Someone on Twitter asked today: "What is the worst book you have ever finished?"
I found that quite an interesting question, as I am not one of those people who feels duty bound to plod through every single page of a book they are not enjoying. I decide the book isn't for me, put it to one side, and feel no guilt whatsoever. Very occasionally a book has surprised me and got much better as it went on, but more often than not the first 100 pages is quite enough to realise that what you are holding is garbage. So for that reason, there are many many bad books I've never finished. In my 20s, I tried, out of some sense of completing an unfinished education, to read books like Das Kapital and Mein Kampf, but quickly gave up. Marx is like reading a badly translated textbook on the dullest subject imaginable, and Hitler is like being trapped next to the person on the bus who won't stop going on about immigrants - if Rudolf Hess had edited it, I'd hate to have seen the original. Likewise fiction: L Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth is probably the worst written book I have ever read, but I felt no compunction to slog through all 1,050 pages to make completely sure of that, and James Joyce's Ulysses may be a breakthrough work of modernist literature, but I have to agree with Virginia Woolf's verdict: "never did any book so bore me", and like her, I quit around page 200. By the by - some books that often make it into people's 'most hated', like Moby-Dick, I actually quite enjoyed. I guess you just have to find the technical stuff about whaling interesting.
So for me to finish a book, it has to have held my attention somehow, and surely that means that by at least one definition, it can't be that bad a book? The Da Vinci Code springs immediately to mind; like Jeffrey Archer, with whom he has a lot in common, Dan Brown writes terrible prose, but both authors have the saving grace that they can do plotting and pacing, like a lot of pulp fiction writers, and so they carry you along to the end in spite of themselves. For sheer incoherent muddle it's hard to beat the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe, whose career with pulp imprint Badger Books spanned dozens of pseudonyms and literally hundreds of books, 'written' at the rate of one per week, actually dictated into tapes sent off to be typed up by little old ladies, who might call back to say he was approaching his word limit, leaving him to wrap up the story in about two incredibly confused pages of deus ex machina. His Galaxy 666 (written as 'Pel Torro') is the Plan 9 From Outer Space of pulp SF, but like that film it enters into 'so bad it's good' territory, as Fanthorpe desperately tries to pad his word count with thesaurus dumps or spends three pages describing the colour of grey, pink and white rocks. He's also a lovely man in person by the way.
I had to wrack my brains to think of the worst book I had actually finished. Full disclosure - I read a lot of very bad pulp SF and horror in my youth. Frederick Dunstan's Habitation One? A derivative SF tale of a post-apocalyptic society in a huge closed city that aims for JG Ballard via Logan's Run, but falls horrifyingly short. The entire corpus of Guy N Smith, sub-James Herbert low rent British horror writer, a kind of real world Garth Marenghi, with his tales of killer crabs and the seven plagues of Egypt unleashed upon Birmingham? Getting warmer. The Splatterpunk Anthology, an unremitingly disgusting feast of shock-lit that wanted to be Bret Easton Ellis when it grew up (or at least Clive Barker)? Certainly in the bottom ten. Incidentally - do not attempt to read any of these books. Really. To paraphrase the warning they used to give after Captain Scarlet - Sub-Editor is Indestructible - You Are Not.
But all fiction, no matter how bad, still has something to it - that human desire to tell stories and entertain. I think to really plumb the depths you have to consider factual (or notionally factual) writing. Below the 1421 - China Discovers the World and Holy Blood, Holy Grails of this world are reams of poorly thought-out works of pseudo-history and pseudo-archaeology to make the blood of any rational individual boil with their cavalier disdain for 'evidence' and 'facts'. And then we come to self-help books. And then we come to those that try to combine them all with cod philosophy and act as a cheap way of cashing in on people's insecurities. I'd love to place Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health in here, but unfortunately that's another one that I never finished. So my own prize for the worst book I have ever finished goes to a piece of garbage I was given as a going away present to university by my eccentric aunt, herself a devotee of transcendental meditation, reflexology and various other forms of bullshit. Behold the wonder that is: Bring Out The Magic In Your Mind, by 'Al Koran'. To quote Angel Heart: "even your name is a dime store joke." 'Al' - I think we can assume this is not his real name - to quote the blurb, tells you how his incredible discovery of "Personal Electricity Within You" gives you "Magnetic Powers". With these you can "Learn How
To... Send Out Dynamic Thought-Wishes, Silent Messages That
Influence People To Like You, Trust You, And Help You." Boiled down to its roots, his thesis is - if you wish hard enough for something, it will happen. Naturally these wishes must be essentially selfish - a new car, an attractive girlfriend, a private plane. All is within your grasp, if you will it. Go through the world bending lesser mortals to your mighty will.
I didn't know then, but have since discovered, that Al was born in the rather more prosaic surroundings of Clapton in 1917 as Edward Doe, and after giving up his career as a hairdresser, he became a magician and "mentalist" in the 1950s and 60s, and he wrote the book in 1964 at the height of his 'fame', before he went to the US. You can see him performing in a very grainy recording of the Ed Sullivan Show here. He reminds me a bit of a proto-Yuri Geller, in that like him, he was clearly a talented stage magician who had decided to pretend he was a genuine psychic because it brought in bigger bucks, and I'm half certain that he was Geller's inspiration. The book was ghost written for him, and was clearly just a cheap cash-in. Looking back on it now, it seems one of many similar such things, and I'm not sure why it annoys me so much that it has become my Worst Book Ever, but I think chiefly it's not just how terribly written it is (and by God it is), but the lazy cynicism at the heart of it. At least Jehovah's Witnesses believe the rubbish they're spouting. Al Koran clearly didn't, and just wanted to squeeze some more moolah from some gullible marks, and I think it annoys me most that my aunt was one of them.
Anyway, that's mine. What's yours?
