Scathing Book Reviews of 2022Like this list

13 items

• The Philosophy of Modern Song

  Dylan, Bob, 1941-

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  "I began to feel like a therapist, sneaking glances at my watch while the crackpot on the couch blurts one creepy fantasy after another" - Jody Rosen (The Los Angeles Times)

• Lapvona

  Moshfegh, Ottessa

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  “Moshfegh’s own sacraments involve a different orifice, so you will forgive her if her search has led her up her own ass" - Andrea Long Chu (Vulture)

• The Passenger

  McCarthy, Cormac, 1933-2023

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  "Reading it is like immersive theatre: one of those elaborate warehouse productions where you stumble about from tableau to tableau, trying to piece the story together" - Claire Lowdon (The Sunday Times)

• All the Broken Places

  Boyne, John, 1971-

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  "Boyne has gifted us with a Holocaust novel so self-indulgent, so grossly stereotyped, so shameless and insipid that one is almost astonished that he has dared" – Ann Manov (The New Statesman)

• To Paradise

  a Novel

  Yanagihara, Hanya

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  “To Paradise is so unusually terrible that it is a sort of anti-accomplishment, the rare book that manages to combine the fey simplicity of a children’s tale with near unreadable feats of convolution." - Becca Rothfeld (Times Literary Supplement)

• Ghost Lover

  Stories

  Taddeo, Lisa

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  "In the course of producing this Goop noir, Taddeo has abandoned any interest in women as complex, conflicted humans." - Johanna Thomas-Corr (The Sunday Times)

• Lessons

  McEwan, Ian

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  "Within the first fifty or so pages, Roland experiences no fewer than three portentous epiphanies, none of which turn out to have any bearing on the subsequent four hundred, as though they were narrative coupons McEwan cut out but forgot to cash in"…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Unfolding

  Homes, A. M.

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  "Do we need to know what the taxi seats feel like? … I was bored by this book. By its lazy stances, its lax politics, and its rote writing.” – Brandon Taylor (4Columns)

• Happy-go-lucky

  Sedaris, David

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  "Sedaris is like the social director running around the deck of a listing cruise ship, frantically playing for laughs and doing jazz hands while the reader wonders whether he doesn’t know the ship is sinking " - Dan Brooks (Gawker)

• The Last White Man

  Hamid, Mohsin, 1971-

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  "Whereas most...writers bend race transformation toward satire, offering us topsy-turvy and hysterical tales, Hamid is deeply earnest about his conceit...a ‘meditation’...on how losing whiteness is going to make white people feel. Mostly sad, as it…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Last Chairlift

  Irving, John, 1942-

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  “John Irving’s 15th novel is 11 shy of 900 pages long. And boy, did I feel every one of those pages … a baffling amount of weak literary explication and juvenile political opining" –Sweeney Byrne (The Irish Times)

• The Fruit Thief

  Or, One-way Journey Into the Interior

  Handke, Peter

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  "As an avant-garde firebrand in the 1960s, Handke wrote an ‘anti-play’ titled Offending the Audience, but now his strategy has shifted perilously close to Boring the Audience to Tears" - Rob Doyle (The New York Times Book Review)

• The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2022

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