For me, it’s Jude the Obscure. That book is easily the worst book I have ever read, without a single redeeming quality, other than that it finally ends. I only finished it because Far from the Madding Crowd was so damn good.
But really, Jude is the gold standard of awful books, in my opinion.
What’s your so-awful-it-deserves-shelf-space book, if you have one?
Or am I just weird?
I absolutely hated The Power by Naomi Alderman. Two-dimensional plot and characterisation, terrible dialogue, and a kind of revenge-porn zeal in its depictions of female violence towards men.
As a guy I thought it oddly insulting to women to posit that, given the power, they’d almost immediately sink to the level of the worst male abusers in their use of it. As a human it struck me as a really depressing portrait of our essential nature.
There’s a guy on Instagram that my friend and I randomly found and started following. He wrote a book. We bought it.
It’s so bad. It’s just so bad. It’s not going anywhere. I’ll cherish it forever.
Children Of The Matrix by David Icke and Bear by Marian Engel. Absolutely unhinged shit.
The Girl On The Train
Sons and Lovers, by DH Lawrence.
Basically a treatise on hating women.
I have Bryan Washington’s Memorial, and I have often thought about putting it in a little library around town, but I don’t want somebody else to have to read it.
House of Leaves
the electric monocle
Not a masochist so No.
El Caballero Tetrapaq by Jorge Ureta
I loved Jude the Obscure! :(
Ready Player One
Most I’ve ever hated a book
I read it in high school and thought it was kinda mid. It was filled with so many references I didn’t understand.
At one point he started describing his gamer gear. I read about 3/4 of a page. Realized I didn’t actually intake that information so started to reread it. Thought, “wtf is is” and just skipped through the pages. It was like 3 full pages of him just describing stuff. From that point forward I just skipped the pages where he would go into painful details.
Absolute garbage
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.
Finally… i hated this book too. I mean what in the name of crap was it
There are some books which are very much a product of their time. The Alchemist is one, as is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and the scribblings of people like Richard Brautigan. If you read them in your late teens/early twenties when they first came out, they were so much part of the zeitgeist that you were swept along and thought they were wonderful. Where you reread them decades later, you realise how badly written and shallow they are, but they still have memories of a special time in your life attached.
I gave into the hype and read it end with us. NAHH.
Ready player one
Loved it despite the obvious flaws; Ready Player Two is f—-ing awful.
I don’t, but I enjoy knowing that good art is as ubiquitous as “bad” art and if the worst book worst can make is, so can I.