2016 Reading Challenge: The Worst of the 50

This list is in no particular order:

1. Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson: I really wanted to like this. I’ll admit there were chuckles here and there, and some interesting information few and far between, but for the most part this travelogue was a huge drag and a struggle to finish. Maybe I should’ve picked up something more recent by Bryson, because this seemed to be a bit outdated. Also, if you’re going to write a travelogue about walking around Great Britain, how about you don’t incessantly complain about it throughout the whole thing?
2. St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell: I could not wait for this collection of short stories to end, which was a disappointment, because I thoroughly enjoyed Russell’s novel Swamplandia! She has some great original ideas, but I found that she couldn’t execute them very well, and most of the endings to these stories were very unsatisfying.
3. Get in Trouble by Kelly Link: I can say pretty much the same think about Kelly Link that I said about Karen Russell. Both write about magical realism, but neither of them do it very well.
4. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara: I picked this up because it made so many of the “Best of 2015” lists I’ve read. At 720 pages it was a bitch to get through, not to mention the harsh subject matter. I stopped halfway through, and finished two other novels before I managed to get around to finishing this one. It follows the lives of four friends through their college years in New England, and then later their lives in New York City, or at least that’s what we’re led to believe. Actually, the book is more focused on one friend, Jude. Jude is an orphan who finds himself in a monastery somewhere in the Midwest, where he is subsequently raped by every priest there, except one. Jude finally escapes from the monastery with the one priest who hasn’t sexually abused him, and guess what? That priest ends up whoring young Jude out in seedy motels for cash, and eventually rapes him as well. But wait! That’s not the end of the raping either! Jude will find himself in unfavorable circumstances all throughout the novel, whether it’s sexual abuse, self harm (cutting), or low self esteem. In the end, when you’re tired of Jude flat out refusing to seek help, you’ll lose all the sympathy you had for him. Now, I understand what Yanagihara was trying to do with this novel, but I think she went overboard. I think it could’ve benefitted from better editing and rewrites, and maybe even been cut down to 400 pages or so instead of the massive 720 that it is.
5. Setting Free the Bears by John Irving: It pains me a little bit to put this on my list, because I love John Irving. However, this debut from Mr. Irving misses the mark. At just over 300 pages, it felt like I had read 500, because Irving was wordy in his early writing. He even made a word up, “beshitted”, that I also came across in his most recent novel, Avenue of Mysteries. It kind of makes me want to read through his bibliography again to see how many times he’s actually used that word before.

To see a list of the Best Books I read in 2016 CLICK HERE!