For me, it’s Jude the Obscure. That book is easily the worst book I have ever read, without a single redeeming quality, other than that it finally ends. I only finished it because Far from the Madding Crowd was so damn good.
But really, Jude is the gold standard of awful books, in my opinion.
What’s your so-awful-it-deserves-shelf-space book, if you have one?
Or am I just weird?
I absolutely hated The Power by Naomi Alderman. Two-dimensional plot and characterisation, terrible dialogue, and a kind of revenge-porn zeal in its depictions of female violence towards men.
As a guy I thought it oddly insulting to women to posit that, given the power, they’d almost immediately sink to the level of the worst male abusers in their use of it. As a human it struck me as a really depressing portrait of our essential nature.