A book you hated

I am just going to state upfront that just because I hate a book doesn’t mean the book has no value. That’s a given. Reading is a relatively subjective activity. We all bring our own personalities and sensibilities and biases to the books we are reading. Also, I think it’s only fair that I only consider the books that I’ve finished in this category. My book club awards two prizes at the end of every reading year (usually late June). We give a prize for the book we enjoyed reading the most and one for the book we enjoyed reading least. Clearly if you haven’t actually read the book it’s not fair to say you didn’t enjoy reading it. I make a sincere effort to read every book club book because I want in on the discussion and that’s hard to do if you haven’t read the book. But there have been duds.

My friend, Michelle, who womans the delightful food blog Bite, picked one such book a few years back: The White Iris. The hysterical thing about it was her sheer delight in the book and the fact that she was positive, adamant even, that she was going to walk away with the prize for best loved book that year. She won a prize all right. My short and scathing review of the book can be found here.

Generally speaking, I don’t get rid of books. It’s a thing; don’t judge me. Unfortunately, I don’t have limitless space and so every once and awhile I do have to cull. Usually I get rid of mysteries I won’t read again (Harlen Coben, stuff like that) or books I’ve read, didn’t particularly like and wouldn’t ever pass on (like The White Iris). Sometimes a book I didn’t like remains on my shelf – I like the author or it’s a hardcover (I know, I have weird standards!) So – looking at what’s on my shelves currently:

I hated Dismantled by Jennifer McMahon and it pains me to say it because I LOVED her novel Promise Not to Tell.  Promise Not To Tell was everything Dismantled was not but I kept at the latter because it was Jennifer McMahon and how could it NOT be as amazing as Promise Not to Tell (a dozen copies of which I hand sold when I worked at Indigo.) I talk about Dismantled here. I talk about Promise Not to Tell here. Dismantled remains on my bookshelf out of my loyalty to Promise Not to Tell. I have high hopes for McMahon’s novel Island of Lost Girls which is on my tbr shelf.

Most underrated book

Wow. This is actually quite difficult. It’s easy to talk about popular books with hype you don’t quite get, but it’s slightly more difficult to talk about an underrated book. Underrated by whom?

Anyway, I don’t think Stephen King gets the respect he deserves. There. I said it. Sure, he’s a bazillionaire but being a best-selling author doesn’t necessarily mean that people hold your work in high regard. My favourite King book is It. (I’ve read many but not all of King’s novels and short stories and I think his non-fiction book On Writing belongs on every writer’s bookshelf.)

The terror, which did not end for another twenty-eight years – if it ever did end – began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

It (in case you’ve never read it) is the story of seven childhood friends who encounter a horrific evil and then reunite many years later to fight it again. As with many of King’s stories, this one is set in Maine and begins in the 1950’s. The reason I think King is underrated (and why I chose It to illustrate my point) is because I don’t think there is a living writer today who manages to capture the innocence of childhood and the bond of friendship made during those early years quite as well as King does. I think that critics (and readers of lit-er-a-ture) dismiss him because he writes horror fiction. Silly, really. You don’t dismiss Stoker or Shelley because they wrote horror fiction!

It scared the crap out of me – is there a creation more malevolent than Pennywise? If there is, I don’t want to meet him, thanks very much!-but the reason it was so successful as a horror novel was because I cared about the people in the story and the reason I cared about them is because I got to see them as kids. King channels kids. He understands their loyalties and fears and hopes and he gets their rhythms and speech. He  allows them their fears and bravery, their weaknesses and their ability to overcome those weaknesses.

I read this book 20-odd years ago. I was living in NYC at the time and I carried that book (all 1,000 pages of it) around with me everywhere. It creeped me out. It made me laugh. And the denouement was tear-worthy.

Possibly King fans would choose another  title as underrated. I say, read It.

A book that you’ve read more than 3 times.

If you saw my to-be-read shelf (350+ unread books that are physically on my shelf) or flipped through the notebook where I keep an alphabetical never-ending list of the books I’d like to read, you’d laugh at the notion that I have actually read a book three times.  But I have.

The hands-down winner is Kristin McCloy’s 1988 novel, Velocity. I purchased this book around the time it was published at The Strand in New York City. I was really excited to find it because I hadn’t been able to find it at any book store in my hometown and this was before the days of ABE and Bookcloseouts.

Velocity is the story of Ellie, a young woman who leaves her life and boyfriend in NYC and returns to her teensy hometown after a car accident kills her mother. Her father, a local police officer, is lost in his own grief and he and Ellie spend their summer tiptoeing around each other. Ellie doesn’t, however, tiptoe around Jesse, the Hell’s Angel biker who lives down the road; her grief manifests itself in an all-consuming sexual relationship with him.

I tell myself, Once he was mine, and that was enough. But it wasn’t. It was never true, and it was never enough. You hunted down your needs – simple and precise – and in those days it was me.

So, back in the day, Velocity spoke to me because I was madly, crazily, obsessively in love with the quintessential bad-boy. Her story was my story (without the dead mother.) Her crazy, reckless lust for Jesse mirrored my own doomed relationship and I couldn’t get enough. My relationship ended, but my love affair with this book did not. I still read it once a year and have done for over 20 years.

Why? I think it’s the quality of McCloy’s writing and the story’s emotional weight. Ellie’s story has stayed with me all these years because ultimately this is a story about loss and reconciliation and Ellie is intelligent and fragile and so desperate to be strong that she implodes. Jesse is not just her sexual foil; he is not without shades of gray and he’s impossible attractive.

Kristin McCloy, as far as I know, has only written one other book and I haven’t read it. I don’t know this for sure but I’ve always felt that Velocity was a very personal book for her. I have passed it on many times – but only if the borrower promises to return it!