Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times fiction editor
Dostoevsky has always defeated me. Even when stranded overseas with
nothing to read but The Idiot – a situation that returns in nightmares – I
couldn’t make it to the final page. “It nearly finished me; it was like
having an illness,” Robert Louis Stevenson said (admiringly) of reading
Crime and Punishment. Delete the admiration and that’s how Dostoevsky’s
fiction, with its hysterias, hallucinations, feverish goings-on and
characters with nonstop mood swings, affects me.#
Ian Rankin, novelist
I haven’t ever wanted to hurl it to the floor, but I’ve started Midnight’s
Children several times and been unable to get past the first 10 pages.
Not sure why; it’s been a few years since I gave it a go . . . maybe time to
try again! I loved Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, but was told by
author friends that Blood Meridian is his masterpiece. I tried it and
couldn’t get halfway through. Just didn’t find it interesting. Also couldn’t
finish The Road. How can a book be harrowing and pedestrian at the
same time? Enjoyed The Hobbit as a teenager; gave up on The Lord of the
Rings after about 30 pages. The first book I really remember hating was Ancient
Evenings by Norman Mailer. I was studying American literature at
university, and he was supposed to be a leading writer. I gave up at about
page 600, tired of pharaohs and anal sex. He taught me a lesson, though:
it’s okay not to finish a book.
India Knight, writer
Ben Okri won the Booker prize for The Famished Road. Has anyone
ever finished this? Are his sentences supposed to be funny? Are his poems
supposed to make you hysterical? It’s a mystery. Take this, from an early
collection of short stories, about Biafra: “There is a cold fire in the air.
/ I hear it / Consume the groins / Of heroes.” What does it mean? Why does
“cold fire” – see what he did there? – eat groins? If my 12-year-old son
produced this kind of stuff (there’s a line further on about “tubers of
life”), I’d have a word with his English teacher. Instead, bafflingly, Okri
is garlanded.
Stephen Amidon, novelist and fiction reviewer
The Waves by Virginia Woolf is everything a novel should not be
– and so much less. After the triumphs of Mrs Dalloway and To the
Lighthouse, and the fascinating experimentation of Orlando, Woolf decided to
change tack with this “playpoem” and wound up sinking into a putrid morass
of unreadability. Beloved of American academics – which ought to tell you
something right there – the book fairly accurately simulates the experience
of sitting next to a pretentious old windbag on a flight to Australia.
Christopher Hart, critic and novelist
St Mawr by DH Lawrence Actually, anything by Lawrence. St Mawr was my
most recent attempt, only 100 pages long, so I thought it might not be too
painful. How wrong I was. Lawrence is a humourless bore, a finger-wagging
bully who knows simply everything about his characters, their inner thoughts
and darkest motivations, and insists on telling you in wearisome detail.
Great writers – from Homer to Jane Austen to Cormac McCarthy – only tell you
what their characters do and say. You can work the rest out for yourself.
But Lawrence thinks we’re too stupid.
Bryan Appleyard, writer
The Awkward Age by Henry James This late (1899) book marks the
beginning of the end for James, and persuaded me that he was never that
good. FR Leavis called it “one of James’s major achievements”. Leavis was
mad. I tried to make myself read it, my mouth gaping in a silent scream, but
I failed. I wanted all the characters to die, slowly and in terrible agony.
It would be the first interesting thing that had happened to them.
Simon Jenkins, columnist
I have lost count of the number of times I have taken Crime and Punishment
on holiday and ended up throwing it in the pool. Every page seems calculated
to depress the spirit, and its sense of place reeks of poverty, treachery,
decay and death. It is as far removed from a beach, the sun, good company
and relaxation as could be imagined. I am sure it is fine for a weekend
suicide break to Siberia, a sort of Karamazov without the laughs. But
please, not for a holiday.
Helen Hawkins, Culture editor
Atonement by Ian McEwan The only book that has ever moved me to hurl it
across the room is McEwan’s 2001 bestseller. I was doing fine – wading
through the minutely detailed atmospherics, ducking the gobbets of Fine
Writing that careened off each page, soldiering on through the epic
nightmare of Dunkirk – until about p330, where it was revealed that the
whole damn effort I had put myself through had now to be reevaluated
retrospectively, as the book was Not What It Seemed. Then, 50 pages later,
came the final paragraphs, where I was informed I had to decide how to end
the plot myself. My weary brain protested that McEwan had bottled it. He was
effectively handing over a key responsibility of the novelist – the ultimate
fate of his imaginary creations – to the unsuspecting reader. I thought John
Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman had rendered the double-ending
gimmick redundant 30 years earlier.
Daisy Goodwin, TV producer
Patricia Cornwell... anything lately Her first few books starring the
paranoid but compelling Dr Kay Scarpetta were gripping, if a bit gory – but,
in the past few years, Cornwell seems to have abandoned any pretence at
coherent narrative structure, decipherable plot or any shred of credibility.
I threw her last book off a boat. A classic book I have never managed to
stomach is The Lord of the Rings – enough with elves already.
Mark Ravenhill, playwright
When I was a teenager, I loved Dickens and tore through his books at a
greedy rate. Coming back as an adult, however, I found I couldn’t bear the
grotesqueries and sentimentalities of his world. Having now experienced more
of life at first hand, and having read a true great such as Tolstoy, Dickens
seems a fairground barker, offering up waxworks and automata. His only book
I still reread is The Pickwick Papers. It seems be a true act of comic
genius. Everything from there on is, to me, mannerism.
Susannah Herbert, The Sunday Times literary editor
Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook deconstructs the life of Anna
Wulf, an ex-communist single mother with writer’s block and a fragmented,
alienated consciousness, the kind that was de rigueur among 1960s feminists.
Apparently, the book’s experimental structure is meant to evoke the symptoms
of a nervous breakdown, but, as it fell from my limp hand 20-odd years ago,
I can’t be sure. It’s highly autobiographical and, at more than 600 pages –
not bad for a blocked writer, eh? – highly unreadable.
John Carey, The Sunday Times chief books critic
My redmist book is Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the acme of
Bloomsburyish poppycock, a self-flattering appropriation of English
literature and history, distilled from Woolf’s temporarily addled brain by
the heat of her infatuation for the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West. Should
be sold with a sick bag attached.
Tarquin Hall, writer
One book that comes to mind is Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson.
Stephen King says, in his On Writing, that it helps to read the odd bad book
because it boosts your confidence – “I can do a lot better than that!” I had
the same reaction to Bryson’s travelogue. I read it when I was about 23,
after living and travelling in Pakistan and Afghanistan and east Africa. I
was contemplating writing a book about my adventures, and found the content
of his so tedious and boring that it helped to motivate me. Here was a book
about checking in and out of hotels and going to museums and getting on
buses and meeting extremely dull Europeans; mine was going to be about
travelling in disguise with the Afghan mujaheddin and tracking down Wilfred
Thesiger to a mud shack in northern Kenya. I thought, ‘Well, if he can make
a living writing this dross, mine’s going to be a bestseller!’ Sadly, it
didn’t turn out that way. But I owe Mr Bryson a debt of gratitude.
Andrew Holgate, The Sunday Times deputy literary editor
London Fields by Martin Amis Almost everything that is wrong with
Amis’s writing is here, in full-colour detail, in this overblown,
self-regarding, sexist, appallingly snobbish novel. The preening,
self-consciously hip mid-Atlantic drawl is bad enough, but what takes the
breath away is the vitriolic portrait of British working-class life. You can
feel his father’s prejudices seeping out of every sentence. Cartoonish,
offensive and in the bin, I’m afraid.
David Kynaston, historian
Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Letters from Oxford (2006) to Bernard
Berenson are immaculately edited by Richard Davenport-Hines, but they still
made me throw them across, well, only the bed, not the room. It was, after
all, a London Library copy. Their self-satisfaction, their snobbishness,
above all their petty-minded bitchiness – it was all horribly reminiscent of
the aspects of Oxford that had so disenchanted me as an undergraduate more
than 30 years ago.
Aminatta Forna, writer
The White Maasai by Corinne Hofmann would be better retitled
Confessions of a Sex Tourist, for it chronicles in lurid and unedifying
detail the obsessions of a German tourist with an African warrior. There’s
no secret to this book’s success. It plays to the gallery of national
stereotypes, as well as appealing to certain western female sexual
fantasises often to be seen being played out on the beaches of The Gambia
and Jamaica. When the love affair was over, Hofmann jumped on a plane and
made millions writing a trio of books about her experience. Their
relationship forced her husband to abandon his beloved warrior life to
become a house-husband and small-time trader. Some time after they parted,
he died, a few years short of the average Kenyan life expectancy of 52. The
book was called The White Maasai, but Lketinga was a Samburu.
John Sutherland, writer
I was in Turin last week, a city that has as many bookshops as Soho has
knocking shops. And there that bearded one was, leering at me from every
window, every bookstall. He has sold 100m copies of his soppy mystical
allegories (most famously The Alchemist) in 66 languages, and they pursue me
round the world. I’m talking Paulo Coelho, of course. If hell
has a circle specially for me, it will be eternity and the corpus coelhano.
DJ Taylor, writer
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence My grandfather had a copy
of the famous post-obscenity-trial Penguin paperback. Even as a teenager, I
remember chortling over some of Connie Chatterley’s high-flown imaginings of
the sexual act. Gamekeeper Mellors – half gentleman, half “eh by gum, lass”
son of the soil – is horribly unconvincing. The sexual sermonising is
intolerable. Never has there been a highbrow novel that more convincingly
outlined the advantages of reticence in literature.
Joan Smith, writer
Years ago, I picked up a crime novel by an unknown author called Patricia
Cornwell. It was called Postmortem, and I remember being gripped by the
main character, Kay Scarpetta. The writing wasn’t great, but the plot was
clever and I looked out for her next few books with pleasure. Then something
happened – aside from Cornwell becoming a worldwide bestseller, I mean.
Scarpetta has become the centre of a paranoid universe in which every
stalker and psychopath in the USA is out to get her. Her small team of
increasingly weird sidekicks battles to protect her from these loonies, and
the extreme violence of the novels would be unbearable if it wasn’t
cartoonish. (Occasionally, bad writing is a blessing.) Cornwell has become a
brand, and her novels are nasty, absurd and totally devoid of humanity.
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