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The Bad Book Club

Book List

The only thing worse than having to read a bad book is having to read it alone—if you’re the only one plugging away at it, you don’t have anyone to bitch and moan with about the prose, the plot, the people, the whatever.

With that in mind, my family and I have formed a Bad Book Club. Every month or so, we select a reputedly “classic” novel that doesn’t sound like anything any of us would ever want to read on our own, we nag and heckle each other to the very last page, and then we get together to kvetch about its badness and celebrate having finished it. The benefits of this approach? We all get bookworm points for having read a “classic”—and, sometimes, we find a book that’s not as bad as we’d expected it to be.

Right Now

Currently Reading

Fiction

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Romy	Tony	Aged P
Finished!	60%	Finished!

Drama

Upcoming

64 books

• The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
• The Ambassadors by Henry James
• An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
• Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
• Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett
• Armadale by Wilkie Collins
• Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala
• The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson
• The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni
• Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
• The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck
• Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
• Felix Holt, the Radical by George Eliot
• Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
• Germinal by Èmile Zola
• The Golden Bowl by Henry James
• The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
• Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson Smith McCullers
• Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
• Ironweed by William Kennedy
• Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
• Les Misèrables by Victor Hugo
• Light in August by William Faulkner
• The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
• The Magus by John Fowles
• Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
• The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
• The March by E. L. Doctorow
• The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
• The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
• The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
• Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
• Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
• The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett
• On Beauty by Zadie Smith
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley
• A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce
• Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
• The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence
• The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
• The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher
• The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
• Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
• Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
• The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
• Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
• Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm

Mystery & Suspense

Upcoming

6 books

• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
• The Lamplighter by Anthony O’Neill
• The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
• Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
• The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Upcoming

9 books

• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
• The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
• Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
• The Once and Future King by T. H. White
• The Stand by Stephen King
• Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
• The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

Ratings

• Excellent
• Memorable
• Average
• Meh
• Stupid
• Terrible

Spoilers look like this.

Qualifications

To qualify as a “bad book”, a novel must have at least one of the following qualities:

• it is too sad, depressing, or long to read alone
• it is written by an author we do not usually like
• it is in a genre we do not usually read