Books of 2016 Part 5: My Bottom 16

So in every write-up of top books, there inevitably has to be some sewerage that leaks out the bottom. Naturally not all of these are intrinsic garbage, since I rank them based on my subjective experience with them, but these 16 at the bottom were either less enjoyable, more mediocre or, in fact, intrinsic garbage.

51. The Windup Girl – Paolo Bacigalupi

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This was a good example of grabbing something random off a library shelf that I ended up… well, ‘regretting’ is the wrong word, but basically I wasn’t really inspired or uplifted by this. It’s a vivid vision of a dystopian future, and the world is well put together so I get why I picked it up. Still, it feels very much like late dystopian fiction, with the themes of ‘what is humanity’ and environmental ruin feeling extremely familiar, and at worst totally derivative here. The central story of an engineered girl who is alienated and humiliated by those who fear her, is engaging, while much of the rest of the action plays out like an action sci-fi film and suffers a little from its lack of character development. It’s William Gibsonesque at times, in that Bacigalupi doesn’t really bother explaining things, just rolls with it, and at times it’s a little nerd-blokey with women being either kowtowing servants or kickass military types (or, indeed, both at once, and always, always coincidentally sexy as well of course). An ultimately entertaining read without achieving anything new or big.

52. Mr Paradise – Elmore Leonard

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For whatever reason, I felt like I’d never really be a proper book and/or film guy with any credibility if I hadn’t read any Elmore Leonard. This is a fairly late work from him and it’s ultimately a bit of fun; it seems reminiscent of your typical slick Hollywood crime films – of course, especially those based on Elmore Leonard books. Likewise the characters here are quite familiar: the crooked lawyer, the brilliant but flawed cop, everybody sexy but only because they're Leonard ‘types’. Generally, though it seems familiar, he just spins a cool yarn. Not ground-breaking but I'm pleased to have read it. It's also a really easy read so at least it has that going for it.

53. The Marriage Plot – Jeffrey Eugenides

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Eugenides is definitely part of that Franzenesque set of writers – people who are lightweight substantially and easy to read, but can make themselves and their readers feel all highbrow by casually name-dropping Julia Kristeva in a character's dialogue even though it doesn't go anywhere or contribute to the story. I don't mean to denigrate him, but with all three of his books (and that is, all three, as he’s only written three novels) I've been left thinking they're engagingly written and interesting, but my life is not really richer for having had that experience, ultimately it was just entertainment. Substance-wise of course the same could be said of Pynchon, except he's such an idiosyncratic writer so there’s something elucidating about reading him. Eugenides definitely has a comfortable milieu which is college-aged kids or younger, and coming of age stories. It's probably more overtly stated here even than in The Virgin Suicides if that's possible, and yet I feel here the characters are sort of cut-out types, they're all just flawed youngsters trying to find themselves. It also suffers from the same flabbiness that Middlesex did - that there are certain parts of the narrative, and certain characters, who don't contribute a great deal to the ultimate ‘point’ of the story. I'm being very negative; actually it was quite enjoyable - if overlong  and superficial - but I feel Eugenides is a very transparent writer and I just notice his flaws a lot because the wizard is so visible behind the page, and I really don't feel challenged or provoked even when he covers some contentious territory.

54. A Song of Stone – Iain Banks

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Iain Banks, what are you doing in my bottom 16? I don’t think it’s really Banks’ fault I didn’t respond well to this book but just the creation itself I found less enjoyable. I found the protagonist unsympathetic and annoying; his obsession with his mysterious lady companion to whom his first person narrative is dictated (an interesting device) is somewhat short of moving, because it just doesn't tug at the heartstrings. This is an extremely obtuse reference, but it reminded me of the protagonist in the unsubtitled 2014 Ukrainian-sign-language film The Tribe (Plemya), in that he acts all protective and defensive of her, and certainly jealous, but it feels less like love/chivalry as it does sexual obsession of a beautiful possession. This can be read as a bit of a gothic mansion/castle type story, but it’s also post-modern in that it's post-apocalyptic and there’s an undefined war going on, and the usually beguiling permanence of the castle is at best tenuous. I also thought the narrator’s prose is far too elaborate and wordy, and it adds to my dislike of him because he’s so melodramatic and self-important while he can’t manage the simplest practical tasks which are all that’s required. So while Banks never really belongs in this section of my list, this bloody annoying character certainly does. Good riddance to him, in the end.

55. Steppenwolf – Hermann Hesse

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I feel like I'm reading Hesse in reverse order from what should be done or that seems logical: I haven’t yet read Siddhartha which will naturally be next and seems to be a more coming-of-age and spiritual-awakening novel. Instead I read The Glass Bead Game first, which is a thoughtful reflection at the end of a life of the mind. Then I read this second, a treatise it seems on ageing and dealing with the first strains of mortality, so I’m sort of going backwards through a life. I can see why this book is so frequently misunderstood, as it's extremely elusive- a dark dreamscape or nightmare, meandering and allegorical as well as highly introspective and philosophical. I didn't love reading it at times but it's a curious and provocative book and one worth pondering.

56. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War – Max Brooks

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I feel like I’ve had a go throughout all my write-ups (not just this year) of really ‘culty’ books, especially speculative fiction ones. This is another, very beloved culty book that I’m probably about to have a go at. I can see why people are really into this, because it provides such a broad and yet deep understanding of a fully-fledged zombie 'experience'. Brooks attempts heteroglossia, but as with other authors with cult followings, he seems significantly more comfortable adopting the voice of alpha-male American characters, and is ultimately pretty narrow-focused. He's clearly well-read and the book is well-researched, and he writes well, but he's gotten himself a niche and he sticks within that nice. I would be more intrigued to read him exploring another genre or subject matter, just to see what he does with it.

57. Black Dogs – Ian McEwan

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So I've obviously been delving into McEwan's back catalogue a bit this year, and I think I've found his weakest point so far. This oddly meandering and glibly truncated story really feels like it bites off more than it can chew. I feel like McEwan is trying to weave into this memoir about writing a memoir some kind of analogy or extrapolation of the clash between communism and other pragmatic ideologies, but each time it feels like he's on the verge of making a point, the timeframe shifts again and we start over. It's unclear throughout what the point of this story is, why we care about the narrator or about his struggle to write his parents-in-law’s memoir and reconcile their juxtaposing worldviews and the point at which they diverged. If there's subtext and metaphor in this, they're poorly employed. Though there is attempt at character, it's also poorly employed. They're very empty vessels, emotionally and textually. Thankfully McEwan is a skilled writer so even though it never reaches a point and seems tortuously trying to get there through circuitous means, it's not a bad read.

58. Confessions of an English Opium Eater –Thomas de Quincey

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I quite like the way de Quincey writes. But this book is very, very dense and meandering for what I'd hoped might be a 19th century Naked Lunch. Instead it's a really protracted bildungsroman/stream of consciousness memoir that's 70% travails of a naive young man, 20% misery leading to opium and maybe 7% essay on the effects of opium plus 3% footnotes/reflections on his own writing. At times the story is engaging but at other times just dragged itself down in its own self-reflexivity. And while he writes engagingly, I'd edit it to have sections rather than leaving it all as one huge block. I was reading a ‘Wordsworth classics’ edition though, so what did I expect? Good editing? Certainly interesting historically, and even narratorially at times but overlong and with way too much exposition.

59. Little Birds – Anaïs Nin

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More porn. Funny thing about this second compilation of Nin’s ‘erotica’ is that this, unlike Delta of Venus (in an odd piece of near-symmetry, my #60 book of last year), this one doesn’t begin with an explanation/apology for the ensuing pornography, it just accepts that if you’ve picked up the second collection then you’re obviously a bit of a perv – uh I mean, someone interested in different subgenres of twentieth-century literature. This collection doesn't have any story that works alone as a particularly engaging story, but it still works intriguingly as a collection, as it looks at different facets of sexual 'awakening'. This also seems to have a focus on fetishes of sorts and particular quirks that catalyse this awakening, whereas Delta often seemed to focus more on impotence or sexual obstruction. A big embarrassing read for the train of course, but her language is strangely compelling to elevate it clearly above the level of trashy 'romance' dross. It's porn but it's oddly engaging porn.

60. Rob Roy – Walter Scott

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I found this book very bland, for something otherwise and ostensibly so full of adventure and mythology. The first part, of a man discharged from inheritance of his father's business, and sojourning with an uncle to enlist his replacement, is way overlong for something that merely sets the emotional context for the adventure to follow. The big Scottish brogue in dialogue is probably the most distinctive part of the novel's voice, but in prose form it’s difficult for me to follow it. I actually feel I missed some crucial story points due to my misunderstanding of the dialogue. I guess I liked the characters and the story but it was far alienated from me.

61. Go Set a Watchman – Harper Lee

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Yes indeed, as literally every 2015 thinkpiece on this late afterthought to Lee’s career stated, this is a troubling read. It's an engaging read, but it gets more and more troubling as it goes on. I don't think I've ever bought into the Atticus Finch hero worship that seems so prevalent, and that the film adaptation of Mockingbird is far more guilty of propagating than the original book is. In the book Atticus is a sort of simple, bumbling fool and the story is Scout's - which makes the father hero worship a bit less zeitgeisty and more personal, and also serves as the premise for this entire book. But this novel follows a similar sort of trajectory, it starts with a sort of "life in Maycomb" pastiche and meanders aimlessly until the inciting incident happens almost halfway through the book, where Jean Louise (ie Scout) happens upon a citizen's council meeting for maintaining segregation, at which Atticus and JL's paramour Hank are present. Although this is 100 pages in, it isn't a spoiler since the preceding 100 pages are genuinely unrelated. It then devolves worryingly into an exploration of bigotry and prejudice in the deep south and the underlying casual racism of Harper Lee is exposed as something deeply engrained. Jean Louise is again treated as the simple childlike figure talked down to, only here her chid-like naiveté takes the form of having been exposed to strange modern ideas up in the Yankee north, and that she doesn't have a nicely granular and nuanced understanding of the south and why its people are so profoundly racist. Her arguments are all sort of facile, knee-jerk bleeding heart liberal type things and the Maycomb community is juxtaposed as misunderstood and mistreated by those ignorant northern states and the horrible reactionary NAACP. Maybe it's a bit more troubling having read it in the shadow of all these misunderstood Nazis in America painting swastikas who just suffered such disenfranchisement at the hands of neoliberalism and it really should be understood and heard that their painting of swastikas is totally understandable if you put on their shoes and walk a mile in them... But the cutesy and saccharine philosophy espoused at the end of the book where JL is led into compromise just jarred horribly on me, and it felt rather like some of Ayn Rand's more ridiculous anti-capitalist caricatures in Atlas Shrugged, only regarding racism and basic human rights. For the most part this is very adroitly written prose but the longer the lecturing/philosophical diatribes dragged on the less I was being drawn in.

62. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells

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I think it's finally crystallised in my mind that Wells is a great thinker, but not a great storyteller. The opening couple of chapters here, dealing with the physical and logistical concerns of time travel, and the descriptions of the "Utopian" future the time traveller visits and/or tells about, are really quite interesting and engaging, as philosophical musings. But there's a plodding dowdiness to the way he weaves the narrative as if it's just an excuse to expostulate on these themes. And from what I've read in the past, he has some great thoughts which he expounds in A Modern Utopia, and when I read the Invisible Man last year, it didn't really work for me at all, as I feel the philosophical musings on the moral implications of invisibility weren't really explored at all but sacrificed in favour of pure storyline (which in turn wasn’t well worked, because the whole premise was that Griffin was a cunt, rather than invisibility itself being morally questionable). So here, I feel like as an essay or a hypothetical, it would work better. The story elements just don't excite me to nearly the same extent as Wells' imagination could.

63. The Circle of Reason – Amitav Ghosh

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I bought this one for my bookshelf many years ago, on a whim, after liking Ghosh's later work The Hungry Tide, but not really loving it. I should have realised that his first book wouldn't be even more engaging, but rather be less competent. Really it's a sprawling, largely incoherent narrative that clearly wants to be - as the cover claims it is - in the tradition of Márquez and Rushdie, but it doesn't manage to synthesise it at all into the sort of overarching treatise on humanity it would have been in better hands. Instead there are just incongruous touches of magical realism and postmodern plot twists and loads of tangential story arcs. There are too many characters, too many locations and too little depth to all its intertextual, historical and mythological narratives. In The Hungry Tide, Ghosh's prose and narrative had clearly gotten a lot tighter, so even though the story didn't totally grip me it felt whole and well-constructed, whereas this is unhinged and I'm still not sure what it was trying to say.

64. Island – Aldous Huxley

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This book has an intriguing premise. A piece of speculative fiction with a big philosophical bent, dealing with a fictional island nation of Pala where the most advanced western medicine is blended with eastern Zen Buddhism to create a society in equilibrium with a compromising and flexible structure to iron out the flaws. But the way Huxley goes about narrating it is absurdly dogmatic. The narrative takes the form of an endless array of interminable lectures, exploring every aspect of the political philosophy in minute and excruciating detail, delivered by a long chain of named characters that are impossible to tell apart, yet it doesn't matter. I've rarely seen such an intriguing premise delivered so woodenly and drenched in such dry philosophy. But I don't blame the book, I blame myself for having thought that the author of the world's blandest and most stodgy and academic dystopian vision, Brave New World, could have written something in any way engaging. The other flaw is that there's this framing device of our protagonist trying to come to terms with his wife's death and having this dilemma whereby he is supposed to introduce/negotiate a contract to drill for Pala's oil reserves, but this framing device is just a pointless and clumsy distraction from Huxley's clear purpose of filibustering his didactic vision, and it just makes the whole narrative feel disingenuous. About a third of the length, with each scene truncated to the same degree, and it could have been somewhat interesting.

65. The Tree of Man – Patrick White

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Given my surprising appreciation lately of Australian literature, which I’d otherwise given up on very early in my reading life, I felt the time was ripe for a necessary first taste of Patrick White, and faced with a choice in the library I opted for this one, basically to challenge myself because it sounded like the driest and most uninspiring Australian “paddocks and cattle” narrative of the lot. And what a terribly dry, uninspiring option it ended up being, just to alienate myself. White seems determined, incongruously, to dehumanise his characters. He refers to families as "Armstrongs" for instance rather than "the Armstrongs" and this seems a quirk, used in both mimesis and diegesis but I have literally no idea why. But it's systematic throughout. He vacillates between referring to his characters by name and will then refer to them as "the man" and "the woman" in anecdotes, apparently because he's trying to make a larger point but it just serves to further alienate us from characters who have no identity and no clear motivation, and whose only distinguishing features are that they have no idea who they are. Mainly though, the language is far too florid for how mundane the story is, and in doing so he creates immense inefficiency. He gets quite interestingly philosophical when it comes to the characters dealing with death, where the florid language serves a purpose, but by then it also serves as a reminder how unnecessary about 200 pages of detail prior to this are. It’s dull, and a disappointing reaffirmation of what I always thought Australian literature was.

66. Uncle Tom's Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe

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This was the very first book I read this year, and it sadly set the tone low for a year in reading (and 2016 itself amirite it’s a meme). There were so many problems with this book, but let’s start with the fact that the language is far too florid, which for its time might have been fine but it draws this out unnecessarily. The book is completely sanctimonious which would be patronising itself, except that it’s totally casually racist. There’s a theme common in the bottom of the barrel for me here: like Go Set a Watchman the underlying assumption these books seem to rely on is that black people are inherently inferior to white folks, so once we accept this as gospel truth, let’s unpack some manifestations of this. This is obviously an indictment of the time it was written, and Stowe’s heart, as a white woman in the Yankee north, was clearly in the right place but it feels now so anachronistic and it’s sad that such a book needed to be written and have such influence. It’s mostly interesting to read this after Richard Wright’s Native Son (my number 5 book of 2013). It’s obvious that the ‘heroic’ submissiveness and piety of Uncle Tom would arouse anger in a more contemporary society. Wright seems to include an explicit reaction to Tom in calling his black protagonist ‘Bigger Thomas’ and making him not a meek, submissive slave to the system whose inherent value is wrapped up in white folks’ sentimental feelings towards him, but an angry, disenfranchised youth who violently reacts against the system that has failed him. It’s not that both books aren’t necessary products of their time, but the whitewashing inherent across Uncle Tom’s Cabin seems so embarrassingly dated now. Likewise, Stowe’s well-meaning proselytising about how ‘even black people’ should probably be given basic inalienable human rights have so little value in today’s society, and I felt deeply uncomfortable reading it, even on top of the fact that the writing itself felt clunky and overblown. I’m not as angry about this book’s existence as I was towards my bottom book of last year, but I think it very much warrants forgetting by now.