What's the worst novel you've ever read?
>inb4 IJ
>inb4 meme shit you had no business reading anyway
>>8159686
book of disquiet
>>8159686
maybe Huxley's The Island
Probably asoiaf desu.
Or maybe the first half of ride the tiger where he pretends he understands philosophy. He should have just said feels>reals and saved 140/240 pages
Or Fahrenheit 451 fuck that turd
>>8159699
Dude yes
>>8159686f
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
>>8159686
Sabbath's Theater
>>8159686
Taipei by Towelin
>>8159686
Anatomy lesson - Philip Roth
>>8159718
The circle Dave eggers
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.
>>8159686
Hard Times by Charles Dickens
Put me off Dickens forever
>>8159729
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
>>8159699
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
>>8159686
lord of the rings...
bored me to tears
The Corrections
>>8159729
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.
>>8159686
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.
>>8159686
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.
>>8159686
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.
>>8160019
the prose in toftc is pretty good
agree otherwise, a very overassigned book
>>8160008
Never going to make it
My Brother George is Dead
>>8160008
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.
>>8160019
Sydney's death is one of the best things in literature
>>8159686
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
>>8159706
you probably just didn't read it in a well enough lit cáfé
>>8160038
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.
>>8160190
Seriously, I tried three times and couldnt get past page 3
>>8159686
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.
>>8159699
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
>>8159686
Anthem by Ayn Rand
(only Rand I have read)
>>8160582
Shoplifting from American apparel
The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
God help the Child by Toni Morris. Glad I stole it.
>>8160008
>>8160156
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.
>>8159686
Vernon God Little.
What a godawful book.
At least it was short
>>8159686
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.
>>8160059
>that preemption
don't be so insecure anon
elitism is the cancer of /lit/
>>8161824
t. nabokov
>>8159686
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
>>8160012
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.
>>8159833
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.
>>8159702
Fuck farenheit 451. Fuck it.
>>8159686
Far from the madding crowd.
>>8162862
Lul
>>8162451
No. Elitism is one of the things that keeps this place in a healthier state than other literature boards on the net.
>>8159686
2666
its just racist bullshit. he had some ideas going on, but in the end its just pedestrian babble
>>8159686
Walden, Thoreau was a cunt and a poor mans Tolstoy.
>>8162945
Triggered
Try actually reading the book
>>8159686
Thirteen Reasons Why. Had to read it in High School but holy fuck do I wish I hadn't
>>8162862
So is any Hemingway good or is it all trash?
>>8159833
>>8160285
>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.
>>8162988
OP here. To be clear, I excluded IJ from the options because I thought its shittiness was a forgone conclusion.
>>8159729
That's a great book
>>8160190
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.
>>8162972
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'
>>8162972
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
>>8163021
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.
>>8163167
It's a terrible book, you should read it
>>8163183
you should read my asshole fagget
>>8162940
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 /lit/core faggot (aka (You))
>>8159729
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.
>>8163021
Naw, he wasn't afraid to tell me something else. He just didn't have a healthy life where he grew up.
>>8163316
>>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
>>8159835
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
>>8159693
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
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.
>>8159686
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.
>>8163832
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)
>>8163156
I always think people are taking about The Bell Curve and get confused for a second.
>>8163884
I second Catch-22. His ideas aren't original, he's not good as a novelist, and he's got such a shitty unlikable fedora worldview.
Cien años de soledad.
Pinche prosa pretensiosa.
My diary, t b h f a m
>>8159686
Demian - Herman esse
>>8163445
>he tries to attack diction out of the blue
>he doesn't understand contextual language
begone, pseud. You have the comprehension of an ESL student
>>8159834
Why did you find Madame Bovary so bad?
>>8163995
>uses elitism the way public newspapers and tween twitters use it
>gets called out on it
>butthurt ensues
Stay mad, fag.
1Q84 was damn awful. Not even Maxwell Perkins could have saved that book.
Murakami writing an entertaining novel ever again doesn't seem likely.
>>8159976
This.
Moravagine, although I'm not sure if it counts as meme shit since it's relatively unknown trash.
Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
>>8159796
shite fucking book ay
>>8162573
*sudden exhalation of air from nostrils*
Atlas Shrugged.
Read this in English class at school.
>>8164492
This is also a competitor though, read this for French class.
>>8159686
How To Be Good by Nick Hornby.
Meant to have a female narrator, but he fails at it miserably. It's horrific.
>>8164494
Reading The Princesse de Clèves right now for a French lit course...
It reads like high school aged girls gossiping about crushes.
We The Living
>>8164546
Oh god, High Fidelity is the one book I've never finished
Bukowski's Factotum
and really anything by that faggot
Flowers for fucking Algernon.
>>8164362
Yyyyeah
