Now that would be a fertile topic for constructive debate, if only we had a suitable forum… 
Ugh. Dan Brown. Definitely!
I’ve read Twilight after being implored to by a friend. It’s okay, I suppose. Dracula is quite a sexy book. Twighlight is too much “no, don’t touch” for adult enjoyment. It didn’t inspire me to read the others, but it didn’t have me throwing it against the wall every other page like “The Da Vinci Code” did.
I can’t remember who posted this link, but it’s worth repeating. Why Dan Brown’s writing is so bad: explained
We covered Norton"s Anthology of English Lit. in high school. Our English teacher was Lithuanian and our Russian Lit. teacher plus our strings instructor. But I only avoid stuff like the garbage Cormac McCarthy writes, even Anne McCaffrey’s bodice busters are more interesting.
James Joyce - Ulysses
its the only book on my shelf i havent red and have no intention of reeding, its mostly there to impress the women, not that theres been a woman near my bookshef for years but nonetheless.
my father also got me ‘the end of oil’ and ‘our final centuary’ which i deamed too depressing to read
Thanks for my laugh du jour, IB.
That’s exactly the reaction I had to Dan Brown’s prose (no, I’m not one of the 4 people who hasn’t read The Da Vinci Code,) but I appreciated the thorough exposition.
I’m one of the four. Here’s my alibi:
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2009/07/13/127-where-the-wild-things-are/
I fully agree with Dale"s take on the cultural status of the Bible.
Some of my favorite books are therein.
I WON’T, however, study the wads of Ancient Hebrew statistics and personnel records!!! 
Any Twilight book.
I will never read another Tom Clancy book.
I will never read another Tom Wolfe book.
I INTEND to read lots of great works but I KNOW I will not.
You were too busy reading
“Where the Wild Things Are”?
We’re agreed on the Bible I see. I think I’ll probably never read the Qur’an, though I can’t help thinking I should give it a whirl.
I saw the movie before I had a chance to read the book. I read Where the Wild Things Are a long long time ago so I still got good white cred.
I’ve never read anything by Dan Brown, and after reading that article I don’t think I ever will. Thanks for the warning, IB.
“Sometimes A Great Notion”- Highly recommended, but never able to get through it before losing interest. Perhaps a steady childhood diet of comics, TV and enjoyable tripe such as *“The Third Eye” has wrecked my attention span & literary palate for the duration.
*purportedly written by Lama “T. Lobsang Rampa” after a favored boyhood in Tibet and unmasked later as Cyril Hoskins from Plympton, Devon. A fabulous read in any case for kids not ready just yet for “The Outsiders”. Kids whom like “Jumanji” or “The Modern Handy Book for Boys” would like it.
I read that back, oh, I dunno, decades ago and liked it.
I have had a decline in my attention span in the last 10 years ago. I still read a lot of novels, among other things, but it takes me longer to read them and I read in shorter sessions.
Huh. Wassup with you guys. Even as I get older I find I can still concentrate for long periods, In fact, I’d even say that I…
Let’s go and ride bikes fellahs…
Ha! I remember “The Third Eye”. It was pretty obvious that the thing was bogus, but it was a good read, nevertheless.
Me too, and I don’t like it. I read while exercising, in 20-30 minutes stints, but rarely undertake serious reading beyond that.
Today, while wasting a little time, we took a peek in the Johns Hopkins University/Barnes & Noble bookstore, and–yes–several things intrigued me, as they always do in university bookshops, but I know my concentration is too patchy to commit. I don’t know whether it’s life conditions or an age thing.
This conversation reminds me of a comment a member of the Idaho Legislature made years ago when the U of I needed funds to upgrade the library. “Why do you need so many books? One person can’t read them all.”
For me the more interesting (and frightening) exercise is not to list books I don’t think would be worth reading but rather to list books which I think are worthy but which I still know I won’t read. Well, Proust and most of the Anthony Powell novels come to mind. Lord of the Rings is another. There will be lots of excellent shorter works I miss too, but because I can pick any one of them up on a whim, I can’t name them yet. Well, I do have a strong feeling that Satanic Verses will remain unread.
I’ve tried War & Peace 3 times and have never got past about 600 pages. I will never try again. I have heard it described as -
The ‘war’ bits are good and the ‘peace’ bits are good but there’s an awful lot of ‘and’.
I don’t get Dostoyevsky either.
Tried Ulysses. Didn’t get more than a few pages through that. Impenetrable.
I have read The Da Vinci Code. Horrible. Although I did somehow make it to the end, only to realise I knew what it was going to be from about 1/3 the way through.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Totally unreadable, and for all it’s claims, utterly condescending to the point of racism. Not one to be tossed lightly to one side but hurled with vigour at the nearest wall.
I don’t ‘do’ celebrity biogs either. shudder