The worst books you read in 2017

Another one underwhelmed by The Power. Didn't think it did anything that hadn't been done better before.

I read it TES before I’d read anything about it, and loved it without any expectations. It is a thoughtful, lyrical book, but probably not to everyone’s taste as not a great deal “happens”.

Agree re Cursed Child. Abominable.

Stalin book annoyed me because he kept changing people's names, so I kept forgetting who I was reading about.

Into the Water. Paula Hawkins. Didn't even bother finishing it.

The Power and My Name is Leon were both underwhelming.
I read The Passion of New Ever this year. It my first Angela Carter book and I absolutely hated it. I also hated The Little Red Chairs by Enda O'Brien.
But if I had to pick the very worst book it has to be The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel. It was nasty, predictable and poorly written. Runner up would be the very unnecessary Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler.

Why did you not like the Stalin book, Remus? I read it too and I was impressed because I don't know much about Russian history but it was very accessible. I felt like I had a good grasp of the subject by the end.

Agree re: the girls. Horribly dreary and depressing.

(TBF with the Essex Serpent at that point in the year it did feel a bit like if I wanted to hear about unhappy marriages, domestic violence, children with ASD finding life difficult, terminal illness etc etc I could just spend the night down the pub with me & my friends.)

Interesting, I gave up on The Essex Serpent and thought it was me being crap as it seems much loved on here.

Agree about the girls! I'd forgotten about it because I had been so bored by the time I finished

Oh glad I’m not the only one with NOTW I mean I did finish it, because some elements of the story were intriguing and I kept thinking it would go somewhere. I’m glad to hear confirmation it doesn’t get better with the second one, as in vulnerable moments I’ve been tempted to just see if the story picks up I felt like the author had never met any real women so didn’t attempt writing about any in case he got it wrong.

I haven’t included the ones I didn’t finish - but I gave up on The Dust That Falls From Dreams as I felt it should have been called “Here is Some Research I’ve Done on WWI (oh and some characters that do and say unrealistic things)” Disappointing as I quite like Louis de B.

Swing Time I got utterly fed up with, mainly because of her awful sentences that just, sort of, meander on, and on, I suppose, with lots of weirdly placed, commas, and which, never seemed to end, but I still think about, I suppose, finishing it, maybe, someday.

The first Red Rising I ditched when the narrator described a character as gliding in like a lonely tower or a golden spider - oh like one of those gliding towers? The ones a bit like golden spiders? What?

But I didn’t mind Elinor Oliphant and liked the Essex Serpent very much

The Essex Serpent for me too. The main character was utterly unbelievable and annoying to boot.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. This week I read the first chapter in the next book in the series: Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash written by a predictive text bot. That brought be more pleasure and made more sense than that travesty of a script. Very very disappointed in you JK.

Mend The Living by Maylis de Kenangal. Managed to turn something dramatic and moving (what happens to the people involved in the 24 hour period of a heart transplant) into an overwritten, overwrought, pile of bobbins. Extremely poor use of the comma. Winner of the highest number of times I threw a book on the floor in disgust award 2017.

The Improbability of Love by Hannah Rothschild. Book about a painting. Many, many pages of mediocrity leading up to the final frightfully tense auction scene at which point the author went “nah, don’t think I can be fucked with this any more. The End.”
Complete waste of a week’s worth of reading.

The Sport of Kings by C E Morgan. It’s about horse racing and CONTEMPORARY ISSUES. A veritable smorgasbord of contemporary issues written in such an overbearing, preachy and incontinent style of prose I would have thrown it to the floor many more times than Mend the Living had it not been on my Kindle. Deeply regret not DNFing it after 30 pages.

The Vegetarian by Han King. Unpleasant and not in a good way. Thankfully rather short.

The Power interesting concept but so badly executed.

It read like an enthusiastic GCSE student had written it.... 'look miss, look miss, I'm doing an analogy!'

Couldn't give a shit about the characters male or female. What little plot there was bumbled along and it was just dull.

The Couple Next Door.

A page turner, granted. Otherwise very sloppy, unimaginative, hollow, unsatisfying, really poorly edited - where was her editor FGS? - every page I turned I knew I was being taken for a ride but I wanted to see what happened in the end.

Oh I've got The Girls. I keep !meaning to read it but then I read the back and put it down again!

The Essex serpent

All that hype.

I have bought the Howards End is on the landing for my DD as a Xmas present, I hope she likes it.

I found the Couple next door to be ok, nothing remarkable though. I won't read any others of hers. I've tried and failed to get into the Eleanor Oliphant book, I doubt I'll try again.

I have a 100 page rule but I didn't get that far with the Eleanor Oliphant book. I've got a collection on my kindle of books I've started and not finished over the last 8 years or so, it's got about 200 books in it

Oh god yes Eleanor Oliphant as well. So bad.

Ha! I didn’t enjoy The Girls either. R Bpppoioiiiiiin

The worst books I read were:

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine - a similar story to The Rosie Project but this book was even worse, with clichéd events and a ludicrously written and unbelievable main character.

More crapola in The Girls by Emma Fine. Slow and depressing, there was lots of flowery description here and the effect was that it felt like she'd been to a creative writing course and wanted you to know about it. Somewhere in the pretentious crap was a good story.

Girl on a train was utter shit!!! I don't even know why I kept on reading. I haven't seen the film cos I thought would be just as dire too!

Behind her eyes. Complete drivel

Got a few, unfortunately
The keeper of lost things - Ruth Hogan - ridiculous drivel - book club read!
Hot milk - Deborah Levy - too clever for its own good, hated the main character.
Into the woods - Tana French - huge unresolved storyline which was the only reason I read to the end!!
A street cat named Bob - James Bowen - feel so guilty about it and I know it was supposed to be a 'heart warming tale' but honestly nothing happened!
Reconstructing Amelia - Kimberly McCreight
Silent Child - Sarah A. Denzil
Her perfect Life - Sam Hepburn
The missing - CL Taylor
Three of the above were again book club reads which everyone else loved! And I hated. Along with Her Perfect life I thought they were weak and full of plot holes.

I quite liked The Name of The Wind but satsuki's review had me in tears of laughter! You nailed it. Think I have rated it four or five stars on Goodreads myself. I'm fairly undiscriminating, sometimes I need the flaws to be pointed out to me.

The Couple Next Door was also one I wish I hadn't bothered with. Like christmastits just kept reading hoping it would get better (and also incapable of leaving a book with a missing child in it unfinished, sigh)

Books that I wished I'd just given up on . .
Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia Martinez, no matter how illuminating, I just couldn't warm to the author.

And some that I thought I would LOVE but just didn't get . . .
Alexander Chee's 'Queen of the Night' (possible don't know enough about opera!)
Ransom Rigg's 'Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children'