Books of 2023: Stay Away

This past year must count among the best reading years of my life.  I am grateful to have enjoyed a whole lot of books and disliked very few.  In coming days, I will share all about the good stuff.  Today, dear reader one stinker of a book stands out, and I shall do my best to warn you away from it.

Bad Book of the Year

Book Lovers, Emily Henry, 2022

My friendship with Cassie Christopher will survive me reading this book under her recommendation banner of "anything by Emily Henry."  Hopefully, it will also survive this review. ;)  The thing about books is that each reader responds to each book subjectively.  Cassie has long defended the romance genre to me, and she has built up a solid trust account with more literary recommendations.  Alas, she and I don't share the same taste for escapist reading.  She probably wouldn't like my spy novels.  I definitely didn't like Book Lovers.  I suppose I can see the appeal of this particular kind of carefully-constructed escape, but subjectively, I hated it over and over again.  Book Lovers, in particular, turned out to be an extremely self-conscious, self-referential romance novel.  The story is framed with the conceit of essentially Hallmark movie plots, winking relentlessly at big city movers and shakers descending on a small town to follow familiar paths to romance with a local lover, saving a local business, and generally living happily ever after.  That Book Lovers plays with the tropes doesn't make the constant references to the tropes more bearable.  If one is subverting tropes while treating them as a lode star, the ratio still ends up out of whack.  Some characters stand out as nearly believable.  The rest, I could neither believe nor stand.  The dialog may have been generated by an AI that had been fed nothing but Saved By the Bell scripts.  I'll stick to Cassie's reliable recommendations for actual literature and my own preferences for schlock.

 

Dishonorable Mention

Think Again, Adam Grant, 2021