Worst Books of 2010

I'm not ready to list the best books I read this year, but I do have a list of the worst books. Hopefully in the next six days I won't read anything else that belongs on this list!

1. Even the Dogs, Jon McGregor. I love everything else McGregor has written. But this was a mess.

2. The Finkler Question, Howard Jacobson. The Booker judges and I are so rarely on the same wavelength.

3. Black Mamba Boy, Nadifa Mohamed. Just really, really boring.

4. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, Elif Batuman. Okay, I know everyone else loved this book. To me, it was as if a precocious child who has been told once too often that she is precocious was standing in the middle of the room trying to prove to me how precocious she is.

5. One Day, David Nicholls. I didn't like the characters, I didn't believe their relationship, I thought the ending was overwrought and hackneyed and too long. Yikes. Hated it.