\Bad as I Want to Be""
This book had annoying changes in font and type size, like a schoolkid using different crayons randomly. I hoped the book would help me understand Dennis Rodman, but it just reinforced what an idiot he is. His lurid details about sleeping with Madonna were classless-you can't help but get absorbed, but as soon as it's done you kick yourself for wasting your life on that crap.
""Waterborne""??
I usually don't finish bad books. But the worst one I have finished was ""Waterborne"" by Bruce Murkoff. I fell asleep twice while reading this plotless wonder, once on the toilet on a Greyhound bus. The driver was not happy with me.
??""Tuned Out""
This book turned out to be a horrible anti-drug book that is even recognizably cheesy to those of us not digging the drugs.
Evidently someone took to making seventh graders into authors. The tackiness is still here, and the recent television ads like the ""drugs and terrorism"" ones have not progressed much from this drivel. Trying to impose morality in 30 seconds or a few hundred pages won't change anyone's mind about drugs, one way or the other. This book was so miserable I tried to throw it into the recycling bin that is my subconcious.
??""Forrest Gump""
This book, by Winston Groom, is the worst book I've ever read. It takes a shallow look at a turbulent generation. Gump dabbles in just about everything-from pro wrestling to traveling in space to fighting in Vietnam, but these occupations are too slapsticky to have any point. It's the only book I've read that's significantly worse than its movie version, and it's also the only book I've ever thrown away immediately after I finished reading it.
""Jane Eyre""
I've read this book by Charlotte Bront?? numerous times, and it continues to befuddle me that such a book is shoved down the throats of millions of unwitting students every year. Anyone who counts ""Jane Eyre"" among their favorites is either a liar or a masochist, and should walk blindfolded into any bookstore-the first book they bump into is almost guaranteed to be better than ""Eyre.""
""Oscar and Lucinda""
After three months of trying, I had to give up. I wanted to like ""Oscar and Lucinda,"" but Peter Carey couldn't have made 19th-century Australia less interesting. To be honest, he didn't accomplish much more than putting me to sleep.
??""The Content of Our Character""
This book presents the unfounded justifications of a linguistics professor that had the academic clout to produce something outside his discipline: race relations-still a touchy subject. Clearly written to absolve and assuage the ""compassionate"" conservative.
??
""The Writing Life""
This book sucks.??There is no other word that can describe Annie Dillard's incomprehensible piece of dretch. I picked it up to get some writing tips and was mired in a sea of meaningless metaphors and stories that spiraled into a black abyss.??I actually felt dumber after three pages.
""My Antonia""
""My Antonia"" by Willa Cather is as plodding as it is uninteresting. An early 20th-century tale about daily life on the prairie? Oh yeah, that's hot! If you have to read a book about how tough it was for Bohemian immigrants to live in Nebraska, make it any other book than this one.
""Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me""
Richard Farina tried to one-up his counterpart Bob Dylan when he published his book about a hipster trying to make the scene.
Unfortunately, the protagonist, Gnossos Pappadopoulis, is completely self-consumed, Farina's frenetic writing only makes sense for drugged readers, and ""Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me"" makes less sense than ""Tarantula.""
