I have just read possibly the worst book in the world

keech Scottish colloquialism for shite
some books are keech

What's "keech"? Do you mean kitsch?

cant polish a turd some books are keech
no wordy prose or effusing can make a bad book good
although certainly some seem to prefer a wordy long winded précis.when its pish would have done

"Never let me go" is one of my all-time favourite novels.

Oh, and I'd also recommend sticking with The Hare with Amber Eyes.

I'm not talking about "literary criticism", but about giving reasons why you've formed that view. Of the books I've given low ratings to in the last few years, a couple were badly written, one was weirdly translated but my real issue with it was that it was a racist book dressed up in academic disguise, and one was well written but horrible.

sometimes a book is just pish though and no amount of literary crit. can improve on just calling it pish

I don't like descriptions of books as tosh or utter drivel. It doesn't tell me much about whether I will think the same if I haven't read the book, and if I have and I liked it I feel insulted and defensive. What didn't you like, and was it a case for you of a genre you dislike or a book you hated in a genre you would normally enjoy?

If reading reviews, which I do quite a lot, I want to know what worked or not for the other reader. I might not agree with someone else's opinion but even from a negative review there may be something to make me think I might enjoy it. I reviewed books for www.thebookbag.co.uk for two years and one question that we answered in each review was Buy? and Borrow? If something I liked the sound of from the blurb has a poor or disappointing review, I can think, maybe I'll see if I can borrow this from the library and see what I think, and buy something else for now.

I have just read Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal (good book) and was pleased at the bit where she is working her way through the library alphabetically but got stuck at N because she couldn't bear Nabokov and couldn't get beyond the women-hating.

Also YY to Lisa Jewell dreadfulness. I threw Ralph's Party away in disgust.

it is worth perservering with 'the hare with the amber eyes' as the final chapters are unbearably moving

'are we there yet' self indulgent drivel and if he mentioned john cleese one more time i would have had to hunt him down and shove the book up his arse (except it was 99p on my kindle)

Can I just say if you haven't read Villa Trieste by Lucretia Grindle read it. Its brilliant. The heroes in it are women I couldn't put it down, neither could DH, my parents, my friend and my friends husband .

Like Thingiebob, I agree you don't have to like the characters in the novel you are reading, but they do need to be interesting. I found One Day a real struggle to read because Dexter was such an arse all the way through and Emma terribly dull. I found myself not caring when she died (plot spoiler). I much preferred The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides - a much better written novel.

Never let me go - only finished this book because of my book club. It was boring and un engaging drivel. Glad I only bought it for a kindle, therefore relatively cheap.

I agree completely with Twilight and Pemberley, both had to go to better homes. I read The Lovely Bones that had great reviews but hated it, it made me very uncomfortable and I would never recommend it to a friend

I couldn't get past the first 10 pages of The Slap.

I thought Room was alright, but not ground breaking or anything.

I couldn't finish 'P.S. I Love You. Utter crap

"A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - read it all waiting for it to get good but it never happened! "

I loved that book and so did my mum, but we could identify with the father as my dad was an immigrant, although not eastern european. The father's speach patterns were so much like my dads, it was very realistic in that respect.

No, I don't have to like the characters, but I do have to be interested in them. The popularity of 'One Day' is down to how likeable the characters are and how the reader can identify with them. At least, this is what I have heard time and time again from fans of the novel.

I didn't 'warm' to the characters. I found them flat, unpleasant and dull.

hackmum I'm the same about The Great Gatsby. I studied it for A-Level so I spent a lot of time deconstructing it and thought it was a great novel. Then I re-read it a few years later and whilst I could still appreciate the writing, the story wasn't so important because I really didn't care about the characters (although some of this may be in part owing to the unreliability of Nick as the narrator, and his snobbishness: we only see them through his eyes, after all).

marshmallowpies RC-B is an utter bastard in almost all of the books, except for 'Rivals' (best JC book ev-ah). So because of that, even when he's a bastard in subsequent books, I can overlook it (but still not like him very much).

The protagonist in The Wasp Factory is horribly, horribly unpleasant and wholly unlikable, yet I was compelled to read it. I can't say I enjoyed the book, but I was totally engrossed in it.

Nickname - The Debt to Pleasure is wonderful. Am always pleased to find a fellow John Lanchester fan. But the thing about Tarquin is that although he's a bastard he's a very funny clever bastard, which is what makes it so enjoyable.

I'm a bit funny about The Great Gatsby. I know it's a classic. But I find it hard because the characters are so unlikeable. I know you're not supposed to like them, that they're supposed to be spoilt and superficial and unpleasant, and that's the point, but it makes it awfully hard to care about what happens to them. And I think you do need to care a bit if you're going to enjoy a book.

As for The Little Friend, I'd agree about it being a struggle. I couldn't understand how someone who had managed to produce such a page-turning first book could write such a turgid second.

Non-likeable character - Tarquin in The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester. Absolutely adore this book.

Definitely agree that characters can be unpleasant or repelling and yet still compelling to read about - think of Lolita or Brighton Rock.

Or a whole cast of characters can be annoying as hell and yet still compulsive - The Corrections.

Trying to think of a character a bit more complex - Emma by Jane Austen - based on the authors own statement, you're not MEANT to like her, except of course Jane in a typically Janeite way wants us to find her heroine charming and captivating in spite of ourselves. I didn't, though - when I first read the book I thought 'what a nasty cow' and it was my least favourite Austen book for years as a result. Now I have realised I can love the book without actually having to like Emma herself.

A slightly more lowbrow example - Rupert Campbell-Black in Jilly Cooper books: are women supposed to think he's a loveable rogue type that you oughtn't to like but deep down you really do? I don't, I think he's an idiothole, and whenever he cropped up in the book I wanted to stop reading. (I was only reading it because a friend insisted I had to read it & lent me her copy).

These are my 'why did I bother' list of last years reading;
The Catalpa Tree - odd story!

Room - left me cold!

Twilight - I read them all and enjoyed them but when DH asked what they were like the best description I could come up with "mills and boon" but with biting!

Life of Pi - found it really hard going but stuck with it to the end.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - read it all waiting for it to get good but it never happened!

Got you back - dragged on a bit but harmless enough.

Currently reading The house at Riverton and am waiting for 'the event' to happen, if I can stay awake.

Think I'll let my son pick my books for me in future. He always comes up trumps!

How about Hannibal? Main character is definitely not very likeable.

I struggle with this view because most of the characters in my favourite books are not particularly nice people, hence not terribly likeable. That is probably because I avoid books about nice middle-class people living their nice likeable little lives with their nice little children. I mean, that is the life I live 24/7, why would I want to read about someone else living the same life?

That rules out all chick-lit, and pretty much all books written by female authors and for a female audience and male readers don't seem bothered about likeable characters, which might be why books written for them don't have that constraint.