What's The Best "Bad" Book You've Ever Read? (8/8/21)

[Marc]

Tell us the best of your "bad" reads. Was it the "best" simply because it wasn't the worst of the "bad" or did you actually enjoy it despite its poor reputation, critical panning, etc.?

[Luke]

There but for the by Ali Smith. Loved it. Same for Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer, which also has a very low average rating.

[Paul]

Are we defining bad by Goodreads ratings?

If so Ok, Mr. Field I thought was brilliant, but has a GR rating of 2.70 from over 500 reviews, which puts in in the bottom 0.5% of the books I've read.

There are some others around 2.8 including An English Guide to Birdwatching, Felix Culpa, and (with 3,000 ratings) After Me Comes the Flood which I also rated highly but seem to be largely regarded as 'bad'.

These are mostly formally ambitious novels which have left many readers bemused.

Of big-names (Booker winning authors) I really liked J but again the avg rating is below 3.

[Hugh]

If we are using GR average ratings, the lowest I can see on my read shelf is 2.65 for Tomorrow, then 2.79 for John Brown's Body. I gave both of those 4 stars. The lowest I gave 5 to is Inglorious at 2.83

[Bill]

Paul wrote: "Are we defining bad by Goodreads ratings?"

I'll go with Paul on this. Otherwise I'd launch long digressions on what's "bad".

My contribution is Patricia Duncker's The Deadly Space Between. I could have sworn the GR rating used to be lower, but now it's up to 3.1. (I gave it 5 stars, and my friends know how incredibly rare this is.) Most of the unhappy reviewers used the words disturbed/disturbing etc, like

This One Disturbed Most of My University

Yes, it's disturbing (like many of my favorite books). The writing is beautiful and riveting. The three main characters are all unreliable. And Duncker manages to make this all work. If that sounds like a recipe for a 5 star book from me, well it is.

(I see this actually has the lowest average GR rating of my favorites. Compared with Hugh's list, I feel like such a Philistine. I guess I should try harder!)

[Whitney]

Going by what other people are using, the GR ratings vs my rating, the winner is Universal Harvester by John Darnielle. Looking at the low ratings, they are uniformly of the "this isn't what I expected" variety. In this case, the copy editors are mostly to blame, as the blurb makes it sound like some kind of creepy J-horror type novel, when it's really an examination of people reacting to personal tragedy in a small town.

As far as intentionally bad books, I don't read those as often as I used to, but it would be hard to beat Killer Flies, which is exactly what you think it is.

[Luke]

Somewhat tangential to this topic, I have a shelf for TBR works whose average rating falls below the 3.7 mark. I happen to own the two lowest rated: Love in the Kingdom of Oil by Nawal El Saadawi at 2.61, and The Proof of the Honey by Salwa Al Neimi at 2.62. I could slip both of them in for Women in Translation Month, if I wanted to.

[Lark]

Marc, when I read your question I had a different idea of what it meant--books I love even though I know they're pulp fiction, or hopelessly outdated, or for some other reason books I have trouble explaining to book-lovers why I love them.

I used to have a shelf called 'guilty pleasures' but I realized I don't feel guilty at all so I changed the name of the shelf to joyful indulgences.

It includes a lot of "Golden Age" science fiction that I'm embarrassed to still love, a couple of Norman Mailer books I unabashedly adore but would never recommend to any of my friends, a handful of horror manga, and nearly every book in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga.

[Bretnie]

Gosh, looking at my books I don't have any in the two star range that I loved. And I can't think of books that people call bad that I loved.

The only books that come to mind are books that some people don't like, but that hardly qualifies as "bad."

I'm stumped!

[Stacia]

Well, if I go by GR ratings like many have done so far, it looks like it's An Exaggerated Murder by Josh Cook. GR rating 2.78 from 222 ratings. I gave it 4 stars. But, I often like experimental fiction & many don't. So I'm not necessarily concerned by or even notice overall GR ratings in general especially for "out of the norm" books like this one.

The other ones are actually two by author Jody Shields: The Fig Eater (2.93 out of almost 3k ratings), which I loved & rated 5 stars, & The Winter Station (2.95 out of about 500 ratings), which I rated 4 stars. (Btw, The Winter Station would be interesting to revisit in our current pandemic life.) I find it fascinating that both the books have such low ratings/panning reviews & I made note of that in my reviews for both books. I don't know if Shields is marketed or shelved inaccurately, but I feel like that may be part of the problem with the lower ratings of her books. Maybe the wrong audience is reading her? I found a lot to like in both of her books but apparently others didn't.

[LindaJ^]

The book with the largest difference in rating between mine and the GR average is Our Lady Of The Forest by David Guterson. I rated it 5 stars and the GR average out of 455 reviews is 3 stars. But I have no recollection of the book and wrote no review, as I read it years before joining GR. I suspect I read it around 2004 and did so because I liked Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars very much. That one I remember pretty vividly.

The next closest after that would be The Need by Helen Phillips. I rated it 5 stars and the GR rating is 3.04 based on 2114 reviews.

[Vesna]

Well, if you ask many members of The Mookse and the Gripes group on GR, The War of the Poor by Éric Vuillard is decidedly a "bad" book, ranked the last on their ever-interesting dynamic rankings, in this case for the 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist. But I loved it! After seeing the reviews by a few GR friends who ranked it low, I realized that I read this book from an entirely different angle which might explain why a "bad" book can be essentially "good" :-)

[Beige]

How disappointing, I seem to mostly be in agreement with the ratings on "bad" books I've read.

Since I read across genres, I've had to learn what a "bad" GR rating threshold is for each. For example, I wouldn't balk at adding a low 3 to my tbr for a literary work, but a low 3 for a fantasy/scifi book would likely have you wondering if there was an editor involved at all.

[Lee]

The lowest rated book I have on my read shelf is The Finkler Question at 2.80, and my collective friends rating for it is 2.73, but I see that there’s Lark with a 5 star rating for it, so there you go Lark, haha.

I didn’t particularly love that one myself so I think my answer would be Call Me Zebra with a 2.85 GR rating, which grows ever better in my mind. I disliked it myself on my first reading, read it again and rated it a 3, and now I’d give it at least a 4…