Dawn Bonker
The American Book Review has set off a debate with its list of 40 “bad books” (PDF), many of them nominated by professors. The “chosen” books include Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, all of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence, One-Party Classroom by David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin, Bob Dylan’s Tarantula, Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (The Road and No Country for Old Men are also mentioned; McCarthy takes something of a beating…), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Poetic Gems by William McGonagall, Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, all the current “zombie” books, The Temptation of St. Anthony by Gustave Flaubert, A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman, and, but of course, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.
Agree? Disagree? What’s your definition of a “bad book”? Do you have a favorite “bad book” to add to the list? Discuss!
I’d be interested to hear the various objections to these titles. 🙂
You can click on the link and read the various professors’ explanations about why they chose the “bad” books they did.