Our theme for the month of March is “How to.”

Gosh darn it, Gabbie.

The idea was fresh in my mind, to look back on books I’ve read in the last few years and explain my rationale for those I poorly reviewed. Then I checked in on the post calvin’s homepage and what did I see? “My Bad Reads on Goodreads” by Gabrielle Eisma, published February 11, 2025. Insert Angry Rightfully Deplatformed Conspiracy Theorist here.

No matter. Roasting bad books isn’t copyrighted. Therefore, I present to you…

 

How to Get a Badreads Review From Me

 

Be boring…oh, and written by a sex offender. I began reviewing books back in 2021, posting them on my main Instagram page’s story. Gerard Jones’ The Comic Book Heroes: From the Silver Age to the Present was the first truly negative review I gave. I’d read it once before, researching for an independent study on comic book history I’d done in eleventh grade, and my critiques in 2016 remained the same in 2021. Dry. Talked about comic books, one of the zaniest entertainment mediums, in the most boring way possible. Also published in 1986, so three decades out of date.

A few years later, as I looked back through my 2021 reads, I clicked on The Comic Book Heroes and scrolled down to the written reviews to see if I was alone in thinking this stank. The first review I saw made me click over to Google and type in Gerard Jones’ name to see if the reviewer was pulling my leg. He wasn’t.

Six months after summer vacation brought my independent study to an end, Gerard Jones was arrested and eventually convicted for possession of child pornography. I flashed back to memories of ephebophilic customers and bus blabbermouths with arson murder on their record. When my flashback ended, I came to a conclusion: f— The Comic Book Heroes.

 

Be a mind-numbingly boring collection of essays about a certified classic. For my English capstone class, Professor Naranjo-Huebl challenged me and my classmates to read the book(s) we’d wanted to read in college, but hadn’t been able to. I picked three: Tara Westover’s Educated, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre’s Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, and the relevant one, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. 

We put our chosen books in a shared document. Professor Naranjo, when she saw IKWtCBS on my list, gave me Joanne M. Braxton’s Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: A Casebook as a companion piece.

When I think of Braxton’s book, I think of an exchange from Kitchen Nightmares after Gordon Ramsay tried an awful wedding soup:

Owner: That’s to get them in the mood to get married.

Ramsay: Jesus, I’d rather get f—ing divorced.

No hate for Professor Naranjo—she’s a great professor and her classes made me think outside the box—but everybody has the occasional miss.

 

Make your main character an idiot in the third act. L.K. Madigan only wrote two books before tragically losing the battle with pancreatic cancer in 2011. I read her debut Flash Burnout as part of my quest to read every book that had won the William C. Morris YA Debut Award. Acts one and two were good: a fairly unique premise, a main character with a funny narrative voice that knew when to get serious. It probably wasn’t going to get five stars, but as long as it stuck the landing, I could see a three- or four-star review in Flash Burnout’s future.

It did not, in fact, stick the landing.

No spoilers, but in the last fifty or so pages of Flash Burnout, the main character does something so mind-bogglingly stupid and so out of left field that I remember looking at the page it happened on and wondering, Ghostwriter? It’s giving ghostwritten Animorphs books.

I’d still be down to read her follow-ups, which is more than can be said about other authors I’ll discuss.

 

Be a preachy, clunky, dated, culture war-y sermon that happens to be novel-length and follows the Freytag model. There is such a thing as good Christian media: The Passion of the Christ, The Chosen, the best books by Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker, C.S. Lewis. Heck, the reason I picked up a second Randy Alcorn book was because the first one I read, Edge of Eternity, was good. There’s no out-allegorying Lewis or Bunyan, but Edge of Eternity was—is—a solid, interesting story of a man confronting the worst parts of himself.

Fluke.

Randy Alcorn’s Deadline is, with little competition, one of the worst books I have ever read. It is so bad that I wrote an entire essay about how bad it is for one of my final classes at Calvin. It wasn’t unsalvageable—I could see the potential of a good book buried beneath the soapboxing about abortion and the main character beating strawman after strawman in debates. Potential or no potential, Deadline is basura calor.

Naturally, considering how great an experience I had reading Deadline, I read a third Randy Alcorn book last fall.

I did it as a favor for my church’s youth pastor Max, who thought Alcorn’s book The Ishbane Conspiracy could be a good way to kick off a youth group discussion about demons and spiritual warfare. With great trepidation and some facial exercises in preparation for all the cringing I’d do, I got into it.

Readers, I own The Screwtape Letters. I’ve read part of The Screwtape Letters. The Screwtape Letters is a book most Christians and a lot of non-Christians would gain something from reading. Readers, The Ishbane Conspiracy is no Screwtape Letters.

I like my memes and gifs in text messages, so here’s a collection of the memes I sent Max regarding The Ishbane Conspiracy:

Gunnery Sergeant Hartman’s excoriation of Private Pyle for stealing from the mess hall once I’d reached the one-third mark.

John Cena’s “Are you sure about that?” when Max told me there was some good stuff mixed in there.

A gif of John Walker yelling “Why are you making me do this?!?” and throwing Bucky Barnes thirty feet once I reached the one scene you never want to reach in a Christian novel: the one that takes place in a college classroom.

Deadpool’s “Exactly” when Max asked me what was bad about it besides the God’s Not Dead foreshadowing.

The things I do for my kids’ spiritual lives.

 

Be a sequel devoid of its predecessor’s good qualities. Rachel Hartman’s Seraphina won the 2013 William C. Morris Award. I enjoyed it. It’s a well-paced, wickedly creative, vividly written tale of a world where dragons and humans uneasily coexist and where the titular Seraphina, a dragon-human hybrid, must solve a murder that could be the first shot fired in a human-dragon war.

Take my previous sentence and replace all of the adjectives I used with their antonyms, and you have Seraphina’s sequel Shadow Scale.

The vibrant land of Goredd is replaced by generic locations Seraphina passes through searching for more dragon/human hybrids. The brewing war between dragons and humans is sidelined in favor of making a character who got maybe three mentions in the first book the main antagonist. There is nothing nearly interesting enough to justify the sequel being 150 pages longer than the original, and boy does it show in the sluggish pacing. There were other things that made this book suck, but I’ve blocked them out of my memory, tossing them in the same mental dumpster my worst middle school memories reside in.

I talked my book club into reading Seraphina for January, and I made sure to lead with a disclaimer: sequel? What sequel?

 

Be too long. I’ve written two posts that make it clear I’m a Stephen King fan. You might ask, “Noah, you’ve read so much Stephen King. Are there any of his books you dislike?”

Why yes. Yes there are.

I don’t feel bad criticizing Insomnia because King himself doesn’t have many positive things to say about it. In his memoir On Writing, he calls Insomnia and the book he wrote after it, Rose Madder, “stiff, trying-too-hard novels.” Stephen King has famously written some novel bricks—It, The Stand, 11/22/63, Desperation—and I’ve read most of them. I think some of them, like Needful Things and Under the Dome, are some of his best. Insomnia is the only one of his paperweight novels that feels too long. This book could be half its 902-page length and tell the same story.

Still better than Deadline and The Ishbane Conspiracy, both of which have the same problem, among a host of others.

 

Be a worse version of a book I already felt lukewarm about. Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick and Other Essays is a worse version of Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage, which is itself a worse version of Morgan Jerkins’ This Will Be My Undoing. The only thing I remember from Thick is that in the middle of a subject totally unrelated, Cottom paused the essay to mock author and New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks. Granted, there are no shortage of things to criticize about David Brooks. Still didn’t like the book.

 

Have a main character who raises my blood pressure. It always sucks when the protagonist is the worst part of a story. See: Captain Marvel, Orange is the New Black and the Monster Blood quadrilogy of Goosebumps. Such is my issue with the 2020 William C. Morris Award winner, Ben Philippe’s The Field Guide to the North American Teenager. The protagonist, Norris Kaplan, is a shallow douche, which is a shame because I like Philippe’s sense of humor.

More recently, I had the same problem with another award-winning book. Eleanor Cameron’s A Room Made of Windows won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Prize for Fiction [and Poetry] in 1971, and it robbed whichever books it beat out for the prize. Protagonist Julia Redfern is a whiny brat who meanders her way through an actionless narrative. A Room Made of Windows is the first in a five-book series, which would baffle me were I not soon discussing another book series whose success makes me wonder if bribery and/or sacrificing children to Satan played a part in its getting published.

 

Emulate the worst aspects of Ralph Waldo Emerson. If you took Professor Naranjo-Huebl’s nineteenth century literature course in the fall of 2021, you may recall that during a presentation on Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, I said the difference between Thoreau and his mentor and fellow Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson was, and I quote, “Thoreau’s writing doesn’t suck balls.” I followed that up with the explanation of, “It takes a truly talented writer to pen thirty pages of words and say absolutely nothing in them.”

Stretch thirty out to 224, and you have Dennis Covington’s Revelation: A Search for Faith in a Religious Violent World.

Spoiler alert: he doesn’t find it.

 

Be disgusting. I like young adult fiction and I hope to write young adult fiction myself, so I read young adult novels by the pound. Most of the time, I don’t feel weird about that. No non-teenager should feel strange about reading YA fiction…most of the time.

One exception to that opinion is Melvin Burgess’ Doing It. In the world we live in, which manages to be both obsessed with sex and obsessed with villainizing people who want sex, some circles would celebrate a book like Doing It. I am not a part of those circles. This book about three teenage boys’ misadventures in trying to get that good lovin’ made me feel gross, and painfully conscious of my not being a teenager anymore. Also, one of the main characters sleeps with his teacher, a trope that irritates me with increasing intensity the longer I suck air, and Burgess takes way too long to call it out as the predatory dynamic it is.

Doing It somehow won the 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Novel, another award I read my way through. You find a lot of gems reading your way through awards, but you also find Doing Its and A Room Made of Windows…es.

 

Be an undeserved classic. I could never be a literature snob. Being a literature snob requires me to have something positive to say about A Tale of Two Cities, and I don’t. An iconic opening line doesn’t change the fact that A Tale of Two Cities is BOOOOOOORING. So boring that if someone put a gun to my head and asked me to remember anything about it besides the opening line, the main character’s name, and the ending, my response would be, “Full metal jacket or hollow point?”

 

Be bad but also get such similarly good reviews that it makes me wonder if you AstroTurfed your way to success. Megan Whalen Turner’s The Queen’s Thief series sucks. The Thief was sort of clever with a major twist that changed the context of the plot’s first half, and that is where the series peaks. The Queen of Attolia (a book so terrible I said, “Thank God that’s over” upon finishing it) joins Deadline on my gratefully short ‘worst books I’ve ever read’ list. The King of Attolia and A Conspiracy of Kings, the latter of which won the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Novel and is the reason I picked up this godforsaken series in the first place, were improvements, in the same way that breaking a finger is an improvement over breaking your spine.

After my experience drudging through The Queen of Attolia, I read a couple reviews of both that book and of the series as a whole. Review after review praised the series for its pOlItIcAl InTrIgUe, using that exact phrase. The identical wording combined with the four books I read having all the political intrigue of a middle school class president election made me suspicious. I’m not accusing Megan Whalen Turner of doing anything shady to win The Queen’s Thief the acclaim it apparently has, but I am saying this whole thing is funny. But not funny haha. Funny, weird.

Alex, my editor, is probably sick of me not adhering to the recommended word limit, so this is a two-parter. Today covered the worst of my 2021 and 2022 reading years. Come back next month for ‘23, ‘24 and the worst I’ve read so far this year.