I just read a terrible book

[Orangeis]

Bring me back, B A Paris.

What a load of absolute tosh. A man's partner dissapears, 6 years later he gets with her sister and lives with her. The big twist is.....the new girlfriend is actually the missing sister. He didn't realise this as she had a different hair do.
That's hours of my life I'll never get back. I feel like taking the book in to the back garden and burning the bugger.
What's your worst book and why?

Never by Ken Follett. Just awful.

It's funny, I picked that up in easons, read the back of it and felt instantly weary like i'd been pulled in to some drama that had nothing to do with me and that I really hadn't the energy for. put it back down!

That is a very good description of The Slap! It was very wearing and hard work.

Ah thank you you're the first person I've heard has felt the same. I really love my female friends and the whole central relationship just felt so deeply odd to me that I didn't care about the rest of it.

Hahaha yes, can totally relate! Am currently binge-watching (against my better judgement!) Harlan Coben's 'Stay Close' on Netflix... purely for the brilliant James Nisbett. The lapdance club with huge car park in the middle of a forest in Lancashire or somesuch is another example of cultural mistranslation!

The Shards by Brett Easton Ellis. I wanted to enjoy it but got bored by all the overly-long descriptions of him driving around. Street name after street name after street name interspersed with song titles.

Ha, yes. I was watching one of those and it was about a woman who had to disappear and leave her scandalous life behind, think she was a stripper. So she moved to a town 5 miles away. Awful trash, but I did enjoy it

I adored The Shadow of the Wind!

As a general rule I look sideways at anything being pushed by THAT high street book chain because so much of it is what they think they can sell shedloads of, rather than a good read.

I used to force myself to read a book I had started but don't bother anymore.

I think that goes back to old style Eng Lit studies at school and university. We knew Shakespeare, Chaucer etc. were likely to be hard work just because of the language, and that from a cultural POV you would need to meet their work more than half way. But somewhere along the line that morphs into ‘You’re not allowed to say ANYTHING bad about set books or classics because they’re GREAT BOOKS and you KNOW NOTHING’. Force feed your brain enough stuff it can’t emotionally engage with and you stop enjoying reading. ☹️

I sort of lost the plot with my reading choices once I got past adolescence. Too much dross around and too much marketing, bit like TV. I studied English at uni and contemporary literature was my least favourite part of it. Too many naked Emperors. (Totally agree about the overrated Woolf; also see James Joyce and Samuel Beckett).

I think a really interesting dissertation topic might be the role of commercialism and modern marketing on contemporary novels, and whether the literary prize circuit is an accurate gauge of quality or just one big round of upmarket salesmanship and promotion.

Stay Close. That was it!

It's decades since I read Birdsong but IIRC the first wee chapter has some quite sexy sex in it and then the rest is being shot at. Wonder if the shagging blinded other people to the rest of the book.

Most people who talk about Birdsong haven’t read the book; they’ve seen the film.

Not remotely intellectual and pretty old now but I thought 50 Shades of Grey was utter shite! Terribly written. The character (I forget her name) was always blushing, sort yourself out girl, and Christian was described as having long fingers - ergh! Made me think of the Reeves and Mortimer characters 😂

I absolutely loved American Pastoral by Philip Roth… as a recommendation!

I can't remember the name or the author but I was after a who dunnit that wasn't bloody or violent, more a good story with lots of twists. This had a beach on the front cover and revolved around a young woman coming back to her hometown by the sea to investigate the murder of her best friend. You guessed it, she was the best friend after all and wasn't dead. I guessed it quite soon in.

There was one character in Birdsong whose death did make me slightly teary. He was the main protagonists's friend. He was an alcoholic virgin, and then he died, if I recall. But other than that I was generally meh about the book.

Agreed, 50 Shades is utter trash, But then again, it never pretended to be anything but. I skim-read it just so I could join the conversation.

Jamie Dornan eased the pain of the movie adaptation 😆

Lord of the Rings- The Hobbit was ok at first as a book I read as a kid, but the the whole thing is just tedious to me and seems to only appeal to middle aged blokes who never grew up!

Oh God yeah, Where the Crawdads Sing just really didn't make any sense and was so stupidly implausible,

The Lovely Bones and The Time Travellers wife. I could never be bothered to finish either of these- both make no sense to me!

I loved The Lovely Bones, but I think I can see why some people didn't.

And all celebrity biographies are dull- most people have boring lives and sound even more dull on paper than in real life. esp. Dawn French

I love them
Not a bloke though😁

I tried to read The Hearts Invisible Furies twice, bloody hell it was so badly written and don’t get me started on the 7 year olds discussing sex in adult voices..awful, no future attempts will be made.
Where the Crawdads Sing had some beautiful descriptive writing but just so implausible. The main character has no hairbrush, shampoo, toothpaste, washing powder or decent nutrition living in desperate poverty but somehow manages to have long lustrous hair, beautiful skin, posing about in sparkling white dresses…give over. These glaring errors spoil books for me.
For the most disappointing book I’ve ever read I give you Shrines of Gaiety. If I had commissioned Kate Atkinson to write me a book this would have been the storyline but it is bloody terrible. Cliched, laboured, repetitive, weak characterisation and full of ridiculous co-incidences. I can’t believe it was written by the same person as her earlier books. Gah!

The Thursday Murder Club - thought it was going to be ok, but then the ending seemed so contrived and was so convoluted about which characters did things and why. I just got confused.

Michelle Obama's - Becoming - doesn't she love herself and how hard she worked to get where she is? And I thought she tried too hard to make Barack sound like the perfect husband, when he actually seemed to be quite self centered.

Another one here who thought the Richard Osman books were awful. Big disappointment. He needed a tougher editor.
Also read three prize winning contemporary books that were dreadful - I really don't understand the criteria for these prizes.

I’m going to brave it even though I know MNs love JK Rowling
But
Very disappointed with The very long and drawn out ‘The Deathly Hallows’
If you only watched it on tv and thought it was dragging, reading it was worse

Think she must have felt forced to turn one book into two