ok let's see

cxxvii. mrs dalloway, virginia woolf
hustle and bustle and life.

going to list this one as an incomplete, the line of beauty, alan hollinghurst
once upon a time a patient walked into my room holding the brick that is 'the stranger's child', upon which i enquired as to its merits and read-worthiness; it was within my general possession at the time, as i had borrowed it from the library. he informed me that he had 30 pages to go and 'not to bother' because he didn't expect it to improve within 30 pages but just wanted to get through it. however he did far recommend 'the line of beauty' instead. so i did not bother bothering with the stranger's child, also in part because of the book's poor portability with regards to public transport entertainment, but i did borrow the line of beauty, which was a mistake. (there is no specific synonym for 'reading'!! this is a problem i can't believe i didn't realise until now.)
are you ready for some vitriol, i don't even care. the beginning lifts the entire premise, basically, of brideshead revisited, and puts it in the 80s with appropriate promiscuity and less innuendo (not in a good way). i hadn't even seen any reviews prior to reading and don't even care so much about brideshead revisited apart from reading it once, and yet even to me it was so blatantly obvious! add to that the fact that there was no interesting, true-personality-revealing crisis to speak of, at least not at the beginning, which seems now to be very important in any kind of good storytelling, and the amount i cared about the spoilt, self-involved characters correspondingly depreciated exponentially.
to conclude, this was one of the few books in a long time that i haven't cared enough to finish.