Alas, this was a rather easy list to compile by just searching past reviews for the words "disappointed" or "disappointment".

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
Olympos by Dan Simmons
Fanny Kemble: A Reluctant Celebrity by Rebecca Jenkins
Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh
Pyongyang by Guy Delisle
The ( Read more... )

Looking through my backlist, this tends to be mainstream fiction books which I bought because I knew a lot of other people had read them, but did not expect to finish with more than just being able to tick the box. In particular, as I look at the two recently read books that seem to me my best answers to this question, they are both books where the ( Read more... )

This is a slightly difficult question to answer. Looking through my LibraryThing catalogue (yet again) I find I have given five stars to the following books originally published in languages other than English:

Albanian: The File on H
Anglo-Saxon: Beowulf
Chinese: Wild Swans
Dutch: The Diary of Anne Frank
French: Persepolis I, Persepolis II, ( Read more... )

I've given a partial answer to this with the earlier question about books I hate; I have seen no merits in Dan Brown, J.D. Salinger, Stefenie Meyer, Arthur Golden, Alice Sebold, Paulo Coelho, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jodi Picoult or Anne Rice worth celebrating.

So I'm going to veer into my own specialist interest, and single out three Doctor Who ( Read more... )

When the question is asked that way, one is tempted to reply in the spirit of Wendy Cope: When they ask me, “Who’s your favourite poet?”,
I’d better not mention you.
Though you certainly are my favourite poet
And I like your poems too.
Rest assured that if you are a writer, and you know me well enough to be reading this, you probably fall into that ( Read more... )

Thanks to my obsessive book-blogging and cross-referencing, I can reveal that these are the top ten books on LibraryThing by popularity which I have given two or fewer stars out of five:

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Twilight by Stefenie Meyer
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur ( Read more... )

It is going to be tricky to answer questions like this otherwise than going on about The Lord of the Rings, which really is my favourite book ever but maybe is not such an interesting answer. One other book that I rate very highly is George Eliot's Middlemarch, which puts a very human face on a historical period of rapid social, political and ( Read more... )

I'm taking this to mean the best books which I have read for the first time since the start of 2010. This is where my LibraryThing cataloguing is useful - I see that I have awarded five stars to the following:

Non-fiction
The Language of the Night, by Ursula Le Guin
Dreams From My Father, by Barack Obama
The Bloody Sunday report

Non-genre fiction ( Read more... )

I feel that I would like to have a bit more content in here, and these 30-day memes which are going around are rather attractive. The "book-lovers" meme starts by asking for your favourite series of books with more than three volumes. I'm going to give several answers, as I imagine will be the case for later installments too.

The Vorkosigan saga ( Read more... )