LitHub just dropped its annual list of the most scathing book reviews of the year. The books that got pilloried by reviewers this year include Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk, Ron DeSantis’ The Courage to Be Free, Prince Harry’s Spare, Roxane Gay’s Opinions, Jo Nesbø’s Killing Moon, Minna Dubin’s Mom Rage, Paris Hilton’s Paris: The Memoir, Patrick J. Deneen’s Regime Change, Naomi Alderman’s The Future, William Boyd’s The Romantic, Richard Ford’s Be Mine, James Comey’s Central Park West, Tom Hanks’ The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, Barbra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life.
Here’s an excerpt from Gary Shteyngart’s review of Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk, which ran in The Guardian:
“Who or what is to blame for Elon Musk? Famed biographer of intellectually muscular men Walter Isaacson’s dull, insight-free doorstop of a book casts a wide but porous net in search of an answer … There’s a lot to work with here, but it doesn’t make reading this book any easier. Isaacson comes from the ‘his eyes lit up’ school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI. I drove my espresso machine hard into the night to survive both craft and subject matter …
And from Rachel Cooke’s review of Prince Harry’s Spare, which also ran in The Guardian:
It’s not only that Harry is so petulant: a man who thinks nothing, even now, of complaining about the bedroom he was allotted for his summer hols in Granny’s castle. With every page, his California makeover grows less convincing …
What kind of person insists on an air-clearing meeting with their father on the day of his father’s funeral? A myopic, self-obsessed, non-empathic kind of person, I would say.
