The ten most disappointing books I read in 2017

I read only books that I expect to like, but sometimes I've been steered wrong by recommendations, reviews, awards, apparent similarities to other books I've liked, or just plain bad decisions on my part. Let it be said once again: If you're reading a book and you just don't like it (after giving it a fair chance - at least 2 serious reading sessions I would say - especially if the work is challenging, innovative, or unconventional - stop, and find something else to read. There are so many great books to be read or re-read! That said, here are ten books that I started reading this (and for various reasons sometimes finished reading) that really disappointed me; often, they're not bad novels per se - but these are 10 that for failed to live up to hype and expectation:

Autumn, by Ali Smith

Smith has written some fine novel, but this work shows that she’s good at setting up straw men and then burning them down; for example, some of the “bad guys” in Autumn include officious bureaucrats who give the protagonist (Elisabeth) a hard time with her passport application and a thesis advisor who tries to dissuade Elisabeth from writing about a female artist – is he living in 1955 or what? Billed as a take on Brexit and life in contemporary England and among the Times’s top 10 books of 2017– but I don’t concur. Not her best book.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by Milan Kundera – 1978

The two concluding sections are absurd and uncomfortable, with women treated as objects. This novel may have been a formative work for Kundera, but it’s one that does not stand up well over time. Read Unbearable Lightness instead.

Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox – 1970

Perhaps good of its type, but it's a type that seems dated: a novel about a small set of NY intelligentsia and other professionals and their difficult marriages and criss-cross of relationships. Nice that the New York Review Books has revived many classics, but this one is way oversold by Franzen’s glowing introduction.

The Last Tycoon, by F. Scott Fitzgerald - 1941

One can only imagine that Fitzgerald would have improved The Last Tycoon had he lived longer and completed this novel. For us, it’s a curiosity at best.

Life and Fate, by Vassily Grossman  - completed 1960/published 1980

There are many fine scenes covering a vast swath of life in the USSR during the seige of Stalingrad and a few great moments, including some Tolstoyan passages, of musing on the nature of warfare. But there are far too many pedestrian scenes in which we get lots of dialogue, often concerning now-obscure points of Soviet history and ideology, without any clear delineation of character. Couldn’t finish it.

Lincoln  at the Bardo, by George Saunders  

It pains me to write this because Saunders has been one of my favorites since I read his first story colleciotion, Civilwarland. The whole construct of Bardo – souls speaking from dead to console Lincoln on the death of his son - seems to me an idea that was poorly framed and never worked out. Great that he won the 2017 Man Booker Prize, but as so often happens: right guy, wrong book.

Memoirs of Hadrian, by Margauerite Yourcenar – 1951

If you want to know the facts about the life of Hadrian why not read a nonfiction, scholarly work? If you want a great novel on historical themes, however, you probably should find something that focuses on a moment or period of crisis or a fraught relationship.

Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama

About 90 percent of the narrative concerns the internecine battle for control w/in a Japanese regional police department. For a non-Japanese reader, and maybe even for a Japanese reader, it’s almost impossible to follow the thread of this narrative and ultimately - do we really care which faction wins? A glowing page-one review this year in the New York Times Book Review steered me wrong; couldn’t finish it.

The Sleepwalkers, by Hermann Broch - 1930

This three-volume novel may have been important in its day, but claims that Broch is in the same class as Mann, Musil, or even Doblin are in my view overstatements. Read volume one and half of volume 2 – then quit.

Testing the Current, by William McPherson - 1984

McPherson, who died in 2017, had a prodigious memory and summoned up the events of a year in his childhood (this is a personal narrative thinly disguised as a third-person narrative work of fiction), so the first chapter or so of the novel seemed promising as he introduces some eccentric characters and establishes a sense of time (the 1930s) and place (a well-to-do Midwest Protestant summer colony replete with all of the racial and anti-Semitic prejudices of the day). But as we proceed through the novel it becomes increasingly apparent that ... nothing happens! Another NYRB reprint, but not one of their better decisions. 

To order a copy of "25 Posts from Elliot's Reading: Selections from the first 2,500 blog entries," click here.