I just read a terrible book

I didn’t love the book, but to be fair it wasn’t that he has going to visit her sister, it was that he was going to imprison and torture her.

😐

A Slow Fire Burning.

More like a slow plot burning with boredom. I only read it a few weeks ago and can’t even remember who the killer was in the end.

Agree with PP who said Into The Darkest Corner was a terrible book.
Badly written, one dimensional characters - who act to further the plot rather than in any logical manner - and gratuitous sex and violence.
However as I found out when I posted a one star review on Goodreads it has a fanatical following.

You're spying on me!

HotSauceCommittee I think that was Peter James, not Peter May, and my recollection of the plot is pretty different...

The Absolute Truth by Peter May. A lab chimpanzee types a comma after a letter and leaves a space before doing some more typing. This is supposed to prove God exists and we are supposed to give a fuck about it.
I didn't finish it. Absolute bollocks.
YY to the Colleen Hoover domestic violence novel and Sally Rooney's crap.
That Sophie Kinsella character needs treatment, not novels written about her.
I love The Secret History, though.

Every generation thinks it invented sex...

I wrote a dissertation on a Victorian celebrity who shagged around a fair bit in her youth and ended up advertising Pears soap as an extremely respectable woman in her later life so it can’t have been a tragedy for everyone.

As an aside re BA Paris, Behind Closed Doors was good if you could suspend your belief system. A woman who socialises regularly and has loads of opportunity to tell people she’s been kept as a prisoner, never does and no one is alarmed when her husband keeps following her to the loo. And she’s too scared because apparently he will go and visit her sister or something. Weird.

I think that’s the point of Jane Eyre though - a tedious woman meets a total twat and they fall in love because they’re both so awful

Yes and one intervention cures her alcoholism! It’s a wonder other alcoholics don’t use this approach

this post contains spoilers for the Time Traveller's Wife.

The reason i loathe it is because the writer makes him make a big deal about how important his feet are to him. So of course, he gets frostbite and loses one (or both?)

I don't mind so much that he watches the wife grow up, but it's a bit of a conundrum. Does he watch her as a child because he knows her as an adult, or does he groom her?

But mostly it is the utter irresponsibility of getting pregnant completely against his will, knowing he arrives naked and has often been attacked and even raped. And blithely gives birth to a child - a daughter! - knowing that she may carry the gene. Absolutely awful awful woman. And no judgement from the author, just she's right and he's wrong and the poor child just has to put up with it.

Hahaha your synopsis made me chuckle OP 😂

Shit books I’ve read lately:
Dont Let Him In by Some Bloke
All Your Perfects by Colleen Hoover. It wasn’t badly written it was just really, really sad.
Elenaor Oliphant - cannot fathom why this is so popular. It’s awful

I found it a very difficult read, so many characters and I was forgetting who they were.

Did people frown on teen sex in the 80s? Passed my school by

One Day in December. People were raving about it, but it made me so angry. She falls in love from making eye contact with a man who drives past on a bus. Obsessed about him for a year like an absolute psycho then used that 30 seconds of time to justify betraying her best friend in the whole wide world. It wasn't romantic at all, just really stalkerish and the audio book characters were smug and annoying. I ended up shouting at them when I listened to it in the car.

But to get back to books ....

So many that have been mentioned on here that I agree with:

Hated A Little Life so much. Only finished it because my daughter had insisted I read it and we normally have similar tastes. Thought it was bleak and depressing, and unbelievable.
(Conversely though I found A Fine Balance, which is a similarly bleak tale, gripping and memorable. In some ways it worked better for me because it uses characters as cyphers to reveal the atrocities and misery inflicted upon the people of India during the mid 1970's making the historical facts come to life. Not sure I'll ever read it again though - it's not an easy read.)

Also hated:
The Alchemist - dull and rambling. In this case The Emperor definitely has no clothes.
The Island - Read this on Crete staying opposite the Leper colony island of Spinalonga where it is set, and even this didn't save it! Shame really because the central conceit of using Spinalonga could have led to an outstanding novel, it's just this isn't it!

The Time Travellors Wife can't remember why I hated this - it wasn't the main character lusting over his wife to be when she was a child particularly, I think I just found it tedious.

I did think Birdsong was good though - more the war bits than the French set affair at the beginning.

Never Let Me Go irritated me, because of the narrators voice more than anything.

milkman I persevered with but it never really grabbed me.

Piranesi I quite liked, it was certainly atmospheric, but I was waiting for a clever ending to make sense of what had gone before and it didn't come so I was ultimately disappointed.

Which is why most Architects can’t stand grand designs
Kevin McClouds inaccurate use of terminology and ‘cutting edge design’ term, when it’s tech that has been used for ages. Just grates too much.
However, I’m very into history and enjoy things such as Downton ( a modern Upstairs Downstairs) because these sort of programmes are an escape.

If you can ever get hold of a copy, this book offers a fascinating insight into sex in the 1920s. It's a collection of letters received by Marie Stopes when she set up the UK's first "family planning" clinic, and the chapters are divided by social class and profession e.g. lower/middle/upper classes, clergy, military etc.

I'll never forget the desperate letters from a farmer's wife with at least a dozen kids whose doctor had told her another child would be the death of her, but refused to explain how to avoid pregnancy. Her brutal husband insisted on sex whenever he wanted it, anal rape if she refused.

There was a commonly held view that if the common rabble found out how to practice contraception, morality as we knew it would collapse and there would be open fornication in the streets.

Mind you, the Daily Mail would have us believe that's exactly what has happened 😁,

See what I did there, back onto books!

In times gone by people were free to start shagging as soon as an engagement or promise of marriage was made, particularly in rural areas. That is why a broken engagement was such as disaster.

I didn't mean to derail the thread by criticising Titanic!

I know people have always done daring things out of wedlock, but... the way she runs squealing with carefree delight around the whole film, like having sex is no big deal. It was a big deal. Even if she knew the ship was going down, I can't see her behaving that way.

Rates of teenage pregnancy were far higher in the 1980s than they are now. Things being 'socially unacceptable' doesn't mean they weren't happening. A significant number of Victorian brides were pregnant on their wedding day despite the Victorians being notoriously prudish about sex.

I don't like it when films will use historical glamour without taking on any of the attitudes.

I do agree it can get annoying in some circumstances.

There a certain type of historical romance that uses Georgian England as a backdrop with little social or historical information and more dukes than ever existed - that doesn't bother me personally as its a fun quick read with no serious intent.

It does bother me when it claims a more realistic situation with actual historical people or situations - and there it can really irritate.

I mean sex was happening. It wasn't a complete outrage until they found out who the father was.

Well, yes! It wasn't exactly a positive story for her