Most books that I didn't like, I didn't read all the way through, so I don't count them as ones I regretted reading. The 2 I mentioned by Iris Murdoch & Glenda Adams pee'd me off because, by hoping that if I kept plodding through them to the end they might redeem themselves I wasted good reading time that could have been spent reading something more worthwhile.

While working in the library, and especially when ordering books, I became adept at swiftly identifying books I'd probably enjoy reading, just by reading the blurbs on inside cover and on the back, one paragraph of prose and one section of dialogue. Iwas usually satisfied with my choices using that method. I also became aware of the "Emperor's New Clothes" school of literature which defied blurb-writing and so the blurb was replaced with exclamatory phrases like "the best this author has written so far!" etc and was totally devoid of anything approaching a plot-line teaser.

That's another little beef of mine: while studying literature at University I became aware of a modern literary trend to discard plot-lines because only "plebs" needed to be "mollycoddled" with plots. Intelligent people, worldly people etc should be able to get into the literary work without the "crutch" of a plot, just by becoming intrigued with the character, even though the character just meandered around aimlessly without getting anywhere in life.

Not to be confused, of course, with Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman which satirised something very similar in his own time. What a giggle! So deadpan, sostraight-facedly, humourous.

Helen