For me, it’s Jude the Obscure. That book is easily the worst book I have ever read, without a single redeeming quality, other than that it finally ends. I only finished it because Far from the Madding Crowd was so damn good.

But really, Jude is the gold standard of awful books, in my opinion.

What’s your so-awful-it-deserves-shelf-space book, if you have one?

Or am I just weird?

  • panda388@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I worked at a public library for around 12 years as an aide in a very small Massachusetts town. I knew my regulars, and one guy with his wife would check out around 20-40 books every few days. And I mean novels. The husband tended towards fantasy and sci-fi, the wife towards non-fiction and basic fiction. But they really hit every genre. They. Read. Everything.

    I asked about it once because I was interested and he said they did not own a TV. Weird to me, but whatever.

    We had another similar guy who was a regular. Hyper-political and… self-intelligent? He thought he knew everything. He self-published a novella and aggressively pushed for us to include it in our collection. Mind you, you don’t just toss a book on a library shelf. You have to add it to a database which takes some time. This guy was so fucking proud when his book hit the shelves and was checked out.

    Guess who checked out this dude’s novella. It was the guy with his wife who read everything and injust had to ask about it. He said it was the most poorly written and confusing thing he has ever given up on. He gave up on it! The book was maybe 90 pages. This guy could trek through multiple 1000 plus page books in a day and he gave up on basically a long pamphlet that insulted his intelligence so badly.