Booklr Questions – What is the worst book you’ve ever read?
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What is the worst book you’ve ever read?
I try not to hate books, though I can often tell you things I don’t love about them. My biggest beef is with (usually self-publsihed) books that obviously haven’t been edited. I read a book a few months ago that took place in winter, and while the plot arc of the book was very interesting, I won’t be reading the rest of the books in the series because almost every time the author meant to say “snow” it was written as “show.”
This bothered me a lot. I know it’s an easy mistake to make when you’re typing quickly, and it’s a word, so spell check wouldn’t catch this error, but you would think that they might have let a friend read the manuscript before publishing to catch errors like that.
I know what you mean about some of those self-published books, but some of the paperbacks are pretty bad too–not only typos but elementary-school grammar errors like subject-verb agreement. Whatever happened to proofreaders??
In terms of content, the worst book I’ve ever actually finished…well it’s a tie between Moby Dick (which I was forced to read 3-4 times for work) and The DaVinci Code. It’s a great comfort to me to know that MD was a flop when it was published; the only reason it got any notice was because Alexander Woolcot and the Algonquin group decided they liked it. I knew I wouldn’t like the DaVinci book before I read it–I didn’t know I would throw it across the room 2-3 times. (Just as well it wasn’t on my ebook reader, then!)
The book I have tried 3 times to read and have been unable to turn the pages until the end was The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. I know it was meant to be a joke. That doesn’t help.
Wow… I have to say that I have never disliked a book so much that I needed to throw it. That makes me feel a lot better about the books I’ve disliked.
I have also thrown Emerson’s Essays. Repeatedly.
Can anyone read those without throwing them across the room?