I just finished a book called The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. It started off strong and I really appreciated the accurate way she wrote child protagonists but... halfway through it the story just collapsed and meandered painfully for another 250 pages. The ending was so unsatisfying you couldn't even call it putting the reader out of his misery. But no matter how much I dislike a book, I usually finish it.

So what books have made you gag?

Trish wrote:I just finished a book called The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. It started off strong and I really appreciated the accurate way she wrote child protagonists but... halfway through it the story just collapsed and meandered painfully for another 250 pages. The ending was so unsatisfying you couldn't even call it putting the reader out of his misery.

I agree completely with your take on The Little Friend. I was so disappointed with the last part of the book; especially the ending. I tried to read her first book, The Secrete History. It also starts off very strong and then just gets too weird and the characters get so unlikable. I would say both of Donna Tartt's books go on my list of worst -- but only because they crash and burn toward the end.

I started to read a self help book about procrastination called "Getting Things Done" about a year ago and it's still on my desk... ooops.

LOL it wasn't because I am such a slackass, it was just a stupid book. I don't need to be told to make a list of tasks I need to do every day and then, duh, do them.

I think this is mainly the domain of fiction but there are plenty horrible nonfictions out there.

The worst book I've ever read was a nonfiction by Robert Ardrey. It was called, The Social Contract. It was horrible. It was the only book I ever threw in the trash to save others from reading it.

That book is probably like Jumanji, though. It's probably on top of some trash mound, attracting attention to itself, hoping some trash man will see it and read it. Poor trash man.

Life is so short and I don't have enough time to read every book (unlike tulip), so I usually do a good job of finding just what I want to read. This makes reading a bad book pretty difficult.

What I do is make a list....

The Shack .... worst book ever.

farmgirlshelley wrote:The Shack .... worst book ever.

I'd put this into the category of "Smarmy self-help" and call the whole category "Worst book ever," because they all seem to be roughly the same thing. I don't care whether it's called "The Shack," "The secret," or "The Celestine prophecy," I wish it would all return to the secret Celestine shack it crawled out of.

The only book of this category that I ever enjoyed was Peter McWilliam's "Life 102: What to do when your guru sues you." It's a story about what happens when smarmy self-help meets the real world.

I read The Celestine Prophecy; haven't even heard of The Shack. I remember thinking "Stars, this is awful" when I was reading Celestine. I had many despairing thoughts about humanity's rational capacity when I heard how popular and how "acclaimed" the book was.

I agree about The Celestine Prophecy. Nothing happens by mere chance, seemed to be its message--nothing that we regard as good, that is. It was awful.

I was prepared to like a book by Susan Jacoby that we read here. It was called The Age of American Unreason. How could the writer who did such a fine job with Freethinkers bomb so badly when trying to cover the contemporary scene? The book was unfocused,self-congratulating, and completely unconvincing in whatever argument it was trying to make.

lol I have both of those Donna Tartt books sitting on my shelf!
I'll let you know what I think when I get to them. They don't sound too promising though.

An Imaginary Life by David Malouf. For some reason this one just did not gel with me and I read it three times [for my HSC] and never once got what the author was trying to illustrate completely. It was just a strange book.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest I found frustrating because of the lack of chapter divisions - I wasn't sure where I could stop so I could eat, sleep, watch TV, go to other classes etc, so I ended up re-reading paragraphs a few times before getting through it.