Hate Book Club: Interview with the Vampire

It’s time for a new installment of Hate Book Club! If you need a refresher, Patricia Ladd and I are reading books we think we will hate, and then reviewing them. Each post has to include a graph, a summarizing GIF, and at least some positive comments (sarcasm is allowed). I’m also doing little report cards at the end. Go read Patricia’s review!

Interview with the Vampire, the 1970s novel by Anne Rice, is the book that rebooted the vampire craze by rewriting the mythology and adding an electric undercurrent of sex appeal. Which is why it’s surprising to find out that the book is totally boring.

I thought (and, I think, Patricia thought) this would be a bodice-ripping tale of excitement, bloodthirst, and poisoned romance. And I guess technically those things are still there. But, in practice, it’s complicated. For instance, our narrator, Louis the Vampire, does fall madly in love with a girl vampire. Unfortunately, she’s five years old. Imagine if Lolita was half her age, but thought and spoke like an adult, and you have a pretty good idea of it. Creepy? Yes, very. It’s downright unpleasant.

2015 Books of the Year

Each year for the past ten or so years (since I was inspired by my friend/book-pal Elizabeth), I’ve kept track of all the books I read and come up with a list of my favorites. In 2015, I read 83 books. Whew! And here they all are:

Special Harry Stephen Keeler Category for So-Bad-It’s-Good-ness

Sing Sing Nights (Harry Stephen Keeler), The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu (Sax Rohmer), Here’s the Situation (Chris Millis)

Ah, good old Harry S. Keeler, the Ed Wood of books. He’s here joined by a mindlessly racist old adventure novel and the shameless ghostwritten memoir of Jersey Shore‘s Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, in which actual author Chris Millis takes every opportunity to mock his subject.

Irredeemably Bad

The Overton Window (Glenn Beck), Daughter of the Blood (Anne Bishop), The Art of the Deal (Donald Trump & Tony Schwartz), Interview with the Vampire (Anne Rice)

This was all for Hate Book Club. Daughter of the Blood was the worst. There were parts of The Overton Window that were actually kind of funny, and a couple were on purpose.

Just Kind of Okay (or So Forgettable I Forgot Them Already)

The People’s Platform (Astra Taylor), Twentysomething (Robin & Samantha Henig), The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, & Me (Sofka Zinovieff), The House on Mango Street (Sandra Cisneros)

The first two books in this category had really interesting topics and ideas, but I forget the authors’ conclusions already. Oops.

Disappointing but with Some Merit

Jazz (Toni Morrison), The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (William Brashler), The Empathy Exams (Leslie Jamison), Operation Nemesis (Eric Bogosian), The Summer Book (Tove Jansson), A House and Its Head (Ivy Compton-Burnett)

A lot of these share the problem of “incorrect expectations.” For instance, I foolishly thought Jazz would have jazz in it. The Summer Book actually has a lot in common with The House on Mango Street: it’s a series of short-story postcards from a little girl’s summer with her grandmother. It even includes little drawings.

Hate Book Club: Trump: The Art of the Deal

It’s time for a new installment of Hate Book Club! If you need a refresher, Patricia Ladd and I are reading books we think we will hate, and then reviewing them. Each post has to include a graph, a summarizing GIF, and at least some positive comments (sarcasm is allowed). I’m also doing little report cards at the end. Go read Patricia’s review!

Usually on Hate Book Club, my friend Patricia and I try to keep it timeless, by hopping around all the most hateable books in world literature. Well, okay, at least American literature. But this month we’ve chosen a book that couldn’t be timelier. Except maybe if we’d chosen it last month instead.

The 20th Anniversary Edition has a new title, Trump: I Had Decent Hair Once.

Yes: Trump: The Art of the Deal, by Donald J. Trump and Tony Ghostwriter. What can we learn about 2016’s most terrifying presidential candidate by reading his 1987 self-help-slash-memoir guide to dealmaking?

A lot, it turns out. The first thing we learn is: Donald Trump can be really, really, really dull. I bet you’re thinking Trump: The Art of the Deal would be outrageous, or cringe-inducing, or full of Trump saying outrageous things. It’s not. It is tedious as shit.

Imagine your dream book. How many times do you want to read the phrase “tax abatement” in your dream book? Only, like, 5 times, right? Well, Donald Trump talks about tax abatements a whole lot more than 5 times in The Art of the Deal. See, this is not a book of advice. It’s a rote, moment-by-moment retelling of all his most successful deals, conveniently leaving out all the stuff that you would expect him to conveniently leave out. But, as much as Trump leaves out about his failings or secret schemes, he includes a lot of really dull stuff.

Hate Book Club: Here’s the Situation

It’s time for a new installment of Hate Book Club! If you need a refresher, Patricia Ladd and I are reading books we think we will hate, and then reviewing them. Each post has to include a graph, a summarizing GIF, and at least some positive comments (sarcasm is allowed). I’m also doing little report cards at the end.

Well, Patricia and I may have finally broken Hate Book Club. See, this time we picked a book we thought we’d hate, as usual, except…we liked it. (Here is her review.)

Yes, this is real.

Here’s the Situation is the autobiography/self-help advice book by Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, star of MTV’s Jersey Shore. The Situation rose to prominence on Jersey Shore after a failed first career working at a gym. His claim to fame: being muscular, tanned, promiscuous, and basically brainless.

But wait! The ghostwriter is Chris Millis, a humor writer and cartoonist who uses the book as an opportunity to make a cascade of jokes at The Situation’s expense. It’s not totally clear how much of the book The Situation was involved in writing, or honestly how much of it he ever read. There’s a good chance that he just flipped through the manuscript and said “sure.”

The result is stuff like: “I recently brought three girls back to my hotel room. After a little bit of fun, I realized I was down to two girls. It took me thirty minutes to discover the missing chick was lost in a crevice in my six-pack.” And: “Personally, my favorite drink in the club is anything given to me free, because I’m famous.” And: “I spent $1,828.94 on tanning in fiscal 2009.” And: “In my life, I’ve been a regular guy and I’ve been an international superstar. But the moral of my story is that I like the second thing a lot better.”

Hate Book Club: Daughter of the Blood

It’s time for a new installment of Hate Book Club! If you need a refresher, Patricia Ladd and I are reading books we think we will hate, and then reviewing them. Each post has to include a graph, a summarizing GIF, and at least some positive comments (sarcasm is allowed). I’m also doing little report cards at the end.

This month, we challenged each other to read dreadful books from our own past. I tasked Patricia with one of the worst novels I’ve ever read, The Natural by Bernard Malamud (here’s her review!!), while she saddled me with Daughter of the Blood, a fantasy novel by Anne Bishop. We’re not sure who won/lost this matchup. Both of these books are unspeakably, painfully, grindingly awful.

Even the cover image is giving me memory shivers.

This is the book that almost broke me. If I was ever going to give up our book club, this would be the time. But I didn’t. How smart of a decision that was, the reader may decide.

How terrible is Daughter of the Blood? Well, the first problem is that it’s utterly impenetrable. Author Anne Bishop offers no help to the novice reader. This is the first book in a series, but aside from a couple of weird glossaries involving the rankings of different jewel colors, you just get thrown in with no guidance. First some crazy lady gives a prophecy, but it’s not clear why the prophecy is important or why people care about it. Then we suddenly zoom forward like 700 years, but we’re still in the same weird medieval kingdom. A very weird medieval kingdom, as you shall see.

So the plot is, uh, okay, bear with me. There’s this girl. She’s like seven years old, and then suddenly she turns 12. She is super duper magical and is not only a witch, but the ultimate witch, so people call her Witch. Apparently this is good news. The prophecy spoke about her. She’s supposed to do something really important that everybody’s excited about. But, what is it? Aside from be super powerful? Nobody explains. We just get told she’s super important and powerful.

Also, the characters are impossible to remember. That’s because none of them has even the slightest shred of personality or interest. Plus, a lot of their names are similar. There’s this guy named Daemon, and a guy named Saetan, and a guy named Lucivar (and a minor character named Uncle Bob) (not joking here), and sometimes they live in Hell, but sometimes they live in Hayll. And it’s not clear whether this is the more famous Hell or not, and likewise the characters. And I don’t know what Hayll is. If this universe has a Daemon and a Saetan and a Lucivar, where is the Godde and Gawd and Gahd? Or Jezus and Jeezis?