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Twilight, maybe? A cliche response, but not untrue. Yeah, I'm sure I must've read something worse... but barring the worst games on here and the worst fanfictions I've run across, I cannot think of a story or book (one that I've physically held) that I thought was more inane or annoying.

Mind you, I did eventually laugh my ass off at it once it dawned on me just how funny it was, but ... dammit, I love vampires. I have always loved vampires. -_- Seeing more glitter on them than a pride parade float caused me to die just a little inside.

The only Anne Rice books I've read are the Sleeping Beauty ones.

I used to read those Anita Blake books.  Before they turned into porn-without-plot.

What exactly counts as a vampire book anyway?

There are always the classics like Dracula and Nosferatu. Back when vampires were still firmly rooted in the genre of Horror, not...the very different kind of horror that results from reading the entire Twilight Saga.

Sleeping bea--oh, God, do you mean that never ending parade of smut and fetish fuel that begins with rape and ends with, like, two guys doing public pony play? I've never actually read it, but the review I read of it was more than enough for me to be sufficiently creeped out.

Don't judge me! XD   I was bored, they were there.

Yeah, I don't really get what's erotic about the whole pony thing.  And as I recall the books had way too much focus on delayed orgasm.  Still better than 50 shades of gray. 

(Not my favorite erotic retelling of fairy tales, but I'm not saying what is.)

Um. I don't actually have a favorite vampire book, tbh. I've read a lot of fictional works with vampires in them, I really like the various legends and takes on the creature, and I've written more than a couple of pieces involve them.

Any Werrier Keatz book.

Arrgh.  Can't find the name of the book now. 

It was a mystery, one of a number of books by the same female author.  Almost all her stories had the setup of 'mysterious present-day thing with its roots in a past mystery, intercutting between the two time periods.'

This one was about someone whose sister disappeared when they were kids.  They thought fairies lived in the woods behind their house, and the sister left on her own to be with the fairy king.

Then as an adult they moved back there for some reason?  I don't really remember the middle part, but the stupid ending was that the housekeeper? was part of a weird cult and had some kind of deformed son? and he was the "fairy king" & for 20 years he'd been keeping the sister drugged up in a secret basement? and then the cult killed everyone?

I mean, I guess as a metaphor for how the mundane world kills everything magical, it was. . . still the stupidest shaggy dog ending ever.

It reminded me of that Roger Ebert quote about The Village.  "To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. . . . It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore."

I don't remember the rant.  What was it about?

Oh come on, Bucky!

Nothing so perfectly encapsulates America, and American childhood young adulthood, as the fervent, steadfast belief that total strangers are enraptured by the inane minutia of your existence.

Ominvore's Dilemma is what I think it was called.

It was a book about what to eat that basically was written by some guy who could afford tons of organic foods and lots of supplements of high priced other things, so he basically said everyone could eat exactly like him and should. 

I read it for a high school reading competition thing.

I was extremely pissed when another team member was found out to have not read the books that he said he would cover.

At the risk of making another very cliché response: Fifty Shades of Grey. I read it solely because I didn't think I was allowed to complain about books I hadn't read, and no amount of brain bleach can undo the damage.

It was...I didn't know whether to be more offended at: the terrible writing, or the blatant misinformation. The fact that it became a bestseller makes my soul die a little inside every time I hear about it.

You wanna know what kills me about 50SOG? Its origins. Not only is Twilight directly to blame for its existence, but I could not and did not want to believe a FANFIC WRITER FINALLY MADE IT BIG with one of their works and THAT is what we got.

I've read countless funny, original, beautiful, truly worthwhile pieces of literature that just happened to be fanfiction and I would've absolutely been thrilled to see any one of them be made into an original (if with air-quotes around it) novel and movie. Hollywood dove into the pile known as fandom and from its depths, instead of any number of harmless trinkets to priceless jewels, it picked that crap and put it on display. And that day, fanfic writers were made into even more of a joke than we already were.

Unfortunately true. (Reminds me of Trump's campaign for presidency, now that I think about it. The more you bash it, the more powerful it becomes, but even knowing that, it's so hard to quell the anger.)

George Orwell's Animal Farm. :P

I mentioned this in a similar thread years ago, but I had to read Animal Farm in seventh grade. I really got into the book and with a naive belief that good always triumphs over evil, due to that being the case in every form of entertainment I had ever been exposed to up to that point in my life.

When I got to the end of the book, I was so disappointed and outraged that Orwell would ruin it like that, I ripped the book to shreds and tossed it in the trash.

Then I was like 'oh shit... I just destroyed a school library book...'

Back in class, when the teacher had all the students pass their books back up, I had to sit there and say "I can't".

When the teacher asked why, I told him about ripping the book up, due to how much it had offended me after reading it. I thought I was going to be in big trouble, but the teacher was so impressed with my story, he launched into a hearty discussion with the class about the impact of writing on society and how Animal Farm was really an analogy of Russian Revolution/WWII, etc.

I was just glad to get out of being disciplined for destroying school property haha!

(Farking Animal Farm...)

XD that's great.  I guess that was probably the reaction Orwell intended. 

I have a friend who recently got a job as a proofreader, and they've been telling me about this one book that is apparently absolute garbage. I haven't actually read it myself, but just hearing about it made me cringe.

It's about a boy who goes around solving mysteries in London, which on its own doesn't sound too bad, until you factor in that its written by an American woman who has quite obviously never actually been to London and seems to be basing all of her research on horribly out of date stereotypes.

Everyone is either rich land owners that live in mansions with butlers, valets and scullery maids, and have names like Lord Fumblesnatch; or poor orphan boys taken straight out of Oliver that all go around picking pockets and saying things like "'Ello guv'na."

I sort of want to read it to see just how hilariously ridiculous it is, although according to my friend its incredibly infuriating, so I might have to give it a miss.

Depends on how much fun you can personally have with bad writing in the moment. As I said above, Twilight was an awful experience, but in retrospect, it's hilarious.

I hated Warriors and Hunger Games, but that doesn't come nearly as close to my hatred for Island of the Blue Dolphins, which I was forced to read for 5th grade. Fucking made me sick with boredom, but at least there were some action sequences. The book I hate the most, whose name fills me with angst, was Warhorse, which I was forced to read in middle school.

It was suggested to the teachers because, y'know, they were making a movie. It was a shitty movie, for much the same reason that it was a shitty book. It's full of action scenes in which nothing badass happens, pisses and moans about "the horrors of war" in a cliched, uninteresting way, and it follows a fucking horse around as he traipses over trenches and pulls machine guns around. The war was bad? Boo fucking hoo, try getting me to empathize with the PTSD of a goddamn horse. You know what other books talked about how shitty the war was? The Great Gatsby, and that was not only published when the subject still mattered, but it portrayed it in an interesting way that wasn't shoved down your throat at every corner, through the eyes of a stupid animal who probably had no idea what the fuck was going on the whole damn time.

Fuck. That. Book.

The stupid thing about Island of the Blue Dolphins was that they wrote a sequel about the girl getting off the island.

Modern life sucks, she wishes she was back on the island, and she gets sick and dies. wtf?

The Great Gatsby is about the war?

It's a Modernist story, so it touches on that theme. The war is, essentially, the Big Bad of the story in the sense that all of Gatsby's problems, (and Daisy's by extension) essentially come from the fact that he was thrown into the trenches and kicked out of her life for years.

It's every point Warhorse managed to make, except it wasn't boring as shit, they didn't force it on you every time you turned the damn page, and it was very quick to get that shit out of the way by gently implying it, then moving on to all the other reasons why humanity sucks and you should just buy a farm somewhere and live life the good old-fashioned way.

Oh man, Islamd of Blue Dolphins was so bad. So bad. Ugh. Hated it. 

Islamd?

Yeah what else would it be, dipshit

Yeah, Islambda is the sorority she joined when they took her back to the mainland and enrolled her in the White Mans' college.

I read Island of the Blue Dolphins once, and I honestly tried to burn it. Unfortunately it was a school book so I stopped once I got the lighter.

Yet I did manage to burn a dreadful book once I finished one of the Warriors books ("The Darkest Hour," was it called?). I just threw it in a bonfire.

A gift for Caillou.

Uglies by Scott Westerfield. Terribly slow paced, is horrible at trying to convey a positive message/ moral, and half of the book is filled with empty garbage of the protagonist trying to get to some place while there is no backstory or anything interesting to keep you hooked. Worst book I've had to read for school.

Edit: Fuck! I just necroed this. Didn't realize it was an old thread. @Kiel_Farren, @Sethaniel can one of you delete this? Lol.

I think it'll be okay.

I couldn't resist the urge to necro because I need to say that "Their Eyes were Watching God" is the most most pointless and hard to read trash I have ever been forced to deal with in my life. The protagonist is a fucking whore and none of the characters can speak proper English. The author tries so hard to put in symbolism, but it is so incredibly forced that the plot has no logical drive behind it and you're left with a growing resentment towards the main character. It's going to be hard to forget that one.

I remember spending several months plowing through Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom's Science Fiction novel "The Jesus Incident" simply because I wanted to read their follow-up novel, "The Lazarus Effect". SO B-O-R-I-N-G..... I expected better of Herbert because he wrote Dune (but then Dune is very talky and hardly anyone in that novel speaks like a real human). Anyway, "The Jesus Incident" is about this Starship that was sent from Earth generations ago to escape the Sun going nova. The ship computer (called Ship, of course) has pulled a HAL 9000 and taken over and has over the centuries convinced the crew that it is the one true God. The ship is in orbit around an ocean planet with strange tentacled balloon creatures and what is apparently sentient kelp (or something like that) and the crew do a lot of scientific research. When they're not doing that, they're sleeping around with each other and stabbing each other in the back to rise in the ranks of the ship hierarchy. The humans screw up the planet's environment, the kelp and the balloon creatures die and Ship decides to abandon the crew on the desolate planet. Heavy ecological themes (because Frank Herbert) and a lot of questions about spirituality which were handled more expertly in the Dune books. A painful slog. I was PISSED when I finished it.  So bad I have yet to start reading Lazarus Effect. 

To be fair, it's not like Frank Herbert's known for good movie adaptations.

He's hard to adapt to film. But apparently the movie "The Lazarus Effect" has only its title in common with the novel.

There was a movie of the Lazarus Effect? I'll have to look that up.

Okay, I just watched the trailer for the movie "The Lazarus Effect". It pretty much has nothing to do with the novel of the same title. The novel is set on a ocean planet with no land masses and it deals with the  conflict between two factions of earth-descended peoples: the mutants who live on bioengineered clone rafts on the surface of the ocean, and the humans who live in underwater cities below the surface. I think this is like that movie "Brokedown Palace," which takes its title from a High Fantasy novel but which is itself like "Midnight Express" but with two attractive young woman trapped in a foreign prison instead of some dude.

I always hated Wuthering Heights. It had great imagery and that, sure, plus the language was good, but the plot and characters in the book read like bad fanfiction. The actual romance between Catherine and Heathcliff lasted for like two or three pages, before I had to spend the rest of the book dealing with unending whining between everyone else. I wasn't sure who I was supposed to empathize with, be it the shitty traitor of a girl Catherine, the sociopathic, abusive Heathcliff, the pretentious, racist Linton or who the fuck. Really, none of them were likeable. Plus, it seems like the writer only knew a handful of names, with Catherine, who is also called Cathy, having a daughter also called Cathy, or Heathcliff having a son with Linton's sister, that he called Linton Heathcliff for some reason, even though Linton was the man's last fucking name.

The characterization isn't even good, with Linton Heathcliff going from a mean, petulant child who tricks Cathy into coming over so they can kidnap her, before helping her escape again to suit the plot. Catherine goes from a rebellious spirit to whom Heathlcliff falls in love with to a very spoilt cunt, yet it's not shown as her maturing or whatever, because apparently, they still love each other a shit ton. Lines like "I am Heathcliff" are said, before she goes off and says she'd never marry him because he's poor and generally not giving a shit about him.

Most of the important things, like the title romance or Heathcliff making his money, happens off the pages, for god's sake. It's really just a cheap, shitty romance novel that everyone should've seen through. The story's not told from the protagonist's perspective. It's not told by Nelly, who even then missed out a shit ton of the story. No, it's told by a man who never met most of the characters, hearing stories from Nelly. We're getting the story second hand, for god's sake. It's a ridiculous, shit book.

I detested that one too.  And, I think it's actually third hand by the time the narrator tells it.  Or, some of it at any rate.

But your description also kinda makes me think of Vanity Fair.  None of the characters were really very redeemable.  Even Amelia, who was 'nice' was kind of, well, delusional and pathetic.  I mean, I felt sorry for her, but she wasn't really a strong character.

Either way, both of them are books I'll probably never read again.  Fortunately for me, I didn't pay for either one of them.  That would have been a true tragedy.  (Not really.)

No idea who Amelia is.

That's okay.  If you've never read Vanity Fair, I wouldn't expect you to.

I feel like this thread wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t once again state my hatred for Charles Dickens.

However, I’d still read one of his long ass plodding books over Beloved.

Fucking hell, the story had a scene where the slaves were so desperate they fucked cows in the barn and it still managed to bore the hell out of me.

The one Anne McCaffrey novel I tried to read was "Dragonsong" or "Dragondrums" or something like that. The one about the teenage girl who befriends fire lizards. Rather tedious. But a really bad novel was by Ursula K. Leguin. It was called "The Beginning Place" and it was about a twenty-something woman and a twenty-something man who go into this magical land that somehow connects to our world. Anyway, they have to save a village by slaying a dragon.  But Leguin couldn't just be happy with that cliched premise. No. She had to make it a heavy-handed allegory about becoming an adult. The guy has an overbearing mother who makes him feel put-upon to the point where he has almost no life of his own. So of course the dragon they slay has breasts! Because of course a reptilian creature like dragon is going to have mammary glands. But it's SYMBOLIC. I don't even think C.S. Lewis was so heavy-handed when he wrote his Narnia books. Normally, I like Leguin's work, but she occasionally goes to pretentious places.

I'll have to read some more of her short stories then. I have that book "The Wind's Four Quarters," which collects a lot of her her early stories. I also have her book "Orsinian Tales," which is nothing but stories centered around her imaginary country of Orsinia. I didn't think it was possible to write a boring imaginary country story till I started reading that book. I did like the first two Earthsea books, especially The Tombs of Atuan. But I thought her Science Fiction novel The Dispossessed was pretentious. Left Hand of Darkness was better, but it was a little pretentious in places too. 

AP English Literature is a horrible class to take for anyone who wants to come out still holding a passion for reading. I had to read several books mentioned here including Their Eyes Were Watching God, Beloved, and The Awakening because my teacher happened to be a black feminist. Even still, I would have to say the most terrible book I've read was Pride and Prejudice, which was assigned by my 10th grade English teacher and is a narcissistic piece of trash.

Must...resist....urge....to....tell....people....off....for....hating....certain....books!

(Be strong, Myn, you can do it!)