ITT: Shittiest book you read and why you feel that way. Let's

Andy Weir's The Martian.

The humour is what irritated me the most. It felt like it was aiming for a more young adult/teenager audience so a lot of the humour felt very immature to me. One of my friends defended it, saying that he didn't find it funny either but that it made sense as the protagonist is attempting to lighten the mood for himself, otherwise he would just be in a spiral of self-wallowing and he isn't that type of character. I sort of agreed but I don't think that excuses lazy attempts at humour (lazy attempts without any sense of irony). When the protagonist isn't in the chapter, the pace also drops to a stunting halt as various people at NASA with no characterisation spout paragraphs upon paragraphs of hand-holding exposition.

I only read the book because a friend gave me a copy and he wanted to know what I thought about it.

Anything by Mark Z Danielewski. That motherfucker relies too heavily on formatting and graphology gimmicks to pass off subpar mysteries as post-modernist experimental literature. You remove any sense of gimmickry from his writing and you're left with a pulpy book with some twists and turns. He's like Stephen King, he just likes to waste paper.

>>9577854
Bloodmeme by corncob tortillas yecarthy

It's all about spitting, killing injuns, eating tortillas and saying ye.

>>9577917
> literally hasn't read it

your favorite book

>>9577932
i know this is a lie to try and hurt my feelings because nobody who has read it could dare say don quixote was a shitty book with a straight face

>>9577887
Exactly how I feel reading House of Leaves at the moment. I was totally sucked in by the visual appeal but it's a mediocre mystery so far.

>>9577854
Bought a book once from the supermarket. Never again.

>>9577873
I actually liked it, but then again I read it when I was 16.

I have a special hatred for The Scarlet Letter, because not only was it awful, it also brought my reading streak at the time to a grinding halt, so badly that I stopped reading for a while.

>>9578077
I know how that feels. Nothing but trashy pulp novels, romance novels, flavour of the month crime novels, James Patterson and Stephen King with some mindfulness colouring books and books ghostwritten for Youtubers.

I really wish we had more book / film stores in my area, other than going online there's nowhere else to pick up a film or book.

>>9578056
>don quixote was a shitty book with a straight face

>>9578102
that proves my point

if you had read don quixote you would not have said that for it would be very foolish to do so

at least you tried clap clap

the alchemist

a shitty self help book written worse than harry potter

across the river and into the trees

I didn't read it in English, mind. But the dialogue seemed just bizarre and/or atrocious. It was like a demented parody of A Farewell to Arms.

>>9577854
Probably Ready Player One. I've read most of the books listed so far, and while I think the Martian is OK at best and House of Leaves is 80% gimmicky bullshit, those books didn't frustrate me nearly as much as RPO. The cover reviews say it's a love letter to the 80s, but an actual love letter written in this style would be "Breasts, those times we fucked on my sofa, blowjobs, star wars, and anal'.

Literally Rupi Kaur's book Milk & Honey. It's not poetry, they're somebody's Tumblr blog posts. What infuriates me is how well it's selling, like most people buying it don't realise how piss-poor it is.

Typing out your
Texts and phrasing
It with
an
Enter key is
just
truly the most
poor form.

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>>9578249
B-but anon

>>9578284
P E R F E C T
O
E
T
R
Y

>>9578284
Death of a Salesman is a classic and has a piss-poor score of 3.48. 50 Shades of Grey has a better score than that.

Goodreads' rating system and reviewers don't know dick and are not representative of what has and what has no literary merit.

unironically the unabomber manifesto

because just when you think he's about to hit the nail on the head he goes full retard

save yourself being put on a watchlist and read ellul

>>9578294
Seriously though, Rupi must be laughing all the way to the bank. Imagine making that much money and appearing as 'successful' from putting in that little effort.
And she's Canadian too no doubt!

>>9578297
I wasn't being serious.

>>9578307
I know, anon, it's just that people rate shit like Milk & Honey above actual worthwhile literature really bugs me. nothing personal kid....

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>>9577854
Elizabeth Kostova ,The Historian. Terribly anticlimatic ending. Thats about it really.

>>9578319
*personnel
Don't let it bug you so much, it's fairly obvious that most people are going to be plebs and share their shitty opinions with the world.
It's a weird kind of narcissism where people think their opinion is special but are also ignorant of refined ideas. Like babby's first pretentiousness.

>>9577930
>literally a cob of corn

Drood by Dan Simmons.

It's supposed to be an intriguing mystery novel set from the Point of View of Wilkie Collins centred around whether he and his friend Charles Dickens is or isn't being menaced by a supernatural figure called Drood.

It was a really frustrating read because it kept flipping back and forward between "Drood is real!" and "Drood is really some hallucination brought about by Collins' substance abuse/being hypnotised by Dickens/some other weird reason." Pretty much every time I was getting bored of it there was another twist that made me think it was worth sticking with to see how it ended. But at the end they don't actually reveal whether Drood was real or not. I was so angry at having bothered to stick through all 800 pages of it I threw the book across the room when I finished reading it.

Honourable mention to The Night's Dawn Trilogy by Peter F Hamilton, which I couldn't even finish reading. Got half way through the third book and got to a point where I realised I didn't care about any of the characters, or the plot, and just dropped it.

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>>9578239
>love letter to the 80s

I don't think I could be persuaded to read a book pitched this way.

Especially when 'love letter to the X' means 'contains references to children's media popular in X'

>>9578284
>rated higher than anything by Joyce
JUST

>>9578462
>implying you haven't been brainwashed by the white-favoritist literary media and joyce isn't just a dead white guy who wrote literal nonsense

>>9578249
If you sent this to the Atlantic they'd probably publish it.

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>>9578090
>I really wish we had more book stores in my area

tfw I work at a second hand bookshop and use it as my personal library, occasionally buying a book I particularly liked always for well under market price

>>9578363
you can't have monopolar depression and bipolar disorder at the same time, what the heckaroo

>>9577854
Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Freud. Absolute fucking snooze of a psychological text written as a series of useless revelations (I said one word when a meant another because I just did some thing involving said word). It's philosophical at best but the point he's trying to make could be delivered in a few pages, without all the examples.

>>9577854
I've read my fair share of shitty young adult back in the day, but John Green's Paper Towns is horrendous. Not to let my bias bleed in too much, but it has to be one of the most boring, predictable books I've ever read. It felt like reading a generic teen TV drama except you stopped watching before you got to the finale. I don't know how it got published.

>>9578056
don quixote was a shitty book with a straight face

>>9577887
Have you seen his facebook page? 2/3rds of his posts are him advertising duffle bags and scarfs with HoL quotes on them.

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Empress by Karen Miller
The cover looked interesting, but the book was a massive slog to get through. The MC is also extremely unlikable as well as the society she's raised in. It was an extreme waste of my time.
Second place probably goes to The Circle. A boring book with a stupid MC.

>>9579374
i spend a severe amount of time in the second hand bookshop near my apartment. working in one is literally my dream.

>>9577873
This. I completely hated this book. It reads like a nerdy blog post about how to survive on Mars. Weir only added characters because he realised it wouldn't sell without them and he managed to get away without any more characterisation than giving them names.

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>>9577854
Pic related

The protagonist is the only example of every seen where she perfectly fits the Mary Sue. Every chance the author gets, she has to talk about how the protagonist is supremely awesome, but also delightfully humble. What no one mentions is that she is also rock stupid.

The characters are retarded and their motivations don't make any sense

Despite being only 130 pages it DRAGS

I am probably supposed to read the other books in the series, and they look more interesting, but this is canonically the start of the story.

The only redeeming factor is some of the sci-fi shi,t but it ends up turning into X-men with eugenics. This book is basically black Twilight.

13 reasons why - Jay Asher
It's shit because the girl is a weak retard and by killing herself over silly boys being boys type reasons that took place in situations where she placed herself she literally just keeps causing problems for everyone. She doesn't even try to get help. I cannot imagine why everyone is fawning over the netflix series, the book is garbage

>>9579374
T H E D R E A M
H
E
D
R
E
A
M

>>9577854
Undeniably Atlas Shrugged, and yes, i've read the whole thing.

It's rare for any book to be so blisteringly appalling in it's every slightest aspect, let alone one that's considered an actual classic. The prose is trash and cringeworthy, the characters are dull and hypocritical and merely vehicles to spill out more of Rand's shitty philosophy, the same way a bombed oil rig spills oil into an entire ecosystem, the plot is contrived and only even happens because the antagonists are ridiculous strawmen that spend most of their time stroking thier Dick Dastardly moustaches (which is impressive because it shows that Rand somehow got even worse at writing, because her earlier fiction didn't have antagonists this fucking retarded) probably because she realized her world view doesn't actually fit into the real world so she has to create a shitty one so it seems reasonable, and of course it's philosophy is nonsense, but not only is it nonsense, but Rand finds a way to somehow fuck it up even in-universe through the astounding hypocrisy of the characters. The book is beyond grotesquely bloated and would be pushing it at 600 pages, not to mention the philosophy this basic and moral struggles this black and white would fit better into comics than actual literature.

>>9577887
I dont want to sound smug, lol but how is this not extremely obvious just looking at it?

>>9579393
You can if you're depression-fluid.

>>9581647
i think that's what bipolar means

Slaughterhouse 5

Dune, sorry but it is. The Martian is hot fucking trash too

>>9577854
Can't even remember the title or name of the author. It was some shitty YA fantasy garbage about a Knight in NYC. It was bad.

>>9580204
I fucking love this place.

I couldn't stand the Scarlett Letter, as it seemed it just dragged on and didn't really make sense.

The Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy because the plot was everywhere, characters unforgettable, humor post half of 3rd book dropped and ended up being DOA style humor.

And Gears of War series, yes the books to the video games. I was kind of obsessed with game canon at that time and I regret it.

>>9578249
There are a few good poems in there, but it seems like most of it is filler.

>>9578341
> literally a post made of shit

>>9579437
It was made into a film too i think

>>9580239
Oh shit I just bought The Circle recently because I noticed all the positive reviews.

Have I just wasted £3?

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>>9577854
Pic related. It's just a bunch of scenes with limb removal and zombies jizzing dust, and I couldn't work out whether they were supposed to be horror or grossout comedy (they didn't really work as either). Also uses inane catchphrases like "toppermost of the poppermost" on every page.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a solid 3/10. Really not sure why it's so highly regarded other than it inspiring much better works.

>>9585485
>Eggers
You should've known it'd be shit.

Ett öga rött, I was forced to read it in school and it was unbearable. It was horribly written and the characters were incredibly one dimensional.

God, probably Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. After 300 pages nothing remotely interesting had happened and the big twist was incredibly obvious. I tried my best to slog through it but I got so frustrated doing that that I ended up just quitting reading for sophomore year of Highschool. Now I have a huge distaste for authors that pad for length like that.

Like Jesus Christ guys, Stephen King writes unnecessarily long, mediocre books, but at least shit happens in them.

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>>9584635
It's possible to accidentally write a good poem.

>>9585997
I'd never heard of him before, anon.

>>9586085
so before i read this book i guess you could say i shouldn't have great expectations???

>>9586085
Dickens used to get paid by the page so a lot of his works are unnecessarily long and meandering.

>>9577854
mostly genre books that do nothing new with the formula. books that have cunt characters for "realism". books where events are semi real, semi metaphorical (lazy writings friend) quirk /funny books that are about some contemporary crazy (like time traveling with nikola tesla and getting endless compliments from him) books that rip off popular movies or other products, books that are reimaginings of fairy tales. I hate them all equally.

>>9578123
I did not much care for it because its not well built and is religious but I did like the atmosphere

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>>9578363
lies, she is only attracted to men and her sister.

>>9581587
both are garbage but you have to word it better, it seems like you are saying "I did not like it because the character did not act like I wanted them to"

>>9586133
oh and all those books made by retaliated people. you will usually find that big chunk of the books is about whatever job they used to do so you think you are buying an adventure book but end up with half baked musings on theoretical physics or engineering. I also have yet to find a good murder mystery

>>9586109
So he literally was British Stephen King?

>>9586104
Ecksdee

>>9578239
Ready Player One here too.

Actually read it cover to cover because it was so bad it was hilarious.

it's like reading those facebook screenshots of neckbeards trying to seduce models

>>9583065

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I would have him shot

>>9586218
from the cover alone i know this will suck

>>9586090
Damn that's powerful

>>9579393
Pretty sure BPD = Borderline personality disorder

>>9586155
>I also have yet to find a good murder mystery.

"The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chandler.

You're welcome (if you don't enjoy it, you're a total fucking scrub).

>>9578102
Underrated.

>>9578084
>brainlet can't handle Hawthorne

>>9581600
I liked it more than you, but you also missed how it was a power fantasy for Ayn.

Francisco is touted as the future most powerful man in the world - falls in love with her. Hank Rearden becomes THE industrialist of the era - falls in love with her. John Galt becomes the most sought after and influential man on the planet, not just falls in love with her, but has been in love with her for years because he saw her ordering workers around or some shit and did a low paying job for a decade just to be around her.

>>9586218

"Joseph D'Lacey rocks! We did probably pounds of blow together for a couple years in the mid-seventies. He was always inviting me over, asking me to finish up meals he couldn't eat himself -- really stand-up guy. Great record collection, too. Can't write worth shit though. Wait, is that thing on? I didn't think we were on record yet, I just, give me that -- "

-Stephen King

>>9586148
He's implying that the sympathy we're supposed to feel for the protagonist is undeserved, therefore meaning the book is poorly written since it fails at such a crucial part of its story

>>9586304
but no one has even rated me

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Infinite Jest. You could tell he was just pumping up the page count with all this boring shit.

>>9588822
I am reading this right now and it doesn't feel that way to me

>>9577854

Harry Potter. I can't believe people buy that shit.

>>9583065
Yea I'd agree there I think maybe it was the point but giving away all the events in your book at random intervals probably wasn't a good move

>>9586109
this goes for most 19th century authors.

reading white noise is like watching a compilation of seinfeld openings

>>9578476
the narrative of the modern,
oh, how it spins

The Stranger

Superfluous, boring, the last 15-20 pages were more than enough

>>9588822
Disagree. Even the bits that arent relevant to anything else are fun/inventive and worth reading

>>9587605
Well, that goes implied where i talk about how the characters are merely a vehicle for Rand's philosophy, but yes, you're right.

All of Rand's books are power fantasies, she's like that teenage boy who writes shitty masculine power fantasy sci-fi/fantasy in his spare time about how he's actually totally cool and what-not, except Rand just never fucking got over that. Even reading the plot summaries to her works make me fucking cringe.

>>9589365

19th century writing is my bane. I force myself to read some once a year but something about their pacing and syntax grates on me. I have Moby Dick sitting on a shelf and its my white whale. I am determined to read it just out of spite but I've started and stopped reading it like a dozen times in the last 15 years. I refuse to take it off my to read shelf. I think this summer is going to be it....I might have to buy adderall and a couple cases of 4 hour energy drinks but I'm going to get it done.

>>9591501
Moby Dick is great, it's challenging and there's quite a bit of faffing about but when you actually finish it it all comes together, and it feels quite satisfying.

Dickens is fucking trash (except for A Christmas Carol), all of his plots are contrived messes and since he was being paid by the word there's lots of completely boring, unnecessary and utterly artless faffing about. How anybody could call any Dickens book a favorite is a mystery for me.

>>9591201
im not gonna get into the absurd camus talks about

but i dont get how the guy is scared to die in prison but refuses to lie about accepting jesus at the end. why didnt he just lie? if anything, did he not give in to the absurd by not lying and taking death?

Anything Kafka. I don't like his shitty prose.

>inb4 it's bad on purpose because muh bureaucracy

Franz was well aware of his shit style

The Man in the High Castle is a terrible book. I read it twice to make sure I didn't miss something. Terrible book.

>>9591514
>Moby Dick is great
I agree

>Dickens is fucking trash
I disagree. I cried while reading Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities. Maybe you have to be in the mood.

>>9577854

So far the only books to truly make me angry with how fucking terrible they are were Meaning of Night by Michael Cox and The Vorrh by Brian Catling.

The former because absolutely fuck all of note happens, it just seems like pseudo Victorian masturbation, and the characters were stiff and retarded.
The latter for most of the same reasons, but add in a completely useless subplot involving the guy who invented cameras and some weird colonization fetish involving a tribal african. Also the semi-bestiality thing with the cyclops. Jesus fucking christ what a trainwreck

>>9591978

>>9585538
You have to be really into the story until the last page to appreciate it.

"Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone."

>>9592003
>>9591978

My bad, meant to actually say something kek. I wouldn't call it terrible, but it definitely doesn't deserve the praise it's gotten, no. Was kind of enjoyable though in a pulpy way

>>9577854
The Catcher in the Rye

Never got a chance to read it in high school so i read it on my own time after I made my way down the list of books I want to read.

I like books that reflect something from the time they were written in (1984 -> cold war, The Time Machine -> communism, that kind of junk) so I steer towards older works and I gotta say reading Moby Dick's chapters on the various uses of whale oils from each individual whale was more interesting than this book.

I struggled to find anything remotely impressive about this book. The writing style was even boring. The motifs were wasted and monologing was exhausting to read. Wish I had skipped over right to Catch-22. The book is brilliant.

>>9578357
I red Terror by Simmons and I absolutely loved everything about the expedition. And I absolutely hated everything supernatural. I just want a comfy book about things going south in a deadly place and how people react to it, but I couldn't find any. The actual reports are so lifeless and artless and autistic.

Godlike by Richard hell

I liked punk and I liked his band, but this book was a pile of shit, pretentious and boring, incoherent and edgy. It's all 70s nu decadentism. It's "Lou reed and the modern rimbaud: underaged gay sex, the book"

>>9588822
Took me twenty pages to feel the rhythm of what he was doing but nah, it's actually pretty good.

>>9588938
I think a lot of people are just nostalgic over it having read them/seen the movies when they were children.

>>9590707
So it's fantastic then?

>>9593667
i like seinfeld a lot but 9/10 of the openings suck my cock

>>9591501
Dude, fucking do it, it's a genuine treat. As long as you take the book slowly, maybe 20 pages a day, then sure it's going to take a while but it'll be at a comfortable pace. Also prepare yourself for chapters on whale anatomy, whaling methods, sea mythology, etc. IMO that shit was a fascinating way to provide context into the next narrative-driven chapters but a lot of people seem to hate those parts.

>>9592004
not that anon, never read frankenstein before, but after reading your post i think i'll read it after the book i'm currently reading, that passage is sublime

A friend recommended me a few YA novels in high school. Lucky for me they were so undeniably bad I got through that phase quickly.

The worst would have to be the fantasy series that was someting along the lines of The Warrior Apprentice, the Wizard Apprentice, and then Dragonborn, I don't really recall. Holy shit though, aside from the usual one-dimensional YA characters, retarded actions, classic overthrowing of the magical government, there were straight up errors in that series. One scene in particular I remember distinctly, where two people are in a car, they arrive at their house, the lady mentions she is getting picked up in some two hours or so, they sit around in the car for fifteen minutes exactly, go inside the house, and immediately the person arrives to pick her up. No, "oh hey, you're early", or a break in the text, or anything. Literally two hours have passed, the main character looks at a clock soon after I think. Around that point onward in that book (the wizard one) everything just deteriorated. Weird occurrences like that, grammar mistakes, I swear to god a couple spelling mistakes, and a rushed ending. The first fifth of that book wasn't even that bad, but it's like a whole other story than the rest, and probably the only part that wad edited, too.

any self help book beyond Lin Yutang's "The importance of living"

Self help is the only kind of book that I can stomp over my taboo of never dropping anything that I read.

>>9578056
don quixote was a shitty book with a straight :^|

Probably The Recognitions, it was just so overly long and meandering, and only a few scenes are actually fun or endearing.
And in the end you're left with a mediocre family drama, with bad prose.

Also, I read about three pages of The Sympathizer before giving up.

To the Lighthouse

I don't know why, I just hate it.

>>9578239
Yea this is also my contender for one of the shittiest I've read. For me, it also came across as a kind of justification for consuming ridiculous amounts of mass entertainment. The way the book's plot is setup makes this guy a hero through what he knows about the copious shit he's watched/listened to/plays.

>>9586090
That is actually really a great poem

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>>9578239
>>9586203
Read Player One cringe

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>>9594763
and another

>>9586085
I didn't like Great Expectations much either but I kind of wish I'd paid more attention to it as a kid because there's an important message in there about staying grounded and not wasting your potential. The actual characters and plot weren't too compelling though, except for Wemmick who I found to be inspirational.

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Eragon. It was Babby's First Fantasy Novel and its' plot was exactly like A New Hope's but with a dragon.

I read every single book in the Inheritance Cycle and I still don't know why.

The Satanic Verses probably. A lot of it may have gone over my head because I read it before I started reading literature seriously, but I interpreted the book as being very anti-integration and it seemed to be very critical of any characters who wanted to fit into a non-islamic society.

Having said that it was also wrapped up in every way in what I presume was Islamic Myth and literature so I know that a lot of it was totally over my head.

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>>9577932
VERY rude

>>9592004
really purple to be honest

>>9590707
I actually was looking through to see if anyone else put White Noise, I gave up halfway through because of how bad it was.

Good comparison lol

>>9594763
>>9594771
man i was born in the wrong generation the 80s were so namedroppable

>>9586090
This wasn't an accident. Nael is a poetic genius.