Playing With Boys

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by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
2004 St. Martin’s Press

First sentence: There were times that made me s’dang proud to be a Mexican I wept ’til my mascara melted — say, when Vincente Fernandez sang “Cielito Lindo” for the Republican National Convention in 2000.
All-time worst title for a book: “Playing With Boys”
Only way to make it worse: “Playing With Little Boys”
Way to make it funnier: “Playing With Boys While Dressed as the Easter Bunny”
Way to make it a horror novel: “She Played With Boys”
Way to make it a tragic but ultimately heart-warming story of an impoverished black family during the Jim Crow era of the Deep South: “Mamma Played With Boys”

I was unaware that Mexican-Americans are important. I thought they were just dishwashers. But Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez makes the argument that they have other important roles in our society, such as mariachi bands. She lays this out in a collection of essays disguised as fiction. I know she is an essayist because there is no story here, just a desperate female narrator using a tongue-in-cheek way of addressing the reader as “darlin'”, as “y’all”, and through frequent parenthetical statements which are supposed to be funny, but are instead the opposite of funny.

The opposite of funny is holocaust. And that’s what this book is. A holocaust. For my dignity.

I have no beef with chick lit, but someday I hope one of its many authors will explain why they have to write their books as if all their readers are high school sophomores. It’s degrading.

Other reviews: Fresh Fiction, Book Reporter

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Under the Dome

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by Stephen King
2009 Scribner (Simon & Schuster)

Method of selection: Random number generator (really)
First sentence: From two thousand feet, where Claudette Sanders was taking a flying lesson, the town of Chester’s Mill gleamed in the morning light like something freshly made and just set down.
Other uses for this book, after reading: use to mash woodchucks, use as a paperweight for smaller books during a hurricane

Before my review, you should know that I am already a Stephen King fan, but I had to choose this book because my random number generator took me to a shelf that was all Stephen King.

I know of no other writer who so swiftly draws you in and keeps you there, without complicated language or tricks. It is storytelling at its most basic. I chose this book out of all the Stephen King books because it was written recently, and I assumed that this late in his career, he must be losing steam. I was totally wrong.

The first thing you see in opening this book is a map of the town of Chester’s Mill, which immediately gives you all the sense of place you need for this story, and further suggests that things are going to get complicated enough that a map will be necessary (and at 1,071 pages, it better get complicated). There is also a list of all the people in the town on the day it is domed over, including three dogs.

The story opens on a banal scene where two people pilot a small plane over the town. At first I thought King had gone soft, until the second page when he announces “Their lives had another forty seconds to run”. Then we get a micro-story about a fat and happy woodchuck who gets smashed in half, followed by a description of the plane crash. So at the end of three pages I’m dying to read on and see what happens. And that’s what King does so well. Even though the writing isn’t always brilliant, at times even juvenile, you always want to see what comes next. King is one of the few writers that makes the very act of reading fun. Not shitty!

Other reviews: Den of Geek, Not A Fanatic, The Book Stop, HorrorScope

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The Perfect Poison

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by Amanda Quick (Jayne Ann Krentz)
2009 GP Putnam (Penguin)

First sentence: Lucinda stopped a few feet away from the dead man, trying to ignore the fierce undercurrents of tension that raged through the elegant library.
Clichés in three successive sentences, written while the author was eating a frozen lemonade:cool and composed, as cold as ice, chill her to the bone
Pairs well with: oatmeal, dry toast, iceberg lettuce, lite beer, unsalted nuts, dental appointments and broken marriages

Jayne Ann Krentz needs to spend more time creating characters and less time writing 122 shitty novels. Krentz is another author of “genre romance”, a genre we last met with Spellbound by Patricia Simpson. But rather than being shitty and charming, this is just shitty and crappy.

In three pages she introduces the following characters:

  • a Scotland Yard Inspector who is stout, cheerful, has a voluminous mustache and a “psychical gift” for noticing small clues at a murder scene
  • the “severe-looking” spinster sister named Hannah Rathbone
  • a handsome man named Hamilton Fairborn, with his “well-modeled” jaw
  • a coterie of offended Victorian ladies

I wasn’t sure if I was reading a novel or playing a game of Parker Brothers Clue. It seems Jayne Ann Krentz gets her novel ideas from watching Masterpiece Theatre knockoffs on the Mexican PBS (which is likely acronymed “BSP” or “SBP”).

Krentz has published six to seven thousand novels (the exact number is not known by modern science) under seven different pseudonyms, in part because she is so embarrassed about everything she writes, and in part because she has killed six other authors, all of them shitty, and assumed their identity. The editor of her page on Wikipedia (who is really Krentz working under the pseudonym “James Patterson”) points out that “Krentz created the futuristic romance subgenre, and further expanded the boundaries of the genre in 1996 with Amaryllis, the first paranormal futuristic romantic suspense novel”. Paranormal indeed.

I considered suicide once for every verb in the first three pages. Luckily shit hardly happened or I would be dead right now.

Other reviews: Jandy’s Reading Room, Working Girl Reviews, Penelope’s Romance Reviews, More Vikings

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The Human Blend

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by Alan Dean Foster
2010 Del Rey (Random House)

First: “Let’s riffle the dead man.” Jiminy scowled at the newly won corpse and hopped to it.
Techo neologisms on the first page: Meld, mudbud, barker, fib, flexstent
Method of selection: Look at the cover. This has to be shitty. 

Call me crazy, but this book is not shitty. I expected it to be because it appears to be cheesy sci-fi. Only now have I learned that Alan Dean Foster wrote a lot of the original Star Wars, plus The Empire Strikes Back, and the first Star Trek movie. This guy has stratospheric nerd points, and from what I can tell, he knows how to write pretty well.

Foster drops us into a scene where two futuristic thugs have killed a man and are raiding his body for artificial parts, because in the future many people, called melds, have been modified in extreme ways, some as a form of criminal punishment. But rather than present a clichéd story about normal people versus androids, the thugs themselves are also melds, one whose legs have been modified for jumping and the other who has been modified to be unusually thin. And to my surprise it’s believable and invites some critical thinking about medical ethics. I was actually interested in where the story was going, and the technical descriptions were fun instead of cumbersome. For extra fun, the setting is a post-global warming Savannah, Georgia, which is loveably specific. Even the plot synopsis on the front leaf is compelling.

Other reviews: Functional Nerds, Owlcat Mountain, Bitchy Reader, The Merry Genre Go Round Reviews

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Zero History

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by William Gibson
2010 GP Putnam’s Sons (Penguin)

First sentence: Inchmale hailed a cab for her, the kind that has always been black, when she’d first know this city.
Idiotic clauses (see below): Glyphed in Prussian blue…a smoother simulacrum of its black ancestors…its faux-leather upholstery a shade of orthopedic faun.
You will enjoy this if you are also a fan of: eating your boogers

Perhaps I am too dumb to read William Gibson. I know what all these words mean, but they don’t fit together. It’s as if William Gibson chopped up a thesaurus with a hatchet and hammered the pieces together to make a novel. Every time I come across one of these clauses, like, “multiply flapped and counterintuitively buckled” I wait for a light to go on in my esoteric brain, the part that enjoys Baudrillard and jazz (I don’t enjoy jazz but I pretend to like it for all the jazz pussy), but instead I just groan and get sleepy. By the second page, I was in a coma.

It shared a richly but soberly paneled foyer with whatever occupied the other, westernmost, half of the building.

William Gibson, you are trying too hard. Clever, richly-appointed prose has a place, but you give your reader’s imagination no room to expand. You fill out every passage with stumbling blocks like, “Japanese herringbone Gore-Tex” and “one might have ridden a horse without having to duck to clear the lintel”. Every time you write something, your reader has to think about it. If this were a poem, it would be perfect, because we know it’s going to be over by the end of the page. But this goes on for 401 more pages! And besides being an obstacle course to read, I can safely estimate that at least 200 pages of this shitty book are unnecessary filler, which means you skimped on story.

Go back and read Hemingway. He wrote prose like this:

I woke up with a headache and took a drink. I farted. It burned. Then I beat my wife. She cried.

It’s simple, it tells a story, there’s implied tension, emotion, even humor (especially the part where he beat his wife — what a clown!). And best of all it has no confusing speedbumps like, “the floor plan gave evidence of hesitation”. You don’t have to write exactly like Hemingway, but there’s probably a happy medium.

And lastly, I don’t see why people make such a big deal about you inventing the word “cyberspace”. I’ve never said the word “cyberspace” in my whole life except when I was talking about William Gibson and his shitty books.

Other reviews: Mostly Fiction, Iceberg Ink, Big Dumb Object, City of Tongues

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Mister B. Gone

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by Clive Barker
2007 Harper Collins

Selection method: Wanted to find non-shitty non-Stephen King horror fiction. Failed.
First paragraph: Burn this book. Go on. Quickly, while there’s still time. Burn it. Don’t look at another word. Did you hear me? Not. One. More. Word.
First, page 2: What are you waiting for? You don’t have a light? Ask somebody. Beg them.
First, page 3: What’s the problem? Why are you still reading?
Most totally idiotic: …the book sat somewhere through the passage of many centuries in a pile of books nobody ever opened.

I was convinced that Mister B. Gone was young adult fiction, and that the library had misfiled it. It’s not, because Clive Barker thinks you are retarded. In fact, this is considered “metafiction”, which isn’t even a real word (see my feelings on “meta” in general) and I guess that is supposed to impress me. Instead of being impressed, I took up arson. And I was BAD at it.

I read through the first three pages of warnings about how evil this book is just to find out how shitty it could get. It didn’t take long, with the narrator revealing, “Yeah, I’m a demon.” Yeah, you’re a shitty book. Clive Barker must be taking writing lessons from James Patterson now. There was nothing compelling, suspenseful, scary, or macabre in those first pages. The only good thing I can say about it was that there were no spelling errors. And the cover design was nice, but that was the work of Mary Schuck, whose career is now ruined.

Even if Clive Barker were to claim this was young adult fiction, I would never let a child of mine read it. I wouldn’t want them to grow up thinking it’s okay to write this way. Clive Barker may have even sensed that this book was shitty, and so in a stroke of genius, spent three pages telling you to stop reading and burn the book, which is so meta my nuts just exploded from a hipster orgasm.

Don’t read this book. It is shitty. Put the shitty book down. Now. Burn the shitty book.

Other reviews: Fantasy Book Critic, What We’re Reading Now, No Room In Hell, Morbid Outlook

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The Dog Walker

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by Leslie Schnur
Atria Books 2004

Selection method: Went looking for the worst book title I could find. Instead got the worst author’s name I could find. Schnur is a Pokemon character. Schnur! Schnur!
First: Nina Shepard was in love with a man she’d never met.
Worst: It was funny how she could know more about a man she’d never met than all the men she had met put together.
Most profound: After thirty-five years, she liked her legs.
Misspelled word used to describe Lenny Kravitz on page two: white-bread

Leslie Schnur likes hyphens. She wants you to know. She uses them to construct witty-and-familiar-but-not-that-familiar-and-not-that-witty adjectives. They’re easy to spot, like a curly black pubic hair in a bowl of warm cream. And good thing because I was not going to read more than three pages of this shitty book. Here is a selection, which I swear I didn’t make up:

  • soon-to-be-ex
  • way-too-long life
  • only-in-New-York sight
  • lovely-to-look-at alt-lifestyle junkie
  • irony-is-dead-or-not-dead argument
  • cinematographer-libertarian-vegetarian-qigong-expert ex-husband
  • real-life-adventure-tragedy-on-Everest-in-Antarctica-in-Krakatoa-with-sharks-with-fire stuff

She also desperately wants you to know about her dog. He is the best dog in the world, and his name is Charlie and he is a mutt from the ASPCA and he apparently is great enough to be listed in her dedication right next to her flesh and blood children. Thanks, mom. Happy to know we’re as important to you as a dog from the pound.

It is also important to know that Leslie Schnur has been an editor and publisher for over twenty years, and this is her first novel. In writing this wonderful piece of shit, she gives us further evidence that editors don’t know how to read. How could she even approve her own work? Cosmopolitan Magazine wouldn’t print this. Fake Chinese Teen Cosmo wouldn’t print this. And the label “chick lit” is too high a compliment, as it implies “literature” which this is not. I suggest instead the term “curdled festering placental tread marks on society’s sweaty undergarments” (which I think was also a song by Carcass).

This is a New Yorker clearly infatuated with her life and her city, which she thinks are crazy and vibrant, respectively, but which in fact are both alcohol dumpsters. I’m not saying Leslie Schnur is an alcoholic, just that there were a lot of wine stains on the cover and I got contact drunk while holding it.

The offending publisher here is Atria Books, which is where Simon & Shuster flushes everything not good enough for their flagship imprint. We last met Atria Books in Jennifer Weiner’s unputdownable (no hyphens necessary) Goodnight Nobody. We are far from surprised, then, that Jennifer Weiner lends the first puff quote to the back cover — the shitty pot calling the kettle shitty. But no less than the esteemed US Senator from Minnesota, Al Franken, also claims to like this book (he’s lost his mind, and my vote….when I get my illegal absentee ballot from Minnesota). I’m looking into whether Atria Books is really a business front for a meth lab.

I would like to round up every person who read this all the way through (start with her own list of acknowledgments), put them into a rocket ship, launch them into space, and drop them all on the Moon. Then blow up the Moon, impeach Al Franken, blow up Minnesota, and finally mix the Moon debris and Minnesota debris into a giant ball and make a new Moon. Then fire this second Moon directly into the Sun using futuristic ion rockets. Then burn the factory that made the rockets and have a party.

Other reviews: The Romance Reader, Trashionista, Curled Up, The Best Reviews

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The Pale King

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by David Foster Wallace
2011 Little, Brown, & Co.

First sentence: Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the AM heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butterprint, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.
Words in that sentence that are also names of bluegrass bands: cutgrass, foxtail, wild oat
Words in that sentence that are also names of shitty rock bands: shattercane, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, muscadine, goldenrod, creeping charlie, ragweed, vetch, blacktop, downriver,
Words that are shitty metal bands: nightshade, rust 
No. of children in Africa who died of malnourishment while David Foster Wallace was writing that sentence: One zillion.

The reason David Foster Wallace hung himself in 2008 was that he had written most of this book and finally realized that it was shitty. That first sentence takes up half of the entire first chapter. The first three pages are mostly white space and I was forced to read a whole extra page just to get a sense of where DFW went wrong. I can reasonably say he went wrong by exiting his mother’s womb.

The first character we meet is named Sylvanshine, which I believe is Elven, or if not, then very very gay. From what I can tell, this is a story about an accountant. Wow. DFW is a genius.

I have never understood the cult surrounding this man. The guy wore bandanas and his books are shitty and I say that having read not just one, but zero of them. It is amazing that a man can write so much and have so little to say. This book would be better shredded into packing material — more entertaining, too. The publishers should have left this unfinished novel unfinished and not besmirched DFW’s name further.

I feel a little bad trashing a dead guy, but last I checked, corpses couldn’t defend themselves, and suicide is cheating.

Other reviews: Literary Sluts, Writerly Life, 26 Books, Of Books And Reading

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Toys

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by James Patterson
(Actually by Neil McMahon)

First sentence: When I arrived at President Hughes Jacklin’s inauguration party that night in the year 2061, I was flying high, happier and more self-satisfied than I had ever been.
Greatest tagline ever: The one with the most toys…dies.
Note from the publisher: James Patterson’s Toys is a thriller in a hyperplane — with a hero who rivals both James Bond and Jason Bourne.
Statement that can be proven false simply by reading it: That one.

This book was written by a mutated slime mold fungus, or perhaps a reindeer. It is not possible for a human being to compose this book, because it uses an alternate form of communication that induces instant sleep instead of joy and wonder. It is written in English, which is probably the highest compliment I can pay to this work of fiction. However, I am unable to tell you what the first three pages are about. And even if I were capable, telling you would be an act so inhuman, it is specifically listed as a Crime Against Humanity in the Geneva Conventions.

In doing a little research on James Patterson I learned that he is a liar. He doesn’t actually write books. He published nine books in 2009 and another nine in 2010. That is not possible for a person, not even for a mutated slime mold reindeer. Instead, he lets other people write the books, and then he revises them. So he isn’t an author, he’s an editor. A really bad one. And that makes me feel bad for Neil McMahon, who has to have his name attached to this. I’m betting the McMahon’s first draft was much better, but he probably made a lot more money by letting James Patterson wipe his butt with it.

I also learned that James Patterson has a Masters in English from Vanderbilt, which I’m guessing selects their students using a divining rod. His masters degree is likely printed on toilet paper. Or perhaps English was just easier in 1970. There were less words then.

Even Stephen King hates this guy. This book is shittier than all other shitty books. I had to add a special category because it insults the other shitty books.

Other reviews: A Writer’s Review, The BookBag, The Mystery Site, Red Adept Reviews

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Goodnight Nobody

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by Jennifer Weiner
Atria Books (Simon & Schuster) 2005

Method of selection: Asked the librarian directions to the restroom. This was the book I found in the toilet.

First sentence: “Hello?” I tapped on Kitty Cavanaugh’s red front door, then lifted the brass knocker and gave it a few thumps for good measure. 
Types of diabetes I came down with trying to slog through this: Type 1 (body does not produce insulin), Type 2 (body ignores insulin produced), Type 9 (only affects people who read this book, and cannibals who eat the brains of people who read this book. I did both, so now I also have Type 12 diabetes).
You will like this book if: you’re a hospice patient with nothing to do but wait for death.

Why do authors write books about normal people doing normal things and complaining about it? I know how boring life is already. I do it every day, and complain about it. Where’s the robot fellatio? Where are the Templar Knights travelling through time to have sex with you? And how long must I wait to get to the murder parts? Nobody I ever know gets killed. Life sucks! We know!

The first three pages of this are about a suburban mom and her sad lonely life raising three kids and a husband who ignores her, and the sexy cool moms who are sexier and cooler and less Jewish than her. My hope was she would bury her three children alive in the yard and then go rape the sexy moms, but she hardly did any of those things.

The publisher’s synopsis calls this book “unputdownable”, but I didn’t have any trouble putting it down, which means either the publisher is lying, or someone drove a 1/2-inch bolt directly through her palms and into this book, and used a locknut on the other side. That story would have made for a more interesting read, as do most instructions on playing billiards.

Other reviews:  The Infinite Shelf, Tiny Little Reading Room, Capricious Reader

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