These were rubbish - dont waste your time! (Top Ten Unreadable/Unfinishable Books)

Member Name: herbie__53

Product:	Top Ten Unreadable/Unfinishable Books
Date:	27/03/09 (89 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None!!

Disadvantages: I wasted my time!

1. Salmon fishing in the Yemen. This was awful. Truly awful. It wasn't told as a story - you had to piece it together from excepts of diaries, letters and newspaper articles. It was rubbish!! Basically someone wants to put salmon in the Yemen, and someone else says you cant. So they set out to put salmon in the Yemen and prove everyone wrong. Boring!

2. Rules of Attraction. I saw the film of this with James Van Der Beek in it, so thought I'd give it a try. Mistake! The writing style is awful, basically its one big rant told from several viewpoints. The viewpoints happen to be that of college students who are only interested in getting in to each others pants.

3. Children of Men - P D James. Again I had seen the film of this, and expected more from such an accomplished writer. The book is boring, basically there has been no babies born for 20 odd years, but we don't know why, and then someone gets pregnant, and we don't know how they managed that either as all the men and women were supposedly infertile. But then a baby is born. And that's it.

4. Engleby - Sebastian Faulks. I'm sure this is a good book really, I think there is a murder in it and there is question as to whether the main character did it (he is mentally unstable so I'm told). I didn't even get as far as the murder in the book as I just couldn't stand to read any more. Maybe it was the writing style or the fact that it was set in college life in a decade when I wasn't even born, but I just couldn't read another word.

5. Farenheight 451. You have to read this book. Seriously. Just to see how totally weird it is! The main character works as a firestarter whose job it is is to burn books as no one is allowed to read them anymore. Farenheight 501 is apparently the temperature that the books burn at. Anyway this character has a weird wife who has serious imagination issues, and I read about half the book and still was none the wiser as to what was going on!!

6. Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris. This book was about an advertising office full of people trying to avoid redundancy. To me there were too many characters to follow what was going on, I was totally lost! It did have its funny moments, and I think it had the potential to be a good book if the number of characters were cut down. I just couldn't keep track of who was who so I had to stop reading.

7. Girls of Riyadh - I like books that are set in foreign countries, and thought it would be interesting to read what life is like for young girls my age in a totally different part of the world. I couldn't get more than a few chapters in to this book, it was written in a series of emails and the writing style just didn't appeal to me. I think it had the potential to be a fantastic book, but I found it hard to follow what was going on and lost interest very quickly.

8. Kingdom Beneath The Waves - Stephen Hunt. This book was a fantasy type story, which usually appeals to me. I don't think I made it more than a third of the way into the book, and I couldn't tell you what time the book was set in, or indeed what sort of world the book was set in. I gathered that they were trying to find a lost city (which they believed to be in the clouds I think?) and I only go so far as to them getting a submarine crew together before I lost interest and gave up.

9. How to Be Good by Nick Hornby. I'd never read any of Nick Hornby's books before this one, I thought I'd give him a try as he's written lots of novels so there must be something about them. This one was about a wife who cheated on her husband because she was unhappy in the relationship. She tells him, but instead of ending the relationship he feels it must have been his fault and immediately sets out to be a better husband. His "trying to be good" drives her insane. I don't really know what happens at the end, whether they split up or not, as I never got that far. The story was just so boring and it didn't seem to be going anywhere!

10. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. This one is supposed to be a classic so I though I'd give it a go. Luckily I borrowed it out of the library rather than paying out any money for it!! I only made it a couple of chapters in, but the writing seemed very slow and boring and just wasn't enough to hold my attention. I don't even know what the story was about!!

Summary: How many have you read?