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As we approach the end of my first year of recorded and reviewed reading, I have read almost no bad books. The Fermata was bad, but the guy could write, he just decided to write something we all thought was fucking awful.

This was a bad book.

Oh how do I hate this book? Let me count the ways:

1) Every word in this novel is written in conversational, lazy prose. "Absolutely" is used repeatedly for emphasis. "Cue" something or other. The kind of verbal junk we are all guilty of in verbal conversation, but letting it form the bulk of your novel is unforgivable. I felt like I was reading a second-year English essay. Honest to god, I'm not exaggerating. Junk prose. Never a hint of an interesting sentence structure.

2) This device, used repeatedly, I'm guessing to give the novel some appearance of depth. Let's call it the Family Guy Device. "The day was turning out badly. Almost as badly as that barbecue with David Morris and Bettie Constance in Salford last summer, thought George." STOP RANDOMLY FUCKING DROPPING NAMES I'VE NEVER HEARD BEFORE AND WON'T HEAR AGAIN. There's enough one-dimensional characters to keep track of without my having to check off new names against the list every two chapters. I can't tell you how many times this was used in the course of 500 pages.

3) 500 PAGES? To tell this story? Are you kidding me?

4) The relentless assault of pop-culture references. Lethal Weapon, The 6th Sense, The Lord of the Rings, BBC Radio 4. Wedding music is "that Bach Double Violin piece from the compilation CD Dad gave her from Christmas last year." And it's not just the pop-culture bits (Oscar Wao was full of Lord of the Rings stuff), it's that they are brought up again and again and again, but not one character betrays any interest that dips below to most shallow and obvious cultural stables. It felt like examples of tastes were deliberately chosen so that no reader would ever miss a reference. These people, is seems, are the most banal people you have ever met.

5) 500 FUCKING PAGES?

Picture a wet Sunday afternoon, and you are spending it at a slightly run-down shopping centre in the outskirts of town. You check out the record store, but whoever's stocked their shelved has decided to focus on boy-bands and Nickelback and club-anthem compilations. The book-shop is full of ugly, glossy cookbooks and footballer biographies. You glance into the clothes shops but the mannequins all look like the men you feel most uncomfortable around in the pub at weekends. You go to the cafeteria to kill some time, and sit under bright fluorescent lighting at grey plastic tables and eat a bun seemingly made out of another kind of plastic. The tea is tepid and has an oily film on its surface.

And it's not the afternoon you're experiencing in this place, it's the people around you, when you realise that even if you asked them, they wouldn't see what's wrong with this. They wouldn't understand your problem.
This novel was a 500 page trek through everything that tires and disappoints me most about the modern world, and I'm sorry if that illuminates some fault in me and not the novel, but that's the way I feel.