Books I Wish I Hadn't Read by Sylvia Sikeston Certain books have such a formidable reputation that we, almost instinctively, know to avoid them: Ulysses, War and Peace, Remembrance of Things Past, Moby-Dick. Maybe already in the crib we overhear conversations and are thus saved the later trouble of buying and trying to read them. Other books to be avoided easily fall in several categories: <> Then there are the more problematic books, those that achieve a certain medium-term hipness, and whose titles are likely to pop up in casual conversation: "I just read the most marvelous book. . . ", or "I bought this book off the remainder table, took it home, and couldn't put it down . . . ", or (worst of all) "If you're looking for a book that'll change your life . . . " For several years, I've kept a tally of books in this last, unnameable category. Perhaps my research will be of some assistance: 1. Ayn Rand. The oeuvre. 10. Tom Wolfe. It's been downhill fast and far since The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. While we're on the name, the other one (Thomas Wolfe) now seems so quaintly slapdash that you can only wonder what all the shouting was about. 11. Dinesh D'souza. The George W. Bush of conservative think[sic]- tank writing. 12. Ernest Hemingway. King of the troglodyte writers, master of coelocanthic prose. I have no doubt that forced reading in school of E.H. by young female persons in the 1940s and 1950s planted the seeds, no, let's change that metaphor, supplied quite a bit of rich fertilizer for the seeds that would become the New Feminism when those persons came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. Reading Germaine Greer will tell you everything you need to know about E.H. 13. Bertolt Brecht. Dramatist par excellence, which means he should be seen and not read. 14. André Gide. Enough to give homosexuality a bad name. If forced to read Gide, you have only one effective antidote: watch a video of The Importance of Being Earnest. 15. 20th Century Japanese Fiction (long or short). What's to admire in a culture that brought us Iwo Jima and the Bataan Death March? (Not to mention later contributions to world culture such as the Walkman and Godzilla.) At least the better German writers knew enough to flee once Hitler got going (all right, so they mostly wound up living in Los Angeles; I'm not going to hold that against them). How many Japanese writers fled Japan either pre- or post-Pearl Harbor, eh? 16. Anything from St. Martin's Press. Apparently their books go directly from writers' hard-drives to paper to binding with no editorial intervention of any kind. Carefree copy-editing is the least of their problems. 17. Neal Stephenson. The oeuvre. The fact that the creator of cyberpunk has a career as a novelist is proof that McLuhan was right about the decline of literacy, at least in the airtight little world of geekdom. The "novels" are packed with fascinating ideas from the far edge of technological development, but devices such as "character development" and "plot" continue to elude the author. These books are enough to give science fiction a bad name. END
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