You Are the Weakest Reads, Goodbye

Recapping my Least Favorite Books from 2023

It’s a rare day for you to hear me talking shit about an author’s work. Writing a book is a daunting, uphill battle and any author who accomplishes this feat should be celebrated. However, that does not mean that I will gravitate toward, enjoy, or even agree with the writings of every author. While I’m hesitant to recap any books in a negative light, I felt it was necessary to recap some of my least favorite reads from 2023 just so that you can all learn my preferences and decide how much stock you want to place in my opinions. In no particular order, here are my 5 least favorite reads from 2023.

Mercury Pictures Presents, by Anthony Mara

Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father’s arrest.

Fifteen years later, on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Her mother won’t speak to her. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators. Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese-American actor, can’t escape the studio’s narrow typecasting. And the studio itself, Maria’s only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy.

Over the coming months, as the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European émigrés: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled. While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father’s past threatens Maria’s carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father’s fate–and her own.

Written with intelligence, wit, and an exhilarating sense of possibility, Mercury Pictures Presents spans many moods and tones, from the heartbreaking to the ecstatic. It is a love letter to life’s bit players, a panorama of an era that casts a long shadow over our own, and a tour de force.

I was so excited to read Mercury Pictures Presents. I hyped this book up for over a year, then when I finally read it, which took me about six months to get through, I could not tell you a single compelling plot point from the story. I only finished out of sheer spite. While there are entertaining moments, Mara took on too many of the subplots from WW2 and mashed them in the same pot with no finesse or tie back to his characters. You can make the argument that all these disparate stories eventually converge, but at what cost to the reader? Frankly, there are other recommendation worthy reads set during WW2, like The Baker’s Secret. I expected a book about 1940s Hollywood, and instead I was plunged into fascism, although now that I’m summarizing this, that’s pretty much par for the course for 2024.

Saint X, by Alexis Schaitkin

Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, disappears on the last night of their family vacation at a resort on the Caribbean Island of Saint X. Several days later, Alison’s body is found in a remote spot-on a nearby cay, and two local men – employees at the resort – are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. The story turns into national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved. For Claire and her parents, there is only the return home to broken lives.

Years later, Claire is living and working in New York City when a brief but fateful encounter brings her together with Clive Richardson, one of the men originally suspected of murdering her sister. It is a moment that sets Claire on an obsessive pursuit of the truth – not only to find out what happened the night of Alison’s death but also to answer the elusive question: Who exactly was her sister? At seven, Claire had been barely old enough to know her: a beautiful, changeable, provocative girl of eighteen at a turbulent moment of identity formation.

As Claire doggedly shadows Clive, hoping to gain his trust, waiting for the slip that will reveal the truth, an unlikely attachment develops between them, two people whose lives were forever marked by the same tragedy.

Saint X felt like a cheap alternate reality to the Natalie Holloway case. We’re meant to go on this decades long adventure for a young woman seeking the truth behind her sister’s disappearance, and all we stumble upon are plot holes and an underdeveloped plot. The way that Claire decides to investigate her sister’s disappearance is something that only a white woman with a true crime fascination would go through. And not just go through but get away with. She goes well past investigating to the point of stalking. I had started Saint X with the intention of watching the Hulu adaptation, and I disliked the book so much that I did not even give this series a chance.

“I am comfortable saying I don’t do anything because people are always surprised by me.”

– Isa Epley, Happy Hour

Happy Hour, by Marlowe Granados

Refreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicating novel of youth well spent. Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old, and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. After a sojourn across the pond, she arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blond Gala Novak. They have little money, but that’s hardly going to stop them from having a good time.

In her diary, Isa describes a sweltering summer in the glittering city. By day, the girls sell clothes in a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side to the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, Internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters. Money runs ever tighter and the strain tests their friendship as they try to convert their social capital into something more lasting than their precarious gigs as au pairs, nightclub hostesses, paid audience members, and aspiring foot fetish models. Through it all, Isa’s bold, beguiling voice captures the precise thrill of cultivating a life of glamour and intrigue as she juggles paying her dues with skipping out on the bill.

Happy Hour announces a dazzling new talent in Marlowe Granados, whose exquisite wit recalls Anita Loos’s 1925 classic, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, updated to evoke a recent, golden period of hope and transformation—the summer of 2013. A cri de cœur for party girls and anyone who has ever felt entitled to an adventure of their own, Happy Hour is an effervescent tonic for the ails of contemporary life.

Nothing happens in Happy Hour. It is probably the saddest of hours I’ve spent reading a book. Isa is quite possibly the most insufferable character of all time, which is a credit to Marlowe Granados and her writing, because I hated this bitch. Typically an unlikeable character doesn’t phase me, but Isa was a different breed. There are plenty of books where there is no plot and we are just taken on a stream of consciousness day in the life journey, but Happy Hour made me want to just stay home instead. I will say there are a handful of quotes that made me actually laugh out loud, but only because they emphasized the sheer absurdity under which Isa lives her life.

“We also have to laugh on demand. I do this frequently so I don’t find it difficult.”

“Remember girls, if you’re not on the table, you’re on the menu.”

“I prefer to drink wine at home because it makes you clumsy and irresponsible.”

“Degrees are social leverage, so we should hang out with people who have them.”

Psyche & Eros, by Luna McNamara

Who said true love is a myth?

A prophecy claims that Psyche, princess of Mycenae, will defeat a monster feared even by the gods. Rebelling against her society’s expectations for women, Psyche spends her youth mastering blade and bow, preparing to meet her destiny.

When Psyche angers the love goddess Aphrodite, she sends Eros, god of desire, to deliver a cruel curse. After eons watching humanity twist his gifts, the last thing Eros wants is to become involved in the chaos of the mortal world. But when he pricks himself with the arrow intended for Psyche, Eros finds himself doomed to yearn for a woman who will be torn from him the moment their eyes meet.

Thrown together by fate, headstrong Psyche and world-weary Eros will face challenges greater than they could have ever imagined. And as the Trojan War begins and divine powers try to keep them apart, the pair must determine if the curse could become something more . . . before it’s too late.

A joyous and subversive tale of gods, monsters, and the human heart and soul, Psyche and Eros dazzles the senses while exploring notions of trust, sacrifice, and what it truly means to be a hero. With unforgettably vivid characters, spellbinding prose, and delicious tension, Luna McNamara has crafted a shimmering and propulsive debut novel about a love so strong it defies the will of Olympus.

I am an absolute sucker for a Greek myth retelling, this is not breaking news. What’s also not breaking news is this “retelling” of Psyche and Eros’s story. There was absolutely no creativity, no unique perspective shift, no spin to the story that has been told for centuries now. I tried to reflect and point out specific details that might make the story feel more modern, and I could not point to a single one.

Uncensored, by Zachary Wood

Rooted in his own powerful personal story, twenty-one-year-old Zachary Wood shares his dynamic perspective on free speech, race, and dissenting opinions–in a world that sorely needs to learn to listen.

I read uncensored during Black History Month, thinking that it would force me to evaluate my whiteness and how I present that whiteness in conversations, actions, and any general interactions – another tool in the deconstruction of my racial biases and education of my white privilege. I found that this book was more of a memoir of Zachary Wood’s upbringing without there being much true reflection on the role that race played in his early years. My biggest question mark about the book was the light switch flick to free speech. We spend 200 pages learning about Woods’s upbringing, then all of a sudden we must decide if the first amendment protects free speech, even when it is laced with violence, racism, bigotry, and other unsavory topics. It gave whiplash. I would have much rather read a book all about Wood’s unique upbringing or a book that dove further into the argument on what is protected under free speech. Both concepts in a single book felt half baked.