4. A book that shall not be named

I said I was counting books that I make a good-faith effort to read. In the case of this book that I shall not name, a good-faith effort constituted 12 painful pages before I decided that life's just too short. The dialogue was stilted and awful, the characters absurd (and not intentionally so). In addition, I thought this author would have done well to heed the oft-repeated writing advice, "If you aren't Mark Twain, don't write dialect." This is, however, an author who has made bestseller lists and a tidy fortune not heeding this advice. I'm only glad that I didn't add to the aforementioned fortune by spending my own hard-earned money on this book.