Books I Loathed discussion

Hi all,

Not sure if you get this all the time, but I'd love for you to hate my book. Hell, I'll pay you to trash my book.

Books are a collaboration between great writers and great readers. An author can only tell a story: it takes smart readers to give it a meaning. The smartest reading is usually hateful.

The story I've written is, frankly, difficult. It takes interpretive work, close study; a lot of reviewers say they had to read it twice. You can see why I'd pay you to loathe it: it takes some work to loathe.

Thus, I'm offering a prize: not only is "Dark Chatter" free today and tomorrow on Amazon (http://amzn.to/14z4CCg) but I'm offering $300 for the best analysis, for anyone willing to take on the hermeneutic task. In the name of objectivity my girlfriend will be judging the prize and, as she really thinks my book is terrible, you'd have a good shot at winning if you trashed it :)

Details on the essay prize are here: http://www.grappling-book.com/prize.html



And here's a summary:

Quicklime Petterson is still kicking around campus two years after commencement. But as the post-college daze is petering out, an offer comes in: pen a porn script for the policeman who just busted him, get his charges dropped. With no time to workshop, the erstwhile English major pounds out an introspective, Oedipal flesh-flick entitled "Conceptual Tart." The project attracts a tween star in search of an edgy role, and media frenzy ensues. As the would-be one-off deal threatens to become a vocation, Quicklime attempts to find the honest career he meant to start after college, amidst growing renown as a pornographer.

This sounds pretty awesome to me. Clever PR too!

Thanks, Kate!

One of the things I most loathe are authors self-promoting inappropriately here. (yes, there is appropriate self-promotion. U have been introduced to a number of good, new authors through goodreads).

Thanks for guaranteeing that I won't read you book.

As the moderator of this group, I wasn't bothered. It is an interesting plug.

Hi stormhawk,

I share your distate for promotion, and as you say there are appropriate and inappropriate ways to do it. I'm a new author doing my best to stay on the right side of that line, but I definitely do make mistakes. I respect the community you all have here and I apologize if I misused it.

I have a real interest in the group. My "day job" is as a literature professor and so, while I read a lot, I am used to discussing books in a classroom setting. When I first started joining GR groups, I found it very hard to talk with the people I met -- there was a lot of "loved it!" and "great!", which are not things I would let my students say or write about a text, and not things I find interesting. Honestly, I was impressed by the discussions I stumbled upon here, so I joined.

I also promoted my book, because I (selfishly) want to hear the things interesting people might have to say about it.

I'd like to be a member of the group in the longer term, and I hope I haven't soured anyone on that prospect. I do tend to read slightly obscure novels, and so I've kind of been scanning the board looking for a chance to talk about a book I knew something about, without one coming up yet.

It so happens that I loathe the book I'm reading now, and would love to strike up a debate, but I'm afraid few others will have experienced the annoyance of reading it.

Than again, if anyone else has encountered the twee, orientalizing, misrepresentation of what science has to say about child development that is:

Métaphysique des tubes

do let me know!

One final thing (a plug, but not for me -- I don't know the author at all): the question of whether reviews should be nice in the first place, of whether, as I tried to imply by my title, public loathing is actually a public service, strikes me as an interesting one. This point is made far better than I could make it by Jacob Silverman in a slightly old Slate article called "Against Enthusiasm:" (http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/bo...)

The meaner Goodreaders out there might enjoy the piece; Silverman basically implies that smart reviewing is often harsh reviewing, and that professional reviewers need to be tough, because people on Goodreads are too ill-informed to say anything other than "omg sooo good!"

To quote:

"[professional reviewers'] virtue over the algorithms of Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and the amateurism (some of it quite good and useful) of sites like GoodReads, is that we are professionals with shaded, informed opinions. We are paid to be skeptical, even pugilistic, so that our enthusiasms count for more when they’re well earned."

I say 'eff that, GoodReads can be skeptical too, and your group proves it. Maybe if we're lucky this thread, which started as my attempt at promotion, will become an interesting debate on the Slate article.