We've all read a book we found particularly annoying, anger inducing, or just plain stupid. Talk about (or rant about) how bad they were here. :3

I'll start:

Uglies Trilogy by Scott Westerfeld (or something like that)

I chose to read this book for English last summer due to recomendations from friends. They had read it earlier in the year and wouldn't shut up about how "eye opening" and "exciting" it was and eventually badgered me into reading it (have you ever seen Charlie the Unicorn? It was like that. XD)
So, I read the book. The first chapter or so was alright, nothing special but it kept my interst, but then we get into the blatient moral of the story. In the second chapter (which was only about 15 pages in) the narorator flat out tells you that in this society at a certain age (it was a year ago, I don't remember exactly what it was but it was around 11) kids are taken away from their homes and labled "Uglies." At this point they live in a dorm away from their parents (who can visit but are apparently too full of themselves to do so) until they are 16 when they are given a surgery that makes them "Pretty" and apparently assholes.

Ok, anyone with half aa brain knows that most kids start puberty (or showing signs of it) at about 11. 16 is the age generally associated with the end of puberty and the begining of adulthood (anatomicly speaking) at which point one might say you look and feel a lot better about yourself. The ackwardness of jr high school is gone and you can start to devlope yourself more mentally. Basically it a "prettier" age.

Ugly = Puberty and Pretty = After Puberty?! OHEMGEENOWAI!

Really, the fact that he put such a blaiten moral in a young adult novel kind of insulted me (if it was a book geared towards 8-12 year olds I'd understand making it so prominate a bit more, but, come on, teenagers don't need that stuffed down their throat. >> )

Later in the book the main character, after seeing someone who had naturally aged passed age 16 actually thinks to herself "Maybe I'm not ugly, maybe I'm just at an Ugly age?"

D:

Besides the morals thing (there were quite a few more.. apparently our civilization killed ourselves off, thus the need for perfection in the decendants of the survivors, with something that had to do with wasteing oil and metal) I just found it too much like The Giver which, in my opinion, was 100% better, and I kind of wanted the main character to die or something. She annoyed me a lot.

In the book's defence the author did a good job developing their world and explained certain things pretty well, but I really had a hard time finishing it....

Also: The names of the towns were Uglyville and Pretty Town. IT SOUNDS LIKE SOMETHING FROM NICK JR! NOT YA FICTION! D:!!!!!

The Catcher in the Rye
Holden Caulfield is the equivalency of some of the I'm better than you idiots here on DD.

I have a tough time pinning down the "Worst book ever". But I can tell you that I really hated Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. Somebody tell me why 85% of the books I had to read in school have been women's literature. No offense to the women out there, but I want balance.

Basically all the books I've had to read for school which revolve around someone coming to high school for the first time, after a tragedy, or, catch how original this is... BOTH!

ugh.

I DON'T CARE IF YOU THINK I'LL RELATE TO A STUDENT TRYING TO FIT INTO A SOCIETY I'M IN. I DON'T WANT TO HEAR THE CHARACTERS WHINING.

I'm the kind of person who stays with his group of friends trying to stay away from chliche High school life. I DON'T WANT TO BE ACCEPTED BY ALL IN MY SOCIETY. I enjoy being somewhat of an outcast and NOT finally asking the girl out and making a few TRUE friends who won't judge you and will always happen to agree with you.
ARRRRRGGGG!!!!!!










breath...



Don't get me wrong, I have friends, who I enjoy to spend time with, we all are just the people who HATE THOSE BOOKS!!!



You know who I'm talking about.

A lot of people I talk to say that their school has them read women's literature, but I think my school is the exact opposit. I don't think we even read a book with a girl main character in jr high and To Kill a Mockingbird was the only book in high school we've read so far that had a female lead.

In jr high we read a lot of Steinbeck and Jack London. Steinbeck's alright but I hated Jack London's stuff, The Call of the Wild made half my class break down crying. D:

the worst books ever are great expectations and the scarlet letter. two of the biggest pieces of snoozefest i ever bought cliff notes for.

The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks
Just because you're famous, doesn't mean it makes your book not suck. ~_~

Also Our Town. Apparently it's supposed to be a play, but who would waste even 2 hours of their life to see this? There was no plot, we just followed a character through her life wherin NOTHING UNUSUAL HAPPENED for like 120 pages and then I was put into a bore coma at the end. 'One of the best American plays ever written' my ass...

And I guess the third one would have to be The Andromeda Strain. Wtfactionpls. Literally the WHOLE book after the intro was how they decontaminated themselves to study the virus. I'm glad I got to know that. It was a ridiculous let down hailed as a 'suspenseful page-turner'. I hate book critics. >:|

To Mock a Killing Bird

Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time series.
The first couple of books are ok... But pretty soon you realise it's exactly the same story over and over again with the characters yammering on about how they don't want to go mad and how girls are better than boys blah, blah blah. And the whole thing is basically a rip off of the Lord or The Rings and Dune mixed together.
Gah, dull!

The Early Elric books by Michael Morcock are VERY overrated. He wrote all the early stories in only a few weeks each when he was a very young man and it shows. They're the wishful thinking of a dorky metalhead teenager, which is probably the audience they appeal to most of all. But that doesn't stop them from being poorly written.
-The stories he wrote later though, the ones earlier in the Elric timeline, or the hundreds of other series and single novels, are much better and show how much he grew as a writer.

To this day, I consider having to read (for school) The Catcher In The Rye an irrecoverable waste of my life. Having to write a bullshit paper on it afterwards was an even bigger waste of my life; I didn't mean a single word I wrote in that paper. I might as well have written "This book sucks and you suck for making me read it. Gimme an A- plz kthxbye."

I cannot comprehend how my best friend loves it and considers it a life bible.

I hated the Catcher in the Rye. It WAS well-written, but really, Holden is such a huge twat.


Also written by a woman, who was a good friend of the author (Truman Capote) of one of the most awesome books of all time, In Cold Blood

Skool is a teacher (I think). YAY, a teacher who agrees The Catcher In The Rye SUCKS!

I liked Catcher in the Rye...

What I didn't like was I know Why the Caged Bird Sings.


I don't really count books that I had to read for school as the worst books ever though. When you choose to read something that turns out bad then yeah.


I can't define it as bad, but Eragon was a really mediocre book that my friend was all about and I, after reading that, was like, "Paolini didn't do anything with this, but it wasn't bad and it wasn't really good either. It just was. I'm pretty sure that's when you know it's a bad thing when people are pretty half-and-half about whether it's even bad or not.

All the books I have read are awesome.

I liked Our Town!
It was experimental and the moral of the story is that people don't appreciate life (the first act.)! I understand your quarrel with it, but I enjoyed it.

Catcher And The Rye is one of my favorite books ever...

Lord Of The Rings
I hate JRR's writing style through the whole story. Yes I know that apple is shiny, now move the hell on!

For me, it was probably "The Summoning of Everyman". If you think High-school literature was boring, wait until you get into college!

"Grapes of Wrath" -- Just plain hated it. I didn't like "The Pearl" either. I'm not a fan of depressing stuff, but it is the writing style that I hated the most. I think a paragraph (and a sentence for that matter) should be shorter than a page. I remember having to reread sentences three or four times to figure out what the hell they said.

Great Gatsby

I'm not a teacher per se (although I have the qualifications for it) but I do work in education.

The themes and all in Catcher in the Rye were well done. I agree the book is a great piece of work, but I couldn't stand reading it. I have to be able to identify with the main character, which I just couldn't do. I didn't like him and that made the book fairly unlikable to me.

For books like The Great Gatsby, Grapes of Wrath, etc... those are books people usually read in school, and it's my belief that the best way to ruin a good book is to read it in school.

Me too... no one else in my class liked it though.

Not the case for me. I really enjoyed many of the books I was assigned to read (Gulliver's Travels, Treasure Island, Lord of the Rings... ). The only issue for me is that if I pick up an AWFUL book outside of class, I simply won't continue reading it and can therefore discard it from my mind. That's why pretty much all books in my memory of hating were assignments. If no one made me read those books, I would have tossed them aside before finishing a chapter. That said, most of "the classics" are not to my taste at all. I like adventure stories, detective/mystery stuff, and comedies. Assign me to read the books I like, and you can't ruin them for me.

When I say Grapes of Wrath is awful, it isn't spite of school. I really hated the book.

My fav book was a school book. My teach was this small, pretty, prim woman who is a gothic romance nut. I didn't even know what the genre was until I took her class.

There was no book in that class I didn't like.

Macbeth. Prehaps it was because it was written at a different time, or it was the fact I had to do an essay on it, which I had to redo three times, I may never know.

Macbeth!! If you have to hate something, hate Hamlet! You can't hate Macbeth!!!

It's got... WITCHES! And... Macbeth!

Hans Brinker and the Silver Skate. It is a classical book and also the worst book I have ever read. Do not read this book. It will bleed your eys, or something to that effect.

Ballad of the Sad Cafe. I read it in high school English. Supposedly it's literature but I didn't see the point of it. I guess I was supposed to appreciate the cultural nuance of the 1930's American South but it didn't even feel authentic, just boring.

I liked all the other books we had to read in school, but gatsby was just retarded.

For non school books: The Da Vinci Code and no, I'm not mad about the controversy, it just friggin sucked.

But didn't it have some badass assassin monk or something? So, he didn't like go kung fu all over Tom Hanks and stuff?

Did they find Jesus? Or at least a mosquito in amber with Jesus blood?

My two least favorite -
The Sound and the Fury by Willian Faulker
The Egoist by George Meredith

Unfortunetely I don't remember much about them - though I remember being really, really irritated by the characters in Egoist and that it went on and on and on forever - I had to read it for class -

The rest of my family raved about the Da Vinci Code. I got maybe halfway through before I abandoned it. Looking back at a journal entry about it, the final straw was that the characters found something and droned about how amazing and shocking it was - but the chapter ended there, and I skipped ahead and found whatever it was wasn't revealed to the reader until three chapters later. That just struck me as really cheap. It wouldn't have if the author only used those kinds of cliffhangers once, but it seemed like every chapter ended like that -