Telegraph blogger Ceri Radford discusses books that are so bad that you simply have to stop reading immediately in an entry called "When a Book is a Bore."
Giving up on a book is so infuriating.
Deciding at what point to stop is always a lose-lose situation - you feel like a literary lightweight for quitting, especially when a turgid plot might just take off on the very next page, but then to persevere could mean wasting yet more hours of your life on something utterly dull and unedifying.
Quitting is the worst possible review you can give a book.
*****
Fortunately for this blog, my track record with fiction is significantly better. I can only immediately remember giving up a novel once, and I think circumstances played a major role.
After loving Never let me go, I took Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled with me on holiday. It was perhaps a bad choice. Lying on a beach yearning for a cheerful holiday read, I found myself dragged down into the drab, disorientating world of a concert pianist trying to fulfil a mission he does not understand in an unidentified European city suffering years of decline.
It was putting me in a bad mood, but I felt sure the rave reviews on the back cover would ultimately be justified and I was determined to carry on – until, that is, I happened to stroll past a second-hand bookshop crammed with English-language books.
Before I knew it, I was two euros poorer and happily installed in a café trying not to giggle out loud over a yellowing copy of Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue.
The fate of The Unconsoled was sealed: shoved guiltily into a suitcase, earmarked for reading after the holiday, but ultimately left to languish with The EU: A
Very Short Introduction.
Somehow we never got around to reading -- much less reviewing -- The EU: A Very Short Introduction, but we're sure it was fascinating and that we would have read every word.
