A Brutal Art by Jesse Kellerman

This is the worst book I have read in a long time. The concept is great - a man that owns an art gallery discovers some dark but brilliant pieces of art that may have been drawn by a serial killer. After the first half, though, the book is awful. It's too pretentious to be a good page-turner, but isn't well written enough to be literature. In A Brutal Art you get the impression that the author can't decide what sort of book he wants to write, and it ends up being boring and anti-climatic with everything resolved in a way that was simply lazy. His use of tenses bugged me too - past tense for the present, and present tense when describing the past. Hmph. If I had not been on a train journey with it, I doubt I would have finished.

Overall score: 3/10 (it gets some marks as I actually finished it rather than throwing it to the ground in disgust)
Genre score: 1/10.

What's the worst book you've read recently?

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

This book is the best that I have read in a long time. The plot pulled me in right away (it's about a young boy who accidentally kills his best friend's mother) and the chatty narrative kept me riveted to the end. Like many other fabulous books I don't want to say too much, but that I look forward to other people reading it also so I can talk about it - the themes of fate and destiny kept me thinking about the book long after I had finished. The only flaw I found was it had a little too much foreshadowing which took away the element of surprise in places.

Overall rank: 9/10