While recommending Marge Piercy's The Longings of Women to a friend the other day, I remembered being bitterly disappointed by her latest, Sex Wars, a novel set in the Gilded Age and including fictionalized versions of Anthony Comstock, Victoria Woodhull, and similar personages. It was atrocious--clunky dialogue, stereotypic characters. And yet Longings has vivid, unique characters and a strong story line weaving together three subplots. Funny how something can go so terribly wrong this way. Anyone have any similar experiences?

From a fiction standpoint, I definitely put Tom Wolfe up there. He's written some genius; some trash that I loathe. I'd also put up Kurt Vonnegut. Saul Bellow, Martin Amis, and Philip Roth. I really have a love/loathe/love/loathe relationship with Roth's books.

Probably the pop poster child for this is Stephen King who has written many exemplars of pure fiction for the masses and a great number of worthless pieces of garbage.

From a non-fiction standpoint, I think there are a great number of authors that fit this mold for me, and it usually occurs when they leave the area of their true expertise. For instance, Noam Chomsky is great reading on linguistics and linguistic theory, but bunk on politics. Same with Christopher Hitchens who is fascinating when he is doing literary criticism or biographical works, but is unreadable when he writes about politics. There are any number of writers who are interesting when they are writing about their areas of expertise, but obnoxious when they decide to preach or try new forms: Gore Vidal, Robert Bork, Bernard Lewis, Harold Bloom, Hannah Arendt, Umberto Eco and I could go on.

There's few writers I have read that I find everything to be brilliant. George Orwell would be one.

Message edited by its author, May 4, 2007, 2:37pm.

I'd have to agree with you on King, and thanks for reminding me of Roth in this respect. I thought The Plot Against America was great, and enjoyed The Human Stain, but I only made it to about page 27 of Portnoy before I said, "OK, I get it, you hate your mother" and threw it across the room.

I agree with dios about Martin Amis, but the example of this that really sticks in the mind is Vikram Seth: I loved A suitable boy but cannot tell you how much I dislike An equal music.

Milan Kundera has been very good to me, but my favorite book is "Actual Air," by David Berman. I'm not huge on poetry, but this is one of the saddest, funniest, and most insightful books I've read about contemporary American life. I'll admit he's writing to genXers, but he's just too much fun. I carry the book on every big trip I go on.

On the other hand, while I don't hate him, I have to admit that several attempts to get into James Joyce have failed miserably. Reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has been like trying to run underwater, and Ulysses has been like trying to run under jello, even though my good and brilliant friend TheMadJuggler was nice enough to lend me his notes on the book.

Umberto Eco. I read The Name of the Rose in one ass-numbing sitting, and I loved Foucault's Pendulum, but The Island Of The Day Before left me cold and I abandoned it not one-fifth through. How's Baudolino measure up?

I often feel this way about Chris Ware. I love his design sense and I find his books really compelling, but damn it! I can't read half of the Jimmy Corrigan books without a 30x magnifier. It's maddening.

"How's Baudolino measure up?"

I'd give it a pass. I had the same kind of reaction you did to The Island of The Day Before despite loving The Name of the Rose & Foucault's pendulum. I still finished it and thought it was ok, but definitely a let down. Baudolino was worse.

For fiction, I'd say that both Robert A Heinlein and S. M. Stirling fall into that category. I like a lot of Stirlings stuff, but Conquistador left me cold, as does a lot of his early work, and I can't say I liked the Protector's War series very much either.

Heinlein was (by far!) my favorite childhood author. I started with his juveniles at about age six or seven, then went on to read almost all (or possible all) of his other books by my teenage years. I don't think I've revisited any of those books, though, as a adult with the exception of Stranger in a Strange Land. In retrospect, I'd be hard-pressed to call any of his books "great", even by science-fiction standards, although there's a few that I agree are arguably so. However, by the same token, I'm inclined (though in retrospect) to say that nothing he did was really awful. I think he was pretty consistent.

As to Sirling, I've only read the Nantucket books, which I really enjoyed. The others just haven't looked promising enough for me to take a shot at.

I'd not heard great things about either Baudolino or The Island of the Day Before. Which is a real shame because, like jtron and juv3nal, I loved both The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. The former, I've always thought, is a near-perfect novel. Like Shakespeare, it functions as pure entertainment yet also has the hallmarks of good art and literature. It teaches us things, makes us think, has deep insights if we look for them. I think the very best art is both highly challenging (in some ways), insightful, and of great social value, while at the same time being very entertaining. If only more books were like The Name of the Rose. I enjoyed Foucault's Pendulum, and learned some things, too, but it wasn't as entertaining as it should have been (in my opinion). I also thought it was more than a bit eruditionally ostentatious.

To me Jonathan Carroll is the worst example of this. Some of his stuff (The Land of Laughs and The Wooden Sea) are among my favorites, but I couldn't even get halfway through anything else he's written.

Pinker's How the Mind Works was provocative, The Blank Slate however was so riddled with spin and misrepresentation that I couldn't get past the introductory chapters.

Steven Brust. To Reign in Hell is one of my all time favourites. I remember not being able to fall asleep at night because I was so excited that someone had actually written this book. I was ready to proclaim mr. Brust as my new god. Then I read The Phoenix Guards and it was absolutely terrible. Now I'm working up the courage to read another one of his books to see which of the two it's closer to.