Lyza's Week in Books, Part II: Or, How much I Hate Dave Eggers

August 24, 2006

My sister called me from some airport this afternoon. My hunch is that it was Washington’s airport because she lives in DC. The poor girl is on the way to meet my father and stepfather in Nice (translation for geographically-phobic Americans: that’s in southern France) and had bought several books for the upcoming trip and wanted to know what I thought.

All went smoothly until she admitted that one of them was Dave Eggers’ Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Unfortunately, though I like my sister, that was almost enough to make me throw my cell phone across the room. HWOSG is my absolute least favorite book of all time, no holds barred. It is, in fact, the only book that I have ever thrown away after I finished it. So much wrath that I didn’t even recycle it. I threw it away, to rot in a landfill forever and ever.

Actually, I take that back. I threw one other book away once: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Those two. Shudder.

One Comment

  1. mikety, mike mike mike says:

    The worst, okay, to hedge this, the worst book I ever read that wasn’t supposed to be crap, you know like Dean Koontz or some such, the worst literature I ever read, or tried to read was: Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. Ye gods, what a piece of shit, page after page of people sitting around trying to get a steamship working or god knows what, followed up by tracking down old what’s his ass, Kirch or whomever, in the damn jungle. Who is he? What the hell’s his deal? Beats me, he’s dead. Followed by a lot of pompous bloviating about nothing. Giving a sense of some profound message with no actual content, it’s shite. Don’t give me that Apocalypse Now bullshit either, that’s crap too, you ask me.

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