The most disappointing books and stories I read in 2015

And now we come to the reading (books, stories) that disappointed me the most in 2015. These are by no means the worst books and stories of the year - why would anyone want to read the worst? - but they're books and stories that let me down because of the initial hope or promise they offered based on author's reputation, recognition of the work, or establishment of a fine premise at the outset - and then?:

Lauren Groff's novel Fates and Furies. This novel has been earmarked as a literary version of the best-selling thriller Gone Girl. But for me the thrill was gone. After a promising start in which we learn the back story we go on for a hundred pages or more with a very unlikable crowd of Vassar grads trying to make it in the arts in NYC and if any one of them had any insight, wit, or thoughtful conversation I must have missed it. I know that part 2 contained some surprises, but I bailed. (This was disappointing as well because I admired a few of Groff's stories that I read this year.)

Milan Kundera's story The Apologizer. This guy wrote some of the best fiction of the 20th century about the artist-intellectual's life under Eastern European communist rule, but in his years of exile in the West - in Paris - his writing has been weary and self-indulgent, like this piece of about a man trying and failing to write a story. Exactly.

Haruki Murakami's story Kino. I was a huge fan of Murakami's early works but as he continues to publish he seems stuck on one place. The many symbols and idees fixes that characterized his early works and made his writing distinct and mysterious - cats, ears, ghosts, coffee shops, jazz bars, running, mysterious journeys, just to name a few - now seem like literary tics. In this story a man orders the narrator to take a journey and send back post cards to a certain address - which he does. But why? Who knows?

Zadie Smith's story Escape from New York. Some of the blame here is not Smith's but lies with the New Yorker editors who used this piece to lead off the summer fiction issue. 3 people - Michael, Marlon, and Elizabeth - rent a car to get out of NYC just after the 9/11 attacks. These are 3 celebs - you can figure out who - and story leads to various lame jokes such as they have never heard of the kind of car they're renting (Camry). They're bound for Bethlehem, which they hear is "some place in Pennsylvania." Biblical allusions aside, it's almost insulting that this is Smith's or the NYer's take on the events that changed so many lives forever.

Bram Stoker's Dracula. The first section - the narrator's visit to the Count's castle in Transylvania - is truly fabulous and exciting, as he gradually realizes the nature of his host and as he escapes his captivity. Then we go to England for an endless, tedious investigation into the vampire phenomenon, completely uninteresting to the contemporary reader.

That's it - there were a few other novels I started and couldn't or at any rate didn't finish, but that was mainly because they were the wrong books at the wrong reading time: various dark European novels that were obscure and too demanding and a 1,000-page Trollope tome.