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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

The worst book you have ever read?

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12:06 / 17.03.07

Cecilia Dart Thornton's Bitterbynde Trilogy. Yes, I bought and read all three books (and returned them to the second-hand bookstore shortly thereafter). It became a test of my endurance, a challenge to get through the trilogy, to see if my eyes would bleed out before my brain dissolved. The worst bit about the whole experience was that, at the time, I really wanted to like them.

A small extract:

Shang storms came and went close on each other's heels, and then the wild winds of Winter began to close in. They buffeted the landscape with fitful gusts, rattling drearily among boughs almost bare, snatching the last leaves and hunting them with whimsical savagery.

"Wild winds of winter"? "Whimsical savagery"? And there's PLENTY more where that came from!

01:18 / 01.04.07

Da Vinci Code was aweful.
Titan and its sequels by...**googles** John Varley were stodgy and torpid.

Whisky Priestess

21:15 / 01.04.07

Not a book but a short story in the latest issue of Interzone (somehow, however, still far, far too long).

"The Whenever at the City's Heart" is Hal Duncan's stunningly shit and pretentious title for his almost superhumanly shit and pretentious, and tedious and portentous story.

Example (from the Interzone website, displayed as though it might tempt people to want to buy the magazine that saw fit to print this nonsense):

"Rumpled, stumpy, the old watchman ascends on the clockwork spiral of escalator, steel scales grating underfoot, gyring up into the ticks and talk of turning gears and sproinging springs, the whirl of mirrored cogs and jam of hammer-and-bell that should be knelling, telling time in rhyme and reason, chimes and seasons..."

GAAAAHH

Stop with the whimsical, rhythmical rhymey-rhymey bullshit, you terrible, pompous, boring man or I will bludgeon you to death with unsold hardback copies of your insanely overwritten, unreadable work!

I had nothing else to read but Tube ads for international phone cards and still I gave up about a third of the way through. I have a new vision of hell; being locked in a cell and forced to read the work of Hal Duncan every day for the rest of my life.

No apologies, only commiserations to any of his fans, I'm afraid, if he boasts any on this board; I really thought that story was so very, very bad.

19:18 / 10.04.07

"Virgin Planet". Poul Anderson.

Basically a Normal Bloke lands on a planet populated entirely by clones of an all-female exploration ship that crash-landed on it on many decades before FTL. They have a primitive society of hunters, priests and suchlike based on a caste-clone system. None of these female clones have any idea what a man is, except that Men are Holy and Godlike. They think Men are sort of like women but bigger and think the Norma Bloke is a sort of useless, lumpy woman but gradually they all fall in love with him.

It's So Bad. SO BAD.

22:34 / 11.04.07

That's nonsense. Because as all sci-fi fans know, a man on an all-female planet would just be getting serviced morning, noon and night, no question. They'd be desperate for a man.

Whisky Priestess

12:59 / 12.04.07

After a few months of it, so would he.

08:39 / 13.04.07

Oh. Wow. That sounds . . . incredible.

All Acting Regiment

13:01 / 13.04.07

Oh yeah, Neil Gaiman, basically.

00:20 / 30.05.07

Wild Animus by Rick Shapiro, I believe. Whoever published it had an apparently extensive promotional campaign handing out free advanced copies of it in my area. As a consequence, it turns up all the time in used book sales.

Best I can tell, the plot has something to do with a guy who has a wild goat-man alter ego. The best part is that you can pick any passage at random and it will yield comedic gold.

12:12 / 30.05.07

Yikes! That's a bad book that gets around. Similar story over here RM, every other charity shop has one (at least). I wonder how common that phenomena is...

Phex: Dorset Doom

13:50 / 30.05.07

Best I can tell, the plot has something to do with a guy who has a wild goat-man alter ego. The best part is that you can pick any passage at random and it will yield comedic gold.

Goat-boy is pleased.

Whisky Priestess

13:03 / 31.05.07

Let's have some of that comedic gold, then! Go on, pick a passage at random (as the actress ... etc.)

03:43 / 01.06.07

Here you go. I don't have the book with me, but I found some passages online. Enjoy!

"I've changed. My kiting motes glimmer. A glow permeates the ether, suffusing everything with a buttery warmth. I feel my specks reeling, caught by an undertow. Animus is taking my lightness away. I keel, rotating down. The brightness remains aloft, the gold drawing together, its border rounding, more and more dense. I'm diving through tiers of the sky. Below, the mist swirls over smooth snow. Beneath my muzzle, two dark shapes keep pace with me--the Lead and the Wise, surfacing through the fog and disappearing back into it, trading bounds, one then the other. The dark shapes are my hooves."

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

"Sam struggled to meet her gaze, discomposed by the thought that the sorrow he'd imagined in her was nothing but a mirror of his own troubled state."

"I'm unmarried and childless," Katherine said. "Not even the birds give me joy."

05:51 / 01.06.07

The birds give no joy, but the prose gives me pain!

I'm still finding my humanity crippled by Adriane on the Edge by Paul Mandelbaum. Bookslut has good things to say about it, some otherwise reasonable human beings I know seem to quite like it, and I have it on good reference that Mandelbaum is a fine person, himself. The book, a novel in stories, is annoying for hesitating to dig into its characters, for its unwillingness to be satire, parody, or just a straightforward attempt at that specious genre called chick lit. It's further annoying in its ability to resemble nothing so much as telling a clearly funny joke in the most unfunny and uncomfortably boring way possible. There's no part you can't retell and make work, from a hospital full of people who think Adriane's lost ear is the fault of a bad boyfriend (it was her dog who chewed it off) and trying to help her move out of the perceived abusive relationship, to the real abusive relationship with her dog, whom she wants to be reincarnated as a man of stable means, about her own age. Sad, hilarious, absurd and touching... whatever emotional well you want to cull from, there's something in the plot that could do it, but it's executed in a way that robs it of any relevance or intensity.

Secondary characters all blur together or are identified by certain tics, so that being in a wheelchair or being Jewish helps one stand out against the entire poker night clique who end up in gay relationships (often with each other), but have to defining feature other than a name and that they're the new lesbian now. The India stuff is funny in a Passage to India parody kinda way, but not really insightful or particularly relevant because the thing can't decide whether it's honest or satirical and hasn't the teeth or energy to be either.

Not the worst book I've ever read, but bad enough I never would have finished it if I didn't have to, and even then, so bad I had to read it in one go, because I knew from about page fifteen, if I put it down, I'd have an incredibly hard time picking it back up again.

09:28 / 01.06.07

Hands down, the worst book I have ever read has got to be 'The Bourne Identity' by Robert Ludlum. Period. Many years ago, prior to the movie and sequels, a guy I worked with lent it to me. He knew I was heavily into reading and it was his favorite book of all time. I didn't want to be a jerk and tell him I wasn't interested (I do totally judge a book by it's cover...and back page synopsis...and title...and knowledge of the author), so I read it. This was the most painful reading experience I have ever had. Anyone else had the masochistic pleasure (and not in that good masochistic pleasure way?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

13:01 / 01.06.07

Ridiculous Man- that sounds like the BEST book ever, surely? "Not even the birds give me joy"? I'm literally pissing myself RIGHT NOW.

13:19 / 01.06.07

Hope you laid a towel down on your chair, then.

15:30 / 01.06.07

There are some comments on the distribution of the book here.

A candidate for the worst book ever?

Though it would face stiff competition from the "cosmic emptiness" summoned to mind by Harold Bloom's The Flight to Lucifer:

He did not know where or what Lucifer was, or why the voyage was necessary. It would not have stopped him had he known that one of his travelling companions was an Aeon, a heretical angel by the canons of the faith in which Perscors had been raised. Nor would his departure have been prevented had he confirmed what he suspected, which was that his other companion, Valentinus, had indeed been reincarnated from earlier lives. The image on an inner fire, which had haunted him from childhood, flared more strongly than ever after his summons by Valentinus.

Which is maybe not so transparently awful on its own, except that you have to understand how each paragraph of leaden prose and clumsy imagery follows the next without relating to what's gone before (as if the implied connection was sufficient), where each character, setting and title seems to have assumed both a meaning and relevance to the plot from some never expounded body of eisoteric knowledge, where you never find out what the journey is or why it's taken and where you never ever care, and where the overall effect is something like the latest Temple dingbat rewriting Hal Duncan's Vellum for an ever greater impenatrability with the self-obsession of an onanistic teenager and the self-importance of a feted cultural critic. Just dire.

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