What was the worst book you read this year?

Don't think too long, or you'll come up with more than one, or talk yourself out of nominating that stinker.

Mine was The Girl She Used to Be by David Cristofano. There were a few really bad books that stole hours from me that might have better been used doing laundry, but this one combined sloppy writing and badly drawn characters with a frightening vision of female sexuality, that would have made the pope uneasy.

That is distressingly easy for me to answer. It was an ER book, The Gnoll Credo by J. Stanton, which is one of those books that goes beyond just being bad to being bad in ways that make me feel offended by its very existence and insulted at its intrusion into my life. Bah! Total sacrifice of ideas, characterization, writing and sense to a ludicrous soapbox rant that would have been better confined to some crazy corner of the internet. And it was made all the worse by the fact that it started out deeply flawed but sort of vaguely interesting, so I kept trying to give it the benefit of the doubt, only to have it turn on me viciously in the end.

Ahh, I'm getting annoyed all over again just thinking about it. Definitely time to go make that "best of the year" list...

After Claude by Iris Owens. A huge disappointment as it is a NYBR novel -- the first I've ever disliked. Although some reviewers found it well written and biting, I just found it mean and distasteful. I only finished it because it was an ER, and I felt obligated.

Them by Nathan McCall, a novel about gentrification in the Old Fourth Ward section of Atlanta (in a section and street that I'm pretty familiar with, as a resident of the city since 1997), which portrayed black and white Atlantans as bigoted and shallow, and was filled with glaring errors and poor writing.

I am copying below what I posted in another thread, but if I had to pick one it would still be a tie between The Finkler Question and Memories of Hecate County.

I tend not to finish books that I really don't like, so the books listed below fall more into the category of disappointments -- they didn't live up to my hopes, which were based either on recommendations or hearing about the book some other way.

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson I found the characters unappealing, the Jewish issues presented in a stereotypical and sometimes offensive way, and the "humor" not funny.

Wigs on the Green by Nancy Mitford Joking about Hitler still isn't funny, and they should have known better, even then.

The Thieves of Manhattan by Adam Langer -- fun idea, didn't work (for me)

70985::Memoirs of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson -- Wilson should have stuck to criticism.

2017 by Olga Slavnikova Despite some parts that I really enjoyed, the plot was hard to follow, the mixture of reality, myth, and science fiction not to my taste, the writing dense and often overloaded with adjectives and analogies, and the characterizations not psychologically believable.

The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State by Shane Harris Despite the intriguing title, this book was not a serious history and analysis but a journalistic look at some of the key creators of surveillance technology and its "hero" was John Poindexter of Iran-Contra fame.

I would say The Historian was the most disappointing read this year; Great premise but poor execution. That's not to say that it isn't well written it just had too many glaring flaws for me to overlook.

Probably The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo

The Storyteller of Marrakesh, an ER book.

>5 rebeccanyc:, Oh that's lovely, you've got to love a book where Poindexter is the hero... Bleech.

I'm looking over my 2010 reads and will post a stinker soon, I'm certain.

Ok, so I have two kinds of worst books. The first is a crap book that I basically expected to be a crap book, simply because of the genre. The second is a real book that I was so excited to read but that turned out to be a huge disappointment for me, even though it was not terrible.

The first is Alyson Noel's Immortals series, the last one I read was called Dark Flame - a horrible young adult urban fantasy series that I couldn't stop reading for a while even though each book in it merited no more than two (generous) stars from me. My private comments to myself after Dark Flame read "Bah, this series is horrible. STOP READING IT."

The second is Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood, a fact which devastates me, as it is a follow-up to Oryx and Crake, which I thought was a well-done, interesting dystopia. My review is here. It wasn't a horrible book, it's just that so much of it annoyed me & it's very existence undercut the ending of O&C, in my opinion.

Of this book, Ursula K. Le Guin said ""I sometimes felt that I was undergoing, and failing, a test of my cleverness at guessing from hints, reading between lines and recognising allusions to an earlier novel."

The worst book I started this year was A Ship Made Of Paper - I think I only managed about 40 pages before deciding I would be a gibbering loon if I continued reading much further. A lot of people have really liked this book - it's even quoted in Francine Prose's Reading Like A Writer as an example of good writing - but I found it massively unsubtle.

The worst book I finished this year was Cold Earth, a novel whose central character was smug and whiny (and not meant to be).

By an astronomical distance, my most hated book was an ER book: Who Owns the World. Here is the bulk of my review:

Who really does own the world? I’ll save you the frustration of reading the book and just tell you: according to this book, it is highly probable that wherever you are, the land is somehow in some form, ultimately owned by the state. Not very useful, I know, but there you have it. For example, Cahill says that Queen Elizabeth II is the largest single landowner on the planet. The first problem with that is that he uses her name as a synonym for the British monarchy or crown, which it is not. The second—bigger—problem with this is that he includes her property to include every inch of the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and a whole bunch of other countries. Maybe that’s technically true on some level, but it is simplistic and meaningless. It gives zero information on the reality of everyday life for the people connected to that land. Furthermore, in the case of Canada, he doesn’t even mention that Quebec is legally a “distinct society” has its own system of law based on the French system, and he fails to mention Indigenous land claims. He doesn’t come right out and say it, but the implications of his statements are that, if she wanted to, Queen Elizabeth could, say, kick everyone out of the province of Prince Edward Island because she wants to retire there on her own private sheep farm. This is absolute nonsense.
The structure of the book is terrible. First, there is not one single map. Not one. How do you have a geography book without maps? Two, instead of logically dividing the world into its physical landforms, he discusses first “The Land of America,” by which he means only the United States, and utterly ignoring all the other countries that are part of America (the Caribbean, Central America, Canada, South America). This is just one example of how the author is sloppy in his use of language. He may think that America = USA, but many people in this world strongly do not. Along the same lines, he states that Columbus “discovered America.” Why would he choose that term when it has been widely deemed offensive and inaccurate for at least the past 25 years? He could so easily have selected historically correct and neutral words. It’s not just with language that he is imprecise. He does not value precision of fact either. According to Cahill, Canada (which he categorizes not as part of North America, but as a “Land of Queen Elizabeth II”) is a “federation of 13 provinces.” Uh, no it’s not. There are ten provinces and three territories. Similarly, he claims that Australia is “a federation of six states, including Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and Jarvis Bay Territory.” That one isn’t even close to correct. It’s not like these details about Canada and Australia are obscure or confusing. I had this info down by the time I was nine years old. And it’s easy to verify. So why would he blunder so? And if he gets this simple information wrong, what else has he messed up? Why would you bother to read a book by an author with no credibility?

Okay, maybe I’m being too nit-picky, and I need to look at the larger picture. Unfortunately, as a whole, the book doesn’t get any better. Many sentences are ambiguous, and Cahill constantly drops facts into paragraphs without explaining the implications of what it means. The organization is a mess—entirely inconsistent. He throws in trivial tidbits intermittently that have nothing to do with landownership, but then doesn’t give basic information in other places. (I really could go on and on and on and on about how poorly organized this book is—if you really need to know, ask me for more details on my profile page.) He uses seemingly important statistics but doesn’t explain what they mean. For example, for most countries, he gives an “ownership factor,” which is always either “N/A” or “1”. I have no idea what that means. He sometimes gives the information collected from a World Bank land-registration system questionnaire, but does not explain the implications of this information, or what the reader should expect to see.

In conclusion, this book is a worthless mess that is sadly a waste of the paper used to print it.

Recommended for: people who like lots and lots of stats, but don’t really care about accuracy; people who think the United States is the centre of the universe; people looking for scrap paper to start their campfire.

The Road, hands down. I actually yelled at the book a couple times - on the subway.

Also bad, the final books of the Sword of Truth series, though in fairness I knew these were bad but am an insufferable completist and cannot stop myself.

>12 Nickelini:, Joyce, I remember when you posted about that book originally. Hilarious review then and now.

Chicago by Alaa Al Aswany was the pits. Cardboard characters and ludicrous dialogue. Stereotypical and dated. And very disappointing because I was expecting much better.

Oh yes, wasn't Chicago terrible?! It was so horribly and inaccurately stereotyped that it actually made me wonder if The Yacoubian Building, which I loved, was similarly stereotyped and inaccurate.

>15 arubabookwoman:-16, Oh gawd, you guys.... I've been meaning to read Chicago, which avaland graciously sent me a long while ago...You are really not making it seem appealing. Though rebecca's comment made me remember something I recently read somewhere on the interwebs about stereotypes of America in Arab literature. I wonder if I can find it.

ETA: Here it is: http://arablit.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/reading-an-arabic-novel-about-americans/

Daughters of the North (or, The Carhullan Army) by Sarah Hall. Not completely terrible, but easily my most disappointing read of 2010. Banal and unbelievable.

Sadly, Thad Carhart's Across the Endless River. Flat characters, leaden dialogue. Sadly, I think, because he wrote a lovely memoir called The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, which I loved.