What's the last book you've read (or mostly read) that you would consider "bad"? Noticed while going over the books I read in 2016 that I enjoyed 90% of them, which seems strange since I only liked about 50% of the movies I watched and about 25% of the games I played.
For me it was Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. Dropped it about halfway through.
my diary desu~
I hated The Big Sleep. I'm the same, OP, it's pretty rare that end up with a real dud.
>Dropped it about halfway through.
>thinks he can talk about it's quality
I got memed into reading Pinecone. Only true pseuds can pretend to like dat crap.
Dune.
Oh, I gave that one more than it deserved, desu. Were you able to finish it?
He's a weird one. I liked Inherent Vice but couldn't get through Bleeding Edge, even though on the surface BE sounded more interesting (realistic cyberpunk).
Tried to read Jonathan Franzen's "Purity" but it was such bloated tripe that I dropped it halfway through.
Dostoevsky's Demons.
I've tried reading it three (3) times last year. I got firstly a 100 pages, then 200, then half-way through.
It's not a book that's bad, it's just that I prefer Dostoevsky's drunk Russian's psychology rather than drunk Russian action.
Ulysses
Pure pseud shit
Eco's Name of the Rose
I haven't read it but I don't think you should properly judge a book if you didn't finish it.
>see this image
>cant help but think of BOOM CRASH PANCAKES every time
Taipei by Tao Lin was by far the worst piece of shit I tried to read in 2016. I can't believe that I fell for it.
The Sun Also Rises
Not OP but your logic is exactly why people read the entirety of Infinite Jest and then log onto Veeky Forums so angry. I drop bad books at 40 pages, no matter how long it is. I won't be bothered. I also walk out of movies 30 mins in or less if it doesn't grab me.
I love Henry Miller, I finished one of his books last night on Rimbaud but haven't read this one.
The Stand is the worst book I've read in recent memory and it wasn't terrible, the prose ranged from serviceable to less than and the characters ruined an otherwise decent idea for a plot. I dropped it halfway through.
Cover to cover, in recent memory, was Dune, which also wasn't terrible, but bland characters and scenes around an otherwise interesting world. I'm always kind of shocked by how poorly some genre fiction is plotted and how flat characters are.
Howl would be a close 2nd in 2016. The Immoralist by Andre Gide, also.
I also attended a lecture for an Ozu film in Paris last year, and the accompanying screening, the actual film ("Bonjour") was unbearable, but I was with a girl and couldn't leave. I have never seen a more boring movie in my life, or at least one I can't remember.
Also, Henry Roth's "Call It Sleep" and Aldous Huxley's "Island". The latter I read for a project and may have been the worst thing I've ever read in my life. "Call It Sleep" I read for a class and wanted to blow my brains out it was so boring.
You can't properly judge it, no. Thankfully this is Veeky Forums. Properness is unnecessary.
I think with reading the fact you spend hours to finish a book means your brain tricks you into recognizing one or two good sentences in an otherwise boring, shit-tier book and tells you "hey kid, you enjoyed that" because otherwise you'd have to admit that you just wasted time for the sake of appearing intellectual. Me? I haven't enjoyed reading a single book since I was about eleven years old. I still read a hell of a lot but it's literally so that I can justify my narcissism and will have someone to appear interested in should I ever become intimate with a girl and need to impress her with my intellect. Fuck reading and fuck white people.
Books have a longer tradition, a canon and better developed writing rules, which results in typically higher artistic quality. I assume you also tend to avoid genre fiction where the low quality is the norm.
To answer your question, I didn't come across any particularly horrible books last year either, but I hated Transmetropolitan.
If the book is so bad for the first 100 pages that you want to stop reading it altogether, do you actually expect it to become any better in the last 100, to somehow excuse all the shitty prose, shitty characterization and [instert more criticism here] from the first half?
Fucking pleb
i should think there are easier ways to impress a girl with your intellect: painting, cooking, music, film, photography, etc. or if you really do feel the need to appear to know literature just read poetry. its shorter and you can spend all that saved time on lifting weights.
This so much
It's the most uninspired babble ever, hamfisted semiotics
Exactly what people should read before calling Pinecone or Joyce ''pseud''
I'm reading Heroes of the Frontier. Dave Eggers is a hack.
Killing the Host was the last good contemporary (published in the last 20 years) book I have read.