I've tried Anthony Powell repeatedly and never got anywhere.
I tried Harry Potter and was staggered by how pedestrian it was.
I have learned through experience that all books written under the influence of drugs are profoundly tedious. And that includes Hunter S. Thompson.
I recently read a Peter James thriller having heard it enthused about on Radio Four and was shocked how terrible it was.
I didn't expect the De Vinci Code to be good but I thought it might be diverting and not jaw-droppingly dull.
I thought Piers Morgan's diairies were invented.
Kingsley Amis's journalism makes me laugh but I only laughed once during "Lucky Jim" and that was the bit about the mouse and the hangover.
All contemporary political memoirs are rubbish apart from Matthew Parris's.
The average rock and roll memoir of today is put together from Google and tarted up with a few drugs references.
I need to lie down now.

Acclaimed and popular. I get to the end of page one and gave up.

1. Take that underwhelming, story-thin 75-page novella out of your drawer. Copy every couple of paragraphs and paste it in again a couple of paras down. Then again. And again.

2. Place your cursor at the end of every sentence. Hit the carriage return twice to create a new paragraph. Look, ma! Before it was a page; now it's a chapter!

3. Every four or five pages, find a long sentence and gradually cut it down, as if you were chopping a carrot. Find a long sentence and gradually cut it down, as if you were chopping. Find a long sentence and gradually cut it down. Find a long sentence and gradually cut. Find a long sentence. Find.

4. Repeat the above steps throughout. Leave no phrase unrepeated - if possible, several times.

5. Cross your fingers and hope nobody notices you're riding on the back of your earlier, deserved, success with the Red Riding Quartet and The Damned United.

Scratch, scratch.

Spook Country - William Gibson - got about 50 pages into this garbage before I threw it out the window

Saturday - completely over-rated, I absolutely hated it and ended up casting it aside, what a load of pretentious rubbish. I'll be giving him a wide berth from now on.

Da Vinci Code made me laugh out loud, such was the absurdity of the plot and the execrable writing. My mum threw it across the room...

I don't get on too well with Dickens either, all those bloody stupid names just irritate me.

I've always liked the idea of the Gormenghast books, but when I get to about page 50 of the first one I suddenly remember that I need to purge radiators. This has been happening a regular intervals for about 35 years. Should I keep trying, or is this the Grateful Dead of fiction: you either get it or you don't?

I know he is well received in 'these quarters'. The Rotters Club seemed like a great idea - set in my city in the years I was in my late teens. The historical background ie. Red Robbo and the decline of British Leyland etc sounded like it would have been a good prop for an interesting novel. Quite the opposite - the quality of the writing was GCE level English at best and the characters were not memorable at all. I am sure Jonathan Coe has written a good book but this one wasnt it.

Da Vinci, 25 pages binned (sorry recycled)

Haven't read "Saturday" but just finished "Atonement" and "On Chesil Beach" which were both amazing.

How about "Zen and The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance" new age wank before new age was actually around

Not read any of his thrillers but Peter James's "Dead Simple"
was a great Stephen King type of beach read. I like the Inspector Grace series.

Harry Potter was tedious but then again it is for kids (isn't it??). Give me Biggles and Algy anytime (yikes).

I never got more than a few pages in before I wanted to slap the author. Ye Gods, what a ruddy pseudo-intellectual show-off tosser. That's my best considered analysis, you understand, my gut reaction involves gratuitous violence.

...taking Gertrude Stein's interminable work of experimental prose - Three Lives on a long train journey from Ho Chi Minh city to Hanoi. After the first few pages I realised that there is a good reason why you never see this book on sale in airports, however I had no other means of entertainment and so was stuck with it.

As I see it, the main problem with Three Lives lies in Stein's insistence on reporting every last bit of mundane nonsense that comes into the heads of her characters and her willingness to repeat this nonsense. Ernest Hemingway appeared to attempt a similar style in Across The River and Through the Trees. I found that tedious as well. You would have to stud both of these books with precious stones before I would consider rescuing either one from a cleansing fire.

He needs a thick ear, that kid.

Should come with a dice.

1 - throw book away
2 - give book to jumble
3 - ebay book
4 - recycle into arse wipes
5 - compost (provides browns apparently)
6 - read first chapter and then shake dice

So very, very awful.

It's about philosophy. It condenses western thought into a couple of hundred pages. It's unmitigated shite.

Tried to get into it twice couldn't stand the characters so stopped around page 30-50.
see also Catch 22 (war is bad who knew), Midnight's children (aids restful sleep)

Would agree with a comment made earlier on Ernie, the fastest milkman - sorry - the most tedious writer in the West. Specifically Farewell to Arms and Snows of Kilimanjaro. Never made it past the first 30 pages of each so technically I haven't read him at all, so I'm not being fair.

But I couldn't bear either so over the shoulder they went.

The worst book I've read recently (or should I say got 2/3 through before throwing it away) is A Year in the Merde by Stephen Clarke.

Supposedly a witty, fictionalised account of the author's time in France, it's actually a badly written, unfunny, cliche laden load of old tosh, full of every stereotype you can imagine.

Merde sums it up.

..or he knows where the bodies are buried. Kill Your Friends is bloody awful. If you are looking for an insider's thinly fictionalised account of the music industry, go for Kevin Sampson's Powder or Robert Calvert's account of the career of one Tom Mahler, both of which are far superior to this dreadful faux-nihilist bucket of pants. This time last year I was relaxing on a sun lounger with the latest works of Will Self and Philip Bryer, both of which shat on this terrible ego fest in spades, which is a shame as I was really looking forward to it, based principally on the thoroughly entertaining podcast he was on. Giles Smith, or even Wilbur Smith it ain't. Bobbins, unpleasant, tedious.

I made it through all 12 volumes of A Dance To The Music Of Time and I do think Powell could turn out some great prose. However, it's a work of the most appalling snobbishness, where the real crime of the 'villain' Widmerpool seems to be that he's not 'one of us' (ie the upper classes).

Thumbs down also to Captain Corelli's Mandolin - I managed to tolerate most of it only to endure one of the most silly, pointless endings I've ever read. And to Harry Potter: only read the first one, but was put off by the sheer dullness of the style. The fact it's a children's book is no excuse - The Narnia books are brilliantly written (even though I'm very uneasy about some of C S Lewis's ideas in them).

I had heard great things about Ken Kesey, enjoyed "One Flew Over..." (the fillum, natch) so invested a few pence in "Sometimes a great notion" second hand, read about 20 pages of the first chapter and reckoned that as it was a thick book with tiny print and so far had singularly failed to ignite any interest, it was a fools errand to persist. Closing the book I noted that the previous owner had amended the title on the cover so that it read "Sometimes a great notion (sometimes not)"

I could only agree...

I read one of his books, not the Fight Club, the one with the interconnected horror stories and found it to be complete and utter rubbish.Badly written , poorly structured and downright ugly.
I have an elderly neighbour who loves the whole Harry Potter nonsense but he´s quite mad.
I tried to reread the Lord of the Rings a few years back and found it to be complete tosh. It was great when I was a teenager but now it´s just mind-numbing piffle.
Oh, and that Brett Easton Ellis American Psycho is utter crap, too.
Right, here´s me bus

I quite liked American Psycho and could easily empathise with how his appalling taste in music may have driven him over the edge. If you accept it as an exercise of style over content, it works quite well. Film was tosh.
Surprise, surprise: LOTR tosh, and Harry Potter likewise.... Good thing they didn't write books of Starwars as that too would have been equivalent piffle, and I suspect, troll-like, that Disc World will be similar claptrap. Science fantasy, do they call it? My dogs can write better books with their arses.

I've tried many times to read LOTR and after watching the films again, I decided to give it another go. I spent a very reasonable 99p on eBay for a box set of 7 books (each book divided into 2, plus the appendixes) and started book 1, 'The Ring Sets Out'. I'm on about page 200 and have given up again.

Somebody help me out here. Why did it win that best books ever thing on the BBC a few years ago? It's dull. Nothing happens.

by Paolo Coehlo makes a satisfying fluttering-flappy noise when you throw it off a ferry into the Adriatic.

Over the last 4 years or so I read every one of the Potter books to my son at bedtime and my conclusions were:

1. So bloody longwinded
2. She really lacks a sense of wit - great opportunities for humour not taken and anything 'funny' wasn't
3. So hard to read (especially out loud) - use of unneccessarily long words, tedious sub-plots, overly complex plotlines many of which are red herrings
4. When I hear parents proclaim that their 6 year old is reading one of them, my reaction is 'Yes Yes, aren't they bright, but if they are getting real reading pleasure and understand what's really happening then I'm Stephen Fry'
5. The film screenplay writers must have run of of red ink with so much crossing out - gawd help them with the penulitimate book/film
6. I am not sure they'd have been half as popular without the film series
7. My son loved them and it was a great father-son thing to have done, but boy am I glad it's over.
8. Didn't Joanna do well?

I've read a few of his and while I liked The Wasp Factory, Walking On Glass and The Bridge (although I was very young when I read those), increasingly (eg, in The Crow Road and Dead Air) he seems desperate to 'be' the cool young dude he presumably felt he wasn't in real life.

is to skip over the bits you find unbearably twee (Tom Bombadil) or dull (or both). Of course this might mean you skip right to the end, in which case do the same with the un-ending appendices.
Though my favourite bit is in death of Aragorn which is in the appendices not the book proper.
And never mind the bleeding Silmarillion.

On Harry Potter, I think the problem is that people confuse popularity with quality. Good luck to JK, and if she had sold say 100 000 books in total people would not slam her for not being Shakespeare. They are kids books.... (as is LOTR if we are honest).

I prefer Iain M Banks to just plain Iain Banks these days. At least you know what you are going to get with Space opera.

By Mark Haddon

Gave up by about page 40. Boring. Very boring.

Watching a bad film is easy. Disengage the brain and passively sit there for two hours (and read a magazine if it's that bad). Reading a book is too much work to waste the effort on something bad. You can't read passively and it's going to take you at least six hours to get the thing finished. I realised that it just wasn't worth it and I have become hard-core about not reading bad books.

I must have got caught up in all the hype – particularly from The Guardian (were they on a retainer?) – and bought Zadie Smith’s ‘The Autograph Man’ when it was first published. I saw it through to the end, but realised about four or five pages in that it was complete rubbish.
I clearly hadn’t learnt anything for the experience because I then bought ‘On Beauty’ which was equally poor.

...which was truly dire, even if a nice idea. Written too soon and too quickly.

Well I quite enjoyed the book whilst on holiday in the states (dodging tornados in Indiana and all that) - ALTHOUGH I am biased as I was taking part in the filming of it last week at Elland Road - got all star struck working with Colm Meany (Don Revie) and Michael Sheen (as Cloughy). Look out for me when its out in 2009, I'm the one with the authentic 1974 Gilbert O'Sullivan grey flat cap (with button on top) - lovely!

by Evelyn Waugh. Decline and Fall and Scoop, both wonderful novels, didn't prepare me for this which I found cold and generally unappealing. Wouldn't strictly say it was terrible but I just could not enjoy it after reading the other two above.

Again this is an unfair, unfounded prejudice but I normally steer clear of any novel with a cover photo in soft focus of a guy on a bike or a girl in silouhette chasing a ball or a kite or something. Especially if the cover blurb mentions the words 'elegiac','uplifting', 'loss' or 'redemption'.

I am a silly old Hector.

Can I just say that I really liked it? Yes, the writing is execrable. Yes, the plot is ludicrous. Yes, it's historically fanciful. But otherwise it's a fantastically well-constructed page-turner, with cliff-hangers ahoy, an exercise in literary manipulation.

So I finished it feeling slightly grubby, but having loved every page.

Foucault's Pendulum is very excitingh, Davinci Codfe 20 years earlier with added wit, plot, mysticism and terror. Thye Name of the Rose very good too. His last two, VERY bad.

A huge critical success about 10 years back, and absolutely dreadful on every level. It was either badly written or translated from Peter Hoeg's original Danish by a computer (significantly, a translator isn't named). But you can't blame the translator for the jerky plotting and utterly implausible action - at one point the 'ordinary' heroine is hanging off the outside of a supertanker by her fingernails in the midst of an Arctic blizzard!

Conversely, I'm a huge fan of Anthony Powell and won't hear a word said against him...

I tried really, really hard with "The Possibility of an Island" and, on reaching about page 80, realised it was a load of old tosh! No, make that pretentious old tosh.

This is a long one, Missus.

I might have kicked this off but the original idea ain't mine, as already said.

Seems fair to point you to Mr Liddle's original article and the various similar comments of Times readers at:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/...

His books are all a thousand pages long and involve someone called Miss Innocent being led astray by a Mr Bastard with the unwitting help of a Mrs Bumblepants. Oliver Twist when read as a child made me despise everything from the 19th Century for years.

Stephen King is another, every damn book is about a writer in peril. Come on man! Have a new idea!

Virginia Wolf, God I tried. Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, Orlando, her unbearable snobbishness kills every word.

Salman Rushdie. Apart from Midnights Children and The Satanic Verses. They were good enough to make me attempt Fury, The Moor's Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Utter shite the lot of them.

And Martin bloody Amis. Sorry folks, Money was crap. So John Self signs a dodgy contract about seventy pages in (which is easy to miss and don't think I can't spot when a writer is trying to slip one past me) and tricks poor writer Martin Amis (only twats appear in their own books apart from Kurt Vonnegut) into writing a crappy film, WHO CARES?????

God that's got a lot off my chest!

Britains biggest selling living author?

was it just me or was this "state of the Nation" masterwork just another American style soap opera not that far removed from Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susan

The world's slowest whodunnit and by the time you got near the end there was only one person left alive who it could have been. Then we never found out why he did it. That's about 6 hours of my life I'll never get back.

Severed by Simon Kernick - all action and precious little content.

Not Dead Enough by Peter James - I simply don't believe triplets not even brought up together are so identical as to be able to fool partners after 40 years.

I quickly returned to masterly works of James Lee Burke, only to find that his last book was a collection of short stories levered out from other books I'd already read.

Now reading Fury by G.M.Ford; "great ticking-bomb suspense" - Harlan Coben is says on the cover. 2 for £5 in Tesco.

Sebastian Faulks. I think there was praise of this up there somewhere. I've enjoyed his other stuff but this was one I only barely managed to finish. Tedious story told by an unlikeable unreliable narrator.

Iain Banks, on the other hand - Wasp Factory, ok, The Bridge, beautifully done, Walking on Glass, pretty good. Haven't been able to stomach the rest - and as for Raw Spirit, take out the petrol-head stuff and the self-righteous political bollocks and the rest of it's not bad. Shame that only leaves a couple of pages.

Mmm, I feel better now.

... by Kazuo Ishiguro. Does the title refer to the poor bastar*s who struggle through to the end. I mean ... what is going on? Has anyone out there made it to page 535?

Underworld by Don Di Lillo (or something similar) - dull. Also not fiction but so dry I gave up on it was Naomi Klein's No Logo, I have a brain, I can read, I don't need someone to tell me that Nike are good at marketing. More fool me I 'spose as I knew it was about this but god it's boring.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins. The first book in my life – and I had reached my mid-30’s by that point -- that I hurled across the room. I think I made it about fifty pages in before I realized that it was the very epitome of literary masturbation. What’s worse, I'm convinced Robbins thought it was an act of masturbation as well. And that he thought that was a Good thing, and that he was awfully clever, wasn't he? I’m quite sure I would hate anyone who said this was their favorite book. And, in fact, I came to loathe the person who recommended it to me, though for completely unrelated reasons.

According to the Word podcast this thread has been 'burning the wires'.

Hurrah!

I was only joking. I quite like 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union' really...

was very painful to read it was so bad. The reviews lied.

Martin Amis has only written one book I've enjoyed - his memoirs which felt like he was simply communicating and not trying too hard.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin - tried a couple of times to get past page 12 and failed. Awful, awful book.

Kill Your Friends was like a novelty hit - the gimmick being lists - lists of bands...lists of people working for record companies - none of these were integrated into the story and it began to grate.

I've never got Rushdie either. Never tried Dickens but I do love a bit of Jean Paul Satre!

Now, I think it's about time I reread Espedair Street having loved it a decade ago and thinking it was the best 'rock novel' I'd read.

Most of my least favourites have been mentioned already, but bear repeating.

I like crime books and Brighton was the town of my youth, so put the two together and you get...Peter James, staggeringly pedestrian cops 'n' robbers that thinks street names qualify as local colour. Just begging to be made into Sunday night TV.

Gormenghast: bought for me by my Dad as revenge for the JG Ballard i bought him. The book that broke the back of my 'I've started so i'll finish' policy.

Kinky Friedman: you shouldn't be able to go wrong with a Jewish cowboy country & western singer-comedian private detective so i bought two trilogies on recommendation. Still haven't got past the first part of the first one. Reads like it was written by someone playing a character.

"Kill Your Friends was like a novelty hit - the gimmick being lists - lists of bands...lists of people working for record companies - none of these were integrated into the story and it began to grate."

Thanks for that Dannyboy3000 - I was on the verge of buying this but you've confirmed my sucpicions.

Having only just subscribed to The Word newsletter and been alerted to this thread, I was worried when I'd got so far down into it that nobody before Jim Thomas had given The Corrections a shoeing. Misanthropic load of old toss - see also Vernon God Little.
I'm sort-of with Dannyboy on Corelli; just as I was about to give up, it suddenly gets infinitely better around page 70 and the rest is "There's something in my eye" reading. A few friends feel the same in judging it as a slow start/great otherwise.
The Line Of Beauty was ferried very quickly to my local Barnado's.

It's alright for you lot, at least you can choose what you read and pack it in when you get fed up. The Book Club i'm in regularly picks the most awful overwritten floral rubbish and the worst of the lot is 'Love Is Strange' by Joseph Connoly. If the jacket cover pictures of his whiskers doesn't put you off, you'll be trying to claw your eyes out by page 10. Try this for size:

"But wait: hold. The cord of my memory is tugging me elsewhere. There is an obstacle now that I am very aware of........all my face is throbbing to the bone, and now I am conscious (as conscious as I can be, now and for the last time as I continue to lie here quite uselessly)of a man hovering above me who I have seen here before......etc bloody etc. Ponderous or what.

Hang your head in shame man.

Zadie Smith's work is like a lot of that by writers favoured by the trendy media set: a couple of good scenes, a few nice turns of phrase, but a lot of pretentious references to issues favoured by the academic crowd and plots that fizzle out into an unfeasible mish mash of the coincidental and irrelevant.
It goes like this. Someone takes a shine to a new writer because they've got the right personal background for marketing, have latched onto the right social set, or because they want to get into his/her underwear. They then make a big fuss about what a great new talent they have found and many of the broadsheet/Radio Four/consumer press crowd are eager to jump on the bandwagon. When the books appear they turn a blind eye to failures such as clunky plotting, weakly drawn characters, and long passages of turgid prose. This can also apply to writers who have produced one or two good books but have dropped the quality control from their work.
The result is lots of media coverage, lots of promotional support in the bookshops, and good sales to people who think they ought to be reading it because it's meant to be quality work. You can get away with this over half a dozen books before people realise you can't write.
Who could find anything in 'On Beauty' apart from the self-satisfied academic/literary types it was about?
Nowhere near as good as a supposedly more down market writer like Ruth Rendell.

Some one has commented on drugs & alcohol not adding to literary skills. But I tried Bukowski and may be he thought his books read great because he was wrecked at the time, but they are dull and self centred.

White Teeth would have been so much better if half the book had been cut out. Same goes for anything by Dave Eggars. Good editors seem to be in short supply these days. Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith is abysmal. History lesson bolted on to a plot that James Patterson would have rejected as far fetched.

I have tried and tried and tried to read this clasic but I have never got past Page 10!!!! Too much detail about characters and it makes me put it down and do something less boring instead! By the way I make a point of revisiting Holden Caulfield every 2 or 3 years and, yes he is annoying, but it is one brilliant piece of writing!

I read a Michel Houellebecq novel, and it was so bad I can't even remember the title. I seem to recall it was set in Lanzarote, the rest I've blotted out.

Also, a book called 'Horribly Awkward', about modern British comedians and the comedy of discomfort ( Sacha Baron Cohen, Little Britain, Ricky Gervais etc. ). Nice idea for a book, but it over-explained some things and insulted the intelligence of the reader as a result. There were some bad mistakes, too, that stuck out like a sore thumb.

To be honest, though, if I'm reading a book and not enjoying it, I won't waste my time hoping it'll get better - I simply drop it ( not literally, that would be wrong ) and move on. Life's too short to read books you don't enjoy, and won't learn anything from.

I've started Yiddish Policeman's Union twice and not got on with it (loved Kavalier and Clay + Wonder Boys, not got round to Summerland or Wolves of Pittsburgh yet). So I'm confused, Andy, should I give it a third try because it gets better or is it the irritating, smart arse, hard to follow tome that the first thirty pages suggest?

Not read 'Kill Your Friends' which a lot of people seem to hate but the same author's (John Niven?) novella about 'Music From The Big Pink' in the 33 1/3 series is terrific.

The most overrated novel that I can recall reading recently was the last but one Salman Rushdie. A friend tells me there's a good bit buried in it but I didn't get that far. I like crime and have recently given up on books by Graham Hurley and Peter James, both of which came highly recommended. I'm coming to the conclusion that any best selling British crime novel is bound to be rubbish (I'd except Rankin, but he sold sweet FA for the first seven or eight Rebus books).

The Ghost - I should've have known better - I haven't enjoyed any of his previous efforts - he's the new Jeffrey Archer.