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 and I found Perfume very creepy and repellent. Never re-read it.

One reader's creepy & repellent is another's original & and edgy

I am a big fan of J G Ballard, who has some masterpieces with strange subjects & plots like Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition. Especially the latter is so twisted but so absorbing that I found it hard to come back to the real world after reading a couple of pages.

I quite liked Interview With The Vampire when I read it 20 years ago, barely out of my teens. I probably wouldn't find it as interesting now but it is nowhere near the worst book in the world. (That is what we are talking about, isn't it? Not just books we didn't like).

As an immortal, vicious & inhuman predator that observes and kills humans for thousands of years, Lestat is a deeper character with more interesting things to say than Death in The Book Thief, for example.

Re The White Masai, I haven't read it, but I did read the sequel when she goes back to Africa and goes on a tour to Kilimanjaro. I read most of it with my mouth open. Truly awful stuff (and I say this as someone who lived in Kenya and married an African, and so I was very disposed to be interested). Awful, patronizing towards Africans (the darlings, how they sing and smile despite their poverty!) and the stilted writing ever. All we learn about one her companions on the tour was that she had a wide selection of toiletries. It was so bad that I got a perverse amusement out of the whole thing.

The Slap!!! Worst book I have ever read. It was so hyped and I was bitterly disapointed.

cote: "The Island had an interesting premise but was very badly written."

Just wanted to say how much I agree with it. The historical bit - the island for lepers - was fascinating as an idea for a story but the book as a whole was dreadful, really poorly written with two-dimensional characters. Am amazed at the number of people who rave about it.

I loved the Ukrainian Tractors book - she now has 3 others and I love the latest too. I also love Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's books (One Half of a Yellow Sun and others).

I thought One Day was overrated and one Tony Parsons book was more than enough for me, ever.

Cote I have read some JG Ballard - High Rise & Super-Cannes - very intriguing and prescient of recent events, all the stuff to do with gated communities & rioting - but they were uncomfortable reading and not books I'd want to re-read.

JG Ballard seems to buck the idea that writers who produced disturbing works must be disturbed themselves - he seems to have been a decent person and much loved by his children who he raised alone after his wife's death.

On the other hand - Anthony Burgess, a writer whose work I love, but hard to like as an individual. Not sure I'd want to have been in a lift with him.

""Sepulchre by Kate Moss is about 10 times worse than Labyrinth too. Quite dreadful."

No, not possible, surely? It would defy the Laws of Physics??"

Having chuckled my way through this thread I would love everyone of you who hated Labyrinth to go and read Sepulchre, just to see the explosion of profanities that would follow.

And can I please ask why they jeff Sebastian Faulks hasn't been mentioned at least 20 times on this thread? The man cannot write for toffee; he is dire (although I once saw him speak and he actually compared his writing to the greatest of classical symphonies)

Also Philippa Gregory. I am ashamed to say I do like her books in that I love historical fiction and the plots always hook me in, but dear god her writing is drivel. My teeth ache if I go anywhere near The Other Boleyn Girl (but fascinating subject matter).

marshmallow - Ballard has written some of the strangest books I have read and loved, but as you said, he was a single dad who lived an ordinary life in Shepperton - took his children to school, then came home to write. His autobiography Miracles Of Life is brilliant - from his childhood in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai (like he wrote in Empire of the Sun), to the home birth of his children, to the exhibition he curated in which he showed some crashed cars (and got the idea to write Crash). All so singular, and written so brilliantly.

Super-Cannes is interesting but not his most intriguing book. I would really recommend his short stories in Vermillion Sands and The Atrocity Exhibition that starts with this sentence:

"A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition - to which the patients themselves were not invited - was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses."

And it gets better from there

Another one for Labyrinth by Kate Mosse. So, so bad, it took my breath away.

David Nicholls, One Day. Not bad in the same way as Labyrinth but just a bit rubbish. I didn't warm to the characters at all. I can't believe it has become to so popular.

Sincere question: Do you need to warm up to the character to like a book? If so, why?

I keep seeing this sort of comment on Amazon's readers' comments page, and find it puzzling. I have read and loved books about serial killers and psychotic mental patients. As long as the book is interesting and well written, do you really care if protagonist is an unusually disturbed person whom you wouldn't be friends with?

I mean, there are only so many books written about nice people in everyday circumstances.

Sebastian Faulkes - haven't read his fiction, just "Faulkes on Fiction". Was left spluttering with indignation at his belief that Pride and Prejudice is about D'Arcy's emotional journey.

CoteDeAzur, I'd want to be interested in the character and what they do.

If it were a serial killer as the main character I'd want there to be something to read about their reasonin, thoughts on other.

I don't lik books where the charcter isn't understandable or unbeliveable.

Ultimatly I supposed I want character development in the main ones!

Hmm, now that you mention it, my favourite author is Barbara Pym, and a big part of the appeal is identifying with her characters. I certainly like books where the main character has a flaw (eg. E.F. Benson's Lucia and her appalling snobbery) but I do like the protaganist to have redeeming characteristics. I can't think of many books about serial killers etc that I've read and enjoyed.

I'd like to add "The little Friend" by Donna Tartt. I adored and loved and worshipped "The Secret History" but this book is the most awful snoozefest!

regards characters
they need to have depth, range and develop as story evolves.don't need to like character but there needs to be an interest in character
in too many books feel like writing by numbers, and certain authors their style irks me.Ian mcewan I mean you

Moln - I agree with you that main characters need to be developed well enough to be interesting and for their motivations etc to be understood.

That is not what I understand from "I didn't warm up to the characters at all" or "I didn't like the main character so didn't care what happened to her". These sound like they expect the author to make the main character likeable.

That is what I was asking. Do many people here actually expect the main character in a book to be likeable - i.e. someone they would invite for dinner?

The Birthing House by Christopher Ransom was badly written and I swear the author had made up three or four different endings, couldn't decide which one to use and so mixed them up and used them all. It made no sense from start to finish but the last few chapters were impossible.

After the Party by Lisa Jewell was so horrendous that I immediately searched the house for copies of her other books and donated them all to the charity shop for some other poor fool to suffer through. I liked her earlier ones but they were getting successively more shit and there was one hugely irresponsible and inaccurate bit in ATP that finally pushed me too far.

With regards to liking a character, one of my favourite books is The Collector, and there is nothing likeable about that main character but the book is fantastic. If I say I didn't like any of the characters what I usually mean is that I found them bland and unbelievable and that I just didn't care about them, what they did or what happened to them next. The main character in The Collector is awful and I didn't like him but I cared very much about what he did next and could hardly put the book down in my need to find out.

CoteDAur

I think some people do, I think it's harder to think you like a book if the main character isn't likeable, because you feel negative feelings about the book due to not liking the character (explained that well didn't I- there's a reason I'm not a writer!)

I'm trying to think of a book where the main character isn't likeable, the only one that springs to mind is The Slap, and a lot of people say they hate it (also bit problem with that book is you are made to not overtly sympathise with the innocence of the child - makes people feel bad!)

Can't think of another at the moment

How about Hannibal? Main character is definitely not very likeable.

I struggle with this view because most of the characters in my favourite books are not particularly nice people, hence not terribly likeable. That is probably because I avoid books about nice middle-class people living their nice likeable little lives with their nice little children. I mean, that is the life I live 24/7, why would I want to read about someone else living the same life?

That rules out all chick-lit, and pretty much all books written by female authors and for a female audience and male readers don't seem bothered about likeable characters, which might be why books written for them don't have that constraint.

These are my 'why did I bother' list of last years reading;
The Catalpa Tree - odd story!

Room - left me cold!

Twilight - I read them all and enjoyed them but when DH asked what they were like the best description I could come up with "mills and boon" but with biting!

Life of Pi - found it really hard going but stuck with it to the end.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - read it all waiting for it to get good but it never happened!

Got you back - dragged on a bit but harmless enough.

Currently reading The house at Riverton and am waiting for 'the event' to happen, if I can stay awake.

Think I'll let my son pick my books for me in future. He always comes up trumps!

Definitely agree that characters can be unpleasant or repelling and yet still compelling to read about - think of Lolita or Brighton Rock.

Or a whole cast of characters can be annoying as hell and yet still compulsive - The Corrections.

Trying to think of a character a bit more complex - Emma by Jane Austen - based on the authors own statement, you're not MEANT to like her, except of course Jane in a typically Janeite way wants us to find her heroine charming and captivating in spite of ourselves. I didn't, though - when I first read the book I thought 'what a nasty cow' and it was my least favourite Austen book for years as a result. Now I have realised I can love the book without actually having to like Emma herself.

A slightly more lowbrow example - Rupert Campbell-Black in Jilly Cooper books: are women supposed to think he's a loveable rogue type that you oughtn't to like but deep down you really do? I don't, I think he's an idiothole, and whenever he cropped up in the book I wanted to stop reading. (I was only reading it because a friend insisted I had to read it & lent me her copy).

Non-likeable character - Tarquin in The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester. Absolutely adore this book.

Nickname - The Debt to Pleasure is wonderful. Am always pleased to find a fellow John Lanchester fan. But the thing about Tarquin is that although he's a bastard he's a very funny clever bastard, which is what makes it so enjoyable.

I'm a bit funny about The Great Gatsby. I know it's a classic. But I find it hard because the characters are so unlikeable. I know you're not supposed to like them, that they're supposed to be spoilt and superficial and unpleasant, and that's the point, but it makes it awfully hard to care about what happens to them. And I think you do need to care a bit if you're going to enjoy a book.

As for The Little Friend, I'd agree about it being a struggle. I couldn't understand how someone who had managed to produce such a page-turning first book could write such a turgid second.