The Spite List

Or, the worst books I read in 2019

I didn’t do a proper spite list last year, but I had to do one this time if only for 3 and 5 on this list. Do not fear, my favourite books of the year (both published this year and not) will be following soon to get past the negativity, but for those who prefer spite, here it is. The books I didn’t get on with, in order of when this year I read them:

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland – I used to be really into 90s American fiction, and I currently read a fair bit about tech companies, so I thought this would be up my street. Instead, it turned out to just be boring. Microsoft employees…get fed up of working for Microsoft. Some of it could’ve been amusing with hindsight if I was overwhelmed by how much I didn’t care about any of it.

Miracle Workers by Simon Rich – The premise – two angels need to stop God closing down Earth – sounded, again, like something I might like. The execution, again, was boring, and possibly too amused by its own concept.

Fall, or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson – Here begins the real spite part of my list. I wrote a review of why I didn’t like this one, but basically, it is far too long, the second half is almost unreadable, and the ideas could have been just as interesting in a fraction of the space. Also I would argue it doesn’t deserve the title at all (but maybe that’s because the title is what made me interested in it). Apparently I shouldn’t have trusted books about any kind of afterlife this year.

The Club by Takis Wurger – I picked this up due to my inability to not read books that promise to be about shady things at Oxbridge (or other elite universities). The few reviews of it should’ve warned me, but it was both not a very interesting example of that not-really-a-genre and used a handful of outdated slurs and ‘no homo’ moments for seemingly no reason (other than presumably avoiding the inherent homoeroticism of all ‘shady things at elite university’ novels).

Find Me by André Aciman – I also wrote a proper review of why I didn’t like this one, but the tl;dr version is: what was the point of this other than trying to cash in on the popularity of Call Me By Your Name and failing? The narratives just feel aimless and I wasn’t sure why I was meant to care.