Worst book(s) you read in 2020

Fleishman is in Trouble.

He deserves to be in trouble, he's a twat. Irritating rich people problems written with no sense of irony or affection.

Girl, Woman, Other

Just could not get into it and had such high hopes. The lack of full stops bothered me.

@Quizmas - You’ve summed up Eleanor O well. In many ways, it was an engaging read, but at the same time, someone who went to university, and became a manager for her company would not be that ignorant on life.

I enjoyed The Lido but it did go off the boil a bit towards the end. I hated Nine Perfect Strangers.

The trouble was Oliphant was that it was genuinely an engaging read for a while but some way before the end you just realised it was completely unrealistic - that a woman in her situation, even with the aspergers, would not be so unworldy. The author wrote her as though she had just stepped off a spaceship, when she had been in and out of the care system all her life and would have been more streetwise than many of us.

Surprised to see the poor reviews on here for Crawdads. I loved it so much, it was my standout book of the year in 2019.

I listened to Queenie and Eleanor Oliphant on BBC Sounds (abridged versions) and while I didn't hate them, I wouldn't have been delighted if I'd paid cash to read the printed versions.

Like many others I hated A Little Life, I cant bear it when I feel like my sympathies are being obviously manipulated. I did get through it, but not sure why I persevered, by the end I was almost disappointed with myself for not giving up sooner.

I've not read much this year though, I'm finding it too hard to concentrate. Best read has been The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead.

I thought Queenie was ok actually. I didn't love it, but I got through it without totally rolling my eyes, which is unusual when I read novels.

Not sure if it was this year, but I couldn't agree more with whoever said Eleanor Oliphant, which I hated.

The Catch was also terrible. I'm also battling my way through The Woman in the White Kimono and am not keen at all.

Piranesi - I bought it based on a thread here, thinking 'no idea what it's about but I'll keep an open mind'.
Still no idea what it was about, no plot twist, no sense.

The book thief. I try reading it every few years. I always get a few chapters in, remember why I put it down - it's unbearable - and shove it back in the bookcase again!

Eleanor Oliphant - didn’t really like it

Crawdads - okay, but flawed

Thursday murder club - didn’t like first half, second half was better

@froggywentacarolling I loved The Goldfinch - I read it during the first lockdown, happy memories of lying in the hammock in the sun absolutely engrossed!

My worst of the year were :

IT by Stephen King
The Gift Of Fear by Gavin De Becker
Delta Of Venus by Anais Nin

and

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

I would agree about Crawdads and Normal People not quite as bad as those listed BUT a pair of overrated shockers

Come back to 50 Books OP! We are mostly doing roundups now.

Gave up on Normal People which isn't like me. Husband started Milkman twice then gave it to me unread. Have Crawdads on my pile too.

The Goldfinch: Bought it in hardback when it was first released, finally managed to get through it. The Secret History is a masterpiece. I loved The Little Child. This is eight trillion pages of meandering nonsense (you could skip through the entire section that's just the main character getting wasted in Vegas and not even notice) with no point to it.

After the Snow - Susannah Constanine. Got this as a free Kindle ebook. No idea who the target audience is. The main character is a horse-obsessed little girl and the writing style is so simplistic you'd assume it's a children's book, but the language and some of the content makes clear it's aimed at adults. It's also basically just one big British aristocracy arse-kissing fest. I don't need to read about small children excitedly murdering foxes, or how all working class people are illiterate oiks. The part with Princess Margaret in the bath is utterly bizarre!

The new Phillip Pullman - how does a writer go from the masterpiece that is the original Northern Lights to this?

The Swap - Nancy Boyarsky. Some random thriller which was another Kindle freebie. Set in London but clearly written by someone who's never been here.

I read The Last last year and found it totally stupid.

The Scent of Bones by Levi Fuller

My comments at the time were

I couldn't read more than 20 pages because of the errors, but I paged through the rest. I can only guess he was too busy to do any research.

Bute does not have a Bute PD - it has a Police Office and is part of Police Scotland.

Bute will have a sergeant and 3 or 4 constables. Additional support, detectives, forensics will come from the mainland.

No one in Bute will be described as the Chief of Police.

Burglars is not a term in Scotland, the police refer to them as house breakers.

We don't have the rank of Detective in Chief either.

We don't have interrogation rooms we have interview rooms.

All in all The Scent of Bones stank it was as if someone had taken a story written for a small American island and decided moving it to Scotland and picking out a small island. Picking the island seems to have been the limit of the author's research. It is simple arrogance to assume that everything is the same as America and that police in Scotland would want or need help from a Miami detective.

@TheYearOfSmallThings - that's the one!

Oh no, that's our book club read for January, which I have put off starting for the past two weeks...

Really struggled with Rodham, Such a fun age and Normal People.

However I loved Crawdads and A little Life (although I get its a bit misery porn)

I just finished the second in the Book of Dust series.
Really really bad. What on earth, Phillip Pullman? It was just, bad. The ' ending' is awful, the story is thin. Parts of it read like some creepy man's fantasy.

So glad I borrowed and didn't buy

Some trite 'gothic horror' bollocks I can't even remember the name of. I learned more about sheep farming from it than I did about the rest of the plot.

That would be "The Coffin Path". I liked it . I also learned a lot about fly strike.