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The worst book I've ever read

Started by holyzombiejesus, October 28, 2017, 01:16:27 AM

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holyzombiejesus

As mentioned in the terrible book covers thread, I found this at the station Library yesterday.







It's very difficult to read it without imagining Alan Partridge doing the narration.





Thing is, it's got 488 reviews on Amazon with an average of 4*s. The author himself has his own Amazon page, where he writes...

QuoteDAVID P PERLMUTTER, that's me, and welcome.

I started to write my first book when I lived in Portugal, about 4 years. I now live in London. That book called Wrong Place Wrong Time has, I'm pleased to say has been a #1 BESTSELLER on Amazon around the world, with many hundreds of 4 and 5* reviews. The story is based on true events that happen to me in Marbella with I was wrongly arrested for arson and manslaughter.

My other true story is called Five Weeks which is about my visit to Pennsylvania, America where after I was offered a job, I had to go for, you guessed it, Five weeks of training. I won't give too much away, apart from saying that I was nearly left for dead in a Pennsylvania wood.

I have just put another true story on Amazon, which is available for pre-order, called 24 Hours In New York and as you may have guessed, its about a trip I took, which, again I'm not going to give much away, but to say that it was one hell of a 24 hour period.

Away from writing true stories, I also write marketing books for indie authors, called MY WAY, in fact, I've written 8 books in the series. Its called the My Way Brand.

So feel free to take a look at my books, read the chapters and if you buy any of the books, I hope you enjoy and please leave a review.

holyzombiejesus

After sealing the deal and earning himself a "five grand" commission, our hero is sent to the pub to celebrate by his boss. It is here, in the Horse and Crown, he meets his mate Michael.










BlodwynPig

Oooooh. This is getting steamy. I hope those girls aren't too bloated for the sex scenes.

ps. is this in Marbella yet?

JesusAndYourBush

No Logo by Naomi Klein.
I was given it as a gift and from reading the blurb on the back it looks like it might be decent but I found it dull and badly written and gave up 12 pages into chapter 1.  I flicked through it and it didn't look like it improved later.

holyzombiejesus

Quote from: BlodwynPig on October 28, 2017, 01:37:37 AM
Oooooh. This is getting steamy. I hope those girls aren't too bloated for the sex scenes.

No, unfortunately they are never mentioned again.



Quote from: BlodwynPig on October 28, 2017, 01:37:37 AMps. is this in Marbella yet?

Not yet. The hero gets done for drunk driving, gets put in the cells for one night, has this sobering experience...



gets fired (and doesn't get to keep the five grand commission) and decides to move to Spain.

Dr Rock

Camden Girls by Jane Owen. A rushed, very-poorly written attempt to cash in on Camden's then burgeoning popularity. It made me think 'I could easily write a better book than this', so I did.

Some reviews

''Not good. If I remember rightly the punctuation was no existent.''

''its absolute garbage probably one of the worse books ive ever read ..''

''Firstly I cannot express how bad this book really is ...It is the most atrocious read that I have ever had the misfortune to buy ..It is not in the least bit fast paced as the summary suggests. It is tedious and trashy without even being good trash .Its badly written and quite honestly the most boring read I have ever come across.The heroine of the story irritated me beyond belief with the constant student "up talking" and continual drug references .Was the author trying to make a point here or something ? I can only believe that after reading the introduction about the author this must be her very poor attempt at art trying to imitate life .Needless to say I wouldnt recommend this book to anyone ..Unless of coure you cant sleep or you ran out of paper to wipe your backside with ...''

''1.0 out of 5 stars Seriously bad
Worst book I've ever read... Piece of crap... I only gave it 1 star because Amazon made me''

''1.0 out of 5 stars Can it get any worse?
How does this stuff ever get published? A badly written account of a wholly unremarkable series of events lacking plot, theme and characterisation. Please tell me she hasn't written another one....''

touchingcloth

Hands down the worst book I ever read was Retrieving Lobsters from Jayne Mansfield's Bum.

jobotic

I think a mug tree is only as beautiful as its beholder.

holyzombiejesus

I finished the book last night. It certainly was a gripping fast paced read. The guy goes to Spain, has sex ("she was a sexy as fuck. Great in bed!"), gets a job giving out fliers and helping to set up a karaoke machine but gets sacked and thumped because the boss' girlfriend fancies him so much. He then has it off with another woman ("fast and frenzied"). Then he becomes homeless, sleeps on the beach with a tramp called The Son of Elvis and gets a hard-on watching a fit woman sunbathe ("I shifted on to my side to make it a little less obvious"). Then he meets the woman he'd had sex with ("when she threw her head back and opened her mouth in a silent scream, I came too, feeling a weeks worth of tension leave me") and goes to a party where everyone think he's ace. He leaves the party, sees a building on fire, runs in and (he claims) saves 2 people's lives but then goes back in and steals some money and credit cards. He's arrested and beaten but bailed to live with an English reporter. At this stage you think that there'll be some investigative journalism that clears his name, but no. He fucking legs it! He gets his dad to buy him a plane ticket back to England and sneaks off to the airport. In the afterword he states that he never cleared his name but continues to travel abroad without being collared.

Utterly bizarre.

PM me if you want it.

Dead Soon

Quote from: Dr Rock on October 28, 2017, 05:40:40 AM
Camden Girls by Jane Owen.

I recall a post on here by someone who once slagged the book off when asked of their opinion by a friend, not knowing that the woman accompanying said friend was Jane Owen herself.

Serge

Funnily enough, in the 'Memories' bit of my Facebook feed this evening, the review I wrote of a certain book on this day last year came up, so here it is in full:

QuoteFor the last twenty years, there has been one certainty in my life - which is that I would never read a book that was worse than 'The Beach' by Alex Garland. 'The Beach' is powerfully bad, eye-gougingly bad, so bad that even the fuck-awful film that was based on it, as bad as it is, isn't as bad as the book.

It's worse than 'The Da Vinci Code'. It's worse than 'The Girl On The Train'. It's worse than 'Generation Of Swine' by Hunter S Thompson. It's worse than 'Timbuktu' by Paul Auster. It's worse than anything Martin Amis ever wrote. It's worse than 'The Lord Of The Rings'. It's worse than 'The Catcher In The Rye'. It's worse than 'On The Road'. It's worse than any book with the words 'Paolo Hewitt' on the cover. It's worse than any book of poetry, even the ones written by Wendy Cope. It's worse than Morrissey's autobiography. It's worse than Neil Morrissey's autobiography (I have no idea if this exists, but if it does, it's not as bad as 'the Beach'.) It's worse than that really bad Scandi-Noir novel I read about the bloke who goes around injecting killing juice into people's necks to make them go on a rampage. It's worse than that Terry Pratchett novel I attempted which ended up being thrown across the room as it had annoyed me so much I didn't want it anywhere near me.

But now.....that wall of certainty has been breached. I have found a book that is worse than 'The Beach'. It's called 'Five Rivers Meet On A Wooded Plain' by Barney Norris, and it is so unutterably foul that I had to cut off my head after reading it, and then cut off the arm I cut my head off with, and then the arm I cut that off with, etc. I'm typing this with my ribcage.

Where can I begin? Maybe with the fruitily overwritten prologue, which I was convinced was meant as a homage to the works of Adrian Mole? Possibly with the chapter on Rita, a troubled woman in her sixties, which is easily the worst piece of writing I have ever read in my life. I'm guessing Norris is very middle class and thinks that working class people can't say a sentence without using the word 'fuck'. It also suffers from one of my least favourite literary conceits - page after page written in italics. What does that even mean?

Nearly as bad is the longest chapter in the book, which is actually about a 15 year old boy who might as well BE Adrian Mole, with its shorter but more florid bursts of italics. Not to mention the fact that if you ever encountered a 15 year old who actually spoke like Sam does, you'd beat him to within an inch of his life.

That's followed by a rather weak chapter on an elderly man who has just lost his wife of 40 years and who is one of the main protagonists in the central event of the book, a car crash (that's not a spoiler, as it tells you about that on the cover.) This has the good point of being relatively brief. But that is then followed by what seemed like several thousand pages of whining from the point of view of a 40-year old Tory, who again, speaks like nobody I've ever heard - even Michael Gove would call her unrealistic.

Than it's back to the over-fruity narrator from the prologue, an aimless divot whose ramblings are probably meant to be the core of the book's message, but which are about as profound as a picture of a blue sky with a couple of clouds on it with the words, 'Today is the first day of the rest of your life' printed on it.

It could also have done with an editor going through and pointing out that the timeframes of the individual character's lives don't actually match up. And also crossing out all of the words and kicking Norris so hard up his arse out of the office that he landed on Pluto.

I'll be honest, I didn't really like it.

Other than this:

The Beach, as mentioned above.

Are You Experienced? by William Sutcliffe, which by rights I should have just abandoned, but I found myself stuck on the slowest moving bus in South London one evening and ended up finishing it off, but not before it gave me a thundering headache.

The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins. Wherein a character conveniently forgets being attacked by the killer right up until the point where the plot demands that she suddenly remember it. A friend of mine gets wound up if you remind her that this was actually Hawkin's fifth book (albeit the first under her own name), as she likes to cherish the idea that Hawkins hit the big time with her first book, and hates it when I cough and mutter 'fifth'.

The Da Vinci Code. Obviously.

Autumn by Ali Smith, the only book that took less time to write than it does to read it.

Obviously, these are the books that I actually finished, there is an unknown number of titles I've abandoned within 50 pages. But when a book is so bad (as with all of the above), I feel a duty to see it through to the end. The abandoned ones are merely mediocre.



grassbath

Serge, why do you hate The Beach so?

BlodwynPig

^^^ "reminded her of Michael Praed, the actor who played Robin Hood"

fucking hell.

G.C.

I don't think the Da Vinci Code is all that bad, really - no where near as bad as its reputation.

The prose style is pretty basic, the characters are one dimensional, and it errs towards telling (instead of showing) too much, but it's well constructed from a pace and plot point of view, and the ideas are genuinely great, in my opinion.

I found it far more interesting that either of the single Wallander and Rebus books I've read, both of which were palpable dogshit.


Pepotamo1985

Quote from: holyzombiejesus on October 28, 2017, 01:16:27 AM
As mentioned in the terrible book covers thread, I found this at the station Library yesterday.

That reads exactly like the series of crime thrillers allegedly written by a goalie for a UK football club whose name annoyingly escapes me currently. Someone posted a series of excerpts on Twitter, and it was so transcendentally awful I was gonna order them all on Amazon, but life got in the way. Would love to remember/know who I'm chatting about.

Andy147

Steve Bruce (though he was a defender rather than a goalie)?

Serge

Quote from: grassbath on October 29, 2017, 03:48:42 PM
Serge, why do you hate The Beach so?

It's badly written, the main character is a twat, every other character (except possibly Daffy Duck) is a twat, etc, etc. To be honest, it's about 20 years since I read it, so I don't remember a lot of specifics, other than it aroused a deep loathing in me that has lasted to this day. But thanks to Barney Norris, it is no longer the worst book I've ever read.

Quote from: G.C. on October 29, 2017, 04:34:38 PMI don't think the Da Vinci Code is all that bad, really - no where near as bad as its reputation.

It starts with a SEVEN FOOT TALL ALBINO MONK shooting someone in the Louvre. Despite this being the busiest Art Gallery in the World, not one person notices someone who is A SEVEN FOOT TALL ALBINO DRESSED AS A MONK DISCHARGING A GUN IN ONE OF THE GALLERIES. The man who has been shot doesn't die immediately, and decides to spend his last 20 minutes on Earth staggering around a gallery leaving elaborate clues in a variety of unusual places, before disembowelling himself in order to look like the Vitruvian Man for whoever discovers him. Rather than using the time to, oh I don't know, ring an ambulance and say, "I've just been fucking shot!", which is probably what I'd do in that situation.

This isn't the worst thing in the book, though. At one point, the three main characters, who by this point have been established as the top three codebreakers in the World come across a code which even they can't crack, leaving them to utter things like, "I've never seen anything like this before," and "This is going to be tough." We are then shown the code that has stumped them. It is - I shit you not - backwards writing.

Small Man Big Horse

Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy - I was forced to read it for both for A-Level and my degree, which is something I've never quite recovered from, it induces misery to such an extent that I'm sure it's responsible for more suicides than any other book.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King - A girl gets lost in the woods and whines and whines for 200 pages. I was stuck in hospital when given it, and had nothing else to do but read it or stare at the ceiling, and I wish I'd thrown it in the bin and done so now. I used to like King a lot too, but this is absolute garbage.


Pepotamo1985

Quote from: Serge on October 29, 2017, 07:09:00 PM
It's badly written, the main character is a twat, every other character (except possibly Daffy Duck) is a twat, etc, etc. To be honest, it's about 20 years since I read it, so I don't remember a lot of specifics, other than it aroused a deep loathing in me that has lasted to this day.

I remember us talking about our mutual, visceral hatred of the book before many years ago, and while my memories of the book are likewise hazy (must be about 15 years since I read it) I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head. The characters are terrible (entire personalities frequently change to fit the plot) and totally unsympathetic, the dialogue is horrible, the story isn't very good - particularly the buildup-bereft deus ex machina of having everyone go mental and murderous. 

Also, hilariously, given the picture it paints of backpackers - selfish, venal, deluded, pretentious, immature, cooler and holier than thou, etc etc etc - the people I've met who most venerate the book pretty much fit that description. Several people at my Uni who thought they were cultured and worldly because they fucked off to Asia for four months at their parents' expense and got whammed on magic mushrooms while pretending to build a school - and who, by my estimation, probably could count on two hands with fingers left over the number of books they'd read outside the compelled confines of education - were absolutely mad for it. You shouldn't judge art on its fans, but I think it does say something about the book.

BlodwynPig

"The cerulean skyline shimmered in the sky, the sands of time were literally passing through my fingers. I had a thirst, like a thirst I'd never had before. Was that water in the distance or just a mirage? It was just a mirage. Would I live or die. Turn the page to find out.

...

I died"

G.C.

Quote from: Serge on October 29, 2017, 07:09:00 PM
Rather than using the time to, oh I don't know, ring an ambulance and say, "I've just been fucking shot!", which is probably what I'd do in that situation.

You don't know how to die symbolically, which is why you'll never work in the louvre, or provide the narrative drive for an international bestseller.

mothman

It's too easy to self-publish garbage these days. The ebook forum I visit exposes me to so many. The right-wing ones are the worst. The zombie apocalypse that started because the Spendocrats took everyone's guns away and then didn't let Are Brive Boys (US version thereof) invade Iran, so a communist climate scientist used Muslim Magic to raise the dead. You get the idea.

Really I think it needs to have been released - God knows how by a major and/or respectable publisher. I have a good one, if I can just remember what it was called...

Pepotamo1985

Quote from: mothman on October 29, 2017, 11:04:14 PM
It's too easy to self-publish garbage these days. The ebook forum I visit exposes me to so many. The right-wing ones are the worst. The zombie apocalypse that started because the Spendocrats took everyone's guns away and then didn't let Are Brive Boys (US version thereof) invade Iran, so a communist climate scientist used Muslim Magic to raise the dead. You get the idea.

That's brilliant though.

In my more cynical moments, I do wonder whether writing Christian fiction under a pseudonym might net me a shitload of cash. If I get really desperate, maybe I'll sink that low.

BlodwynPig

"Reverend John Pepotamo: he's a priest with a gun, and a very dark secret" from hot new Haitian author Papé Toom

The Girl in the Spiders Web

The second 2 Stieg Larsson books were pretty bad but someone had to come along and carry on the series but amazingly enough even more badly than the originator had finished his lot.

zomgmouse

Ritual by David Pinner, the book that the original The Wicker Man is based on (though I've just read that the connection was denied - yeah, right). I'm surprised they turned it into the spectacular film it is. This was full of atrociously clumsy writing. A real struggle.


Sebastian Cobb

I read a load of Wilbur Smith books as a teenager, I'm a bit miffed as to why and am never going to get that time back.