Daily Archives: August 9, 2016

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Card Catalog Display: Books We Hate

One of the best parts of working in a library is the opportunity to constantly talk about books – to recommend my favorites and to gather recommendations from both patrons and staff. We’ve featured various displays and blog posts with staff favorites, but August’s main card catalog book display is a little different from the typical “staff picks” post; these are all books that we staff members hated (or at least really, really disliked).

Books we HATED (1)

As much fun as it is to talk about books we love, sometimes it feels even better to vent about a book that we can’t stand. Seriously, we all love to complain, don’t we? I think it’s just human nature. And moreover, it’s important to recognize that we don’t all have to like the same things. Some classic favorites will appear on this list, and some recent best-sellers. Just because we work in a library doesn’t mean we like everything on our shelves, after all.

Here are the books that various staff members shared their distaste for, organized by department:

Archives:

One book that I hate with a passion is Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. I took a class on historical-fiction while in grad school at Mount Saint Mary’s College in LA and it was one of the assigned books. The long and short of it, it is dull, unoriginal, uninspiring, and boring. The characters are unrelatable and at times one sided. The most you angle of reposelearn about them is through the letters that were written. The book may be based upon Mary Hallock Foote life, but a biography would be more interesting. It would be much more interesting to read What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, a Novel by Dave Eggers or Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier.

Another is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. I’ll admit the book is one of the great works of American nature writers, and I like some of her other works, but this one is a dull read. The main plot, if you can call it that, is her explorations near her home and views on nature and life much of the books comes from her personal journals as inspiration. Although I enjoy nonlinear books or different ways of storytelling, this books jumps off the deep end. The book reads like short vignettes with no real plot. It wanders around and goes nowhere. Much of the book is her fluid thoughts. It would be much better to read Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich or Desert Sojourn: A Woman’s Forty Days and Nights Alone by Debi Holmes-Binney, which are both incredible reads.

Adult Sergreatexpectationsvices:

The first books to come to mind right away are Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. My reason for Portnoy’s Complaint is that there is one particularly (in my opinion) disgusting scene that I wish I could un-read, but remains one of my only clear memories of the book. As to Great Expectations, I read it years ago as a high school student and as I recall the main character drove me crazy.

Circulation:

A Farewell to Arms:  Hemingway’s writing style just never grew on me, but his misogyny is what consistently turns me off.  This book features a 2-dimensional female character for the big ol’ strapping hero, and perpetuates everything I hate about how we talk about the First World War (that only men did things, and women’s actions are always peripheral).  I remember that the French Mutiny of 1917 happens about 3/4 of the way through this book, and there is a fear that the narrator would get killed.  And I’m sitting there thrilled, only to realize that he’s narrating, so he can’t die.  It was a very sad moment for me…

Murder on the Orient Express: Basically, Agatha Christie breaks all the rules about mysteries, the first of which being that the reader should, technically at least, be able to figure out what happened, if they are talented enough.  She seems so concerned with deliberately obscuring the truth from the reader in order to make an elegant mystery that it’s impossible (for me, at least) to get any satisfaction out of the book.  This was my first Agatha Christie, because all I ever wanted to do with my life was to go on the Orient Express….and even though the character studies are vaguely interesting, the big reveal is so utterly stupid, implausible, and feels like such a colossal cop-out that I was furious.  I’ve read a few more of hers since, and it’s never gotten any better.

Tracker: I get that it’s a book about survival and coming of age and all adaynobigsthat, but it’s also about a kid wounding, terrifying, and killing a deer.  In a very graphic manner. That’s the whole plot.  

A Day No Pigs Would Die: Clearly, I was scarred by summer reading lists…this is another that uses cruelty to animals as a metaphor for growing up.  In this case, it’s a pig that this boy, who lives what I remember as an incredibly boring life with a family who really doesn’t seem to like each other in the slightest, loves.  And then his father tries to mate the pig with a neighbor’s’ boar, and then kills the pig because it won’t mate (pig feminism?) and then the dad dies at the end, and the kid really doesn’t seem to care at all.  Utterly boring, except for the animal torture.

Children’s Room:

I really HATED The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men.  I felt like they were mgrapesiserable and horrible and boring and the only redeeming quality of Of Mice and Men was it was a shorter miserable book than The Grapes of Wrath.

Anything by Paulo Coelho, and The Secret by Rhonda Byrne.

South Branch:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: I have a sneaking suspicion that many of the people who claim the life-altering powers of this book haven’t actually read it. This author had an insufferable tone of voice and talked very little of the Zen that came from maintaining his bike. It actually had very little mention of his bike maintenance on his road trip at all. I think what bothered me most, is that the author came across as a bad father in this book, while trying to make it seem like he was a good father because he took his boy out on the road with him. This was a book full of contradictions, but not in a good way.

At Home in Mitford: I’m not one for evangelizing prose, but what bothered me most about this book was the one-dimensionality of the characters. It seemed that they were there only to serve as a catcherlesson; a sort of throwback to the bildungsroman, even though the main character was firmly in middle-age. The dog that only responded to scriptures instead of commands was a little too on-the-nose and the heavy-handed simplicity of the plot lines made this a very uncompelling read.

Catcher in the Rye: (I’m not going to be very popular at the library after this, am I?) I guess I just wasn’t the angsty, unhappy teenager that this book often appeals to. I know this was life-changing for so many people, but for me, this book was nothing more than someone’s excuse to whine. I didn’t think that Holden Caulfield had enough challenges in his life or gave life’s experiences enough of a chance to be as unhappy as he was which made this an incredibly frustrating read.

Reference:

Gone Girl: I don’t even know if I hated the book and the storyline so much as I just hated the two main characters. The novel switches back and forth from a husband’s and his missing wife’s points of view, and each character painted himself or herself in a worse light each time they narrated. Just when I thought Nick couldn’t be worse than Amy, he’d surprise me with just how awful a person he was – and vice versa. I think that reading from their points of view is supposed to show the inner workings of psychosis – a type of perspective I usually enjoy – but I just found myself annoyed. Then it was almost over, and I thought, “It can’t get worse. I’m almost done,” but the ending was the worst part. Overall the story was suspenseful and has an okay, semi-predictable plot twist, but it was almost hard redqueento care what happened to these two.

Red Queen: This teen dystopian novel takes place in a world divided by blood colors – the weak red-blooded workers who live in slums, and the powerful silver-blooded nobles with superhuman abilities. The main character, Mare, has red blood, but discovers she has the same type of superhuman abilities as silvers after she lands herself in the silvers’ royal palace as a servant. A love triangle between Mare and the two silver princes emerges, and a political rebellion develops throughout the novel. Red Queen had some potential, but ultimately the characters were poorly developed and the action scenes were somehow rather dull. I do give it credit for the fact that even though I was frustrated by it, I still found myself not wanting to put this book down.

 

And there you have it: a list of books that members of the Peabody Library staff just can’t stand.

Join the conversation! Let it out, vent to us: What books have you read and hated?

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The Roar of the Alpha Hero

We’ve begun a discussion on Villains, dear readers, so it only stands to reason that we pay a little attention to the heroes, as well.  Today, I wanted to share a few thoughts with you on a very particular kind of hero–one who shows up most often in romance novels and about whom I (and, I suspect, many of you) have many, many thoughts: The Alpha Male.

First of all–what is an Alpha Male?

Male Lion in all of his glory
Male Lion in all of his glory

Very basically speaking, an alpha male is the top-ranking male in a mammalian social group.   Some animals, like dogs, monkeys, horses, and lions, live in a social structure in the wild where survival isn’t guaranteed.  Thus, in order for their group to survive, they have to identify the strongest, the fiercest, and the smartest within their group–those animals get the best food and breeding rights, in order to ensure the survival of the group as a whole.  It is important to note that there are Alpha Females, and, in species that mate for life, Alpha Pairs.  There is no hard-and-fast rule that says that all Alphas must be male, or that all males are alphas (if they were, no group would survive long, because they’d all be fighting all the time).  Whether the Alpha is male or female, they are responsible for, and representative of the group as a whole.

alpha-logoBecause we’re humans, this concept, like so many others, get super-complicated.  We’re not pack animals in the same way that lions or wolves are, and our methods of communication, courtship, and interactions are specific to our human species, so this concept is a bit different for us, both in life, and in the stories we tell about that life.  One of the specifics of our society is that we live in a patriarchy (defined as a system of society in which the father or eldest male is head of the family and descent is traced through the male line).  Therefore, when we talk about heroes, we are not just talking about an individual person (even if we are, and even if that person is physical).  We are talking about our society as a whole.  Our heroes are representatives of our society–as it is, as it might be, as we want it to be.*

So what?  You might be heard to ask.

So…

Romance novels, as we’ve said plenty of times before, are a place where we can talk about people finding their place–in their own lives, with others, and in their world, and they do that through their relationship with another person.  In traditional romances, it is a woman finding her place with a man.  The reason that romance novels so often center around an Alpha Male is because he is supposed to represent what a society values most (which is why we don’t have Alpha Heroines), in the same way, say, an alpha lion, has all the biological qualities that its pride values.

Romance novel heroes don’t have majestic manes (usually…unless they are, like, shape-shifters, or something…not that there’s anything wrong with that….).  So we need to look a little closer at what qualities our heroes do have, and what that means.  And we also have the right, as readers, to decide if we are willing to accept those qualities.  It’s as radical a social statement as any I can imagine!

Scrooge McDuck--the quintessential rich alpha duck.
Scrooge McDuck–the quintessential rich alpha duck.

American romance novels, specifically, are filled with self-made men, who are all incongruously good-looking, absurdly young, and insanely, illogically wealthy.  In fact, I find it really interesting to see how the genre has gone from making “The Millionaire” into “The Billionaire” as capitalism continues to raise the stakes.  What is important here (for me, at least) is which is more important–the hero’s work ethic, or his money?  If it’s the first, then I am definitely 2609815on this hero’s team.  Even if times are hard–if his obscure real estate/investment/architecture/tech firm goes into the red, he has the fortitude to survive, and to try again.  Captain Wentworth, from Jane Austen’s Persuasion is just such a man, who isn’t afraid of a lifetime of “honourable toil and just rewards”.  If it’s all about the money, then we have problems.  Because now we are glorifying privilege and not the person, and inherently not considering the ways in which he uses that privilege against others.  Heathcliff managed to acquire a fortune–and then proceeds to swindle a bunch of men out of their houses.  More recently, Cole, from J. Kenner’s Ignited, owns a strip-club, a career that is never properly interrogated in the story, because of his privileged status.

Does this mean that heroes can’t evolve?  Absolutely not.  Mr. Rochester is one of my all-time favorite heroes, in part because he goes from a rich-and-privileged hero to one who learns the value of what he has, and what he has lost.  So is Rhys WInterborne from Lisa Kleypas’ latest–he can buy his fiance any ring she wants, but it’s his willingness to work for her heart that really counts, in the end.

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We’ve all seen plenty of buff gentlemen on the covers of books.  Which, again, shows a considerable work ethic and plenty of dedication (and a very good personal trainer).  But it’s what a hero does with that strength that is so important.  If he’s using it for a purpose, that’s great.  Rocky Balboa is always my favorite example of this kind of hero.  He’s got the brawn and the skills to pummel 2249304everyone.  But he doesn’t.  The closest he comes to fighting outside the ring is to defend Adrian…and still steps back when she realizes she’s strong enough to fight her own battles.  When that strength is used to manipulate…again, we have a problem.  In Collleen Hoover’s Hopeless, the female protagonist states, upon meeting the hero, “My instinct is telling me to run and scream, but my body wants to wrap itself around his glistening, sweaty arms.”  This is especially important not only of the physical danger this can pose, but because it’s also an indication of plenty of other forms of manipulation that can be used to coerce another person…and it’s critically important that we give our characters the ability to recognize that none of them are cool.

Again, this doesn’t mean heroes can learn, and can’t change.  But we need to realize that what the behavior that we sanction in our Alpha Males are the same behaviors that we sanction in real life.  And books give us a space to think about those behaviors and those traits, and, especially, to understand how we think about them.

A final note, I noted about that we are talking about “traditional” romances, which are those that feature a man and a woman.  We are really lucky to be reading at a time when there are a fast-growing number of romances that feature a range of identities–primarily gay and queer, but the genre is expanding day by day, and, in the process, reinventing our ideas of what it means to be a hero/heroine/protagonist.  And I, for one, think it is sensational.

*If you’re interested in learning more about this concept, I urge you to check out Catherine Roach’s splendid article “Getting a Good Man to Love: Popular Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy“.  My students got a kick out of it, and I hope you will, too!