Worst book you ever read?

[Finnegan]

What is the most hopelessly abysmal piece of crap book you've ever read? Please, please remember that you can't nominate any of Goodkind's faeces as it would just become another Tairy-bashing thread. I myself will nominate "The Sword of Shannara" by Terry Brooks. I've only read the first trilogy so I can't really judge him as a writer but the first book just seemed to be LOTR with some of the nouns changed around. I thought "Wishsong" and "Elfstones" were fairly awful too but I'm sure a lot of people would disagree. Let the hate commence!

[Errant Bard]

I will exclude The Eye of Argon since it's so bad it's good.

Of the books I've finished, I got to pick Devlin's luck by Patricia Bray. Nothing can redeem this pseudo-gaelic piece of crap.

Also, there is a thread untitled Worst book of all time, check it out

[Ixodes]

When I was in high school, I read a book called Wingman by Mack Maloney. It was about post-WW3 America. The protagonist, Hawk Hunter (for real), flew around a big jet and blew the shit out of the Soviets. Lord, it was bad. They did a whole series.

Mr. Maloney has a web site and this is brief synopsis of the Wingman series. My favorite quote from this link:

The final battle, which takes place in Football City (aka St Louis), is titanic and results in a huge United American victory, this after Hawk single-handedly shoots down 100 Soviet-built planes. There is also lots of sex in this one as my editor at the time told me that Hawk should lay pipe at least four times a book.

Four times indeed.

[Finnegan]

The eye of Argon makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

(I'm new to the board so I didn't know about the other thread. Ah well.)

[duchess of malfi]

Nights With Sasquatch would be right up there.

Probably followed by any of the later novels in the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series by Laurell K. Hamilton. They have sex scenes so awful that I am scarred for life for having read them. I now dread sex scenes in books...

[Jaxom 1974]

The first book by Conn Igguldun about Caesar. Worst thing ever. (within the scope of the thread)

[Xray the Enforcer]

WEEP FOR ME, for I finally discovered the title of the Worst Fucking Book I ever tried to read.

WEEP MORE because the NY Fucking Times Book Review wasted time, money and print space on it.

The Shallow Man by Coerte V. W. Felske (that better be a "stage" name first unfurled in the blue movies) is utter shit. It's worse than anything I've ever read (although I've not read Nights With Sasquatch, and never will, so Felske's title is safe for the time being).

I stopped being friends with the person who handed that book to me. Talk about a metaphorical gutshot.

[niamh]

The witches of Eastwick.

The sheer memory of it is gross.

[Multaniette]

in fantasy, somrething probably by elizabeth haydon. jeez did it frickin' suck.

[tenalpia]

Bad books are wiped from my memory the moment I throw them at the wall

[Lupigis]

Mr. Maloney has a web site and this is brief synopsis of the Wingman series.

That site is a goldmine! From the synopsis of the third book in the series, The Lucifer Crusade:

The Lucifer Crusade - The leader of The Circle is a Russian secret agent named Viktor Robotov, but he also goes by the name, "Lucifer." When he flees to the Middle East after losing The Circle War, Hawk follows him, and teaming up with several friendly mercenary bands, tows a disabled US Navy aircraft carrier across the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal where they launch a surprise air strike on Viktor's forces.

This book is a bit of a rip-off of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," which inspired the movie "Apocalypse Now." (I never read the book, but I saw the movie.) Basically the further the characters move across the Med, the more insane things become. It ends with a replaying of the scene in the New Testament when Christ and the Devil confront each other in the desert, except it's Hawk and Viktor squaring off.

[Lupigis]

Book 8, Skyfire also looks like a gem:

Skyfire - Another strange book and a turning point in the series. Real fans can tell when my contracts were running out because I would always seemingly kill Hawk off, just in case I couldn’t come to terms with the publisher and the series would be over.

This is one of those books. It was also named by the publisher and the cover drawn before I wrote it. I didn’t like the name “Skyfire†at first, but later came to use it as the place Hawk “retires†to. This story is really about him being sick of being a super hero and wanting to settle down with Dominique, which is what he does in the first few chapters. He has a hay farm on Cape Cod, and that’s all he wants to do, grow hay, whatever that means. But his dream lasts only a few pages or so before the country is attacked by – who else? – the Vikings.

Hawk is reluctantly dragged back into the super hero business especially since the bad guys have snatched Dominique. Thus begins a titanic battle against these “new†Norsemen as they terrorize the east coast of America.

Hawk meets another superhero type, a European guy named Wolf, who has a fleet of battleships. They agree to join forces and eventually defeat the Vikings in a battle near Miami Beach. All this Norse stuff came from a kid’s book I happen to see that explained how strange the Vikings were, how they were always depressed and murdering each other, yet were also great explorers.

:rofl:

[Xray the Enforcer]

When I was in high school, I read a book called Wingman by Mack Maloney. It was about post-WW3 America. The protagonist, Hawk Hunter (for real), flew around a big jet and blew the shit out of the Soviets. Lord, it was bad. They did a whole series.

Mr. Maloney has a web site and this is brief synopsis of the Wingman series. My favorite quote from this link:

Four times indeed.

WOW

[Errant Bard]

whatever that means. But his dream lasts only a few pages or so before the country is attacked by – who else? – the Vikings.

Who else, indeed.

Based on that, I like this author.

[Harlot]

Madame Bovary - I still hate that book to this day. Of course, I was forced to read it for school. As a rule, if a book sucks, I stop reading it. There's too many good books out there to waste your time slogging thru something just to say you've finished it.

[Shryke]

Who else, indeed.

Based on that, I like this author.

I do too. I mean, it's like he knows he's churning out shit just for the paycheck, and is having fun with it.

[Tears of Lys]

Bad books are wiped from my memory the moment I throw them at the wall

Same here.

[Papirolle]

Silverfall: Stories of the Seven Sisters by Ed Greenwood

Absolute and utter shite! I can't believe this "author" is getting published.

[WLU]

Wuthering Heights. I don't care if it's a great classic of Western Literature. Wuthering Heights.

[Brude]

I tend to not finish books that I do not like and ones that I really hate I don't get very far in, at all. As a slow reader, the effort and time required to read a bad book just isn't worth it to me. The worst books I ever read, or started reading, would have to be "Angels and Demons" by Dan Brown and "The Godfather" by Mario Puzo. Mind you, movies of The Godfather are on my top ten best list of all time, but the book...*phew*

The worst book I ever actually finished was probably "Heir to Empire," the first of those Timothy Zahn Star Wars books. I can't say it was god-awful, but it wasn't good. Still, the fact that this is alleged to be among the very best of all those post-RotJ Star Wars novels really scares me. It makes me wonder if "Splinter of the Mind's Eye" was really as good as I remembered it to be, or if that's just because I was only 9 when I read it. Alan Dean Foster was once a good science fiction writer, maybe that still held true for when that book was written, I don't know.