Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? Quite a lot of people, it seems, including such diverse souls as novelists A.L. Kennedy and Christopher Priest, poet and critic Tom Paulin, historian Alison Weir, literary journalist Harry Ritchie and television presenter Vanessa Feltz.
Asked by Waterstone's to nominate books that should never have become classics, Ms Feltz describes The Waves as "atypical Woolf, gone completely adrift", while Ms Kennedy confesses that the Bloomsbury writer leaves her "mainly cold", adding that Jane Austen "doesn't do a huge amount" for her, either.
Tom Paulin is bemused that "Woolf's snobbishly sensitive prose has many admirers for reasons which continue to escape me", Christopher Priest thinks all of Woolf "overrated", Harry Ritchie would also happily live without any of her work, while Alison Weir deems To the Lighthouse "mind-numbing".
Still, Virginia doesn't fare quite as badly among the forty-seven writers and publishers canvassed by Waterstone's as Sir Walter Scott, described by Tom Paulin as "desultory, vacillating and annoying" and by Tim Waterstone as "impenetrable and awful", while Roy Hattersley thinks Ivanhoe "a farrago of historical nonsense combined with maudlin romance".
Trollope, Lawrence, Hemingway and Orwell come in for a few brickbats, too. The redoubtable Julie Burchill dismisses Orwell's Animal Farm as "simplistic tosh", and says the exact same about Nineteen Eighty-Four, while "tacky" and "repellent" are among the forthright adjectives Tom Paulin applies to Lawrence.
Even more forthright is Janice Galloway's enunciation of her dislikes: "I'd rather give President Clinton a blow-job than read Lolita, Lady Chatterley's Lover, La Nausee or The Well of Loneliness again." Gee, they must really suck, Janice.
But all is not abuse. The forty-seven contributors also nominate the books they regard as true classics, and Irish writers fare well here, with Wilde, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor, Seamus Deane, Roddy Doyle and John Banville singled out for particular praise. Indeed, Chris Woodhead, who is Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools, describes Banville's The Untouchable as "the greatest work so far by the best and most intelligent contemporary novelist writing today".
You'll find all these opinions and more in the 220-page The Test of Time: What Makes a Classic a Classic?, published by Waterstone's at a mere £1.99.
Ray O'Hanlon, senior editor with the Irish Echo in New York, tells me that his 1998 book, The New Irish Americans, has just been nominated for the prestigious Washington Irving Awards, to be presented in May.
Among the criteria for eligibility is that the writer must live in Irving's Westchester County, a condition Ray fulfils by residing in Ossining, otherwise mainly famous for being the home of both Sing Sing and John Cheever. Past recipients of the awards have included Don DeLillo and actor Christopher Reeve.
Ray, formerly a reporter with the Irish Press, is currently working on a novel. Tentatively titled Hard Men, it also takes as its subject Irish America. Certainly there are a few hard men there.
Following the success of last summer's Reading in the Shade on RTE Radio 1, Seamus Hosey has cast his net wider in devising The Book on One, which began last Monday and which each week devotes itself to readings from a particular book.
It goes out at 2.45pm from Monday to Friday, and next week Anna Massey will read from Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, followed, the week after, by Christopher Fitz-Simon reading from Micheal MacLiammoir's Put Money in Thy Purse. Later in the month Brenda Fricker will be tackling Brian Moore's The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.