{"id":472,"date":"2012-04-07T17:54:16","date_gmt":"2012-04-07T21:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/?p=472"},"modified":"2012-06-25T19:19:21","modified_gmt":"2012-06-25T23:19:21","slug":"the-worst-book-i-ever-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/2012\/04\/the-worst-book-i-ever-read\/","title":{"rendered":"The worst book I ever read"},"content":{"rendered":"

{0.5\/5} The Celestine Prophecy<\/strong> by James Redfield is not just a bestseller but a megabestseller. That is absolutely mind boggling to me, as it’s the worst book I ever read. If I were to read it now for the first time there’s no way I would finish it.<\/p>\n

The quality of the writing is shockingly poor. It was first self published, but even if you’re going to self publish your book\u00a0you should still get it edited.<\/p>\n

The book is structured as a novel, but the author pays very little attention\u00a0to the story.\u00a0It’s just a way to present his ideas — if you’re not going to make the story interesting, just write it as nonfiction.<\/p>\n

The first few ideas are fairly obvious ones but they eventually progress to ones that I just don’t buy. People do not have auras — I cannot believe that.<\/p>\n

I realize that many other people had a different experience with this book than I did, but I find it baffling — about as baffling as most people’s reaction to Star Wars Episode III<\/a><\/strong> (which I loathed).<\/p>\n

To contrast with another megabestseller, I loved The DaVinci Code<\/strong> by Dan Brown. Some people claim that it’s poorly written, but I certainly didn’t notice that. I couldn’t put it down — I thought the ideas were fascinating. There’s one thing you have to make sure you do with The DaVinci Code<\/strong> and that is notice that the spine says “fiction.” Some people have been fooled into thinking that parts of the book are real when they’re not — that’s the aspect I don’t like. But the story was great — clever, exciting, and suspenseful.<\/p>\n

So why was The Celestine Prophecy<\/strong> such a success? Kenneth Moyle has a thought on that:<\/p>\n

Why I Hate The Celestine Prophecy<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

{0.5\/5} The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield is not just a bestseller but a megabestseller. That is absolutely mind boggling to me, as it’s the worst book I ever read. If I were to read it now for the first time there’s no way I would finish it. The quality of the writing is shockingly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,3],"tags":[7,36,28,5],"class_list":["post-472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-the-web","category-books","tag-book","tag-fiction","tag-novels","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=472"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":894,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472\/revisions\/894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}