I have just read possibly the worst book in the world

[Mrsrobertduvall]

A Cold Season by Alison Littlewood.
Disclaimer...I bought it in Smith's on a buy one get one half price, and grabbed it as the cover looked good.
It's about a mother and son marooned in a small Lancashire village with unfriendly locals...a bit Wicker Man-ish. And of course there are witch/devil undertones.
It is utter tripe.
It is now in the charity shop for some poor sod to buy.

Oh yes, Catch 22 is a good one, I have never got past the hospital either, in fact I didnt even know he got out of hospital until you said that!

And RichMan, my mate worked on the set of the Game of Thrones movie thing and is urging me to read it, but the very cover of the books put me off, so you should have known what you were getting into!

Anyone mentionned Jools Oliver's pregnancy book? Fuck me, but that was dire!

Sebastian Faulks - A Week in December. I hoard books, and this was the first one that went on ebay. Absolute twaddle by a middle aged author trying to be cool and edgy. The literary equivalent of Michael Douglas' pullover club dance in Sliver. Ugh.

PS Catch 22 is fantastic, but if you really can't get on with it try Something Happened instead.

glasto oh....maybe he doesnt get out. In that case, I wont bother. I'm not very good at static novels.

re GoT, I have enjoyed it- his plot and character development are great (albeit too much back story/pontificating). However, I just now want it to end, and to find out who gets to be the King. I am running out of characters I care about who havent been killed off yet.

Oh I've got another one, 'Divine sisters of the Yaya sisterhood', god how I hated that book.

Eat, Pray, Love................................................dire.

marymermaid, I made my mum read that just before we took a trip to Rome, it almost put her off going!

I loved the Yayas

One Day was a lot of meh to wade through for the small reward of an interesting twist. Wouldn't recommend the film either. It's not an improvement.

Room was just about OK until they escaped and it descended into drivel. The Slap was just awful, likewise Labyrinth. Gave up on that and donated it to the charity shop where it will no doubt ensnare some poor unwary sucker

Agree with the point upthread about Stephen King being brilliant when he's on form but dire when he's not. Lisey's Story springs nimbly to mind. I also thought someone should have reined him in when he sent the proof of Under The Dome to his publishers.

I have a lot of other non-recommendeds on my to read shelf.

clearly must start exercising discriminatory faculties when entering charity shops rather than taking chances because it's cheap

One Day, truly unbelievably awful.

Just speed reading the second half of the bloody Ukrainian Tractors drivel, just because I hate not finishing a book, approx one minute max per two pages, so I just need half an hour or so.

lots on here I agree with!

I have never ever not finished a book, I struggle painfully to the end, but at page 375 of 800 and something I decided that Crimson Petal and the White had beaten me and that I was pleased I only spent 99p in the Oxfam bookshop.

Madame Bovary is going the same way, but I will struggle through because I like Emma despite her incredible shortcomings.

Anonymous - I rather liked the Ukrainian Tractors novel :), but didn't think too much of another of hers - We Are All Made of Glue. One Day was OK, but not great - certainly wasn't worth all the fuss made about it.

mixedmama - I read Madame Bovary when I was a teenager and even then I thought she needed a good slap. I think I might put it on my re-read list and see whether I've changed my opinion of her :).

One Day's first chapter was promising. But I was bamboozled by the fact they graduated on the same day as me. It just got worst after that though.

Any celeb pregnancy-motherhoody type person should be outlawed by means legal or otherwise from writing about it. FFS, you had a baby, guess what? So did we! Just because yours is a vagina with a rich husband attached to it doesn't mean we need or want to hear about it.

99.9% of the "treading olives into the Tuscan earthy overhanging lemon groves and picking olives and putting up with hilarious bureaucratic blunders and being presented with vats of homemade specialities by toothless black clad widder-wimmin" books.

Agree with many of these but nominate Twilight. Could not finish it and I'll read pretty much anything. What garbage!

I agree that Emma Bovary is eminently slappable but nevertheless, as a portrait of a marriage, I think it's one of the best books I've ever read.

Madame B is a total cow and a whingeing self-obsessed cow at that. However it was a brilliant book so I forgave her. Anyway you can't stay angry at someone who comes to such a dreadful end.

Most recent dodgy read I dragged home from the library was 'The Haven Home for Delinquent Girls' by Louise Tondeur.

It was badly written and the storyline was bollocks, main characters were all weird and irritating and the plot was sketchy at best.

The author also seems to have somewhat of a lesbian obsession but really doesn't write female relationships well which was tough going

Any one read (haha!!) Ambition by Julie Burchill.
If you haven't don't bother.

Another much lorded but virtually unreadable book. I give you one single sentence, plucked at random from a Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell:

Running westward in front of the door, a metalled road continued into open country of a coarser sort than these gothic parklands - fields: railway arches: a gas-works: and then more fields- a kind of steppe where the climate seemed at all times extreme: sleet: wind: or sultry heat; a wide territory, loosley enclosed by inflections of the river over which the smells of the gasometer, recalled perhaps by the fumes of the coke fire, would come and go with intermittant strength.

Every single sentence in the book is like this.

It goes on like this through a twelve volume cycle of novels .

margo ah but it IS at least a 12 book cycle of reasonably slim books. At least they aren't all LOTR style doorsteps.

I've always wanted to give Powell a try but I think he's firmly on my 'one day if I'm really really bored' pile.

Have always avoided Henry James since uni days, but I do have Portrait of a Lady on my shelf waiting to be started. I gave away Moby-Dick without even starting it, though, & felt no shame in the process...

Madame Bovary is definitely back on the re-read list :).

Talking of Henry James I was dragged through Portrait of a Lady at university, Christ it was dull.

If we are allowed books from uni, The Faerie Queen nearly drove me to Despair. And don't get me started on bloody Beowulf!

Madame Bovary is great though, and I actually like Thomas Hardy.

I downloaded Madame B onto my kindle a couple of weeks ago. It is a very very fine book, simply brilliant, despite the fact that Mme B requires a sharp boot up the backside. I can't wait to read it again. In fact, I've just finished the bloody Ukrainian Tractors today so maybe she is up next. I need to step things up a bit after that.

Other drivel? I read the opening sample of something atrocious today - it was recommended on the MN book list yesterday - 50 Shades of Grey. OMG what utter tripe!!!!! It was with great pleasure that I deleted it immediately. So contrived and so poorly and predictably written, like Mills and Boon on steroids, uber-trash factor, and I only had 10 pages or whatever... the mind boggles as to how low the rest of the book might stoop.

All chick lit should be made punishable by death.

Skippy dies is improving. Might survive until the last page.

I like Thomas Hardy too.

Ditto Dickens, Brontes, Austen.

It's contemporary fiction I struggle with at times - and fuck me there's so MUCH of it! So much is self-consciously 'clever' and zeitgeisty and so badly written and the characters so dislikeable.

Jodie Picoult does not rock my literary world. Formulaic and 'issue led' to the nth degree.