What's the worst novel you've ever read?

A Separate Peace

Who else remembers that novel, from high school? What a loathsome melancholy mess. The main character, whose name I think was Gene, was a fucking sociopath, but nobody would acknowledge it. His gay fucktoy friend was named Phineas, and he was an asshole. He gets crippled twice and then he dies.

Gene (I think that's his name) is one of the most loathsome and contemptible characters in all of literature. He has nothing to recommend him, nothing to make him interesting, nothing in his life worth reading about. He is a vile, petty, small-minded sort of person, and he does a small but powerful cruelty out of nothing but trifling spite.

Actually, Gene (I think that's his name) is probably a pretty realistic portrayal of the average American. However, I did not enjoy reading about him.

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Put me off Dickens forever

Lol I vaguely remember the first half of that book from reading it in school

I remember really despising a Room with A View by EM Forster. It was pretentious bourgeois horseshit but I can't remember what about it specifically pissed me off so much.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Zorba the greek

How? I actually liked it, despite the hamfisted message and pedophilia.

I dont know about worst but here are some books I didn't care much for.

Madame Bovary
Life of Pi
Infinite Jester
Great Expectations

lord of the rings...

bored me to tears

The Corrections

same here. I have pretty much a black hole in my memory about that book except for a feeling of disgust in the pit of my stomach.

the alchemist

Under the Volcano

Finnegans Wake

The Lovely Bones.

My eleventh grade teacher made the class read it as the summer reading assignment. Damn, public school fucking sucked, man. I used to hate literature, and did not care for it at all until somebody recommended me Faulkner during college.

Take of two cities
Horrible plot, horrible prose, horrible characters, horrible history. Literally nothing worthwhile

Myal by Erna Brodber

Caribbean literature in general is pretty meh. Except for Derek Walcott I guess.

Probably Twilight.

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King

Self-insert MC, insanely stupid plot and every character is abominable

The Scarlet Letter

Yes, I know its high-school tier

Couldn't finish Walden desu.

I like the lad but he can't write for shit.

Stephen King or GRRM.

the prose in toftc is pretty good

agree otherwise, a very overassigned book

Never going to make it

My Brother George is Dead

I tried reading it and couldn't go past page three. The fuck was he smoking?

>lol universal language
>lol I have a big literary dick

Fucking waste of time.

Sydney's death is one of the best things in literature

the most shockingly bad novel i've read was dune.
the fact that it's lauded, let alone tolerated, was really shocking to me.

>i have reasons if anyone wants them

you probably just didn't read it in a well enough lit cáfé

eh, at least twilight has not a single shred of pretentiousness in it

i put it down after the first seven chapters when i read it in the seventh grade, but i totally got i just wasnt the audience.

Seriously, I tried three times and couldnt get past page 3

Fucking last time I go to an airport without a book I tell you what.
>The author cannot wait until the second chapter is finished to have his pair of tits he calls a female lead naked and bathing.
>Everyone else is naked and bathing in the same "ancient bath" with "mysteriously fresh water"
>Our hero, in full view of the other characters, in the middle of the water everyone is bathing in, stares at the girl swimming and jerks himself off
>the girl is passed from character to character like a football
>every time he writes himself into a corner everything magically works out fine for no reason loosely justified by the pair of tits or the non-main lead says "IT MUST HAVE BEEN GOD."
I always thought I knew how bad the average thriller was but this was outright shocking.

Seriously? Of all the garbage you could possibly have read you think Island is the worst?

Sure his characters are simply mouthpieces for Huxley but the whole story is allegorical in the first place. It honestly enjoyed it.

fucking Jane Eyre, what a piece of shit

Anthem by Ayn Rand

(only Rand I have read)

Shoplifting from American apparel

The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

God help the Child by Toni Morris. Glad I stole it.

This.

Finnegan's Wake is a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book. Conventional and drab, redeemed from utter insipidity only by infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations. Detest it. A cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory. Indifferent to it, as to all regional literature written in dialect. A tragic failure and a frightful bore.

Vernon God Little.

What a godawful book.
At least it was short

1984

Literally young adult fiction tier characters and a really simplistic message that was so fucking obviously explained that he literally breaks away from the story to just write you a manifesto. It's a truly garbage book that's pushed by English lit teachers so that their students can find the "subtext" easily.

Master and Margarita. My translation could have just been bad but that book was a chore.

Read Eat Pray Love for a book club. Probably the worst book I've ever completed but OP said no books I had no business reading in the first place.

>that preemption

don't be so insecure user

elitism is the cancer of Veeky Forums

t. nabokov

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Hated the characters, the nonsensical feminist plot and the conclusion. I'm against book burnings, but I'd make an exception for that trash

I read these sorts of things in my spare time because I love how heavily inserted the author is in their story, and in a way it's fun. This goes for twilight too. I know they're bad books. It's kind of like a MST3k situation.

It was boring, it actually made psychedelic drugs a sleep inducing topic. It wasn't pedo if I remember correctly, one of the tenants of the island was that the sexual experimentation of children amongst themselves wasn't frowned upon. That part didn't bother me. it's an almost entirely plotless hippie handbook, not a novel.

Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma.

Only novel I started and never finished. Main dude was an empty asshole. Nothing happens, nothing happens, something is about to happen, but doesn't. It isn't even the "fun" kind of nothing happening like in Beckett's novels.

Fuck farenheit 451. Fuck it.

Far from the madding crowd.

...

Lul

No. Elitism is one of the things that keeps this place in a healthier state than other literature boards on the net.

2666

its just racist bullshit. he had some ideas going on, but in the end its just pedestrian babble

Walden, Thoreau was a cunt and a poor mans Tolstoy.

Triggered
Try actually reading the book

Thirteen Reasons Why. Had to read it in High School but holy fuck do I wish I hadn't

So is any Hemingway good or is it all trash?

>Of all the garbage you could possibly have read you think Island is the worst?
well I don't purposefully read garbage so it's not like I've got a wide selection of pedestrian bullshit to select from, and when I do dislike something I remember almost nothing about it. I just picked the Island because it was the first thing that came to mind, I'm sure I've read worse.

But the island was pretty terrible, man. Truthfully I didn't get far before falling asleep, but what I did read i found nauseatingly ideological. It felt like Huxley was confidently portraying a worldview and personal philosophy that he felt should be adopted by all, and it was his views that put me off, but it's not like you can debate a book. I just dropped it.

It felt like when you argue against a radical feminist who's trying to tell you how men behave and you want to say "not all men are like that" but you know she'll hit you with #notallmen and a flurry of buzzwords.

But it is IJ
I got it as a gift from someone who praised it highly and so I read it. This was before I ever came here. He was older and at the time I thought he was a smart guy, then I grew up to become an English lit major and I no longer speak to him.

Just to be clear, I thought the book was absolute shit.

OP here. To be clear, I excluded IJ from the options because I thought its shittiness was a forgone conclusion.

+1

That's a great book

I absolutely loved it, so I'm interested to hear why you didn't. Only other person I've met who tried reading it and didn't like it had a mental breakdown around when he started it, so it always brought up bad memories for him.

Read The Old Man and the Sea, that one's great

the bell jar LEL

absolute garbage and whenever you criticize it people just say 'well she was more of a poet than a novelist so when you consider that it was actually pretty good'

lots of hemingway is good, that guy was probably trolling because the sun also rises is one of the best books ever written

>b-b-but nothing happens!!!

shut up dickhead

his short stories are great too

Sounds like your friend made up an excuse so your feelings weren't hurt that he hated your favorite book. True friend or an idiot triggered by association lol.

It's a terrible book, you should read it

you should read my asshole fagget

...

depends on how you define elitism

elitism as in choosing only the most renowned and demanding literature to consume is good. That's what your idol Harold Bloom is championing.

Elitism as in being unable to form your own opinions about literature and adopting the general consensus is bad. Your typical Veeky Forumscore faggot (aka (You))

this is probably the most sad book I've come across.

I remember feeling the same sense of pointlessness and melancholy you felt while reading it.

It's the ultimate downer book, and even years after have been forced to read it, I still sometimes think about it.

Naw, he wasn't afraid to tell me something else. He just didn't have a healthy life where he grew up.

>>Elitism as in being unable to form your own opinions about literature and adopting the general consensus is bad
That isn't elitism, you fuck, I bet you misuse "pretentious" too.

...

gravity's rainbow

>I'm a man.
>So there I was being a man.
>I held my dick in my hand.
>My asshole was hairy.
>"Say, did you notice I am a man?" I asked.
If you enjoyed that go ahead and read any Hemingway book.

I tried reading the two towers. I've never read something so dry. So very... very dry.

It was like crossing a not so great adventure book with a history textbook.

The Time Traveler's Wife

first post best post

>people took the IJ is shit meme seriously

holy shit, you people shouldn't be allowed to read, to be honest.

My diary desu senpai

not a novel

If you really thought a book was terrible why would you keep reading it? Would you seriously keep on through Fifty Shades of Gray to see if it "maybe gets better?"

The kite runner.

Retarded high school teacher had us read it. Absolute trash. It's like the author sat there and thought of all the awful things he could do to a character and tried to fit them all into one story. Then he forgot to make you care about any of the characters.

Worst books I've ever read (that are taken somewhat seriously):
>Catch 22
>Their Eyes Were Watching God

I found Walden pretty dry and tedious

also Death Comes for The Archbishop

though I haven't re-read them at all and when I did read them I was a freshman and sophomore year in high school.

I ended up reading and enjoying a lot of dry philosophical works in college.

I hate not finishing novels.

The only time I thought I really couldn't get it over with, I just skipped to the last couple pages. (I was 3/4 through)

I always think people are taking about The Bell Curve and get confused for a second.