#'that's what you want' truly in the top 5 most heinous nicki moments

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Magnus & Lestat vs. Marius & Lestat

[emmersreads]

My Top 5 Worst Books of 2023

I read 119 books in 2023. Some of the were great, most of them were fine, but some of them were real stinkers. Here are my top five worst books of the year.

This year I didn't read any books that I expected to be bad. Each of these is a book with an interesting premise or perspective but that bungles the execution so badly that I hated the time I spent on it.

You can also read the whole thing on my blog!

Honourable Mention:

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath - Moniquill Blackgoose

You can feel extremely strongly about the themes in your book and still churn out absolute pure dogshit. This entry foreshadows a consistent theme to this year’s worst list but only places as an honourable mention because it’s the only book this year that I dnf’ed. To Shape a Dragon’s Breath takes the intriguing premise in the 18th century colonization of east coast North America but also everyone has dragons and then mangles it with the colonizers being a weird combination of the English and the Vikings. The novel interrogates the idea of ‘civilizing’ the indigenous people but without the underlying motivations of Christian and European supremacy and manifest destiny the messaging is confusing and weak. In addition to a coherent message, To Shape a Dragon’s Breath also lacks multidimensional characters and any plot at all. I dnf’ed at 85% completion when I realized that the book wasn’t going to generate a plot at that late hour.

Fifth Place:

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma - Claire Dederer

I began Monsters with high hopes. There is a lot of meat on the bone of how to love art by the truly reprehensible. Unfortunately it falls victim to a problem shared by all memoirs: in order to be good, the subject has to be interesting. Claire Dederer’s genuinely pretty good discussion of Woody Allen and Roman Polanski devolves into condescending platitudes about why teens like J.K. Rowling, genuinely reprehensible comments about whether getting an abortion makes a woman a monster, and finally into outsourcing her final conclusion to Pearl Cleage’s Mad at Miles. You might as well just read that one instead. Some of Dederer’s commentary is bad because it is poorly researched (Nabokov, J.K. Rowling), but what really bothered me about this book was the nauseating suggesting that women’s monstrousness is exclusively their behaviour as parents, as if being a parent is the primary imperative, at least for women. But else could be described as ‘bad motherhood’? Suicide? Yes! Having an abortion? Absolutely! Not devoting full attention and effort to your children at every moment of your life? Why, you’re just like Woody Allen. The inclusion of some arguments are heinous and the exclusion of others undermines the value of the discussions that do scan. Where’s Kanye West? Surely there’s more to his career than a few lyrics about how his fans don’t know the read him… surely… Sure, committing suicide is super duper monstrous because you’re basically abandoning your kids (heavy sarcasm implied), but what of women like Nicki Minaj? At least for me, a big lesson of the recognition of Problematic Artists is that we don’t actually need to hear from everyone in the name of fairness. Dederer should learn that too.

Fourth Place:

The Idiot - Elif Bartuman

Spicy Hot Take Alert: The Idiot by Elif Bartuman sucks and I am judging you for liking it. I want to be clear about this: I did put this book on the worst list rather than the blandest specifically because it’s so popular. This book is all the more unbearably pretentious because it has nothing to say. It’s fatally boring and exhaustingly incurious. I’ve seen it described on bookstagram as about ‘the formation of the self’ and I suppose corporate middle managers need a formation of the self too. That doesn’t make it book-worthy. Also what the hell are ya’ll talking about this book being relatable?? When I was eighteen I knew fucking everything. Sorry, but I’m different.

Third Place:

The Cheerleaders - Kara Thomas

The Cheerleaders was the first book I finished in 2023 but the memory is not distant enough. For me this was a failure because it seems to hate its own genre. What is the point of a girl detective mystery where it turns out there was no interesting conspiracy behind the deaths and the protagonist doesn’t even pursue the case exhaustively enough to find this out. Sure, maybe its more realistic to suggest that a girl grieving the too-early death of her older sister might be making things up, but I’m not in this genre for the realism. The Cheerleaders doesn’t feel like it has anything interesting to say about subverting the conspiracy-murder, just that it wanted to have a subversion and then couldn’t figure out how to execute that, resorting instead to a deus ex omniscient narrator. It’s like if instead of Sherlock Holmes solving the case through deduction, Arthur Conan Doyle emerged from behind the curtain and told you to go fuck yourself. Read the full review on my website!

Second Place:

Disorientation - Elaine Hsieh Chou

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang was the darling of 2023 but it is not the first novel about a yellowface-ing author who fools the white literary establishment by selling them exactly the kind of bland and easily digestible Asian stories they are comfortable hearing. But it’s a good thing Yellowface did come out because Disorientation needed more time in the fucking oven. Like Yellowface this book attempts a comedic tone, but it chooses pure cringe comedy goofiness over irony and as a consequence rather than being a humourous reflection of Shit White People Do it’s more Making Up A Guy to Get Mad At. It’s greatest asset is an attempt at a discussion of the intriguing topic of sexual politics. Since white men demonstrably do fetsishize Asian women, is it possible to have an individual relationship that is not based on fetishization? Unfortunately, Disorientation doesn’t actually have anything to say about it and so just wibbles along to a nothing of an ending. It’s a scream of rage to be sure, but not all screams of rage are coherent. This is the second entry on this list that undermines its message because it couldn’t bear to kill a few of its darlings, but not the last!

Worst Book of 2023:

The Bone Witch - Rin Chupeco

We live in an era where ‘wish-fulfillment’ and ‘self-indulgent’ are no longer automatic condemnations, which is all well and good for the people writing them but what of me, the discerning reader? One detects great love and passion in this book but unfortunately that’s no replacement for writing ability. The Bone Witch is haunted above all by the knowledge that the author must have a truly colossal lore bible for this thing. It feels like every chapter the book treats itself of an extended tangent about the political system of one of its half-dozen fantasy nations, none of which are actually important to this book, and damningly, none of which are even well explained. As you might imagine, this leaves precious little time for boring things like plot or characters. The plot is little more than disconnected scenes that the author clearly thought would be cool but didn’t think about how they would link together, meaning that the last quarter acceleration to the climax is occupied by a sitcom b-plot ass arc about helping a friend get into the very special dance recital. The characters are even worse with none of them rising beyond an outlining epithet: angsty protagonist, broody love interest, gay best friend. The attempt at a dark and moody tone is childish and goofy. I found the Geisha theming to be overdone and appropriative, and the use of gay characters to be offensive. The only time the book threatens to have promise is with its beginning, where the protagonist accidentally raises her brother from the dead; however, The Bone Witch is quick to inform us that this changed nothing about him or about their relationship, wouldn’t we rather think about how stylish kimonos are?