Active discussions

Please or to access all these features

Talk
What we're reading

Find your new favourite book or recommend one on our Book forum.

Original poster

I just read a terrible book

687 replies

Orangeis · 06/02/2023 11:29

Bring me back, B A Paris.

What a load of absolute tosh. A man's partner dissapears, 6 years later he gets with her sister and lives with her. The big twist is.....the new girlfriend is actually the missing sister. He didn't realise this as she had a different hair do.
That's hours of my life I'll never get back. I feel like taking the book in to the back garden and burning the bugger.
What's your worst book and why?

OP posts:
New posts on this thread. Refresh page
JaneJeffer · 11/06/2024 14:57

Confused now Grin maybe I'll make a third and final attempt sometime

Chikapu · 11/06/2024 14:38

JaneJeffer · 11/06/2024 10:50

I've tried to read Unravelling Oliver twice and I just can't do it, and it's only a short book. Can anyone tell me if it's worth persevering with?

It really isn't, it's all just pointless in the end.

summerisnearlyhere · 11/06/2024 13:06

Or even loved!

summerisnearlyhere · 11/06/2024 13:05

JaneJeffer · 11/06/2024 10:50

I've tried to read Unravelling Oliver twice and I just can't do it, and it's only a short book. Can anyone tell me if it's worth persevering with?

Lived this book! However I listened to it on audible

EclairsAndDoughnuts · 11/06/2024 12:46

I'll be there!

Terpsichore · 11/06/2024 12:15

Yes, come and join us Rather Dated lot @EclairsAndDoughnuts ! The latest read is The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks.

EclairsAndDoughnuts · 11/06/2024 12:14

@JaneJeffer No I haven't but I've just had a look and like it.

Thank you very much

JaneJeffer · 11/06/2024 11:06

@EclairsAndDoughnuts do you follow the Rather Dated threads on here?

EclairsAndDoughnuts · 11/06/2024 11:01

itsmenoreally · 06/02/2023 13:35

My conclusion is that Book Clubs choose some really bad modern novels. Going back to the 'Classics' is often more rewarding. Currently trying Virginia Woolf for the first time.

My friend is in a bookclub that they call slender classics and the books have to be classic and under a certain page number. One of them was Hotel du Lac and another Breakfast at Tiffanys. I read alongside the books they pick but can't join as it is a small closed group that meets in a restaurant.
I would love to join or at least one very similar to it because most bookclubs just pick new books or one that the library has enough copies of. My friend's group usually buy a second hand copy each,

JaneJeffer · 11/06/2024 10:50

I've tried to read Unravelling Oliver twice and I just can't do it, and it's only a short book. Can anyone tell me if it's worth persevering with?

princessperky · 11/06/2024 08:19

There's a lot of bilge out there! I find that many authors "recommend" their friends' oeuvres no matter what rubbish they are. There is an old boys' network if you like.

Terpsichore · 10/06/2024 22:24

Don’t get me started on Sophie Hannah.

EclairsAndDoughnuts · 10/06/2024 21:58

AiryFlyingFairy · 06/02/2023 12:25

'The Orphan Choir' by Sophie Hannah.
Ridiculous plot.
I had read a couple of her other books that were decent but this was so bad made me want to weep.Life is to short for bad books.

Sophie Hannah used to be great but I also read The Orphan Choir and totally agree with you.

A glutton for punishment, I then read , A Game for all the Family....I don't think I have ever read such bilgewater in all my life. It was gaspingly terrible.

TonTonMacoute · 10/06/2024 20:19

cassiatwenty · 10/06/2024 18:05

Girl gets key. Guard unlocks it. He talks to the girl. It's very strange and mysterious. Bees. Corridor of Portals. One speaks. Other listens. 🤣

Show quote history

Did Erin Morgenstern write that Night Circus book?

God that was boring! I was slogging through it then luckily I read a review on Good Reads which confirmed my feelings and warned me it didn't get any better, so gave it up.

cassiatwenty · 10/06/2024 18:05

itsmenoreally · 06/02/2023 12:34

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. It is supposed to be 'spellbinding'. It couldn't finish it as it was cats, corridors, cats, corridors....and I gave up the will to live.

Girl gets key. Guard unlocks it. He talks to the girl. It's very strange and mysterious. Bees. Corridor of Portals. One speaks. Other listens. 🤣

Mirabai · 09/06/2024 17:41

I sometimes wonder if people are more attracted by her world than by her writing

Oh yes I think so. I like Woolf but I between her aesthetic experiments and her mental illness some of her books don’t come off and are rated more highly than they deserve - The Years, Between the Acts, The Waves.

Part of her contribution to literature is as a feminist, a personality, an essayist, diarist, letter writer etc.

Personally, I rate Katherine Mansfield more highly has a writer. But she died before the age at which Woolf wrote TTL. Mansfield is less popular as she is not UMC British and short stories are a less feted medium in the U.K. than in say France and the US.

Cooper77 · 09/06/2024 17:16

I've always been a bit ambivalent about Woolf. I enjoyed and admired To the Lighthouse and also Mrs Dalloway. But I'm not sure she deserves her reputation as the female writer of the 20th-century. Personally, I find Anita Brookner's prose more beautiful. I also think Hilary Mantel as great a stylist. And as for ideas, I'll take Iris Murdoch over Woolf.

I sometimes wonder if people are more attracted by her world than by her writing. The same is true of Oscar Wilde. Both lived in, and wrote about, a world of wealthy, sophisticated bohemians – the sort of people who live in beautiful georgian town houses and have 'luncheon' parties, where they smoke expensive cigarettes and discuss Shakespeare and Walter Pater and so on. For those of us who spend our lives jammed on crowded new estates, where people talk mostly about work and sport and their new car, it's kind of refreshing.

MrsDanversGlidesAgain · 09/06/2024 12:22

TheMarzipanDildo · 09/06/2024 11:50

See I loved Mrs Dalloway.
Orlando baffled me but I put that down to a lack of intelligence on my part.

I still have the Penguin edition of Orlando I bought when I was 18. After my experience recently with Woolf I'm contemplating whether it deserves the shelf space.

OTOH, I love her lit crit and essays.

beguilingeyes · 09/06/2024 12:20

Currently ploughing through Insomnia by Stephen King, dullsville.
Stopped in the middle for The Grapes Of Wrath...just watched a documentary about it...I love Steinbeck.

TheMarzipanDildo · 09/06/2024 11:50

See I loved Mrs Dalloway.
Orlando baffled me but I put that down to a lack of intelligence on my part.

Mirabai · 09/06/2024 11:05

I love To the Lighthouse. So moving. “Mrs Ramsay, Mrs Ramsay - to want and want and not to have”.

PeachPairPlum · 09/06/2024 11:03

Not read To the Lighthouse but struggled through Mrs Dallaway and thought the same .

MrsDanversGlidesAgain · 09/06/2024 10:39

WestwardHo1 · 06/02/2023 16:07

To The Lighthouse.

I got three quarters of the way through and suddenly got so incensed with it, I threw it across the room. What a load of pretentious shite.

Call me a philistine. I won't care

Coming late to this comment but agree with this. I LOVED Woolf when I was 18 - now 69 and got Jacob's Room and To the Lighthouse out of the library a few months ago to rediscover the magic I found.

Both went back as DNF. Life's too short, frankly.

princessperky · 09/06/2024 07:32

AinmÁlainn · 06/02/2023 11:57

The Richard Osman one, Thursday Murder Club. I never don't finish books but I found it utterly painful and refused to give it any more of my life after about a third of the way through.

Didn't like his latest one in the series, Last Devil to Die. Gave up not even one quarter of the way. It's his style I dislike. Childish, as if he's talking to senile people.

user1465390476 · 16/02/2023 07:51

@jux that was my pick earlier on in the thread. I couldn’t believe how bad it was.