It had to happen eventually. Over the past sixteen months, I’ve published reviews on more than one hundred and twenty novels. There’s been good books and bad books and occasionally a book that is truly great.
But The Witches: Salem, 1692, by Stacy Schiff, is the first book that I am giving up on.
I don’t have a car, so I mostly walk or use public transit to get around Toronto. While commuting to various locations, I like to use Audible because my earbuds are easy to stash in my pocket once I reach my destination.
I prefer nonfiction because if I have to tune out for a few minutes in order to cross the street or dodge the ever-present construction in the city, I can quickly pick up the thread of the narrative once more.
For more than nine hours I listened to The Witches, and today I could not tell you anything about the Salem Witch Trials that I didn’t know beforehand. This is because the book is all brain and no heart. It’s filled with facts and quoted and diary excerpts, but it fails entirely to make the historical figures into living, breathing people with motivations.
I always like to know the why of things. For example, I knew the basic facts about Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt before I read Kara Cooney’s The Woman Who Would Be King. What her book provided was the historical context of the period. Using educated guesswork and a dash of wild speculation, Cooney was able to paint a portrait of Egyptian life that allowed me to better understand Hatshepsut’s reign as a whole.
That’s what is sorely missing from Schiff’s book. She spends countless pages describing what the teenage girls of Salem were doing when they were supposedly bewitched. They tore out their hair, contorted their bodies, and screamed the invisible “spirits” tormenting them. These are facts. What I wanted to know was why. If it wasn’t witches, which it clearly wasn’t, then what on Earth would possess an entire community of teenage girls to behave as if they were, in fact, possessed?
If this book had been a little shorter, I probably would have been able to stay the course. But The Witches is more than five hundred pages. Like I said, I listened for nearly ten hours. Then I looked, and saw there were still eight hours to go. And I just couldn’t spend another eight hours in that particular version of Salem, no matter how technically accurate.
My rating: N/A
Normally I leave links here for anyone who would like to purchase the book, but given what you’ve just read, why would you?
Happy reading everyone!
Reddit contributor turned published author Dathan Auerbach has some delightfully creepy moments in this short horror novel. Some of the chapters were better than others though, and overall this book was disjointed and uneven.
This is one of those novels that was not bad at all, just disappointing. It failed to live up to the example set by the first installment in the series, and lacked any major character development.
I’m a huge fan of the horror genre, and was really excited to read this book while I was on a camping trip this summer. Sadly, The Troop lacks any kind of exposition and never takes the time to flesh out its characters, relying instead on graphic and gruesome descriptions of bones and bodies.
The story of Lizzie Borden is known all around the world, and this historical fiction novel set out to tell her story as well as her sisters. None of the characters are terribly interesting, however; and this novel ended up a yawn instead of a scream.
I often find that I am not terribly impressed by Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning novel. Similar to the Academy Awards, I think the judging is very biased towards only specific types of stories. A Thousand Acres was yet another example of a Pulitzer-winning novel that offered nothing particularly new or imaginative.
Set in post-apocalyptic Africa, this novel never adequately explains the world it inhabits. I often felt confused as characters seemed to gain new abilities at random, and there was more than one instance of deus ex machina. This is a book in need of a prequel.
The Appalachian Mountains are shrouded in mist and mystery, as are the people who live up in the hills. This historical fiction novel about a war amputee turned bootlegger should have been more exciting than it was. As it stands, I can barely remember the plot.
The book that caused me to temporarily back away from the thriller genre, I think Friend Request suffered from a cascade effect. I had read several disappointing and forgettable thrillers lately, and this novel, about a women who is contacted on Facebook by a deceased schoolmate, was just the cherry on the sundae.
This book earned its spot high on this list because it made me look bad in front of my book club. I chose this YA science fiction novel, about a town where all the adults suddenly vanish, as my very first “pick” and, needless to say, it was not well received. Potentially because it was written by someone who had only the most passing knowledge of teenagers and how they behave.
I remember writing the review for this novel, and thinking that it was good on paper. The novel dealt with the sensitive issue of Native Americans and the United States government with delicacy and tact. However, the cringe-inducing dialects and italics used in the dialogue of the different woman ruined this novel for me entirely. I have never worst-listed a book based solely on formatting, so this was a first.
Another book club pick (not mine), The Devil’s Banker is what happens when American white nationalism gains sentience and writes a novel. It is a collection of loosely gathered racial biases held together with the glue of fear-mongering and lacquered over with a shiny coat of ignorance.
I absolutely love Shakespeare. He was my primary focus while I was completing my Bachelor’s degree, and I have had the privilege of performing Shakespeare in amateur productions. However of all his major works, I have always found Hamlet to be the least impressive. The character’s are incessantly whiny, the “play within a play” is an interesting idea that fails to materialize, and I’ve always found the female characters to be weak and useless compared to some of his other works. If you’re looking for a truly remarkable Shakespeare play, I would suggest Macbeth or Othello.
This was required reading for my AP Literature class when I was seventeen, which may explain why I didn’t enjoy it. I read the first hundred or so pages and then gave up. The early sections of the novel are narrated by a mentally challenged child from the South, and his young sister. Ultimately, I couldn’t follow the plot at all, couldn’t figure out what was going on, and had to throw in the towel.
I adore Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy. I’ve seen the extended edition so many times I can damn near quote it word-for-word. However, Tolkien’s novels lack characterization to the point where Frodo and the gang feel more like chess players being arbitrarily moved around Middle Earth than real people. And the complete and utter lack of meaningful female characters doesn’t help. Trying to read the books always makes me appreciate just how spectacular a job Jackson did with his film adaptation.
I dislike Beowulf for the same reason I could never get into Canterbury Tales; the language is so frustrating that it’s just not diverting. I read in order to immerse myself in another time and place, and while I can enjoy the history and legacy behind an epic poem like Beowulf, it’s just so much effort. Does this mean I’m lazy? Possibly, but I prefer reading as a form of entertainment, rather than a cerebral exercise.
As an avid horror fan, I remember being really excited to read Frankenstein, which has contributed so much to both the horror and science fiction genres. However, this novel is incredibly boring. The parts of the book that deal with Frankenstein’s monster are interesting and beautifully sad, but too much of the plot focuses on the Doctor as he lists his many regrets in life, leaving me underwhelmed and underscared.
To the best of my knowledge, Victor Hugo was one of many nineteenth century novelists who was paid by the word, and my God does it show. I got three hundred pages into Les Miserables, realized that literally nothing had happened yet, and had to set it aside. At one point, Hugo dedicates an entire chapter to describing an alleyway, at which point I just couldn’t take it anymore. I also can’t stand the musical, which is terribly written except for one really good song. Also Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe should never, ever sing.
Has anyone actually enjoyed Moby Dick? Or is it just one of those novels that people buy to keep on their bookshelf in order to feel cultured? Cause I guarantee that’s why I read it. It’s the “Great American Novel” after all. Except it’s not. It has amazing plot with wonderful characters that gets completely buried under extraneous detail and useless segues.
The only “nonfiction” book on this list is also the only one that made me actively angry. I had to put nonfiction in quotes because I doubt nearly every word of Elizabeth Gilbert’s supposedly transformative experience through Italy, India, and Bali. Gilbert is a monster of selfishness who abandons her life and her family in order to “find herself”. Travel does not solve all your problems, and Gilbert consistently comes across as shallow, trite, and privileged.
I actually rather enjoyed the first installment in this series. The Golden Compass is an entertaining children’s story that does a great job of introducing an alternative world to ours and populating it with interesting and compelling characters. In the following books, Philip Pullman goes completely off the rails and foresakes character and plot development in favor of soapboxing on the evils of organized religion. The final novel, The Amber Spyglass, barely made sense at all.
One Year, One Hundred Books 