Worst Book(s) You Ever Read?

[crich70]

I don't know about worst, but to me the most unreadable was "Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut. I just couldn't quite figure out how to read it somehow.

[beppe]

Originally Posted by Ziguezon

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. It's considered a classic by many, but I really can't figure out why. It was all manner of awful, in my opinion.

To appreciate Naked Lunch it might take an acquired taste. To get that taste you have to be in a certain disposition of spirit, even more than that, you have to be in a certain phase of your life. Now, the way I am now, I would not touch it.

Try some Bukowsky, and before that On the Road, they could be a good introduction.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by beppe

To appreciate Naked Lunch it might take an acquired taste. To get that taste you have to be in a certain disposition of spirit, even more than that, you have to be in a certain phase of your life. Now, the way I am now, I would not touch it.

Try some Bukowsky, and before that On the Road, they could be a good introduction.

I first read Naked Lunch as a little kid and roughly fifteen other books by Burroughs during a two-year period after that. The only Burroughs I feel holds up over time is Junky, his first novel. It's the only one in which he masters Conrad's trick of casting ordinary shallow characters in an eerie light: "His face was lined with a suffering in which his eyes did not participate. It was a suffering of his cells alone."

I've always preferred J.G. Ballard, whom I read at the same time as Burroughs but consider infinitely more accomplished.

Things one reads at around the same time during one's youth: Sade, Burroughs, Ballard, Celine, Lautremont, surrealist and Dadaist manifestos.

I've never liked Bukowski's Tramp of Truth shtick, though certain of his stories have a kind of neo-realist integrity. Can't say I like Ginsberg or Kerouac, either, or any of the beats except Dianne Di Prima and the black mountain poets (Denise Levertov, John Wieners) if they count.

In fact, I once wrote a piece about how awful Ginsberg and Kerouac really are. It was published in an anthology called Crimes of the Beats, but I don't recommend it because my writing has since improved. I only mention it because I truly despise the cult of spontaneity, which the beats appropriated from surrealist automatic writing, only to attach a certain faux rebellious attitude that gets in the way of saying anything useful.

In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon does exactly what Kerouac claimed but failed to do in On the Road: It riffs in the way an accomplished bebop horn player does.

Real jazz soloists play against chord changes and reinterpret song structure. They can rip it open or even seem to ignore it, but you always feel structure's presence in their work.

Kerouac, on the other hand, is riffing on nothing: There isn't any structure in his novels and thus his improv is masturbatory and aimless. Whereas in Crying Lot, Pynchon is riffing on the myth of Orpheus like a virtuoso and the result is something you can reread endlessly and still discover new veins of grace. You can feel the structure he's playing against because he's the truer musician.

Do research and you'll find out Ginsberg revised constantly even as he taught his students to "write another poem" instead. For that and many other reasons, I actually hate him.

This is not to disrespect people who love G and K, however. Other readers' pathologies simply require different emphases than mine. Other writers might well receive something of lasting value from the very influences that irritate me most.

[beppe]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Things one reads at around the same time during one's youth: Sade, Burroughs, Ballard, Celine, Lautremont, surrealist and Dadaist manifestos.

I would put Henry Miller also in the precursor, and leave Sade out. Never reread it again. Dull and shallow. Celine yes.
Ballard is J.G. Ballard of the Empire of the Sun ? Out from that list. Sorry
Lautremont le poet maudit? The precursor of the most wonderful pataphysique?
Lovely. I might karma you for quoting that. But way long way from poor Burroughs.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Funny, because I feel the same way about Henry Miller that you do about Sade. Again, this is personal taste and not meant to be corrective or authoritative.

My problem with Miller is that he actually believed the prostitutes who told him he was incredibly virile and handsome and amazing in bed, and wrote journals filled with second-hand certainty about what seemed to me to be transparently unreal and therefore fragile self-representation.

It's one of the worst insults I can think of for any novelist, since they're supposed to understand people to some degree, and it could be his epitaph: He believed what prostitutes told him about himself.

The late novelist Kathy Acker used to teach writing exercises at Cal Arts based on Sade (they were great exercises, BTW; I've used one of them with other writers I know).

It's a mistake to think he only writes from the point of view of the sadist. His real point was to play with people's preconceptions and outrage, and to so destroy the reader's identification of good with likable characters that you can't even find the author's POV. If Sade were as juvenile as you suggest, he wouldn't have helped to shape the course of modern literature and theory for the past two hundred years.

That doesn't mean I agree with books like Philosophy of the Bedroom. It means that Sade is a polemical model (see Roland Barthes writings on Sade).

If you only know Ballard from Empire of the Sun, then with all due respect, you really don't know Ballard, who was at least as experimental as Burroughs. This is not an insult, as no one can read everything. I myself have read very little.

Empire of the Sun is an autobiography, comes very late in Ballard's career and, to be honest with you, I never actually made it through the entire book because the style isn't really that of the Ballard I know (though it's interesting to know that his haunting the graveyard of an airfield as a child is probably the source of his lifelong technofetishism and tech revulsion).

The books Ballard wrote in the 60s and 70s were so controversial that the publication of one of them -- The Atrocity Exhibition -- was stopped in America when a buyer wandered through the publisher's warehouse, picked up a copy (it was to be called Love and Napalm Stateside) and read the heading, "Why I Want to F--- Ronald Reagan" in boldface. This was long before Reagan was President, but the book stopped production that day. I recall seeing early copies in hardcover in a glass case at a local bookstore. They were rare by that time.

The last thing I loved by Ballard was Running Wild, a novel that pretends to be an interpretation of recordings of the lives of a group of children who murdered their parents. This is announced at the beginning of the book, so I'm not giving anything away.

The Atrocity Exhibition, Vermilion Sands were two of the books that shaped me as a child. Another was The Lime Twig by John Hawkes, who was until his recent death (in my incredibly humble opinion) one of the greatest living stylists in the English language. Other writers I loved: The Nabokov of Pale Fire, Thomas Bernhard, Thomas Lovell Beddoes and Borges's Ficciones.

Anyone is free to hate any or all of these writers and I won't argue against them until I know their reasons. I believe there are good reasons to love or hate virtually anything. After all, we don't all take the same vitamins and medications, nor can we all digest the same food. Why should literature be any different?

One of Ballard's biggest defenders was Anthony Burgess, who used to assert Ballard's superiority to Burroughs in interviews as well as at least one essay. Which isn't to say he's right, but only to show that I'm not alone in considering Ballard important.

[katzenjammer]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

considering Ballard important.

Will read Ballard then

[beppe]

me too.

[Prestidigitweeze]

The point isn't what I think of Ballard (except in the sense that people are welcome to disagree with what I think). It's his place in history and the fact that Empire of the Sun has nothing to do with it.

I have to say -- I'm a little sad to find that no one here wants to argue contrary positions, ideally without making things personal. Perhaps it's impractical to expect that on a forum, but people here generally seem to be civil and well-read, so I did have hopes.

In these polarizing political times, we often forget that one of the best ways to test our conclusions is to find a friend who totally disagrees with us and perhaps can shoot our conclusions down. If no one disagrees, then it's harder to gain perspective.

[beppe]

By the way, I finally got clear in my head what is most certainly the worst book I ever read, even worst than the DaVinci Code.

It is Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeeg.

It starts so well, building subtle images and evocating elusive atmospheres in an intimate minimalistic key to become a James Bond/Superman adventure just in the turning of a page. Dreadfull. A terrible put down.

It was a big hit and even won a prize.

[orlok]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

The point isn't what I think of Ballard (except in the sense that people are welcome to disagree with what I think). It's his place in history and the fact that Empire of the Sun has nothing to do with it.

I agree. Empire of the Sun is an anomoly on the writing of Ballard, as far as I'm concerned. Try "Crash", "The Drowned World", "The Burning World" or "The Crystal World" for dystopian and disturbing visions of humanity. A truly original voice.

[Prestidigitweeze]

I agree that Sense of Snow was a case of either bad taste or dismal opportunism.

But that's why you and I tend not to read bestsellers -- because what we're looking for in a book isn't necessarily what sells in the short-term. (I'm basing that supposition on having read some of your thoughts on the books you actually liked.)

Originally Posted by beppe

It was a big hit and even won a prize.

Still, Snow was a hit with the public and in its own time. Many of the writers we've been talking about were despised by the public initially (Henry Miller included). Often, that first wave of popularity can fade permanently.

BTW: Despite what I happen to think of Miller, he's earned the admiration of some damned compelling fiction writers and critics. If he speaks to you and stands up when you reread him, then it doesn't matter what I think except in the sense that we can talk about it and refine our own thoughts.

I agree with you, too, Orlok. Thanks for that.

[Freeshadow]

everything I was forced to read by Kafka.
This symbol-encumbered whining about Mr. DAD was his self-therapy and should has been destroyed after his death, as he wanted to.

[cearbhallain]

Originally Posted by beppe

By the way, I finally got clear in my head what is most certainly the worst book I ever read, even worst than the DaVinci Code.

It is Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeeg.

It starts so well, building subtle images and evocating elusive atmospheres in an intimate minimalistic key to become a James Bond/Superman adventure just in the turning of a page. Dreadfull. A terrible put down.

It was a big hit and even won a prize.

I haven't read Smilla, but you've described how I felt about _Atonement_.

[SameOldStory]

A Confederacy of Dunces tops my list.
The book looked like a really great book. The opening chapter offered promises. But it just never went anywhere I wanted to go. This was one of the few books that I threw in the trash with malice and forethought. I hated it for failing me and wasting my time. Yeah, I know, some people love it.


Honorable mention - Romance books.
Having had a significant interest in girls as a teenager, I wanted to see what they found so attractive about those books. But clearly, they're written by a different life form. The few I started to read weren’t bad, I just started finding other things that I wanted to do. Like clipping my toenails.

[Pablo]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

If you only know Ballard from Empire of the Sun, then with all due respect, you really don't know Ballard

That's me! I tried to read Empire of the Sun but abandoned it near the end, completely fed up with the story and/or the style, I just can't remember.
As a consequence, I put Ballard on my black list.
From your comments, I gather I am probably wrong, so what would to recommend? I am willing to give him a second chance.