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Macavity:
A list thread, yes, but with a novel fucking twist. I hate everything today.
My Legendary Girlfriend by Mike Gayle. Trite, badly-written, fatuous pseudo-relevant trash which claims to speak for a generation of late-twenties men, but which in reality does nothing but add to the heap of purulent boils which pass for popular literature.
pebble:
An obvious target maybe, but anything by Jeffery Archer. I know alot of people say that as a knee jerk thing, without having read him, but I have and its all true (except for those people who say he's great).
Oh yeah, and I thought the end of Couplands Girlfriend in a coma sucked major ass. It was all ok, until he threw in this sci fi, fantasy ghost time travel bollocks.
Rothkoid:
Hmm. Well, oftentimes, I'll get most of the way through a book and will have to practically flail myself to get through it - I just can't bring myself to quit on something I've invested a couple of hundred pages'-worth of effort on. And so it was, more than any other title, with Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. Goddamn. That book shat me to absolute tears: it's cod-Kafka with a bit of touchy-feely navelgazing thrown in. Does he play the piece? Will anyone connect with anyone else? Would they know if their collective arses were doused in petrol and set alight? Probably not, and I wouldn't care anyway. I should've known better to buy this thing from the throw-out table at a bookstore sale, but you know - literature idiocy springs eternal.
And Stephen King's The Tommyknockers. Cockknockers, more like. Ditto a whole chunk of his output, frankly. The saving graces are few, if any.
z3r0:
Anything by Paulo Coelho
sleazenation:
'Prozac Nation' By Elizabeth Wurtzel.
grant (replying to z3r0):
Ach! You wound me!
ephemerat:
Breakfast in Brighton by Nicholas Richardson. 'A wonderful, seedy, vivid account of Brighton life'.
Apparently.
And I had such high hopes - Daily Telegraph journalists are usually the living embodiment of seedy. Unfortunately this book suggests that they are also the living embodiment of smug, conservative, dull, small-minded, self-indulgent wankers.
It's firmly fixed in the whole 'when I was a student I was so bohemian that many of my friends didn't even have proper jobs' genre. It's 'Withnail and I', but impotent, neutered and teetotal.
This book should have been stowed in a sack full of bricks and slung in some stagnant, midnight canal to sink and rot.
Kriztalyne:
more overrated than bad but Girl, Interrupted did little for me.
z3r0:
Believe "me", Paulo Coelho is just a smart "salesperson", dumbing down the "enlightened" with "obscure" passages in bad-spelled "books", who, if pressed to clarify some of said passages, will try to hide behind pseudo poetic phrases and "mumble" about higher "truths" that the ordinary aren't able to "fathom".
Yes, I "like" quotation "marks".
Nick Jordan:
Anything by Mercedes Lackey. Trite, unimaginative fantasy of the worst kind. Every character's just so bloody nice it makes me heave. I'm surprised there are no elves, although the sickly-sweet girlies on too-intelligent horses more than compensate for the lack. In a word, eurgh!
adamswish:
(re: Girl, Interrupted)
as far as I remember I liked this book, but it was brought during the time where I was getting the novels "trendy" mags were recommending.
Not so much hated books as those I gave up on:
alan moore's "voice in the fire" (the pre-language in the first chapter made my mind bleed and I had to go for a lie down);
clive barker's "imajica" (the majority of the dimensions blow themselfs up half way through the book {which had been a great read up to then} and we suddenly return to normal old human life).
I must admitted hating the ending to "red dragon". For some reason it felt like it had been tacked on the end the way a bad film draws itself past it's natural conclusion.
Sunday:
I haven't finished it yet, but the Fountainhead sure is contending...
(why am i going to finish a 700+ page book that I hate?)
I also nominate "The Ecstasy Club" by Doug Rushkoff. Horribly written, thinly veiled celeb cariactures, and even worse than his non-fiction.
Flunitrazepam:
Books that blow, hm?
Kill Me First by Kate Morgenroth belongs on that list. The book is about the adventures of fifty-year-old kidnapee turned sex goddess. It's a crime thriller written by a woman who probably doesn't know the difference between a revolver and a semiautomatic. Oh, and if that's the main character on the cover, then she bears a striking resemblance to the twenty-something author herself.
Of course, the world has no shortage of cheap knock-off artists and poseurs. If you're looking for condemnation of a great literary figure, I'd nominate James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was an agonizing chore to read and nowhere near as interesting as later stream-of-consciousness narratives like Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.
Lothar Tuppen:
Any of the psuedo-shamanic crap that Lynn Andrews publishes.
Can you say 'fabricate'? I knew you could. 
Jackie Nothing Special:
I haven't read it yet, but a definite possibility is the new Shadow of the Dolls, a supposed sequel to the brilliant, legendary Valley of the Dolls. Shadow is written by Rae somebody, apparently based on notes for a screenplay sequel written by Miss Susann before she died. I'm not sure if I should run around screaming that this is a travesty and hold public burnings or get a copy and devour it in one sitting. Decisions, decisions...
Note: point not in its favour is the preface saying that so as to give it a contemporary setting, 'liberties' have been taken with the ages of the characters. Aaargh! No, no, no! Who wants to see Anne and Neely today? Half their scandalous problems would be completely trivial now. Yes, this book is utterly despicable I think. And yes, I am probably going to buy it this weekend. |
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