When I was an undergraduate, a friend of mine wrote a book review of the bible for the student newspaper.

The opening sentence was: “Not since Naked Lunch has such a boring book been saved by the constant barrage of sadomasochistic homosexual pornography.”

Yep. Bible. Pretentious, boring and way too much first - person stuff.

I wonder how many just check out when they get to the list of begats

Best-selling work of fiction amirite

I read all of Mission Earth. All 12(?) volumes. I couldn’t possibly say why - I hated it.

As a young teen scifi nerd I enjoyed the world, and tech he built in that book. I read the 600+ pages pretty quick. I think I was too young to critique it as a literary work.
The movie was absolute garbage.

I tried reading his “Mission Earth” series. I did not finish the series; I managed about two and a half books before I realized that I wasn’t obligated to finish it just because I’d started.

Oh man, I really enjoyed Battlefield Earth. And the movie. What turned you off?

Tried a few times and can never get past the first few chapters.

First 10 pages was probably the bulk of the story; the rest was just email replies.

Never read it, just some parts here and there because a girlfriend was reading it and it was hilarious LOL The descriptions are supposed to be sexy or alluring or god knows what but they are so cringey! It took me a bit to understand that my friend was reading it seriously.

You should see the movie. It stars nic cage and he did it as a favor to a friend. It’s fucking awful. funny thing though, my story is identical to yours. Had no idea until it was too late lol.

I didn’t finish the last couple books, but I did enjoy it fully knowing the subject matter was about Revelations. I mostly read it as a kid and re-read for a bit as an adult. I did not grow up in a religious household. There was a point though where the books went a little too off the rails, and I gave up.

In the later books they accidentally open a portal to the part of the world where there are communists and for a while afterwards Richard finds himself unable to eat cheese as penance for all the communists he’s killing but then he realizes that communists are so evil it’s ok to kill them so he can eat cheese again

I don’t know if it’s the absolute worst I ever read but the parts I read were pretty bad. At some point I was like “What kinda Ayn Rand bullshit is this?” and quit reading. It turns out that he was a Ayn Rand make-super-improbable-and-convoluted-examples-in-my-fictional-fantasy-world-to-justify-terrible-political-views school of writing type guy.

I read a bunch of those books because my roommate was in love with them. It established an idea of a writing flaw in my mind that I called “The Heirachy of Cool”. Basically the guy practically has an established character list of who is the coolest. Whichever character in any given scene is at the top of the hierarchy is mythically awesome. They have their shit together, they are functionally correct in their reasoning, they lead armies, they pull off grand maneuvers, they escape danger whatever…

But anyone below them in the Heirachy turn into complete morons who serve as foils to make the people above them seem more awesome whenever they share page time together. These characters seem to have accute amnesia about stuff that canonically happened very recently (in previous books) so they can complicate things for the hierarchy above, they usually make poor decisions due to crisises of faith in people above them in the hierarchy… But because that hierarchy is infallible it’s predictable. Less cool never is proven right over more cool.

… Until that same character is suddenly alone and they go from being mid of the hierarchy to the top and all of a sudden they have iron wills and super competence…

Once I caught onto that pattern it became intolerable to continue.

On a somewhat lower pedestal: Eragon. What a hugely derivative poorly written piece of crap. I’ve run D&D campaigns with better dialogue and pacing than that.

What I remember most vividly from that series is how absolutely bone-chilling everything about the Confessors were. You could absolutely have a really cool and interesting fantasy series in which they’re the main villains, but Terry Goodkind’s political views just wouldn’t allow it.

Wizards First Rule is Goodkind not Brooks, Brooks wrote Shanarra

Damn I legit liked this book, one of my top series. I just enjoyed the magic system, the antagonists, and the over the top nature. I might just have bad taste though lol.

It’s the cliche answer for good reason. I think I appreciated it better than most people who hate it, and I still barely finished it for class. All the clumsy symbolism and retro-futuristic sci-fi schlock was right up my alley. The premise about rich terrorists absconding with all of the fucking money… not so much. The whole third act is just Ayn Rand’s vengeance fantasy about killing everyone who ever failed to agree with her hard enough. I was skimming through by that point, and still had to double-take and re-read where her derision toward “looters” included farmers.

My final paper roundly calling it a bloated screed by a mediocre author largely criticized it on its own terms and still turned vicious. John Galt is is among the worst monsters in literature because he wouldn’t feel satisfied having his name carved into the face of the moon in recognition of everything solved with his infinite energy glitch. Any mere worker acting as Rand insisted they should died in the apocalypse her tradwife-cosplaying nobility deliberately caused. It is a bad story about bad people told badly by a bad person, and the worst part is that it’s so fucking boring.

That is, still, to this day, the only book I could not finish.

Got about 2/3rds of the way through it and violently set it down. I love books too much to set it on fire, but I wanted to. It was the worst pile of shit I’ve ever read in my life. Completely divorced from reality.

And she died penniless and depending on the support of the same social services that she demonized in her book to convince people that capitalist leaders are paragons of humanity and the rest of us are just peons.

Herbert didn’t want to continue Dune and was pressured to write a follow up. It was an era when most science fiction was still published in periodicals. The first half of Messiah are the results that were then compiled into the start. It is like a really shitty draft. Everyone experiences the same thing. I put it down for quite a while too. If you can make it to the second half, it will become one you can’t put down, like the first. It does setup well for what is to come. After I got back into Messiah, I read all the way to the end of the entire series, even the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson stuff. Those last two are not like Frank’s writings, but are their own thing and still more readable than the first half of Messiah. IMO the first half of Messiah is a great example of what happens when Art takes a back seat to an anxious banking type mentality. Bankers make terrible artists and advisors.

GEoD is IMO the best book in the series as it eviscerates many cultural norms and deep assumptions like fascist altruism, eternal boredom, the coexistence of misogyny and feminism, manipulation that is both brutal and kind, and if an alien can be human. It even infers the question of potential delusional prescience in my opinion. It will make you think about the motivation of leaders and what you may endure because of their vision of a future.

Wait until you get to chapterhouse!

The Silmarillion is one of my favourite books, but I totally get this. Unless you’re really into Tolkien’s world as well as this style of book it’s not a fun read.

That was actually my favorite Tolkien book. He was a terrible fiction writer with an excellent story to tell… but when he was writing non-fiction style in the Silmarillion he was really in his element… and/or the posthumous editing was top notch.

I had the same experience with the two towers. I can’t watch the movie of the two towers. And I can’t make it more than 60 or 70 pages into the book before my brain gives up and says they’ve been walking through the fucking Hills and talking to the trees for 30 pages this is some bullshit.

Maybe I’m cutting myself short by not pushing through but I just literally cannot build up the energy it takes to push through this wall of infinite text.

You didn’t make it past the first book??
Lucky.

DISCLAIMER: Orson Scott Card is a bad person and I have since gotten rid of my collection and tell everyone not to support him because he uses his platform to hurt marginalised groups of people for religious reasons.

Now, I would argue that you’re skipping over a lot of interesting stuff.
The Overseer (mind-controlling satellite robot) was built by humans to keep rewriting human brains so they would perpetually forget how to invent the wheel until they proved that they’d evolved beyond their barbaric nature and would not go on to invent the nuclear bomb. The satellite then dies of old age millions of years later because humans are just kind of shitty. The book ends with the main character’s family hopping onto an Ark rocket back to Earth aaand… Hundreds of years have passed and all the characters you’ve invested in emotionally are long dead, here’s some bat furries I guess.

Some pretty cool ideas in there, despite who it was written by.

Now, the worst thing I have ever read was also by Orson Scott Card and I refuse to speak about it.

You’re saying that the book couldve been an essay?

Ooo, I was trying to think of what to answer in this thread and you just reminded me of another Orson Scott Card book, Empire.

Absolute trash. Prior to that I had read all of the Ender and Bean series and loved them. Didn’t know much about Card personally, but picked up this book because it was supposed to be tied in with a video game I was looking forward too.

Reading this book is how I found out what a shitty person he really is. It was basically all him hitting you over the head with his shitty fascist ideology while jerking off to a bunch of military porn like a dollar store version of Tom Clancy. I never did play the game.

I feel you. Sorry you had to go through that experience.

I feel that a lot with Heinlein. Starts good with an interesting premise, becomes weirdly sexual, and the ending leaves you wondering whether the premise even mattered.

Is it just the (lead) character or do you think the book itself is also shit?

I enjoyed The Alchemist and The Zahir at the time, but in hindsight I think The Zahir was an elaborate cuckold fantasy. I think if I reread it I’d remember the rest of it but that’s what it feels like thinking back over a decade later.