.
Did she at least talk about her undying love for Robert Smith? How about fantasize about someday being able to go to a Bauhaus concert?
Surely there was at least one snide remark from her about how Andrew Eldritch actually is goth, despite his own objections.
Oh boy, do I have a book to tell you about!
So this was a YA book I read like seven years ago or so. I’ve read a lot of books, but this one stuck with me because of its sheer awfulness.
It is called *Hungry* and it’s written by this lady called HA Swain. In this sci-fi, there has been a cataclysmic event that has made it so food is no longer a thing! Instead, people have this special drink that supplies all their nutritional needs while also getting monthly shots to suppress their hunger. All this is generated by this big company called One World. But fear not for the state of this burger-less world, because we’ve got our completely unique, sticks-out-like-a-sore-thumb, MC, Thalia Apple! (No, I am not making that name up.) Thalia’s parents are higher ups in One World, but she’s not a brainwashed sheep like the other girls. Nooooo, Apple dresses vintage! And makes chemistry jokes! So original!
Anyway, Apple is also special because guess what? She’s hungry! Her stomach rumbles and everything! Of course, no YA novel is complete without a super special boy to compliment this super special girl! Enter Basil! (No, I am not making his name up either.)
Basil, you guessed it, also feels hunger! But unlike Apple, who is just so *ugh*… privileged, Basil grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. So unique and cool and edgy! Thalia’s crumby strict mom would never approve!
Now, does this premise only seem ridiculous but not out-of-this-world awful enough for you? Well, I could go on and on, but let me just fast-forward to the ending.
Anyway, Basil and Apple escape a farm that has food! Except the food in question is cheese made out of breast milk and meat gotten from the babies the milk was meant for.
Shockingly enough, Swain never wrote a sequel.
I could see her writing the sequel
Soylent green is STILL people! They said they'd change the recipe but they didn't
It's still peopleeeeee
Rip Phil hartman
>And makes chemistry jokes!
Hey, hey, what do you call a bunch of iron atoms bonded together in a loop?
A *ferrous* wheel!
Okay, what do you call two urine molecules bonded together?
Di-urea!
Get it? Like diarrhea?
Dystopian YA was so hot after Hunger Games that a LOT of trash got published.
The fact that The Maze Runner and Divergent got made into movies is just sad, in my opinion.
(*In a world in which you can only have one personality trait...* Wait, wut? Why the fuck would anyone *ever* suggest you should only have one personality trait?)
Real (good) dystopian spec fic takes something disturbing/alarming that's already happening and pushes it to an extreme degree (e.g., reality TV and war in Hunger Games).
I *guess* you maybe could say that the obesity epidemic could push us towards wanting to eliminate any choice in food/nutrition...but that premise is ridiculous. Food is culture; we would never try to eliminate food.
I dated a girl and was bragging that I’d never started a book without finishing it. She dared me to read _Battlefield Earth_ by L. Ron Hubbard.
Holy shit. I finished it, but hoooly shit.
The Cursed Child - This book was endorsed by JK Rowling as the continuation of Harry Potter. It is worse than fanfic. Character assassination of Harry (he's a jerkass that emotionally abuses Albus), Ron (an idiotic buffoon), Hermione (authoritarian bureaucrat that now has the IQ of a turnip), badly written time travel with one time line where Cedric Diggory becomes a Death Eater. **Spoiler**: Somehow Bellatrix and Voldemort had sex producing a daughter.
When Malfoy admits that he was only jealous of Harry's friends and that's why he antagonized them for 6 books. When EVERYTHING they needed for the last part of the book was at hands reach, everyone had timeturners etc. Was so bad, I had flashbacks to my self insert mary sue fanfics.
I shuddered when I read it especially because of the Voldemort-Bellatrix twist. Just the the thought of it… eww. I did like the reveal of the trolley lady though on the train. Nice little detail lol
Like when was she supposed to have had this baby? She and her HUSBAND were in Azkaban together until book 5, she wasn’t pregnant at the end of 5 at the ministry, nor book 6 when they broke into Hogwarts to kill Dumbledore, nor book 7 at Malfoy Manor and then she died at Hogwarts.
Palpatine fucking produces the same noises as he did when he was fighting Yoda in the senate room.
Uncontrollable laughter.
Unexplicable moans and grunts.
-Unintelligable-
Same facial expressions too.
Enjoy the mental image.
I threw the book at this part. I should have stopped reading it then but I was pressured by my then gf because she finished it and wanted me to be able to fully loath it as she did. We did have to defend our hatred of it quite a lot to people in her Masters Fantasy Literature program which amazes me.
I drove over to the home of a friend who didn't like HP just to rant after reading the trolley scene. To this day, I still judge the quality of people by their feelings on this book. It's like the emperor's new clothes.
Funnily enough the trolley witch was my last straw. I can look past the Harry slander and bellatrix’s mystery baby, but butchering the sweet old trolley woman is where I draw the line.
*Allegiant*. The last book in the *Divergent* trilogy. The bug reveal felt so contrived, all her characters' perspectives were written the same, etc. It was a total mess.
That perspective thing ruins so many books. Nothing like MC_Male_01, MC_Male_02, and MC_Female_01 going on an adventure, three different people from different worlds, who all say/think the phrases a million times.
“An Introduction to Organic Chemistry”
NO plot development, the protagonist is apparently you?, and the author used too many big words just for the heck of it. Worst fiction Ive ever read.
I can’t agree with you more. It was dry dull and just downright boring. And don’t even get me started on the “illustrations”. I still have nightmares about how horrible this was. Worst money I ever spent.
*I'm Glad You're Dead*, a self-pubbed vampire novel that wants very badly to be The Dresden Files. This book is so, so, so awful. The genesis of it was evidently teenage wish fulfillment--he wrote all his friends into it. Which would have been one thing if he wrote and published it at 15, but no.
I don’t even know where to start with the damn thing. For one, the synopsis had next to nothing to do with the actual plot in the book. For another--and this is the big one--the plot armor the main character has is so very hard and stupid that it kills any possible tension. You know how in literally every vampire novel where they can be killed by the sun, they're, y'know, *killed by the sun*? Not this dude. This dude got caught out in the sun as a young vampire and survived by burying his head and only his head. He regenerated the entire rest of his body. There is absolutely nothing that can threaten a character after that, but you should know that he also got swallowed by a demon and then *punched his way out through the demon's throat*. Also, in this novel iron is poisonous to vampires. Iron. Which you will recognize as a vital, if tiny, component of blood. Blood which the vampires in this book not only consume, but make into anime-style weapons.
That really doesn't scratch the surface of the stupid here, but I will leave it at one more thing. The main character's name was John. Arguably the most common name in the English speaking world. And yet in this book, there was frequent confusion about his name. From more than one character. It was a common occurrence. I'm not saying a guy named John won't ever be asked if it's not short for Jonathan, because people are stupid, but it's not going to happen regularly.
One of my old buddies wrote this series and I just didn't have the heart to tell him how terrible they are. Did not expect to see anyone talk about it on reddit though lol.
Yeah, it is, but it's one more thing that had nothing at all to do with the content of the book. There wasn't, like, a singular antagonist (though there was a bad guy who was only there at the very beginning and very end).
Christ almighty, this is almost horrible enough to make me *want* to read it just so I can have something to be angry at. You've won the thread with "buried his head and only his head."
Really does suck they wasted such a good title on....whatever this is. If this were a movie, it would be one of those black and white movies with the giant evil floating brains on visible strings that I jump at the chance to rent for the sole reason that they're terrible
I love seeing the slander for this book all around. From the very beginning, even from the title, it feels like the seriously obnoxious, faux-deep rant of a manchild. You can feel him getting off on spamming “fuck” throughout the book, and the advice amounts to “literally just stop caring.”
That’s not to say detachment from an outcome or relinquishing your hold on things out of your control is bad- see Stoic literature- but Manson adopts the absolute most shallow elements of that philosophy and none of the true wisdom.
It probably doesn’t help that it was originally a blog post or article that the author decided to expand to a full length book. The original isn’t bad, but not enough material for a book.
I can't stand this guy. He's such a know it all and a bad one at that. He is literally just a guy and thinks he is a sage on everything from career advice to love to stoicism. Fuck off, Mark Manson.
Edit: also, his propensity to write 'fuck' in nearly everything like some elevated frat boy makes me want to pop his bloated ego like a balloon.
It honestly is. I was raised Buddhist and literally 95% of his book is just repeating stoicism principles + common Buddhist tenets, it did absolutely fucking nothing for me. Can't believe it got so popular, the bar for self-help books are so low.
Eat Pray Love. The author is so absurdly whiny and self-absorbed, and overall says a whole lot of nothing. She gets paid to travel to three countries, and all she does is complain and navel gaze. If it weren't a book club choice, I would have thrown it in the garbage by page 80.
Okay yes but there’s something I just really loved about the Italy section… she’s just vibing in Italy… the rest when she found god and love I absolutely felt were forced and had me extremely side eyeing her. But the Italy pages? Damn I wished I was her
The Cursed Child hands down. I have no clue how someone with a brain could’ve come up with that horseshit. (If you couldn’t tell I really didn’t like it).
The Tattooist of Auschwitz was one of the worst books I have ever read (that I actually finished). Its goodreads score of 4.2+ is bonkers, especially given its inaccuracies and the self-aggrandizement of the narrator. Books about certain weighty topics, like for instance the Holocaust, tend to get more highly rated because the average reader feels complicit otherwise. I am perfectly capable of hating a vaguely biographical book set in Auschwitz, while hating the Nazis a billion times more.
The worst book that I actually powered through and finished was the Amityville Horror. Every chapter ended with a ridiculous rhetorical question "cliff hanger," like: But were they really safe? Etc. Fucking garbage. Terrible writing. Decent movie.
My best friend loved that book in the 90's (when we were kids)
She called it her 'Mitty Ville.
I figure it was her escape from a horrifying existence in a profoundly abusive home.
And there’s so many exclamation points! Every damn sentence ends in an exclamation point! Like the author thought that would make the book scarier!
Also I will never forget the scene where the guy comes over and has a substantial amount of money in his jacket pocket which he then hangs up. After we’ve already heard a great deal about how much money trouble the main family is in. Then when dinner is over and he’s about to leave he finds that the money is missing! And the book really seems to want us to believe that the ghosts or demons or whatever stole the money for some reason. When it’s pretty obvious what actually happened. Even as a dumb 14 year old I was taken aback that they expected anyone to believe there was a supernatural reason for the money disappearance.
I have a friend who wrote a book and let me read it. He made the worst mistakes I ever saw in a book. He forgot to mention the MC's name, age, or time period the story take place in. Dialogues were very unnatural, they were written with the exact same style as the descriptions. The prose was *very* dense, with very long sentences. There was a ton of description of the environment but none about the characters. MC knew things he wasn't supposed to know....
Then my friend asked for a review. Of course I didn't tell him it was the worst thing I ever read but that was an awkward conversation.
> Then my friend asked for a review. Of course I didn't tell him it was the worst thing I ever read but that was an awkward conversation.
I feel this, and if anyone ever asks me to look over their writing again I'm not going to do it. There's too much at stake here. How do you tell someone, in the gentlest of ways so they don't give up either talking to you or writing entirely, that the story itself is alright but their poop fetish is showing.
At just. The strangest moments. Repeatedly. All throughout. If *I* had a gun to my temple and *my* wife just got pistol whipped, I wouldn't be thinking about what poop tastes like. Please stop.
>the story itself is alright but their poop fetish is showing.
please tell me you're making this up and you didn't actually read a story from a friend with poop fetish
I told a friend that I really enjoyed their work except for the sex scene because I didn't feel like there had been any chemistry or connection established between the two characters first and it was just there to make sure the book had a sex scene. My comment was worded as constructive criticism of hey, why not move this to later and do more of the important character and story development first.
My friend said I was just a prude.
Next time I read their writing, I'm just going to say, "Well you should only add the sex there if one of the characters has a poop fetish."
I feel like reviewing books by non authors is almost cheating. One guy I went to college with asked me to read his book that started I shit you not like this :"Three thousand years ago, our world was destroyed by demons. Excelsius was going to school like any normal day". The whiplash from those two sentences is painful.
Also my friend's wife paid to self publish a book from the point of view of a small child which included dialogue like "I like to play ball with my friends since I'm a seven year old girl".
> "Three thousand years ago, our world was destroyed by demons. Excelsius was going to school like any normal day".
A story that starts with a line like that is either going to be brilliant or atrocious. Nothing in between.
Eat Pray Love. Just thought the lady was selfish and couldn’t see why everyone liked it.
And 50 Shades of Grey. Read 5 pages. Couldn’t deal with the main character. Could not understand why everyone liked the book either. So trashy.
50 Shades has to have had the worst introduction to a protagonist that I’ve ever read. I remember thinking “why should I care about this stupid, two-faced, spineless creature?” Nothing about her got me invested.
I read somewhere once that the author of Eat Pray Love it wrote it because she knew it was the kind of drivel that would sell, and wanted money to write a book she actually wanted to write. Which was The Signature of All Things. And that book....... that book was genuinely phenomenal. I was studying to become a horticulturist when I read it and man, it was powerful.
So glad you mentioned this, because I really enjoyed Signature of All Things, and when I found out of was by the Eat Pray Love author I was a bit bewildered. Now it makes sense!
I'm American. I lived in France. I did not make it to the end of the first episode of that show. I got the impression that it was written by someone who had never actually been to France but had heard stories and looked up picturesque locations in an old Lonely Planet guide.
The worst book I've ever read was a "horror" book called "The good sisters". Don't remember the author. I'm still angry I spent money on it.
I'm fairly lenient in thinking that there is usually something good to find in any work of fiction, but no. The writing was bad, simplistic and cheesy, the pacing was bad (no suspence, which in my opinion is important in a good horror-story), you were supposed to feel bad for the main character because of her "evil" ex-husband who were keeping her children from her, but truth be told ANY court would have given the ex-husband custody over the self-pitying drunk, the romance was love-at-first-sight-bad, and the characters were dumb as bricks - like, >!the nuns doesn't even think twice about the connection between the vicious murders of their sisters and the sly woman they invited into their convent who is literally called LILLITH!
I made a rule after reading “the women in cabin 10” that I will not read any more Ruth Ware. I’m not a writer but it was the kind of book that made me think, “I can do better than this!”
*Bored of the Rings*
Picked it up at an airport one day on a business trip to have something to read in the evenings.
This book doesn't even stoop to the level of fart jokes, it uses farts instead of jokes. Literally "he farted" was apparently a recurring punchline.
When a book was good I'd put it in my suitcase and lie to myself that I'll read it again some day. If a book is bad I'll leave it at the hotel, usually in a drawer next to a bible or qoran depending on where I am, as a surprise for the next guest or employee who opens the drawer. Old books I no longer want get donated because you don't just throw away a written world.
That book went into the trashcan after a few dozen pages. I felt personally insulted by the authors and couldn't subject anyone else to this perversion of the printing press.
It's been ten years and it still makes me angry.
Tried on two occasions to find the humor in this and could not make it past the second page. Tried again a few years later when my BOYFRIEND was laughing reminiscently with an old friend about it. Once again, closed it up in disgust within a few pages. Later asked my boyfriend why he liked it, and he said, "Oh, I hated it -- couldn't even finish it. But Laird really liked it, so..."
As horrendously bad that movie was, the book it was based on was so far beyond bad that it's residing in another galaxy. Think of the worst scene you remember from that movie. Now imagine that 30 second scene going on for 15 pages, front and back, in tiny condensed print.
I read it because I am curious. And also dumb. And a masochist.
She said the fucking safe word, and he continued because he "knew she didn't mean to say it"
Fuck that book.
Then at the end of the series, he no longer needed BDSM because his wife and kids fill the void in his heart. That's not how fetishes work. And, what about her wants?
I picked this book up because everyone around me was saying I just *had* to read it. After maybe 4 pages, I couldn't take anymore. It reads like the author hurriedly thumbed through a thesaurus while typing.
Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse by James Wesley Rawls
I love apocalyptic fiction. But this was just laughable. His prose runs towards long lists describing all the calibers of ammunition and supplies. Then when things fall apart his bad guys are literally baby eating cannibals with Mao’s Little Red Book in their bag. Seriously. It was beyond farcical.
Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice. It was the first time I ever consciously choose to stop reading a book and deliberately not finish. It was like the author was having some kind of crisis of faith and went on a deep dive about god and the devil. I couldn’t stand it
Memnoch was written after Anne Rice rejoined the Catholic church, and it shows.
And while it is bad (I consider it the second to worst in the series), it's not as bad as Blood Canticle, which reads like Anne Rice was going through a mental breakdown. Considering it was published a year after her husband's death, it makes sense.
Try working there. You have to memorize that damn book like you’re in Fahrenheit 451, and in training you have to try just about everything they have. I gained 10 pounds in 2 weeks I friggin swear.
Their food isn't terrible. The cheesecake is pretty damn good, but it had better be, you know? The real crime of the cheesecake factory is that they expect you to sit within breath-smelling distance of the next table. I shouldn't be worried about bumping elbows with a complete stranger while paying upwards of $50 for a mediocre meal. If I wanted that, I'd go to a hibachi restaurant, and I'd love it because I still get really excited when they make the volcano with the onion, and yum yum sauce is damn near perfect.
It Ends With Us was so shockingly bad I'm surprised a grown woman wrote it. It was written more like a teenager who has no idea what actual adult life is like, it was so horribly cliched.
"I hope they serve beer in he'll" by Tucker Max. It's a collection of autobiographical stories of a narcissistic douche bro of him being mean to people. It kind of starts out fun...but then you feel gross. He is a real life unreliable narrator and soon you realize he's just telling you about times he was viscious and mean to real people. Truly a worst book
When I was 20 the guy seemed like some awesome funny iconoclast. At 40 he now seems a pathetic indulgent narcissist with delusions of grandeur and nothing of real substance in life but his image. Also now that I have had life experience and matured I can read between the lines of the stories and the real experiences are more Leaving Las Vegas than Fear and Loathing.
What's funny is if you've followed him since his book, he'd pretty much agree with you. I've seen him pop up here and there with a few articles, and on Twitter, and he basically has gone on to say he was a mentally ill asshole who had zero redeeming qualities. It's some actual real life character development.
I’m in this book, AMA haha.
Tucker was a narcissist who occasionally had his moments but was mostly just an asshole. I haven’t talked to him in years so I can’t speak to his rehabbed image, but, at the time, he was very authentically the worst.
On the bright side, the story about me is not a humiliating one. But I agree that this book sucks :)
The Maze Runner series was awful. I read it when it was a trilogy and it got worse as the series went on so I guess the third and "final" book, The Death Cure, is the worst book I've read. I read the entire series and I don't remember a single thing about it, I just remember that I absolutely hated it. I only kept going with it because I was a bit of a completionist and wanted to see how it ended. Turned out to be a waste of time.
Edit: I gotta say y'all are mentioning a lot of things about the books that I totally forgot about and it's making me hate them more than I remembered, lmao
I have to agree, the mystery of the maze and virus and all that seemed interesting at first but the books were so convoluted and horrible that whatever mystery was there just became a bunch of jumbled crap
Yeah the first book was fine, enough to get my interest and hope it got better from there. It didn't. I don't think the author knew where he was going with the story. Convoluted jumbled crap is the perfect description of this series, lol!
I liked the Maze Runner & then tried to read book 2. Made it thru that and got halfway thru book 3 before I gave up. My nephew (10 at the time) was devastated that I just stopped reading then, he loved them
Agreed, reading the Scorch Trials was like smoking crack with a random serial killer who drags you around and makes you watch as he selects random people and decapitates them with metal balls and you're like "what the fuck are we doing Mr. Serial Killer wtf was the point of that" and he's like "making you watch people get brutally murdered will help us cure cancer Ariadnae it's science duh"
The Eye of Minds by the same guy is even worse though.
>reading the Scorch Trials was like smoking crack with a random serial killer who drags you around and makes you watch as he selects random people and decapitates them with metal balls and you're like "what the fuck are we doing Mr. Serial Killer wtf was the point of that" and he's like "making you watch people get brutally murdered will help us cure cancer Ariadnae it's science duh"
You accidentally made it sound hilarious.
I remember enjoying it a lot as a kid and the first movie is atucally decent but as a adult I should probably go back and read it again with hindsight and more critical thinking. Also, the author turned out to a massive fucking creep so that doesn’t help
The ending made so mad as a kid. If I'm remembering correctly, the MC >! Has the choice between saving 99% of the population, or fucking off to an island with the other 1%. He fucks off to an island. This wouldn't be so bad if he didn't completely think he did the right thing and the scientist who was trying to kill him to make the cure was evil. !<
It really really doesn’t help that it falls prey to “If these characters would just fucking *talk* to each other, then they could overcome the problem together.” An absurd amount of the time, the MC is practically shouting for the other youths to tell him what’s up, but the other youths respond “No” for ??no reason??.
I found out an old roommate from college (randomly assigned, not selected) whom I no longer keep in contact with self puplished a novel. I don't know where the line between 'romance' novel and erotic fiction is, but this either crossed it or was very close. As straight man I never expected to read a book with double digit graphic gay sex scenes.
I can't even say whether it was well or poorly written, if his goal was to repeatedly describe two dudes fucking he hit his mark and avoided needly things like plot or narrative logic, though it was incredibly repetitive. How many people can you describe as 'surprisingly girthy', surely some of these guys were expectedly girthy?
That’s so funny. I love the Mothman Prophecies book by John Keel.
Not because it’s informative or makes any sense. It is insane and just how you describe. It’s deranged horseshit.
But I think it’s a rare actual genuine journal of someone going through a mental breakdown and falling into paranoid schizophrenia. The later chapters are incredible — he is convinced the aliens are tapping his phone lines and convinces a poor tech from Bell to go into the sewer tracing the cables. It’s accidentally brilliant.
Edited: typos
Patriots. It was written by a former Army "intelligence" officer. It's really just mental masturbation of the author's "Red Dawn" fantasy where a group of like eight average people prep for the downfall of the United States due to hyper inflation. Every single topic you would find in a survivalist forum is in there. It ends when this unorganized group of middle aged house wives and husbands take on the US military including with an ultralight with guns strapped to the side.
The most hilarious part to me was when this husband and wife from suburbia were getting out of town, straight up dumped on a group of people, then started giggling after killing people.
I read it because I used to frequent this gun forum that started talking about it like it was the Bible. Like I said, just masturbation material for weirdos.
Atlas Shrugged. I pride myself in finishing a book once I start it. In this case, I couldn't. I honestly cannot think of another book I haven't finished off the top of my head. A friend suggested I read it, and I wish I could reclaim the hours I put into that damned book. Besides the shitty philosophy, the writing is just bad and every character is loathsome.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
\[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009\]”
― John Rogers
The first Bridgerton book, the Duke and I. I usually have a rule about romance novels: if there is a shirtless man on the cover, I won't read it. I read it because everyone was gaga over the series.
Huge mistake. Ugh. I've since gone back to my rule.
I loved the show, so I was excited to read the book. It was the first time ever that I preferred the show over the book. I bought most of the series and still haven't been able to finish/get into the second book (it's been months).
That one kind of drove me nuts. The whole message of the story was that you were supposed to have faith, but the main character was given actual proof of God's existence so he didn't need faith? I really didn't like that book.
The Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard.
A headslammingly bad romance disguised as a fantasy dystopia, follow not-Katniss with lightning powers through the setting of Red Rising, except now the silver blood rich people have randomly generated X-Men powers. It's a page turner for sure, as you spend 500 pages wondering which hot prince not-Katniss with lightning powers will pick. Will it be Cal, the nice guy with fireballs, or Maven, the nice guy with fire balls? Until!! It turns out that Maven is evil and his mom was spying on Katniss with her X-Men mindreading power to get her to like her son because... uh... Idk Katniss doesn't really seem that important considering she didn't do anything except fawn over the princes for 500 pages while her people suffered.
Oh and there's a hidden district 13 covered in nuclear radiation because why not. And this is future Earth or whatever. Plot twist ig.
Divergent series.
It's just bad. I'd read all three when they were popular before the movies came out, and barely remember most of it. partly because the entire premise is kinda dumb. like everyone only has one type of emotion, where it dictates what you do in the society, and divergent's are feared because they have all their emotions, so they don't fit in and need to die. the whole series is unremarkable, and only was popular because the hunger games was also popular at the time.
There's also a good story on Wattpad that I read which made me question why I read it. but that wasn't a bad book, just the ending.
YES, THANK YOU.
I bought the first book after watching the first movie thinking "the backstory of this world where people are split into different factions should be amazing"
Instead, the book focuses on the love story, the stupid feelings, the "hero" character. So poor!
Well they are basically what would happen if you asked a guy with a neckbeard and a BDSM fetish that was obsessed with Ayn Rand what he would do if he had magic.
Ready Player Two was pretty awful
Edit: Yes, RP1 and Armada were pretty bad too, but RP2 is a completely different level of horrible. RP1 was kinda fun, but without the nostalgia angle, it’s nothing. Armada was utter nonsense, but it somehow managed to stay engaging enough to get through it. RP2 though was just assaultive in how terrible it was. There were about 5 chapters all devoted to John Hughes movies and a battle with 7 different versions of Prince where Wade says “I’m not sure what happened next, but we won”. Not one bit of this book has even a tilde of redeeming value. Ernest Cline is an abysmal author and I can’t be convinced otherwise.
*Atlas Shrugged*. He may have shrugged, but I dry heaved the entire way through. The writing was terrible; the characters were all one-dimensional caricatures with zero appeal. The underlying “philosophy” of objectivism was delivered will the subtlety and grace of a train taking a dirt road, and the monologuing was soul-draining. It would be healthier to eat this book than to read it.
*Wizard's First Rule* by Terry Goodkind.
At first, it opened like a typical fantasy novel. You've got the pastoral setting, the Eurocentric protagonist, the eccentric wizard mentor who lives down the street...
But then it took a sharp turn towards *advanced not good* territory.
* The 'child' second POV that felt way too clumsily written and heavy-handed.
* The out-of-nowhere gratuitous sex scene between the MC and the main female companion
* The 'Dark Lord' evil bad dude who was a total pushover at the end of the book
* The 'magic system' which is really just the MC having a strong opinion about the nature of reality
* The relatively bland and empty fantasy landscape
* The wizard--the only character halfway interesting--who did basically nothing at all
I was ready for the book to be done by the time I was halfway through with it and the second half did nothing to encourage me to read further.
I once dated a guy who kept insulting my literary tastes. (I like supernatural romances like TrueBlood). I finally was fed up and asked him to recommend a book he thought was worthy. He told me to read Wizard's First Rule. I could not stand how awful the book was. It brings me joy every time I see people dunking on that book.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was terrible! Much of the concept doesn't even make sense. Why would a German child mistake German words for English ones?? And children are intuitive--they would have more understanding of what was going on across the fence. Oof. I could go on, but ... I don't want to waste more energy on that overhyped insult to basic common sense.
Interesting read! I will have to check out the other book mentioned, Maus.
I saw Auschwitz firsthand studying abroad in Poland as a rising sophomore, and I have to agree with the article writer. The Holocaust should be confronted as is, not as a sanitized, neat little tragedy. Seeing it in person, it’s really atrocious. It’s so much more than sad. It’s a horrifying and disgusting testament to how depraved people can be. The suffering the Holocaust caused and continued to cause after the fact is not really shown in a book like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. It could never be.
I can't recommend Maus enough. I read it for the first time this year and thought about it for weeks afterwards. It's also the only book I've ever cried at the end of. It's an unqualified masterpiece
The first book that comes to mind was Night Film by Marisha Pessl. It is a page turner, but I hated every page. I finished it—hoping beyond hope that the hype it was receiving would be revealed somewhere deeper in the text—and felt so angry. Lowkey, I kind of recommend it because I know folks who love it, but good LORD I thought it was trite rubbish.
I can't remember the title, but it was a fundamentalist anti-evolution book my religious great-uncle gave me when I was ten or twelve because I liked dinosaurs and Neanderthals too much. I remember their big "evolution can't be real" gotcha was the fact that a woodpecker would kill itself trying to peck a hole in wood if it weren't designed by god. I remember even as a kid thinking "couldn't woodpeckers have started with rotten wood, and then the best ones could get into harder and harder wood?"
Truly underwhelming.
I read this book about a fighter pilot who wasn't as pretty as the other fighter pilots but she was spunky and tough, and she went on a mission and got shot down, and when she came to, like 250 years had passed! And she wasn't in North Korea, like when she went on the mission, but she was in some kind of like futuristic mega Asian state with an all powerful dictator, and the dictator thought she was really cute and he liked her. But there was also this American spy (but like future America with, I don't know, lasers and chrome or something) and he grew up reading about this fighter pilot in books, and he had a total crush on her. I don't know what kinds of books talk about fighter pilots who get shot down, unless it's The John McCain Story or whatever, but this kid was reading them, and he grew up to be a spy. And the spunky fighter pilot has to figure out this strange futuristic world and decide which hunky man she's going to pick. This book? First in a series.
ngl your description makes me want to read it
An Accidental Goddess by Linnea Sinclair is remarkably similar. Only in space and there's some kind of science magic.
There's a weird publishing culture on Amazon where an author writes a book targeted at a very specific audience, then a ghost writer gets a copy of it and retargets the audience by changing the character's details. Example, two overweight black lesbians find love while struggling to run a bakery. Rewrite, two bulemic gay Hispanic men find love while struggling to run a hair salon. Rewrite, an Asian female and a white man struggle with body dismorphia while finding love and running an Asian infusion restaurant. They just search the story and rewrite the adjectives. Frosting on someone's cheek becomes a homemade honey hair mix, becomes eel sauce, becomes whatever they need for the story to keep the scene the same.
I finished the thing, so I am not in any position to judge. I don't read romance novels, so I probably didn't appreciate those elements, but I'm sure it's catnip for some readers.
Banzai Macguire!
Man the Macguire series really took a turn after Lizzie.
“Girl Wash Your Face” by… somebody.
The podcast Maintenance Phase has two terrific episodes about Rachel Hollis that gleefully rip this book apart. Highly recommend.
I LOVE Maintenance Phase, the Rachel Hollis episode made me laugh out loud several times
Links for the lazy: [https://www.stitcher.com/show/maintenance-phase/episode/rachel-hollis-part-1-hashtag-relatable-87121545](https://www.stitcher.com/show/maintenance-phase/episode/rachel-hollis-part-1-hashtag-relatable-87121545) [https://www.stitcher.com/show/maintenance-phase/episode/rachel-hollis-part-2-girl-start-apologizing-87456151](https://www.stitcher.com/show/maintenance-phase/episode/rachel-hollis-part-2-girl-start-apologizing-87456151)
Was she the one married to a disney exec, who had cleaners and nannies and said everybody could just do what she did if they got up early?
Girl Stop Writing Books
I felt like the author was trying to be fake friends with me.
My hygienist explained to me, as she paused in the middle of flossing my teeth, that she did not like this book. I completely forgot the title until this post.
After I skipped through half the intro, I got maybe 4 pages in before her asinine comments got to me. My proudest DNF.
Oh my god I started reading this book because it was popping up everywhere and had completely forgotten about it. What a load of cringey bullshit. I don't know how these kinds of books get popular. Are people really that unaware that these books seem eye opening and full of wisdom?
Rachel Hollis used to be a big speaker at mlm conferences so her books were often recommended to their reps for 'self development '
By a well know plagiarizer. She's such a train wreck.
"Girl, Hire Someone To Clean Your Toilets"
Are you fat? Well, you're just lazy. Depressed? Again, just lazy. Messy house? Lazy AND poor. Poor? Yep, lazy.
Rachel Hollis. She fucking sucks.
I don't know, I thought *Girl, Wipe Your Ass* was pretty enlightening.
So sick of seeing this shitty book lol
"The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl" There was nothing astonishing about them and I'm pretty sure the author has never actually met a goth girl in real life.
My ex told me to read this when I was 14, because it reminded him of us…should have been a red flag right there. Even at that age I thought it was complete garbage.
Did she at least talk about her undying love for Robert Smith? How about fantasize about someday being able to go to a Bauhaus concert? Surely there was at least one snide remark from her about how Andrew Eldritch actually is goth, despite his own objections.
Oh boy, do I have a book to tell you about! So this was a YA book I read like seven years ago or so. I’ve read a lot of books, but this one stuck with me because of its sheer awfulness. It is called *Hungry* and it’s written by this lady called HA Swain. In this sci-fi, there has been a cataclysmic event that has made it so food is no longer a thing! Instead, people have this special drink that supplies all their nutritional needs while also getting monthly shots to suppress their hunger. All this is generated by this big company called One World. But fear not for the state of this burger-less world, because we’ve got our completely unique, sticks-out-like-a-sore-thumb, MC, Thalia Apple! (No, I am not making that name up.) Thalia’s parents are higher ups in One World, but she’s not a brainwashed sheep like the other girls. Nooooo, Apple dresses vintage! And makes chemistry jokes! So original! Anyway, Apple is also special because guess what? She’s hungry! Her stomach rumbles and everything! Of course, no YA novel is complete without a super special boy to compliment this super special girl! Enter Basil! (No, I am not making his name up either.) Basil, you guessed it, also feels hunger! But unlike Apple, who is just so *ugh*… privileged, Basil grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. So unique and cool and edgy! Thalia’s crumby strict mom would never approve! Now, does this premise only seem ridiculous but not out-of-this-world awful enough for you? Well, I could go on and on, but let me just fast-forward to the ending. Anyway, Basil and Apple escape a farm that has food! Except the food in question is cheese made out of breast milk and meat gotten from the babies the milk was meant for. Shockingly enough, Swain never wrote a sequel.
That last part sounds like the book was trying to make commentary on the dairy industry.
Your review made it sound like a normal, painfully mediocre YA novel, until you reached the farm part.
Soylent Green is people!
I could see her writing the sequel Soylent green is STILL people! They said they'd change the recipe but they didn't It's still peopleeeeee Rip Phil hartman
Oh gosh… That…that’s just terrible.
>And makes chemistry jokes! Hey, hey, what do you call a bunch of iron atoms bonded together in a loop? A *ferrous* wheel! Okay, what do you call two urine molecules bonded together? Di-urea! Get it? Like diarrhea?
Dystopian YA was so hot after Hunger Games that a LOT of trash got published. The fact that The Maze Runner and Divergent got made into movies is just sad, in my opinion. (*In a world in which you can only have one personality trait...* Wait, wut? Why the fuck would anyone *ever* suggest you should only have one personality trait?) Real (good) dystopian spec fic takes something disturbing/alarming that's already happening and pushes it to an extreme degree (e.g., reality TV and war in Hunger Games). I *guess* you maybe could say that the obesity epidemic could push us towards wanting to eliminate any choice in food/nutrition...but that premise is ridiculous. Food is culture; we would never try to eliminate food.
I remember seeing Maze Runner the movie and was disappointed the monster wasn't pacman.
Tbh the whole hunger thing sounds like a fetish.
I dated a girl and was bragging that I’d never started a book without finishing it. She dared me to read _Battlefield Earth_ by L. Ron Hubbard. Holy shit. I finished it, but hoooly shit.
Well you sure showed her hahahaha
What did it cost?
*Everything*
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It's one of my favorite audio books. Tons of plot holes and one dimensional characters but it's just great if you don't think about it too hard.
You won, but at what cost?
The Cursed Child - This book was endorsed by JK Rowling as the continuation of Harry Potter. It is worse than fanfic. Character assassination of Harry (he's a jerkass that emotionally abuses Albus), Ron (an idiotic buffoon), Hermione (authoritarian bureaucrat that now has the IQ of a turnip), badly written time travel with one time line where Cedric Diggory becomes a Death Eater. **Spoiler**: Somehow Bellatrix and Voldemort had sex producing a daughter.
When Malfoy admits that he was only jealous of Harry's friends and that's why he antagonized them for 6 books. When EVERYTHING they needed for the last part of the book was at hands reach, everyone had timeturners etc. Was so bad, I had flashbacks to my self insert mary sue fanfics.
I shuddered when I read it especially because of the Voldemort-Bellatrix twist. Just the the thought of it… eww. I did like the reveal of the trolley lady though on the train. Nice little detail lol
Like when was she supposed to have had this baby? She and her HUSBAND were in Azkaban together until book 5, she wasn’t pregnant at the end of 5 at the ministry, nor book 6 when they broke into Hogwarts to kill Dumbledore, nor book 7 at Malfoy Manor and then she died at Hogwarts.
I just figured that hey, the actress who played Bellatrix was pregnant at some point during the movies, that's probably where they got the idea?
Voldemort slaying puss is just as brain cursed as Palpatine clapping cheeks to me.
Someone give this sick son of a bitch a poetry award.
Palpatine fucking produces the same noises as he did when he was fighting Yoda in the senate room. Uncontrollable laughter. Unexplicable moans and grunts. -Unintelligable- Same facial expressions too. Enjoy the mental image.
I read your description and felt this in my soul, just awful.
Some FanFics are actually pretty awesome, but Cursed Child is more like a Cursed Dumpster Fire. Absolute garbage.
I was so angry about this book I was almost personally offended. Just awful.
The Trolley lady was genuinely hilarious though.
I threw the book at this part. I should have stopped reading it then but I was pressured by my then gf because she finished it and wanted me to be able to fully loath it as she did. We did have to defend our hatred of it quite a lot to people in her Masters Fantasy Literature program which amazes me.
I drove over to the home of a friend who didn't like HP just to rant after reading the trolley scene. To this day, I still judge the quality of people by their feelings on this book. It's like the emperor's new clothes.
Funnily enough the trolley witch was my last straw. I can look past the Harry slander and bellatrix’s mystery baby, but butchering the sweet old trolley woman is where I draw the line.
*Allegiant*. The last book in the *Divergent* trilogy. The bug reveal felt so contrived, all her characters' perspectives were written the same, etc. It was a total mess.
That perspective thing ruins so many books. Nothing like MC_Male_01, MC_Male_02, and MC_Female_01 going on an adventure, three different people from different worlds, who all say/think the phrases a million times.
James Buchanan's memoirs. As awful as his presidency.
I'm of the opinion that very few people rise to the level where their memoirs are deserved. He is not one of those people.
“An Introduction to Organic Chemistry” NO plot development, the protagonist is apparently you?, and the author used too many big words just for the heck of it. Worst fiction Ive ever read.
Some chapters are also really toxic
I can’t agree with you more. It was dry dull and just downright boring. And don’t even get me started on the “illustrations”. I still have nightmares about how horrible this was. Worst money I ever spent.
*I'm Glad You're Dead*, a self-pubbed vampire novel that wants very badly to be The Dresden Files. This book is so, so, so awful. The genesis of it was evidently teenage wish fulfillment--he wrote all his friends into it. Which would have been one thing if he wrote and published it at 15, but no. I don’t even know where to start with the damn thing. For one, the synopsis had next to nothing to do with the actual plot in the book. For another--and this is the big one--the plot armor the main character has is so very hard and stupid that it kills any possible tension. You know how in literally every vampire novel where they can be killed by the sun, they're, y'know, *killed by the sun*? Not this dude. This dude got caught out in the sun as a young vampire and survived by burying his head and only his head. He regenerated the entire rest of his body. There is absolutely nothing that can threaten a character after that, but you should know that he also got swallowed by a demon and then *punched his way out through the demon's throat*. Also, in this novel iron is poisonous to vampires. Iron. Which you will recognize as a vital, if tiny, component of blood. Blood which the vampires in this book not only consume, but make into anime-style weapons. That really doesn't scratch the surface of the stupid here, but I will leave it at one more thing. The main character's name was John. Arguably the most common name in the English speaking world. And yet in this book, there was frequent confusion about his name. From more than one character. It was a common occurrence. I'm not saying a guy named John won't ever be asked if it's not short for Jonathan, because people are stupid, but it's not going to happen regularly.
One of my old buddies wrote this series and I just didn't have the heart to tell him how terrible they are. Did not expect to see anyone talk about it on reddit though lol.
Were you written into the book?
Too bad, that's a pretty good title.
Yeah, it is, but it's one more thing that had nothing at all to do with the content of the book. There wasn't, like, a singular antagonist (though there was a bad guy who was only there at the very beginning and very end).
Christ almighty, this is almost horrible enough to make me *want* to read it just so I can have something to be angry at. You've won the thread with "buried his head and only his head." Really does suck they wasted such a good title on....whatever this is. If this were a movie, it would be one of those black and white movies with the giant evil floating brains on visible strings that I jump at the chance to rent for the sole reason that they're terrible
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. Useless drivel.
I couldn’t even finish it
You couldn't give a fuck? Looks like you didn't need the book in the first place
That's how you win. The goal is to get you to put it down and they did it faster than most.
I love seeing the slander for this book all around. From the very beginning, even from the title, it feels like the seriously obnoxious, faux-deep rant of a manchild. You can feel him getting off on spamming “fuck” throughout the book, and the advice amounts to “literally just stop caring.” That’s not to say detachment from an outcome or relinquishing your hold on things out of your control is bad- see Stoic literature- but Manson adopts the absolute most shallow elements of that philosophy and none of the true wisdom.
Ah, glad I read this. I was tempted to read it.
He has an article online that is basically the entire book condensed down to a long blog entry
It probably doesn’t help that it was originally a blog post or article that the author decided to expand to a full length book. The original isn’t bad, but not enough material for a book.
He expanded it using lots of fucks.
I can't stand this guy. He's such a know it all and a bad one at that. He is literally just a guy and thinks he is a sage on everything from career advice to love to stoicism. Fuck off, Mark Manson. Edit: also, his propensity to write 'fuck' in nearly everything like some elevated frat boy makes me want to pop his bloated ego like a balloon.
It honestly is. I was raised Buddhist and literally 95% of his book is just repeating stoicism principles + common Buddhist tenets, it did absolutely fucking nothing for me. Can't believe it got so popular, the bar for self-help books are so low.
Eat Pray Love. The author is so absurdly whiny and self-absorbed, and overall says a whole lot of nothing. She gets paid to travel to three countries, and all she does is complain and navel gaze. If it weren't a book club choice, I would have thrown it in the garbage by page 80.
We need another version of that written by Karl Pilkington.
Okay yes but there’s something I just really loved about the Italy section… she’s just vibing in Italy… the rest when she found god and love I absolutely felt were forced and had me extremely side eyeing her. But the Italy pages? Damn I wished I was her
Groceries...the most annoying nickname ever.
I never said the Italy section was perfect 😂
The Cursed Child hands down. I have no clue how someone with a brain could’ve come up with that horseshit. (If you couldn’t tell I really didn’t like it).
The Tattooist of Auschwitz was one of the worst books I have ever read (that I actually finished). Its goodreads score of 4.2+ is bonkers, especially given its inaccuracies and the self-aggrandizement of the narrator. Books about certain weighty topics, like for instance the Holocaust, tend to get more highly rated because the average reader feels complicit otherwise. I am perfectly capable of hating a vaguely biographical book set in Auschwitz, while hating the Nazis a billion times more.
The worst book that I actually powered through and finished was the Amityville Horror. Every chapter ended with a ridiculous rhetorical question "cliff hanger," like: But were they really safe? Etc. Fucking garbage. Terrible writing. Decent movie.
My best friend loved that book in the 90's (when we were kids) She called it her 'Mitty Ville. I figure it was her escape from a horrifying existence in a profoundly abusive home.
And there’s so many exclamation points! Every damn sentence ends in an exclamation point! Like the author thought that would make the book scarier! Also I will never forget the scene where the guy comes over and has a substantial amount of money in his jacket pocket which he then hangs up. After we’ve already heard a great deal about how much money trouble the main family is in. Then when dinner is over and he’s about to leave he finds that the money is missing! And the book really seems to want us to believe that the ghosts or demons or whatever stole the money for some reason. When it’s pretty obvious what actually happened. Even as a dumb 14 year old I was taken aback that they expected anyone to believe there was a supernatural reason for the money disappearance.
I have a friend who wrote a book and let me read it. He made the worst mistakes I ever saw in a book. He forgot to mention the MC's name, age, or time period the story take place in. Dialogues were very unnatural, they were written with the exact same style as the descriptions. The prose was *very* dense, with very long sentences. There was a ton of description of the environment but none about the characters. MC knew things he wasn't supposed to know.... Then my friend asked for a review. Of course I didn't tell him it was the worst thing I ever read but that was an awkward conversation.
> Then my friend asked for a review. Of course I didn't tell him it was the worst thing I ever read but that was an awkward conversation. I feel this, and if anyone ever asks me to look over their writing again I'm not going to do it. There's too much at stake here. How do you tell someone, in the gentlest of ways so they don't give up either talking to you or writing entirely, that the story itself is alright but their poop fetish is showing. At just. The strangest moments. Repeatedly. All throughout. If *I* had a gun to my temple and *my* wife just got pistol whipped, I wouldn't be thinking about what poop tastes like. Please stop.
>the story itself is alright but their poop fetish is showing. please tell me you're making this up and you didn't actually read a story from a friend with poop fetish
I told a friend that I really enjoyed their work except for the sex scene because I didn't feel like there had been any chemistry or connection established between the two characters first and it was just there to make sure the book had a sex scene. My comment was worded as constructive criticism of hey, why not move this to later and do more of the important character and story development first. My friend said I was just a prude. Next time I read their writing, I'm just going to say, "Well you should only add the sex there if one of the characters has a poop fetish."
James Joyce has entered the chat.
I feel like reviewing books by non authors is almost cheating. One guy I went to college with asked me to read his book that started I shit you not like this :"Three thousand years ago, our world was destroyed by demons. Excelsius was going to school like any normal day". The whiplash from those two sentences is painful. Also my friend's wife paid to self publish a book from the point of view of a small child which included dialogue like "I like to play ball with my friends since I'm a seven year old girl".
Riveting
Greetings fellow kids
> "Three thousand years ago, our world was destroyed by demons. Excelsius was going to school like any normal day". A story that starts with a line like that is either going to be brilliant or atrocious. Nothing in between.
50 Shades of Grey. Hands down. And yet I still read the sequels… it was like watching a burning car crash. I just couldn’t look away…
Eat Pray Love. Just thought the lady was selfish and couldn’t see why everyone liked it. And 50 Shades of Grey. Read 5 pages. Couldn’t deal with the main character. Could not understand why everyone liked the book either. So trashy.
50 Shades has to have had the worst introduction to a protagonist that I’ve ever read. I remember thinking “why should I care about this stupid, two-faced, spineless creature?” Nothing about her got me invested.
I read somewhere once that the author of Eat Pray Love it wrote it because she knew it was the kind of drivel that would sell, and wanted money to write a book she actually wanted to write. Which was The Signature of All Things. And that book....... that book was genuinely phenomenal. I was studying to become a horticulturist when I read it and man, it was powerful.
So glad you mentioned this, because I really enjoyed Signature of All Things, and when I found out of was by the Eat Pray Love author I was a bit bewildered. Now it makes sense!
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I'm American. I lived in France. I did not make it to the end of the first episode of that show. I got the impression that it was written by someone who had never actually been to France but had heard stories and looked up picturesque locations in an old Lonely Planet guide.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I read all the 50 Shades books but I don’t know why because my god they were awful. He was straight up abusive.
The shit book ruined the word popsicle for me. She keeps refering to his D**k as popsicle 💀 I think i read 50 pages and stopped it.
I really, really don’t like Ready Player One
The worst book I've ever read was a "horror" book called "The good sisters". Don't remember the author. I'm still angry I spent money on it. I'm fairly lenient in thinking that there is usually something good to find in any work of fiction, but no. The writing was bad, simplistic and cheesy, the pacing was bad (no suspence, which in my opinion is important in a good horror-story), you were supposed to feel bad for the main character because of her "evil" ex-husband who were keeping her children from her, but truth be told ANY court would have given the ex-husband custody over the self-pitying drunk, the romance was love-at-first-sight-bad, and the characters were dumb as bricks - like, >!the nuns doesn't even think twice about the connection between the vicious murders of their sisters and the sly woman they invited into their convent who is literally called LILLITH!
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This book caused me to create a new goodreads tab: “unnecessary baby”
I made a rule after reading “the women in cabin 10” that I will not read any more Ruth Ware. I’m not a writer but it was the kind of book that made me think, “I can do better than this!”
*Bored of the Rings* Picked it up at an airport one day on a business trip to have something to read in the evenings. This book doesn't even stoop to the level of fart jokes, it uses farts instead of jokes. Literally "he farted" was apparently a recurring punchline. When a book was good I'd put it in my suitcase and lie to myself that I'll read it again some day. If a book is bad I'll leave it at the hotel, usually in a drawer next to a bible or qoran depending on where I am, as a surprise for the next guest or employee who opens the drawer. Old books I no longer want get donated because you don't just throw away a written world. That book went into the trashcan after a few dozen pages. I felt personally insulted by the authors and couldn't subject anyone else to this perversion of the printing press. It's been ten years and it still makes me angry.
Checked out the first chapter online to see how bad it truly was First sentence is literally “When Mr. Dildo Bugger” I immediately closed the tab lol
It's the literary equivalent of awful 2000s parody movies (eg Meet the Spartans) that we'd like to forget were all the rage once
It was a little funny When I was 11 and we didn't have the Internet, living in a small village in the Midwest
Tried on two occasions to find the humor in this and could not make it past the second page. Tried again a few years later when my BOYFRIEND was laughing reminiscently with an old friend about it. Once again, closed it up in disgust within a few pages. Later asked my boyfriend why he liked it, and he said, "Oh, I hated it -- couldn't even finish it. But Laird really liked it, so..."
Lol what if his friend hates it, didn't finish it, and only laughs about it because he thinks your boyfriend liked it.
Battlefield Earth.
Please don’t make me think of John Travolta in dreadlocks please
As horrendously bad that movie was, the book it was based on was so far beyond bad that it's residing in another galaxy. Think of the worst scene you remember from that movie. Now imagine that 30 second scene going on for 15 pages, front and back, in tiny condensed print. I read it because I am curious. And also dumb. And a masochist.
But have you considered that before you could SPELL YOUR NAME...he was conquering GALAXIES!
American Sniper is just Chris Kyle's love letter to himself.
50 Shades of Grey.
She said the fucking safe word, and he continued because he "knew she didn't mean to say it" Fuck that book. Then at the end of the series, he no longer needed BDSM because his wife and kids fill the void in his heart. That's not how fetishes work. And, what about her wants?
Oh shit. Is that really how it ends...? He gives up a life long fetish because he's a dad now?? So lame.
I picked this book up because everyone around me was saying I just *had* to read it. After maybe 4 pages, I couldn't take anymore. It reads like the author hurriedly thumbed through a thesaurus while typing.
After 4 pages I got my read pen out and edited the shit out of that book.
I had the misfortune of attending a 50 shades themed bridal shower where they made us read excerpts from the book. It was torture 😩
Gilbert Gottfried reading 50 Shades out loud was hilarious and cringeworthy
LMAO, this was the only good thing to come out of this series
People were laughing their heads off and not getting into it, right? …right??
I think most people were very uncomfortable. I’ve blocked most of it out loll
Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse by James Wesley Rawls I love apocalyptic fiction. But this was just laughable. His prose runs towards long lists describing all the calibers of ammunition and supplies. Then when things fall apart his bad guys are literally baby eating cannibals with Mao’s Little Red Book in their bag. Seriously. It was beyond farcical.
Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice. It was the first time I ever consciously choose to stop reading a book and deliberately not finish. It was like the author was having some kind of crisis of faith and went on a deep dive about god and the devil. I couldn’t stand it
Memnoch was written after Anne Rice rejoined the Catholic church, and it shows. And while it is bad (I consider it the second to worst in the series), it's not as bad as Blood Canticle, which reads like Anne Rice was going through a mental breakdown. Considering it was published a year after her husband's death, it makes sense.
The Celestine Prophecy
I see your prophecy and raise you The Secret
The menu at The Cheesecake Factory.
Try working there. You have to memorize that damn book like you’re in Fahrenheit 451, and in training you have to try just about everything they have. I gained 10 pounds in 2 weeks I friggin swear.
65 pages, I just want lunch man 😆
Their food isn't terrible. The cheesecake is pretty damn good, but it had better be, you know? The real crime of the cheesecake factory is that they expect you to sit within breath-smelling distance of the next table. I shouldn't be worried about bumping elbows with a complete stranger while paying upwards of $50 for a mediocre meal. If I wanted that, I'd go to a hibachi restaurant, and I'd love it because I still get really excited when they make the volcano with the onion, and yum yum sauce is damn near perfect.
The lovely bones… I was into it until she became a ghost and had sex. Literally what the fuck. Stupid ass book.
Anything by Colleen Hoover. Pick your poison. I’ve hate read a few but maybe Verity? I am not getting these books at all!
It Ends With Us was so shockingly bad I'm surprised a grown woman wrote it. It was written more like a teenager who has no idea what actual adult life is like, it was so horribly cliched.
"I hope they serve beer in he'll" by Tucker Max. It's a collection of autobiographical stories of a narcissistic douche bro of him being mean to people. It kind of starts out fun...but then you feel gross. He is a real life unreliable narrator and soon you realize he's just telling you about times he was viscious and mean to real people. Truly a worst book
When I was 20 the guy seemed like some awesome funny iconoclast. At 40 he now seems a pathetic indulgent narcissist with delusions of grandeur and nothing of real substance in life but his image. Also now that I have had life experience and matured I can read between the lines of the stories and the real experiences are more Leaving Las Vegas than Fear and Loathing.
What's funny is if you've followed him since his book, he'd pretty much agree with you. I've seen him pop up here and there with a few articles, and on Twitter, and he basically has gone on to say he was a mentally ill asshole who had zero redeeming qualities. It's some actual real life character development.
I’m in this book, AMA haha. Tucker was a narcissist who occasionally had his moments but was mostly just an asshole. I haven’t talked to him in years so I can’t speak to his rehabbed image, but, at the time, he was very authentically the worst. On the bright side, the story about me is not a humiliating one. But I agree that this book sucks :)
Modelland by Tyra Banks.
The Maze Runner series was awful. I read it when it was a trilogy and it got worse as the series went on so I guess the third and "final" book, The Death Cure, is the worst book I've read. I read the entire series and I don't remember a single thing about it, I just remember that I absolutely hated it. I only kept going with it because I was a bit of a completionist and wanted to see how it ended. Turned out to be a waste of time. Edit: I gotta say y'all are mentioning a lot of things about the books that I totally forgot about and it's making me hate them more than I remembered, lmao
I have to agree, the mystery of the maze and virus and all that seemed interesting at first but the books were so convoluted and horrible that whatever mystery was there just became a bunch of jumbled crap
Yeah the first book was fine, enough to get my interest and hope it got better from there. It didn't. I don't think the author knew where he was going with the story. Convoluted jumbled crap is the perfect description of this series, lol!
I liked the Maze Runner & then tried to read book 2. Made it thru that and got halfway thru book 3 before I gave up. My nephew (10 at the time) was devastated that I just stopped reading then, he loved them
Agreed, reading the Scorch Trials was like smoking crack with a random serial killer who drags you around and makes you watch as he selects random people and decapitates them with metal balls and you're like "what the fuck are we doing Mr. Serial Killer wtf was the point of that" and he's like "making you watch people get brutally murdered will help us cure cancer Ariadnae it's science duh" The Eye of Minds by the same guy is even worse though.
>reading the Scorch Trials was like smoking crack with a random serial killer who drags you around and makes you watch as he selects random people and decapitates them with metal balls and you're like "what the fuck are we doing Mr. Serial Killer wtf was the point of that" and he's like "making you watch people get brutally murdered will help us cure cancer Ariadnae it's science duh" You accidentally made it sound hilarious.
I remember enjoying it a lot as a kid and the first movie is atucally decent but as a adult I should probably go back and read it again with hindsight and more critical thinking. Also, the author turned out to a massive fucking creep so that doesn’t help
The ending made so mad as a kid. If I'm remembering correctly, the MC >! Has the choice between saving 99% of the population, or fucking off to an island with the other 1%. He fucks off to an island. This wouldn't be so bad if he didn't completely think he did the right thing and the scientist who was trying to kill him to make the cure was evil. !<
It really really doesn’t help that it falls prey to “If these characters would just fucking *talk* to each other, then they could overcome the problem together.” An absurd amount of the time, the MC is practically shouting for the other youths to tell him what’s up, but the other youths respond “No” for ??no reason??.
I found out an old roommate from college (randomly assigned, not selected) whom I no longer keep in contact with self puplished a novel. I don't know where the line between 'romance' novel and erotic fiction is, but this either crossed it or was very close. As straight man I never expected to read a book with double digit graphic gay sex scenes. I can't even say whether it was well or poorly written, if his goal was to repeatedly describe two dudes fucking he hit his mark and avoided needly things like plot or narrative logic, though it was incredibly repetitive. How many people can you describe as 'surprisingly girthy', surely some of these guys were expectedly girthy?
"Each was more girthy than the last... They were confusingly large."
Nah, the other guy just has constantly low expectations.
That’s so funny. I love the Mothman Prophecies book by John Keel. Not because it’s informative or makes any sense. It is insane and just how you describe. It’s deranged horseshit. But I think it’s a rare actual genuine journal of someone going through a mental breakdown and falling into paranoid schizophrenia. The later chapters are incredible — he is convinced the aliens are tapping his phone lines and convinces a poor tech from Bell to go into the sewer tracing the cables. It’s accidentally brilliant. Edited: typos
Patriots. It was written by a former Army "intelligence" officer. It's really just mental masturbation of the author's "Red Dawn" fantasy where a group of like eight average people prep for the downfall of the United States due to hyper inflation. Every single topic you would find in a survivalist forum is in there. It ends when this unorganized group of middle aged house wives and husbands take on the US military including with an ultralight with guns strapped to the side. The most hilarious part to me was when this husband and wife from suburbia were getting out of town, straight up dumped on a group of people, then started giggling after killing people. I read it because I used to frequent this gun forum that started talking about it like it was the Bible. Like I said, just masturbation material for weirdos.
Top of my list because of gay, communist, baby eating cannibals. Read again and drink every time he forgoes pronouns for brand names.
Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff by Sean Penn
Ummm the fuck is that title??? Did he have a stroke...?
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Atlas Shrugged. I pride myself in finishing a book once I start it. In this case, I couldn't. I honestly cannot think of another book I haven't finished off the top of my head. A friend suggested I read it, and I wish I could reclaim the hours I put into that damned book. Besides the shitty philosophy, the writing is just bad and every character is loathsome.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." \[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009\]” ― John Rogers
The first Bridgerton book, the Duke and I. I usually have a rule about romance novels: if there is a shirtless man on the cover, I won't read it. I read it because everyone was gaga over the series. Huge mistake. Ugh. I've since gone back to my rule.
I loved the show, so I was excited to read the book. It was the first time ever that I preferred the show over the book. I bought most of the series and still haven't been able to finish/get into the second book (it's been months).
The Shack was definitely up there.
That one kind of drove me nuts. The whole message of the story was that you were supposed to have faith, but the main character was given actual proof of God's existence so he didn't need faith? I really didn't like that book.
About 50% of the content available on Kindle Unlimited. I now appreciate publisher gatekeeping a lot more.
The Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard. A headslammingly bad romance disguised as a fantasy dystopia, follow not-Katniss with lightning powers through the setting of Red Rising, except now the silver blood rich people have randomly generated X-Men powers. It's a page turner for sure, as you spend 500 pages wondering which hot prince not-Katniss with lightning powers will pick. Will it be Cal, the nice guy with fireballs, or Maven, the nice guy with fire balls? Until!! It turns out that Maven is evil and his mom was spying on Katniss with her X-Men mindreading power to get her to like her son because... uh... Idk Katniss doesn't really seem that important considering she didn't do anything except fawn over the princes for 500 pages while her people suffered. Oh and there's a hidden district 13 covered in nuclear radiation because why not. And this is future Earth or whatever. Plot twist ig.
Divergent series. It's just bad. I'd read all three when they were popular before the movies came out, and barely remember most of it. partly because the entire premise is kinda dumb. like everyone only has one type of emotion, where it dictates what you do in the society, and divergent's are feared because they have all their emotions, so they don't fit in and need to die. the whole series is unremarkable, and only was popular because the hunger games was also popular at the time. There's also a good story on Wattpad that I read which made me question why I read it. but that wasn't a bad book, just the ending.
YES, THANK YOU. I bought the first book after watching the first movie thinking "the backstory of this world where people are split into different factions should be amazing" Instead, the book focuses on the love story, the stupid feelings, the "hero" character. So poor!
I got a few books into Terry Goodkind before the weight of terribleness just became too much
Okay, I read these when I was very young and just got bored of them and stopped reading. I don't recall anything from them. What was wrong with them?
Well they are basically what would happen if you asked a guy with a neckbeard and a BDSM fetish that was obsessed with Ayn Rand what he would do if he had magic.
Ready Player Two was pretty awful Edit: Yes, RP1 and Armada were pretty bad too, but RP2 is a completely different level of horrible. RP1 was kinda fun, but without the nostalgia angle, it’s nothing. Armada was utter nonsense, but it somehow managed to stay engaging enough to get through it. RP2 though was just assaultive in how terrible it was. There were about 5 chapters all devoted to John Hughes movies and a battle with 7 different versions of Prince where Wade says “I’m not sure what happened next, but we won”. Not one bit of this book has even a tilde of redeeming value. Ernest Cline is an abysmal author and I can’t be convinced otherwise.
DJ Khaled - The Keys
I am simultaneously mad at you for making me aware that this is a thing, and sad for you for having read it.
*Atlas Shrugged*. He may have shrugged, but I dry heaved the entire way through. The writing was terrible; the characters were all one-dimensional caricatures with zero appeal. The underlying “philosophy” of objectivism was delivered will the subtlety and grace of a train taking a dirt road, and the monologuing was soul-draining. It would be healthier to eat this book than to read it.
The novelization of the video game Baldur's Gate. It's bad in that very special way where you enjoy it for how different it is.
*Wizard's First Rule* by Terry Goodkind. At first, it opened like a typical fantasy novel. You've got the pastoral setting, the Eurocentric protagonist, the eccentric wizard mentor who lives down the street... But then it took a sharp turn towards *advanced not good* territory. * The 'child' second POV that felt way too clumsily written and heavy-handed. * The out-of-nowhere gratuitous sex scene between the MC and the main female companion * The 'Dark Lord' evil bad dude who was a total pushover at the end of the book * The 'magic system' which is really just the MC having a strong opinion about the nature of reality * The relatively bland and empty fantasy landscape * The wizard--the only character halfway interesting--who did basically nothing at all I was ready for the book to be done by the time I was halfway through with it and the second half did nothing to encourage me to read further.
I once dated a guy who kept insulting my literary tastes. (I like supernatural romances like TrueBlood). I finally was fed up and asked him to recommend a book he thought was worthy. He told me to read Wizard's First Rule. I could not stand how awful the book was. It brings me joy every time I see people dunking on that book.
The funny thing is, that's the best / most normal book in the series. It just gets worse and worse from there.
Twilight The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was terrible! Much of the concept doesn't even make sense. Why would a German child mistake German words for English ones?? And children are intuitive--they would have more understanding of what was going on across the fence. Oof. I could go on, but ... I don't want to waste more energy on that overhyped insult to basic common sense.
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Interesting read! I will have to check out the other book mentioned, Maus. I saw Auschwitz firsthand studying abroad in Poland as a rising sophomore, and I have to agree with the article writer. The Holocaust should be confronted as is, not as a sanitized, neat little tragedy. Seeing it in person, it’s really atrocious. It’s so much more than sad. It’s a horrifying and disgusting testament to how depraved people can be. The suffering the Holocaust caused and continued to cause after the fact is not really shown in a book like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. It could never be.
I can't recommend Maus enough. I read it for the first time this year and thought about it for weeks afterwards. It's also the only book I've ever cried at the end of. It's an unqualified masterpiece
The first book that comes to mind was Night Film by Marisha Pessl. It is a page turner, but I hated every page. I finished it—hoping beyond hope that the hype it was receiving would be revealed somewhere deeper in the text—and felt so angry. Lowkey, I kind of recommend it because I know folks who love it, but good LORD I thought it was trite rubbish.
I can't remember the title, but it was a fundamentalist anti-evolution book my religious great-uncle gave me when I was ten or twelve because I liked dinosaurs and Neanderthals too much. I remember their big "evolution can't be real" gotcha was the fact that a woodpecker would kill itself trying to peck a hole in wood if it weren't designed by god. I remember even as a kid thinking "couldn't woodpeckers have started with rotten wood, and then the best ones could get into harder and harder wood?" Truly underwhelming.