I'd like to hear what some of you have to say about this topic. I'm not calling this a 'worst books ever' thread because i have ceased trying to argue standards of value with people. I happen to enjoy REM's album Up alot, but I can't make an aesthetic argument about it anymore. i can't defend it as the best album ever, nor would i even want to. and I think most people get all riled up about what they think is the best without actually defining their criteria. So, i'm just going to list books that i really hated and why. some of these defenses will include aesthetic critceria, but we'll all just have to accept my hypocrisy.
My standards for this are books that were bad for whatever reason -- poor piece from otherwise great writer, boring, bad writing style, hateful characters that do unrealistic things, or it was written by one of your friends and you were STUCK reading it (oh me!).
I'm not going to include any John Grisham on here becuase, really, what would I expect besides a cheap thrill?
Women in Love by Rama Bauer, er, DH Lawrence -- need i say anything?
Kindred by Octavia Butler -- a pointless sci-fi novel (w/o the sci-fi) about an African American woman married to a white man who go back in time to pre-Civil War America for no reason and learn valuable lessons about how racism is bad and learning how to read is good. I actually had to read this book 2xs as an undergrad (for the same professor) and I hated it both times. The writing is bad and the story is essentially a slave narrative written in the 20th century that reveals nothing about the African American experiance that hasn't already been covered in the works of Toni Morrison & countless others. and, to top it all off, the time travel is never explained. it just happens and lessons are learned. woopdy freakin do. the one part that could have saved this book was if the author had shown the experience of the white husband who manages to become a villain simply because he's white, even though he's portrayed as a sympathetic character in the first half of the novel. i'm not saying that this book about the African American experience would be better if it were 'whiter' but it may have balanced the narrative more so that the struggle of the wife (who becomes the slave of her great-grandfather, an obnoxious white guy whom she cannot kill) became more important.
Captain Blackman by John A. Williams -- At the risk of sounding like a horrible, horrible racist, I have to include this novel as well which is by and about an African American man. Particularly because it uses time travel in the same way as Kindred, which is to say poorly. In this novel, the main character Captain Blackman (oh, wait, it's SYMBOLIC. i get it now!) is a captain in Vietnam and he gets injured. He either literally travels back in time and lives or simpy hallucinates the bulk of the novel. i have no idea which is the case since the author seems to have abandoned the time travel part after the first few pages. But it seems important at first since Blackman appears in the revolutionary war talking as a 1960s black soldier and wearing his vietnam uniform. He then proceeds to fight in every US war from 1776 to 1950 before coming out of his coma (oh, so maybe it is a dream? yeah. maybe.) along the way, the years in between the wars are skipped and Blackman never ages or dies. It's probably the most comprehensive literary attempt at capturing the african american war experience, so i guess it deserves some credit for intentions, but the execution is what made me cringe so much. characterization is sparse. In defense of the book (which has some pretty awful prose in certain places), the stories about certain wars are interesting and Blackman isn't simply a hero in heroic times.
All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland -- file this under 'bad book by otherwise good writer.' This is actually a really boring book that follows a 'psychotic' family around the day the daughter is going into space. I read it and returned it to the bookstore within a day. Sadly, it has a great cover photo (on the hardcover) and the first chapter is really amazing. the rest is a mess of plot points and sitcomish wackiness that made me reconsider the quality of other coupland novels. yeah, it was so bad that it tainted other books for me!
Nimbus by someone whose name I cannot recall -- This is from back in my sci-fi adolescent days. the storyline is absolutely dopey but the writing style was really really good. the fact that he could put a sentence together made the book seem worse than it probably was.
Magazine Beach by someone else who i cannot recall -- i looked at this book for a long time at borders back in HS and finally bought it. in fact, i kept putting it on an endcap hoping someone would buy it because it was kinda big and took up too much room in the Sci-Fi section. it's about a global disaster created by some guy for some reason. and there are twin siblings that end up having sex for no apparant reason. other than the obvious (they are super-attractive and rich).
Moonshadow -- A graphic novel that was heralded as genius. i seriously have no idea what it was about. one of those 'it's so abstract you have to like it' kind of things. i probably still own it, but i'll be damned if i will read it again. damned i say!
Forrest Gump by Winston Groom -- Yeah, i read the novel. and it's one of the few examples where the movie is better than the book. and i don't like the movie (er, I hate it's message and it's conservative morality; the acting is decent and the cinematography is good). the movie is a complete overhaul of the novel. all that remains is the character's name and the fact that he interacts with some famous people. but otherwise, Gump is a farting, annoying character and Groom is probably just as farty and annoying. Seriously, Gump has gas through the entire thing.
What's Eating Gilbert Grape? -- another movie that's better than the book, though in this case I think the movie's pretty good. In the novel, no one is really likeable. in the film, johnny depp has a character arc where he goes from likeable to not likeable to likeable. or something like that.
Jane Eyre -- too many semi-colons. i mean, what the fuck? this is the book that forced me out of honors english my sophomore year of HS. guess i showed her! fuck you Jane Eyre, now I TEACH the classes, bitch! you know where you can put all those colons? in your colon!
