Why are you telling me all this?

From katyha: What's the worst novel you've ever completely failed to finish?

We should exclude from this, I think, the famously awful. No-one seriously expects L. Ron Hubbard or Jeffrey Archer not to suck. To be truly awful, a work of art needs hope on the part of the reader.

My second prize winner: V. by Thomas Pynchon. Apparently it's l33t litritchoor. The writing and some of the scenes were okay, but I found myself underwhelmed and never went back.

All time prize winner: Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. It's a thousand pages of unmitigated plotless toss. I could put up with the toss if it was going somewhere, but I battled through to page two hundred and something still waiting for the story to start. Apparently it's even l33t3r litritchoor and the plotless, circular eternal now is the point. I remain comprehensively unconvinced.

I barely read fiction any more. My last serious burst of fiction reading was fifteen years ago, when I was living in Perth, reading all the J.G. Ballard and similar British new-wave SF and being keenly aware I was in Vermillion Sands. I'm not sure Burroughs counts as "fiction," even when he claims to be; it's all his stand-up routine. Spoken-word Burroughs is amazing.