h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

How to Marry A Marquiss... american romantic fiction sold on Amazon.co.uk

agcB

To stay in the Star Trek genre on my side...

Star Trek Voyager : The Garden by Melissa Scott

bored me to tears...

hard to say again i don't remember them the was a doctor who one which I hated, I supose the worse ones are the ones that somone else loved and wants you to read even though you don't like that kind of book

pardon my ignorance but if a book were bad, why would you read it?????

pardon my ignorance, but if a book were bad, why would you read it???

...Stranded in Germany with nothing else to do...

...like eating too much choloclate cake, you know you'll feel queasy when you have finished but its there and its sugary...

...it was recommended by a friend...

...you enjoyed the early ones in a series and hope the later ones will be as good (particlularly Anne McCaffrey)...

...the concepts are interesting but it is not particularly well written (eg Ringworld)...

...you should be doing something more important, like working...

Now books I have started but flung aside in disgust: that is a whole different thread, starting with Anna Kerinnina and Emma Bovary.

agcB

Fractal Mode by Piers Anthony. I read it 10 years ago and I've still got a bad taste in my mouth. Bad even by SF's low standards. Childish, vague, dull, horribly long, just embarassing.

I read a book a while ago that was so dull that it failed to go past page 6 without getting to the point where you read the words and don't remember them because they have no meaning to you. I was meant for people younger than me.

personally i nominate Engineering Mathematics (4th edition)
I only had to read 6 of its 30 or so chapters, and they went on for about 300 pages - just so i could complete a "mandatory module".
I've never needed laplace transforms at Sainsburys!

First Impressions: Albany, Travellers Tales (compiled by R. Sellick)
Albany the town is boring, and the only thing worse is people writing about how boring it is.

>personally i nominate Engineering Mathematics (4th edition

(sorry to go off topic,) but I find it absolutely hilarious when economics text books put exclamation marks in them. That demand concept is just so exciting! ! ! !

(another reason you would read a terrible book) - uni course demands it (or high-school for that matter)

Just jumping in here,,,,,splash,,, lovely and vitriolic in here, Isn't it ?
The only book that was so bad that I couldn't get past the first page, This is my personal viw, and if 100 years of english literature is dammed, then so be it...
Charles Dickens "The Pickwick Papers".
Turgid would be a good word, didn't see anything to make me want to try page 2, yes I know the pages don't work that way, but that's what I mean.
There is a lot of bad science fiction, but you can generally work through it. "The Ringworld Engineers" wasn't that bad surely?
Gotta go and see djsdude...
Bye

I am not the biggest fan of To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. It bored me so much that I had to reread the first three pages over and over (it was required) because I found that I hadn't retained anything I had just read!! ( I think my brain knew that it was bad for me, and rejected it)
By the second half of the book, it got interesting, but I would never put myself through that again.

I know how you feel, there's stuff I've read and have forced myself to finnish it because I hate to half read a book and then make myself read it from the start again, sometime,

mind you there are some things that no matter what I just can't read it

Like most "classics" and a lot of victorian style books

perhaps, but but moaningabout victorian books and "classics" for beingin an archaic style is like moaning about hitchcock's "psycho" being in black and white. to a certain extent, if you are going to read anything but new stuff, you have to read it on it's own terms.
Having two chapter of travellogue in a horror story woudld be totally unaceptable by modern standards, but when frankenstein was written, this was the only way most people heard about what other countries were like.

Yeah, but a lot of thrillers have huge sections of quasi-technical descriptions of guns, explosives, weapons, and other guy-tech-stuff.

agcB

I've read dracula and jekyll and hyde, some sherlock holmes, and some older science fiction stuff I wouldn't say they were bad, so what about a updated version of the books?

Perhap I just cannot apreciate them

Why update something that is not bad? I mean, what's the point?

agcB

would it still make sence if it were updated?