I just read a terrible book

Not remotely intellectual and pretty old now but I thought 50 Shades of Grey was utter shite! Terribly written. The character (I forget her name) was always blushing, sort yourself out girl, and Christian was described as having long fingers - ergh! Made me think of the Reeves and Mortimer characters 😂

I absolutely loved American Pastoral by Philip Roth… as a recommendation!

Most people who talk about Birdsong haven’t read the book; they’ve seen the film.

It's decades since I read Birdsong but IIRC the first wee chapter has some quite sexy sex in it and then the rest is being shot at. Wonder if the shagging blinded other people to the rest of the book.

Stay Close. That was it!

I used to force myself to read a book I had started but don't bother anymore.

I think that goes back to old style Eng Lit studies at school and university. We knew Shakespeare, Chaucer etc. were likely to be hard work just because of the language, and that from a cultural POV you would need to meet their work more than half way. But somewhere along the line that morphs into ‘You’re not allowed to say ANYTHING bad about set books or classics because they’re GREAT BOOKS and you KNOW NOTHING’. Force feed your brain enough stuff it can’t emotionally engage with and you stop enjoying reading. ☹️

I sort of lost the plot with my reading choices once I got past adolescence. Too much dross around and too much marketing, bit like TV. I studied English at uni and contemporary literature was my least favourite part of it. Too many naked Emperors. (Totally agree about the overrated Woolf; also see James Joyce and Samuel Beckett).

I think a really interesting dissertation topic might be the role of commercialism and modern marketing on contemporary novels, and whether the literary prize circuit is an accurate gauge of quality or just one big round of upmarket salesmanship and promotion.

I adored The Shadow of the Wind!

As a general rule I look sideways at anything being pushed by THAT high street book chain because so much of it is what they think they can sell shedloads of, rather than a good read.

Ha, yes. I was watching one of those and it was about a woman who had to disappear and leave her scandalous life behind, think she was a stripper. So she moved to a town 5 miles away. Awful trash, but I did enjoy it

The Shards by Brett Easton Ellis. I wanted to enjoy it but got bored by all the overly-long descriptions of him driving around. Street name after street name after street name interspersed with song titles.

Hahaha yes, can totally relate! Am currently binge-watching (against my better judgement!) Harlan Coben's 'Stay Close' on Netflix... purely for the brilliant James Nisbett. The lapdance club with huge car park in the middle of a forest in Lancashire or somesuch is another example of cultural mistranslation!

Ah thank you you're the first person I've heard has felt the same. I really love my female friends and the whole central relationship just felt so deeply odd to me that I didn't care about the rest of it.

It's funny, I picked that up in easons, read the back of it and felt instantly weary like i'd been pulled in to some drama that had nothing to do with me and that I really hadn't the energy for. put it back down!

That is a very good description of The Slap! It was very wearing and hard work.

Never by Ken Follett. Just awful.

@PollyAmour I developed a bit of an obsession in locldown with those terrible Netflkix adaptions of Harlan Coben nivles where they made the strange decision to transpose the action to Norther England, France or Southern Spain but not iron out any of the resulting cultural oddness (eg people driving around Nice in massive cars toting guns or state school teachers in small Northern towns living in a huge private gated developments)

This is a lovely refreshing thread - thank you all! I also hated Crawdads, Birdsong and Grown Ups and loads of others. Sally Rooney!! As soon as a book gets some hype around it, I try and avoid it as it won't be for me, but so often I get drawn into reading them...

I liked it but I thought the ending was a real disservice to women's real experiences in Ireland over the last .. century. I suppose there are exceptions to all rules and his book focused more on the experience of growing up gay decades ago but honestly (sorry for spoiler) what young irish girl a virgin of 16 seduces her brother in law. Completely stupid and it made me angry.

I meant to say I did love some of the books mentioned on here, including The Paper Palace and Piranesi.

I so totally agree. It was very opaque and devoid of any warmth. I wonder if this is because it was a bad translation. All my friends love Ferrante though, so I have always wondered if I am wrong.

Ordinary People - it may remind some people of their school/university experience, but all I can say is that what I was not doing at uni was dinner parties and holidays in the south of France. And it was so boring.

That Colleen Hoover book - It Ends With Us? The first one, anyway. It was a book club book, and everyone else raved about it. I got about a third of the way in, on a very long delayed train journey with nothing else to do, and still couldn't keep going. Never mind the relationship issues - I couldn't get past the bits about "I will start a flower shop! Oh look, a millionaire girl just walked in off the street and offered to do my flower shop up for me. Our USP for our flowers will be that they will be wrapped in leather and chains..." WTAF. When you add that to the fact that the first thing the love interest guy does is ask her for a blow job, it was so dire. I get that the point is that he's supposed to be a portrait of an abuser, but the rest of the book was so bad I didn't get that far. Oh, but I did encounter the gay best friend who only existed to find a nice dress and do the heroine's hair.

Someone ,mentioned the Foundling by Stacey Halls earlier. I read that recently, disappointing would be my verdict. I worked in the archive that holds the Foudling Museum admission books and this novel read like the author had been captivated by those and tried very hard to construct a story around them. I can see why, they are heartbreaking items. However it wasn't a very good book.

As an author myself, I try to avoid saying negative things online about other authors' books, as I know how much writers tend to take the unpleasant reviews/comments to heart. But I do make an exception for B A Paris's Behind Closed Doors. It was the most ridiculously over-the-top, implausible, melodramatic portrayal of domestic abuse I've ever read, and probably did a fair bit of damage to people's idea of what domestic abuse actually looks like.

I stopped reading when the police forced the main character back to her evil husband after she'd told them she was being kept prisoner. And the husband's motivation for trapping her and abusing her was just ridiculous - it was about wanting to get control of her sister with learning disabilities because he thought she would be the perfect victim, if I remember rightly. There were so many opportunities for the main character to get away, and she was desperate to do so, but it was as though she was living in a part of the world where she didn't have the right to leave a relationship for any reason whatsoever. It all centred on the flawed premise that she couldn't make people believe she was being abused. This was an intelligent, successful businesswoman who was the legal guardian of her sister, and who had interacted with all sorts of authorities for years, with no history of mental illness, and yet somehow she kept being thrust back into the clutches of her evil, charismatic husband by the police, who were so much in his thrall that they would ignore an allegation of a serious offence and forcibly return a protesting woman to her abuser.

Fool Me Once by Harlan Coben. Utter rubbish, the ending just seemed tacked on, making the rest of the story totally irrelevant.

A Fatal Crossing, heavily hyped murder mystery. Dreadful. Plot holes a mile wide. Terrible writing. Published by Penguin - Allen Lane must be spinning in his grave.

At least mine was a free Prime e-book. Women are being strangled every other day in the neighbourhood. Nobody seems right bothered apart from the horrible, whiny main character, who cleverly spots from all the news reports that they all look identical, and just like her. She points this out to the one police officer investigating the murders. He's impressed. She has a torrid affair with him, then he dies. Her employer, best friend and ex-boyfriend die mysteriously. We still don't know who the killer is, but it's okay because it's probably one of the people who died. The end.

This is SO accurate.

It's funny, I picked that up in easons, read the back of it and felt instantly weary like i'd been pulled in to some drama that had nothing to do with me and that I really hadn't the energy for. put it back down!