What was the worst book you read last year?
Anyone who does enough reading—particularly librarians and readers' advisors, who often read outside of their own interest areas to better understand all of their patrons' reading tastes—eventually comes across a book they hate. Sometimes we find a book boring, or preposterous, or simply not to our taste for one reason or another; often a book infuriates because it is poorly written, improperly fact-checked, or not proofread. We all have books that we feel are, for lack of a more nuanced term, "bad" books.
But rarely do we, as librarians, let those opinions show, or even admit that we have them. Regular readers of Fiction-L can all remember discussions in which someone has asked what books we have disliked. Although such discussions invariably start with civilized comments, they sometimes devolve into what might best be described as a melee, with some readers opining that we should never admit we disliked a book, while others maintain just as strongly that sharing honest opinions about books can only further our RA discourse. Likewise, we are taught never to let our personal opinions show when working with readers at the reference desk; and that is a tenet I can certainly understand (although I would argue that just because you can't show an opinion doesn't mean you can't have one).
But there is one place I think the lack of honesty about books and their quality or lack thereof is hurting us: in book reviews.
When was the last time you read a good review of a bad book? Or any review of a bad book, for that matter? Now that I think about it, how many book reviews have you read in the past week? And I don't mean book summaries, as can be found in Publishers' Weekly or on Amazon or WorldCat. I mean a good, lengthy, thoughtful, well-written, evaluative review?
It's been a long time for me, I'll admit. I used to at least browse my local newspaper's Sunday book section, but now that it's largely become a list of summaries and local bestseller lists, I can't say I look at it much anymore. Likewise with the New York Times book review; I used to look at it to see what titles were being discussed, but for the most part I felt either the reviews were giving me too much information about too few books that people were actually going to read, or were written in such insular New York-ese that even I, a dedicated lover of New York City, couldn't keep up. It's a vicious cycle; I think we're reading fewer reviews, and fewer reviews are being written, with most major newspapers and many other publications drastically reducing or eliminating their books coverage.
Who is to blame for this trend? I think at least part of the responsibility lies with the reviewers and the book page editors, who lately seem to think that "reviewing" books largely means supplying plot summaries and being careful not to offend anyone. That's all very collegial, but it's not very exciting or stimulating. Admit it: sometimes don't you like to hear why someone didn't like a book?
The power of calling a spade a spade-or a bad book, a bad book-was recently proven to me. I write a personal book blog called Citizen Reader, and have (for my purposes) a respectable readership. Meaning, I don't get nearly the traffic of your big litblogs, but I have enough readers who comment to make the blog a source of continual education, entertainment, and connection with other readers. At the end of December, rather tired of the "best of" book lists that proliferate at the end of every year, I decided to post a short list of titles that I called the "Worst Books of 2008."
A few days later it was clear from my blog statistics that the worst list was garnering more attention than anything I'd ever posted; within a week I had four times the number of hits I normally do, not to mention incoming links from other blogs and review sources that had never linked to me before. Weeks after the post appeared, I'm still getting hits on it that I can trace back to Google searches for "worst books 2008." Not everybody who read my list and short reviews agrees with me (just like I don't agree with all the "worst" books listed by Entertainment Weekly), but that's what made it great: in disagreeing, we really discussed these books, and several readers offered their own picks for "worst books," as well as the reasons for their choices.
In that give-and-take I've learned more about authors and books than I learned in a hundred positive reviews that tell me how "compelling" yet another book is. The lack of honest and well-argued, cantankerous book reviews is, in my opinion, at least one of the reasons why traditional book review sections are losing readership, while blogs like Jessa Crispin's Bookslut (http://www.bookslut.com/blog) seem to be at least holding their own. Ms. Crispin, to her credit, is not afraid to tell you what she thinks: "Norah Vincent bothers me…Maybe it was her book Self-Made Man with its non-stop obviousness…There is something about her writing that makes me think she's part of this group of writers who have never actually thought about an issue before, but they just started, and now they have a theory they want to share with the rest of the world."
Now that's good, negative stuff. And you know what? I'm still going to read Vincent's new book, Voluntary Madness, because Bookslut brought it to my attention, and I want to see if I agree or disagree with Ms. Crispin. So how's about it, book reviewers? Got any honesty and integrity left for us? Or has your job really become nothing but reprinting the blurbs the publishers send you?
Some Worst Books Lists of 2008:
- Citizen Reader: http://www.citizenreader.com/citizen/2008/12/the-worst-books-of-2008.html
- Entertainment Weekly: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20246889,00.html Seattle Books Examiner:
- http://www.examiner.com/x-1361-Seattle-Books-Examiner~y2008m12d20-Worst-books-of-2008
SARAH STATZ CORDS has worked for the Madison Public Library and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Engineering Library in Wisconsin. A book reviewer for Library Journal and Bookslut.com, she has taught a course on adult reading interests at the UW-Madison School of Library and Information Studies. She is the author of The Real Story: A Guide to Nonfiction Reading Interests (Libraries Unlimited, 2006), and The Real Scoop: A Guide to Nonfiction Investigative Writing and Exposés (Libraries Unlimited, 2009). She is also an associate editor for the Reader's Advisor Online.