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?
“The Swarm” by Frank Schätzing.
The plot:
The world begins to suffer an escalating and sensational series of natural disasters, and two marine biologists begin to develop a theory that the cause lies in the oceans, where an entity know as the Yrr has developed a massive network of single-cell organisms. It is wreaking havoc in order to prevent humankind from destroying the earth’s ecological balance forever.
The Americans, under the ruthless General Judith Lee, take a more pragmatic approach than the scientists, seeking to wipe out the being of the deep.
The scene is set for a massive confrontation…
Sounds pretty exciting, right? It’s even a bestseller! Well, I’ll be brutally honest…I’ve never hated a book like I hate this one.
I found it to be sooooo boring that I’d rather clean public toilets instead of reading this again. It had so many different complicated characters that I couldn’t even remember who was who without rifling back through the book to refresh myself.
Also, the scientific jargon used could only be understood if you were a huge science buff or worked in that field. I’m not one who complains about a little bit of science, I do really like “Jurassic Park” or “Congo”, but the lay person would struggle to follow “The Swarm.”
I don’t know if it just got translated poorly over from German, but it wasn’t my cup of tea at all.