Books to avoid

My problem with Ian McEwan is that while I think he's talented, I also think he's also unusually limited by his maleness and his middle-classness. Anything I read by him seems to me to scream of an English male middle-classness, whoever and wherever his narrator is. I think that's why I admire David Mitchell, who has (for me) a brilliant ability to throw his voice into anything from future clones to obnoxious Cambridge undergraduates to homicidal Japanese cult members.

Or someone like Colm Toibin, for instance, does a much better job of writing female central characters, with or without children, despite being a childless gay man.

"It was like reading a very long, gorgeously written poem about paint drying"

That sounds like a really good description of Ian McEwan books, actually I love his writing but seriously, the man has no stories to tell whatsoever. Just lots of brilliant descriptions of people's inner worlds.

Lord of the Rings
The slap - my goodness it was tedious with really awful characters - not a single redeeming characteristic among the lot of them.

Maybe the problem with the English Patient is that a lot happens but it doesn't make you care about it?

But there's a big difference between saying a novel is not to your taste and saying it 'should be avoided'.

I don't care for Ian McEwan's shtik at all, and I have no hesitation in saying that Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry is a bad novel - insane plotting, schematic characterisation, complete lack of understanding of London life, or possibly human life in general (though bits are so funny I encouraged friends to read it - AF seems to be a cod-Gothic literary descendant of Virginia 'Twins and Incest' Andrews with added death-kittens), but I'm surprised anyone would say that, for instance, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is a 'bad novel'. You may not like it at all, but surely it's obvious that he can do astonishing things in terms of voice, setting and plotting? They may just not happen to be things that you like, but that's different to saying it's 'bad'. Ditto Wolf Hall.

I did think that The Crimson Petal wore its considerable research too heavily - MF got a whacking great advance, employed a friend of a friend of a friend as a research assistant, and I think got a bit weighed down by the sheer amount of detail she uncovered about Victorian contraception and domestic minutiae, and tried to include it all.

The English Patient was pretty plotty, wasn't it? It's aeons since I read it, but it features war, betrayal, torture, bomb disposal by gorgeous Sikhs, saintly nurses, affairs, attempted murder/suicide, several plane crashes, the death of at least three central characters...?

I'd totally forgotten about Zen and the art of being a pretentious knob
I ploughed my way through it thinking I was being mega cool, now I'm older and wiser I tend to give up on books a bit more quickly.

Will I get flamed for saying Pride and Prejudice ? I honestly tried and tried but never got passed the second page.

eat pray love
that was a right toe curler!

Haven't seen the film, Cote, but I assume it's based on the book. I just remember reading and reading, thinking that surely something must make it worthwhile soon. It was like reading a very long, gorgeously written poem about paint drying.

Cant believe nobody has mentioned eat pray love yet.

"The Crimson Petal and the White. I loved the first third of this, it started so well and then just went on and on and on and stopped."

I would add that the moral of the story seemed to be that even the most interesting female character imaginable (like, an intelligent prostitute who writes serial killer novels in her spare time) becomes dull and boring once she gets domesticated and starts caring for a small child

I watched the movie and quite a bit happened. Is it not based on the book?

'The English Patient' - it's beautifully written but precisely nothing happens.

I have to agree about Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance - I think it's my least favourite book of all time, though Man and Boy by Tony Parsons runs it a close second. Apparently Zen got turned down by 135 publishers before someone agreed to publish it, and while I normally like those stories about publishers being proved wrong, I think those 135 probably had their heads screwed on.

I also got a bit bored with 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'. I got to wanting to punch the author / father, which I figured wasn't very zen

Not hideous, but 'The Beach' was horribly overrated IMO.

I liked Labyrinth by Kate Mosse, but would body-swerve her other books. It would appear there's a reason the first one took so long to finish. Similarly while I enjoyed 'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell', 'The Ladies of Grace Adieu' by Susannah Clarke is best avoided.

I failed to finish 50 Shades (that does not happen often).

I do want to try '100 Years of Solitude' again. I could see it was beautifully written, but I didn't get far at all (kept waiting for the plot to kick in).

The Rosie Project

The Lovely Bones

The something strangeness of Lemon Cake.

All atrociously written, boring nonsense.

Also loathe anything by Will Self. His writing is turgid to the point of self parody.

The Slap.
Hateful people and the author has never been to Bali.
We are all completely beside ourselves.
Like a boring animal rights lecture where nothing actually happens.

Totally agree about Dawn French. Her sentence structure is awful. I kept having to reread passages of her first book as it didn't make sense. It just didn't flow!

One Day - very boring and unlikeable characters

Errol I know - I kind of re read it hoping the end might be different this time round...

Marshmallow - yeah, but what happens to Stephanie is one of the things I didn't like.

Agree with lots of these-the main problem with both Gone Girl and One Day was I disliked all the characters.

I would add Game of Thrones (really boring and too many characters), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series (kept going thinking it would get better), Behind the Scenes at the Museum (trying too hard be clever) and anything by Louise Bagshawe/Mensche (no further comment necessary).

Errol I've read 3 of the Fredrica books and I did struggle - she is such an unlikable character herself and AS Byatt is always trying to cram in all her Big Ideas about art and literature and so on.

But the second book, Still Life, I do re-read every so often because I like Stephanie, the sister - she's much more sympathetic than wretched Fredrica.

Hated the one shopaholic book I read just wanted to slap the main character

Captain Corelli's Mandolin - tried twice and gave up both time

The Kite Runner - got to the end and wondered what all the fuss was about

There would be others but I have since adopted a rule that if I'm not enjoying a book by the end of the third chapter, I give up