Do you hate it? I hate it.
Sam at Book Chase pointed out this Times (of London) article in which various critics reveal the targets of their personal literary loathing - and the occasional leatherbound Waterloo. Predictably, there are a few common offenders: Crime and Punishment, The Lord of the Rings, Ulysses; various works by D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Ayn Rand.
It's a fun subject to discuss with friends. I know that Kit, my college roommate, did grave battle with Moby Dick; My Sister the Blond Artist once greatly objected to my recommendation to The Inn at Lake Divine.
In some respects, "What's the worst book?" is a more easily digested question than, "What's the best book?" because, in context and among similarly-minded people, it's readily understood to be shorthand for, "What book gave you the worst reading experience?" and for some reason that's a fairly comfortable flavor of subjectivity to indulge. Though I haven't encountered a great abundance of books that I truly hate, there are a few I can place on the spectrum from ambivalence to repulsion.
- Though I don't hate it - I actually quite like the story itself - The Lord of the Rings struggled weakly to maintain my interest, as do most works in the same general class of fantasy. This would probably surprise most of the people close to me - My Sister the Blond Artist is a particular Tolkien fan, and my parents like fantasy generally, as do most of my closest friends (you can't help but keep questionable company in engineering school - though my parents are a librarian and minister, so it's not just the geek factor). The genre leaves me cold. C.S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy, gives an evocative account of being romanced by "the north," as he classed all the Norse-inspired imagery that frames up his own and Tolkien's fantasy. It's not an experience I've shared. The earthiness, the jaggedness, the savagery implied, all abraid, rather than excite, my own sensitivities.
- Steinbeck is a turnoff, and after writing the above, I think the reason for this is similar to my response to fantasy. Which sounds terribly odd, since I know few authors less fantastic. But it's the horrible bleakness, in combination with the Western and Country factors with which I find it hard to make a connection. It's not that I only like books in which pleasant things happen to happy people, as described by refined and delicate narrators - far, far from it. It's just that there's a certain type of terrestrialism that causes me so much anxiety, at a fundamental level, that it becomes to hard to appreciate the art that carries it, because it's too difficult to consume a novel-sized serving. If I'm honest with myself, this is probably also why I've never taken to Southern Gothic as much as I would like. Sometimes, I think I must be the reincarnation of a supporting character from a better Edith Wharton novel.
- I've also managed to source endless ambiguous dissatisfaction from the works of Dickens. Taken with the above, confessing this does nothing to improve my sympathetic image. But: corn should be sold by production volume. Fiction, like software, should not.
- The Catcher in the Rye is an easy target. As a favorite book, Catcher ranks right between Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and On the Road on the "refuse a second date, and no goodnight kiss, either" scale. Unfortunately, it's also a durable member of the secondary education canon, at least in the U.S. I moved a lot growing up, so with changing schools and differences in local curricula, I actually had to complete coursework on Catcher several times. I haven't totally forgiven the universe for that. For an assignment in the eleventh grade, I did write a rather amazing satire of it that earned me loads of unsolicited extra credit. I'm still insanely proud of that. But it doesn't change the fact that Holden is a phony.
- Tender is the Night has plenty of devotees. Hemingway. Faulkner. Doppleganger. It drives me crazy. Yes, the plot is disturbing - a psychiatrist marries a madwoman in order to catalyze their mutual self-destruction. But my problem was that I didn't understand the book, in a very particular sense of the phrase. I recall re-reading the same paragraphs, over and over again, trying desperately to figure out what the component sentences had to do with one another. I believe myself to be a person of at least average intelligence, so I don't know what to think about that. But I don't like it. I love Gatsby; I fanatically adore every piece of Fitzgerald's short fiction I've ever read; I enjoyed his other novels in a nondescript way. But Tender does something unpleasant to my universe.
- There is exactly one book that I hate so extremely, so viscerally, so passionately, that I feel an immediate physiological change in myself whenever I see the cover. My remarks about it will be brief, since my reaction to the very thought of it is so overwhelming and involuntary that I absolutely cannot discuss it rationally. In melodramatic moments, I want to retire early and dedicate my life to destroying every copy in print with my bare hands. It's Daniel Quinn's Ishmael. If you're not familiar, the entire volume consists of a self-indulgent jeremiad delivered by the title character, who is both an ecoterrorist and a talking gorilla. Yes. Don't ask me how this happened, but I once found myself stuck on a transcontinental flight with this book as my only reading material. Never before or since have I been tempted to pray for an act of international terrorism to be performed in my presence. One word: Blech!
