the worst book you ever read

Here's material for a meme, no doubt: what was the worst book you ever read, and why?

A quick search around the web, however, turns up several lists of notoriously bad films (e.g. Wikipedia's "Films considered the worst ever"), and indeed there's an annual award for bad films, the Razzies, but I can't immediately find anything similar for fiction.

There is the Bad Sex in Fiction Award; and also the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest, "wretched writers welcome." But nothing for entire books, so far as I can see.

[Update: I now see that The Observer started such a discussion a couple of years ago, though even in starting the debate Stephanie Merrick (who picks Wuthering Heights) notes that "if favourite books are subjective, nominating the 'worst' books is even more so". The ensuing comments, over 1100 of them, can be found here.]

Of course, a document such as the Vatican's Index librorum prohibitorum tried to establish some theologically-validated consensus on what makes a bad book. But not only is the question of moral danger rather different (if not altogether so) than the issue of aesthetic failure; also even the Vatican eventually gave up any attempt to distinguish between bad and good when it comes to literature.

Perhaps that's because there are just so many more books--and therefore so many more bad books than bad films. There are too many contenders. But perhaps it's because there's much less unanimity on what makes for a bad book than on what makes for a bad film.

Here's my contender for at least one of the worst books I've ever read... and what makes it even worse is that it's a trilogy.

Many years ago a co-worker and friend lent me Robertson Davies's The Cornish Trilogy (which consists of The Rebel Angels, What's Bred In The Bone, and The Lyre of Orpheus), telling me I must read them. And read them, I did; every word. Perhaps my effort to continue through these three thick tomes indicates some kind of masochism. Because almost every sentence I found ponderous, overwrought, and yet strangely banal.

I'm really not sure why I persevered in the effort. Maybe I thought that at some point Davies simply must turn the corner, that things had to improve. But no: the oh so slow trainwreck of language and plot continued inexorably, each sentence and each page as poor as the previous one. The trilogy was long; it was tedious; it was pretentious. And it gave no pay-off whatsoever.

Fortunately, I have repressed almost all memory of the books themselves. I only have the memory of the execrable experience I spent reading them. An experience I would be loath to repeat.

Meanwhile, I now find myself in a land in which Robertson Davies is a literary hero. The Canadian Encyclopedia declares that he is "acknowledged as an outstanding essayist and brilliant novelist". And I should admit that a couple of my other contenders for worst books also emanate from the Great White North--not least Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, though that at least has the benefit of a decent title and a commendable brevity.

But I should assure my Canuck hosts that there's no Canada-bashing here: I love the novels of Leonard Cohen and Michael Ondaatje, for instance. But Robertson Davies? Forget about it.

Crossposted from Posthegemony.

Comments

[Matt]

Now that's resistant reading! (sorry Jon). In truth squibb, all I've ever heard of Sokal was some "hoax" or other but no, despite the terrible glibness Eagleton's Introduction to Literary Theory is probably a good thing in the world, particularly at a certain level (say, sophomore undergraduate)? Including the value in learning to take things with a grain of salt. Some of his other books are less hard to stomach though.

You've read more Taylor than I, so I'll defer defer to the possibility.

[Amie]

Matt, you're welcome to your opinion of course. But your comment 'elaborating' on why you called The Most High a bad book seems to only offer very vague generalities which could be 'applied' to any number of books. Surely, one could be more specific?
You write "It[the book] seemed to me to mimic a certain genre" as if to imply that this is a 'bad' thing. You seem to have read Blanchot, so surely you know that 'mimicking genres' is one of the insistent questions of his writing? You seem to have read Derrida as well, so surely you know that he addresses this at length vis-a-vis Blanchot's texts, their specific heterogenous genre(s)?
"chaque fiction demeure incommensurable, et l’événement de chaque version pour une “même” œuvre... " (Parages)

You say you didn't mean anything 'profound'. OK, fine. But since you have also been talking of responsibility, do you think it is responsible to call something bad and then say, i didn't mean anything profound?

[Craig]

Blanchot: there are no bad books.

Does this mean, then, that there are only bad readers? Do some books tend to accumulate more bad readers than others?

[Craig]

Squibb: I've heard a number of throwing copies of Hegel and throwing oneself out of a window whilst holding onto a copy of Hegel, but I've never heard of someone throwing up on a copy of Hegel.

[Jon]

Amie on Matt: "your comment 'elaborating' on why you called The Most High a bad book seems to only offer very vague generalities which could be 'applied' to any number of books. Surely, one could be more specific?"

Perhaps there's something here of the Tolstoyan line: that bad books are all much of a muchness; but good books are good in their own particular ways?

Craig: "Does this mean, then, that there are only bad readers? Do some books tend to accumulate more bad readers than others?"

I like this idea, but I'm not sure how defensible it is. Worth considering at more length...

[nnyhav]

Only bad writers.

[Matt]

So far no one has brought up Nietzsche, at least explicitly...but Blanchot too names "a writer's main temptations," as "stoicism, skepticism, and the unhappy consciousness. These are all ways of thinking that a writer adopts for reasons he believes he has thought out carefully, but which only literature has thought out in him" ("Literature and the Right to Death"). Of course for Blanchot there can be no bad 'literature,' for it is always a process of "becoming other," although I suspect Amie had another passage in mind?

There's the more banally phenomenological take, Jon; surely a book cover, or a description industry can be bad. Unsure where McSweeney's "confession" fits in, nor with Orwell's turn on "good bad books" either - just sayin'.

[Sprezzaturra]

Howze about EP's Jefferson and/or Mussolini? A rather terrifying and horrible book worth reading over and over; what's more, unlike most Bovines Victorian (or Yokeli Americanus) Ez could scribble a fairly decent Anglish on occasion.

[Craig]

Nietzsche's point - if I understand your allusion, Matt - is quite Spinozan: your assessment of affects has a lot to do with "who" you are. A valuation reveals yourself, rather than the evaluated object.

[Matt]

I was thinking of the N. of "Why I Write Such Excellent Books," (-namely, because not unlike Wittgenstein, "nobody will be able to even begin to read me until many years, nay centuries later." That sort of thing.) The N. who in his insistence on keeping the horizon of the future open sounds a lot like certain "postmodernists" opposed to teleological thinking. So the question becomes one of future readers (and what sort of books remain hospitable to future readers).

[Rigoletto]

Aw yeah, N. rules: alas, tho' Herr Doktor FN's prose lacks a bit in terms of pussay power (he hisself guilty of ressentiment nearly as much as some chandala-y marxista). Pound got lots more of ye olde in-out, and I wager knew as much about Latin, scholasticisms, Athenians and the rest--and modern science. And after a few hours of scholarsheep, EP retreated to a glass of chianti and a 3 way with Olga and whatever other cow happened to be around. Salud!