I think we can all concur that the Twilight series was a disgrace to literature.
Printable View
I think we can all concur that the Twilight series was a disgrace to literature.
Imaginarium, did you catch any of the online backlash when Stephen King dared to say that Stephanie Meyers is a bad writer? The hell storm was so amusing to see. I was already a SK fan but I would like to buy him dinner for that.
I'm really happy to hear this of someone, at last!Quote:
I think we can all concur that the Twilight series was a disgrace to literature.
I always hated Twilight and really didn't get why it's compared to Harry Potter worldwide sucessfull books. I am a fan of HP, and couldn't go through Twilight without rolling with laghter when Edward glittered :smilielol5:
Anyways, Twilight is a romance story with a too simple plot I waited for some actions to be done but alas it all ends up well at the end of each chapter.
Let fans of Twilight forgive me, but I truly can't digest this series.
Twlight! This series made me truly nauseated, someone should tell Meyer to never ever ever write a book again.
I took it as us not even gracing Twilight with the honors of being considered a book.
When I've read all the books in the world I'll get back to you on this...:wink5:
I can't be sure of the worst books, but I can say some of their characteristics.
I think it's time for a...
:rant:
The mediocre author always overdescribes conversations. Exhibit A:
"Well, I'd better be going now," said Randall nervously as he took a glance over his shoulder.
"Oh no, you mustn't leave," said Mrs. Connors warmly with a twinkly in her eye as she set a plate of scones down on the table. "You simply must stay for tea!"
"No, I really have got to go," said Randall, turning pale.
"Oh I insist," said Mrs. Connors with a flick of the wrist. "You wouldn't turn down my hospitality," she asked curtly.
What the author really wants to write here is a movie screenplay, not a book, because movies are good at showing things (like flicks of the wrist and glancing over the shoulder) while books are good at telling things. Of course, the author absolutely HAD to include that "flick of the wrist": it was part of the intrinsic essence of the story.
The mediocre author also makes the mortal mistake of describing emotions. Exhibit B:
Her heart sank. The whole world felt like a whirl and all her love seemed to seep out like water down a sink drain. All she felt was her extreme nothingness and a desire to change things. There was a pain in her heart, and it was almost unbearable.
This author does not understand that it is futile to use words to describe emotions; rather, you must use words to convey emotion.
The mediocre author dutifully uses as many literary cliches as possible, such as...
1. When a girl is nervous, she bites her lip.
2. When a boy blushes, his face "turns bright red"; but when a girl blushes "all the blood rushes to her face."
3. Every benevolent grandfather has a twinkle in his eye.
4. If you hear a "cry" that scares you, it is always "blood curdling"; but, if you are scared and let out a "cry" it is never "blood curdling"; if anything, it is "piercing."
5. When a character is scared, they turn pale; this holds regardless of skin color or tan.
6. If a young man is handsome, his eyes are always "dark."
7. You may use a thesaurus. But NEVER, under ANY circumstances, are you to use it to find a synonym for the word "beautiful."
8. Descriptions of scenery must be made as long and excruciatingly detailed as possible.
9. If machine-guns are involved (they usually aren't) their sound must be described as "incessant" and as a "rattle."
10. When a boy and girl first meet, it is imperative that this first meeting be as awkward and "embarrassing" as possible, with much "face turning bright red" and "all the blood rushing to her cheeks."
The mediocre author may also fall into the following traps:
1. Insert lots of foreign-language sentences and phrases. This has the advantage of demonstrating how smart the author is.
2. All characters must talk and think exactly like the author.
Finally, the mediocre author adheres to this motto religiously: leave no noun unmodified; and may no verb suffer the loneliness of not having an adverb as companion.
What are pershap the worst books of all time? I disallow mainstream popular fiction because its too easy and mainstream novels tend to be mediocre at worst. The true **** tends to deservedly obscure.
I say one of the worst books of all time is Rah and the muggles.
I think it may come down to perspective, I know a couple of people that love my nomination, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard (give a crazy woman a pen after getting her high on every drug known to man and you might come close to the terrible ramblingness).
One of the books that I had to struggle to finish was Emma, by Jane Austin. I know it's considered to be one of her best, but it didn't keep me interested long enough. It took me six months to finish the book ( :D ) and that only because I felt I HAD to finish it!!! :p
ok, well it was kinda semi, not really mainstream... but
Cirque du freak series was the worst i have EVER read. and thats a considerable amount.
*and the expression is mediocre at BEST. you basically said that mainstream books are actually good and that the Worst one is mediocre
I meant what I say. At best mainstream ficiton is pretty good, the most are average, and the rest is mediocre. The truly bad stuff is just obscure. Being mainstream is neither a a measure of mediocrity. Jk rowling and stephen king for master writers, nor either are they mediocre.Quote:
Originally Posted by tiredstudent
Alright people!
It's easy to talk about what books you love and what excites you and makes you bubble with happiness.
But what books have you read and been seriously dissapointed with. What books have you stopped reading halfway because the plot lines or language or whatever have bored you.
This is not a place, I repeat, this is not a place for you to slag off books and just call them rubbish. We need reasons people! Was it the narrative? the realistic quality of the book? The characters? The writing? the list is endless.
Personally i find that talking about books that you dont like can be more interesting than waffling on about great ones. Especially if someone disagrees!
So whether its a Meyer vampire volume or a Chekov classic lets get them red pens out and make constructive criticsm.
(sorry for bad spelling)
Personally for me it is Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
The plot line = Fantastic
The Language = Fantastic
The Characters = Too Many
Although I'm a sucker for a non linear narrative this was too much for me. The amount of jumping between characters and what they were doing confused me and caused a lot of flicking through the novel to remember. Also being a book of 1000 pages it meant a lot of flicking especially to where the footnotes where. I felt as i was reading a make your own horror story goosebumps book like i did as a child.
I'm annoyed at myself for not finishing it as im sure the characters would of blended into one anothers narratives. However, at the time I was so confused and could only have the book out for 3 weeks so I had to stop.
One day I will return to it anad power through.
The Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
The only reason why I did not throw the book against the wall mid-way through, and than maybe use it to start a bonfire and dance around it (Ok that last part may be a slight exaggeration) was because I was reading it for an online discussion group so I pushed myself through it to the end.
One of the biggest problems is the fact that I don't do romance, but I had been led to believe by others that the book was more than just a romance, and was a really good Historical Fiction which is one of my favorite genres, so I decided to give it a chance, and found it to be just awful.
For one thing through the entire book I wanted someone to push the narrator off the side of a cliff because I found her unbearable, she was the most useless and incomptant heroine ever.
The writing was bad, the character development was lacking for me, and there is one section of the book in which there is literally like 5 chapters of sex, and I am no prude, but it did nothing to enhance the story, it was just there to wave sex in front of the reader like a shiny object, in addition the book was already longer than it needed to be, so I began to just skip over those parts because they were irrelevant, and not reading them made the book a whole lot shorter.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
pffwwww. I picked this book up several times, I'm glad I didn't buy it. I did however get it free for my Kindle, luckily that can be easily remedied.
Dickens is depressing??? Practically all of his novels have a nauseatingly happy ending!Quote:
Originally Posted by RococoLocket
A Tale of Two Cities, all that death in the French Revolution and ends with a man sacrificing his life for another?Quote:
Originally Posted by Syd A
All the despair shown in the workplace and abuse in Oliver Twist and David Copperfield?
Even the greed in A Christmas Carol which was NOT written so much to be the easy-TV morality play it is, but rather a commentary on folks like Scrooge and how they think..."decrease the surplus population" and all that.
There isn't the adjective "Dickensian" for nothing...
The worst I've ever read?
Well, I read plenty of schlock books in high school because they required them (yes, that's good education...) but the "classic" that I honestly felt was the worst of that kidn that I've read, that I really would dispute calling a classic?
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton.
ATROCIOUS pacing.
OVERLY-DESCRIPTIVE (and this from someone who doesn't care for that style from Hawthorne or Conrad but can at least respect that their form is decent, THIS is just a mess, description over storytelling.)
FLAT dialogue.
STILTED description (add that to the fact I think there's TOO MUCH description, and you can begin to see why I loathe this book so.)
DULL protagonist (I understand Frome is a very reserved man, but really he gomes across as being so reserved and so introverted that he honestly is not a very relatable character, his SITUATION is relatable, loves a woman that's not his wife and that wife is not-so-nice, but really we can identify with that not because Wharton makes Frome identifiable but because that's an age-old theme for mankind and literature itself, everyone from Homer to Shakespeare to the moderns have used that, FROME is just not a dynamic character.)
The ONLY thing I can credit Wharton for is her setting, not only where and when but the wintery scenery she plays Ethan Frome agaisnt, really does come across as not only a believable setting but also very much approporiate for the despair the novel TRIES to convey, that symbolsim isn't attained effectively as the other elements fall flat, but at least the setting gets us a bit of the way there.
But other than that, Ethan Frome is out in the cold.
That's 19th-century England for you. Would you rather he had written about well-fed, happy orphans who play in the meadows all day long? Dickens had to be at least a little bit realistic. At least his novels had a happy ending; most orphans didn't have that happy ending at the time, I assume.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord Macbeth
One of the most powerful scenes in all of English literature is that of Sydney Carton giving his life for a man he considers his better, a man who still has a chance at happiness. How could you not love that ending?
300+ responses to the "Worst Book You've Ever Read"... with half the responses or more naming some classic book that has survived the for generations for some reason. Surely the real title of the thread should be "Books I Personally Didn't Like (for whatever reason... but rarely having to do with issues of artistic merit) or Understand.":D
Wait...I said all that defending Dickens' work, so...why are you asking ME if I'd rather the orphans were all happy and fed and everything was peachy-keen, I just went on about how thematic Dickens' work is.Quote:
Originally Posted by Syd A
I'd challenge that--I understand what Wharton was trying to accomplish with Ethan Frome, I just think she failed as the plot is slow to develop, unrewarding and trite when it does, the pacing is simply atrocious, nearly all of the characters unrelatable, flat, or both, Wharton's obsession with over-narration and over-description make the work feel even more distant, which CAN work if you've a protagonist like Frome who is by his very nature distant, but NOT when the pace and lack of convincing characterization have already made him so distant...Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
I don't dislike Wharton's work because of a personal reason, or a failure to "understand it," but rather because I view it as an artistic failure on Wharton's part. Wharton was a good writer, but Ethan Frome is simply a failed attempt and, to compound matters, many other, perhaps better writers have done the same sort of story--and better.
Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger. Book about a spoiled brat being raised in New York, who's going through puberty and learns how to swear, and it was bad because everyone raves about it like it's mindblowing, and it's just a dated, mediocre, 6th grade reading level book about a spoiled brat whose familiarity with things like unemployment begins and ends with the letters U and T. Really, just a major, major disappointment, and that's what makes it so bad - if it had been a forgotten book, and I'd read it, I'd likely have a different assessment.
To paraphrase a comment about the book on Amazon: Why has everyone told me how fine his threads are when this emperor is wearing no clothes?
The argument from tradition is the weakest argument you could make. Next you'll tell us that Harry Potter is a masterpiece because it sold a jillion copies.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr.
Written in a terrible style.
Ever since I discovered ray carney, I've wondered if its actually possible to critically challenge any artistic canon. Don't get me wrong I have never hated a classic. At worst, a classic simply does not move me.
I vaguely remember feeling appalled by a copy of I spit on your graves.
Stopped reading it soon afterwards...
The argument from tradition is the weakest argument you could make. Next you'll tell us that Harry Potter is a masterpiece because it sold a jillion copies.
Sorry, but the argument as to the numbers sold is the worst possible argument you could possibly make. If a work survives the ages, on the other hand, it is because generations of literary critics and other "experts", subsequent writers, and subsequent generations of readers have found that the work continues to resonate. Your personal opinions or mine are largely meaningless as to whether a given work will survive as part of the "canon". The fact that a work of art has survived, however, leads one to suppose that it has some real merits whether a given individual is enthralled with the work or not. This does not mean we must, can, or even should be expected to like every work of art that has survived. However, one does open oneself to a certain degree of incredulity when one makes a proclamation that this "classic" novel or that "classic" poem is the "worst book I ever read" (as opposed to simply a book that I disliked). The tradition or canon need not be defended. It is the opinion that challenges the tradition that needs to make a argument that is somewhat better reasoned out than "It was boring" or "It sucks". Lacking this, the first thought that comes to mind when someone declares, "It was the worst book I ever read" is "Hmmm... I wonder what books this person actually has read... and which ones they actually understood."
Perhaps a lot of people can't really remember the worst books that they've ever read (as worst would imply unremarkable and boring too), but can only recall well-known ones that they didn't like?
I've wondered if its actually possible to critically challenge any artistic canon.
Certainly... but such a criticism demands more than the personal opinion: "I found it boring", "I didn't like the characters" "I didn't like the ending." It must also be understood that a work that has survived as part of the canon has done so because a great number of literary "experts"... be they academics, critics, "common readers" in the manner in which Virginia Woolf defined the term, and subsequent writers... felt and continue to feel the work is of real merit. You may find it difficult to convince these others and of course you open yourself to their counter opinions.
I find that Erewhon by Samuel Butler is one of the dullest books I've ever read. His satire is mostly amusing; however, his writing is terribly bland. I'd categorize reading Erewhon as cruel and unusual punishment...inflicted by myself, on myself. I suppose I'm a masochist now.
Finnegans Wake and anything by Gertrude Stein. Both utterly incomprehensible.
In 'serious' literature camp. Henry James' "The Wings of a Dove" is now, for me, tying with the Bible, Lucretius, Joyce's Ulysses and Proust. Desert island reading if the island is in hell...
How can you know if something is good or bad? Who could have thought Montaigne could be so good and Lucretius so bad, or that Dickens could be so good while Henry James is so bad? Guess you just have to read fifty pages and then give up if it feels like shovelling mud on the banks of the Styx. Helps to lose opinions like "James is a classic, I *should* read him."... Doesn't make the next hundred pages any better!
Dickens is good????????????????????????
interesting....
As you like it - Shakespeare sold out
My least favorite book by far is John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. It's really a shame, too, because the book started out with this really nice poem by Bunyan. But then the man descends into this abject, ridiculous allegory. I understand, the point of the novel was to teach readers how to be good Christians, but really, it gets to be a bit much. The constant quoting of the Bible I can handle--I've really got to accept the work for what it's trying to accomplish--but I'd also been told that it also worked as an adventure novel. And it is the furthest thing from interesting in that respect.
A much better novel with a religious undertones is Journey to the West. You've got all the desire to teach people how to live morally, but at the same time you've got fun adventures filled with interesting characters. In contrast, what does Bunyan give his reader? Other than cardboard characters and heavy-handed allegories, he doesn't give much.
I'll admit, there's one redeeming aspect. Some of the phrases he used, such as the "Slough of Despond," and "Vanity Fair," were really pretty good. However, five interesting words and one good poem do not a good book make. Therefore, I'm going to have to label Pilgrim's Progress as a FAIL.
James is hit-or-miss with me. I took a class and found I enjoyed about half of what we read, and could barely finish half. Then I looked at the publication dates of the works I liked and the works I didn't like.Quote:
Originally Posted by mal4mac
Turns out the works I enjoyed were all his early to middle works, while the ones I didn't like and found dreadfully boring all fit into his later period works.
They always contain works which are generally considered among those which the well-educated person should certainly read. They may not be the best, but they certainly provide a base for expanding literary capabilities. And they separate the seasoned reader from the dilletant. They also give the frustrated reader a podium for venting his/her feelings which heretofore have not been expressed.
the worst book I ever read is propably the one I was forced to read for english major... kate greenville's the secret river....
quite philosophical content but awfull stile... awfull!
and I read a book that made me skipp a houndred pages ('t was melmoth the wanderer from oscar wilds grand uncle...) and the secret river is even worse
no matter what the NEW YORKER says, don't try it!!!!
'Dharma bums' jack Kerouac, I've explained why on other threads.
'Wasp Factory' iain banks, really not my thing at all, not that I read the whole thing so maybe it got better, since some people seem to like it.
'The Lovely Bones' alice sebold, for obvious reasons.
The worst book I've ever read is a biography of Charles Wesley. I can't even think of the author. It was so badly written and just plain dull that it was a real chore to read it.
New Moon by Stephanie Meyer. **Yawn** :Yawn:
God, I read so much dire crud when I reviewed books.
One of the worst was "Beat the Reaper" by Josh Bazell, which was basically just a literary penis enlarger. I was also forced to read various chick-lit bestsellers and it made me depressed how these gender stereotypes (which I find negative), both male and female, are preserved and strengthened through books. "Bergdorf Blondes" one of them was called. Oh the HORROR!