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| Hearsay: |
A bunch of writers and critics pick their “most-loathed” books of all time, which actually comes out more as a “most-overrated” list than anything else. (Otherwise, I’m sure you’d see a lot more Danielle Brownsteel Koontz.) If that’s the case, chuck Richard Ford’s Independence Day in there for me. Just couldn’t get it going. Have you got some to add to the list? I know you do.
Susannah Herbert, The Sunday Times literary editor
Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook deconstructs the life of Anna Wulf, an ex-communist single mother with writer’s block and a fragmented, alienated consciousness, the kind that was de rigueur among 1960s feminists. Apparently, the book’s experimental structure is meant to evoke the symptoms of a nervous breakdown, but, as it fell from my limp hand 20-odd years ago, I can’t be sure. It’s highly autobiographical and, at more than 600 pages – not bad for a blocked writer, eh? – highly unreadable.
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June 24th, 2008 at 9:04 am
Obviously an entirely subjective list, which is fine, but who cares?
And Ford is a writer who is best at the subtleties of human relationships and minute shifts in psychological state and their consequences. He also does not go for the bells and whistles of peaks and climaxes. If you need more obvious excitement than that, he’s clearly not for you.
June 24th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Gravity’s Rainbow… not so much loathe as just couldn’t get into it.
June 24th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
The Great Gatsby, Underworld, In the Skin of a Lion… anything by Kathy Acker, and anything by Iron Maggie (but especially The Edible Woman–it’s one of the sloppiest, most poorly constructed novels I’ve ever read).
June 24th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Margaret Laurence’s THE STONE ANGEL. Read it in high school, and again in university. An old unlikeable woman complains about her life. Hate to put down Laurence, but WHO CARES?
June 24th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
“The Golden Notebook” unreadable? It’s psychologically fascinating, powerful,
and for a long novel, has remarkably little filler.
Jerzy Kosinski’s “The Hermit Of 69th Avenue” and Henry James’ “The Wings Of The Dove”
were chores and bores for me.
June 24th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
I agree with a few of the books on this list, especially since a few of them are on my bookshelf with bookmarks still in them from when I set them down in university and faked my way through my exams without reading them. Virginia Woolf is wonderful if you like falling into a coma. Tarr is probably the closest I’ve come to actually hurling a book across the room. And who can forget Carwin the Biloquist. I don’t know where my professor came up with that one.
June 25th, 2008 at 7:11 am
I think some books strike certain people at certain times. I loved Independence Day, though I read it at the most unlikely of times (when I was about 25 and moving from one city to another). Nevertheless, for me, anything by Rushdie. None of his work has ever grabbed me. I suspect some of it has to do with my ignorance to religious overtones.
I actually threw Russell Smith’s ‘How Insensitive’ out a window and watched cars drive over it for the rest of the day. That book is terrible.
June 25th, 2008 at 7:49 am
Aren’t all ‘best’ or ‘worst’ lists subjective?