List of books considered the worst

List

19th century

• O novo guia da conversação em portuguez e inglez, Portuguese–English phrasebook written by a man who could not speak English, instead relying on a Portuguese–French phrasebook and a French–English dictionary. The book came to public attention when it was republished in 1883 with the title English as She is Spoke, although that phrase does not appear in the original book. It is notorious for Carolino's literal translation of idioms, which produces unintentionally humorous translations.
• The Virginians : historical novel set around the American Revolutionary War, a sequel to Henry Esmond. An apocryphal story claims that Thackeray once confessed to Douglas William Jerrold that The Virginians was "the worst novel he ever wrote," while Jerrold replied, "No. It's the worst novel anyone ever wrote." In fact, Jerrold died before the first volume of The Virginians was published. J. A. Sutherland agreed to a degree, calling it Thackeray's worst major novel. John Halperin called it "the worst book ever produced by a great novelist." Jack P. Rawlins wrote that "The Virginians is a bad book – dissatisfying in the reading, acknowledged as dull and dried-up by Thackeray."

• What Is to Be Done? : written in prison in four months by a literary critic and radical, What Is To Be Done? advocates the creation of small socialist cooperatives based on the Russian peasant commune, but oriented toward industrial production. The author promoted the idea that the intellectual's duty was to educate and lead the laboring masses in Russia along a path to socialism that bypassed capitalism. The book inspired many Bolsheviks, including Vladimir Lenin, who wrote a pamphlet with the same title in 1901. However, Mark Schrad observed in Vodka Politics that "there is no real plotline or tension, and the environment and characters are stagnant. It has been called the worst novel ever written. Chernyshevsky himself even admitted that his novel contains neither talent nor art, but only 'truth.'" Adam Weiner observed on Politico that "The czar’s censor had given the novel a pass, reasoning that the dreadful writing style would damage the revolutionary cause."
• The Social War : a commercially unsuccessful utopian science fiction novel. Jess Nevins described it in io9 as "reprehensible trash, the most objectionable utopia of the 19th century, and the worst science fiction novel of that period".
• Irene Iddesleigh : published by the author's husband as an anniversary present, Irene Iddesleigh is often described as the worst novel ever written, with purple prose that is circumlocutory to the point of incomprehensibility. It was "popularised" by Barry Pain who called it "a thing that happens once in a million years." Mark Twain called it "one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time," while the Inklings competed to see who could read one of Ros's works for the longest without laughter. In his book Epic Fail, Mark O'Connell wrote "Ros’ prose amounts to a sort of accidental surrealism. There is an intention toward metaphor—a lunge in the general direction of the literary—but an obvious misunderstanding of how such things work."
• The Complete McGonagall : doggerel poetry originally published as broadsheets and then later in collections, usually titled some variation on Poetic Gems. Modern printings collect all of McGonagall's work into a single volume. His lack of knowledge of scansion, deafness to metaphor, inappropriate rhythms, weak vocabulary, and ill-advised imagery combine to make his poetry unintentionally comedic.

  20th century

• The Lair of the White Worm : a horror novel revolving around a remote area of England haunted by a gigantic worm. The novel was badly received by historians of the horror genre. H. P. Lovecraft, in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, stated that Stoker "utterly ruins a magnificent idea by a development almost infantile." Les Daniels criticised the "clumsy style" of the novel and expressed disappointment that the author of the acclaimed Dracula could also write what Daniels regarded as a poor novel. The horror critic R.S. Hadji placed The Lair of the White Worm at number twelve in his list of the worst horror novels ever written. Brian Stableford said it was "one of the most spectacularly incoherent novels ever to reach print".
• Mein Kampf : Autobiography and political treatise written in Landsberg Prison by Adolf Hitler, then the leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Hitler posits a Jewish conspiracy to gain world leadership, speaks of the evils of communism, Marxism, parliamentary democracy, and of the need of the German people to seize Lebensraum from the Slavic peoples to the east. When Hitler gained control of Germany in the 1930s, the ideology expounded in Mein Kampf would lead to the Second World War, the Holocaust, and tens of millions of deaths. Mein Kampf has been described by many writers as the "most evil book in history," and its publication has been illegal or restricted in many countries since the defeat of Nazism in 1945. However, contrary to popular belief, it was never illegal in Germany. Apart from its politics, the book itself has been criticised for its writing style; Hitler's fellow fascist dictator Benito Mussolini called it "a boring tome that I have never been able to read" and called Hitler's views "little more than commonplace clichés." Sally McGrane of The New Yorker wrote "Hitler's seven-hundred-page screed is so unreadable that, despite its ubiquity during the Third Reich it is unlikely that most Germans actually cracked the book open. It is full of bombastic, hard-to-follow clauses, historical minutiae, and tangled ideological threads, and both neo-Nazis and serious historians tend to avoid it."
• Dildo Cay : Novel about the white owners of a salt mine worked by slaves on an island off Jamaica. The title refers to dildo cactuses. Pennsylvania State University's Jonathan P. Eburne wrote "It is so earnestly bad as to call its own existence into question the product less of an unsteady hand than of a resoundingly, so categorically graceless as to supersede camp and plunge straight into ontological confusion. the novel parades the typically forgettable qualities of other undistinguished midcentury fiction: tawdry displays of, liberal deployments of racism and misogyny, textbook Oedipal conflicts, and the hypertrophic use of italics." Despite this poor reception, Dildo Cay was a bestseller, inspiring a film adaptation, Bahama Passage.
• Across the River and into the Trees : Novel about an American ex-soldier who is dying of heart disease, spending a Sunday afternoon hunting ducks in Venice and remembering his experiences of World War I. It was very poorly received; negative reviews appeared in more than 150 publications. Critics claimed the novel was too emotional, had inferior prose and a "static plot", and that Cantwell was an "avatar" for Hemingway's character Nick Adams. The novel was also criticized for being an unsuitable autobiography, and for presenting Cantwell as a bitter soldier. J. Donald Adams in the New York Times called it "one of the saddest books I have ever read; not because I am moved to compassion by the conjunction of love and death in the Colonel's life, but because a great talent has come, whether for now or forever, to such a dead end". Maxwell Geismar wrote, "This is an unfortunate novel and unpleasant to review for anyone who respects Hemingway's talent and achievement. lt is not only Hemingway's worst novel; it is a synthesis of everything that is bad in his previous work and throws an unpleasant light on the future. It is so dreadful, in fact, that it begins to have its own morbid fascination." Philip Rahv wrote that "The first thing to be said about this novel is that it is so egregiously bad as to render all comment on it positively embarrassing to anyone who esteems Hemingway as one of the more considerable prose-artists of our time This novel reads like a parody by the author of his own manner—a parody so biting that it virtually destroys the mixed social and literary legend of Hemingway that has now endured for nearly three decades."
• Valley of the Dolls : Novel about three women who become friends in the post-war Broadway and Hollywood, and become dependent on pills. Gloria Steinem panned the book in The New York Herald Tribune as did the reviewer in The New York Times. Time magazine called it the "Dirty Book of the Month", and said, "It might more accurately be described as a highly effective sedative, a living doll." Eileen Battersby of The Irish Times called it "one of the worst books ever written" and "the first book written for people who didn't read books." Despite the negative reviews, it was successful enough to be eventually adapted for the big screen one year later and a sequel a decade after.
• Naked Came the Stranger : a collaborate effort by twenty-four journalists under the leadership of Mike McGrady as a criticism of contemporary American writing; McGrady believed that any book could succeed commercially if enough sex was thrown in, and to that end constructed a deliberately incoherent, badly written, sexually explicit novel. It indeed became a bestseller, and sales went up even more once the hoax was revealed.
• The Eye of Argon : a heroic fantasy novella notorious for purple prose and genre cliché; attempting to read The Eye of Argon out loud without laughing became a popular party game among fantasy readers.

  1990s

• Worlds of Power: Metal Gear : a novelisation of the 1987 video game Metal Gear, it was described as possibly the worst book ever written by Den of Geek's Luke McKinney: "This must have been a secret plot by Nintendo of America to destroy any interest in reading which may have lurked within loyal players. And this book is so bad it might cause your brain to forget how to read in self-defense."
• Dazzle : a romance novel set in Southern California in the 1980s, in which celebrity photographer Jazz Kilcullen negotiates life and love while contending with her half-sisters who aim to sell off her father's Orange County ranch. John Sutherland described Dazzle as the "vulgarest" novel he had ever read, and listed it among the 20 worst bestsellers of the 20th century. Michael Dirda of the Washington Post called it "unremittingly, heart-sinkingly dull. merely a string of romance narrative cliches tied loosely together by sex scenes every 50 or 60 pages." He later described it as the worst novel he had ever read: "Even the sex in the book was boilerplate, a totally work." Publishers Weekly said "Never a disciple of realism, Krantz's interweaving of plots here is too contrived and her relationships, both familial and amatory, too oblique. Her purple prose takes on ever deeper hues, and her customary parade of hyperbolic description is in constant evidence."
• Borderliners : a novel about three children who attend a private school in Copenhagen in the 1970s, and then realise that they are part of an experiment. The Irish Times critic Eileen Battersby called it "arguably one of the worst books ever written a heavy-handed, monotone polemic the author rehearses every gripe he has ever had about the Danish education system in a novel so unsubtle and woodenly executed as to leave the reader searching for splinters."
• The Jam: Our Story : music biography by two members of the mod revival band The Jam. Brian Boyd of The Irish Times called it "The worst book ever written", noting how obviously the two were bitter at being overshadowed by Paul Weller: "the text is littered with disguised snide remarks about their frontman, the two obviously didn't want to ruin their chances of another big payday if a Jam reunion is still on the cards, so they don't go for a full-on assault You finish the book not only realising why Weller hasn't spoken to either of them since their last gig together but also perplexed at how such an obviously clever man managed to tolerate the two of them for so long."
• Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last Days : post-apocalyptic Evangelical Christian fiction describing the events of the End Times from a premillennial dispensationalist interpretation of the Book of Revelation. Depicts the travails of several survivors who are "left behind" after the Rapture removes all Godly, righteous people from the earth. Despite its commercial success, Left Behind received terrible reviews from mainstream critics. In the London Review of Books, John Sutherland wrote "Criticism lacks terms adequate to describe the narrative feebleness of these novels." Fred Clark of Patheos wrote a lengthy analysis of Left Behind and its sequels, calling them "The World's Worst Books" and discussing the Evangelical subculture from which they derive. In The Escapist, Phil Owen criticised the protagonists for their lack of concern for anyone but other Christians. In The Verge, Adi Robertson observed that "With its unpleasant characters, glacial pace, and bizarre preoccupation with phone calls and travel plans, Left Behind may be one of the dullest books to ever hit the bestseller lists."

  21st century

2000s

• The Da Vinci Code : A mystery thriller novel following secret societies and the struggle between the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei over the possibility of Mary Magdalene and Jesus having had children together. The Da Vinci Code was widely criticized for its many factual inaccuracies and clumsy prose style. Salman Rushdie called it "a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name," while Jodi Picoult said "I don't understand the hype over such a poorly written novel – and as an author who does all her own research, I know better than to consider myself an expert in the field I am writing about." Linguistics professor Geoffrey Pullum said "Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad." Despite this, the book became a worldwide bestseller and was also successfully adapted into a movie.
• Fan-Tan : written in 1979, Fan-Tan was not published until after Brando's death. It was described by Paul Constant of The Stranger as "The Best Worst Novel Ever", saying that "Every line of every page struggles to be as purply out of control as it can be.... The book simultaneously repulses and attracts, groaning under the weight of its pretension."
• Atlanta Nights : a collaborative novel created in 2004 by a group of science fiction and fantasy authors, with the express purpose of producing an unpublishably bad piece of work, so as to test whether vanity press PublishAmerica would still accept it. They did, only to rescind their offer when the hoax was revealed.
• Twilight novel series : Although commercially successful and having spawned an also successful movie franchise, the vampire romantic novel series has always been met with mixed to negative critical response, often strongly negative. The Odyssey ranked the series No. 1 in its list of the five worst books of all time, Psychology Today called it "Worse than just a bad book" due to its dubious moral messages and TheTopTens ranked it No. 1 in its list of the ten worst books of all time.
• American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville : a travelogue by controversial French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Economist's "Schumpeter" column called it "perhaps the worst book on America ever written which compounds its uselessness by mentioning Tocqueville, the author of the best book on America ever written, in its subtitle." In a scathing review in The New York Times, Garrison Keillor wrote "Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore."
• Moon People : a self-published science fiction romance novel, described by The Huffington Post in 2012 as possibly the worst book ever. Notorious for its incoherent prose and irrelevant digressions.

  2010s

• Fifty Shades of Grey : an erotic novel based on a piece of Twilight fan-fiction, Fifty Shades depicts the BDSM relationship between aloof billionaire Christian Grey and naive student Anastasia Steele. As with The Da Vinci Code, many articles collected lists of the "worst lines," particularly those in which Anastasia discusses her "inner goddess." As well as being poorly written, many reviewers criticised the relationship between Christian and Anastasia, which was seen as abusive rather than romantic.
• : a dystopian young adult novel, Save the Pearls features a post-apocalyptic setting in which pale-skinned "Pearls" and dark-skinned "Coals" are in conflict. The attempt at racial commentary was widely viewed as clumsy and poorly-handled, if not outright racist. In The Guardian, Imogen Russell Williams panned it for "awful prose with negligible plot", adding "the whole thing is remarkable for repetition, incoherence, and prose which makes EL James look like Hector Hugh Munro."
• Die Abenteuer des Stefón Rudel : this self-published sci-fi adventure novel by a widely unknown German amateur author gained a small cult following in Germany due to its poor plotting, awkward word choices, and plentiful spelling and grammar errors. German blogger Christian Schmidt called it the worst book he had ever read. German satirical site Der Postilion called it "the maybe worst book of all time". Swiss comedians Andreas Storm and Catherine Störmer featured the book in their stage program and called it "the worst book ever written in German tongue".
• Empress Theresa : a self-published science fiction novel, first noted for its unusual cover, a very poorly-drawn image of a female general with large breasts. In the novel, a ten-year-old girl merges with an alien entity, giving her superhuman powers; as she comes of age, she is forced to put these powers to use for the good of mankind. Boutin has achieved notoriety with his hostile responses to critics. YouTuber Fredrik Knudsen's review of the book has received nearly three million views.
• List of the Lost : a 128-page novel about a 1970s American sprint team written by 1980s rock star Morrissey. Reviews were uniformly negative, often bordering on hostile. The Daily Mail asked "What on earth was Penguin thinking?" In The Telegraph, Charlotte Runcie described the novel as "poorly conceived, awkwardly expressed and lazily imagined." John Niven of the New Statesman, responding to critics who wrote that the book may have been improved by a strong editor, opined that "asking a decent editor to save this book would have been like asking a doctor to help a corpse that had fallen from the top of the Empire State Building."
• Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker : a biography of biologist Charles Darwin with an anti-evolution viewpoint. Jerry Coyne, writing in Dawn, called it "The worst book about Charles Darwin ever written" and "a grossly inaccurate and partisan attack on both Darwin and evolution." The Guardian and New Scientist also gave it extremely negative reviews.
• Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff : political satire by two-time Oscar-winning actor about a serial killer. Described by Cracked.com as "the worst novel in human history," Mark Hill observed that "Penn writes like he's looked up every single word in his thesaurus except "dictionary." The novel was also criticised for racist and misogynistic content. In The Guardian, Sian Cain called Bob Honey "repellent and stupid on so many levels." The novel does have some high-profile defenders, including acclaimed novelists Salman Rushdie and Paul Theroux. Despite the reviews, a sequel was made one year later as Bob Honey Sings Jimmy Crack Corn.