I consider journalist Rod Liddle a Good Thing. His poisonous hatred of Peter Mandelson greatly appeals to me, despite the homophobic overtones to his diatribe in this week's Sunday Times: "He would not know a principle if it accosted him in a Brazilian nightclub wearing a G-string and a handlebar moustache."

The Culture section of the newspaper included an especially enjoyable article by Liddle headlined: "Burning is too good for them." In it he boasted of his own (clearly class-motivated) loathing for the novels of Anthony Powell and gave the opportunity for a number of other writers (mostly from the ST) to identify their own hated books and authors from those generally considered to be among the greats. Some choices were surprising; others not.

Three cheers for Ian Rankin, I thought, for fingering Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. I also shared India Knight's dislike of Ben Okri's The Famished Road, Susannah Herbert's low opinion of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and John Carey's contempt for Virginia Woolf's Orlando.

Two 'panellists' (Peter Kemp and Simon Jenkins) nominated books by Dostoevsky, which I thought very surprising; two others (TV producer Daisy Goodwin and journalist Joan Smith) laid into the recent books of crime writer Patricia Cornwell, which seemed to me spot-on. This hugely successful novelist ceased to be any good at about the time that she ceased styling herself Patricia D. Cornwell, at which stage her heroine Kay Scarpetta had been involved in three or four (excellent) tales.

What are my own unfinishables? Proust, I'm afraid, though I have twice reached the halfway stage of À la Recherche. Almost everything by George Meredith (which will surprise no one). George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Romola (ditto). Late Kingsley Amis. Dickens's Barnaby Rudge (though I like all his others). Mann's The Magic Mountain.

Further ideas gratefully received.