Books to avoid like a bookworm on a diet

mkaobrih · 09-07-2009 08:17PM

I really didn’t like American psycho – boring violence and/or shopping - pages and pages on buying a Whitney Huston CD or Bono looking at him in a weird way. Minute detail of getting washed in the morning before work .I did enjoy the movie though – it removed all the boring stuff (and some of the very disgusting stuff).

NickyNin · 10-07-2009 02:30PM

I once read a book written by a father and Son author team about Father and Son Spy team who were up against a Father and Son Baddie team - wonder where they get their ideas??? I can't remember the name but it was awful.

Patricia Cornwell hornet's nest - worst book ever - Her CAT was getting subliminal messages from the building and talking to its owner to pass on the important information. Yes CAT - in fact I believe he solved the case.

The most overrated book I've read is the The Life of Pi - it might have been okay but I don't know what the bit about the flesh eating island was!? :rolleyes:

Anything by Stephen King.

chezzer · 10-07-2009 02:34PM

Cathedral of the sea .... Absolute bull spit ..

Aard · 10-07-2009 05:42PM

Read the Great Gatsby a while ago, and, tbh, not that great.

galactus · 10-07-2009 07:55PM

Aard wrote: »

Read the Great Gatsby a while ago, and, tbh, not that great.

Frankly I agree, it features unbelievable characters:

"The eyes of Doctor T. J.Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of
enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose."

and in the end:

Somebody or someone....goes in a boat somewhere...

What's all that about! :pac:

turgon · 10-07-2009 08:24PM

I didnt get it/understand it/appreciate it at the time - I think I need to read it again. Many consider it the "perfect" novel.

-Els- · 14-07-2009 01:46AM

^^completely agree! Gatsby has to be one of the most (and I hate to use this phrase!) overrated books out there.

The writing wasn't bad in it, but as far as plot or characterisation goes... not great. And for a book thats supposed to emulate class struggle in America it leaves you very underwhelmed and really didnt make that much of an impact on me!

fisgon · 21-07-2009 09:36PM

Aard wrote: »

Read the Great Gatsby a while ago, and, tbh, not that great.

Gatsby is worth reading, if only for the line near the end, 'we beat on, like boats against the current......' ... though i agree that it is a bit overrated. prefer Hemmingway's Fiesta...

as for books to avoid...absolutely anything by Paulo Coelho, awful, risible, psuedo-spiritual rubbish.....Doris Lessing's Ben in the World, actually contains the line 'and they lived happily ever after', with no irony.

There are others......

TedB · 21-07-2009 09:46PM

Hey, Gatsby is a fine book and I take it as a personal affront if no-one else likes it!

I think why people dislike the Great Gatsby is, as someone has already mentioned, it is damn near to being 'the perfect novel'. Every character is crafted for a particular plot role, while the plot is slowly unravelled, a little like a master puppeteer, twiddling at all the strings together to slowly untangle it apart in a moving finalé.

femur61 · 28-07-2009 05:45AM

Shaybo wrote: »

Labyrinth by Kate Mosse - an absolute disgrace that this ever saw the light of day and a real indictment of the media mafia in the UK that Mosse's (who's a literary biwig at the Sunday Times and in the UK in general) book has been so lavishly praised. Bady written, badly plotted and badly edited.

.

Good, because I thought it was just me.

femur61 · 28-07-2009 06:12AM

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova - Couldn't get into this book at all and couldn't wait for it to be out listening to reviews on it.

trustno1 · 28-07-2009 07:15AM

Q&A by Vikas Swarup (slumdog millionaire) awful book and Rachels Holiday by Marian Keyes, couldn't get past the first chapter (got it as a gift) and I think Ulysses by Joyce is hugely overrated!!!..

DJsail · 03-08-2009 11:54AM

No-one has ever read Ulysses!!!!

trustno1 · 04-08-2009 07:15AM

DJsail wrote: »

No-one has ever read Ulysses!!!!

Huh?

VanishingLayla · 04-08-2009 05:19PM

All James Patterson books are complete tripe.

Twilight, obviously, but I suppose that goes without saying.

Deception Point by Dan Brown was very poor.

minusorange · 12-08-2009 10:36AM

Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics by Tony Triglio

Impenetrable crap. Has all the pretensions of the big man but none of his lucidity, passion and verve

minusorange · 12-08-2009 10:39AM

Sammy Jennings wrote: »

400+ pages of self-aggrandising, score-settling, moronic certitudes and masturbation anecdotes from the German Ringo

ZorbaTehZ · 13-08-2009 10:48PM

994 wrote: »

Robinson Crusoe was important in its day, but it's incredibly dull.

But, but, but... that's my favourite book !

14-08-2009 10:52AM

galactus wrote: »

Frankly I agree, it features unbelievable characters:

"The eyes of Doctor T. J.Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of
enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose."

That was a description of a billboard.

MultiUmm · 15-08-2009 07:29PM

For some reason I could never get into To Kill a Mockingbird. People say it's one of the best books of all time, but honest to God I couldn't take anymore by page 90.

I felt like the plot was going nowhere and it was just an assortment of events really.

I might attempt reading it agian, just to see if I'll view it in a different light, but I doubt I'll suddenly fall in love with it.

pinkheels88 · 25-08-2009 08:56PM

Belfast wrote: »

Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented is a novel by Thomas Hardy,
I dreary and depressing book.

LOVE this book! It's a classic

Thomas828 · 26-08-2009 09:14PM

St Ronan's Well by Sir Walter Scott, reading it is like wading through treacle. Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy is monumentally depressing. Shan by Eric Lusterbader, I lost interest in it after fifty pages or so

Thomas828 · 26-08-2009 09:18PM

And as for the books I couldn't be bothered to finish, there's the first Harry Potter novel and Valley of the Horses by Jean M. Auel among others.

Jay P · 27-08-2009 01:59PM

NickyNin wrote: »

The most overrated book I've read is the The Life of Pi - it might have been okay but I don't know what the bit about the flesh eating island was!? :rolleyes:

Eh....NO WAY! I had never even heard of this book when I read it and thought it was absolutely class. Thoroughly deserves whatever praise it gets. Fantastic.

bmtannam · 27-08-2009 02:01PM

At Swim, Two Birds by Flann O Brien....codswallop.
Could'nt trudge through it so threw it aside.

Busi_Girl08 · 30-08-2009 09:48PM

DJsail wrote: »

No-one has ever read Ulysses!!!!

I have, and it was terrible.

And don't start going on about looking between the lines or whatever, it was nothing short of the drunken ramblings of some eejit, who for some reason didn't bother his arse to use proper punctuation or syntax.

Absolutely no point to the story, just 2 men walking around, thinking about people who died and prostitutes.

He covered up the fact that it was badly structured by trying to convince everyone that it was a "puzzle" of some sort.

"One of the greatest novels of the 20th century".

Yeah :rolleyes:

decies · 31-08-2009 12:14PM

Midnight Children .Salmon Rushdie
Threw it into recycle bin this morning.
Couldn,t get into it at all.

teamB_macro · 01-09-2009 09:16AM

i really tried but i can't prod myself to finish catcher in the rye and the twilight books. oh well just gonna catch them on film. but i don't think there's an adaptation of salinger yet

chenguin · 07-09-2009 07:13PM

I have to say I really don't see the appeal of catcher in the rye. I found it really boring.

dr.bollocko · 07-09-2009 07:15PM

chenguin wrote: »

I have to say I really don't see the appeal of catcher in the rye. I found it really boring.

:eek:

I can't even write a riposte.
Just :eek:

Books to avoid like a bookworm on a diet

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