The Awesomely Bad Book Poll

[rachelmanija]

If you vote, please note which book you mean in comments.

Poll #27820

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 39

View Respondents

I have read and would like to rant about this terrible book

View Answers

Something by Piers "bad puns and underage underwear" Anthony
14 (35.9%)

Something by Terry "evil chicken and Libertarianism" Goodkind
5 (12.8%)

Something by Robin "hero too stupid to live" Hobb
5 (12.8%)

Something by Beatrice "Go Ask Alice" Sparks
2 (5.1%)

Something by Robert "late book incest" Heinlein
17 (43.6%)

Something by Spider "enlightenment ex machina" Robinson
10 (25.6%)

A classic novel they made me read in high school and I preferred not to
11 (28.2%)

Something where the dog dies at the end
5 (12.8%)

A very improving children's book
9 (23.1%)

HOOKS FOR HANDS
4 (10.3%)

Something by Dan "loooooooove literally holds the world together" Simmons
5 (12.8%)

Something by Dean "golden retrievers are angels and Satan eats atheists" Koontz
3 (7.7%)

Something New Age that misunderstands quantum physics
8 (20.5%)

Something where women breast boobily
8 (20.5%)

Something with hilarious Satanists
4 (10.3%)

Something by Sheri "yay infanticide!" Tepper
7 (17.9%)

Something else, which I will describe in comments
4 (10.3%)

Comments

[black_bentley]

BIRDSONG. I could rant about Birdsong forever.

[rachelmanija]

I never even heard of it. Please rant!

[musesfool]

It was college but they made me read it TWICE in two different classes: An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser - one of the few bits of assigned reading I never bothered to finish (either time!) because I hated it so much. Didactic and heavy-handed and ugh.

[rachelmanija]

Oh no. I never had to read Dreiser but I must say this confirms my osmosis ideas.

[yhlee]

I'm not sure this is a rant as such, but in high school I loved Sherri S. Tepper and ate her up with a spoon, largely because I had no idea what was going on. It wasn't until some time after I read Grass, which features carnivorous? alien? horsies? whose riders? have? orgasmic? experiences? on? while? bonding with? and riding? them? that this was some kind of critique or send-up of (probably) Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern and/or Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar and its magical Companion horsies.

Also, I loved Beauty as a high schooler but wow was there a lot of stuff in that book that flew over my head when I was fifteen. I think initially my reaction was "wow, what a cool way to retell a bunch of fairytales by throwing them into a blender!" Then I reread it ten years later and wow was there a lot of sex stuff and probably other things that I've blocked out of my memory.

[rachelmanija]

I actually still really like Grass. I didn't get what it was critiquing either when I first read it, I just liked it as a cool creepy adventure with a neat mystery and interesting worldbuilding.

I never liked Beauty. I liked some dark stuff but it was dark in the wrong way for me.

[minoanmiss]

As a little kid I read a pile of dusty/moldy spy novels (a couple Flemings and some knockoffs) I found in my grandmother's house. I remember being so confused by the breasting boobily. I already had tits because yay early puberty and they were just there.

_Friday_ by Heinlein remains the only book I threw against the wall and then picked up and finished. _Maia_ by Richard Adams would have been the second but after the second time I threw THAT against the wall I left it there. I think an ordinary woman would chafe having as much sex as these two put their heroines through.

And then there was _The Return of the Native_ which they made me read in school and which pissed me off so much. Everyone in that fucking book was a fucking idiot except the reddleman who just sort of watched it all happen. WTF. Hardy should've stuck to poetry.

Bonus: I know it was very historically important but _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is way treacly to modern tastes and the Black people in it were definitely characterized as innately primitive and closer to nature or some shit.

[yhlee]

I had the unfortunate experience of being subjected to a blackface stage play production of Uncle Tom's Cabin for a field trip in 4th grade in South Korea. IIRC all the actors were Korean and I'm wondering if no one had clued them in about Don't Do Blackface; for bonus, we were an English-speaking foreign school and the play was in Korean...and our TEACHERS WERE WHITE AMERICANS who apparently did not see, or point out, a problem with this either. I don't remember any Black students that year (most students were some form of Asian-American) but still...

[sabotabby]

Go Ask Alice OKAY SO basically I read it as a YOOF and the whole beginning of the book is "hippies and drugs are fun," which, as a 9 or 10 year old, seemed about right?? and then I got to the end and was like, wait, none of this makes sense wtf? but it was well before there was an internet or anything so I didn't know anything about it. It just felt fake in the ways that I did not yet have the sophistication to define. It did make sense that a teenage girl might write a diary and get it published, as I knew that S.E. Hinton had been 17 when she wrote The Outsiders, but there was something about it that was definitely not the diary of a teenage girl. Later, of course, I got the whole Mormon backstory.

Flash forward to my first year teaching at an alternative school and the English teacher decides, okay, she's going to do two novels in her class: Go Ask Alice and A Million Little Pieces. I was like, "that's fuckin' rad, you're doing a unit on literary fraud!"

Readers, she did not know that either book was literary fraud.

I honestly don't have as much to rant about with Dean R. Koontz beyond that he's very weird about sex and dogs and virginity and is basically a shit Stephen King. I read The Watchers, which was a very fun movie as I like a movie with a dog where the dog doesn't die. And then I read the book, where instead of a teenage boy as the protagonist, it's a middle-aged man, and his romance is with a middle-aged woman who is a virgin at 40 because of course she is, and when they finally do the sex it's the most cringeworthy thing ever. "His fingers, his tongue, and his manhood" is a phrase that has lived rent-free in my head since I was 12 years old. So fuck you, Dean R. Koontz. Bonus fuck you for writing The Strangers, where a diverse group of alien abductees comes together in a hotel and they're all white. The diverse one is Jewish. Double fuck you.

How about a bonus for Where the Red Fern Grows, which is a boring-ass book to begin with and then the dogs die. My fifth grade teacher read it out loud to us, including the really graphic bit where one of the dogs gets disembowelled and they try to wash off the intestines and stuff them back in, but the dog dies anyway and then the other dog dies from grief. Why would you read that to children. Fuck you, Wilson Rawls, and fuck you Mrs. Tucker who said I wasn't living up to my potential.

Wow I feel much better. I note that all of these are books I read as a child. I'm not nearly so mad about books I read as an adult, mainly because I have far more of a choice in the matter.

[lemonsharks]

WAIT WAIT WAIT I ALSO LOATHED THE OUTSIDERS WITH THE BURNING FIERY PASSION OF ONE THOUSAND SUNS.

Has anyone uncovered S.E. Hinton's fandom pseud? Because last I heard she has a fandom pseud.

[lemonsharks]

I think the thing I loathed most about reading books for class was the part where literally no one did the reading the night before and instead of figuring out how to fix that, we ended up painstakingly reading the text aloud in class. Where I'd be scolded for plugging my ears and reading ahead, then not knowing where "we were" when called on.

The texts I most did not like most were surprisingly usually short stories, with Araby by James Joyce and Hills Like White Elephants being the stand-out awful ones.

For books: A Separate Peace mashed my "everything about this disaster of a novel is stupid" buttons but I also think you've reviewed it before.

[lannamichaels]

Solidarity fistbump on hating Hills Like White Elephants.

I hated most, if not all, short stories they made us read in school and at the creative writing camp I took in the summer. My big one I hated, aside from Hills, was A Good Man Is Hard To Find. Had to read that something like 5 times.

[rivkat]

Robert A. Heinlein, Farnham’s Freehold: My eyes! My childhood illusions! The trauma, it burns! Published in 1964, this bizarre book posits a white nuclear family (with a black servant whose deference and gentility holds past disaster but not past the acquisistion of power) who, with the servant and a young female houseguest, survive a nuclear war in the shelter the patriarch has presciently constructed, only to emerge into a pristine new world that seems geographically the same as the Earth they knew, only untouched by human habitation. That’s not quite true, as they discover. The sexual politics are icky, icky, icky, with the houseguest sleeping with the patriarch their first night in the shelter while his wife sleeps, alcohol-sodden and drugged, nearby. But it’s okay because she’s become worthless in her old age, you see? It’s not that I find last-night-of-the-world sex implausible, but this sex skeeved me – with the nubile girl, who fortunately is a divorcee so she knows her way about a man, immediately declaring her love for and devotion to patriarch Farnham. And then Farnham’s daugher tells him she’d happily commit incest with him if he asked, because he’s just that good of a guy.

This is one sick fantasy of patriarchy (which is why I keep using the epithet for Farnham), in which the patriarch is always right and wise and in control, while everyone else, including the resentful and overindulged son, is dangerously unreliable. Farnham says he takes partial responsibility for his wife’s decline – she used to be a plucky, hardworking sort, but prosperity allowed her to grow torpid and selfish, you see – but we’re clearly supposed to understand that everyone is responsible for themselves and only for themselves, so his guilt is just a sign of good character. The racial politics, when the Farnhams are discovered by an advanced civilization ruled by blacks, are possibly even skeevier, since the blacks keep white slaves and breed them according to a eugenics program. I think Heinlein was trying to be progressive with this role reversal, sort of like the juror in A Time to Kill who asks her fellow jurors to imagine whether they’d let off a white man who killed black men for raping the white man’s daughter. But it comes off as just as patronizing as every other part of the book, since Farnham always knows best and, even when he’s severely outwitted by his new master (and I must congratulate Heinlein for allowing that to happen – Farnham’s prejudices have led him to underestimate his adversary, even though the master is otherwise a monster), he ends up all right in the end. Now I remember why I love Octavia Butler so much.

[nestra]

Jude the Obscure. Once in high school, once in grad school, DNF either time. I made it through other Thomas Hardy stuff, though he is not my favorite. I hit "because we are to menny" and rolled my eyes so hard I couldn't read any more. (To anyone planning to google that phrase, warning for child harm.)

Like, I feel like you get one chance to use "wife disappears and comes back at the most inconvenient time", and that usage is in Mayor of Casterbridge where he literally sells his wife.

[sholio]

So many possibilities. I didn't think I could rant about Dean Koontz - he's not really rantworthy so much as incredibly annoying in aggregate - but then I remembered the rage-inducingly stupid ending of Nameless.

So basically Nameless is a series of novellas about a nameless assassin with total amnesia who is sent on missions and given instructions and materials (ID, weapons, etc) by an unknown agency who never deal with him directly and just send him his instructions for each new job. His jobs are obviously a greatest hits of everyone Koontz doesn't like, evil atheists and whatnot. (The first one is actually pretty good - he's in a small town ruled by a cartoonishly evil sheriff - but it's all downhill from there.)

He keeps getting little flashes of memory and eventually, in the last installment, turns all his formidable fighting skills on the mysterious, dubiously evil shadow agency who have been jerking him around, sending him all over the country, and giving him his marching orders, finds and breaks into their headquarters, and runs smack into the incredibly stupid ending reveal:

The person giving him his orders is ... HIM!! He is a billionaire genius scientist who made kajillions from inventing a memory wipe device. His wife and daughter were killed by (if I remember correctly) an incredibly powerful drug gang who the authorities couldn't touch. His entirely reasonable and not at all unhinged response to this is to use his mind wipe device on himself and leave instructions with his employees (who LOVE HIM LIKE FAMILY because of course they do) to use the rest of his billions to send him out on missions to, one by one, kill people who are too powerful for the normal authorities to deal with. Which, being completely devoted to him and also apparently as unhinged as he is, they do!

Then at his request, they wipe his memory again and send him on his next mission. THE END!

[rachelmanija]

LOLOLOLOL what.

Why bother wiping his own memory? If he wants to murder people, why not just murder them?

[yatima]

Every single female character in a Martin Amis novel breasts boobily 24/7. He's like the Heinlein of litfic.

[sartorias]

I will gleefully read a lot of these!

[lannamichaels]

GODDAMN HEINLEIN. I could rant about most of his books. I actually do truly deeply love Moon Is A Harsh Mistress but oh my god some of the stuff in that book.

[rushthatspeaks]

I have read everything Piers Anthony published prior to the year 2011. Yes, including that one. Yes, including that other one, too.

Yes, I know that other one was published by a small press because mainstream publishing Sensibly Would Not. I read it because I was sitting in a really good library, like, a library whose purchasing strategies I had been admiring for years, and it was just right there on the shelf, and I was like, did they buy this by mistake? They can't have? Maybe it's just not as bad as I've heard it is? It would have been actively difficult to order this because it is tiny press, so surely they had a reason?

Anyway, the worst book I've ever read is the eighth of Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series, a series a lot of people already thought had hit its nadir in the (big publisher) seventh, the one in which the female protagonist is transformed into a man for twenty minutes and upon being transformed back delivers a heartfelt speech about how it is so incredibly difficult for men not to rape women just all the time and all women should be grateful to men every moment of every day because men ever do literally anything else. After she has sexually assaulted her best friend.

So this was the sequel to that.

I've forgotten the title because it's not as though I am ever going to mistake this book for anything else anyway.

For the entire (mostly terrible) previous series, there was one (1) Incarnation of Immortality, Nox, who was the Incarnation of Night and had never been human and had a distinct air of dropping in every so often as a dea ex machina to save the rest of them from their stupid human bullshit. In the seventh book they are literally holding elections for the position of a new God and the book undercuts itself dramatically by it being perfectly clear to the reader, even though it is not to any characters or, apparently, to the writer, that Nox has the capability to either settle the election any way she wants to or just ignore the results completely and continue doing whatever the fuck she wants. (Which latter is what she winds up doing.) The concept of an omnipotent God, which everyone is saying this one will be, is therefore Not Relevant To This Cosmology. I always kind of assumed she made the whole place and just didn't want to run it, or thought this was funny or something like that. It was pretty clear that Anthony hadn't noticed the implications of his own character, and I did enjoy watching his text subvert itself off a logical cliff.

In the eighth one, he decides that she was human all along, and not from deep-time prehistory, but rather from the Middle Ages, having transcended time and space yadda yadda the point is that he wanted to put her in the rapiest time period he could think of and did so. So she's a poor little orphan who has the Terrible Misfortune of being Too Beautiful, meaning that from a single-digit age she gets raped, on page, by everyone with a Y chromosome within fifty miles of her. And then she goes through apotheosis at the age of fourteen because she finds a magic dildo.

No, really. Magic dildo. The source of all her powers is a magic dildo.

Which only works if it is inside her. She stopped aging and became an immortal goddess as soon as she put it in, and she can look like she's any age she wants, but she will lose all her powers and become human again if she ever takes it out. So, underneath all the power and mystique, she is a fourteen-year-old girl who has no real choice but to continuously have The Dildo Of Omnipotence shoved up herself, and it is explicitly uncomfortable and she hates it.

Until eventually it somehow brainwashes her or something I guess and she starts thinking of this as the Perfect State of Humanity and then she can take it out because she has become One With The Dildo or something IDK I don't think it made sense??? And then her only goal in life is to get other women to use The Dildo Of Omnipotence, even though they will all hate it until it eats their brains, but wait, by women I mean girls, because people fourteen and under only power of innocence yadda yadda.

I can't guarantee this is all one hundred percent accurate as it was not very coherent and by this time I was reading through a haze of horror and confusion.

The end of the book is the scene at the end of book seven in which she kidnaps the protagonist's best friend's baby, only this time, from her perspective, it's because he's going to grow up to be the person whom the Dildo Of Omnipotence was, um, modeled from somehow outside time and space, so she's explicitly stealing him so she can raise him to fuck her a lot because she feels that after all this running things for everybody she deserves it and also their union secret heart of the cosmos union of light and darkness yin and yang blah blah blah Jesus fucking Christ. (That last expletive is both a concept in the book and my exclamation about this entire 'plot point'.)

That was an hour and a half of my life I'm never going to get back, and it retroactively makes his entire series so, so, so much worse, not that it was amazing anyway.

In conclusion, dear Awesome Library Purchasing Agent, completism is not always the best policy, and apparently I have been secretly wanting to rant about this experience since 2011. (I read this during my 365 Books year! I was too tired to write it up! I just went and read something else that day and tried to forget this ever happened! Which, apparently, I cannot do.)

[sholio]

I read all seven (I thought) of the Incarnations of Immortality books as a teenager, I remember genuinely enjoying the first five and having increasing levels of ".... um" at the last two (this was about the age when I was starting to realize there was something Not Quite Right about Piers Anthony) but that is ... wow. Just. Wow. No words.

I WONDER WHY he couldn't get a publisher to pick it up. Jesus Christ on a magic dildo.

[silverflight8]

I vote Heinlein because despite trying really hard to not see all the problems, and mostly failing, I do genuinely really enjoy his protagonists' can do attitudes and engineering mindset. There are some novels I genuinely was delighted (Have Spacesuit, Will Travel was one) at some points. So I'll recommend that one for today :)

[silverflight8]

Wait, I totally misread the poll. LOL. I thought you were soliciting recs on what to read that was so bad it would take your mind off things.

Instead I would like to rant about possibly my least fave author ever which is Thoreau. God, I hate his work and I hate him too. The hatred breaks down into so many different parts, but the biggest is that he's such a hypocrite, he's so nasty and so privileged he can't even understand what another person's perspective is, and the general public only knows various snippets of Walden and doesn't know what an utter asshole he was and venerates him. It's the smugness that he knows better - he's done it, he's lived off the land - but he's not content to be smug; instead he's angry and contemptuous of the poor who can't do this. Shocking, that the poor don't have money to purchase a plot of land to practice subsistence farming? He's so sure his way of life is the Right one, that no one else can do it - that supporting one man (family? forget that) for a year through some farming is some universal good way to live. And the hypocrisy burns so badly here because he's not being self-sustaining, his friends, his sister, his mother drop by to give him food. He goes round to his mother's to eat dinner often. He's not isolated in the least; the train tracks run nearby. There are so many people who have lived the life he is playacting - indeed, a substantial chunk of humanity has tried to make a living on this kind of agriculture!!!!!!! with far more isolation than he pretends!!!!!! - and you know what? It's a grinding, harsh and often death-by-starvation path to tread, when you can't just go by your mom's for dinner when you feel like it. He pretends in Walden that he lives all by himself for years, his friends drop in regularly. I hate him and I hate Walden so much, yes I read Walden all the way through.

As for the positives of Walden, the usually cited "good" part of it is the nature writing. I would recommend...so many other nature writers, that are better and more pleasant to read.

I truly wish Thoreau's reputation would tarnish and sink into obscurity, only to be brought up with an "ugh that asshole".

[sheliak]

I feel like I got off pretty lightly Piers Anthony-wise, as I only read one book by him. But I will remember Unicorn Point and its "rape was considered a form of violence by most women and some men" until I die.

[rachelmanija]

I mean, it's true. D:

[viridian5]

My high school English teacher made me--just me, not the whole class--read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and Anthem, with the idea that I could write a paper on one or the other and possibly win a cash prize from some contest. Alas for both of us, I hated them with the rage of a hundred thousand burning suns and didn't want to write or think about them any longer or further than I had to. I could've gone my whole life without personally experiencing these.

[rachelmanija]

Nooooooo.

[sholio]

Moving along to Spider Robinson, I read a couple of his books in high school, in particular liked Time Pressure a lot (... it didn't age well, but it has the distinction of being the first book in which I ever read a foursome sex scene, which I had not previously realized was a thing). Then later on I decided to try him again and, after having a deeply ambivalent experience with rereading Time Pressure, very regrettably picked up the one in which the hero decides to get his girlfriend over her fear of sex due to rape trauma by having unnegotiated sex with her while she was asleep. NOPETOPUS TO THE MOOOOOON.

[ratcreature]

The thing I resented most about high school English class (aside from bring forced to read Hemingway's Snow on the Kilimanjaro which was just tedious) was the times that the teacher pretended we could have input what to read next, but we didn't. Once I pointed out that we hadn't ever read anything by a female writer and suggested a bunch, but every one "wasn't in the school library in sufficient numbers" (as a side note, we regularly had to buy novels and short story collections for class, as not all books were school provided, though admittedly in that pre-Internet shopping era getting English books was more difficult and expensive than what we had to buy in German), then in desperation I suggested Jane Austen (I liked modern writing more than classics, so had suggested bunches of newer books first) who I knew was available in numbers in our school library, but that was then deemed "too difficult". It was a farce. Clearly there wasn't any real choice.

oops

[estara]

I saw the bit too late where I was supposed to quote the names, I just ticked the authors off which I have read a book by, really. I haven't read them in decades and can't really remember the names of the books.

[mrissa]

My school district's curriculum required honors students to read one book by John Steinbeck every year from eighth grade through senior year. This is, in my now entirely too informed opinion, far too high a percentage of Steinbeck compared to, oh, I don't know, the entire rest of the literary world.

It was: 8 - The Red Pony
9 - Of Mice and Men
10 - The Pearl
11 - Travels With Charley
12 - The Grapes of Wrath

And whenever I complain about this to people who went to my same school, they say, "Oh yeah, yeah, God that was bad...Travels With Charley was okay but the rest of them...."

Guess which grade I skipped.

[edenfalling]

Guess which one of those books wasn't on my school's curriculum at all! *headdesk*

[cupcake_goth]

I have a highly personal rant about Heinlein's Stranger In a Strange Land: I'm named for the female lead. My parent's changed the spelling to Jillian-with-a-J so I wouldn't have to deal with fish nicknames all through school, but I am indeed named for her.

1. The sex cult, the women who exist as sexy sexy props, the sex cult, the waste of a decent concept (human/alien nature vs. nurture could be interesting ... just, all of it.

2. Male friends who, knowing I was named for the character, would read the book and then earnestly ask me if I wanted to "share water". A lot of my male friends got punched.

WHY DAD, WHY? WHY DID YOU TALK MOM INTO THAT?

[edenfalling]

I cannot fucking stand The Catcher in the Rye, which we had to read in 10th grade English and like 80% of my class thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.

I will grudgingly acknowledge that it's well written and a good character portrait, but the book lives and dies with Holden Caulfield and I have rarely wanted to punch a character in the dick quite that much. Ugh.

My dad had a couple other Salinger books in our basement -- I think Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters -- and I peeked at them to see if they were less nails-on-the-chalkboard-of-my-soul annoying. They were not.

Also I hate the fucking ~*~mystique~*~ around Salinger after he became a recluse. Just leave the man alone and MOVE ON, literary America!

[lannamichaels]

Regarding Salinger, you may be interested in Catch a Body by Ilse Bendorf.

[skygiants]

As you know I could have checked many of these boxes, but the prize for me remains with "HENRY VIII: WOLFMAN," the one in which Katharine of Aragon's son gets devoured by baby werewolves, Thomas More punches out werewolf Anne Boleyn, and Henry VIII eventually eats Jane Seymour.

[rachelmanija]

Whaaaaaat? Can you link me to your review of this, please?