Worst book you've read recently?

[Yorikke]

@Valgard

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. I know a bunch of people love his stuff but for the life of me I can’t figure out why. Awful. It’s a 100 page story shoehorned into 1,000 pages. He must have been getting paid by the pound.

Utter crap. I put it down after the first few thousand pages. I’ll burn it for heat next time it gets cold here.

I came in here to mention just that very book. I finished maybe 1/5 of it. I keep thinking that I must have missed something, because so many people just jizz over it, but I just don’t get it.

Joe

[Bobotheoptimist]

The Dragon Lensman, claimed to be something which Doc Smith would be proud to see carry on the Lensman tradition, instead it is pure crap that wanders off into mysticism that is so far removed from what Smith wrote that I can’t believe the publisher let this hunk o’ crap be printed.

Worsel helpless if it wasn’t for a 16 year old psychic female human Lensman… Right.

[Selkie]

I didn’t make it far through The Corrections, and wound up giving it to a friend as an insomnia treatment. And although I can’t say Running With Scissors qualifies as a bad book, exactly, I found it so horrifying that while I see the attempts at comedy, I can’t feel the humor at all.

For those who were also defeated by Cryptonomicon and The Diamond Age, may I recommend Zodiac instead? I coud hardly believe the same author wrote it.

[Dung_Beetle]

Over the weekend, I read a book called The Big Turnoff: confessions of a TV-addicted mom trying to raise a TV-free kid by Ellen Currey-Wilson. I expected the usual TV-is-bad-mmmkay, which is preaching to the choir in my case, but comforting. However, I soon came to hate the author with the fire of a thousand birthday candles.

First, she doesn’t want her kid to ever even see a TV set in operation, although she herself watches all kinds of stupid crap. (I know, it says that in the title, but it still irritated me). Second, she was constantly behaving in incredibly immature ways, such as getting jealous when her acquaintances prefer each others’ company to hers, and refusing to do housework in her frequent spare time because she “would resent it” although her husband works and she doesn’t. At one point, she goes so far as to offer a blow job to a friend’s husband in exchange for him giving her information about getting her kid into some swank nursery school. This happens at the dinner table in front of everyone, so she then quickly tries to make it “sound like a joke”.

She also talks about her drug and alcohol addicted bag-lady mom, and her woo-woo sister, who thinks her daughter is the Buddha reincarnated and plans to wean her off of food. I mean, these people have issues! Why the hell is this woman writing a book about television?

Anyway, I finished the book in hopes that the author’s husband would divorce her, or the kid would be taken from her by the authorities or something, but no…the kid’s school asks the crazy bitch to teach workshops about giving up TV.

So, um, in closing, if you would like to read a book written by a complete shitstain, this is the book for you!

[MichaelQReilly]

@Shoshana

My LiveJournal review:

Title: In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made
Author: Norman Cantor
Publisher: Perennial
Year: 2002
Genre: Medical history
245 pages

I really enjoy books about the rise and spread of diseases and their effects on politics and culture. I read Hans Zinsser’s *Rats, Lice, and History * at a young age; even as a child I recognized the skillfulness and clarity of his writing. Alas, Cantor’s In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made is disorganized, repetitive, tangential, and unskillful. If a student handed it in as a manuscript, I’d hand it back with the request that s/he outline her work first. I am not exaggerating when I say that putting each paragraph on an index card, throwing the cards in the air, stacking them and recompiling the book in that order without adding transitions might be an organizational improvement. Topics are touched upon and discarded; paragraphs only peripherally related to the topic festoon the chapters like cobwebs; assertions are not backed up with evidence; ideas and statements are repeated. Why this was a *New York Times * bestseller I don’t know, but I think less of us all that it was.

Cantor’s rambling and disjointed text is neither a good introduction to the plague nor, as the title promises, an examination of its aftermath. Theories of the plague’s constituents (Yersina pestis? Anthrax? Cosmic dust?) are raised and dropped at random. Some historical and economic information does address the purported topic, but is poorly written and appears in desultory fashion. It is internally contradictory. Some sentences make no sense. It reads like a rambling professor’s last lecture before retirement.

Odd ad hominem arguments and strange attributive statements mar the text further. Is it really that important to identify Richard II’s homosexuality multiple times? To apparently blame people who had not yet invented empiricism for not understanding about germs? To somehow hold the Jews accountable for the misperception that they caused the plague? To criticize women for choosing chastity and the cloister when their rate of death in childbirth was so high? (Male clergy are not criticized for their chastity at all.) Lucy (the early human discovered by the Leakeys) is referred to as “the black mother of us all,” a phrase in which the inclusion of “black” is superfluous and odd, and which occurs in the context of a several-page disquisition that has very little to do with the plague (and certainly nothing to do with its wake).

Do yourself a favor and avoid this like the… well, you know. Many books of much higher quality address the topic. As for this one, though I am a book packrat of problematic proportions, I’m tempted to throw it in my paper recycling bin it lest it fall into the hands of someone who can’t critically evaluate it.

Here, here! I had a master’s class on the Black Death a few years ago and checked this out when I did the historiography section of my research paper. This book was atrocious, especially since Cantor is supposed to be a well regarded medieval scholar. The Great Mortality, which was written by a journalist, is a better piece of historical writing (and that is saying very little) than Cantor’s piece of garbage.

[ignoramus]

@Carl Corey

Shoshana , I agree with you about Cantor’s book. Fortunately I got my copy for free, because I would have been peeved had I paid for it. I’ve read a couple of his other works and he’s a pretty crap writer IMO.

I liked Plagues and Peoples by William McNeill a lot more.

Damn, I actually quite enjoyed Cantor, but then I’m very much in the ‘popular history’ section… runs off to buy Plagues and Peoples

[delphica]

@Dung Beetle

Over the weekend, I read a book called The Big Turnoff: confessions of a TV-addicted mom trying to raise a TV-free kid by Ellen Currey-Wilson. I expected the usual TV-is-bad-mmmkay, which is preaching to the choir in my case, but comforting. However, I soon came to hate the author with the fire of a thousand birthday candles.

I am so horrified by your description of this mess that I find myself almost wanting to read it, in a sick, twisted, and masochistic way.

[Dung_Beetle]

@delphica

I am so horrified by your description of this mess that I find myself almost wanting to read it, in a sick, twisted, and masochistic way.

It was kind of fun when you look at it like that…when I got done, I tried opening it at a few random places just to see if she pissed me off on every single page, and it seems that she did.

[Algernon]

@Mangetout

This is going to be an unpopular nomination, I know, but I tried really really hard to read Gravity’s Rainbow, but gave up in sheer frustration.

Sigh. I actually finished Gravity’s Rainbow a decade or so past. But regret doing so to this day. I hated every page.

I’m older and wiser now though. I never finished Cryptonomicon (about a year ago), and just recently only made it only 1/4 of the way through Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell before giving up.

I’ve read some pretty crappy books in my lifetime, but these three are the worst of the lot.