Best And Worst Novels And Stories You've Ever Read

[BAYLOR]

And what made them so memorably good or bad?

 

[thaddeus6th]

The Lies of Locke Lamora I'd put up there as one of the best I've read. It did start off a bit ropey, and the time-shifts didn't work, I think, for a while.

However, from the midpoint to the end it gripped me, and was utterly fantastic. Many plot twists, a real sense any character could end up dead, and a great crescendo. Still Lynch's best book, I think.

 

[Michael Colton]

I have mentioned some of my favorites elsewhere on Chrons several times, so I suppose I can mention a different one that affected me a great deal despite it not being very well received and it not being related to SFF. That would be Paint It Black by Janet Fitch. She was heavily criticized for the novel for two main reasons that I recall. First, the enormous success of White Oleander and the related film created absurd expectations. Second, people thought it was melodramatic navel-gazing of the worst emotional introspection. I personally thought she explored emotion incredibly well and in rather interesting ways - but I can absolutely see how it would turn off many people.

 

[Venusian Broon]

I find it difficult to pick out a best from my pantheon of truly 'I am amazed' books.

But A Scanner Darkly by PKD has been the only book in my life that I instantly started re-reading as soon as I had finished it. Funny, personal and totally Dickian. And the ending. So sad and poignant.

As for worst....well the answer I'll specify is Don Quixote. Or at least the English translation I forced myself through. Although to be fair, it is practically the worlds first modern novel, so they were just working out how to write these things. But still archaic and difficult to read, I found.

Actually though that is not the truthful answer, I have read a published book this year that, well, had my mouth agog at how on earth it managed to get published. And that is really the worst book I've ever read. But I'm going to leave it at that and not speak on it further.

 

[svalbard]

Picking one book as the best I have ever read is a difficult one, but if I was to really push myself on this it would be The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer. I have bought the book at least 5 times, as varied people who have borrowed it failed to return it. Currently it sits on my 'not to lend out bookshelf'.

The worst Gormenghast.

 

[Bick]

Actually though that is not the truthful answer, I have read a published book this year that, well, had my mouth agog at how on earth it managed to get published. And that is really the worst book I've ever read. But I'm going to leave it at that and not speak on it further.

It would be a lot more interesting and useful if you just said what it was, VB.

It's hard to say what is the worst book I've read, as I didn't finish the worst ones. To The Lighthouse would certainly be a contender if I'd managed to get through it I suspect. Unreadable for me.

 

[BAYLOR]

The Castle of Otronto by Horace Walpole . I know it's considered a classic and as a gothic novel it's supposed to evolve, horror mystery and tragedy. The problem is the book fails miserably on all counts . It's badly written.

 

[Toby Frost]

The best (or, rather, some of my favourites):

Raymond Chandler - The Lady in the Lake and Farewell My Lovely
George Orwell - Anything really, but Collected Essays is a good start
Geoffrey Willians and Ronald Searle - Molesworth
George Steinbeck - The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights
H.G. Wells - The Island of Doctor Moreau
Stella Gibbons - Cold Comfort Farm
Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim
Mervyn Peake - Titus Groan and Gormenghast

The worst is harder to say. In terms of actual badness contrasted with the praise lavished upon it, I'd nominate Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein: not so much because of its morality, but because it isn't a good book, not even a good lecture. I've certainly read worse, though, although they're not as loved. Earlier this year I got about 30 pages into a book about a Bow Street Runner who, in that time, fought 5 men, seduced a duchess and threatened to beat up the Prime Minister, which everyone somehow allowed. Life's too short for that.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

My best are listed all over the place (Time traveler's Wife, Corelli, Wuthering heights, Dune, a few others.)

Worst? A Song of fire and ice are up there, especially the last two. And Jude the Obscure. I detested it. Moby Dick was fairly grim, too.

 

[Toby Frost]

Just out of interest, why didn't you like A Song of Ice and Fire? I've only read the first one and thought that it was ok, but that I had no intention of ploughing through about 4,000 pages of more of the same to see who lived to the end. A lot of the opinions I seem to hear about it boil down to "Genius!" or "Too much rape and/or murder", so it'd be interesting to hear a more balanced view.

It may seem odd for someone who likes Orwell to say it, by my goodness Hardy was miserable as sin.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I didn't mind the first two books. There were some point of views I really liked - Jon Snow, Tyrion and Arya's - and the story chundered along at a nice pace. By the third book I started to struggle - so many povs had been added, I was losing track of who was who and the nuances (but I'm not a fan of multi-multi-multi characters anyway) but there was enough action to keep me invested.

From there on, though, I felt the story lost its focus (along with some of its main characters) and started to pad. In the final book GRRM decided to split the book in two, using geography as the basis for the split. That meant the povs I'd become engaged with were all in one of the two volumes (the second) and the first was a chore for me.

So, I suppose, some editorial reasons, some genre reasons and some in terms of padding.

 

[Randy M.]

Best?

On one level I'd say Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner or Moby Dick by Herman Melville. These repay rereading, being beautifully written and offering the reader layers and layers from which to ... extract? construct? ... meaning. And both are intense. I think it was William Styron I read wondering how Faulkner could keep ratcheting up the intensity of his books without exhausting and finally repulsing the reader.

On a less conscious level, the books I've reread most often include Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury; The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles Finney; The Adventures [/Memoirs] of Sherlock Holmes & The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; As I Lay Dying by Faulkner; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain; various compilations of Lovecraft's stories; Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges; The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll. I figure that says these are, for me, among the best books I've read.

A similar list of short stories might overflow a server but would certainly include Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" & "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"; Frank O'Connor's "My Oedipus Complex" & "Guest of the Nation"; Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space" & "The Rats in the Walls"; Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"; James Thurber's "The Catbird Seat"; Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"; Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" & "William Wilson"; and on and on ...

I'm not sure about "worst." I have probably read as bad or worse than the following, but considering my expectations going in these two were the most disappointing.

Slate by Nelson Aldyne (pseudonym for Michael McDowell, I believe) received a few good reviews and was supposed be part of a landmark series bringing gays into the mystery story as main and positive characters. That latter is probably true, but the mystery part I found lame and the character interactions didn't really work so well for me, either. I found the book as a whole rather thin and conventional.

I don't recall the title of the other novel, but it was by Edward D. Hoch who was an entertaining short story writer but the mystery/s.f. novel I read by him was thin, the s.f. element just the furniture of real s.f., and the characters unconvincing. Mind you, this even when I was in high school and very undemanding.


Randy M.

 

[Vince W]

I don't think I could choose an absolute best, there's just too many good ones that I've enjoyed.

For worst I would put Heinlein's Number of the Beast high among those candidates. What a slog. For the most part though if I don't like the book I don't finish it.

 

[Michael Colton]

Just out of interest, why didn't you like A Song of Ice and Fire? I've only read the first one and thought that it was ok, but that I had no intention of ploughing through about 4,000 pages of more of the same to see who lived to the end. A lot of the opinions I seem to hear about it boil down to "Genius!" or "Too much rape and/or murder", so it'd be interesting to hear a more balanced view.

It may seem odd for someone who likes Orwell to say it, by my goodness Hardy was miserable as sin.

If you would like a view without the grim criticisms, the reason I disliked the first book enough to not move on to the others was primarily that I found it boring. Many of the characters felt very backstitched and none of them interested me. It felt like an extremely long exposition on archetypes that were plopped into very superficial and tropey settings. But as I have said elsewhere, almost everything I have just said comes down to taste - his style of writing is just not my cup of tea. I finished the book because I know so many people that love the series and I felt obligated to give it a chance, but I cannot recall a novel I had that much difficulty finishing.

 

[Venusian Broon]

For worst I would put Heinlein's Number of the Beast high among those candidates. What a slog. For the most part though if I don't like the book I don't finish it.

Yes I'm totally with you on that one. It was unfortunately (for me) the first Heinlein I ever read. It was fifteen years before I would touch another of his books. First impressions really do count. I should have started with his earlier work...

 

[Toby Frost]

Thanks Michael, that's interesting. I didn't think it was bad at all - it just didn't grip me enough to read all the others.

 

[j.grey]

I read the novelisation of Star Wars. I was locked in while working and couldn't leave. It was so bad I dropped the book in a dustbin twice and threw it at a wall more times than I remember. Terrible, just terrible. Also the Mothman prophesies. I just couldn't get through it.

 

[Bick]

I read the novelisation of Star Wars. I was locked in while working and couldn't leave. It was so bad I dropped the book in a dustbin twice and threw it at a wall more times than I remember. Terrible, just terrible. Also the Mothman prophesies. I just couldn't get through it.

Throwing a book in a bin twice seems less critical than throwing it in once. You had to want to retrieve it to try it again in your multiple discard strategy, one presumes.

When I threw To the Lighthouse in a bin, I left it there with nary a backward glance - now that's critical commitment.

 

[BAYLOR]

I read the novelisation of Star Wars. I was locked in while working and couldn't leave. It was so bad I dropped the book in a dustbin twice and threw it at a wall more times than I remember. Terrible, just terrible. Also the Mothman prophesies. I just couldn't get through it.

The novelization of Star wars was pretty forgettable.

 

[j.grey]

I never forgot it. It was just terrible. The only thing that compares was the ending of 'Hannibal'. The book was a little odd all the way through, the title character being a villain but the writer being clearly in love with him. Still, it was a competent novel until the last chapter where the cheese slid right off his cracker. That's one time when the movie ending was better...

Bick, I couldn't leave. I was locked in all day with nothing to read. I had no choice.