Norman Mailer
I have one Norman Mailer book in my possession. A pocket paperback, it is gold with red edge painting and an all-text cover that delights me. It reads: “THE DEFIANT AUTHOR OF THE DEER PARK AND THE NAKED AND THE DEAD REVEALS, CRITICIZES AND DEFENDS HIMSELF IN AN OUTRAGEOUSLY FRANK VOLUME UNLIKE ANY OTHER BOOK YOU HAVE EVER READ.” Its title? Advertisements for Myself.
Published one year before he stabbed his then-wife at a party declaring his mayoral candidacy in New York, this book suggests that the only thing worse than listening to a man’s defense of himself is having to take it in through the eyes. Basically, it’s the title that walked so that A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius could run. It’s also the book I am citing as grounds for this writing of mine.
Here’s a little Mailer moment from Advertisements for Myself (1959):
I have a terrible confession to make—I have nothing to say about any of the talented women who write today. Out of what is no doubt a fault in me, I do not seem able to read them. Indeed I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale. At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquillé in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn. Since I’ve never been able to read Virginia Woolf, and am sometimes willing to believe that it can conceivably be my fault, this verdict maybe taken fairly as the twisted tongue of a soured taste, at least by those readers who do not share with me the ground of departure—that a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.
Make no mistake, this is the only paragraph I have read in the entire 477 page book… and I read it in an article. It is also the only paragraph that I need to justify my stance: that if Norman Mailer can refuse to read an entire group of authors based on their gender and his estimation of their worthlessness, then so can I.
Instead: Amiri Baraka, Masha Gessen, etc.
Jonathan Franzen
Forgive me, but I just don’t think we need more “sprawling, satirical” family dramas written by white men. Nor do I think we need more men to be featured in The New Yorker going on about how attractive, or not attractive, they imagine Edith Wharton was. In short, we don’t need to be reading Jonathan Franzen.
See also: ciswhitemale.com
Instead: Celeste Ng, Tommy Orange, etc.
Stephen King
“I’m a reader now,” my friend S— declares as she strolls into the Palouse Library, sweetly clutching at her copy of The Shining. It has been keeping her up, calling her in, turning her over, she tells me.
At an earlier date in the same library, my middle school history teacher puts his hands up and says, “Okay, okay, I hear you. If you change your mind though, be sure to pick up Different Seasons.”
I don’t dislike Stephen King. In fact, I have a beautiful old paperback of The Shining that I cherish from my days at A Good Used Book. Aside from that, I am sure to keep a copy of Different Seasons on the shelf at the library should I ever change my mind. Except that I don’t think I will. For years I have said that I may read On Writing, but even that is feeling distant, fogged out.
Sure, he is fine on the internet. Yes, he is beloved by respected sources. No, I am not interested.
Instead: Stephen Graham Jones, Carmen Maria Machado, etc.
Clive Cussler
Can anyone explain to me what Clive was going for? From 1973 to 2020, his titles ranged from: Journey of the Pharaohs, Vixen 03, Celtic Empire, The Romanov Ransom, Havana Storm, The Mayan Secrets, Poseidon’s Arrow, The Adventures of Hotsy Totsy, Atlantis Found, Night Probe!, Inca Gold, and more.
Someone, please, show me a list that screams “white male author” more than this one. What was his genre? What was his draw? Either way, it’s all lost on me.
Instead: Jacqueline Winspear, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, etc.
James Patterson
In Fredericksburg, Virginia there is a bookstore that my partner has visited, my childhood best friend has visited, my local post office clerk has visited, my town’s mayor has visited, and that I have only ever hoped to. This store, Riverby Books, has an elevated status here in Palouse, Washington—likely as a result of my aforementioned partner, but also as a result of its own personality.
That now-canonical symbol of challenged literature: books wrapped in chains? Riverby did that first. An annual “dirty rag sale”: where everyone is welcome to grab a rag, collect some dust, and return it to the counter for a free kids book? Pure Riverby genius. My personal favorite Riverby bit, however, is the Super Secret James Patterson Section. Near the bathroom in the basement, from my understanding, sits a sign that reads:
James Patterson has written more than 300 books and is one of the best selling authors in the world. We don’t carry his books upstairs because we are sort of snobs.
Nevertheless, when COVID forced the store to close temporarily in 2019, James Patterson gave our store (and hundreds of others like ours) a no-strings attached gift of $1,000 to help us get through those tough times.
These shelves of Patterson books are for sale at any price you’d like to pay—we recommend $10 for hardcovers, $5 for medium sized softcover, and $3 for pocket paperback—but if you want to pay less, that’s fine.
As soon as we reach $1000, we will make a random donation to another independent bookstore & then will begin again. This is our way of passing along the generosity that quietly permeates our society.
I mention this approach to James Patterson because it accurately reflects my own: that we don’t have to be reverent of this sort of success, or beholden to mediocrity. In libraries across the country, Patterson’s books take up a significant portion of shelf space and purchasing funds. In homes, in Costcos, in bookstores, in minds, he is represented. To only briefly mention his comments about “racism” against white men in the publishing industry, I will simply say: there are much better things to read.
Instead: S.A. Cosby, Walter Mosley, etc.
Jeffrey Eugenides
I bristle when people gush about Middlesex, because Jeffrey Eugenides makes me deeply uncomfortable in a way that is neither productive nor literary. His famous novel has defined a whole sub-class of sensational bestsellers* that link incest and abuse to the trajectory of their trans, intersex, or queer characters. But I guess some readers just really love his prose.
To me, Eugenides feels like he could be the unknown fourth of the Bennington three. A stylistic and shadowy sibling of Donna Tartt, Jonathan Lethem, and Bret Easton Ellis—the last of which I will also never read.
*Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle also makes this list.
Instead: Rivers Solomon, Pidgeon Pagonis, etc.
Louis L’Amour
My uncle Terry loved Louis L’Amour and I loved my uncle Terry. He was one of those oldsters who always had a western playing on the basement television: one that I would mute while the wives made dinner upstairs, while I read my book against the soft leather green of the sofa, and while the fellas played cribbage outside the screen door.
Still, no matter how many times he insisted I read one of his gold-spined Western favorites, I never did. Terry and I, we could talk about the rivers and diners and winters of the West. But what we never discussed was the colonial propaganda, the social glorification of violence, or the cop-energy element of L’Amour that I did not have the language to articulate my dislike for at the time.
In the end, Terry left me many of his books. Gold-spined copies of Jane Eyre and Moby Dick and The Mill on the Floss. All unread—shipped to him from a Franklin Library subscription service in the late 1970s—and smelling of cigarettes. I’m not sure what happened to his L’Amour collection but I am sure that, with Terry gone, I certainly have no reason to read any now.
Instead: James Welch, Annie Proulx, etc.
Brandon Sanderson
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good pocket paperback. What pains me, however, is a pocket paperback covered in cobwebs or swollen with moisture—which is the state I have most often found Brandon Sanderson’s in. They turn up as library donations: in milk crates, or dusty cardboard boxes, or deposited soggily into the book drop. In this way, I have come to understand them as the kind of books you pick up at the recycling center, read, and then donate somewhere else.
Except that in March of 2022, Sanderson’s campaign to release “Four Secret Novels” became the most successful in Kickstarter history when it finished with 185,341 backers pledging a total of $41,754,153.
Personally, I think someone should be paying me to dispose of them properly.
Instead: N.K. Jemisin, Becky Chambers, etc.