Great question, yoyoybon! I don't know what the last one was, but I have several I can name...

A good friend says Atlas Shrugged is her favorite book ever - I've tried three times and haven't gotten far. :)

My sister highly recommended Bonfire of the Vanities. I actually read the whole thing, but I didn't like it!

Many people I know loved Cold Mountain, but I thought it was the most dreary, depressing book I'd ever read.

Donna

There have been so many . . .

The worst ever for me was a book club book. I've repressed names of the title and the author, but perhaps someone will recognize it from the description. The author, poor guy, was an alcoholic living in New Orleans who spent years and years writing the book then could not get it published anywhere. Eventually he committed suicide, and so of course the book was immediately published to overwhelming literary acclaim. But oh, it was dreary! I wish he had had his moment in the sun, but me torturing myself by reading his book would not make it any better for him.

I feel the same way about James Joyce. Simply unreadable in the novel form. I have read some of the short stories. I actually liked a couple of them but I refuse to read a novel which describes a day in more detail than I could actually experience during that time. I find such writing to be self-absorbed. I'm not actually all that interested.

I have read a couple novels each by Edith Wharton and Henry James. I figure I paid my debt to society and don't have to read any more. Talk about doomed lives! I am okay with sad endings in books, sometimes even like them, but I don't like fiction that proposes that we are marching inevitably toward misery with no possible escape.

Msmeow, I didn't like Cold Mountain either. I almost always finish every book I start, but I need to stop doing that when it's just a waste of my time.

I have given up on a few books after the first couple of pages but I can't even remember the titles. If the book is a mystery I might get hooked enough to skip to the end and find the solution though.

Yes, FriedaG, that is it! I was thinking that it had the word "confederate" in the title, but that didn't seem exactly right.

As Annpan says above, if I start a book and read almost nothing of it, say less than a chapter, I don't keep a record of it and send it back from whence it came or possibly pass it on to some unsuspecting friend.

As some of you have said I cannot be doing with unrelenting tragedy/wallowing in misery/no-hope/lets go and cut our throats/man's inhumanity to man/ . . . thinking of Lord of the Flies which we read here a while ago and was for many years a 'set book' for exam age pupils in the UK.

On the other hand I cannot enjoy those light frothy books in the Georgette Heyer mode (sorry all you GH fans). They seem SO samey and you know from chapter one who will marry who . . . sassy and willful girl and darkly brooding older man who looks good in tight breeches.

Vee, you could try some of the Heyer books that deal with mature love. Just to trick you, The Convenient Marriage starts early in the book with a marriage and the sensible young woman isn't willful nor is the husband old!

Venetia and Frederica are interesting and not too light either.

I have been a Heyer fan since I was a teenager and although I liked her dashing heroes then, I grew to appreciate her other books.

Penhallow is unique as a story that defies the usual rules but I won't say how as that would be a spoiler if you decide to give it a try!

The woman you quoted once as saying that Heyer was Blyton for grownups probably hasn't read many of the books. Blyton never wrote about murders!

Probably "Gone Girl." But I may give it another try. I hated "Fall on your Knees" years ago. I did not finish quite a few of Ann Tyler, as well as the Mitford series. There were a couple of Bookers I could not finish, as well.

I wonder if those of you who did not like "Cold Mountain" would enjoy the movie as I did? You might try it.

Oh, dear. I really like Edith Wharton, and I remember liking Cold Mountain. But recently I simply couldn't finish a kind of sci fi book by Caleb Carr (so bad I can't even remember the name). I hope it was a failed satire of the genre and not his best effort.

One of the really unsatisfying things about ebook readers is the inability to slam the book shut. Switching it off with finality doesn't quite have the same effect.

Probably the last one which I read and thought "Come on - I've got better things to do with my life that continue with this rubbish" was The Hundred Year Old Man who Walked Though a Window and Disappeared (or some such title). If he had actually disappeared, it would have been a better book. Unbelievable tripe.

There was one on the Booker long-list last year which I never finished - and fortunately, it wasn't shortlisted.

Oh - and The Slap, by Christos Tsiolkos. A good premise, but completely spoilt for me by not a single person in the book being in the slightest bit pleasant. I gave up when I arrived at a random sex scene in the kitchen between two people who as far as I could make out barely knew one another.

Two more: "Cloud Atlas" and 'Swan Green."

I, too, hated A Confederacy of Dunces. Possession by A.S. Byatt was an incredible disappointment. I had heard a delightful interview of her on the radio so picked up the book. All the characters were awful and it was just a slog. Also, I read Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood for my book club. It's a short novel, but I couldn't finish it. Awful characters in a depressing setting with not much actual story does not make a successful book for me.

Woodnymph, I started The Bone Clocks by the same author as Cloud Atlas. I didn't get far - the character telling the story is a 16 year old girl in London and I just didn't care for the style.

Cloud Atlas, Woodnymph? One of the greatest books of this century so far - it was a travesty that it didn't win the Booker. I've still got the discussion we had.

http://www.zelemo.co.uk/RP/Cloud%20Atlas.htm

I guess we'll just have to agree to differ on that one.

I do have considerable sympathy for woodnymph/Mary as I found Cloud Atlas very difficult. I enjoyed some of the individual chapters but their sum parts didn't add up to a satisfactory whole.

I could have done with Martin's explanation before I started reading the book.

Merry, I, too, find Flannery O'Connor's work incredibly depressing. I realize she was a Catholic who was exploring the tenets of her faith, but some of her characters seem beyond diabolical malevolence. I had to stop trying to read her, even though she is considered to be one of the "greats."

Makes you wonder what is the definition of "greats " in the literary sense.

Does it boil down to the number of readers who share the same taste in reading?

Though not recently, The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips, was one of the few books that I have really hated.

This is what I wrote in my reading notebook:

The Egyptologist is boring, slow, self-indulging. I read in starts and fits for 26 days, got to page 136 and hated Ralph Trilipush (the main character) and Arthur Phillips for inflicting this book on readers. Decided then to check the Amazon website and did an interesting finding. The editorial reviews are for the most part, very good, hailing Phillips as a new great voice (I rolled by eyes). The readers reviews are one after the other, with very few exceptions, very bad: "boring, tedious, contrived, convoluted, bore-fest", and those who finish the book have a piece of advice for unwary readers: Don't bother. So I dropped the book immediately, because life is too short.

I loved Cloud Atlas, but I couldn't get into Black Swan Green - tried twice and had to let it go. Another I was happy to give up on was The Story of Edgar Sawtell, which was basically Hamlet with dogs and just awful.

Middlemarch

Mrs. Queen Rides the Train

Mrs. Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

I am sure there are others. Dare I say Shakespeare? Much of what he has written, I simply do not enjoy. I am always up for a mental challenge, so that is not the reason. On stage, where those plays belong, sheer brilliance. On the page, forget it.

PAM

And... I will toss, slam or thump much of the genre known as "chick lit".

PAM

The Dying Light by Alison Joseph. This isn't a slam-shutter, more of a heavy-sigher and a "Can I bother to read anymore of this?"

Trouble is it turns out to be the third book in a series about Agnes, a French nun working in a women's prison in a less salubrious part of London, so I don't know her 'back story'.

I find I am not interested in her many problems, one of which is a dislike of her dying mother. I care nothing for the 'inmates' who are violent, abusive and foul-mouthed . . . or whimpering in corners and waiting to be abused and sworn at.

The prison-staff and convent sisters are holders of deep secrets and are tight lipped or hollow-eyed with private grief.

Agnes spends her days feeding sandwiches to an elderly priest, walking the corridors of the prison unlocking/relocking innumerable cell doors, making cups of instant coffee and visiting shady nightclubs talking to the boyfriends of the 'cons' while consuming large quantities of wine and whisky.

I am halfway through the book and have yet to uncover any sort of plot or care what, if anything, will happen next.

Pam, one of my English Lit professors said that Shakespeare was never meant to be read--just performed.

Gone Girl -- it was just too unpleasant because I didn't like any of the characters.

oh no, not Miss Peregrine and Cold Mountain? I loved them both. Agree to the thumbs down for The Slap and Fall on Your Knees. I basically gave up with with Lionel Shriver's Ordinary Decent Criminals (see the August thread.) We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Quick is another I stopped reading as I found it unrelentingly depressing.

Slammed shut? Where Tigers are at Home (Jean Marie Blas de Robles) and some horrid thing by Brett Easton Ellis. I can't help but think that both those authors are seriously twisted.

Mindset by Carol Dweck. I start to read, then the one-sided mindset of it will make me slam it shut. Then I pick it up again to get past that, and on to useful information. So, oddly, I'm utterly aghast at some of the premises but appreciate some of the suggestions. I did make it through the book despite multiple slam-shuts and days-long breaks, watched videos, and even went to a presentation by the author. Still am aghast at some things, but buying in to the ultimate concept.

Still another one: "How to be Both". I think that was another Booker. Not many of those have I liked....

Oh dear, Woodnymph. You seem to dislike all my favourites. :(

Another one disliked (not sure if it is a Booker) : "Black Swan."