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Worst book ever written

Buddy Bradley

Buddy Bradley

Pantheistic solipsist
From an Amazon review The Shadow God by Aaron Rayburn:

Okay, I know it doesn't seem THAT bad from the plot. But I haven't begun quoting yet. Mark Twain said, "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."

Rayburn wasn't even close.

"Spiers's eyes popped extraneously from their sockets, as his face turned from a deep red to a sickly purple."

"Extraneous" means "irrelevant." I don't think that's what he meant. At least, I hope not.

Here's my favorite:

"The lamp's glow was very weak compared to the blue glow emancipating from the basement."

Emanating, Rayburn, EMANATING. When will people learn never to trust their SpellCheck without verifying it's the word they meant??? There are, in total, 11 instances of Rayburn using the wrong word, and believe me, each one is funnier than the last.

Okay, one more.

"It infiltrated his lungs, filling them with a kind of innovativeness he had never felt before."

To be honest, I don't know what word he meant, but I keep seeing Craig's lung filing patents for a dozen new inventions, getting promotions for discovering an even newer formula for Tide laundry detergent, or finding the cure for cancer.
Click to expand...

:D Anyone ever read it?
 
I have never persevered with a book I haven't been enjoying so I don't know.

Sorry what a boring answer :oops:
 
Dune by Frank Herbert. I would say The Lord of the Rings, but I pass that phase now.

ETA: Sorry I thought this was the best book ever written.
 
An acquaintance of mine once wrote a book. She asked me to take a look at it. Here is a random extract:

Without so much as to go back to the inn for his belongings, to the City of London where that man was, and that boy. He grimaced at the thought of the boy, his large turquoise orbs catching the silver of the moon, offering a glimpse of a future forever formless. What foul decay could infest such youth, how putrid the cerebration? This child's spirit was weird and black; it was wrong: a perception of life and place within it moulded to dark imaginings and ambitions. Yes, this boy’s secret fire had gone out long ago. But no matter, his eternal Winter had arrived.

The rider turned from the coast and made his way to the road, and there established a comfortable pace towards his destination. In an oppression of shadows and silence with the spectres of remembrances flickering before him like cold white flames, he forgot as each second passed about the man involved. A good man, whose desire to grasp the Light had become his own personal disease, nurtured to fever pitch; its very presence plaguing his dreams with the iridescent colours of a peacock’s feathers never meant for him. The colours brought to this man barren memories of all that had been lost: hollow demons sent out to torment, creeping and crawling out of a silken fabric like so many insects, coming in through the back door, laughing in their fists.
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The book is 404 pages long. It is all like this. It is the worst book ever written.
 
And if you don't believe me and think I may have taken an unfairly poor passage, pick a page number and I'll quote it for you.

It is the worst. book. ever. written.
 
missfran said:
An acquaintance of mine once wrote a book. She asked me to take a look at it. Here is a random extract:



The book is 404 pages long. It is all like this. It is the worst book ever written.
Click to expand...

404 pages of that?

Alright, holy types, I am convinced. Hell exists and it's exactly 404 pages long.
 
missfran said:
The book is 404 pages long. It is all like this. It is the worst book ever written.
Click to expand...
I second this.

I read portions of it and could not work out what in the name of suffering fuck was meant to be happening from one paragraph to the next,
 
missfran said:
An acquaintance of mine once wrote a book. She asked me to take a look at it. Here is a random extract:

The book is 404 pages long. It is all like this. It is the worst book ever written.
Click to expand...

I don't see what the problem is. I laugh in my fists all the time.

:)D)
 
missfran said:
And if you don't believe me and think I may have taken an unfairly poor passage, pick a page number and I'll quote it for you.

It is the worst. book. ever. written.
Click to expand...

Would you describe your relationship with your acquaintance as cordial?

:eek:
 
And to pre-empt the naysayers: yes, yes, jolly well done to her for actually having sat down and written a novel.

It is, however, the worst novel ever written.
 
missfran said:
And to pre-empt the naysayers: yes, yes, jolly well done to her for actually having sat down and written a novel.

It is, however, the worst novel ever written.
Click to expand...

Worse than anything by Jeffrey Archer?

Then it would truly lay claim to that crown.
 
8den said:
Page 74 please.
Click to expand...

Page 74:

To the left, was a fireplace with a uniquely carved mantle-piece in a dark but unidentified type of wood. It showed fantastical creatures and grotesque demons in an Eastern European style that looked like it had been modelled on Botticelli’s cartoon of Dante’s Inferno: horrible but comical at the same time. It had been there for ages, before the printing things but unlike those, had never really become a part of the house, never really blended in. No one ever looked at it. On the rare occasions it was noticed, it was considered merely a funny curiosity worthy only of the odd ‘oh, won’t you look at that’ and ‘that face is just like my mother in law’s, and that one’s my wife when I’ve been caught with the maid’.

Frightened (of his predicament, not of the fireplace), the man quietly sat down on the table as the surgeon instructed the prentice to fetch clean towels and bandages. He felt dizzy, struggling to remain upright. As Cornelius returned, he was slumped to one side, eyes tight shut, paralyzed with pain, fighting to stay conscious. Cornelius stretched him out and examined him. He felt cold and clammy and an irregular pulse fluctuated between a very hard beat and an almost imperceptibly weak one. The man fiercely clutched his side, refusing to let go, spluttering a cough that seemed to cause him a lot of pain.
Click to expand...
 
ChrisFilter said:
Lord of the Rings is fucking great. I'll fight anyone that disagrees with me.... to the death :mad:
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Chris, it is a terrible book - possibly only taken seriously because of the academic standing of its author. It is too early (relatively speaking) to regard it as having any status as a classic book, and it is one of a select few books that I have thrown across a room in disgust.
 
Fictionist said:
Would you describe your relationship with your acquaintance as cordial?

:eek:
Click to expand...

I haven't spoken to her for 3 years, we used to work together.

When she asked my opinion on the book, I politely said "It's not really my thing, I'm afraid".
 
missfran said:
An acquaintance of mine once wrote a book. She asked me to take a look at it. Here is a random extract:



The book is 404 pages long. It is all like this. It is the worst book ever written.
Click to expand...

That's great. I've read it a few times now and still have very little idea as to what is supposed to be happening there. Compelling stuff though which raises interesting questions - like how can you progressively forget something second by second?

page 138 please.
 
missfran said:
I haven't spoken to her for 3 years, we used to work together.

When she asked my opinion on the book, I politely said "It's not really my thing, I'm afraid".
Click to expand...

Well I'm glad to see that you were polite - you could have been far more cutting.

:D
 
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