by Sarah Statz Cords
Each year I eagerly await the Annual Best Books/Worst Books Smackdown on Fiction-L. You know the event I’m talking about; some kindly and ambitious souls offer to compile everyone’s “best books” suggestions, and pretty soon someone else suggests listing what we thought were the “worst books,” and soon there’s a big heated discussion about whether or not it is useful or advisable to list “worst books.” Some years this discussion gets extremely acrimonious, but this year I was pleased to see that everyone was feeling generous, and many library staff members got on with the business of naming the books they enjoyed the least.* I have always been firmly of the camp that thinks you can learn just as much about a reader by listening to what they DON’T like, so I thought I’d get into the spirit and present my 2009 list of Worst Nonfiction Books.
Genre: Memoir/Humorous Memoirs
1. Augusten Burroughs–You Better Not Cry: Christmas Stories.
Burroughs, well known for plumbing the depths of an unhappy childhood and challenging adulthood in such memoirs as Running with Scissors and Dry, here offers a slim volume of holiday-themed essays. I personally found them unfunny, super-depressing, and largely similar to material that Burroughs has already mined. I also find “holiday books” kind of an annual plague of books published for a quick buck, and which are marketed as gifts to be purchased for people you don’t know very well. (Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, with its snappy title and forgettable text, was another example of such a “gift book.”)
Genre: Making Sense…/Of Our Culture and Society
2. David Denby–Snark: A Polemic in Seven Fits.
Mr. Denby is a film critic with The New Yorker, and the author of the memoirs American Sucker and Great Books. Here he turns his attention to “snark,” which he thinks is the nasty hallmark of modern journalism (and Internet journalism in particular). I’d like to be able to explain this book further, but it was SO BORING and written in such critic-ese that I couldn’t make it through its mere 128 pages. As far as I could tell, he spent a lot of time defining what snark is NOT–it’s not Jon Stewart, for instance, which I still don’t really understand–and he never really got around to explaining what he thinks snark is or why it might be bad for our culture.
Genre: Memoirs/Coming of Age/Self Discovery
3. Isabel Gillies–Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story.
Gillies, an actress on NBC’s Law and Order: SVU program, describes the dissolution of her marriage, and her struggle to care for her two young sons after her husband left her (a situation which, according to a friend of hers, “happens every day”). I wanted to like this one; it’s short, and the subject was interesting enough, but I found Gillies’s writing so clunky it was beyond distracting. Celebrity memoirs should only be written by celebrities who can write, or by ghostwriters who can write.
Genre: Investigative Writing/Political Reporting
4. Thomas Friedman–Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–And How It Can Renew America.
Mr. Friedman, repeating your catch phrase of “hot, flat, and crowded” in your nonfiction book about the “need for a green revolution” does not make you clever. It makes you annoying. Now, granted, part of my annoyance with this title is because Friedman tried to charge my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a fee of $70,000 to come to campus for a speaking engagement, which is ridiculous. For a considerably angrier (and more profanity-rich; be warned) review of this title, check out what Matt Taibbi had to say about it.
Genre: Life Stories/Relationships/With a Little Help From My Friends
5. Jeffrey Zaslow–The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship.
Journalist Zaslow interviewed ten women who had known each other since their high school days together in Ames, Iowa. At one point he actually uses this line to describe the women’s personalities in high school: “As a clique, they had a reputation for being flirts–more social than academic, and more apt to tease boys than to please them. In reality, though, most of the Ames girls were very good students. And a couple of them actually pleased more than they teased.” Pleased more than they teased? Um, Mr. Zaslow? The 1950s called, and they want their line back.
Now, as with all Worst lists (and, let’s be honest, Best lists as well) this one is HIGHLY subjective. It is not offered to offend, and I’ll be the first to admit that many of these books that were worsts for me might well have been enjoyed by many other readers. But, I’ll bet you any readers’ advisor, without hearing about any books I’ve enjoyed, could look at the above list and tell you what they’ve learned about my reading tastes: Writing style is important to me. I don’t particularly need or want books by big-name authors. I might be up for some books by Matt Taibbi (which, in fact, I always am!).
*And, my heartfelt thanks to all the contributors at Fiction-L. I thoroughly enjoyed this year’s Best AND Worst round-ups.
