I have just read possibly the worst book in the world

mrsrobert the funny thing is, if we put The Slap or One Day out on the shelves they will sell, so for all the people getting rid of them, just as many are keen to buy. (No-one buys Tony Parsons though).

The Hare with the Amber Eyes is v popular in our shop, people ask for it by name on quite a regular basis!

Has anyone mentioned Kazuo Ishiguro's 'The Unconsoled' yet? I waded through all 600 pages of it, waiting for the resolution in which this strange nightmare would all be explained. It never was.

Thumbwitch - you're right about 'witty'.

I also hate zany, wacky, quirky.... the early Pratchett books were described that way and he ended up stating categorically in a v.short preface that they were NONE of those things!! I do love Terry.

Someone jibbed at Mansfield Park earlier - we had to do it at school and everyone thought Fanny was crap, me included. The rest of the book had 2 or 3 interesting bits but it was not vintage Austen by a long shot.

I was in a charity shop the other day where they had arranged 3 of the same book next to each other. Now how does that encourage me, the consumer, to buy it? 'Ooh, it must be good, they've got loads of copies!' Silly shop staff - books weren't even alphabetical so can't blame it on that...

I guess none of you have read 'Jemima J'

So bad i had to keep reading because I couldn't believe it could possibly stay that bad. It did

The invention of Dr Cake was a pile of pretentious rubbish. Agree Twilight is terrible, Edward is just a creepy stalker and Bella's wet. Didn't understand all the hype over Dragon Tattoo either never read the next ones.

If you think Eat Pray Love is the worst book in the world, you can't have read 1000 Splendid Suns.

Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is not even a bad book, let alone the world's worst.

You people have led a sheltered life. Get into a (women's) book club to read some truly awful books.

Stewie- everyone goes on about what a romance Wuthering Heights is. I read it at 17 and frankly it's one of the books that started me on the path to feminism. I thought it was a book about domestic abuse and uncontrolled rage. Really can still not see anything redeeming in any of the characters in the book (except the maybe the father who rescues the urchin Heathcliff in the first place).

Eat Pray Love?

Slap Kick Punch more like.

I nominate the last India Knight one, about Christmas. There was a working class mother in law in it that she treats as some sort of freak, clutching at the middle class hem of the main protagonist ( a thinly disguised India ) and being all suspicious of olives.

FFS. Really pissed me off. To the extent I can't remember the title and can't be arsed to look it up

duchesse, My excuse is that I am convinced that Harlen Coben's Win is but a crappy ninja version of Niles Crane, but only I have recognised this.

OP, you obviously have not read "Eat, Pray, Love"

Aarrgh, no, Harlen Coben. My friend gave me "Caught" saying I'd love it, which I dutifully read, and hated. I hated it so much that it's actually left the house, along with We need to talk about Kev, recycled to a charity bookshop in France. The expats might be desperate enough...

I am strangely in thrall to Harlen Coben and the dreadful character Win.

Sorry, I meant The Forgotten Waltz. Title had nothing to do with content as far as I could make out...

And yy to spelling mistakes. Labyrinth was my first Kindle purchase ( on my phone) and I began to wonder if there was some problem with the processing software. Haven't had the inclination to pick up a paper copy for comparison's sake.

My new rule of the thumb is not to read anything, but anything that's less than 10 years old. I figure if it's still in print after 10 years it may be worth considering.

Hate DH Lawrence and I've had the misfortune of reading Women in Love twice (for college). I even think my lecturer hated it.

Also thought The Last Waltz by Anne Enright was the biggest pile of drivel I have ever read and was astonished to see a positive (well, not negative) review of it in last week's Saturday Guardian.

I had to 'do' Jane Eyre at school and I don't think I ever finished it. Even now I just remember it neon to most terrible shite I had ever read. When a group of friends went to see it at the cinema recently and asked me to go along, I think I put a couple of them off by saying just how awful the stupid story was.

Othello by Mr Shakespeare was also terrible (I like some of his others though), again a school text. Why on earth didn't they just talk to each other instead of Othello listening to odious Iago? (And the answer isn't 'because it's a tragedy'. You can have a great tragedy without having stupid plotholes). I moaned about it so much in our English class that our teacher set us homework to write an essay on 'Why Othello Is Dramatically Dull'. I'm still quite proud of that!

DH reads and usually loves all the Booker short listed books but I try them and get bored fairly easily with most of them. I did enjoy Midnight's Children though and McEwan's Amsterdam so I'm not completely thick.

Mirage - me me! to the grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. But also to worn-out clichés - or over-use of a phrase or word (every chapter? Really? Just not necessary)
One of my least favourites is "she slicked on more lipstick"

Herrena - my rule of thumb is never to buy anything that claims to be "witty" - IME, "witty" is code for "boring shite that tries to be amusing but fails every which way".

We need to talk about Kevin-drivel.Martina Cole-same plot each time,I can guess how it's going to end after the first chapter.Heart of Darkness-unreadable.Ulysses,DH and I know no one who has managed to finish it.

Does anyone else get fed up with finding spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in books? It really puts me off,I remember finding 4 mistakes in the first chapter once and it annoyed me so much that it spoilt the book for me.