Overrated Books
I’m becoming increasingly tired of picking a book which has glowing reviews on it, or I’ve heard good things about from friends, only to find it’s at worst a pile of dross, or at best mediocre. I don’t stick to just one genre either, it’s happened over a broad series of books in the past year. Authors that people rave about such as Christopher Brookmyre, I read one of his (Country of the Blind) and was utterly underwhelmed. Books with praise heaped upon them, like Moshin Hamid’s ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’, turned out to be 200 odd pages of basically nothing. Philip Pullman, author of my much loved ‘Northern Lights’ trilogy said, “The author has managed to tighten the screw of suspense almost without our being aware it is happening, and the result is a tale of enormous tension.” Nothing happened!! Absolutely nothing!! I never got to a point where I understood his fundamentalism, as the book just wasn’t convincing enough for me.
Even in my preferred genre of sci-fi, the dross is present. Andrew Robert’s ‘The Snow’ is a perfect example. Glowing reviews? Check! “Intriguing, convincing and well thought-out” (Simon Withers SFX magazine) The plot? Snow started falling & didn’t stop. Millions of people died. All sorts of theories abound. Guess what? Aliens did it. Fucking aliens. How entirely unoriginal. Some of the conspiracy theory’s the characters in the story came up with were much more plausible & more entertaining than fucking aliens! Seems I am not alone, the customer reviews of this book on Amazon seem to be of a similar opinion to mine. It was so bad that I have been put off reading any of his other work. Or indeed anything! I didn’t read a book for almost 3 months after getting so fed up with everything I read turning out to be rubbish! Eventually I picked up Charlie Brooker’s ‘Screenburn’ and started enjoying books again.