Books of 2024: Stay Away

I always like to share books that I disliked so that other readers might be spared a bad experience.  This year, I disliked more than one book that someone had recommended strongly.  Taste in books is, of course, subjective.  One man's trash and so forth.  Even though it feels funny that someone I know would love a book that I dislike, it's perfectly natural.  

For example, this year, I have a John Le Carré book on both my books of the year and this worst books post.  Also, Arrowsmith won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1926, and Stay True won the Pulitzer for Memoir/Autobiography in 2023.

Books of the Year: Stay Away

Our Kind of Traitor, John Le Carré, 2010

It sounds right to say that a John Le Carre spy novel always hits the spot for me. Our Kind of 

Traitor puts the lie to that statement. I have to wonder if listening to the book - rather than reading it - made it more difficult for me to follow. Sadly, that's true, though. We meet a lot of characters here and flash forward and back in time, especially early on. Around the 65% mark, the action got gripping, and I enjoyed the climax and falling action until the ending plopped pointlessly with no chance at redemption. Come to think of it, the later Cornwall (Le Carre) got in his career, the less I liked the books. Perhaps he suffered the plot-eroding effects of the smart phone era. Perhaps the further he got from his heyday, he started mailing them in. So, while I can mostly rely on him, no author is perfect.

Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis, 1925

My adulthood-long project of reading all of the Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction has led me to fantastic books that I may or may not have discovered through other means. Also, it led me to Arrowsmith, a long novel that seems like contemporary readers may have found quite funny at points. Perhaps they would have considered its 1920s city and countryside cultural comment spot on. Nearly 100 years on, Arrowsmith comes across as a bloated drudgery about a mercurial, unlikable, pompous medical researcher. Lewis must have been doing a thing. I just can't quite fathom what it was. Martin Arrowsmith takes himself plenty seriously and can't see his faults. Correction: at the beginning of hundreds of paragraphs, he can't see his faults. Miraculously, by the end of the paragraph, self insight guides him to the right word or action. I hated this book and am unhappy I read it. Happily, it's nearly out of print.

Stay True, Has Hsu, 2022

Based on Hua Hsu's close age to mine (he's 4 years younger) and based on both of my siblings loving this book, it would seem like I should love it. I'd also heard him interviewed on NPR and heard about the period when he and his father corresponded by fax because his dad had returned to his native Taiwan for significantly more pay and responsibility than he could find in US jobs. And yet. And yet, I pretty much hated this book from start to finish. Its hard to state why, but it may be that four-year age difference. It may be that Hsu liked different bands and pop culture than I did. It seems, though, like the main reason is that Hsu is a self-contradicting condescending jerk. Some would say that it takes one to know one. In the first half of the book, he goes on and on about how anti-capitalist he is while documenting an endless stream of purchases. He waxes entirely too poetically about stuff that never mattered. You made mix tapes and looked down on CD burners? Congratulations. After a terrible thing happens to a friend - a plot turn I credit myself with seeing coming even if I couldn't fully articulate it while reading his descriptions of said friend - Hsu spends most of the remainder of the book gazing at his own navel about whether he had been as good a friend as he thought he was. Then, late in the book, he discovers drugs. Sorry. Meh. Never interested.