Worst books you've ever read?

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Cockney Mackem said:
The problem with Cloud Atlas is it's basically a collection of bang average short stories that Mitchell has nailed together, and marketed as some kind of work of impossibly complex and artistic genius. Not one of those stories stands out on its own as particularly good - the one set in the hi-tech dystopian future Korea is head and shoulders over the rest and still not that great. Every single one of them is at best pretty derivative, and the overarching narrative device is quite shit, it simply doesn't pay off when you wait half the book for the ending of stories that mostly didn't start all that well and mostly don't finish all that well. What it amounts to is some nice writing to recreate the diary of the 18th century character at sea and one reasonably compelling futuristic story, amid hundreds of pages of meh.

What really grates though is that this has been handed down from the ivory tower of the literary fiction genre as a "superior" piece of science fiction writing, as if actual writers and readers of science fiction are so unenlightened and not used to "proper" writing that they will just be blown away by the efforts of a "proper" writer having a dabble in this silly little genre. The reality is that real science fiction writers like Gibson, Stephenson, Vonnegut, Le Guin and Ray Bradbury will have literally thrown better stories in the bin than made it into Cloud Atlas. Most of them have also created narratives a good deal more complex and mind-expanding, and built and explored worlds in their writing that made you think a lot more about the future and the present. It also assumes a lot about the quality of the writing that it is automatically better than any genre fiction, when especially people like Gibson, Doris Lessing, Vonnegut and Bradbury stand up very well to that comparison.

It is everything that is pretentious and arrogant about literary fiction. Perhaps Mitchell's other stuff is really good but I was so put off by this that I'm really not interested in trying any of his other books
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*blows raspberry*
 


Son of Stan said:
Umberto Eco - The name of the Rose. That got chucked across the room.
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A f***ing disgustingly pretentious book. Gave up on it. It was on my list along with these stinkers:

Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear
The End of the World Running Club by Adrian Walker
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Seven Days in New Crete by Robert Graves
Little Star by John Arne Lindqvist
The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub
The Little Old Lady Who Broke All The Rules by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg
Crash by JG Ballard
Song of Stone by Iain Banks
Loop by Koji Suzuki
Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky
The Fog by James Herbert
 
If a book's shit, I generally give up after a chapter or two, but the Da Vinci Code and Ben Bova's Exiles Trilogy spring to mind.

I am also attempting to read Das Boot but finding it a hard slog, due to the poor translation. The Moomin books were also very badly translated IIRC, attempted to read them to our kids and gave up after a few chapters.

Life's A Pitch said:
Birdsong aside, anything by Sebastian Faulkes.
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Birdsong is probably the only pile of wank I persevered with to the end.
 
Arkle said:
I seem to be in the minority on here in rating David Mitchell as an author.

I've just remembered one for me "A Song of Stone" by Iain Banks. Really enjoy Banks' work generally but this bordered on unreadable.
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Mitchell is a f***ing twat. He was on the radio at the weekend and he's just as irritating in spoken language as in written.
 
taipeisafc said:
I thought it was good too, read his follow up something snake related and didn't like that mind. I am trying to remember the name of ne book I read about an Indiana jones type bloke finding stuff in South America it was truly execrable (author was Matt something I think)



It's bad for Ian banks but his shopping list would read better than owt by dan brown



I liked it - thought it tried too hard to be clever but no a bad book all told
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Matthew Reilly. How he ever got published I'll never know. But, his books used to be my guilty pleasure. Like reading an Arnie movie. :lol:
 
Lexingtongue said:
A f***ing disgustingly pretentious book. Gave up on it. It was on my list along with these stinkers:

Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear
The End of the World Running Club by Adrian Walker
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Seven Days in New Crete by Robert Graves
Little Star by John Arne Lindqvist
The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub
The Little Old Lady Who Broke All The Rules by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg
Crash by JG Ballard
Song of Stone by Iain Banks
Loop by Koji Suzuki
Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky
The Fog by James Herbert
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I didn't mind Crash but can see why it wouldn't appeal.
 
I went all the way with The Da Vinci Code, probably because I thought there must be f***ing something, anything, which has earned its author such sales.

Astonishing massive sales. Fuck everything.
 
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