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.

Favorite Books: Part Two

Here's Part Two. I got a poem or two finished while I was on vacation in Florida and I'm almost finished with this second short story (by that I mean the second short story I have finished since graduating college...not that I had solid endings to any of those but I digress). It looks like it's going to be around 30 pages double-spaced. I'll try and post an excerpt when i get it finished.

NEON VERNACULAR: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Yusef Komunyakaa

THE MUSIC THAT HURTS

Put away those insipid spoons.

The frontal lobe horn section went home hours ago.

The trap drum has been kicked

down the fire escape,

& the tenor’s ballad amputated.

Inspiration packed her bags.

Her caftan recurs in the foggy doorway

like brain damage; the soft piano solo of her walk

evaporates; memory looses her exquisite tongue,

looking for “green silk stocking with gold seams”

on a nail over the bathroom mirror.

Tonight I sleep with Silence,

my impossible white wife.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Brother, brother, what are you saying? I mean, you have blood on your hands!” Dunya cried in despair.

“The blood that’s on everyones hands,” he caught her up, almost in a frenzy now, “that flows and has always flowed through the world like a waterfall, that is poured like champagne and for the sake of which men are crowned in the Capitol and then called called the benefiters of mankind!”

THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF JEAN-PAUL MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE by Peter Weiss

...man has given a false importance to death

any animal, plant, or man who dies

adds to Nature’s compost heap.

because the manure without which

nothing could grow, nothing could be created.

Death is simply part of the process.

Every death, even the cruellest death,

drowns in the total indifference of Nature.

Nature herself would watch unmoved

if we destroyed the entire human race.

SATURDAY by Ian McEwan

Who could ever reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter? And who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction?

THE INFERNO by Dante Alighieri

Their sighs, lamentations and loud wailings
resounded through the starless air,
so that at first it made me weep;
Strange utterances, horrible pronouncements,
words of pain, tones of anger,
voices shrill and faint, and beating hands,
all went to make a tumult that will whirl
forever through that turbid, timeless air,
like sand that eddies when a whirlwind swirls.

REDWALL by Brian Jacques

Matthias gasped with shock as a giant horse galloped past, its mane streaming out, eyes rolling in panic. It was towing a hay cart which bounced wildly from side to side. Matthias could see rats among the hay, but these were no ordinary rats. They were huge, ragged rodents, bigger than any he had ever seen. Their heavy tattooed arms waved a variety of weapons - pikes, knives, spears and long rusty cutlasses. Standing boldly on the  back-board of the hay cart was the biggest, fiercest, most evil-looking rat that ever slunk out of a nightmare! In one claw he grasped a long pole with a ferret’s head spiked to it, while in the other was his thick, enormous tail which he cracked like a whip. Laughing madly and yelling strange curses, he swayed to and fro skillfully as horse and wagon clattered off down the road into the night. As suddenly as they had come, they were gone!

HAMLET by William Shakespeare

'Tis now the very witching time of night,

When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out

Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood

And do such bitter business as the bitter day

Would quake to look on.

TWELFTH NIGHT by William Shakespeare

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.

KING LEAR by William Shakespeare

When we are born we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.

OTHELLO by William Shakespeare

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, 

Is the immediate jewel of their souls: 

Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing; 

'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands; 

But he that filches from me my good name 

Robs me of that which not enriches him 

And makes me poor indeed.

ANGELA’S ASHES by Frank McCourt

The master says it’s a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it’s a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there’s anyone in the world who would like us to live. My brothers are dead and my sister is dead and I wonder if they died for Ireland or the Faith. Dad says they were too young to die for anything. Mam says it was disease and starvation and him never having a job. Dad says, Och, Angela, puts on his cap and goes for a long walk.

MAUS: A SURVIVOR’S TALE by Art Spiegelman

BELOVED by Toni Morrison

Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched up everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can't hold another bite?

THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy

Beyond a crossroads in that wilderness they began to come upon the possessions of travelers abandoned in the road years ago. Boxes and bags. Everything melted and black. Old plastic suitcases curled shapeless in the heat. Here and there the imprint of things wrested out of the tar by scavengers. A mile on and they began to come upon the dead. Figures half-mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. Take my hand, he said, I don’t think you should see this.

THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE by Stephen Crane

He felt that in this crisis his laws of life were useless. Whatever he had learned of himself was here of no avail. He was an unknown quantity.

Favorite Books: Part One

A lot has been happening in my personal life of late. I said in the first post of this blog that I'd try to keep my personal life to a minimum here - this is supposed to be showcase for my writing and artwork, not Facebook - but I feel like I ought to explain a few of the wrenches that have been tossed into my productivity. For one, I'm in the middle of moving. Since my parents' divorce about a year and a half ago, my Dad has moved out and found his own apartment. Our house went up for sale. We had to do several renovations, keep the house spotless in case a realtor wanted to show the property (in which case we'd have to leave for an hour), haggle over price, and when it finally did sell, try to find a decent apartment or townhouse and move in in a two-week window. 

Fortunately, we did find something close-by for less than the monthly mortgage payment, and managed to get everything in before the house was signed over to the new owners. With a house's worth of belongings now in a little townhouse, it feels like my Mom and I are living in a episode of "Hoarders." We can barely find anything, especially in the kitchen, but at least we're not loosing things between two houses and having to drive several blocks over to grab a tube of toothpaste or a plate. 

Money is as tight as ever. I'm down to one job. I quit Home Depot, but that's a whole 'nother blog post. The college loan bills keep coming. I can't seem to find anything I'm qualified for. I've tried looking for human resources work, secretarial work, even government jobs, but nothing is happening. I'm having trouble sleeping.

I gotta find a way to sell some of this artwork taking up space in the new townhouse, but every gallery is every 1) not interested, 2) doesn't respond, or 3) is booked until 2013. I wonder if Etsy.com is a viable option or whether it's another eBay?

Right now I have several unfinished writing projects:

(1) completed short story that needs heavy editing

(1) short story, two-thirds of the way done that needs an ending not as loose as the last story

(5-6) half-finished poems and a dozen fragments of poems

(2) mediocre ideas for short stories

(40) pages of an abandoned novel

(0) pages of an outline for a half-baked novel on an apartment of college grads trying to weather the Recession.

More updates on these later.

In lieu of some decent content, I've decided to post some excerpts of my favorite books (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays, and graphic novels are all included) since I don't know if I could articulate a list of what I consider to be "good literature." I considered explaining what I thought made each book great and how it influenced me, but decided to let them speak for themselves. 

Side note: I'm also thinking of posting a list of what I think are the most overrated books ever written, but this may get me shot by a lunatic. *cough Catcher in the Rye*

HERE'S PART ONE:

MIDDLESEX by Jeffrey Eugenides

I could sense the happiness of couples holding first babies and the fortitude of Catholics accepting their ninth. I could feel one young mother’s disappointment at the reappearance of her husband’s weak chin on the face of her newborn daughter, and a new father’s terror as he calculated the tuition of triplets. On the floors above Delivery, in flowerless rooms, women lay recovering from hysterectomies and mastectomies. Teenage girls burst with ovarian cysts nodded out on morphine. It was all around me from the beginning, the weight of female suffering, with its biblical justification and vanishing acts.

FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 

I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.

WIT: A PLAY by Margaret Edson

This is my play's last scene “Here... Heavens appoint my pilgrimage's last mile And my race Idly, yet quickly run Hath this last pace My span's last inch My minute's last point And gluttonous death Will instantly unjoint my body and soul" John Donne... I've always particularly liked that poem. In the abstract. Now I find the image of my minute's last point, a little too, shall we say... pointed. 

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED by Tim O’Brien

They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment.

WATCHMEN by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore

  

GRENDEL by John Gardner

I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I understood that finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly - as blindly as all that is not pushes back. I create the whole universe, blink by blink.

THE HOBBIT by J.R.R. Tolkien

The yells and yammering, croaking, jibbering and jabbering; howls, growls and curses; shrieking and skriking, that followed were beyond description. Several hundred wild cats and wolves being roasted slowly alive together would not have compared with it.

LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding

“Maybe there is a beast....maybe it's only us.”

THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

THE LUCIFER EFFECT: UNDERSTANDING HOW GOOD PEOPLE TURN EVIL by Philip Zimbardo

The genocide and atrocities committed in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Burundi, and recently in Sudan’s Darfur region also provide strong evidence of people surrendering their humanity and compassion to social power and abstract ideologies of conquest and national security. Any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us - under the right or wrong situational circumstances. That knowledge does no excuse evil: rather, it democratizes it, sharing its blame among ordinary actors rather than declaring it the province only of deviants and despots - of Them but not Us.

THE CRUCIBLE by Arthur Miller

Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!

"Day One" by Doug McClellan Burn the clothes you wore that day. Save the ashes. Bring them to the square where we are fashioning a monument of ashes. Winds will rise, soften the heroic shapes, the paper faces around the square will become eyeless, the sideshow will depart to a muffle of drums, leaving only hollow sounds of wind-- and wind being wind, the ashes will follow it, leaving a swept field of countless jagged stones. Newspaper and oil on canvas.

A Showing at Last!

I don't know if you remember the twelve shadowboxes I posted a while ago, but I finally found a place for them. It wasn't easy. I tried several galleries and coffee shops around the town. Many required a monthly membership fee (there was no way I could do a one-time showing), wouldn't have any space for a while (the airport), or didn't respond at all. But I did manage to find this cool little place called Domino in Manitou Springs. It's a tiny place but I like the neighborhood and a lot of the art showing. The shadowboxes should be up the first Friday of October, but if you're in the area you should definitely check this place out.

http://www.domino80904.com/

On a personal note, I havn't posted a new blog in an ages because I've been working two jobs. One is still the framing store and then I've picked up a seasonal job as a cashier at Home Depot. Luckily, the two are really close...like...to the point where I could walk from one to the other in five minutes. The framing job is still my favorite: it's in my field, the work is pretty laid back but usually interesting, I get to see artwork people bring in, and I like the people working there. 

Home Depot is just really stressful. The store is enormous and there are so many things to remember. I'm only a cashier, but I'm the first person people see when they come in so I get a lot of angry people returning things (which I'm not authorized to do; I have to send them elsewhere) or asking my advice on what weed killer or screws to use. Most of the customers are decent people, but I've had a few try to steal things by hiding them in other products, give me hell because their card is declined, or bitch about prices and lay down their entire political and economic theory on me. That's a whole 'nother blog, though.

I'm still writing and cranking out some art, just not at the pace I'd like to be. I dunno when my next post will be but I'll try and keep you up to date.