Book Unrecommendations

Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey

For decades, I’ve been told I need to read the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey. It’s one of the greatest fantasy series ever they said.

They were wrong.

This book is utter trash. It reads like a 12-year old girls fanfic about her favorite horse. A decent premise, with terrible characters, terrible plotting, terribly written. One giant wish fulfillment spew of dreck. It turns out that McCaffrey is the first woman to win a Hugo, and the first to win a Nebula. The committee must have been super drunk during those years.

Among Others (Jo Walters) – How did this win the Hugo and the Nebula. Barely fantasy, could have told what little story it has in under 100 pages. (And while I’m picking on women authors, The Doomsday Book is depressing pablum for several hundred pages with zero fantasy or science fiction.)

Dead Wake, by Erik Larson. Actually all of Erik Larson. Erik Larson is vastly overrated as an accessible historian. I’ve had the misfortune of reading three of his books, and they are all… meh. His fundamental flaw is throwing any random facts into the narrative, regardless of whether they support the narrative. The onslaught of irrelevant names and dates keeps the reader from actually following the history. His most recent work, The Splendid and the Vile is a perfect example. It takes everything interesting about World War II and Churchill and ignores it for countless pages of his daughters social adventures at garden parties. Who could possibly give a shit is beyond me.

If you like to read accessible history, stick with David McCullough, Steven Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, maybe Walter Isaacson for biographies.

Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders. Everyone else loves this book. I don’t. An interesting conceit, done poorly.

Coming in a couple days later to add another. Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice. WTH. Why is this a classic? It’s terrible. Just terrible. A bunch of psychosexual bullhockey that makes zero rational sense. How this ever got turned into a series of successful books, movies, and now a TV show — there’s no accounting for taste.