I was going to writea post exactly like this
Silmarillion - deathly dull. I love LOTR and have read it many times (literally about 20 times) but I just can't get into the S. at all.

Ulysses - I have an annotated excerpt in an anthology, where half the page is foonotes and annotations of things I feel you must know to appreciate it. If they could do that for the whole book, I could read it - but not otherwise. (They also had an excerpt of Finnegan's Wake, which was 1/4 text, 3/4 annotations. It's just not worth the effort.)

Anything by Derrida - I can read expications of him and vaguely understand. But anything BY him is an intensely frustrating experience, where you suspect the hint of an idea is obscured by insanely obscure, abstruse, unreadable prose.

Stephen King books after Dolores Clabourne or so - just shite. He was a bit hit and miss anyway - I never liked 'Salem's Lot or The Tommyknockers - but since then I've not liked a book he's done. Cell, Gerald's Game, Bag of Bones, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Rose Madder, they were all pish.

"The Autograph Man" by Zadie Smith was a major disappointment. Got 300pp into it, but just gave up when I realised it wasn't going to get any better. 400 pages of sheer pointlessness, characters you don't care about, a plot that isn't remotely exciting, themes you couldn't give a rat's ass about.

Dan Brown, J.K. Rowling, Tom Clancey etc etc - maybe a page, then thrown down in disgust. But I didn't expect any better.
(McChinaman banned, Fri 25 Jun 2010, 16:33, 1 reply)

Derrida, yeah...
After my degree, I still had a copy of 'Of Grammatology' for years.

Eventually gave it to Oxfam because every time I even spotted it on the bookshelf, it made my head hurt.
(SnowyTheWereRabbit the Leporid from Hell, Sat 26 Jun 2010, 12:54, closed)

Thing about Derrida is
His ideas aren't *that* difficult. He does his utmost to hide this, though.
(McChinaman banned, Sun 27 Jun 2010, 3:33, closed)