The Foutainhead or Atlas Shrugged. Horr-ible steaming piles from a horrible person. Worse than Mein Kampf.
Joking right? That is easily the best book that I have ever been forced to read(I would read it even if I hadn't been forced). It's probably one of the top 5 books I have ever read. Seriously, it's the worst book you have ever read? I don't know if there really is a book that I consider the worst, but I really did not enjoy "Ethan Frome" at all. I also did not like "Across Five Aprils" or "Uncle Tom's Cabin." But that is probably because I tried reading them before I was ready. I should look into re-reading those...
Dammit think i have to read this book this year! , read The Crucible earlier this year in my english class, so far thats #1 worst book i have read, we are about to finish Huckleberry Finn but i havent read a page of that book so i couldnt tell ya about it .
SCARLET LETTER, holy **** was that terrible. The Great Gatsby was okay. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein was HORRIBLE.
I loved Atlas Shrugged...you need to read some more so you can realize what crap is. For example, as someone previously mentioned, "Bad As I Wanna Be". Now that was a steaming pile of crap. Another one was Whirlwind - the first 100 pages were so bad I put it down. It was the first book (out of probably thousands?) I read that I couldn't finish.
Worst - Billy Budd by Herman Melville. (makes even Moby Dick not look so bad) Honorable Mention: -waste of a premise: The Scarlet Letter (never thought a book about adultery could be so boring) -horrible ending: The Hunchback of Notre Dame - entertaining until you get to the ending, which is depressing not to mention sick -nauseating: Candide by Voltaire. (OK, so he has something negative to say here, but I think we already figured that out) -main character you cannot identify with in the least: The Stranger by Camus -waste of your time: Waiting for Godot (or any other existential work that wants to prove that life is meaningless and random, and uses over 100 random pages to prove that when a few would have sufficed)
Another vote for The Fountainhead here. God, that book is so full of itself. While reading it (back in school), I wanted to reach through the book and choke both Roarke and Wynyrd. What awful characters! What an awful book! Second place goes to Tolkien. The Silmarillion is the only book I've ever given up on after the first chapter. Nomar might think it's the best thing since sliced bread, but I thought it was simply awful and unreadable. It's like reading something by e.e. cummings... only worse. Oh, and I'll go ahead and plug "How To Be Good" by Nick Hornby here. Not his best book, but it's a fun and quick read...
Ethan Frome was just god awful A Separate Peace - John Knowles sucks As I Lay Dying - there's something to be said about Stream of Consciousness writing: it sucks Someone mentioned not liking Grapes of Wrath, a better story along the same lines is The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.
MacBeth sucked ass. *Man, I can only post a messege every 30 seconds? Holy ****, First time I have seen that.
I dont finish a book that starts out crappy. Therefore, i dont have a "worst book". If it was assigned in school, there is a good chance I didnt touch it.
Mr. and Mrs. Jeff: I think I took the same English class as you, though at a later date. When you took the class, was it with a professor with a white beard and was the focus on "bestsellers?" If it is, I also read the worst book ever there - Gone With the Wind. Not only was it the most nauseating glorification of the most moronic aspects of the "South," but it was poorly written and full of bad stereotypes. When a book suggests that a woman enjoys being raped, you know its not going to enrich your life I'm amazed at some of the choices here - Hemingway? Hawthorne? Fitzgerald? Shakespeare?. I mean, it's one thing to find a book difficult or to not relate to the subject, but it's another to call it crap. Do you really think these books are worse than John Grisham's (whose A Time to Kill was another waste of trees).
Yep, that's the class -- we had to read "Gone With the Wind" as well. In fact, the first time Jeff and I met, he spotted me reading that book and asked if I was in his english class (why else would a college student be reading that book?). That was the spring semester in 1992.
The information we know about people on this board is amazing. I know how Jeff and Mrs. JB met in college. Crazy, funny, cool.
Another vote for Atlas Shrugged. I've also never been able to make it through anything written by James Fenimore Cooper.
i would never dis the pearl b/c it was really short and i make it a point to never dis a short book they made me read. however, steinbeck definitely loves to depress. hey, everything else has gone wrong for the guy, lets blow his baby's head off, even better. as for worst, i could just give a collective vote for the first semester of english 1 my freshman year of HS. scarlet letter, ethan frome, maggie: girl of the streets, the crucible. my god, talk about boring and depressing. i'm pretty sure there was one more, too, but i forget. worst, i guess i'll just give it to grapes of wrath. i mean, wtf. did steinny need to waste 600 pages of my life that bad? i really loved how every other chapter just talked about non-plot related stuff and just told us how much sand there was, how many friggin jalope's (that word was brought to me by that book and i can't hear that word w/o thinking of this book and it is permanently etched into my brain from this book and i hate it for that) there were, and how many poor people there were that ate **** for breakfast and drank piss for lunch. and this was the 2nd semester of english 1. i think they were testing our limits. unfortunately i was a good student and actually had to read all this crap to get A's. damn english 1. i'm sure there were crappier books, but anything that's 600 pages and boring gets my vote.
Excellent. My least favorite Hornby book, but that's like saying "Crash Into Me" is my least favorite Dave Matthews Band song.
