When we asked you to follow an anonymous UK publishing insider’s lead and talk about books nobody should bother to read, we knew we’d be seeing some of the usual suspects. One literary agent, for example, savaged Dan Brown‘s The Da Vinci Code: “It’s not just the flatness of the characters and the writing. It’s the damn worshipping of the book. If this makes you rethink all you’ve ever held dear about Christianity, then you never really held it that dear.” Another reader couldn’t take Special Topics in Calamity Physics. “Rather than allow her characters to completely transform, or be a part of anything, really,” she complained, “Marisha Pessl leaves them floating around (especially the annoying-as-hell narrator) in a state of ‘look at me, I’m perpetually precociously distant from everything!'” And, yes, she especially hated the narrator: “I found her tone and worldview to be a little too precious to take, and I generally felt the desire to beat her to death with a shovel.”
Even established literary writers came in for criticism, though. One reader really hated Ian McEwan‘s Saturday (“the flat-out impossible, just laughable plot & maladroitly sketched antagonist reek…a middle-class nightmare of what lower-class villains must probably be like”), while Bella Stander‘s hatred for Patrick Susskind‘s Perfume runs so deep she wrote about it on her own blog, describing the international bestseller as “unrelentingly creepy and morbid, without a single ray of hope or redemption.” (Film critics seem to be catching on, as the Oscar-bait cinematic adaptation has been severely panned since its late December release.) One publishing insider couldn’t believe Lionel Shriver won an Orange Prize for We Need to Talk About Kevin. “I’d give it a C+ in Freshmen comp,” she sniffed. “Blech!” (Then again, my wife liked the novel just fine, which I mention only because my taste came into question, too, when someone called Joshilyn Jackson‘s gods in Alabama “over-hyped and contrived.” These are the sorts of differences in opinion that make for lively conversations, though, right?)
But the pithiest comment may have come from the New York City librarian contemplating Wally Lamb‘s She’s Come Undone: “Just shoot me.”