Worst Books I Ever Read

Over the years I started many a crappy book. But these five (six) have the sad distinction of having been read cover to cover. All totaled, probably a hundred or so hours of my life that can never, ever, ever be recovered.


5. The Beast, by A. E. van Vogt

If you lined up all the SF books I’ve read (maybe 200, I’d guess), from the very, very best on down, eventually you’d come across that 200th book. And in this case, it’s The Beast, by SF master author of the golden age, A. E. van Vogt. This book has turned me off from exploring any other further books by this writer. I think it’s a novel cobbled together from a bunch of serialized novellas, but nothing added up in the final count. I kept waiting for it to get better, and it just never did. So call it the worst of the best.

4. Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth

Read this disgusting book as a result of high school peer pressure. Pure angsty garbage (accent on the second syllable).

3. No One Here Gets Out Alive, by Danny Sugarman

Not a bad book per se. But it had a tremendously wicked effect on me as a young lad of eighteen or so. Now I recognize Jim Morrison as an overrated poet and drunken second-rate singer. But back then I worshipped him and as a result, became a devoted hedonist for at least the next six or seven years, until I returned to college after dropping out. Set me back two decades, I think.

2. The Philosophy of History and The History of Philosophy, by Hegel

A pure intellectual exercise in literary masochism. Oh, and one I’ll never partake in again. A complete waste of time. Reading Hegel is like reading the transcription of a three-hundred hour conversation between two ex-professors in a lunatic assylum in a language you are struggling to master to keep your grade-point average above three-point-five or so. Like sleepwalking, I’d read five or ten pages without actually remembering a single word of them. Lots of anecdotal stuff about Romans and Greeks and “Orientals,” if I’m not mistaken, meaning the Jews, I guess. Very little made sense. A bad writer even in his native German, translated Hegel is, at its most simplest, one of the best insomnia antidotes known to man.

If you click on the “Philosophy” Category to the right and go back to this blog’s earliest entries, you can read of a young, wide-eyed LE’s first excited glimpses into German Idealism. (Which lasted about twenty minutes … )

1. Beloved, by Toni Morrison

The worst of the worst. Exponentially worse than the factorial of the previous four books. Forced to read it for a college class, a “Modern Fiction” lit class which also had the distinction of being taught by the most gloriously liberal of all the professors I’ve ever studied under. This book was agonizing to get through. So much so that it almost derailed my deep, abiding love of the printed word. A story that made no sense. Unlikable characters. Incomprehensible dialect. Morrison subscribes to the dictum, “never use five words where five hundred will do.” Her style, mercifully, has not been imprinted on my memory. However, there is a site out there on them internets which deconstructs her writing if you want to hunt around a bit. I won’t; I’ve already wasted twenty-five or thirty hours of sweet, precious life on this overrated piece of crap masquerading as high art.


* * *


Wow. I didn’t know I had that in me. What a cathartic experience ... I feel lots better now, thanks.

Back to some book loving tomorrow!