Ask Lemmy

I read the Bible once... Meh, didn't liked the ending.

Any book where the pages aren’t cut together. Fucking pain in the ass turning pages, and forget about flipping through the book.

I tried to read The Wheel of Time and discovered that some people really think men and women are different species, incapable of communication or cooperation. These people believe that pretty much everything about a person is a result of their sex and are incapable of relating to a person without their stereotypic lenses. It explains the trans panic.

Beowulf. The version I was given in high school was kinda half-translated from ancient English to modern English, such that I had to struggle to figure out what the modern equivalent of a lot of the words were supposed to be in order to understand it.

Also every time a character is introduce it goes for like a whole page about their family tree and sword collection.

I never imagined a book about fighting monsters could be so boring.

The Dutch education system forced us to read many Dutch works of literature every year in the last years of highschool. This completely ruined my joynin reading, since imo most Dutch literature is boring. Interesting books like the Lord of the Rings or Dune were not allowed since they weren't Dutch.

The worst memory of them all was the book called "De Grote Zaal". Basically the entire book was about a dying old lady in the last years of her life reflecting on her life. It wasn't a thick book, but it felt like it took ages because nothing happened and it had exactly nothing in common with the average life and interests of a highschooler.

Before the last years of highschool I'd always read books for fun, even when school started requiring it, because it was fun. Books like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter (fck J.K Rowling), Star Wars, and countless others that I'm missing were great fun. But Dutch literature is a lot about old people, WW2, etc. Dutch fantasy books were not considered literature because they were too much fun to read.

The worst one I remember was having to read Great Expectations in high school. Maybe I might appreciate the book more today, but at the time I found it incredibly boring and it just seemed to drag on and on and on. It really felt like a written soap opera from the 1800's, which it kind of was as it was originally published a serial where the reader got a small part of it every week. Which probably accounted for how slowly the plot seemed to move.

Perhaps an honorable mention would go to "Triton", as that's the first book I remember where I started reading and actually got a decent way into it before putting it down as it was absolutely boring me out of my mind. Though I was a teen at the time, and one of my main sources of reading material was whatever I could find at garage sales for cheap. But nevertheless, almost always if I thought a book was interesting enough to buy it was also interesting enough for at least one read through, but that one stood out as an exception. Though I have to wonder if I tried reading it again today if I might manage to get through it this time.

I read the book Paper Towns by John Green as a teen, and out started out good, then just kept getting better and better and way more adrenaline inducing. The characters were going on this crazy exciting midnight excursion and I was up reading until like midnight.

At a certain point, the mood just dropped straight off of a cliff. It was so depressing and draining but I was in too deep at that point, so I kept reading. After like two chapters of emotional torture, I knew I had to stop so I stopped reading and fully deleted the book off of my kobo and went to sleep.

The next morning though, I woke up desperate to know what happened, so I booted up my computer, went through Adobe's proprietary mess of a program to redownload the book onto my kobo, skipped the entire middle section, and kept reading. In the end, the ending was okay, but definitely not worth that rollercoaster of emotions.

I read John Green's The Fault in Our Stars right after, and I enjoyed it!

When I was a kid I would read the sexy parts of the Illuminati and jerk off.

My brother caught me and ratted me out. Handing over the book was terrible.

Dickens - A Tale Of Two Cities.

In ninth grade my class was forced to read it. No lie I actually never got past the second page. I tried so hard but was bored to death and confused by that intro. I used cliff notes to get through the assignments. Worst reading experience ever.

First thing that comes to mind is The Witcher (books), but my interpretation of worst is “its been the worst a book has left me feeling” and I don’t read a lot of books.

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. I thought it would be all James Bond shit. It was the most boring thing I ever read.

American Psycho would occasionally get so graphic about the torture shit that I'd have to read a couple of paragraphs and then pause and look out the window for a bit. Rinse, repeat. It would only be for a handful of pages here and there, but I've never had a similar experience with any other book. But I also rarely read fiction.

I tried to read The Reactionary Mind, but had to stop pretty early in. I consider myself to have a pretty decent vocabulary. Part of why is an OCD-like need to look up the meaning of any word I don't know when reading. However, this author was using so many words that I didn't know that I couldn't get into a flow. I kept having to pause and grab my phone for my dictionary app. Doing that many times per page just doesn't work. I really wanted to get the content from it but it was too distracting.

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!!!

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.

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.

If you mean "which book did you like the least" I'm going with Wuthering Heights. It's a miserable story about awful characters that is for some reason a curriculum requirement.

Honorable mentions:

I was told A Confederacy Of Dunces was a tremendously funny book, "one big clockwork of a joke" couldn't bring myself to finish it, I just didn't want to spend any more time with these characters.

I've also managed to slide off of the Aubrey-Maturin series (Remember that Russel Crowe movie where he's a British sailing ship captain? The books that movie was based on)...I might have been able to slog through ye olde timey languagee if the author didn't have a habit of changing scenes and not telling us. At the end of one chapter we're sailing around having nautical adventures and then the next chapter begins 5 paragraphs into visiting with some old guy and his step-nurse. The tag line of these books is "Wait, what's going on?"