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?

@Kanaloa agree. I lived in Utah for a while and became friends with lots of mormons. The book suddenly makes sense when you read it from the perspective of that religion.

And the Native American characters being described as smelling bad and being unpredictability violent? Hmmm….

Isn’t it so weird that dressing it up with vampires glossed over all the weirdness of it altogether? I can’t imagine removing the vampires and parents hearing their child is reading about a girl who is obsessed with marrying and having sex with a boy she’s just met and is obsessed with, along with a comparison of native Americans as animals and a literal confederate soldier on the side! But make them vampires and it’s cool?

I do still agree with the pp that said they were rubbish though! Badly written and dull with no character development. But still interesting to read with an adult eye and an understanding of the author’s beliefs/motivations.

The book I hated was Less, how on earth did it win a Pulitzer?

Night Library and Miniaturist were so disappointing.

Nine Perfect Strangers is by some measure the worst Lianne Moriarty, her others are better.

I also hated Conversations With Friends, all the characters are deeply unlikeable.

HyggeTygge I love your username!

I can’t think of anything that was “terrible”, just stuff I didn’t like.
I read Hideous Kinky several years ago (Esther Freud) and remember finishing it and thinking “is that it?” It just felt like nothing really happened.
I gave up on “All the Light We Cannot See” as, again, I just felt like nothing really happened.

I can't do fantasy or sci-fi at all, fiction has to be pretty grounded in reality for me and I find most 'chick-lit' horrendous. Horrible term but you know what I mean.
Someone lent me Rivers Of London having raced about it but the inclusion of ghosts just put me off.

beguilingeyes I was really annoyed by the inclusion of supernatural nonsense in The Hunger and The Terror. The real events are scary and horrible, why introduce some stupid magical element?

A good friend recommended The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. She raved and raved about it so I bought it. Absolutely hated it. I have no idea why I ploughed through to the end - but I do remember thinking at the time - well x said it was brilliant so I should keep going as it's clearly going to get brilliant. It never did. She loved everything that I hated about it. I have never told her though. Vampires featured heavily.

I loved this book! I read it when I was about 15 though which was probably peak age for appreciating gothy dark tales.

Came back to read through and have remembered so many more books I didn't like.

JK Rowling – The Casual Vacancy. I have come to the conclusion I just don't like her writing. I tried a Cormoran Strike one as well, didn't like it.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - if you're going to write a book in the form of letters, then the letters at least need to sound like different people wrote them. I'm a huge fan of historical fiction, especially WW2 historical fiction, and this one was just...not good. Felt like it was ok to pass the time if there is literally nothing better to do. I can't believe so many people loved it!
Kristen Hannah – i read The Great Alone and really liked it, so then read The Nightingale. Disliked it for all the reasons posted in the Goodreads review someone linked to a few pages back. Terrible. I then tried another one - it was in fact and arc from Netgalley, and was about the great Depression and in particular the Dust Bowl in America. Lots of very modern attitudes in it, which jarred - but it was like she read the Wiki page about it and then spewed a novel round those facts. Terrible, predictable but not realistic. Won't bother with any others.
All The Light We Cannot See - I wanted to like this. But I didn't. It was just boring. So turgid. I didn't feel anything for the main characters.
Anything by Ishiguro I want to love, but just don't. I don't like the style - very flat.

I was conned into buying a book by Stephen King - no, not that one - someone who had craftily inserted a tiny R in between Stephen and King. It wasn't terrible, but it was blatantly obvious after less than a paragraph it was a different person!

I love all the hate for A Little Life. I can't stand it either. What a load of toss. Literary misery porn with ideas above its station. Two friends of mine asked if I wanted to go see it on stage with them. I was momentarily tempted to go purely to see James Norton, but quickly realised even he wouldn't be compensation enough to have to engage with A Little Life again!

The Colour of Water in July; some nice bitsof prose here and there but otherwise so predictable and obvious. Jess particularly annoying and stupid.

I'm still a bit cross about The Island (that Hislop woman) as we were flat broke when it came out and I scrimped and saved penny by penny to get it, took a loooong time. It was utter crap, writing so bad a two year old could tell you a story and make it more interesting.

@jux that was my pick earlier on in the thread. I couldn’t believe how bad it was.

Didn't like his latest one in the series, Last Devil to Die. Gave up not even one quarter of the way. It's his style I dislike. Childish, as if he's talking to senile people.

Coming late to this comment but agree with this. I LOVED Woolf when I was 18 - now 69 and got Jacob's Room and To the Lighthouse out of the library a few months ago to rediscover the magic I found.

Both went back as DNF. Life's too short, frankly.

Not read To the Lighthouse but struggled through Mrs Dallaway and thought the same .

I love To the Lighthouse. So moving. “Mrs Ramsay, Mrs Ramsay - to want and want and not to have”.

See I loved Mrs Dalloway.
Orlando baffled me but I put that down to a lack of intelligence on my part.

Currently ploughing through Insomnia by Stephen King, dullsville.
Stopped in the middle for The Grapes Of Wrath...just watched a documentary about it...I love Steinbeck.

I still have the Penguin edition of Orlando I bought when I was 18. After my experience recently with Woolf I'm contemplating whether it deserves the shelf space.

OTOH, I love her lit crit and essays.

I've always been a bit ambivalent about Woolf. I enjoyed and admired To the Lighthouse and also Mrs Dalloway. But I'm not sure she deserves her reputation as the female writer of the 20th-century. Personally, I find Anita Brookner's prose more beautiful. I also think Hilary Mantel as great a stylist. And as for ideas, I'll take Iris Murdoch over Woolf.

I sometimes wonder if people are more attracted by her world than by her writing. The same is true of Oscar Wilde. Both lived in, and wrote about, a world of wealthy, sophisticated bohemians – the sort of people who live in beautiful georgian town houses and have 'luncheon' parties, where they smoke expensive cigarettes and discuss Shakespeare and Walter Pater and so on. For those of us who spend our lives jammed on crowded new estates, where people talk mostly about work and sport and their new car, it's kind of refreshing.

I sometimes wonder if people are more attracted by her world than by her writing

Oh yes I think so. I like Woolf but I between her aesthetic experiments and her mental illness some of her books don’t come off and are rated more highly than they deserve - The Years, Between the Acts, The Waves.

Part of her contribution to literature is as a feminist, a personality, an essayist, diarist, letter writer etc.

Personally, I rate Katherine Mansfield more highly has a writer. But she died before the age at which Woolf wrote TTL. Mansfield is less popular as she is not UMC British and short stories are a less feted medium in the U.K. than in say France and the US.

Girl gets key. Guard unlocks it. He talks to the girl. It's very strange and mysterious. Bees. Corridor of Portals. One speaks. Other listens. 🤣

Did Erin Morgenstern write that Night Circus book?

God that was boring! I was slogging through it then luckily I read a review on Good Reads which confirmed my feelings and warned me it didn't get any better, so gave it up.

Sophie Hannah used to be great but I also read The Orphan Choir and totally agree with you.

A glutton for punishment, I then read , A Game for all the Family....I don't think I have ever read such bilgewater in all my life. It was gaspingly terrible.