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The worst thing you've ever read.


peterbound

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Yeah so not to start shit but

The Subtle Knife. So bad I dropped the series and sold my books. Probably not the worst EVER but it certainly is up there for books that made me angry.

Hmmmmm I feel like I'm missing a big one. I'll have to troll through some lists later.

If Brooks is the worst you've ever read consider yourself lucky.

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I read something by him this year, already forgot the name. It wasn't horrible but it was horribly jarring to read. Constant interruptions of unneeded info dumps put into the middle of sentences. Such as -- The man jumped on his jaguar (a species of large feline found in the southern areas of the land) and launched into action. I made the sentence up randomly but that was the style of it. And these drops happened on almost every page.

I would have to dig pretty deep to think what the worst I have read is though.

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Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert's Dune books. Well, I didn't read all of them, I read the prequel trilogy they wrote and then the 2 books of "Dune 7." Hot garbage. And I guess they've had a bunch of others since then, so they must sell well. But seriously, who buys these things?



Does Goodkind just go without saying at this point? I only made it through the first 200 pages of Wizard's First Rule before I said, "Nope!" and put it down. Then I discovered the Goodkind threads on here, which are much more entertaining than the Yeard himself.


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I couldn't finish it. I felt like reading the same point 20 times in 50 pages was enough commitment, thanks very much.

I almost read through it. While I'm not religious, I am not atheistic as well. I read it, because I wanted to know what a smart, atheistic person like Professor Dawkins thoughts on the topic are, because I really dislike all those militant atheists who constantly say, that religious people are stupid, believing in god is something stupid and that you are a bad person, if you believe in god. I wanted to find out what great minds think and how they discuss this topic objectively.

Well, as it turned out, Dawkins is just another of those militant atheists. Furthermore, he obviously has no idea of religion, philosophy and logic reasoning.

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I don't find His Dark Materials *bad*, just incredibly disappointing. Pullman took armoured polar bears and a War Against God and made it boring.

Yeah it wasn't so much the writing as the fact that he turned my favorite character from the first book into a scared little girl that needed to be rescued by men. The fuck. I could go on for pages on that one.

All of you who think Goodkind is the worst there is are lucky. Not that he doesn't suck ass, but my god there is some real trash out there that defies explanation.

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Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven. I can't think of a single thing I liked about it. Not the way the plot is structured, not the characters, not the prose, not the treatment of womens. It has a lot of good reviews on Goodreads and it was on the board rec list.



A lot of books that aren't good/I don't like have redeeming qualities. I also hated His Dark Materials, but it's nowhere nearly as badly written as some of the worst things I've read. Dragonlance has Raistlin and I think it's less of a bad series (the original three) and more of an age/maturity mismatch. I wouldn't hesitate to rec them to a 14 year old. I honestly thought that SoT was supposed to be comical, so found the first two books accordingly entertaining.



The dumbest book that I've read must be Divergent. I read it in a book club that had some people I genuinely like in it, and ended up leaving the book club because I realized that their reading selections were decreasing my respect for their intelligence, which wasn't fair as they were otherwise bright and thoughtful people, just had affection for the most vacuous YA tripe. However, it wasn't hard to keep reading - the structure and the prose were fine for a page turner - whereas I had to force myself to finish Lucifer's Hammer, alternating between reading the same paragraph 3 times because it couldn't hold my attention and skimming large sections. For me, there are two kinds of bad writing - a book can be luridly awful but still readable - you can even want to know what happens next, was there an evil chicken uprising? - but once you add convoluted prose and wandering sentence structure that makes fast reading impossible, that's the book that's the worst.


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Yeah it wasn't so much the writing as the fact that he turned my favorite character from the first book into a scared little girl that needed to be rescued by men. The fuck. I could go on for pages on that one.

All of you who think Goodkind is the worst there is are lucky. Not that he doesn't suck ass, but my god there is some real trash out there that defies explanation.

I automatically discount romance novels (which is just written porn) and political manifestos.

I dislike Goodkind intensely because he's a shit writer who makes a ton of money and while having the gaul to insult his audience by saying that 'he doesn't write fantasy'.

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Shit as Goodkind's writing is (boy, did he like to repeat himself in Wizards First Rule), I never got the problem with his claim even though it isn't true. What's there to be insulted about? It makes fantasy readers seem pretty thin-skinned.

Okay, bad phrasing- he insults fantasy writers more than he insults fantasy readers.

I'm actually not a big fantasy reader. My preferred genres are classic literature and historical fiction. But if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. Goodkind somehow thinks his work somehow transcends the average fantasy series.

It's not so much that I have a 'thin skin'. I simply think that on top of his shit writing and terrible storytelling, he's also an ass to boot, which sort of completes the trifecta of horribleness.

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I don't find His Dark Materials *bad*, just incredibly disappointing. Pullman took armoured polar bears and a War Against God and made it boring.

Yeah I don't think its bad in the way the OP meant, it just comes to mind when I think of books that really pissed me off.

Some of you people have obviously not read enough trash. I don;t knwo if I envy you or not.

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