Hey Pandas, What Was The Worst Book You Have Ever Read?

Fifty Shades of Grey. Beyond terrible.

Any Chicken Soup for the Soul

Dune. Tried reading it multiple times, but have never been able to stay awake past page 50.

The bridge to terabithia. I might reread it, since I read it in 4th grade. I hate that my favorite character had to get killed off, and it wasn't even a good death! Just fell in a river, bonked her head and drowned. I remember really hating that part specifically

The "Story of O." Holy poop. What did I just read?

Twilight. It’s so weird and toxic.

Also anything by Dickens, we had to read A Tale of Two Cities freshman year and y’all, it’s f**kin’ sucked.

The Satanic Verses ..... Should have declared a fatwa for insulting literature..... Rambling, pointless piece of tripe....bored the absolute tits off me.... I want the week back that I wasted reading that pile of shite....

Verity by Coleen Hoover.

All of the characters are unlikeable, selfish and cruel. The main character is a Mary Sue (so average but everyone is very attracted to her), the love interest is objectively a monster who we're instructed is amazing and the only interesting character is abused both by everyone else in the book and the author.

All of Colleen Hoover's books are bad, but this one struck me at the worst.

Can't decide between the sandman (E.T.A. Hoffmann) and the Metamorphosis (Kafka)

We had to read them in school

I think the worst book I ever read was "The Woman who went to bed for a year" by Sue Townsend she is a very famous author in the UK. I've never read a book where I wanted to punch every single character. I struggled through to the end because I wanted to find out what happened and I wish I hadn't bothered.

Starship Troopers. I was excited to read it becuase the film is silly, satirical and good fun. It was absolutely garbage. Incredibly dull which is difficult when you're in spcae fighting aliens, even the fights were boring. Incredibly right wing and sexist as well without any satire in the mix. Only bothered finishing it because it was short and I kind of hoped it would get better. It did not.

Five Quarters of the Orange. Horrible people and so boring. I was lent it by a friend who usually gave me great books, but this one was so awful! When I returned it, she told me she just wanted to see if it was really as bad as she thought. It was! Thanks Sue for making me waste my time on a book you knew was horrible!!

Wildlife by Richard Ford. It was terribly boring and I couldn't relate to anything going on. It just seemed like the story of an unremarkable kid in 1960s Montana who's parents hot divorced. I admittedly did not finish. I was assigned to read it in AP English as a modern counterpart to the classic "one day in the life of Ivan denisovich" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which was awesome and I highly recommend.

The Celestine Prophecy

Probably the bible, very boring with poor character development. New Testament better-written but super repetitive, like first four books almost identical and clearly plagiarised each other, some lines verbatim. The pauline epistles tedious praise rambling. The OT full of fury and vengeance and genocide and sexism and mass murder and scatology. (Really) Ezekiel 4:12-17 etc. Caused so many genocides, so much death, justified slavery etc etc. Plus did I mention boring. Yep, read it a few times.

Any/all of William Faulkner's books. I know he's a great writer and he made his books complex to read for a reason but dang - it was next to impossible to get through them or understand what I had read. I read a lot - at least 30 books a year and every once in a while I try Faulkner again - nope, just can't do it.

You think I know how to read

Let's poke the fantasy nerds: Silmarillion. It's a convoluted, needlessly hard to follow history text book about a fictive world. I'm sure it's filled with good stuff, but I for sure am too attention deficit to ever enjoy going through it. I just feel that a good book, including text books, should still be easily enough read that even people with minor disabilities can understand them.

I had this one book I had to read for a French class called "Les Enfants de Dracule" (The Children of Dracula).

2/3 of the main characters were unlikeable, and the book opened up with both a sex scene, had poor pacing and also included an offensive/stereotypical portrayal of a member of the LGBTQA+ (hope I didn't miss any letters).

If I can say the best part of the book was this graded presentation I did where I portrayed a member of the Belmont Clan from the Castlevania series, retelling the demise of Dracula and one of his more unlikeable children following the events of the book (where I had full creative control), then that should be all of the indication of it's quality.

The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work and Team with Positive Energy, by Jon Gordon

Just so, so awful. Incredibly boring and filled with pseudo-science and toxic positivity. This whole book is weirdly cult-like and has just a soupçon of racism for good measure. Ugh.