Best book takedowns?

[Darren_Garrison]

Every once in a while a book comes along that is so awful and yet so high-profile (especially in the case of author misbehavior) that someone takes the time to vivisect the book into tiny bits, then stomp on those bits. One of the better ones is this takedown of The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, from an author who attempted to sue J.K. Rowling for copying her ideas. Still in it’s early stages is this destruction of Handbook For Mortals.

So–any favorites?

[Panthan]

Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses, by Mark Twain

“Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in ‘Deerslayer,’ and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.”

[JohnGalt]

Are you looking for the equivalent of Roger Ebert’s review of North?

I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.

I don’t think anyone can match Roger Ebert. Gawd, I miss him.

[Face_Intentionally_Left_Blank]

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” - Dorothy Parker on various attributed books.(apocryphal)

Too good not to be recognized anyway.

[Asuka]

SomethingAwful’s Gun SubForum “The Firing Line” had some really good chapter by chapter takedowns of various crazy right-wing gun books like “Ghost - Paladin of Shadows” (Imagine 24 but if Jack Bauer was constantly complaining about liberals and murdered tens of thousands of people with his bare hands), “Unintended Consequences” (A man gets set-up by the ATF and goes all vigilante against him, and somehow this leads to all gun laws being revoked at the end) and my personal favorite, the “Enemies Foreign and Domestic” trilogy (which is basically what would happen if America had a second civil war between liberals and conservatives, except written by a libertarian man who really hated George W Bush who was President when the book was first written so it’s really weird in retrospect).

Unfortunately you have to be a forum member AND archive access to read them and I don’t have archive access but you can find them if you do have archive access by just searching their forum.

[Andy_L]

There’s a review that I adore of Crichton’s “Prey.” It was written by David M. Palmer on USENET - here Redirecting to Google Groups

"The theme of this book is that if you take many simple, low-complexity units with limited communication between them, then the combined system will exhibit emergent behaviour that will cause Bad Things to happen.

In this case, the simple low-complexity units are the characters. The guy who narrates doesn’t talk to the wife who cheats with the guy who lies. The children who squabble stress the guy who narrates. The guy who hums annoyingly eventually causes the guy who panics to panic. The gal who escapes ends up with the guy who narrates.

The Bad Thing that happens is this book.

There’s also a subplot that involves some nanotech run amok."

[Little_Nemo]

@JohnGalt

Are you looking for the equivalent of Roger Ebert’s review of North?

I don’t think anyone can match Roger Ebert. Gawd, I miss him.

One of my favorite movie put-downs (sorry, I can’t remember the writer) was “I wouldn’t watch this movie again if it was being projected on Salma Hayek’s naked body.”

[Jim_s_Son]

As the great Ann Coulter points out: “What Happened. Hillary Clinton” explains it all.

[Malleus_Incus_Stapes]

I hang out on the website Das-Sporking a lot, and I have to give a shout-out to Feminist Fairy Tales, which has to be seen to be believed. Really, there are no words. None.

As for books that are actually well-known, there’s Battlefield Earth on the same site, in which there’s an entertaining storyline parallel to the actual sporking about how the awfulness of the book is tearing holes in the fabric of reality. Also, there’s Cthulhu. (The entries are members-only to protect them from rabid Scientologists, but if you sign as BattleFail, password “guest99”, the link should work).

[Darren_Garrison]

@Asuka

SomethingAwful’s Gun SubForum “The Firing Line” had some really good chapter by chapter takedowns of various crazy right-wing gun books like “Ghost - Paladin of Shadows”

That reminds me–Oh, John Ringo, no!

[RealityChuck]

Jim McDonald’s takedown of The Pleistocene Redemption.

[APB]

This one is a bit Anglocentric, but Steve Jones’s recent trashing of A. N. Wilson’s new Darwin biography deserves a mention. (Available here behind the Times pay-wall.) The punchline about the Ladybird Book of Evolution is particularly good.

The joke being that, although that Ladybird Books have recently been reinvented (with deliberate irony) for adults and Jones’s Ladybird Book of Evolution really does exist, British readers still think of them as the classic series of books for young children.

[Gyrate]

@Jim_s_Son

As the great Ann Coulter points out: “What Happened. Hillary Clinton” explains it all.

I dunno - even if there is a certain amount of truth to it, that’s pretty low-hanging fruit to pick.

[don_t_ask]

Jack Kerouac’s On The Road is often listed among the great book’s of the 20th Century and I loved it when I read it in my 20s. A couple of years ago I read Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex review of the book. It begins:

There’s a story about a TV guide that summarized The Wizard of Oz as “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.”

It’s funny because it mistakes a tale of wonder and adventure for a crime spree. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is the opposite; a crime spree that gets mistaken for a tale of wonder and adventure.

On The Road is a terrible book about terrible people. Kerouac and his terrible friends drive across the US about seven zillion times for no particular reason, getting in car accidents and stealing stuff and screwing women whom they promise to marry and then don’t.

and then gets really scathing. What is most shocking about it is that, on reflection, it is a pretty fair precis of the book.

[Aspidistra]

Historical novelist Mary Renault’s takedown of her least favourite source:

“Muddled sensationalism is typical of Curtius, an unbearably silly man with access to priceless sources now lost to us who frittered them away in the cause of a tedious literary conceit about the goddess Fortune, and many florid exercises in Roman rhetoric (Alexander, exhorting his friends kindly to remove the arrow stuck in his lung is impressively eloquent)The favours of Fortune being conducive to hubris and nemesis, Alexander’s story is bent that way by recourse to anti-Macedonian agitprop… Bearing about as much relationship to objective truth as a History of the Jewish People commissioned by Adolph Hitler”

[Darren_Garrison]

@APB

This one is a bit Anglocentric, but Steve Jones’s recent trashing of A. N. Wilson’s new Darwin biography deserves a mention. (Available here behind the Times pay-wall.)

Here is an excerpt outside the paywall. Also, check out some of the top Amazon reviews.

[WordMan]

@don_t_ask

Jack Kerouac’s On The Road is often listed among the great book’s of the 20th Century and I loved it when I read it in my 20s. A couple of years ago I read Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex review of the book. It begins:

and then gets really scathing. What is most shocking about it is that, on reflection, it is a pretty fair precis of the book.

The best takedown of On the Road was by Truman Capote: “That’s not writing. That’s typing.”

[GreenWyvern]

I just came across this recent one, a review of ‘The Course of Love’ by Alain de Botton:

A Discourse on Love, by Deepthinker Whatshisname

Extract of review:

His novel tells of a love story between two characters whose names I can’t even remember. The male character has a few Michael-Corleone-in-Sicily moments with various women on public transport until he finally meets a Scottish girl, who, after lengthy preliminaries, finally gives him a blowjob in an airplane bathroom—a scene written with less eroticism and a weaker grasp of human sexuality than the snippets of very bad porn I have glimpsed, well, never mind.

The narrative love story between these two characters is frequently punctuated with italicized aphorisms about love that are too trite to even be considered superficial. Suddenly, midway through one of these italicized nuggets, came a frightening realization. Oh, God. Alain de Botton wants to teach me about love. He wants to instruct me on how love really works. Not only that, but he appears to believe that he is writing in the style of the great French psychological novels of Proust and Stendhal.

The result is that I have to spend the next 150 pages getting narrated at about love by someone whose writing would indicate has never actually felt love, or even understood it from the outside. The agitations of the human heart, which great writers try to tease out, are totally alien to Alain de Botton.

…

His total inability to think in subtleties leaves him with a need to overexplain ideas as if conversing with the reader in the elevator. And I’d hate to be trapped in an elevator with this guy. His book is basically a laundry list of banal feelings stuck to the fridge beside the torn-out pages of a daily-inspirational-quotations calendar. If you need to tell me directly that a character has “intelligence and kindness, humor and beauty” without being able to demonstrate these qualities, then why are you writing a novel instead of doing something more constructive with your time? Why are you even in the game?

…

[CalMeacham]

@Panthan

Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses, by Mark Twain

“Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in ‘Deerslayer,’ and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.”

A lot of people know this, and refer to it. But Twain wrote a later (and to my mind, funnier) takedown of Cooper. It was entitled “Cooper’s Prose Style” or “Fennimore Cooper’s Further Literary Offenses”. It was reprinted numerous times, including in the Bernbard de Voto-edited anthology Letters from the Earth, which is where I first read it:

http://strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/twain-coopers-prose-style.pdf

Coopers-Prose-Style.pdf

"Notwithstanding the swiftness of their flight, one of the Indians had found an opportunity to strike a straggling fawn with an arrow, and had borne the more preferable fragments of the victim, patiently on his shoulders, to the stopping-place. "

…
There was only one fact in that long sentence that was worth stating, and it could have been squeezed into these few words-and with advantage to the narrative, too: “During the flight one of the Indians had killed a fawn and he brought it into camp.”
You will notice that “During the flight one of the Indians had killed a fawn and he brought it into camp,” is more straightforward and business-like, and less mincing and smirky, than it is to say, “Notwithstanding the swiftness of their flight, one of the Indians had found an opportunity to strike a straggling fawn with an arrow, and had borne the more preferable fragments of the victim, patiently on his shoulders, to the stopping-place.” You will notice that the form “During the flight one of the Indians had killed a fawn and he brought it into camp” holds up its chin and moves to the front with the steady stride of a grenadier, whereas the form “Notwithstanding the swiftness of their flight, one of the Indians had found an opportunity to strike a straggling fawn with an arrow, and had borne the more preferable fragments of the victim, patiently on his shoulders, to the stopping-place” simpers along with an airy, complacent, monkey-with-a-parasol gait which is not suited to the transportation of raw meat.

[Annie-Xmas]

ANYTHING by Dan Brown.