An introduction to organic chemistry
I haven’t read a whole lot, but so far: Madame Bovary. We had to read it in high school, because it was culturally significant and because it caused a large amount of controversy when it came out due to its subject matter. When I was reading it though, it felt like I was reading a literary version of every TV soap opera ever. It was a slog to get through and I was bored and annoyed throughout.
I’m sure I’ve read worse but one that stands out as making me question the time I put into reading it is Out of the Dark by David Weber. I go into it expecting a military sci fi, and for the vast majority of the book that’s what you get - aliens invade Earth and plucky humans resist etc etc. The aliens however have more reserves and air superiority so are slowly winning as the end of the book approaches, at which point you expect the main characters to pull a rabbit out of the hat and do something different. Except that’s not what happens.
spoiler
What actually happens is that Count Dracula appears out of (almost) nowhere and flies with a bunch of vampires up to the alien spaceships to kill the aliens, winning the battle for Earth.
I was definitely not satisfied with this ending, even if there was some foreshadowing earlier in the book that made sense after knowing this was a possibility in this universe.
Probably Don Quixote. It started off really well, but it devolved towards the end into this long-unending self-referential rant full of name-drops and exposition, and I could barely follow any of it and pushing through that was a huge chore.
I later learned I had read a bad translation, and that there is one good translation out there I should try, but the whole thing has left a bad taste in my mouth and I don’t want to go anywhere near that book again.
I don’t even remember the title, but it was written by Clive Cussler.
It was the dullest, most stereotypical adventure book with the bog standard protagonist and plot, with no interesting twist or unexpected event at all.
that’s an easy one, Atlas Shrugged
“The Cat Who Walked through Walls” by Robert Heinlein…
Now Heinlein is usually kind of obnoxiously sexist so having a book that opens with what appears to be an actual female character with not just more personality than a playboy magazine centerfold, but what seems like big dick energy action heroesque swagger felt FRESH. Strong start as you get this hyper competent husband and wife team quiping their way through adventures in the backwoods hillbilly country of Earth’s moon with their pet bonsai tree to stop a nefarious plot with some promised dimensional McGuffin.
Book stalls out in the middle as they end up in like… A swinger commune. They introduce a huge number of characters all at once alongside this whole poly romantic political dynamic and start mulling over the planning stage of what seems like a complicated heist plot. Feels a lot like a sex party version of the Council of Elrond with each of these characters having complex individual dramas they are in the middle of resolving…
Aaaand smash cut. None of those characters mattered. We are with the protagonist, the heist plan failed spectacularly off stage and we are now in his final dying moments where we realized that cool wife / super spy set him up to fail like a chump at this very moment for… reasons? I dunno, Bitches amirite?
First time I ever finished a book and threw it angrily into the nearest wall.
I feel that a lot with Heinlein. Starts good with an interesting premise, becomes weirdly sexual, and the ending leaves you wondering whether the premise even mattered.
The first 5 or so of Trump’s books. No meaningful lessons in business to be had. Just him bragging about people he knew, people he’d screwed over, how good he thought he was at pretty much everything. How he got back at anyone who crossed him. Insufferable. I knew he was one of the worst people ever before he even mentioned getting into politics.
And in those 5 books, he probably name-dropped every New York socialite he ever met. It’s consistent with his whole image of self-worth and needing to look and feel important. You know who he didn’t mention? Someone we’ve seen him with in several photos? Who he definitely would have mentioned if there wasn’t a reason not to? Jeffrey Epstein.
I have to ask what possessed you to not give up after the first couple
I am not sure about ‘ever’ (I am old and have been reading for over 4 decades now), but a book I hate-read recently was Foucault’s pendulum by Umberto Eco. It is meant to be a satire on conspiracy theories and as such it is still a relevant book after 35 years or so. However, the point of satire is to get to the point eventually, preferably within 500 pages. It was pompously written and sometimes felt like a showcase of ‘look how much I know!’.
the Piers Anthony novelization of the movie Total Recall. it’s very bad!
I haven’t read that, but his original novel Firefly is the only book I ever threw away instead of adding it to my collection shelves or trading it back to the used book store. It’s horrifically gross. One of the main characters is shown in a flashback enthusiastically participating in her rape as a five year old. Anthony is a problematic writer already, but this was way worse than I could have guessed.
I was assigned Ethan Frome in a high school lit class and to this day I think it is one of the worst books to assign to emotional, angsty, experience-limited teens.
I also don’t understand why Romeo and Juliet is the go-to Shakespeare work that we default to.
How do we handle complex romantic relationships? Suicide / attempted suicide, of course! Just what every teen needs to hear /s
Possibly because Romeo and Juliet were stupid teenagers and and part of the tragedy is about the impulsiveness of youth. A good teacher can sometimes get that across, but I suspect it doesn’t really sink in. And if they didn’t teach it with A Midsummer Night’s Dream it’s also a missed opportunity - Romeo and Juliet is satirized during the Pyramus and Thisby play-in-a-play.
The bible. Inconsistent, unethical, and immoral.
Tried a few times and can never get past the first few chapters.
LOL. Try the Quran, it has the same characters and same stories but written in a way that makes much more natural reading
Canonical answer is The Homecoming Saga by Orson Scott Card, since it turns out that if the good guys have a mind controlling god computer that’s always right on their side it gets really hard to have meaningful conflict.
You didn’t make it past the first book??
Lucky.DISCLAIMER: Orson Scott Card is a bad person and I have since gotten rid of my collection and tell everyone not to support him because he uses his platform to hurt marginalised groups of people for religious reasons.
Now, I would argue that you’re skipping over a lot of interesting stuff.
The Overseer (mind-controlling satellite robot) was built by humans to keep rewriting human brains so they would perpetually forget how to invent the wheel until they proved that they’d evolved beyond their barbaric nature and would not go on to invent the nuclear bomb. The satellite then dies of old age millions of years later because humans are just kind of shitty. The book ends with the main character’s family hopping onto an Ark rocket back to Earth aaand… Hundreds of years have passed and all the characters you’ve invested in emotionally are long dead, here’s some bat furries I guess.Some pretty cool ideas in there, despite who it was written by.
Now, the worst thing I have ever read was also by Orson Scott Card and I refuse to speak about it.
You’re saying that the book couldve been an essay?
I don’t think it would’ve made a very good essay either
I don’t know if this counts, but when I was about 13I was very excited to find an enormous book in my favorite genre at the time, Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard.
It was the first book I ever put down in disgust without finishing. In the almost half-century since then, there are under a dozen that I haven’t finished. Shows you just how bad it is.
As a young teen scifi nerd I enjoyed the world, and tech he built in that book. I read the 600+ pages pretty quick. I think I was too young to critique it as a literary work.
The movie was absolute garbage.I read all of Mission Earth. All 12(?) volumes. I couldn’t possibly say why - I hated it.
I would love to hear more about this. Those books are SO long
Worst book I’ve quit is Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. What a horrible book!
Worst I’ve finished is Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, immediately followed by Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I’ll throw in a special mention for The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby. All terrible books that I finished only because they were required reading in school.
As much as I loved many of Stephensen’s books, I could not get into Anathem.
Huh. I loved Seveneves.
Same. Loved the world building over millenia. I was hoping to see another book each on the miner people, the Navy men, and the spacefarers who went out into the wilds after water.
My older sister hated it, she wants stories about characters and not the world-building. She compares the pages on moving through 3D space with small jet thrusts to the pages of whale info in Moby Dick.
It’s a book I recommend with caveats. Not everyone is going to like it. Lesson learned, as much as I liked Snow Crash and Anathem too, I won’t recommend them to her. And moving beyond Stephenson, I’m confident she would immolate Canticle for Leibowitz halfway through.
