I will countenance they I may be odd. But I found Captain Corelli's Mandolin to be insufferably cloying and the pacing just lolled around with all the animation of a dead fish floating in the harbour. It was all terribly, terribly I'm Going to Write a Proper Book. But it wasn't a book I wanted to read. I mean, I can understand it being not a bad book. But I did throw my copy over a hedge in a fit of enough already. It was also used to stun the albino assassin in my alternate denouement of the fabulous Dan Brown epic Inferno (you probably don't recall, as I think everyone had bailed out on that thread, that it was a casually tossed copy of CCM that saved our debonair historic symbologist (trust me, it's a job) from being shot by the menacing silhouette of the albino assassin). We should all be grateful for this as it allowed Robert Langdon to go on and buy some name brand tweed jackets and have sex with enigmatic, athletically striding European ladies. Possibly in jaundice coloured tights. Them, not him. And not during the sex. Although maybe that's a Thing too. I'm not Googling.
But then there's stuff like The Martian (and what was the other one I complained about, oh, Brilliance) which come loaded with five star reviews and gushing praise, but I think, hold on, this is genuinely awful. Now, when choosing a book (and I'm not very clever, which I believe you should have established by this point), I only read the one and two star reviews. This is pretty good practice, because if I ever publish a book, it'll probably only have one and two star reviews.
