Amis isn't an awful writer, but he's atrociously smug and is cursed by the belief that he's a far better writer than he is. He also mines that seam of middle-class edgy that is characterised by not being edgy at all. Just being annoying.
As mentioned, I've never tried Harry Potter and don't really understand why vast numbers of adults (one of whom I'm married to) read them all and go on about it. It might be great stuff (though I'm inclined to doubt it) but I have no idea why I'd want to read it. Whoo teenage wizards. How thrilling.
Trying to think of recent additions to the canon of irredeemably awful. I've been threatening to do you a live-action review of Inferno – maybe Christmas is the time (I only got through the first couple of chapters). Dan Brown is fish-in-a-barrel territory, but fish are du jour at the moment, so we should take all we can get.
The Martian, utterly dire, yet implausibly popular. No one can explain it to me.
The Corrections, never really got far. I've no doubt Franzen is a talented writer, but everyone character was some flavour of unpleasant, and it was basically a survey of the entitled and odious, and I just couldn't read another chapter that didn't promise to feature the words 'enormous explosion' and the 'the end.' It might have had something to say if the characters had some genuine struggle, but they were all rich, upper-middle-class Americans acting out their tedious self-involved issues.
That sort of middle-class book club literature on both sides of the Atlantic normally defeats me, they're filled with people I don't care about.