As someone who earns most of my living from writing books it is genuinely painful to be negative about whole classes of books, but for me, there are definitely three circles of bookish hell. The worst, without doubt, are adult colouring books. I once upset Alex Bellos by being snarky about a mathematical adult colouring book he wrote the words for, both because it missed the opportunity to give far more text to accompany the pictures and also because... well, it was an adult colouring book. But that was arguably one of the better examples of the species. In the next circle come the coffee table books. These seem now to be something of an endangered species. You don't see them as much, perhaps because fewer people have coffee tables these days (or perhaps because there's less pretentiousness in home decor - we have less of the Changing Rooms vibe). The idea of a coffee table book is that it should be large format and picture driven. No one is intended to read it from end to en...
Technically, this 1985 Gene Wolfe novel could be classed as science fiction, but the reality is far closer to fantasy. I particularly love the cover image from my UK edition, because it's the worst example of a cover artist not knowing anything about the book I've ever seen. It portrays a hi-tech future city complete with a spaceship, where the actual novel is set in a seedy, run-down US city with a 1970s feel - and even when surprising technology does arrive, it's decades old. It feels like Wolfe is still finding his feet with real-world fantasy, and the book has a number of flaws, but it's still interesting. Four individuals down on their luck end up staying for a few nights free at the condemned house of Ben Free. The majority of the book simply features these four going about their lives, often in near-farce. This is particularly the case in a section involving a mental hospital where the staff assume everyone they meet is mentally ill. The two female characters - s...