Books to avoid

[Redglitter]

Plenty of threads for recommendations but what books would you advise people to avoid

For me it's 'Her' by Harriet Gray

A total non story with a dreadful ending. I actually thought my kindle had forgotten to download the last chapter. Don't know if the author was running late for her deadline or what but ugh avoid

The Rosie Project

The Lovely Bones

The something strangeness of Lemon Cake.

All atrociously written, boring nonsense.

Also loathe anything by Will Self. His writing is turgid to the point of self parody.

Not hideous, but 'The Beach' was horribly overrated IMO.

I liked Labyrinth by Kate Mosse, but would body-swerve her other books. It would appear there's a reason the first one took so long to finish. Similarly while I enjoyed 'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell', 'The Ladies of Grace Adieu' by Susannah Clarke is best avoided.

I failed to finish 50 Shades (that does not happen often).

I do want to try '100 Years of Solitude' again. I could see it was beautifully written, but I didn't get far at all (kept waiting for the plot to kick in).

I also got a bit bored with 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'. I got to wanting to punch the author / father, which I figured wasn't very zen

I have to agree about Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance - I think it's my least favourite book of all time, though Man and Boy by Tony Parsons runs it a close second. Apparently Zen got turned down by 135 publishers before someone agreed to publish it, and while I normally like those stories about publishers being proved wrong, I think those 135 probably had their heads screwed on.

'The English Patient' - it's beautifully written but precisely nothing happens.

I watched the movie and quite a bit happened. Is it not based on the book?

"The Crimson Petal and the White. I loved the first third of this, it started so well and then just went on and on and on and stopped."

I would add that the moral of the story seemed to be that even the most interesting female character imaginable (like, an intelligent prostitute who writes serial killer novels in her spare time) becomes dull and boring once she gets domesticated and starts caring for a small child

Cant believe nobody has mentioned eat pray love yet.

Haven't seen the film, Cote, but I assume it's based on the book. I just remember reading and reading, thinking that surely something must make it worthwhile soon. It was like reading a very long, gorgeously written poem about paint drying.

eat pray love
that was a right toe curler!

I'd totally forgotten about Zen and the art of being a pretentious knob
I ploughed my way through it thinking I was being mega cool, now I'm older and wiser I tend to give up on books a bit more quickly.

Will I get flamed for saying Pride and Prejudice ? I honestly tried and tried but never got passed the second page.

I did think that The Crimson Petal wore its considerable research too heavily - MF got a whacking great advance, employed a friend of a friend of a friend as a research assistant, and I think got a bit weighed down by the sheer amount of detail she uncovered about Victorian contraception and domestic minutiae, and tried to include it all.

The English Patient was pretty plotty, wasn't it? It's aeons since I read it, but it features war, betrayal, torture, bomb disposal by gorgeous Sikhs, saintly nurses, affairs, attempted murder/suicide, several plane crashes, the death of at least three central characters...?

But there's a big difference between saying a novel is not to your taste and saying it 'should be avoided'.

I don't care for Ian McEwan's shtik at all, and I have no hesitation in saying that Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry is a bad novel - insane plotting, schematic characterisation, complete lack of understanding of London life, or possibly human life in general (though bits are so funny I encouraged friends to read it - AF seems to be a cod-Gothic literary descendant of Virginia 'Twins and Incest' Andrews with added death-kittens), but I'm surprised anyone would say that, for instance, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is a 'bad novel'. You may not like it at all, but surely it's obvious that he can do astonishing things in terms of voice, setting and plotting? They may just not happen to be things that you like, but that's different to saying it's 'bad'. Ditto Wolf Hall.

Maybe the problem with the English Patient is that a lot happens but it doesn't make you care about it?

Lord of the Rings
The slap - my goodness it was tedious with really awful characters - not a single redeeming characteristic among the lot of them.

"It was like reading a very long, gorgeously written poem about paint drying"

That sounds like a really good description of Ian McEwan books, actually I love his writing but seriously, the man has no stories to tell whatsoever. Just lots of brilliant descriptions of people's inner worlds.

My problem with Ian McEwan is that while I think he's talented, I also think he's also unusually limited by his maleness and his middle-classness. Anything I read by him seems to me to scream of an English male middle-classness, whoever and wherever his narrator is. I think that's why I admire David Mitchell, who has (for me) a brilliant ability to throw his voice into anything from future clones to obnoxious Cambridge undergraduates to homicidal Japanese cult members.

Or someone like Colm Toibin, for instance, does a much better job of writing female central characters, with or without children, despite being a childless gay man.

I have just given up on The Blackstone Key, after taking 2 months to read the first 250 pages - I could read that much in less than a day if I really wanted to. It promised mystery and intrigue, but had thus far failed to deliver, while being desperately slow and boring.

The lemon cake one without a doubt. Boring nonsense is what it is.

A Girl is a Half Formed Thing by someone whose names I don't care to remember but was obviously thinking they were being cleverly alternative. It's nonsensical boring nonsense.

Anything by Colm Toíbín. Tedious repetitive female characters based on his mother. (Contradicting a post up thread)

I think Colm Toibin's novels are generally good (haven't read all of them, yet, though) but I wasn't overly impressed with Nora Webster. I didn't hate it, but just didn't think it was as good as it could have been - ever so slightly disappointed by the storyline which seemed to wander about a bit and not really go anywhere interesting.

was the lemon cake about a young girl's sense of smell

that one about Jersey and war time letters, anyone? p sounds I think

Well, doesn't that underline how much of reading comes down to personal taste, then, Wixing?

I really like CT's pared down prose (though friends whose opinions I respect but differ from have described it as 'dull' and 'journalese'), and I don't find his female characters repetitive. I don't think there's much in common between his Lady Gregory, the cold, angry heroine of The Blackwater Lightship (and her manipulative mother and grandmother), Eilis Lacey in Brooklyn, his version of Mary in 'The Testament of Mary) and Nora Webster. Eilis Lacey and Nora Webster share coming from the same place at roughly the same time.

I didn't enormously care for A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, either. Wixing, but I think it's a decent enough debut and interesting things with style, though flawed, mostly because the characters don't develop. It's just not to my taste.

just googled it, Guernsey library and potato pie society or something like that - Mary Shaffer, very dull

To anyone who said Lord of the Rings, I'll raise you The Silmarillion.

I read the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society recently - thought it thin and disappointing.

The bits about the hardship under the German Occupation were interesting but so much of it was padded with silly letters and telegrams from the central character talking about romance and and mooning over various blokes she either fancied or didn't.

Stopped caring about any of them by the end.