Has anyone started to read a book and realised that they HATE it with a vengeance before the even finish the first sentence??

The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Thingie. Given me for my birthday by mad auntie. The first book EVER that I gave myself permission not to finish, having persevered to about page 100 and still loathing every minute. I shiver at the mere memory. Still, the option of actually (gasp) not finishing a book is a useful one to have so it was an important lesson to learn

And for the James Joyce haters: have you never read Dubliners? Can appreciate not liking the others, but The Dead is just beautiful.

(Full disclosure: I did one of my dissertations on a chapter of Ulysses and DH bought me a first ed of Finnegans Wake for my wedding present so I am a card-carrying FAN. But can recognise why not everyone feels the same.)

Oh God, Margaret Attwood. Have never mustered up energy even to open that one which stares out of bookshelf accusingly.

I didn't get passed about page 5 of the Blind Assassin by Margaret Attwood. I really don't give in easily (ploughed through the first half of Kevin whilst not really liking it) but this was too much.

Maybe I will try again one day.

Just looking at the bookshelf and next to the Attwood are some Anita Brookner books my MIL gave me - books to make you want to jump in the blardy Hotel du Lac is you ask me.

I quite liked Lovely Bones though

Book of Dave sounds shit. (My friend has bought me a ticket to go and see Will Self with her and i really don't want to go.)

Yes Madamez,Lord of the Rings crap. Yaaaaawn.

Also Captain Corelli's bloody Mandolin. Cow dung I tell ye, cow dung.

I have just read an extremely irritating and patronising book about some knob who goes to work in Bangladesh (as my dh has just done so) which made me so angry I am going to hunt the fucker down and tell him how awfukl it was.All about him, him,him,dealing with amusing yet tiresome little Bangladeshi fellows and trying to procure alcohol.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - unbearable pile of wank.

Middlemarch - confirmed George Eliot as my most hated author. I struggled on for about 8 pages as was supposed to read it for my BA, but just couldn't do it to myself. Got into a row with my tutor who was an Eliot nut

Haven't read the whole thread so perhaps this has already been covered, but have you ever started a book, realised it's complete jank but still felt compelled to finish it anyway? I must be some sort of textual masochist, so many times have I done this. Clive Barker's Coldheart Canyon is one particularly bad example - I read it with a mounting sense of incredulity that such a badly written, cliched, sentimental gush of vomit could have come from someone who used to produce half-decent work, yet somehow couldn't tear myself away. I was so incensed at the awfulness that when I finished I threw it (hard) into the bin.

MarmadukeScarlet I know what that book is - it's somewhere on my bookshelf. Will find out if you REALLY want to know - I really like her other books but that one was pretty depressing...

One to Barnstaple on American Psycho. I HATED that book - didn't even want to give it shelf room and had to take it back to charity shop after I'd started reading it. Really wanted to throw it away but old habits die hard and I couldn't do that to a book, even one I loathed. I have read others by him and although they didn't rock my world they didn't irritate me to the same extent. i just felt it was the equivalent of sex & shopping but with a bit of torture thrown in for effect.

Ah yes, Captain Corelli. I tried, I really tried but I couldn't get past the first ten pages.

Captain Corelli. What was the point?

The Heart of Darkness. Hated it. I usually cannot start a book and not finish it but that was the exception.

Some ghastly thing called Christopher Unborn.
Ulysses (I knew I hated it but perservered to p360 - I am incredibly proud of myself; every word was torture!)
Any Jeffrey Archer or chick lit
French Lieutenant's Woman
The Island - loved the story, hated the execution; puerile, empty, pointless. Never bother with Hislop again.

GooseyLoosey and Flamesparrow: did you find that reading American Psycho had an effect on you? DH read it first, and he was horrid - short tempered, impatient (not violent!!) - all the time he was reading it. When I read it I noticed it was making me like that too!

Can never get on with anything written in dialect or rubbish made-up languages - stand-up Irvine Welsh, Clockwork Orange and the latest culprit - "The Book of Dave" by Will Self, which sounded like a great concept (diary of a London cabbie found 500+years later and mistaken for religious text) but COMPLETELY UNREADABLE, and I refused to let it clog up a further precious minute of pre-baby mat leave!

DV Code = monster-rubbish.

I agree entirely with what Rue wrote further down:
That Labyrynth book by Kate Mosse.
The Traveller's wife
And yes yes to Da Vinci code.
Fortunately my book group didn't do the Da Vinci Code but DH and I read it once out of horror - it takes four hundred or so pages of improbabilities before the light of morning arrives.

Oh thank God, a chance to get it off my chest! Amazon won't publish my review for some reason. In fact, there's two: Lessons in Calamity Physics - in the bin. Pretentious crap. And PS I Love You. The worst book ever written in the world ever but i haven't read her other ones so suppose I might be wrong there.

Ahem. I love Ulysses - that description of the Guinness bottle caked with sand has always stayed with me...
I lurved Donna tartt's Secret History but have never read page of The Little Friend too creepy. Hated Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner was a drag, adore Wuthering ..

I'm about half way through The Other Boleyn Girl - not really my kind of thing but I'm enjoying it; it rattles along quite nicely.

I read the first page of The Book Thief and thought "oh, I'm not going to like this," but I stuck with it and loved it by the end.

Worst book ever - like many others on this thread - The Da Vinci Code. What a pile of appallingly written, derivative crap.

I gave up half way through Elizabeth Costello - which is further than I'd have got had I realised up front that it was going no where and would never improve.

Famished Road was a load of pants, too.

Tried a Philippa gregory once, wasn't keen.

The worst book I ever failed to read was Julie Burchill's - 'I Knew I Was Right', I think it was. Really stupendously bad opening scene.

Oh, I have no guilt about not reading things I don't enjoy - don't really understand why one should feel guilty, tbh. I did read a couple of Bret Easton Ellis books, but just ended up thinking he was an arse... DWP, it appears we have differing tastes! Just could not abide Cloud Atlas - struggled through a couple of chapters, and then my retinas attempted to self-detatch with boredom. I'm not what you'd call a patient person!

Oh, god, yes, Ulysses. What a load of rot!
I even tried to read it drunk and stoned, as it was compulsory in an English class I was in.

I'd like to mention a Booker Prize Winning Novel AND be really pretentious about it..
BUT..My "couldn't get on with" book was Jordan's (umm.. yes Katie Price') first effort ..I thought it might be quite interesting because of her son Harvey.I WAS WRONG!
And yes before the end of the first sentence I thought..
"trust your instincts here,back away from the till"

Oh! I know. Paul Auster.

Couldn't get it in the suitcase. Shame.

I like WH too. And I LOVE Illywacker and Oscar & Lucinda, but the Kelly Gang and that one set in a hotel in Singapore about a journalist and an artist - god, that gave me bad sinking feeling but I carried on regardless. It was very dull.

I'm trying to think of a book I stopped reading recently. Holidays are good for this because then you can pretend you can't fit it in the suitcase.

Elizabeth Costello by JM Coetzee

it was so bad it made me ANGRY

And wuthering heights is one of my fave books ever