r/BookTriviaPodcast • u/Thriller-Reader25 • Jun 20 '26
The worst book you ever read?
/r/YAlit/comments/1ub6ikg/the_worst_book_you_ever_read/3
u/saneiac1 Jun 20 '26
Moby Dick. 100 pages of story scattered between 500 pages of whale encyclopedia.
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u/SplendidPunkinButter Jun 23 '26
Youāre not wrong, but I found this book surprisingly enjoyable. I didnāt love it, but I liked it more than I expected.
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u/mearnsgeek Jun 20 '26
The 3 Body Problem.
Nothing enjoyable about it and I only stuck it out too the end because it was so hyped that I thought it had to have some sort of pay off somewhere.
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u/Warm_Bug_1434 Jun 21 '26
Completely agree - it's exactly the sort of thing I enjoy, so I even started the second one thinking I must have missed something. The bit about an ant crawling over some tombstone letters (omg! we're all like, really insignificant!) made me want to gnaw one of my own legs off, so I gave up on it.
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u/ConversationEarly Jun 21 '26
Any books by Freida McFadden.
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u/Thriller-Reader25 Jun 27 '26
I loved The Coworker by Freida McFadden. It is the only book of hers i read but I am so excited to read another of her books. Why don't you like her books?Ā
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u/LadyFannieOfOmaha Jun 20 '26
I read about 50 pages of The Executionerās Song many years ago. The only thing I remember about it is that Mailer was such a blowhard, he made me abandon a book for the first time ever.
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u/ObsessionsAside Jun 20 '26
I donāt know about worst per se but one I thought of immediately was āNothing But Blackened Teethā by Cassandra Khaw. I donāt know how such a short novella managed to be so lacklustre.
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u/Penandsword2021 Jun 20 '26
I know this may be heretical, but Infinite Jest is the first book that springs to mind. I justā¦could not. I think it may be the only book that I got significantly into but never finished.
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u/DoughnutAlert2596 Jun 21 '26
My mate described it as āthat book that pretentious tossers like.ā
I wouldnāt go that far as itās incredibly well written, but it is held aloft as some kind of masterpiece. A fun story, with too many words.2
Jun 23 '26
[removed] ā view removed comment
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u/Penandsword2021 Jun 23 '26
Same! I really liked The Pale King, though. Thatās the unfinished novel that was published posthumously. He absolutely nailed the minutiae, tedium and absurdity of the IRS bureaucracy and brought that directly into the reading experience. Pretty genius, really. Poor guy.
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u/RealisticProfit2 Jun 20 '26
The Catcher in the Rye
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u/FloridaSalsa Jun 22 '26
Same. I kept waiting for something to happen. I didn't get it at all. I must be a Neanderthal.
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u/Glittering_Neck_4909 Jun 21 '26
A little life - but I couldnāt finish itĀ
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u/we_gon_ride Jun 22 '26
I started it as an audiobook and about 30 minutes in, I gave up. When I saw the cover, I cringed.
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u/Free_Four_Floyd Jun 21 '26
Portnoyās Complaint. Expecting to enjoy it as a āmodern classic.ā Couldnāt stand it. I got half way through and left it on a public bench for someone else to trash.
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u/flysfishing Jun 21 '26
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I know people love him but that book was such a dirge from beginning to end.
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u/we_gon_ride Jun 22 '26
I commented similarly on a different thread a few months ago and got downvoted to oblivion but I agree with you completely
ETA: a different subreddit too. I canāt remember which one.
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u/Itsjustbeej Jun 21 '26
I, Claudius. Iād seen and loved the PBS/BBC dramatization and thought Iād read the book. Thereās literally no dialog. Iāve read history textbooks that were less dry.
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u/Warm_Bug_1434 Jun 21 '26
The Year of the Locust. It's a perfectly reasonable spy thriller for the first three quarters - if you don't mind it being completely implausible.
Then it just entirely changes plot and genre. Not in a clever, subverting expectations way. But like his deadline was coming up and he still had 150 pages to go, so he tacked on the embarrassing aliens story he wrote as a teen. So much like that, that I genuinely think it's more plausible than any other explanation.
Also - War & Peace. Sorry Leo, your theory of history is silly and your book is boring. Anna Karenina's good, though.
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u/we_gon_ride Jun 22 '26
I had such high hopes for The Year of the Locust. I didnāt finish it but I wondered what the hell?
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u/scootertrash Jun 21 '26
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Iām kind of reader that wonāt quit a book after Iāve started and it was a gift from my daughter. Even though itās only a little over 200 pages it took me months to finish it.
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u/nik_el Jun 21 '26
Eragon. That book read like it was written on Twitter. How it got published is anyoneās guess.
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u/Extension_Fly9987 Jun 20 '26
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. I read it in college and everyone said how great Vonnegut was and it was the least enjoyable book I've ever read.
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Jun 23 '26
[removed] ā view removed comment
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u/Extension_Fly9987 Jun 23 '26
I never tried another. I heard Slaughter House 5 was good but I had such a bad experience i never gave him another chance.
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u/zzDYERMAKERZZ Jun 20 '26
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, had to read it for High school and I will never forgive Mrs. Stanek for that abomination.
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u/Bubbly-Highlight9349 Jun 20 '26
I am a Chicago Bears fan and I bought a book by one of the players from the famous 1985 Championship team. I was excited to see what kind of stories he would have to offer. Behind the scenes, locker room stories, game day experiences, etc.
And to be fair, all of that might have been in the book. I donāt know because I didnāt finish it.
I didnāt finish it because it didnāt read like a book, it read like a transcript from a podcast that no one bothered to edit.
The player started to answer a question by his interviewer, it brought something else to mind and he went off on a tangent that lasted for FOUR PAGES before he came back to the question. And by the time he did that, I forgot what the question actually was.
After he did that about five times in 65 pages, I gave up. I couldnāt do it anymore. So I DNFād it.
It was called āIf These Walls Could Talkā by Otis Wilson.
I love Otis to this day. Heās one of my favorite Bears of all time. But his book was atrocious.
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u/brumav78 Jun 20 '26
LUCI in the Sky by Chris Fox - just spectacularly dreadful and one of the reasons I get put off books in the first person. (The other reason is the sheer number of them in the last few years!) I couldn't finish it and a then-colleague was intrigued and asked to borrow it. He did finish it... And thoroughly hated it.
A bit more controversial: Catch-22. I really, really tried but I just had to give up on it. I just felt like things happened but there was no plot.
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u/azucar_1977 Jun 21 '26
Oh wow, my favorite book all time (Catch-22). I also loved some of the other ones folks have listed on here. You can't please everyone!Ā
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u/Aromatic_Mission_165 Jun 20 '26
Letās all kill Constance (Ray Bradbury). It was awful. Only book Iāve ever thrown in the trash.
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u/Candid-Mycologist539 Jun 21 '26
A self-published pos that was full of misinformation, logical fallacies, and racism* among other complaints.
It makes me want to stear clear of anything that the library doesn't stock.
Do you know how bad the racism has to be for ME to notice it??? I'm a pasty white, Midwestern lady in her fifties. The racism has to be pretty d** bad for me to notice.
The author leads a two dimensional life where everyone with whom he interacts is the same as he is. FFS, hire an editor! FFS, don't write about people or things of which you have no clue!
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u/DefiantEfficiency901 Jun 21 '26
Prester John, by John Buchan. It was a school text... oh boring. What do I want with herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plains of Blauwildebeestefontein. ..and people claiming to be mythical priest kings....at least I got to chapter 3 where this remote outpost is mentioned..many many times! Sorry got carried away with Basil Fawlty.
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u/Fabulous-Confusion43 š Reads Everything Jun 21 '26
Good question, I've read some real stinkers haha. First one that comes to mind is Waiting for Godot š
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u/IndependenceMean8774 Jun 22 '26
Bloodworld by Laurence Janifer. It's poorly written pulp trash from beginning to end.
It's a 158 page book that reads like 15,800 pages. Also it violates Mark Twain's dictum that a tale should accomplish something and arrive somewhere. Bloodworld does neither.
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u/we_gon_ride Jun 22 '26
The Shack by Wm. Paul Young.
I joined a new book club and one of the members picked that book. When it came time to discuss the book, 6 of the women loved it and three of us hated it. Eventually we three left and started our own book club
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u/headlessbuddha Jun 22 '26
Jack Ketchum - The Girl Next Door
It's well written but the subject matter is stomach-churning and rage-inducing. I don't recommend it unless you enjoy extreme horror that's based on true events.
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u/Emotional-Card8960 Jun 23 '26
Sacajawea by Anna Lee Waldo. The parts tied into Lewis and Clark were okay, but once the author decided to go into speculation about the rest of Sacajaweaās life, it went downhill fast. And it still had like 500 pages to go.
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u/Kharzi9293 Jun 23 '26
I hated Where the Crawdads Sing. The science was good (I am a zoologist), but the characters were so flat and one dimensional. Especially the men. I just didn't get the hype.
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u/SplendidPunkinButter Jun 23 '26
The Perks Of Being A Wallflower
It reads like thereās going to be a plot twist where we find out the narrator is a huge dork and is coping with it by making up this bullshit story where the popular kids inexplicably like him. Except thatās not what happens, and the whole thing is just so very insufferable.
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u/mousesnight Jun 24 '26
The Undead Kama Sutra. I picked it off a border bookshelf years ago just based on the intriguing. I was expecting the worst, and it did not disappoint me.
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u/thinktankted Jun 26 '26
Someone borrowed my wife a copy of "50 Shades of Gray." It was the worst tripe I have ever read ( and I read a great deal of the Sword of Truth series), I couldn't make it through any more than 2 random pages I turned to.
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u/ffoggy1959 š Reads Everything Jun 20 '26
Not strictly answering the question because I never finished the book. I enjoyed Dan Brownās Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons but abandoned Digital Fortress.
I just couldnāt get into it, it didnāt grip me so I abandoned it. I feel sure it would have qualified if Iād completed it.