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?
A Desert Called Peace by Tom Kratman (Space Marine!). It was gifted to me as a joke a while back and it is, without question, the worst book I have ever read. The background is that human colonists settle a far off planet through a wormhole, the colonists become detached from Earth (which is under the control of the liberal, paedophile UN) and proceed to go through all of Earth history (because the author believes history is cyclical or something?).
The plot is that 9/11 (in Space!) happens, killing the main character (a blatant self insert)'s wife. He then proceeds to go on a roaring rampage of revenge, building a mercenary army and turning the middle east (in Space!) to glass and basically genociding muslims (spelled Moslems for some reason).
https://www.reddit.com/r/badscificovers/comments/f277b7/a_desert_called_peace_by_tom_kratman/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
A link to a post discussing the cover
Moslem is the spelling you’ll find in older books. I’m not sure when or why Muslim replaced it. Obviously neither’s fully accurate because you’re transliterating an Arabic word into the Latin alphabet. No idea why a modern author would choose that spelling, but I suspect the answer has to do with Islamophobic reasons.
…in any case, the idea that history all transpires the same way, on a planet with its own landmasses, native flora and fauna etc., is hilarious. How would, say, Columbus settling America work? Was there a Black Death? How? And how could history play out the same way if there wasn’t? And why would a spacefaring people decide to just abandon all their knowledge and start history over again, anyway? And why would things only diverge when 9/11 happened? And…and how did Caesar, Napoleon etc. still get born? And if they weren’t, how did history turn out the same?