Sunday, January 22, 2012

Ten of the Most Overrated Books

*pulls on his bulletproof vest, straps on his helmet and life vest, readies an epinephrine shot, and locks himself in a fallout shelter with his computer* Okay then. 


Just a couple of things. This is all my personal opinion. If you absolutely love one of these books, more power to you. They're just books that garnered tons of praise, all kinds of award, and when I sat down to read them, they fell flat. The writing style was obnoxious, the narrator was real didactic, the characters were annoying, or the plot just had too many holes. Now I'm not saying these are the most overrated books ever. These are just the ones I have read. That's why you won't find any of the Twilight books on here or War and Peace. I'm sure I'll find plenty of welcome additions to this list over the years.


That said, here they are in no particular order (except the last one which I hold a special grudge against):



1.     Dracula, by Bram Stoker

Often considered a cornerstone of gothic literature and modern horror, Dracula is responsible for popularizing the vampire, thus, inspiring several movie franchises, book series, and one of the most famous accents. The book itself starts out strong with real estate agent Jonathan Harker travelling to Count Dracula’s castle. Everything it there: the wolves, the famous lines, the chilling atmosphere, the three slutty vampires eating an infant, but it doesn’t last. Most of the book is a series of letters between Lucy and Mina and it is boring as hell. Dracula and the psychopath Renfield are the most fascinating characters but they don’t get much time in the novel. It mostly centers around Van Helsing, Jonathan, and the two women. Though he’s be reinterpreted as vampire-slaying badass in recent movies and comic books, he’s more of a doctor here and really doesn’t have much depth or a good back story. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but for a villain of Dracula’s caliber, I felt a little cheated how easily he was defeated. The horror is definitely there, but in small amounts. The rest of the book just drags too much to be a classic.

2.     The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
I think I read this book for the same reason many other adolescents have picked it up: it was controversial. The book was a sensation when it came out, it has been pulled from libraries, banned in schools, and was supposedly what led the crazed fan Mark David Chapman to shoot his idol, John Lennon. It continues to be part of our culture: a musing probe into teenage insecurity, anger, and melancholy. I guess, but I was pretty underwhelmed. I’m probably supposed to identify with Holden Caulfield, a lonely boy who – recently expelled from another prep school – wanders about New York City getting drunk and talking to random people, but he just comes off as a whiney emo brat who doesn’t realize how privileged he is. “Oh, woe is me!” The story has little focus and little conflict; it’s like a pretentious bastard recorded every genius thought he had as he ran errands in New York City. I don’t necessarily object to unlikeable protagonists, but I really don’t think Holden carries the novel well. I’d like to get to know Jane or Allie better, but we’re stuck with Holden. I guess I appreciate what the novel did for modern fiction, but I personally can’t stand this book.

3.     The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
Often cited as a landmark in feminist and twentieth-century literature, The Bell Jar is a thinly disguised autobiography that centers on college undergrad, Esther, who has been born with no personality. The Bell Jar is supposed to be about her mental breakdown but it really just sounds like the whining of a privileged rich girl. Nothing leads up to the breakdown; it just comes out of nowhere and when it does arrive, it’s not very interesting. She doesn’t change or discover anything about herself and the cliffhanger ending where she just goes into a doctor’s office and the book ends is infuriating. The first half is filler. I guess it’s meant to show what her life was like before the breakdown but nothing she does reveals anything about her character and the other characters that are introduced have nothing to do with the story and are never heard from again. Keep this one on the shelf and pick up One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest instead.



4.     White Noise, by Don DeLillo
I’ve found that most of DeLillo’s books are like the Colorado Avalanches: both the novels and the games start out strong but get weaker and weaker as they go. One of his later novels - Mao II – opens with a pretty spectacular mass wedding in a baseball stadium, evoking questions of individuality, conformity, religion, and entertainment. White Noise opens with college students moving into their new dorms. As commonplace as that sounds, it’s about as exciting as this novel gets. There’s an assassination, a chemical leak that forces a town to evacuate, and a mysterious drug that eliminates the fear of death, yet somehow it all seems incredibly boring.

I think it comes down to the characters. DeLillo’s characters are just mouthpieces for his own reflections. Granted a lot of authors do that and there’s nothing wrong with having a character being defined by their beliefs (Dostoyevsky does it well in The Brothers Karamazov), but in White Noise, that’s all the characters are. They have no dimension, they discuss death and modernism as dully as a philosophy dissertation, and when they’re in peril, I really just don’t care. There’s just nothing likeable or human to attach to. This isn’t the first book to talk about commercialism and it’s effects in Suburbia and certainly not the best.

5.     Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
“My book is an impenetrable labyrinth of literary masturbation. No one on Earth can understand it. It must be profound!”












6.    A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
This book isn’t awful; it’s really just a mediocre book. The reason I’m listing it here is because it has such a huge following. Toole couldn’t find a publisher and committed suicide. Lo and behold, ten years later it’s published and wins the Pulitzer. People claim this novel is hysterical, but it really isn’t. I chuckled a couple of times, but that’s it. Toole creates a colorful cast of characters but aside from the mother, they’re pretty one-dimensional. Ignatius, the main character, is a loud-mouthed, preachy, self-inflated bum. He’s a lot of fun as an unlikeable main character, but the problem is that he, too, is a one-note character. As in The Bell Jar, he doesn’t change, he doesn’t learn anything about himself, he just keeps on being an annoying leech only with his girlfriend instead of his mother. The end doesn’t resolve a lot of plot points and I remember thinking, “Really, that’s it?”




7.    The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
*dodges bullets* I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I had to put it on here. This is another book where I appreciate what it did for the genre much more than I appreciate the book.  I like that the various cultures of Middle Earth have their histories and languages and that there’s definitely a world created beyond the four corners of the page, but Tolkien just couldn’t edit it down. There are massive long-winded descriptions of fields, how the elves make win, and the lineage of dwarf kings. The plot and the characters definitely take a back seat to the setting. It’s hard to get emotionally involved when the story is interrupted by a five-page tangent on a forest.

This is one of my few exceptions to the rule “The book was better than the movie.” Peter Jackson’s film trilogy surprisingly does a better job developing its characters and establishing its plot than the book does. Tolkien has his moments – Gollum is a great character – but The Lord of the Rings reads much more like a history textbook than a story. This should be no surprise since Tolkien was a linguist, historian, and Oxford professor, but he managed to pull everything off with The Hobbit, I just don’t know why he failed to do it here.

8.   The DaVinci Code, by Dan Brown
This book only became a bestseller because it was controversial. The actual history of how the Catholic Church got started and how the religion changed over time is pretty fascinating and I think a lot of people wanted to look at some of the origins of their beliefs but the research is incredibly sloppy. First and foremost, the Prior of Scion was disproven as a hoax by a Frenchman trying to claim he was descended from Christ in the late 50’s. Brown gets a lot of basic facts wrong like his assertion that the Olympic Games were in honor of the Sacred Feminine with the pentacle as the symbol. Actually, the games were meant to honor Zeus and the games had no emblem until they were revived in France in the 19 century. When the author is constantly getting his facts wrong, it’s hard to take the book seriously.

Still, The DaVinci Code is a work of fiction. So what if some facts are skewed? Well, the book fails there as well. The tone of the narrator is preachy, always pushing his social opinions and often, it’s hard to tell if where in Langdon’s thoughts or the narration. There’s all these holes in the story. Why didn’t any of Sophie’s family try to find her if she was allegedly from the Merovingian bloodline? Do the police just not think to take her and Langdon in for questioning? Really, nobody found that tomb when they were building the Louvre? Not to mention all the “Well, that’s what they want you to think” logic.

9.   The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
This is another terrible book that was flooded with awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer. This book takes place in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic so it should have had a interesting sense of culture but instead we just get tons of “Spanglish,” slang, and footnotes which really don’t add anything to the already thin plot. The sense of place just isn’t there. Also, the narration is choppy and real difficult to get into. The copious footnotes are just distracting; why can’t they be worked into the narrative?

Furthermore, Díaz inserts as many references to nerd culture as he can but his main character – the comic book living Oscar – feels flat and lifeless. I feel like he’s not trying to describe a character, but just trying way too hard to be clever.  The book has no sense of flow, the narrator rambles on, and the writing is just plain bad. Half of this book could be edited out. Díaz is just trying to write in the flashiest prose that he can but utterly forgets his story and his characters.

10. The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
Rand has experienced a surge of new readers among conservatives and libertarians in the wake of Glenn Beck and The Tea Party. She’s sort of this bizarre pop philosopher that goes in and out of style depending upon the current political climate. She wrote dozens of essays and books about her philosophy, Objectivism, and really that’s what she should have stuck with. Her books are just dry and boring as tax codes, overwritten like a Russian novel (she did emigrate from the Soviet Union), didactic as a Baptist preacher, and have the overdone drama of most romance novels. There really aren’t characters so much as manifestations of ideas all competing. They’re thinner than cardboard and are nothing like real people.

The Fountainhead centers around an architect named Howard Roark. He’s a genius (Rand makes sure to hammer this into his head) and care about nothing but himself and his buildings.  In the first few chapters, I thought, “This character is kind of a dick. I’ll bet he has a life-changing experience or meets someone who makes him realize the world doesn’t revolve around his ego.” But no, this is Rand’s notion of the ideal man! Her books champion individuality, ideological and artistic freedom, and being true to yourself – which are all fine things that need to be defended – but Rand sees the world entirely in black and white and takes these ideas to the extreme. When a firm makes some changes to a building without Roark’s knowledge or consent, he dyamites the building to the ground. Another character buys a statue from a museum then throws it down a laundry chute and destroys it so that no one else can have the pleasure of looking at it.

Everything in the novel is framed as Roark vs. everyone else, selfishness vs. altruism, the individual vs. the collective, the lone genius and the masses of jealous ignorant leeches who want to bring him down out of jealousy. It’s a 600-page lecture on the virtue of selfishness (the title of one of her books, seriously), greed, and morality that ends at the tip of your nose. Charities, environmentalists, and humanitarians are wasting their time. This is one of the few books where I hate the writing style as much as I hate the message. Ayn Rand’s message may be popular among Tea Partiers now, but it’s nothing more than a childish, egocentric philosophy: a philosophy of half-truths with no place for compassion, friendship, or the outside world. I imagine Rand must have died an admired writer, but without a single friend.

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