Books I Hated

or, what we learn from disappointment; or, books are not a personality

what I probably look like when I write about books

I’ve long suspected that people prefer when I talk shit versus when I speak from the heart, so I’m going to speak shit from the heart.

Now, someone will probably get upset about what I write here. But, like, it’s not my fault these books are terrible, and it’s definitely not my fault that you wrote a terrible book or that your favorite books are the worst.

On top of that, why do you care what I think? If you love one of these books, go on loving it! No one’s going to care.

I refuse to rank this sort of thing because I think we can all agree these are all terrible in their own, delightful ways. Of course, some of this just has to do with a specific book not working for me.

This is also not a complete list but just the ones that come easily to mind.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

I’ve tried to read this three times and every time I give up on it earlier. The most recent time was last summer when I only made it about fifty pages.

It has one of the best opening chapters I can remember and then it becomes…whatever it becomes. A sloshing mix of nonsense, sex, drugs, violence, and incomprehensible tech jargon. I have a lot of potentially controversial thoughts about the cyberpunk genre this partially invented. Maybe I’ll write more about it someday.

But I think this novel is somewhat emblematic of the whole genre: style over substance.

I welcome your hate in the comments!

Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson

I have a lot to say about this in some future essay. Like, a whole lot. It may even require two posts

To put it into a single statement: the nerdism is so thick in this book that it stops functioning as a narrative.

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

What if we told the history of the Revolutionary and Critical Period without including anyone besides Thomas Jefferson?

Well, you get this. A somewhat incomprehensible take on US history that does more to obfuscate the period than illumine it.

I mean, part of this may be my distaste for Jefferson as a man and historical figure. But I also just think this book sucks. Especially with how it discusses Sally Hemming and implies that she willingly stayed with Jefferson and probably had a real love story with him.

I mean, maybe she did, but I think the fact that he literally owned her makes this difficult to know and deeply unpleasant to speculate about.

The Anatomy Lesson by Philip Roth

Zuckerman Unbound was about the struggles of being a famous writer, which…it’s definitely a choice. Despite that choice, it manages to succeed in several ways.

That The Anatomy Lesson is yet another novel about how hard it is to be a famous writer just felt masturbatory in a sequence of novels very fond of puerile embellishments.

I think, basically, if you want to get a taste of Philip Roth, his Zuckerman novels aren’t a bad place to start, but this one really collapses inside itself like a blackhole of perverse and bitter monologues.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

About ten years ago, I read Oryx and Crake and really liked it. Then ten years went by and I reread it because I wanted to read the rest of the trilogy. I liked Oryz and Crake even more this time so I was excited to read the rest of the trilogy.

Then I got to whatever this absolute mess is. Oryx and Crake works, in part, because of its structure and the way it plays with its dueling narratives. That this book attempted the exact same thing was tedious to me.

The book becomes locked into expanding the worldbuilding of a world we already understood and were hooked by. I wanted what happens next, not a different look at what happened before.

The novel felt like it was constantly treading water when I wanted it to drown or fly or just move in any direction.

Crazy Horse and Custer by Stephen Ambrose

I could say a lot about this, but I think it really does come down to a bias against native peoples and for anglo-americans. It’s not really a good biography of either man, but if you want one about Crazy Horse, I liked this one. This biography about Black Elk also gives some interesting insight into Crazy Horse.

I was fairly interested in Custer as a historical figure when I picked this up. In some ways, he seemed the avatar of Manifest Destiny, which is interesting! But had I looked at when this book was published, I probably could have saved myself a lot of time. Rather than a critique of Manifest Destiny, it’s almost but not quite a comforting myth about how sometimes great men are misled by their culture.

Unfortunately, this book sort of killed my interest in reading about Custer so he’ll just remain another genocidal maniac to me.

Probably that’s a fair enough assessment.

Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen Donaldson

The operatic prose borders on hilarity and the transgressive elements are effectively assaulting, but they also pushed me completely out of the novel. I just…

I’ve read a lot of dark fiction. I am not often put off by unpleasantness. But this really did batter me a bit too much. Not because it’s darker than, say, American Psycho, but because it doesn’t quite pull off what it needs to in order to make this singular act reconcilable or worth experiencing.

Also, the over the top nature of the prose sort of grated on me.

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

I have a lot of problems with this book that go well beyond the book itself, which is maybe a bit unfair. To put it simply, though: her book does not even attempt to address systems or structures that oppress and subjugate people or that uphold white supremacy.

There is no political project here. To me, it seems primarily like a marketing device for her consulting business and for her industry writ large. Her job and the entire purpose of her industry is to absolve corporations and government agencies of their systemic prejudices and institutional barriers to people of color by arguing that all racism is individualized. More than that, which is to say, less than that, the purpose seems to be to simply have white people acknowledge that they have institutional advantages.

And that’s it.

You can be bigoted and restrict the advancement of people based on their gender, race, or sexual orientation so long as you do it politely and acknowledge that you have advantages in life that they don’t. There’s no sense of systemic injustice, because everything is individualized.

This also makes it impossible for collective action and organization, because all politics becomes single datum points perpetrated by atomized individuals.

I hate this book. It makes me angry that it exists. It makes me angry that people will defer to Robin DiAngelo over someone like Angela Davis or Cornel West.

Not to mention that she, a white woman, was catapulted to bestsellerdom by white people who didn’t want to feel like a Bad White during the George Floyd uprising. Never mind the academics and activists who have been working their whole lives to address systemic injustice and institutional prejudice. Let’s make this corporate consultant who describes the manners of racism to white people in a comforting way the true voice of antiracism.

The US would be better off if this book didn’t exist. It would be better off if no one knew who Robin DiAngelo was.

My advice is to read some actual history, like:

• The New Jim Crow

• The Warmth of Other Suns

• The Color of Law

• Stamped from the Beginning

• A More Beautiful and Terrible History

• An African American and Latinx History of the United States

It’s a start, anyway.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

This book honestly feels at times like it was written by an alien. I’m sure it was groundbreaking at the time, but to read it now is quite bizarre. The humans in this novel behave in ways that are absolutely wild to me.

I’d honestly just consider it bonkers science fiction at this point.

The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley

I love Beowulf. Someday I’ll write something about this.

I didn’t always like Beowulf, but, for whatever reason, I read a handful of translations of it a few years ago and came to find a real appreciation for the old poem. Then this book came out and it seemed perfect, since I had just been reading Beowulf for several weeks.

I know Headley is an actual translator and scholar, but I felt like this fundamentally and even purposefully misunderstands Beowulf to make a different political point. Which, I mean, I’m actually sympathetic to this. This is not just a modern retelling, but a feminist retelling.

But, buddy, this book hates one woman in particular more than it hates anything else. It seems more interested in detailing why suburban white women are the absolute scum of the earth than it is in even telling its story or reinventing the myth.

In fact, her absolute disdain for her character—one of the main POVs!—was so powerful that I kept thinking: why should I care? Why should I care about these people that you hate so much? Why did you write about these people? You didn’t have to, yeah? You could have written about anyone! You chose to focus so myopically on this one woman that it’s almost distracting how much you seem to hate her.

Anyrate, I would like to read a feminist retelling of Beowulf done with a bit more subtlety and nuance, or at least compassion.

Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng

This book goes to transgressive places in a way that is actual quite unusual. I got excited by the way it toed towards taboo and seemed prepared to dive straight in and make us deal with it.

But then it gives the characters an out. An absurd out, I might add. One so absurd it broke the novel for me. Then, somehow stupider, it doubles back on this out and attempts to use that as a powerful emotional blow.

But it just felt silly and cowardly at that point. So much of this novel is driven by its narrator, but the idea that she would so simply lose herself shattered the illusion of the novel (I realize I’m being a bit vague here, but you may want to read this, for some reason, so I won’t spoil the absolute horrendous shape of the narrative).

Which is too bad! The novel is atmospheric and weird and intriguing. But then it all kind of comes to nothing.

Dance Dance Dance and South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami

More on these in an upcoming essay. But to say it simply: Haruki Murakami is as bad as his most devastating critics say he is, if we only judge these two books.

The Second Apocalypse by R Scott Bakker

More on these, too, in a future essay. But, to put it succinctly: the writing is amateurish, the philosophy is childish, and the novels are brutal to the point of comedy. It is so grim and so dark and so humorless that with a few changes to a few scenes, this would be one of the best satirical works of fiction I’ve encountered.

But instead, nope, it’s serious as heck about how hecking brutal this heckhole is.

Or, to put it even simpler: R Scott Bakker’s brain is bad at braining.

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go and Remains of the Day are some of the best novels ever written in the English language. They’re such subtle, quiet, and powerful novels that I was staggered by the way he dropped a single sentence like an ACME anvil on Wile E Coyote’s head.

So I did what anyone would do: I read the rest of his novels.

For the most part, they’re all good. None of them are nearly as good as these two masterpieces, but When We Were Orphans not only doesn’t live up to the rest of his oeuvre, it doesn’t even manage to be a functioning novel.

The novel rests upon the artifice of an absurd quest that almost defies the logic the novel builds its foundation upon. While this could have been used to great effect as a grand and ridiculous Seinfeldian comedy, it instead kind of quagmires into bizarre alleys of narrative.

It’s a detective novel where it’s impossible to make sense of the central mystery. Then, near the end, we just have someone explain everything for ten pages, which is about the least interesting way for a novel to resolve itself.

It is a profoundly bad book.

The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan

I have a lot to say about this and maybe I’ll write it more fully someday, but I already wrote at least one essay about it.

The short version: Robert Jordan may not hate women, but he definitely doesn’t like them. Also, his obsession with his own world swallowed the story that he set out to tell.

The Black Company by Glen Cook

I’ve tried this book a few times too. It’s a foundational text for a certain type of fantasy writer, but it seems so shallow and poorly wrought that it’s hard to even feel attached to anything that happens.

Just goes to show that sometimes people like terrible things a whole lot. I mean, I really like Ariana Grande, and someone probably has some juicy takes about that, so who am I to judge?

Sky Saw by Blake Butler

I have read a lot of bad books by small, indie authors, but this is the worst by far. Asemic nonsense, bizarre imagery, and words piled upon words without even the surreal logic that could make something like this work.

The Tunnel by William H Gass

I don’t know, exactly, if I hated this book, but I know it hated me. I have never read a book so full of hate and so obsessive about that hate.

I know people love Gass and will praise him long after I’m dead, but I found this book so chillingly unpleasant and hateful that I couldn’t even make it through.

What an awful, horrid mess of a screed.

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

Sometimes books are victims of their own hype. So this novel should maybe get a bit of a pass, because had I not heard such universal praise for it, I probably could have come to enjoy it more for what it actually was.

I am being deliberately unfair is what I’m telling you. At least in this case.

I think this suffers a bit from people outside a genre trying to write inside it. Often, this can be great. But sometimes it means people are stumbling into tropes so well worn they have their own highway.

Also, while the writing is generally quite good and even hauntingly beautiful, it’s also sometimes incredibly clumsy. Like every line of dialogue is borderline embarrassing. That this won awards staggers me.

Bellweather by Connie Willis

Young people—young women, especially—are stupid and frivolous and their stupidity and frivolity feels assaulting to the smart middle-aged woman.

That’s what I would’ve written on the dustjacket. Connie Willis is a very famous and acclaimed author so I was excited to finally give one of her books a read. This was available at the library so I picked it up and I mostly just feel embarrassed for her.

Probably her other books are better, but if I were her, I’d take this out of print and pretend I never even wrote it.

On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee

Had high hopes for this one. I had never read one of Lee’s previous novels, but I’m always interested when someone critically acclaimed for their writing ability takes a go at genre fiction.

Unfortunately, this novel just sort of collapses under its obsessive worldbuilding.

There are a lot of great scenes and sequences here. Some of them have stuck with me for a long time, but the totality of the novel just feels like someone building a world at the expense of telling its story.

The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch

What if life for oppressed people brutalized by totalitarian regimes was comparable to how hard it is to be an artist living off grants?

If that comparison seems both insulting and ridiculous, then you’ll probably feel the way I felt about this novel.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

I read this book a few months before Junot Diaz got outted as a sex pest, but it really seems like his view of women should have been somewhat clear from this novel.

This novel is for literary nerds what Ready Player One was for dorks who believed cataloguing nerdculture was the same thing as having a personality.

Or, well, there is a very good section of this novel, dealing with Dominican and family history. But everything that took place in the active narrative of the novel was tedious and rather unpleasant. The whole novel is obsessed with allowing some obese asshole to have sex with a woman.

Like, literally. That is what this novel’s about. We can dress it up and talk about the writing on a sentence by sentence level, but the reality is that this novel is built around objectifying women, and that objectification giving purpose and meaning to life.

I mean, yeah, sure, let’s give every creepy incel a Pulitzer for writing artfully about how men need sex with women…or else!

There you have it. Feel free to tell me I’m wrong in the comments or mention your own most hated books so I can tell you how you’re wrong.