"About Harry Potter (Not for Muggles): What Every Kid Should Know!" is an utter TRAVESTY of a book. It scores a '0'. It was a clear attempt to cash in on a popular series, had the most convoluted plot I've yet seen and a shed-load of mistakes. It beats me how it got published, and further so that I picked it up. It's the one book I've been unable to force myself to finish; after a few chapters I had to give up. I loathe it...

I don't read a lot of fiction. But in terms of non-fiction [and there will be some irony in the following book being non-fiction!] I absolutely hated reading the Communist Manifesto. It wasn't for school; I saw it on a shelf and thought "it's a classic" etc and grabbed it. I have to say that it was the most boring, insipid load of verbiage! I am not commenting upon the political perspective. Rather, I wanted to find out what communism was. After all, it had a huge impact upon the 20th century. Did I learn anything? Not a scintilla! The jokes are irresitible. Maybe Trotsky was icepicked by an unhappy reader who couldn't find Marx.

I forgot - was 10 the number for the worst? If so I give Communist Manifesto 10. It is sleep-inducing.

I will also add "Mechanism of Mind" by Edward De Bono. His other books - Po, beyonnd Yes and No - are OK but in this case De Bono went off the deep end. I gave up at chapter two. It was some convoluted lecture on comparing the human mind to a ball bearing. I understood none of it and hated all of it.

Some Debonoites see Mechanism of Mind as being his best work; I would rather read the phone book.

Almost the worst thing that I have tried to read: 9.5/10

I have found many deadly dull books in genres from ethnographies to trashy romance novels, some of which I have to read and others which were used as projectiles. But the one I most remember is Terry Pratchett's "Hogfather." My best friend is a huge Pratchett fan and so I was highly motivated to like it. I normally like that kind of fantasy humor,too, but I tried and tried and just couldn't get through it. I was very disappointed in myself .

Y

I hated Kathy Lette's "Puberty Blues". Now there's two hours of my life I won't get back!

Thank goodness I only paid $2 for it at a garage sale. I was sucked into wanting to read it because I'd heard of it and knew that it was a best-seller that had been turned into a cult movie. It purports to be an accurate account of what it was like to grow up in Australia in the 1970s. Well, I am the same age as the author and I grew up in the 1970s and it doesn't resemble anything like that in my opinion.

Amazon describes it as "a seminal work of major significance" and "the feminized answer to J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye". As an Aussie, if this is the best we can do, I think that's downright embarrassing!

The blurb on the cover said things like "hilarious" and "insightful". Honestly, they should be done for false advertising.

I finished the book in two hours and at the end I wondered why I'd bothered. I guess I kept thinking it would get better, but sadly, it didn't.

Just on Terry Pratchett's Hogfather ...

I have always enjoyed Sci-fi or fantasy novels and was advised to read TP's discworld books. I tried several times and just didn't 'get' why they were so popular ... To be honest I laboriously plowed through two or three of them without any enjoyment at all and abandoned them as a lost cause. Until I read the Hogfather.

I was travelling and had no time to get to a bookstore, so I purchased the Hogfather at the airport (there was nothing else available that I hadn't already read, or was even tempted to buy). Perhaps it just came at the right time for me, or I was in the right frame of mind to appreciate it, but I absolutely loved it. I have gone on to read several of Pratchett's Discworld books and have thoroughly enjoyed them all.

I find them humorous, easy to read, totally absurd and extremely well thought out. Did I really just write that? On reading my first two or three Pratchett's I would have dismissed them as childish drivel. How come I have changed my opinion so much? Perhaps with maturity I have just come to appreciate just how well researched and pertinent a lot of the witty bits are. I guess they have to be read not only on a superficial level, but with some appreciation of how observant the author is to light on so many human characteristics and to exaggerate and caricaturise them to just the right degree.

Toni, you have made me think I ought to try just one more time to like them. I have tried, believe me and like you I couldn't (still can't) see what the big deal is. I will get that one from the library and see.Thanks.

I know I am probably in a very small minority here but like GuitarGoddess, I also did not care for Catcher in the Rye. I read the entire book hoping my feelings would change however I couldn't bring myself to like Holden Caulfield at all. I'd like to hear from a fan of this book, maybe you could help me to find something good in it?

Catcher in the Rye is still required reading in H.S. I hated it when I read it and the kids still do. The English teachers still ooh and aww over it. My comment to my student's was "It's like a drum solo...it's only really appreciated by another drummer" Now THAT they got.

I've heard some interesting things about the book "The Giver", and I admit it's an intriguing sounding read. Has anyone here read it? And if so, what are your thoughts? Would you recommend it?

I'm a lover of books, and can usually appreciate that a good book is good, even if it perhaps didn't do it for me. Having said that, there are three "classics" (though for the life of me I cannot see why), which I cannot stomach.

Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Thomas Hardy - The Mayor of Casterbridge
John Fowles - The French Lieutenant's Woman

Fowles & Conrad I have some time for as authors, in that I have read other works of theirs and can respect their skill. For them, it is simply these works that I cannot stand. Heart of Darkness is mercifully short, and whilst the themes are of interest, I find the writing to be dire. The French Lieutenant's Woman, I just couldn't bring myself to be interested in a single character, and the stylistic extravagances seemed horribly overwritten.

The Hardy I freely admit I failed to get more than a few dozen pages through. I found it a repeatedly superb cure for insomnia. I may well try another Hardy at some point, but thus far I have been completely put off.

I would say The Host by Stephenie Meyers, the one who wrote the Twlight series. It is supposed to be an adult book. I forced myself to read about a third of it and got rid of it. Could not stand it. I am an adult and to me is is written for children. Most boring book ever. But that my opinion.

I love to read, and please don't flame me for these choices, but I have read the following more than once. I developed TMJ while reading these books:

Gone With The Wind
Wuthering Heights
Jude The Obscure
Vanity Fair
American Psycho
As I Lay Dying
Absalom, Absalom!
Requiem For A Nun
My Antonia
Nick Adams Stories

I should stop before I enrage the entire FT community.

I've caught a lot of flack for this over the years, but I hated "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand. It struck me as a book filled with a group of folks getting together and talking and talking and talking...about nothing.

Typically, I give a book till page 50 and if at that point I don't give a flying fig what happens to those people, I toss it and move on. (Life's too short! So many books, so little time!) However, I kept with The Fountainhead until about halfway through, and it just kept getting worse.

Another popular book most people liked and I hated was "Interview With Vampire" by Anne Rice.

Usually when I get frustrated with a book, I turn temporarily to some good ol' easy stuff like Dean Koontz or Carl Hiassen until I feel ready to bite off some more serious stuff again.

Personally, I'd rather slide naked down a mile-long razor blade then land in a puddle of alcohol than pick up Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha again. That one piece made Bonehead English sheer torture for me. Its trite and repetitive meter was coma-inducing, I cared zilch about the characters and situations, and the real Hiawatha bore no resemblance to the cipher described in the poem. Bah!

I,too, loathed Ayn Rand. I was first subjected to Anthem in school, and although I thought it was embarrassingly badly written, clunky and heavy-handed, I somehow read The Fountainhead, too. I think I was so shocked at how bad Anthem was, that I thought maybe it was an aberration, and her longer work would explain somehow her popularity.

My boyfriend loves Ayn Rand. He recently read "Atlas Shrugged" and couldn't believe I didn't want to read it, too. I told him "The Fountainhead" was quite enough, thank you. (What's especially weird is he normally adamently refuses to read fiction of any kind.)

I bought him a copy of "Walden" -- (here's a gift from your hippie girlfriend and it's nonfiction) -- and, thankfully, he devoured that, too.

So, he's redeemed and I think I may keep him for awhile longer.

But now that I know he'll be open-minded, I've bought him some Emerson...

I didn't finish "Atlas Shrugged", I think I read one chapter. I despised the 4th book in the "Twilight" series. I read it because I had read the previous ones (they were ok, though after the 1st one it started going downhill). The 4th was even more sexist than the previous one's. It was ridiculous. I threw it down a few times, though I finished it to see if it could possibly get better...it did not.

Lord of the Flies. I read five pages and couldn't get it. Also I don't really enjoy graphic novels. They don't tell a story the way a novel can.

I couldn't finish Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I've tried three times and couldn't do it.

Anything by Jeffrey Archer.

I bought two of them on a strong recommendation from a colleague who lived in Cambridge when Archer was the local Member of Parliament. He told me that Mr Archer was a great politician, a fine human being, and a talented writer.

They're derivative, repetitive, predictable, puerile, and over-reliant on the sort of coincidence that William Shakespeare can pull off, but Mr Archer can't. IMHO! I'm very pleased that I bought paperbacks and only bought two of them.

I too had to read Lord of the Flies for 'O' level, and sorry, but I enjoyed it. We also read Hard Times (Dickens) and Silas Marner (Eliot), and I enjoyed them too, although I don't think we're supposed to enjoy set books. English teachers are supposed to over-analyse set books until they put their pupils off ever picking up a work of fiction again. Mine must have under-analysed because he didn't make me want to stop reading. He illuminated the books rather than spoiling them for us. It's taken this thread to make me realise how lucky we were to have him.

I ended up liking a lot of books I was made to read for school, but Lord of the Flies wasn't one of them. It wasn't the worst thing I've ever read, just not really my kind of thing, I guess.

I think the one I disliked the most that they made me read in high school was Cue for Treason. I don't really know what I didn't like about it, but I didn't enjoy reading it, I don't remember much of it, and I never wanted to read it again.