10 Wildly Popular Things I Never Learned to Embrace in 2012 (and one that I did)
Jeffrey Eugenides
So “The Marriage Plot” was technically released at the end of 2011, and that’s when I read it, the end of 2011. But I’m including it in this list because people are STILL talking about it and I saw it recommended on all sorts of recent holiday shopping lists, as if it was a good book at all. It’s not. It’s an absolutely terrible book and so transparent in its takedown of Eugenides’s idea of David Foster Wallace that I was physically uncomfortable reading it. I squirmed. Not to mention the fact that the main female character is impossible to believe as a real woman which made me realize that Eugenides maybe can only successfully write girls from the perspective of some creepy pubescent voyeur which then made me depressed because he is a grown man, and just ugh. Also, there’s his author photo, windswept vest and all. Terrible. But people still seem to like him?