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.