Category Archives: Worst Books

April 21, 2016 · 5:23 pm

The Casual Vacancy: Just because you wrote Harry Potter doesn’t mean you should get to publish nonsense

I know I’m a few years behind the tide on hating J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, so forgive the belated review: it’s a boring book and you shouldn’t read it.

Set it Pagford, a quaint British town (think the Vicar of Dibley), the story follows a ragtag cast of characters after the death of town councillor Barry somebody-I-don’t-remember-because-I-don’t-care. The book tries to make itself relevant and interesting by including cyber bullying, drug use, domestic abuse and racism. It succeeds only in being interesting by virtue of how terrible it is. And how difficult it is to remember who any of the characters are because they are all so boring and yawn.

I suspect the editor of the first draft wanted to put the whole thing in a fire, but felt compelled by the sheer force of the Rowling name to let it see the public eye. I jest (only a little). It’s not punishing to read, but it certainly belies the substance of the book to call this a ‘compelling’ read (as do some reviews) or a (ha!) page-turner. With nary a plot detail to compel, nor a character developed enough to be of the slightest interest (Rowling is surely the master of characters defined by a single character trait and stubbornly resistant to any change through circumstance or reflection) it’s a book you read out of a sense of inertia and a quiet fascination with how someone who wrote Harry Potter could also write this terrible thing.

What, if anything, could I say this book is about? Small town politics? Teenage relationships and the lack of parental engagement with youth? Hardly. I do think it’s trying to be about the social mores of our contemporary moment, but reads as an afterschool special that forgot that in order to make a reader care about an issue you first have to provide a compelling… something.

I have to admit I’m pleased it was so bad. Coming off the glory of A Little Life I was pretty sure whatever I read was going to pale in comparison. The Casual Vacancy did not disappoint in this respect. With my palate cleansed I feel ready for another terrific read: suggestions?

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March 17, 2016 · 8:58 pm

& Sons: The Only Reason to Run a Marathon is So You Can Say “I Ran a Marathon”

Don’t believe anyone who tells you they ran a marathon out of a sense of personal achievement. Or to raise money for a charity. Or in honour of someone else. They’re lying. They ran the marathon so they could tell you they ran the marathon.

I’ve run two marathons.

And I read all of David Gilbert’s & Sons even though every page of the last third (two thirds?) felt like an agonizing shuffle to the end. In running they call it “hitting the wall” – the moment around 30km when your body realizes it is still running and decides continuing is a very bad idea and would rather stop, if fact, would rather we had stopped 28km ago. But your brain is all like ‘no no, we need to be able to tell people we ran a marathon,’ so it supersedes all the pain and lactic acid and in a feat of masochistic revel marches each foot forward. Reading & Sons didn’t physically hurt (beyond the arm strain of hauling about a 5lb monster), but it nevertheless felt like a slog. A slog I’d made my way too far into to abandon, and one that I felt I ought to finish so I could say I had. An absolutely ridiculous idea because no one seems to have read or to care about the book – and if vanity was my motivation I really should have finished (okay, started and finished) Ulysses ages ago. Why did I begin in the first place? I don’t know. I’d ordered it from the library. I’d paid some late fines. I felt literary guilt. (what is literary guilt? I’d like to know).

I digress.

What do you need to know about it? Plot wise it’s another novel about being a writer in New York and attending parties with writerly folks and sharing the unstated but nevertheless omnipresent anxiety of writerly folks. Actually that’s not a plot. Someone alert David Gilbert! Writing about being a writer in New York is not a plot! Sure, sure. He strings in some business about fathers raising sons, human cloning (don’t get excited – there’s nothing thematically or plot-ly interesting about it) and funerals as a waving of the hands like ‘hey! look! a plot!’ But it’s really just more about being a writer. In New York. Character? I guess it’s supposed to be interesting that we have an unreliable narrator – Philip? Patrick? I forget his name and can’t be bothered to look it up – who inserts himself into the famous writerly Dyer family because he so wants to be a part of the family and to tell us about what goes on with the Dyers. I guess it’s interesting like listening to a runner tell you about their training runs and carb loading is interesting. Which is to say: not at all. Setting: Did I mention this is a book about being a writer in New York? That doesn’t actually spend any time on the New York part except to remind us that we’re in New York?  Theme: Uhhh… something about the ethics of writing about people you know, and the desire for immortality, and the inheritance of sons (if the title didn’t give it away you should know this book is entirely uninterested in women. In fact it seems genuinely put out that mothers have to exist at all. I think there’s probably some interesting thematic questions buried in here – just like you probably run past some beautiful scenery – but in the focused effort to just. keep. reading. I didn’t notice.

So yeah. Give me my medal and my banana. Time for a recovery read.

 

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December 31, 2015 · 1:16 pm

The Heart Goes Last: Your Contract to Read All Atwood Has Been Voided. Thank God.

As a student of Can Lit I am always going to get the new Margaret Atwood novel. It was in the contract I signed when I chose my field. Or did I not read the fine print? Or bother to inquire? If I had I might not have so readily signed on because at a certain point (as in The Heart Goes Last) reading the new Atwood is an obligation and chore, rather than pleasure and delight.

I jest about contract signing because this novel-that-ought-to-have-been-a-short-story-but-who-is-going-to-tell-that-to-Atwood focuses on the ways people ‘freely’ choose their subjugation and constraint. Yawn hegemony. Made more complex, perhaps, by the setting of a post-depression era North America where 50% unemployment means the collapse of society as we know it. You could read other reviews that will praise the way this question of choice is taken up in relation to technology. You won’t read that here because I read this as – at best – an obvious consideration of the reach of technology in regulating individual life and desire. You don’t have to look far – *cough* The Circle – for similar, if far better executed, allegories and literary prophesies.

*spoiler alert* Though it’s not much of a spoiler as so much of this plot is either predictable or uninspired: Stan and Charmaine, out of work, sign on to live in Consilience, a town that provides employment and safety. The trade off is the town is selling body parts and making people into sex slaves. The bit about working for a month in a prison and a month in the town is neither necessary to know nor interesting in the plot, it seems to be there just for shock value.

Had this been an interesting novel (or a compressed and worthy short story) I might have been taken with the ideas explored around individual choice. The tone of the novel blames Stan and Charmaine for their choice to sign on to Consilience, as if they ought to have read the fine print or been brave enough to choose ‘freedom over security’ (that familiar binary). One of the unitarian principles I appreciate is the idea that individuals have choice, but choice within constraints. That what we can do for a more just society is to create conditions under which individuals have the maximum range of choice and are equipped and supported in choosing. (This push to create ‘choice conditions’ is part of the reason the church has such an aggressive (if you can call unitarians aggressive about anything) social justice mandate as part of their non-doctrine-doctrine.) So sure, you can make an argument that the two ought to have chosen violence over the promises of the town, they ought to have known such a thing was (in every way the adage) too good to be true. But you could also make an argument they – like we – made a choice inasmuch as they could choose anything within their constraints. It bears repeating, however, that the novel doesn’t do much – at all – to further this line of questioning or explore this nuance. It simply blames them – and us – for being dupes and moves on.

So don’t be a dupe. Give this one a pass. You can choose how to spend your reading time, even if I can’t.

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July 12, 2015 · 10:10 pm

Reading in Newfoundland; or, How to Hit a Moose

Fear not. We didn’t hit a moose. But I also didn’t get as much reading done as I intended because my time as a passenger was spent on moose patrol, rather than reading. What? Oh, yeah, I was on holiday in Newfoundland for eleven days. Saw some whales, dolphins, puffins, no big deal. No moose spotted (happily), though we learned that in Gros Morne (where we spent the latter half of the trip) there are five moose per square kilometer. Symbols of Canadiana don’t come much more dense (ha ha).

In retrospect, with such a quintessential ‘Canadian’ vacation planned (though many of the Newfoundlanders we talked with disputed the ‘Canadianness’ of Newfoundland) I probably should have selected Canadian or Newfoundland-based novels. As it was, I took along several of your summer recommendations (thanks):

Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer

Post-apocalyptic fantasy finds a group of four ‘explorers’, defined by their roles (the psychologist, the anthropologist, the linguist…), sent into a [anthropomorphic][animated][alien] landscape/environment to gather data. They encounter a range of challenges that are at once metaphoric and practical. With a nightmarish, oppressive atmosphere, the book asks the reader to consider the environment/natural world as both hero and antagonist to our present and our future. 3/5

Euphoria, Lily King

Following the anthropologist theme, Euphoria is based on the life of Margaret Mead with Mead fictionalized as Nell, her husband as Fen and their collaborator as Bankson. In addition to being one of the best love stories I’ve read in recent memory, the book is a thoughtful and nuanced exploration of ideas of ethnocentrism, positivism and colonialism. Principally narrated by Bankson, the retrospective time frame infuses the novel not only with urgency and threat, but with an assurance of the importance of the narrated events: for it is only in retrospect, the novel argues, we recognize and signify small choices, taken-for-granted actions and chance encounters with power. 4.5/5

Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon

Gawd, N. Gawd. What a mess of terrible boredom. Maybe I’d have liked this one if I knew anything about the early years of the Internet. Or New York. Or business ventures. Who am I kidding, the point of fiction is that you ought not need to know anything about the subject to be captivated and moved by it (see Euphoria above!). The novel was altogether too interested in its own clever turns of narrative direction and layered sentences to present anything like compelling character or plot. I was marginally interested in the thematic concern of American greed and self-centered ambition, but only barely. 1/5 #worstbooks

The other books recommended still to come: I’m nearly done part one of My Struggle (Karl Ove Knausgaard) (It is So. Good.) and have the Pope and Mussolini and Snow Boy Bird from the library, and am on the waitlist for Station Eleven. All this to say: stay tuned.

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