Books that were recommended to you but turned out to be absolute pointless drivel - the wasted hours you'll never get back - a warning list for others!

Agree about Patricia Cornwell, I force myself to read the books for some reason. Also whenever I read interviews with her she seems slightly nuts and paranoid!

Love Thomas Hardy. Bamboo, he didn't write Adam Bede!!

oh yes and Thomas Hardy.
Have read about 6 books thinking I might find the one that people rave about...... no.

Anything by India Knight. What a load of contrived, cliched shite.

agree about ernest hemingway. i WANTED to enjoy for whom the bell tolls.
I think it's the only book i've never finished reading

So reassuring to see so many of my sentiments expressed on here!

Yes, why does Kate Mosse get such good press? Labyrinthe - crap
Also:
Perfume - crap. Read it years ago and the thought still makes me shudder
Birdsong - crap. Why does everyone talk about it as if it's the definitive book of WW2 (or is it WW1?)
Time Traveller's Wife - irritating crap
The Night Watch - utter crap
Alchemist - crap. For all the reasons stated above
Kite Runner/Thousand Splendid Suns - ditto Alchemist

Personally, I expect things like the Da Vinci Code to be crap (snobby, moi?) so when I find out it is I'm not that upset. It's the books that are raved about in The Guardian and the like (such as Kate Mosse) whose crapness actually offends me

how on earth did you manage that!! i was flinging myself about in my chair with the tediousness of it.

Actually, take that back, Crime and Punishment wasn't hard going as such, just intense - which can be a good thing.

Yes, bamboobutton, I read Crime and Punishment to the end! It was hard going in parts but well worth it .

yy to lord of ther rings. loved the movies but i don't want to waste my life reading a 20-page description about every dewdrop in fangorn fucking forest.

found most of thomas hardys stuff hard going, so depressing, finished all of them except adam bede.

forced myself to finish the tenderness of wolves, where were the wolves? how were they tender? what a waste of my time.

tried and failed to finish crime and punishment. is there a single person on the planet who has actually made it to the end?
same with Dr Shivago(sp?)

i stick to my crime thrillers and jack reachers now.

Victoria Hislop's The Island - boring drivel.

Chris Cleave's The Other Hand - poorly edited boring drivel. I mean, really... We're expected to believe that some poor Nigerian girl walks from Essex to Kingston upon Thames, without having been in Britain before and apparently without a map. What did she do? M11 followed by the North Circular? And then a child in a batman suit falls into an open grave. For pity's sake.

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas - now what was that all about?

God yes, Patricia Cornwell is insane. Totally. I think people (like me, it has to be said) keep buying them because it seems somehow rude not to, when you've been reading them all these years...but truly the latest stuff (prob from when Marino rapes her, which was in itself) is just tooooooo weird.

THe later Patricia Cornwell stuff (her earlier ones were better)
Any book passed on to us by MIL that she has bought in "the Works" (or similar bookshops). We just don't have the same tastes.

Catch 22, yeah, dull, dull. The first 20 pages or so was so-so, the rest was just more of the same.

Suspicions of Mr Whicher - fab!

Agree with Jodie read one you've read them all churn them out to a formula Picoult.

Oh god, I'd forgotten (maybe blocked out of mind like some post-traumatic incident) Memoirs of a Geisha (Nicely written though, I think, in all fairness to yer man, it was simply that I find Japanese-ness so alien to me personally anyway, that any books set there leave me a bit cold. Mo Hayder's (who I usually love in a horrific pageturny kind of way) set in Japan are awful too.

Also agree about Splendid Kites and Running Suns a lesson to us all should be that just because the subject is serious, it doesn't mean the storybook is worth reading. It was derivative, badly written, and I felt abused by the writer somehow, as if he'd rubbed his sweaty palms together and thought, "ooh I can make lots of money about this, all I need is a burkha, an abused wife, poor Afghani children......" Horrible.

Blimey- I thought I was the only one in the world who didn't like The Book Thief. Cheers Bumperlicious!

time travellers wife - absolute poo.

Also the the Interpretation of Murder

Re. 'The Lacuna': I've just finished it, and got to love it, but was fully aware that if I hadn't been reading it on holiday, and able to sit for long stretches at a time, I wouldn't have finished it - I think it's a fab holiday book, but not conducive to my usual read-for-half-an-hour-if-that-at-bedtime style.

Loved the Shipping News but couldn't seem to get into any more Annie Proulx's; seemed a bit of a one-trick pony to me.

The Book Thief - dull dull dull

"Can't BELIEVE someone said Catch-22! Probably one of the best books ever written! Shame on you"

MadreInglese Remains of the Day is the best by far of the 3 Ishiguro books that I've read. I also read Never Let Me Go which wasn't nearly so good. Having seen the film of Remains of the Day first, the book slightly annoyed me for the first couple of chapters because it's written as the Butler's first person narrative. After that, I loved it!

he was really sweet too...

Ah - clearly I should have waited for Trotsky!

The hours by Michael cunning ham
2666 by roberto bola no. Worst and longest book ever

I found the Lacuna got a lot more interesting once Trotsky turned up