Books of '18: Stay-Aways

Everyone loves to review books they enjoyed, and that's great.  It may be a greater service reader-to-reader in these times of so much content and so little time to say: don't bother with this title.  Friends don't let friends....  So here goes: some books that bummed me out in 2018.

Worst of the Year: Fiction

The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, Hannah Tinti, 2017

I don't remember how this book got on my list, but it was on my competent wife's list, too.  I do know that fictional saints Meg Wolitzer and Ann Patchett blurbed it.  I don't know why.  It's a good yarn, I suppose, told in a theoretically realist fictional fashion.  The problem is that characters don't behave in a realistic fashion.  There's a level of violence that becomes literally unbelievable.  Literally.  I don't mean it's a lot of violence or more than one might expect.  I mean that I don't believe people actually live lives that are that violent or that if they set out to do so, they wouldn't live as long as the titular protagonist does.  It's not giving away too much to say that the "twelve lives" refer to this character surviving twelve bullets.  Come on.  Also, his dark and murky life of crime stretches credulity.  The family story that gets told in inverted order is somewhat interesting, but there are too many distractions.  Too many characters who emerge from a plot smoke machine.  There's enough plot teasing to keep even a reader who came to hate this book as much as I did reading in order to see where the teases lead.  Begrudgingly, I can give Ms. Tinti that.  But wait! There's more to dislike.  The omniscient narrator turns seriously omniscient - nay, pedantic - on all manner of topics: constellations, whales, dyeing and weaving yarn, fishing, first aid.  This is an author who knows how to do the work of research but lacks either the skill or the will to weave it in without announcing "I did some research!"  Tiresome in the extreme.  Don't waste any of your one life on these twelve.

Dishonorable Mentions
The Master Bedroom, Tessa Hadley, 2007
Black Panther: A Nation Under our Feet Book 2, Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2016  (Note: I am done trying to like comic books, not that I've tried that hard.  If you're thinking about doing something, don't.  Nope.  Don't.)

Worst of the Year: Non-fiction

Basketball (and Other Things), Shea Serrano, 2017

There's a lot about this book that I seriously disliked.  I'm not talking about the writing yet.  I'm talking about the physical object.  The book collects Internet-column-style essays about NBA basketball written by someone with a level of basketball junkie-ness that I can appreciate.  Serrano worked at Grantland with Bill Simmons and now works for The Ringer, his HBO-backed multimedia sports and culture empire.  To supplement the essays, there are lush drawings by Arturo Torres.  Many of them are cool and evocative.  The thing is: the soft cover book is printed on square, heavy paper to support the drawings.  I mostly read in bed.  Heavy, oversized paper with a soft cover means that the heavy book flops and drops when trying to read it in a reclined position.  Fault 1.  Also, every fifth page or so is printed on a page that is covered completely in an often-dark color.  Who commits this kind of crime against legibility?  Shea Serrano, Arturo Torres and the Abrams Image corporation.  Fault 2.  Finally, a combo platter: the font of the main text of the book is pretty damn small, and then Serrano fleshes out or clarifies points in a lot of footnotes.  Footnotes can be cute or helpful, but when they are adding to what is already an illegible, physically difficult book, they're just annoying.  Fault 3.

Now, to the content.  Too cute by half.  The thing about Internet opinion pieces is that they’re usually meant as quick hits, to be easily consumed on a screen.  Also, they should have arguments or ideas that make people want to share and/or argue over them.  Serrano's essays have many of those features but not the brevity.  They can be dense, and their cuteness wears thin.  He writes in a very self-conscious way at points that I would classify in the Lena Dunham Millennial vomit-inducing category if that weren't such a broad and negative brush. Any collection of essays will have winners and losers.  You may not be surprised to know that the essay formed on the premise "Who would do better if you swapped their environment?  Karl Malone or a bear?" drove me absolutely batshit crazy.

It doesn't help that I read the majority of this book while marooned in my bed suffering through and recovering from the flu.  But actually, I'm pretty sure I would have been just as angry and dismissive if I'd been well while reading it.  The book may have induced the illness.