what is your 'emperor in new clothes' book?

[MuchLessTiredNow]

what have you NEVER got, although you keep being told it is a classic, etc?

Wuthering Heights, The Cloud Atlas made me want to poke my eyes out, Lord of The Rings.

Couldn't stand:

Catch 22
Posession
Birdsong
Any Martin Amis bleah!
Kut Vonnegut
VS Naipaul
Philip Roth

Not keen on magical realism in general, or Tolkein

But loved:
Perfume
The curious incident
We need to talk about Kevin
The Handmaid's Tale (but couldn't stand The Blind Assasin, bleah)

Zadie Somthing's White teeth.. - no no no
I really tried but couldn't get through the first few chapters.

Oh me neither - the White Teeth thing - I gave it away..

Nooka - Yes! Harry Potter - skip to the end already!

The Bible

(waits to be struck by lightning)

The Great Gatsby is brilliant, and the problem with Lord of the Rings is that you've all left it too late in life to try it.

Some examples of "Emperor's New Clothes" books for me:

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami: Just duuuuuulllll, with endless descriptions of what people are eating, and a thoroughly unengaging narrator.

Paris Trance by Geoff Dyer: a trite load of crap about a bunch of wankers poncing around Paris and doing drugs and having anal sex to show what an Adult Novel they are in. People I respect love this book. They are MAD.

Most book I give 50 pages these days before I decide to throw them.

Agree about Time-Traveller's Wife - 50 pages, plonk.

That Lewycka woman and her sodding tractors - 50 pages, plonk.

And Virginia Sodding Woolf, oh Jesus H Christ spare me. Plonk.

Something which was recommended to me ages ago called Don't Ask Me Why by Tania Kindersley. This person actually thought I'd enjoy it. Full of smug Oxford stereotypes, swanning around being so thoroughly unlikeable that you really hope they are going to get hit by a bike and end up in the Cherwell. There is a great novel waiting to be written about what 80s life at Oxford was really like. Probably by me

I quite like the Bible. God is one of my favourite fictional characters.

Oh, yes, Harry sodding Potter. Have read the first two, have no inclination to go on, thanks. Unlike DW and my friends who do go on about it. At length.

Good decision there UQD. I enjoyed TLOTR when I was younger, but my theory is that if a book doesn't improve on the second read it gets given away. I actually didn't manage to finishe the third volume, which is pretty much unheard of for me (I am a total book worm).

The only book which I wish I had never ever read is American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, which was just really really nasty.

Re Isabel Allende. Anything written before her daughter died; fantastic, beautiful, engrossing, real

Anything written after her dd died. Don't bother. Harsh but true.

I have recently been hoping God might turn out to be non fiction.
Agree about LOTR UD. And The Great Gatsby.

Most of Steinbeck leaves me cold. Except Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday and Tortilla Flat.

One of the things that is really depressing in life is going back to a book that you enjoyed in your earlier years.

I loved Jane Eyre and re-read it recently when DS1 was doing it at school. Big mistake.

Similarly LOTR. Incomprehensible and pointless drivvle. But I loved it when I was 14!

What I did love was a recent re-read of The Midwich Cuckoos and Day of the Triffids - as much as anything to realise how archaic the language (1950s?) is!

But The Handmaid's Tale isn't about Islam/the Taliban; it's mostly an attack on religious fundamentalism in America, about which it is not at all prophetic. It just gives you a big ol' train ride to cultural superiority. Wow, we're so clever and classless and free..... Most dystopias are like this. Be smug, be smug, be very very snug. Mis lit, the lot of them.

it's about what could happen to women under a totalitarian religious government, and it would be wrong to say that it is hysterical, because it pretty much happened under the taliban.

Most of the books people have mentioned I either hated or never even bothered picking up because I knew I wouldn't like them. I can't be arsed with most 'literary fiction' because it doesn;t have any zombies or car crashes in it and rarely anything baring a resemblence to a decent plot.

Particular venom is reserved for LOTR though (and I like fantasy). What a load of twee sexless interminably boring crap for prematurely middle-aged tosspots.

Oh, and Captain Corelli can stick his mandolin up his arse - read about four pages and realised I had forgotten who the characters were already so binned it.

I also hated Samuel Becket when at school - what absolute shite, how can anyone with a brain take all these hours of wank seriously?

Jodi Picoult has interesting concepts for her books but is a shitty writer who can't handle dialogue or characterisation in the least: all her work reads like a bright 6th former's essay on a Contentious Issue.

i just checked out this interview with margaret atwood, and while part of the inspiration for the novel may have been her feelings about religious fundamentalism in america, she may also have been drawing on this experience of wearing a chador in afghanistan in 1978.

you're right about wordsworth, though. pure shite.

Enduring Love- without a doubt

Also, as mentioned:-

Memory Keeper's Daughter
We Need to talk about Kevin
Captain Corelli's Mandolin

But I loved:-

My Sister's Keeper
The Curious Incident
White Teeth

Am I a complex character?

Ugh, Vanity Fair. The voice of the narrator just made me want to punch him. So patronising that I couldn't keep reading (and that's a very serious prospect for me).

Anyone read The House of God? The wannabe doctors at uni were told to read it (I wasn't one of them, I just like books). It is fucking awful. I try not to swear on forums unless it's comedy swearing, but that book deserves it.

Loved The Time-Traveller's Wife though. And I liked Cloud Atlas, although I was a bit for a while at the beginning.

Oh, here's a handy hint. If you pick up a book and the Author's Acknowledgements bit thanks more than one creative writing group, creative writing course, book group or writing teacher, throw it out of a window and run away. It will be bad Jodi Picoult ie even more clunky and join-the-dots plotting with an Ishoo in the middle.