Courtesy of the Times of London’s online presence, we have a list of books most loathed by various critics and writers.
This is a tricky list for a writer to read, and I’m surprised they got any writers at all to contribute to it. Why? Because any writer with his head screwed on properly knows just how fickle and arbitrary readers’ — or even a particular reader’s — tastes can be. Then there’s the herd mentality, demonstrated in those moments when a single verging-on-trollish wisecrack sends a swarm of commenters into ad-hominem assaults on one another, often forgetting what was being commented on in the first place. (Some people will jump into the fray with no opinion at all on that topic; they just love a good scrum.)
It reminds me of a couple of posts (and ensuing commentary, much of it feverish if uncertainly heartfelt) back in April, on Nathan Bransford’s blog.
The first presented an apparently simple question to the blog’s readers: “You Tell Me: What Revered Book Did You Just Not Get?”
We all have them. Beloved books that we just didn’t get, that make us question the sanity of the world for liking said books in the first place. It inevitably goes something like this: “Clearly I’m not crazy, so the fact that so many people liked X book is a sign that the rest of the world is crazy.”
But of course it’s just a reflection of the subjectivity of books and the fact that no one will ever agree on one book. And also, I hope people will consider this subjectivity before they describe something as a “piece of trash” in an Amazon review. (You know who you are, nearly everyone in America.)
So You Tell Me: What revered/beloved/classic book did you just not get into?
The answers featured the word “hate” and its variants quite a lot, and “disgust” crept in every now and then; at least one comment said that its author was tempted to gouge his/her eyes out while reading a particular classic. A commenter named “scott jones” summed it up nicely, I thought:
Mr. [Bransford] asked a different question than perhaps many of us answered — “what book didn’t we get?” not “what didn’t we like?”
The first is more like asking us for our literary judgment, not our emotive taste as readers. We shouldn’t be afraid to make judgments unless we buy into the total relativism of current literary criticism. Maybe the criteria are:
1. What was wrong about the plot?
[…]
2. What was untrue about the characterisation?
3. What was bad about the purpose of the book?
4. What was false about the values presented?As for not liking a book, surely we’ve all got a twitch about one book or another that just rubbed us wrong, but that really is relative, and, as some posters have pointed out, personal rather than general.
In a follow-up entry the next day, Bransford asked, “Why Is Personal Taste Taken So Personally?”
I know books are subjective, but it’s amazing to see HOW subjective. And what’s fascinating/horrifying to me about personal taste is the way personal preferences morph into a die-hard nasty Amazon review style slam. People don’t tend to say, “Oh, you know, I really couldn’t get into X, but I can see why others enjoyed it.” Run a personal preference through the Internet and somehow it becomes: “That book was AWFUL and I HATED IT and in fact I weep for the oxygen that was consumed by the author during their pitiful lifetime.”
I mean, just imagine if I rejected someone’s query with “This is a piece of trash and I wanted to gouge out my eyes while reading it.” And yet this is how people very regularly talk about books online? This is an ok thing to do?
[…]I mean, I’m guilty of this too — I get that pit in my stomach when I see my favorite authors trashed. I get actually physically angry! What is so threatening about a dissenting opinion? How does a personal preference turn into an ironclad judgment?
After quite a bit of back-and-forth jawboning and navel-gazing, a poster identifying himself as J.P. Martin pretty much summed up the whole argument for me, with a quote which (he said) was from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr:
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
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