Literary Thursdays: My WORST of the WORST

Last week for Literary Thursday I posted one of my favorite poems (if you missed that, you can check it out here: Last Week). This week I decided to shake things up by exploring the other end of the spectrum.

As you all know, I like to read a lot. While this has slowed down somewhat during medical school (instead of reading maybe 6-7 books a year, I'm down to reading just 3 or so), it's still an important part of my life. A while back I compiled a list of every book I've ever read (some multiple times) and by my estimation, I've read upwards of 120 different titles. Of those, some of them I truly fell in love with and consider to be some of the best pieces of literature I have ever read, while others I honestly wouldn't touch again with a ten-foot-pole. Now I'm sure in the weeks, months, and years to come I'll talk enough about the novels I laud, but today I wanted to focus instead on the bottom of that list.

Here are the 10 worst books I ever (had to) read:

*a 'P' next to the title means I only read part of the book, in most cases I stopped more than halfway through

10. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

Ok, maybe it's not "fair" for me to place this book on the list as it's really more of a 'How To' book for Italian autocrats than a true narrative, but I had to read it in high school and I found it about as interesting as I would some some geeky post-doc's treatise on the procedural order of interplanetary space trade debate in the intergalactic senate in the Star Wars universe. Let me also note that I actually like history and even went through a brief phase in middle school where I daydreamed about world domination. If there was ever anyone who would've actually enjoyed the book, it was me. But I didn't.

9. As I Lay Dying (P) by William Faulkner

Another book I was forced to read in high school, although I only made it halfway before giving up. I'm sorry but an entire book about transporting a dead body in a coffin from the perspective of several different people just isn't interesting to me.

8. The Divine Comedy (P) by Daunte

We only had to read part of this massive piece of Renaissance literature (thank heavens) for 10th grade English. I can't say I'm a fan of 14th century Italian writing, I really can't. I will say though that the project we had to do afterwards where we designed our own 'hells' with multiple layers of punishment based on the book was kind of cool.

7. The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Dull, boring, and dry. I'm sorry, I just don't find plays about early American Puritan settlers to be all that exciting... even if there are trials and executions involved. Too dark for me.

6. Hoot by Carl Hiassen

Heaven help me I hate this book. I hate it! Now you know we're getting to the "good" part of the list when we reach the single book that convinced me to review my ten least favorite reads instead of just five since it ended up coming in at number six... Gosh, this is such a terrible, stupid, idiotic book. I really don't even care if you liked it. Back in high school there were always two "categories" of books for summer reading: the books that our specific classes required (so mostly AP after sophomore year for me) and the books the entire grade had to read (right down through remedial-whatever). I'll let you figure out which category this book fell in. The gist of the story is that there's a chain restaurant (pretty much an IHOP) that's going to be built on an abandoned city block that somehow happens a perfect habitat (even though it's in the middle the city) for an endangered specie of owl. Of course the pancake chain is big and evil and wants to kill everything cute and cuddly and nice, so they're bent on destroying the owls... since it's so much easier to do that than find somewhere else to build. Oh, and of course some conveniently high school-aged kid (which also happens to be the target audience) steps in to prevent it all from happening by protesting. So pretty much it should have been called: Occupy IHOP Construction Site.

Oh, and they made a movie.

5. Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The only two things I can remember about this book are: it was so dull I forgot what was happening halfway through but continued to read it until I finished (and still didn't know what was going on) and, it made me never want to read Crime and Punishment.

4. Silmarillian (P) by JRR Tolkein

This might be the only book on this whole list that could possibly get a second shot someday. For anyone who doesn't know what the Silmarillian is, it basically was a prequel written after the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy by Tolkein which was meant to serve as a history of Middle Earth up until said adventures. I had read the Hobbit in middle school and I really enjoyed the LOTR movies, so freshman year in high school I decided to pick up the Silmarilian and see how it all started. Bad move. From what I recall it was pretty much like reading a Roman history textbook written in the 1950's with the additional bonus of a bunch of names and places that were impossible to pronounce or differentiate for that matter. I only made it about a third of the way through before all the levels of gods and floating tree islands and whatnot confused the heck out of me and I gave up. Now that I understand a bit more of Tolkein's mythology and with the current Hobbit trilogy, I may give this one a retry at some point. Who knows, maybe my college-edemecated mined can figgur dis one owt better duh seqund tiem. Hey, and if not, I've always got Hoot I can read!

3. A Hope in the Unseen (P) by Ron Suskind

Ok, where to begin with this gem, where to begin... Anyone who happened to be a freshman honors student at Florida State in the fall of 2007 will remember this book. Someone that year had the bright idea of forcing all the incoming freshman honors students to read this book over the summer before they started classes. You could think of it as a summer reading project that middle schools and high schools assign... only, college isn't middle or high school, and universities don't do that. I suppose the idea was that by reading this book somehow it would promote discussion amongst new students and "unity" amongst an incoming class. It was a commendable initiative, really, but considering that it had never been done before and has never been done since, you can see how it turned out.

Here's where it gets funny. Not only did all the freshman honors students have to read the book (and maybe write a paper, I can't recall if we had to do that too), but as part of the Honors Colloquium we all had to take our first semester, they actually had the author come and speak. Now it was pretty obvious that they expected a big crowd for this event (who knows how much they paid for him to come) as the powers that be arranged for the event to take place in Ruby Diamond auditorium instead of our normal location. For weeks they reminded us about it and built it up to a monumental degree. The only problem? For the class we were allowed to skip whichever two presentations we wanted. Apparently I wasn't the only person who didn't like the book, as almost nobody went. Let me put it into perspective: this wasn't the first presentation of the year people could skip, nor was it one of the last two (when anyone that hadn't skipped would've used their remaining absences). No, this was dead in the middle of the semester. The day after I was curious to find out how it went (I hadn't gone obviously) and I struggled all day until I finally found someone who had actually showed up. He told me there were maybe ten or fifteen people there. Wow. So what made this book so bad anyways?

Well, first off it was a semi-autobiographic novel (which leads me to believe the author must be a real you-know-what, as you'll see). The story follows this poor kid (really the author) who lives in the ghettos of Washington DC and attends a really bad intercity school where almost no one graduates and nobody goes to college. He's not like the rest, of course, and dreams of going to college. So he works really hard and makes good grades, all the while dealing with adversity. Not too bad of a book eh? Well, I agreed with you... up until about two thirds of the way through. You see, eventually there comes this critical point in the story where the kid gets the admissions letters from the colleges he applies to. As it turns out, he gets into two of the universities, but not just any universities, Georgetown and Maryland! Woo hoo! That's pretty awesome! He's going to be the only person in his class to go to college! The first person in his family to go to college and not just to any college, I mean, those are excellent opportunities! He even got scholarships! He should totally be super excited, right? WRONG. Happiness is not the word that describes his emotional reaction; nor is joy or thankfulness or any other positive expression. Instead he's angry. That's right. He's bitter and angry and resentful that he didn't get into an Ivy League school. Say whaaaaaaaat? Come on man, I just read over two hundred pages of this inspirational story for THAT? Oh man, and he gets worse the next couple of chapters, pretty much revealing himself to be a self absorbed pompous, well, you catch my drift. I literally dropped that book with less than thirty pages left. Eventually I think he got into Brown, kudos to him, but what a terrible book. (Geez, the next two must be really bad!)

2. Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

Another assigned high school reading that I did not enjoy (don't worry, there were others I loved including my all-time favorite book, The Great Gatsby). Catcher in the Rye seems to be pretty divisive: you either love it or you hate it. I obviously hated it. For one, I'm not a fan of books with strong language. I mean, I can tolerate some language and I can just ignore things like that, but to me it was just too much in this instance. Combine that with the really strange tense the entire story is written in and the disturbing subject matter (abuse, the main character's affections for his sister...) and I just did not like it one bit. It gave me this really weird nauseous feeling the entire time I was reading. On the positive side though, it inspired me to write a short story about an impoverished middle school aged kid who found a couple dollars lying around at the fair, spent it on a goldfish, and was later beat to death by his drug-addict mother when she discovered what he had done.

1. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

I honestly don't even know what to say. I really don't. I'm a fan of the distopian genre. I enjoy movies like I, Robot and Logan's Run and the Terminator series which portray a far less than perfect future. I found the very distopian and ultra-depressing Nineteen Eighty-Four to be thought provoking and impossible to put down, but this thing, this was just unspeakably bad. Forget the nausea I experienced with Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World made me want to flat out vomit. From the subject matter (hallucinogens, genetic breeding of different "levels" of humans, etc) to the writing style to the story, I hated literally everything. It makes me sick just to think about it. I respect anyone who has a different opinion, but to me, this will always be the worst of the worst.

So what do you think? Disagree about anything? What are the worst books you've ever read? Let me know in the comments or on the new Blog Intersect page!

-JT