For many years, in my youth, I refused to read Anthony Powell, simply on
account of the way he pronounced his name. “That’s as in Pole, dear boy,” I
imagined the Old Etonian saying chidingly. You cannot be a good proto-commie
and enjoy Anthony Powell, I thought to myself in my frowsy bedsit,
surrounded by garish SWP posters, Tom Robinson records and the collected
works of Marx and Marcuse. You could call it a question of upbringing, I
suppose. Instead, I would sit myself down with Edward Upward’s trilogy The
Spiral Ascent, a hideous and rightly forgotten stab at Marxist literature
that can be read now only as unwitting satire. I either didn’t know or
didn’t care that Upward’s middle name was Falaise, and that he had been
educated at Repton. Maybe I thought Repton was sort of okay, because
Isherwood went there too, and he was a good comrade. I think you should be
allowed a degree of inconsistency, or stupidity, in youth.
It was a long time later that I came to read A Dance to the Music of Time. I
was in my mid- to late twenties, I think, when almost all of my adolescent
ideological misapprehensions had been cast overboard. And I can remember,
halfway through reading the novel in the sequence titled A Question of
Upbringing, flinging it aside and thinking: well, son, you were wrong about
Marxism, nuclear weapons, radical feminism, council house sales, positive
discrimination, Tony Benn, the Soviet Union, Gramsci and Edward Upward, but
by God you were right about Anthony Powell. What ineffectual, pointless
drivel.
Powell’s name came up an awful lot as I importuned a bunch of writers and
hacks about books they had read that now, when mentioned, make the red mist
descend. Books that made them angry just thinking about them; that were once
clotted with extravagant critical praise, like the butter surrounding the
tiny crustaceans in the potted shrimp at White’s club, or that sort of
sprang from the collective consciousness of the metropolitan elite of the
time and that everybody felt they had to read. And that, from either
category, we now realise are close to worthless.
Many mentioned Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and
Carlos Casteneda’s interminable drug-soaked hippie ramblings, which I
thought I was terribly cool to be reading as a kid. Luke Rhinehart’s The
Dice Man scored heavily, too, and the names of Colin Wilson and Mervyn Peake
were invoked with a sort of guttural sneer and one or two expletives on
several occasions. Yet two names kept cropping up when my respondents were
asked for the misbegotten stuff of serious literature, the people who still
today have a reputation: John Fowles and Anthony bloody “Pole”.
This was an interesting, if not entirely scientific, exercise. For many, it
provided the opportunity to wallow in what we might call antinostalgia; the
shaking of the ageing head and the muttered “My God, were we stupid enough
to fall for all that claptrap?”. Like remembering you’d once purchased a
Uriah Heep record, or sported three-button high-waisted Oxford bags with a
cheese-cloth shirt. The columnist Catherine Bennett chose “the entire Virago
imprint”, bemoaning the fact that, for political reasons, she had felt
duty-bound to plough through Rosamund Lehmann and the like when there was
Philip Roth waiting there, unread. James Delingpole struck a chord with “all
magic realists, especially Gabriel Garcia Marquez” – there were one or two
votes for Sir Salman, too, especially Midnight’s Children. Meanwhile, the
historian Michael Burleigh suggested all “angry” black novelists (along with
Herbert Marcuse and EP Thompson). Here’s a bunch of stuff we were all told
we had to read by the political and cultural climate of the day; because it
would be good for us and because, way beyond this, it was our responsibility
to start patronising writers from minorities because it was only the
oppressive white male cultural hegemony that kept them in an ethnic- or
gender-defined ghetto.
Well, no. Looking back at Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Rosamund Lehmann, Aphra
Behn, it wasn’t that – it was just good taste that kept those books locked
away. Behn, I remember, was touted by 1980s feminists as the world’s first
novelist and one of the finest; well, try reading Oroonoko and see if you
conclude that it is your ghastly inherent maleness that is provoking tears
of boredom or incredulity to start dripping down your face. Alexander Pope
had the measure of the woman 300 years ago, although I don’t suppose it is
Behn’s fault that, all those years later, she was coopted for political
reasons and waved aloft like a burning bra.
Of the acknowledged greats that cropped up on our list, Henry James took a
kicking from a few quarters; so, too (inexplicably, to my mind) did
Dostoevsky. But much of the bile was reserved for Powell. “What, really – I
mean, really – is the point of A Dance to the Music of Time?” asked Matthew
d’Ancona, editor of The Spectator, adding that he found it “stunningly
tedious”. The broadcaster John Humphrys concurred, having confessed to
starting the entire, endless procession of Powell’s life work, but always
giving up by around about chapter five. Me too. Herman Hesse, meanwhile, was
nominated by a good few, including the controller of Radio 4, Mark Damazer,
and the broadcaster Andrew Marr (who, incidentally, nominated Don Quixote as
the worst novel ever written).
What draws these nominees together? They perhaps captured a certain spirit of
the age in which they were written, replete with its fashionable literary
conceits, its political leanings (or lack of them), its mannerisms. And this
is what characterises almost all of the books that were nominated. They were
not so much deemed to be shocking at the time, or too difficult, or
experimental – there is no Henry Miller on the list, or Robbe-Grillet, or
Sartre. Instead, they seem to be books that fitted in far too comfortably
with the sensibilities of a certain chattering-class elite when they were
published. Remove a work of fiction from the milieu in which it was written
and you remove some of its purpose and point, of course; however, with
Hesse, Powell and Fowles, as with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,
you seem to lose all the purpose and point. Everything simply
evaporates.
Which leads us to the last question: which recently published and acclaimed
books will be seen as similarly purposeless 30 or 40 years from now? Not, I
think, the ones that shocked or disturbed: Michel Houellebecq, Bret Easton
Ellis, Martin Amis, Iain Sinclair and so on. Kicking against the pricks
seems to imbue a certain staying power. Nor books that are distinguished by
their weightiness (WG Sebald) or their experimentalism (Ben Marcus). More
likely, it will be those that tick all the right boxes, books that accord so
perfectly with what our civilised, liberal middle class wishes to believe in
that they might almost have been created spontaneously from the collective
willpower. Books that are so terribly of our age, they cannot hope to see
beyond it. The obvious contender here is White Teeth by Zadie Smith, a
politely written tome of consummate vapidity, from an articulate, photogenic
half-black writer, that tells you, in the end, nothing. Delingpole suggested
a fairly reliable guide, mind: almost any novel that has won the Booker
prize in the past 25 years. Looking down that horrible list, you have to
agree that he has a point. Books chosen by committee that feel as if they
might have been written by committee. As a corollary, we might also ask
which books of the past 40 or 50 years have now been forgotten, but deserve
to be remembered. I’ll start off with almost anything written by David
Storey between 1965 and 1977, Nigel Dennis’s A House in Order and the works
of Heinrich Böll and Vladimir Voinovich.
Now it’s over to you. We have rounded up a selection of the nominations, and
invite readers to pitch in with their own by contributing their suggestions
in the box below.
Nana by Emile Zola.
Tom, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Ian McEwan - particularly Saturday and On Chesil Beach.
stephen, london,
A million little pieces by James Frey.
The collected works of Dan Brown.
This side of Paradise.
On the road.
C, Dublin,
I can't believe no one mentioned Ayn Rand. "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" have to be the first two books on the pyre. I mean, really...
Tom Moran, New York, U.S.A.
Anything (anything!) by Virginia Woolf, Rushdie and Proust. Jane Austen is still (sorry) just Mills and Boon with Hepplewhite chairs. Lawrence, D.H. goes on the fire for sheer vapid boredom-inducing prose (about sex!) while we shouldn't forget non-fiction...Karl Marx, step forward.
Mark, Reading, UK
Anything by Louis de Bernieres. If it wasn't "magical realism" it would be even more apparent what semi-literate fatuous rubbish it is
Roxanne, London,
I am not for burning books. How stupid an author is or a book is pales before the enormity of the stupidity of readers who make it a hit. And this unlimited stupidity of people doesn't incite anger or disgust in me anymore but just evokes wonder, because of its sheer magnitude!
phalachandra, hyderabad, india
paulo coelho's the alchemist, it seems to be written by a seventh grader, there is nothing in it, no substance which is okay but absolutely no style either. da vinci code may have style, but it is the most ludicrous nonsensical subject.
phalachandra, hyderabad, india
Anything by Ted Hughes, Margaret Atwood, or the Atheist Cabal would make a toasty flame. Anyone who doesn't appreciate A. S. Byatt's Possession doesn't understand the way in which it debunked postmodernism at a time when it was essential a great writer do so. A brilliant novel, the finest I know.
Jonathon Joyce, Callander, Canada
Bridget Jones' Diary. Facile, one-dimensional, vapid tosh. It was hailed as some kind of zeigeist for all single women of a certain age. Hooey. It bears no relation to real life, friendships or people; my blood pressure is rising just thinking about it.
I'm also with Andrew Marr on Don Quixote.
Karen S., London, UK.
I don't know why John Fowles is included in this article. The plot of The Magus was flawed but the writing was fantastic. The Collector is one of the most disturbing novels I've read and Fowles didn't resort to gore or shock tactics to achieve this.
IMV Tess of the D'urbervilles is overrated.
Kim, Luton,
The Alchemist - awful utter mindless rubbish!
Ann, Dublin, Ireland
Before you go thinking about burning books read "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury. Good book, and really makes you think.
Sydney C., Kansas, USA
May I burn Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code one more time? It's written in the Dick and Jane literary style (Look. Look. Look. Here comes baby Sally). Or, perhaps, published by Ladybird.
The plagarised plot and characters have some merit, but each setup and cliffhanger was an insult to the reader.
M. Khan, Peterborough, UK
How about Lord of the Rings and/or the Hobbit? I have tried to read both several times because everyone I knew raved about them. I just can't see the point of them.
JW, Boston, UK
Amazing that James Joyce has got off so lightly in this correspondence, "Uyssess" is struggle, but actually conveys a sense of atmosphere and (obliquely) character - but Finnegan's Wake??Give me air! The last word in pretentiousness, self-indulgence and meaninglessness.
Stuart, Kuwait,
Am I the only person on the planet who didn't rate We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lional Shriver? Unbelievable, cardboard-cutout characters (esp Kevin and the dad). Pretentious and daft. The Lovely Bones (Sebold) another pseudo-dark story that descended into utter lunacy about halfway through.
Kate, London,
Vernor Vinge's science fiction classic "A Fire Upon The Deep" begins: "How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails." Obviously grounds for going round to Mr.Vinge's and solidly boxing both his ears.
And then there's the consistently tiresome Umberto Eco, of course..
Miko, Mikkeli, Finland
Everyone has their likes and dislikes but to list which books should be burned is ludicrous. No book should ever be burned and to suggest, even jokingly, that they should is wrong
Elaine Simpson-Long, Colchester, UK
Hardy is a wonderful storyteller but has a tin ear when it comes to dialogue, and if ever a novel's merits failed to match its (laudable) aims, it must be Jude the Obscure.
Alex Garland's best-seller, The Beach, makes Tony Parsons look like Proust.
David Armstrong, oswestry, shropshire
Crime and Punishment for post-it note style. Catch 22 for post-it note content. Anything by Patrick White - awkwardly mannered, wooden and empty (although unintentionally hilarious at times)
Gerard, London, UK
I loathe, abhor and abominate the novel Perfume by Patrick Suskind. It's all atmosphere and sensory overload with no character development or plot. A complete snoozefest.
amy, san francisco,
For complete incomprehensibility Franz Kafka's 'The Castle' is hard to beat. I have started it several times and never got very far. Evelyn Waugh's 'Sword of Honour' trilogy is the most self indulgent book I have never finished. As for 'The Name of the Rose' , the film is a lot better than the book.
Stuart Bolton, Leeds, England
Imre Kertész' "Fatelessness". It won him the Nobel Prize for literature, yet it has nothing to do with literature. It is no more than a half-interesting documentary of terrible events.
Barcsák Attila, Budapest, Hungary
Anything by P D James. Having listened to some of her books serialised on the radio I bought one - The Murder Room - in an airport, and after a few chatpers really wanted to throw it off the balcony.
She is an author who lets her snobbery and prejudice scream through on every page.
Fran Wallace, Wisborough Green, UK
The entire works of Jane Austen, particularly 'Pride and Predjudice'. Had to study this drivel for years at school and would gladly burn the lot! I also hate 'The English Patient'. It's rubbish and I don't understand why people think it's so special. Other than as a cure for insomnia.....
Marian, Southampton, UK
Am I the only one who really, really hated and did not see the point of Kerouac's On the Road? Or maybe I was born too late ('83) for that?
Anita, Budapest, Hungary
Blood and Gold by Anne Rice; part of the Vampire Chronicles, was pretentious, melodramatic, indulgent, poorly written and grammatically incorrect. At the time of reading i was in a foriegn country with barely any english language books or newspapers, and i still couldn't finish it. Truly dire.
Joanna Stewart, London,
Martha Quest by Doris Lessing. A painful 100 mile hike through the mire that taught me to never again finish a book out of obligation. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Muddled.
Gerard, London, UK
Lights Out Over the Territory
Midnight's Children
Jude the Obscure
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Remembrance of Things Past
etc etc
I enjoyed The Magus, however, I was sat on a beach in Greece with a bottle of ouzo when I read it, so I guess there is a time and a place for everything.
Sean, Corfu, Greece
Nigel Dennis also wrote, the fantastic 'Girls and Boys Come Out To Play', another one to be remembered.
Isabel Freer, London,
The Hobbit: I could only take a few pages of this addled, twee nonsense.
Bronte's 'Wuthering Heights': hilariously melodramatic and crude,
Bulgakov's 'Master and Margarita': proof that many purchase books only in order to decorate their walls.
Mind you ... I really liked John Fowles' The Magus.
Gary Gibson, Glasgow, Scotand
Ian McEwan's short stories and earlier novels eg 'Black Dogs' and 'A Child in Time' are very good.
I suspect he started effectively writing screenplays after a certain point though.
He's got a style that appeals to introverted people in my opinion.
Vanesa, Wolverhampton, West Midlands
I would also like to add one to the list: Great Apes by Will Self.
Surely this must go down as one of the most unutterably self-important, impenetrable novels ever written? I threw it at the wall and then tore it up. But I was young and angry at the time.
Kevin O'Sullivan, Chatham, UK
Adele, I think it is far worse to equate a good old bashing of sacred cows with the acts of national socialism. Just as we all love to celebrate great works of art, we also have the freedom to tell others of our annoyance and horror when we are subjected to things which displease us.
Jonathan, Esher, Surrey
Philip Larkin asked four questions: Could I read it? If I could read it, did I believe it? If I believed it, did I care about it? And if I cared about it, what was the quality of my caring and how long would it last? So why on earth did I bother ploughing through C P Snow's Strangers and Brothers?
Iris Oakey, Welwyn Garden City, England
Kafka has got off lightly so far: try The Castle - 400 pages of sledgehammer monotony. Or try a "classic" - Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is astonishly bad. As for modern books, how about Underworld by Don De Lillo for pretentiousness. (But I liked Powell's Dance -1st 10 books anyway)
Andrew Dickens, Bexhill-on-Sea, England
Salman Rushdie should be top of the list: unreadable. Anita Brookner: wrote one good novel but then repeated it endlessly. Guaranteed to send you into a depression. Most Booker Prize nominees.
Unsung writers: William Trevor, John McGahern - well worth it.
C Powell, London,
I am entertained by someone who makes money from writing, advocating the burning of books, albeit whimsically (I trust). Books should never be burned (Nazis, anyone?). There are some books I can't get on with, but it's arrogance to place one's subjective viewpoint above that of others.
Adele, Frankfurt, Germany
Having recently ploughed through 'American Psycho' by Brett Easton Ellis, I'd have to nominate that. Awful, awful book, with no discernible point to it. I'm used to reading crime novels, but the levels of misogynistic violence in the book were beyond the pale. Very poorly written into the bargain
Sophie, Liverpool,
Surely I'm not the only one who thinks Catch-22 is over-rated? Horribly bloated, no real plot and not enough laughs. Agree with all the DH Lawrence detractors: the mere thought of The Rainbow brings me out in a cold sweat. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is, however, the worst book ever.
Rudi, Birmingham, England
The Catcher in the Rye and Heart of Darkness. Both books that made me ask what is the point? So what? And I never got past the first few pages of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, and am not the only person I know who couldn't.
Sarah, Bad Liebenstein, Germany
Reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity Rainbow was like wading through sludge. I gave up through sheer exhaustion after some two hundred pages. I couldn't make head nor tail of it. My brain approached the frontiers of red-out and I had to take refuge in the very funny and therapeutic Howard Jacobson.
John O'Byrne, Dublin, Ireland
The Lord of the Rings - it felt like reading a mix between the Domesday Book and unreadable poetry, unreadably in some cases because it was in fact written in a fictional language)
Sense and Sensibility
Bleak House - too many pointless characters and subplots, even for Dickens.
Michael, London,
Funny, I read the whole DANCE sequence by Powell a few years ago with great pleasure. Maybe the trick to enjoying it these days is to not be English.
NK , New York, United States
As far as something being epoch specific then losing all it's crudential - I'd have to go with recent work published by Francis Fukuyama. Since The End of History, he seems adamant in spewing out as much tripe as humanly possible. Not that I agree with his theory of history in the first place.
samantha, The Lake District,
Rodders is wrong about Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance; however, the books that drive me nuts are the faux-naif, would be philosophical coy little numbers - I loathe with a passion, Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, The Little Prince.
Tim Haigh, Hounslow, Middlesex
Do so many people really dislike Ulysses? Any book containing this: "Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers" can't be all bad.
By the way - The Da Vinci Code isn't a book, it's a 600 page film treatment. (For a bad film...)
Tim Haigh, Hounslow, Middlesex
The Magus, Anything by Thomas Hardy, On Chesil Beach (utter rubbish), Atonement (ditto, though "Saturday" was outstanding), The Lord of the Rings (obviously), Ancient Evneings (right on Ian Rankin), Time's Arrow, The Rachel Papers, All of Harry Potter, Mervyn Peake......etc, etc
Stephen Gillespie, London, UK
The Mayor of Casterbridge. We spent AN ENTIRE SCHOOL YEAR reading and dissecting it. HATE IT HATE IT HATE IT!
Dianne, Perry, SC, USA
Dan Brown, AA Gill, Martin Amis,....seems the list is endless
nick, victoria,
The complete works of Will Self and Martin Amis would be first on the fire - oh okay, stuffed in boxes and dumped, book burning has no positive associations. Not to mention Michel Houellebecq and Bret Easton Ellis - vapid, pretentious, precious poseurs all. Our generation's Anthony Powells, in fact.
Ruth , Glasgow, Scotland
Arundhati Roy's 'The God of Small Things'. Wordy, turgid and self-conscious - I gave up early on. For example: "It was raining... Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, ploughing it up like gunfire." For Gawd's sake, it's only rain!
Tom, London,
I've read Anthony Pole's languid masterpiece (dodecology?) twice, and will again. I shall not speak ill of the living (though the Nobel Prize committee has a lot to answer for) but add my vote for D.H. Lawrence as the most overrated: reading him is like being trapped in a corner by a pub bore.
Grant Thompson, Rome, Italy
Perhaps what enrages us in the condemned works,eg by Powell,, McEwan, Amis, Woolf, Barnes , is an a priori view of the world and the characters in it which conveys a theme in the author's mind. What engages us is written from observation and understanding of persons and events.
Paul McAndrews, London, UK
Iris Murdoch totally unreadable. All John Grisham novels apart from The Firm and the Client.
Dostoevsky leaves me cold.
Anything by Salmnn Rushdie
All Booker Prize winners except Hotel du Lac and Schindler's Ark
Dan Brown books - all the same and pointless.
Stephen King's efforts after his accident
Peter and Tina Brown, Bridgend, UK
Hated Lawrence Durrell's "Justine" . One of the few books I couldn't force myself to finish. I thought he might have been as good as his brother, Gerald. I was wrong.
Owen, Stockton-on-Tees, UK
Ulysses
Sons and Lovers
Time's Arrow
Anything by H. G. Wells
Ditto by T. S. Eliot
David Copperfield
The Old Curiosity Shop
What they have in common is a dreadful vanity, an assumption that the writer is far better than you, and a total inability to prove it in their writing.
Dr. Dick Collins, Cork, Ireland
"I see black people!" What is the point of mentioning "half-black" Zadie Smith and all the "angry black" writers? Martin Amis is an angry white man, but so what? If a black writer writes about his or her experience, that is a black experience I guess, but everyone else just writes about life?
Bob, Sacramento, USA
Perhaps I can recommend this website:
www.ihatethisbook.com
Andrew Furlow, London,
Paulo Coelho's 'The Zahir' is the worst thing I have ever read. Pretentious, worthy rubbish that it gives me a headache to even think about.
Nicki, London,
A.S Byatt's 'Possession' is a book I'd happily toss on the fire. Also politically correct histories like Roger Osborne's 'Civilization'.
John Reilly, Dublin, Ireland
vickie,
Emily
"....misogyny..."
Only allowed to criticise male writers, then?
What if some of them weren't straight? If so, then add homophobia. There's at least one dusky-skinned author listed, so let's chuck in racism for good measure. Ooh, and a foreigner or two = xenophobia
Ken Stevens, Reading,
Patent nonsense to criticise "Dance to the Music of Time" for being successful only because it captured the spirit of its time. Was never so. And certainly wasn't political or trendy. This article makes no reasoned case against "Dance" except that Liddle doesn't happen to like it. Lazy journalism.
David, London,
The Magus is a terrific novel, albeit one that could have done with some judicious pruning ... the entire last quarter, basically.
Declan, Wicklow, Ireland
Ulysses, Midnight's Children, The Alchemist - banal, belaboured and boring.
Doug Bates, St. Albans,
The whole premise of this piece is ridiculous. Like the "Who's the best pop star ever?" polls, or "Who's the best/worst ever footballer" Grow up, for goodness sake. There are books that I like and books that I don't. This recent obsession of "listing" matters of taste is sophomoric.
Allan , Arlington, Virginia,
What, nothing about Rowling? That is something for the trashbin.
Deborah B. Luyster, Jacksonville, Florida, USA
Anything by Martin Amis, or by any Amis, except 'Lucky Jim'.. And J. Barnes, I. McEwan plus all the other 'Hampstead' jerks. Also Fowles' 'The Magus', pointless, pretentious guff., though' 'The Collector' was OK.. And Jane Austen. ¡¡ JANE AUSTEN !!, though she wrote some entertaining film scripts.
L..Waring, Montevideo, Uruguay
The Bible.
Felix Turner, London, UK
'Too Beautiful For You' by Rod Liddle. An embarassing excuse for a novel by a journalist with no literary talent or originality using his media profile to get his work published, it represents all that is fatuous and pathetic in the modern publishing industry, and is hilariously bad writing.
Suzy Kang, London,
What about The Lord of the Rings? Couldn't go past page 10...
Also Eco at his best (or worst) can be quite off-putting.
Luca, Beijing, China
Can we include poetry? If so, Carol Ann Duffy.
J Palmer, Reading, Berks
Anything by Thomas Hardy; Jean Paul-Sartre; the novels (not short stories) of D.H. Lawrence; "Dear God I'm Gay... "(sic) a polemic written bya collective , it's only value being that there are more errors of logic and fallacious argument in a few short pages than one might have believed possible;
Corin Keiler-Lloyd, Wolverhampton,
History of Mr. Polly by H.G. Wells. In response to an "O" Level question (1964) to analyse the humour of this book my reaction, "there isn't any" should have got an A but I bottled it.
Also "Le Grand Meaulnes," A" level set book for French in 1966 (in French by the way), what was that all about?
Mike, Huntingdon,
Also pretty much anything by Martin Amis.
Mike, Huntingdon,
Anything with Jamie Oliver on the cover would be a good firelighter.
Aaron Brown, Hong Kong,
Joyce's Ulysses is a painful read but nothing compares to the smugness of Jane Austen. I think I am still mentally scarred from 'Mansfield Park' at A-level.
Alex, London,
t
All Salman Rushdie
Middlemarch
Flaubert's Parrot
Most Patrick Hamilton
Chris Hale, Berlin, Germany
A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. I flogged through the entire vile opus (OK, I skipped the 83 chapters on French Heraldry) with gritted teeth. I kept imagining Proust sitting down to write it with a smirk on his vapid face & his little finger resting on his lower lip (a la Dr. Evil). Arch or what.
Andy, Saffron Walden, England
Tess of the D'urbs, adored by many, simply makes makes me want to shout "for goodness sake woman, get a grip, make a decision, DO SOMETHING". I have never yet been able to face watching any televised or film version, as the mere thought makes me want to weep.
Jill Garner, Leeds, West Yorkshire
Tolstoy: a Masters in Russian lit but he still leaves me cold; I have yet to complete one novel!
Ian McEwan: the worst case of the Emperor's new clothes I have ever come across, just awful.
Amis x 2: the apogee of misogyny.
"Vanity Fair": please will somebody tell spoilt Miss S to shut up!!
LSE, Bognor Regis, UK
So I'm not the only one that thinks The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown was complete rubbish! Burn it now!
J Benson, London,
I have never read "The Color Purple" but I loathe it!
My daughter was so aghast at its utter tripe that she abandoned English 'A' level . However she saved up and went back to Uni later to get the 'A' Level (with a different set book!) and then English degree that she originally wanted.
Ken Stevens, Reading,
Have to agree with Vickie here - there seems to be an insidious misogyny hiding behind the derogatory comments on women writers.
Emily, Stratford-upon-Avon,
Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code, feverishly promoted as the 'must read' for what felt like several years. Our two heros encounter a series of the most unlikely of dire circumstances which they 'in one bound, escape' . It takes place over something like 36 hours but no one goes to the toilet.
Eric Rafferty, Frodsham, UK
"The Golden Notebook". Worshipped, for reasons which escape me utterly, by a certain type of woman to be found all over the world. I was nearly weeping by the time I finished it, and not in a good way.
Gill Alexander, Harrogate, UK
My choice would be Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. It is impossibly turgid (I have tried more than once)- Ulysses is by comparison a piece of light bed-time reading
John Purkiss, York,
Ulysses and The Catcher In The Rye would be at the top of my list. Both thoroughly depressing but not in a good way. I commend Ian Rankin on getting to page 600 of Ancient Evenings. About ten times more than I managed
John Connolly, Heywood, England
Great article! On so many occasions the fear of feeling inadequate, having not completed a book, creeps up and threatens to consume me.
I vote for a national society to be created for those who celebrate consigning badly-written books to the bin.
Throwing them at the wall is also good therapy.
Kevin O'Sullivan, Chatham, UK
Another strong whiff of misogyny from dear Rod.
vickie, leeds, England