Can you hate read a book?

Why I got kicked out of gay book club

I’ve been removed from the same gay book club twice now—once against my will and the second time willingly.

I was a lurker in the group chat. My friend had invited me to join his friend’s book club, positioned as a group that would read not book club fiction but smart things of interest to a group of gay guys in New York. This was over the summer, when I was pseudo-bicoastal, so every time the group met I happened to be back in Maine. The one time I wasn’t, the organizer changed the time and that was that. I never went to anything, never read the books, and avoided invitations to various raves. In January, when I moved to the city full time, I planned to be an upstanding book club member—I would read the books, I would come to meetings armed with a dish suited to a potluck, and I would still ignore invitations to raves. Then one day, I watched in the thread as the organizer removed other lurkers from the chat, and then a note that I had left the conversation, too.

While the drama of the group thread is another essay that has been written in likely banal form before, what I’m more interested in is what got me to give up the second time. My friend added me back to the group. Because he wasn’t an admin, I was more of a lurker than ever, watching everybody comment and vote on the next book but unable to respond myself. I, again, decided to be a participating book club member and bought the book for February with every intention of going. But once I began to read, my plan went sideways.

I hated the book. The writing was wooden, the plot familiar. My standard for gay coming-of-age fiction in late 20th century Europe that quietly ruminates on art and depends upon a tranquilizing dose of limerence is unsurprisingly high. The novel failed the usual litmus test—if I’d prefer to be on my phone than read it before bed, I can usually tell I’m not that interested. This one went further, however. Not wanting to disappoint book club, I carried the book around in my gym bag for a few weeks but felt too ashamed to read it on the subway. The day of our meeting, my friend and I texted about our plans. He, too, did not enjoy the novel but would still attend. Having only read 30 pages, I decided I couldn’t make my debut in disgrace and that I would unceremoniously disappear.

In the weeks leading up to this final book club non-altercation, I joked to friends that I would hate read the novel. Maybe reading for all the things I didn’t like and wanted to change would help me become a better writer and editor, equipping me to find in my own writing clichés that would alienate readers.

This didn’t work but led me to a core question: can you hate read a book?

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I’ve been writing about books for some six years. I still remember going to yoga in North Carolina and receiving an email before class that my pitch to review Mira Ptacin’s The In-Betweens had been accepted. I was thrilled. Here was a book I was dying to read by an author I admired. Now I would get to read it closely and shape my opinions for an audience. When I received the advanced reader copy, I felt like I was finally joining the literary community, an esteemed artistic world that had always existed somewhere out of reach.

Over time, I started writing author interviews, which I found satisfied me on two levels. I got to speak with writers about their process and what was of interest to them in writing their books, and if I didn’t wholeheartedly swoon over the book, I didn’t have to write a mealy-mouthed review, either. Through speaking with the writer, my affinity for the book tended to grow. Our conversation could allow the writer to speak to their intentions and give the book a new life outside of the printed text, welcoming it into a broader cultural conversation.

Part of my shift from book reviews to author interviews can be attributed to the conditions of contemporary book criticism. The very feeling of the “literary community” that I’d joined by being a writer who also wrote reviews mounted a challenge. In an economy of favors, how can you write honest critique? There are so few rewards for writers that publishing an outwardly negative response to their work can feel unkind, and an operation coalesced around kindness instead of critique can, admittedly, become dull. A reviewer whose publicist may one day have to reach out to other publicists whose authors’ novels that writer negatively reviewed may thus feel shy about writing a negative review in the first place. The system has come to depend upon a certain amount of quiet decorum.

Take Lauren Oyler, the writer and critic who’s written famous takedowns of Roxane Gay and Jia Tolentino. When her book, No Judgment, came out, people were ready to take her down too: as Emma Keates writes for The AV Club, “No one has written a more scathing takedown of an author than the ones currently being shared about Lauren Oyler since, well, Lauren Oyler.” Schadenfraude galvanized reviewers. Ironically, the discourse and so-called “controversy” around Oyler seemed to create a feedback loop, and the deluge of negative PR meant that people were talking about the book in this mainstream way.

Yet, still, the pans were negatively motivating for me. While I could have read the collection out of rubbernecking curiosity, there were other things I preferred to read out of genuine interest instead of acting upon a desire to comprehend the discourse of a particular two week period.

Magazines feel and reinforce this problem too. Constrained by capitalist pressures that are antagonistic to art, book reviews are slashed—the Washington Post the latest to join the graveyard—or they go for viral one liners, like the famous review of Lapvona that says that Ottessa Moshfegh’s vision of “medieval brutality aims for the Marquis de Sade but ends up closer to Shrek.¹

Book critics who do not share the same goals as the writers they are reviewing are essential to the health of the literary ecosystem. When critics can thoughtfully engage with the work they review, and aren’t seeking to boost a platform for their own book sales in turn, there is a healthy challenge to work harder.

On the ride back from AWP, some writer friends and I discussed the matter of hate reading and dove into Maggie Nelson’s latest work. Nelson, who’s a MacArthur Genius and was widely and critically lauded for her memoir, The Argonauts, was summarily eviscerated for pandering in her book length essay, The Slicks, likening Taylor Swift—and through the writing of the book, herself—to Sylvia Plath.

“Parts of the book read like they belong back in 2015, on the shelf beside a Ruth Bader Ginsburg mug,” writes Becca Young for Defector. “The book doesn’t reveal much about the world, and we only get the vaguest sense that it reveals something about Nelson—a prolific woman artist who works primarily in autobiography, whose own career is left strangely unacknowledged.”

We went deep on the book’s flop. It was a foggy night, and the smokestacks of North Jersey blazed fire into the night’s haze. I had, in fact, loved The Argonauts and Bluets when I read them. The work brought something new to my life, and I didn’t want to rewrite my relationship with the writer in light of her latest work. And too, I could feel with clarity that I had no interest in reading Nelson’s latest. I wasn’t interested in reading the wreck.

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Perhaps a more apt question for this essay would be why I can’t hack it as a book critic. As I’ve grown as a reader and writer, I do feel that the bar for what I want from books has risen. I read to learn, to be surprised or thrilled. Simultaneously, as a person who loves books, I want to tell everyone about the books I love—multiple people told me that they read So Old, So Young off my recommendation, and I truly enjoy hearing their reviews and critiques. Sure, there’s some amount of building trust with people by sharing recommendations you believe in, but for me it does go back to what first motivated me to review and interview—a desire to find beauty and something to celebrate within art.

Friend of the newsletter, Kaylie Saidin, said that the problem as I outlined it isn’t so much hating the book as feeling indifferently towards it. Looking at the book that catalyzed my second removal from gay book club, I do see indifference. I was reading it, yes, because I wanted to not be a book club flop, but also because I was trying to find something to love in it: the language, the structure, an original story.

Reading is a generous activity. I want to find what there is to love in something, to uncover new ideas and language that thrills me. Reading a book only to take it down is antithetical to the enterprise. Life’s too short to read books you don’t love.

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Reference Section

• Currently reading: Tom Perrotta’s Ghost Town. I’ve been following Perrotta’s work since hearing him read from Mrs. Fletcher, and I’m a die-hard fan of The Leftovers. This new novel is propulsive, and his writing is crystalline.

• I wrote about Martha’s Vineyard for Boston Globe Magazine.

1. This actually did make me read Lapvona because I don’t not love Shrek.