post itt writers you think are bad

sorry, English teacher smugness dies hard.

Somehow we got 107 posts and no mention of Ayn Rand. Shocking!

x-posts

IMO Lord of the Flies is one of the worst possible things you could give to a child to read. Adults, sure, of course. Actually I have no idea if they even give it to kids to read anymore! Think I read it in high school circa 1991

At her worst, Jill Lepore is just Gladwell with better sentences

Lol just recalled that I actually know what I will never bother with.

Authors you will never read

Seems like a slightly different category, though? I will never read Cormac McCarthy, but I believe people who say he’s a “good” writer in some way.

“Will never read” definitely a different category but imo funnier. How often does one find oneself reading something bad? It’s not altogether hard to avoid, I think.

I see what you mean about Lepore, Chuck; I guess that goes in the category of sometimes wrong or glib, but not a bad writer.

Unless it’s your job to deal with reading stuff you might rather not or whatever. Idk. Easier to encounter awful writers in the periodicals.

In any case “will never read” is more amusing to me, doesn’t lead to dubious arguments about what things are “good not bad”

Yeah different category. I ask about ppl's instincts. Its def easy to read good things -- you know what you like -- but can be tricky to put off something because you think it's bad when it could be good...

xpost

I'm just not a fan of the "I'm gonna research this subject for a few months and tell lifelong experts why they're wrong" genre of New Yorker story

Speaking of which John Lanchester obvs

I read Lord of the Flies while I was still in primary school and it opened my mind up to whole new ways of reading and writing. I wouldn't trade the experience for a later, more 'mature' read.

dubious arguments about what things are “good not bad”

― Canon in Deez (silby), Sunday, February 14, 2021 1:20 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

that’s the whole fun of talking about what makes literature “good” though! It’s totally dubious, especially the way I do it, with an orientation toward absolutism, but the arguments are fun and sometimes help you get specific about your aesthetics.

xpost

It opened my mind to a whole new way of feeling clinically gloomy about human existence, probably 2-3 years too early than was strictly necessary

Hmmm, I'll bite. Foucault was an important thinker but I can't stand his turgid prose. Conversely, most of the hate Derrida used to get over his supposed abstruseness makes little sense if you read him in French and are familiar with his frames of reference.

The real answer, though, is that all writers are bad because writing is bad. Speech, presence, logos 4evah.

naming theorists is cheating

Nah, some of them are/were remarkable writers qua writers is what I'm saying.

How often does one find oneself reading something bad?

i guess as the thread starter i’m reflecting how much, despite my best attempts at untethering myself from it, i am still tethered to media, which is so lousy with bad writers it’s like a garden for the purpose of cultivating them. on second thought scratch the “like,” it’s exactly that

but also if any of y’all read some modern literature when you are not baking sourdough or binge-watching yourselves into invertebrate zombified stupors, plenty of shitty writing there, somehow people publish whole books without managing to cultivate anything resembling a style

which reminds me

taffy brodesser-akner

Imo if you are ever tempted to read The Road by Cormac McCarthy you can just read The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban instead.

Slightly tempted to say Jia Tolentino, but I don't think she's bad exactly, just disappointing.

but also if any of y’all read some modern literature when you are not baking sourdough or binge-watching yourselves into invertebrate zombified stupors, plenty of shitty writing there, somehow people publish whole books without managing to cultivate anything resembling a style

i have a slightly unhealthy distaste for Brodesser-Akner...like i should probably unfollow her on Twitter, but i can't bring myself to...

xp lol Lily, Brad haets J1a, I enjoy her, I’m not sure if she’s still canceled because of her parents’ uh legally troubled immigrant job placement business

no one gets canceled in media

when i started reading a lot more contemporary fiction in the past few years, especially the most-buzzed about stuff, i was amazed by how much of it i found bad. lately i find myself following ficton writers on twitter if i like their twitter personas, and then i am often v disappointed with their novels. and then i feel bad because i "like" them so much on twitter.

xp i like Jia, too; i did think the prose style of Trick Mirror was...odd. i think she's real sharp, but that book had some flaws.

I just found Trick Mirror a bit disappointing, though I only made it through a few of the essays and should give the rest of it a try sometime. I just expected more from her than the book delivered; her style is polished and she can be observant and incisive, but I felt her arguments in those particular essays never quite came together or added up to much.

when i started reading a lot more contemporary fiction in the past few years, especially the most-buzzed about stuff, i was amazed by how much of it i found bad

this is kind of the thread where you have to name those names

i can't because their twitter personae are truly delightful!

Sounds like the author's due for another death.

the essays in Trick Mirror i thought were particularly good were the optimization one, the one on heroines in girls' literature, the Virginia one and the marriage one. the ecstasy one was both good and confounding, i think. i have never done ectasy; maybe that's why? reality TV one was bad imo. the other had good qualities and some serious flaws i think

okay, i truly adore Brandon Taylor on twitter, like i wish he were my friend, but i thought Real Life was bad. Kristen Arnett seems like a cool person, and she has good politics, but i thought Mostly Dead Things was bad. (Parul Sehgal liked it, so i am clearly wrong.) neither book is irredeemably bad, but i thought they were mostly bad.

i think they were debut novels for both writers; hopefully they'll get better

also a few years back i tried to read that Fates and Furies book by Lauren Groff, and it is absurdly bad imo. i got so mad at the purple prose i couldn't finish it. apparently her other books are also supposed to be good, but life is too short.

i am generally quite tractable! viz. Nathaniel Hawthorne.

btw Lily Dale, on the chance that you read Tolentino's optimization essay in the form it was separately published in, the version in the book is longer and better. when i read it online i did not understand how Donna Haraway fit into the overall argument, but i think it's...just right in its full form. as in, correct about the thing it is identifying.

since she’s come up here a few times and i feel like i see a positive reference to her new book somewhere pretty much every day...i kinda go back and forth on lauren oyler. i think part of what confuses me about her is that i don’t think her reviews are all that mean? if anything i wish her writing felt a little more focused, it always feels to me like she’s hovering over some point that she doesn’t want to actually spell out. if you go back and read, like, mary mccarthy on salinger or something, oyler never even comes close to that level of tightly focused fury and cool dismissiveness.

Ctrl+f "paulo coelho hallmark card bullshit"

Huh. No one else?

i don't think Oyler's mean exactly, and i agree with you inasmuch as i find her review of Trick Mirror hard to follow. (her pan of Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist is pretty clear and also pretty accurate imo.) it does feel like she distrusts Tolentino as a writer in part because she is pretty (sorry, but that is what it sounded like to me!) which is...something. to the extent that she was critiquing tolentino for critiquing the internet but being a creature of the internet, that seemed like a more valid critique...potentially, but then it was hard to follow!

i get the impression Oyler's novel is bad, and i have been burned by too many just-published buzzy novels to read it just yet. also it just sounds unpleasant to immerse oneself in.

xp

omg a buzzy book i HATED a few years ago was Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire. that book is bad. i don't know if she's a "bad writer" per se but she is a disingenuous one and engages in Muslim minstrelsy imo.

that book is also a testament to how doing something "skillful" with adaptation (it's an adaptation of Antigone, and clever at it at times) doesn't replace sound characterization. or avoiding playing into non Muslim Western stereotypes of Islam, even though you're Pakistani so you obviously know there are more than two types of Muslims.

really didn’t like sally rooney

lol me neither, but i only read Conversations with Friends. also i feel like she is somewhat a victim of the marketing/hype machine--Kazuo Ishiguro recommended that novel in some NYT book review which is why i read it. that's like Jane Austen recommending Ann M. Martin or some shit! why did he do it? she seems smart enough, but it is not a good novel! she could definitely write one someday.

feel like there is a phenomenon where olds (people my age, i mean) look to rooney as some kind of oracle of young people, which is dumb.

the Ishiguro rec is related to a problem where it seems like everyone in the book world is friends, so reviews are...lies.

the Oyler trick mirror hit piece had some bars but didn’t really have an overarching point even though it was structured as if it did, which was confusing

CWF worked as a mass market paperback thing, and I found the sexual fluidity decently presented.

i don't think it was unskillful in structure (Conversations with Friends) but it was morally unserious and the descriptions of physical landscape and stuff were BAD. she said grass smelled "allergic" at some point or something wack like that.

maybe "allergenic"? shit like that drives me crazy.

i was primed to enjoy a trick mirror takedown and it’s almost all unreadable garbage imo. check out her defense of dan savage or her pan of lady bird for more sick unreadable garbage. she’s what we refer to in the industry as a bad take machine

re: oyler