I hit Bill the Galactic Hero at too tender an age, I thought -- I was a kid, and thought it was going to be, y'know, actually about a galactic hero. So I didn't get it, but assume I'd like it more now.
Not sure I can actually say what the worst thing I've read is -- and I'm not even sure how to judge which ones I disliked personally the most. If I give up laughingly on a book, is that worse than getting all the way through only to throw the book across the room?
Recognizing that this is all opinion, my short list o' dislikes includes:
Perdido Street Station -- I could get all deep and philosophical about it, it boils down to a few salient points:
1. I have enough ideas of my own that reading a book whose main selling point is having a ton of ideas doesn't impress me all by itself. I believe that said plethora of ideas overwhelmed the editors and made them leave everything he wrote in there, even the stuff that made no sense, belonged in a different story, or was just stupid.
2. I found the voice pretentious. If you're going to impress me with your voice (instead of trying to make me forget them I'm reading a story at all, maintaining such a transparent voice that you feel like you're watching a movie or something), you're going to have to do more than sling a lot of big words out there. While reading the novel, I felt like that's what Mieville was doing. Doesn't mean I was right -- just means that I felt that way.
3. The fundamental unpleasantness of everyone and everything in the story. As I said in another thread -- when I come home after work, I have about twenty minutes before my wife gets home, and then we're dealing with bills and finances and stuff. I want those 20 minutes to be fun, and while I'm fine with unpleasant stuff happening for specific plot-necessary reasons (I love murder mysteries, for example), I read through the entirety of this book and never got past the feeling that Mieville was acting like an eight-year old impressed with his ability to say naughty words and do unpleasant things to his characters.
Not that it didn't have ideas. Not that he doesn't have a very distinct style. Not that it isn't different from Tolkien. Please note: Not saying any of that. But for the reasons listed above, it didn't do it for me.
Rhapsody -- Elizabeth Hayden's fantasy novel had an interesting idea, but I read through this entire novel feeling as though everything was too much of a power-fantasy cliche. She's the most beautiful woman in the world, but never realizes it. He's the strongest dude in the world. He's the best warrior in the world. And, for whatever reason, she never sold me on it, like other authors have. It was too simplistic and read like... well, alright, to be blunt, it read like a teenage girl writing fan-fiction about her favorite MMORPG.
That Wayfarer Sara Douglass Thing -- I posted here about this, but this one was frustrating not because it was uniformly bad, but because it had so much potential and kept thudding relentlessly to the ground just as it was about to take off. Sara Douglass can create beautiful, breathtaking images that make my eyes fill with tears -- but every one of her characters is led through the novel by more powerful people who want to make sure that the characters fulfill the prophecy, and it's so heavy-handed that it strips all the passion from the novel. Which is bad, since passion is what the first book, at least, was built on.
Wizard's First Rule -- I've also posted about this one several times. I hated this book, and finished it solely so that I could say "Yes, I read all the way to the end" when talking to fans who disagree with me. My reasons:
1. The last third of the book (the Terry Goodkind Bondage Hour Special), which, above and beyond the unpleasantness and style clash, was just stupid -- evil women who use foot-long leather rods with knobs on the end? Um, Terry, is there any hidden subtext you're trying to get across here?
2. Laziness. I'm fine with authors who buck epic-style and go for colloquial conversation, and I'm fine with authors who go full-epic and just write "Archetype" on their character's forehead. But you can't do both. You can't have colloquial style unless you actually have characters, and he just goes right to people bantering and such without ever giving us actual characters to base this stuff on.
3. Insulting portrayal of the female lead. If you're going to give me a female lead who weeps and whines her way through the entire novel, just own it, man. Don't write explanatory dialogue like, "I'm usually so strong, and lately, it feels like all I do is cry." That's not fixing it. That's telling me, the reader, that you, the author, have lost control of your own book, and that your supposedly strong female lead has turned out to be a codependent weeping lump on the page.
4. The fundamental badness of the sword and the fight scenes. If you make one of the two biggest artifacts in the novel a sword, you might wanna actually let him use it in, I don't know, a fight scene. Against another guy with a sword. Instead, the sword never becomes anything more than a symbol, which would be great if other people in the novel were doing exciting things. Instead, it's like Goodkind read David Eddings and thought "I'll do dialogue like him" and read Terry Brooks and thought "I'll have my sword be symbolic, like him" and never figured out that those guys, while they have their own issues, were doing other things in their work as well, other good stuff that made this stuff work.
(I know, he uses the sword in one or two fight scenes -- but they're horribly described. And just from my memory, I can't recall, but does he ever actually describe the sword in the first book? Or is he too deep and symbolic to tell us if we're dealing with a rapier, machete, or claymore?)
Of all those, Goodkind wins for me as Worst Overall, Mieville wins as Most Overrated, and Douglass wins as Most Frustrating Because it Could Have Been Good. Hayden just gets the Mediocre But Not Wholly Atrocious Enough to Really Laugh At award, such as it is.
