I made it through the smug, insufferable foreword and one agonizingly shitty, self-important chapter of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers before I chucked it across the room. Eventually I decided that there’s probably SOME kind of value in the book so I picked it back up. I started using it as a cutting board for various arts and crafts.

I tripped over a cut-down street sign and smashed into the concrete, scraping my knuckles and brushing my nose and elbows.

Couldn’t get over the accent stuff in Huckleberry Finn. I gotta be able to flow state a book.

Dante’s Inferno. It was full of footnotes explaining the context for all the references and allusions he made, which was important to have, but reading your way through a piece of literature and being stopped every few sentences for a lengthy explanation was so frustrating. I couldn’t keep a good pace up and kept getting lost in the details. My interest gave out and I still haven’t finished the last quarter of the book.

And there are two more volumes after that in the Divine Comedy!!!

So I’m usually pretty careful with my “nonfiction”, but somehow I got suckered into opening an absolute shit heap of utter nonsense called Power vs Force. I had to make a separate goodreads category called trash just so it didn’t show up on my actual “read” list. Also, I finish damn near everything and couldn’t get through more than about a chapter before wanting to vomit.

It’s about on par with the South Park “this is what Scientologists actually believe” segment (no clue if that was faithful), except not funny.

The Winds of War. I enjoyed the Caine Mutiny so much, I plowed right through it and wanted more. Winds completely deflated that. I tried to read a couple other Woulk books and just couldn’t get into any of them.

Life of Pi.

2 of my kids had to read it for school, I was looking for something to read, picked it up, they both said “NO, it’s so bad.” I thought, whatever, it’s a slim volume, short read, how bad can it be?

I want that hour or two back. They were right and I wish I’d never read it.

These days I tend not to persevere with books that I’m having a bad experience with. There are just too many good books out there.

Poor writing sucks but even worse is when the author misjudges how much they can expect from the reader. Sometimes things can get ‘bad’ in a book for just long enough that the reader feels they have risen to a challenge and been rewarded at the next change. Some authors are aware of this and incorporate the dynamic but end up prolonging it too much or over-egging it. I actually feel abused as reader when that happens and end up rage quitting. Unfortunately, deleting an ebook doesn’t come with the same satisfaction as burning a physical one in those cases.

The other thing that is a bad experience for me is overly long dialogue expositions, where a character does an infodump to provide background and context and justify the plot. It totally jangles me, bores me and breaks immersion in the story by making me cynical about the authors laziness. An example of this is all the Librarian’s waffling about biblical stuff in Snow Crash. Rather than making me care more about the outcome of the plot it just yanked me away from what was a really enjoyable story and setting and destroyed the pace.

BTW, if anyone is interested; Bookwyrm is a fediverse platform for discussing and rating books. Much like a federated FOSS version of Goodreads.

Jane Eyre: Every moment of this book was absolute torture. I could never get into this genre of book but this book took the cake. It was like the reading equivalent of trying to force down a terrible meal without gagging because it would be rude. I actually devoted my time to speed read it just so I could finish it faster.

Wicked: It was just a lot of, “Oh god, this isn’t like the musical at all 😰.”

I once dropped a book on my face. True story.

L. Ron Hubbard’s “Mission Earth” series. I was young, and I’d read damn near all the sci fi that my local library had, I was acught up on the Wheel of Time that had been published to that point (I think it was still about five books before Jordan died), and gave it a try.

It was fucking awful.

Given that I was maybe 12 at the time, that’s saying something; it was just trash.

Friends don’t let friends read Hubbard.

I was about to finish the book (it was mine) when my teacher asked to borrow it. I never got it back.

Worst book because of bad book was when I had to read and watch Tristan and Isolde for a school project. It was so bad with SO brain dead characters, but at least it was quick.

The worst book because of the experience however was the full version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. We know interrupt the story to spend 10 pages talking about the special meaning of a throw away line said by Frollo. 5 pages of story later, and we know interrupte the story to spend 20 pages detailing Parisian roof tops to the minutest of details.

Not one book, but almost all of Asimov’s Foundation series. The first one is one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time because I love seeing how each group has to use game theory to solve their own unique issue in order to survive and flourish as a society built on science and reason. While I admit that it’s not always written well, I love the mindset that Asimov wanted to emphasize: violence should be the last resort for solving conflict between nations. When the factions outside of Foundation threaten them with war, they respond with soft power like economic pressure, religious sway, and focusing on making better advancements to science and engineering to defend themselves by being too valuable to destroy.

The fatal problem with the series arises in Book 2 though. Book 2 (Foundation & Empire) introduces the interesting concept of “what happens when a massive wrench is thrown into the meticulously calculated 1000-year plan?” Unfortunately, you can tell that at this point is when the concepts of the story become too smart for Asimov to handle, and he instead begins his trend of doubling and tripling down on deus ex machina characters with mind control powers for the rest of the series. All of the interesting methods of sociopolitical problem solving are thrown out the window to become sub-par adventure stories.

Books 4 and 5 (Foundation’s Edge and Foundation & Earth) were written particularly poorly, and was probably the point where I should have cut my losses. The books follow not-Han-Solo adventure man, contain a sexist female sidekick that only serves to be a hot piece of ass for Asimov’s self-insert character to have sex with, and then has an extremely uncomfortable “happy ending” where a traumatized child is left to be groomed by a robotic parental figure so that the robot can one day mind-wipe the child and insert it’s own consciousness into their body. What’s more is that they completely ditch the core premise of the 1000-year plan, and the ending undercuts any direction that the story could have gone from there.

The prequel books 6 and 7 (Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation) aren’t nearly as bad as 4 or 5, but they completely undermine the importance and intelligence of the character Hari Seldon from the first book. Instead of him being a great man and brilliant mathematician on his own, he’s essentially led around by his nose by undercover robots that are the secret architects of everything just because Asimov wanted to tie-in elements from his books about robots.

I’ll probably get downvoted for it, but The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. The protagonist of the novel, first in a series, is the best example of a Marty Stu I have ever encountered in a book; Kvothe is the dullest, most offensively boring protagonist it has ever been my misfortune to meet. There’s absolutely zero narrative tension because the situation always boils down to “Kvothe wins immediately or Kvothe wins harder two chapters later.”

I peaced out around two-thirds of the way through. Amusingly one of my complaints, that the book had an unnecessarily high amount of smut for something not advertised as, gets even worse in the second book. No thanks