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Battlefield Earth
"Crawl," I can imagine you saying, "why would you have ever wanted to read Battlefield Earth!" Well, for one thing, this was before the movie was made. So, the bad reviews of the movie couldn't have scared me off from the book, but on the other hand, my experience with the book gave me advanced knowledge the movie would be terrible.

To answer the question, though, I earlier read a different book by the same author (yeah, the scientology guy) from the Mission Earth series, and I thought it was alright.

But actually, I never finished this book, though I got a good ways in (it's about seven or eight hundred pages long). It seemed pretty terrible right from the beginning, and I eventually decided there were no signs it could get better, and I couldn't take it anymore, anyway.

If you read any reviews of the movie, almost everything that made the movie terrible applies here (except that, of course, there could be no scenes shot at tilted angles).

The writing is amateurish, even childish. The characters are bland. The plot goes nowhere. This guy is captured by aliens. He's taught by the aliens how to use their equipment. (Why? It makes no real sense, but, as someone else must have said, so the hero can use this knowledge against the aliens) And, I swear, the guy must have tried escaping a half dozen times, and then was shortly recaptured, up to where I left off. Maybe if I would have continued reading, I could have learned of a dozen more escape attempts. Repetitive barely begins to describe this.

And the foreshadowing was so inept! At one point, pains are made to establish that the aliens' breathing gas will explode if it gets near uranium. At that point, I had a pretty good idea how the novel would end.

Anyway, this book was really just irredeemably terrible.

What didn't you like about Catch 22?

Atlas Shrugged
I wish the guy who recommended I read this was here, and that I had a copy of this book, so I could whack him repeatedly over the head with it.

This is supposed to be a novel illustrating a philosophy in action, and it completely fails (both as a novel, and as philosophy) because everything that this novel uses to prove a point is preposteriously artificial.

There are no real characters in this novel (that is, in the sense of real, vivid characters that are found in real literature). Rather, there is one main character, who agrees with every single thing the author believes. The villians are all exact opposites of this character. The heroes are all approximations of this character.

No character speaks in believable, normal human dialogue. Rather, they make speeches that are several pages long, often apropos of very little. An extra's passing comment that money is the root of all evil will earn a rebuttal of several thousand words from one of her heroes. If this novel could in any way be interpreted to represent some real world, you'd really have to wonder what would be happening in these scenes. Would bystandards really just listen -- never interupting -- as someone makes an impromptu speech that lasts a half hour?

Also, no character in this novel has a shred of humor.

There are many of these speeches, and they cover the same terriority. (The novel is over 1000 pages long) At the end, the main character recites a super long speech, which includes every other speech in the book, and which repeats itself quite often. There really isn't much meat in this book's philosophy, so I suppose it has to be repetitive.

To be brief, the book advocates complete free market capitalism. No income taxes, no government regulations. There may be some libertarians who might think that's a good thing, but certainly some people might wonder: Gee, what about the Enron corporate scandals? Or the child workers in the 1800's? Or employers who are derilect in keeping working conditions safe for their employees? (I had a relative that was crushed to death at work) Atlas Shrugged does not argue against any of these things. The only characters in it either agree 100% with its philosophy, or are Evil people whose only purpose in life is to destroy the capitalists. The book always talks about reason, but apparently reason is defined as agreeing exactly with every single thing the book puts forth. The book is written as though the author has never had her thoughts challenged.

Anyway, I count this book as among one of the worst I've ever read.

I liked Frankenstein, too.