The Worst Books I've Read

Something I've been thinking about writing, pretty much for years, is a little about the very worst books I've read. I've done book reviews for years on end, and I rarely slate books. I'm also something of a completionist, so once I've started a book, I tend not to give up. After all, it might get better, right? This is almost never the case.

To start with, I'm not a fan of Kurt Vonnegut. I don't get why people like him so much. So it goes. Kilgore Trout, his fictional unsuccessful sci-fi author, seems to just be an outlet for bad sci-fi ideas, and we don't need more of those, intermediated or not. I acknowledge that Vonnegut played with ideas and tried various innovative things... they just all fell flat with me.

While I'm at it, to show I'm not just down on modern authors, I really don't rate Hardy. I don't know if it's the writing or the distance of time, but Tess of the d'Urbervilles left me nothing but bored.

Having said that, none of Vonnegut's or Hardy's books make my top three. Notably, my top three are all doorstops. A short bad book is one thing, but trawling through a long, tedious work is so much worse. They're also books that think highly of themselves, or at the very least have staunch supporters:

#3: Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

A lot of people think Heinlein is a classic sci-fi author. I read SISL and never read anything else by him. Judging by the descriptions of his other work, it varies and SISL is not fully representative, but... I don't care. I've wasted enough of my life reading Heinlein.

Why is it a bad book? It thinks a lot of itself, yet it's fundamentally naff. It tries to combine so many ideas, yet so many of the ideas are just so bad. It's suffused by mock spirituality, with the most tedious of '60s free love combined with... whatever can be found in the kitchen sink. It grinds away at the brain until, finally, several hundred pages later, you're released, thinking "What was the point of that?".

#2: Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Why am I a glutton for punishment? I read a review of Gravity's Rainbow in the Cambridge University student newspaper by some English student, and decided to read it. The review was positively effusive, but it was really praising the book's cleverness as a proxy for the cleverness of the reviewer in understanding it.

I'm sure it is a clever book. It clearly thinks it is. But it's just too much like hard work. It's some kind of tedious shaggy dog story that is much more interested in showing off than actually telling a story. Is it meandering, or is it just plain lost?

All of which might be forgivable if it wasn't hundreds and hundreds of pages long. All the better to meander with. As it is, I'll be very happy to never read another "Slothrop sez".

#1: The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Gravity's Rainbow was a clear product of the '70s, and Stranger in a Strange Land has its hippie free-love elements. There's some kind of strand here that gets combined in The Illuminatus Trilogy.

There's a paragraph in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas about the wave of hippie idealism breaking and rolling back, and... that's the seventies in so much culture. The leftovers of the '60s gone soured and seedy.

I've never been a hippie person. When choosing between those who fought actual Nazis and built rockets to the moon, and people who dropped out, I know which side my modernist, straight-laced self would fall on. It took me a long time to realise it was ok to not like hippies - growing up, the media did rather go on about how the '60s were the best of times, and it took me forever to understand that this was because the kids of the '60s were running the media.

'70s counterculture, as epitomised by The Illuminatus Trilogy, though, that's something else. Crappy conspiracy theories that look like a trial run for Trumpian reality avoidance. Awful, awful writing. Nonsense plot. More crappy, bad, seedy sex than you can shake a bargepole at. A thousand and one other bad qualities, and behind it all... an astonishing vacuity. It would have had the redeeming quality of being short, but it's a trilogy in an omnibus book and for some reason I read the lot in search for something when I should have given it up as a bad job.

Why on earth would I read such a thing? It's a long and complicated story! As a computer-liking kid in a small town in Gloucestershire in the early '90s, I felt somewhat socially lost. In one rare bookshop trip, I found and bought The New Hacker's Dictionary, which was like a window into the history of computer geekery culture - there was a tribe out there I could belong to!

TNHD was itself derived from "The Jargon File" which had been floating around on the proto-internet (the culture described in it actually being a mish-mash of several subgroups, but that's not terribly important). The bookification process involved Eric S. Raymond (ESR), who also added an appendix on "Hacker Culture", which overlooked the variety of people making up "hackerdom" in exchange for really just scribbling down his own politics. Naively, I bought in.

Oh, and his politics just happen to be quite crappy, with an interest in awful '70s counter-culture. So, when The Illuminatus Trilogy was mentioned as a way of understanding the mindset, I scooped it up. It's crap, I suffered cognitive dissonance, and came to realise his politics sucked. So, I guess it did some good. The real lesson I eventually learnt was that you want to be extremely careful who your role models are. Since then, it's become increasingly obvious that ESR is not a great person, and widespread internet access has made computer geekery into a very broad church - effectively TNHD has been made obsolete as the communities have become directly accessible.

Later, I found out that a friend of mine saw me reading it, took a skim when I put it down, and thought I was some kind of weirdo for reading that crap. To read it and enjoy it, that's a bit weirdo. To read it, not enjoy it, and continue reading anyway... that's my idiocy.

Worst book ever. Seriously.

Posted 2021-04-02.