Worst of 2011

To be honest, I had a very even-keeled year in books: nothing spectacular, nothing awful. I put down boring things, and managed to avoid buying "so bad it's good" things. I'm sure I can find five books I hated, though.

1. Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm and The Lady of the Shroud
The Lair of the White Worm is about ghosts or something, and The Lady of the Shroud is, you think, about ghosts or something but then it turns out to be about juvenile fantasies of becoming king and getting a really pretty wife.
Both of these were awful; the first was racist even for the 19th century - it involved a white woman being absolutely disgusted by a black man, who was described in hateful terms. The second was questionable: there were hints of the noble savage, though in Eastern Europe rather than America or, god forbid, Africa. An Englishman comes in and takes over for the natives, who all think he's the best thing since sliced bread? I don't think so. And, perhaps their worst fault, both of them were absolutely boring. One might say that Dracula is slow; these were positively glacial, with no reward to show for it at the end. And the titular Lady had, it seemed, literal stars in her eyes. This was one of the few things I give one star to.

2. Felix Gilman, Thunderer
It's about rebellion, and magic, and gods, and politics. How did it manage to be so dull?
One of the reasons is that his prose is, while not terrible, nothing to write home about; another is that he chose to write three different perspectives, which rarely works well; another, that his characters are boring and have incomprehensible motivations. Evidently the sentence "They had sex" appeared. It could be argued that the flat tone was purposeful, but I don't think it was; Gilman didn't seem to have that much control over language. Also, because he was trying to write three strands in 300 pages, plot elements were lost, or give short shrift, and the characters were underdeveloped. A fairly major character dies, but it has little emotional weight because the reader's been given nothing to care about. However, his worldbuilding was quite interesting, and there were hints of something I'd want to read; it's a shame they didn't come through more. Two stars.

3. Lawrence Watt-Evans, The Wizard Lord
The Chosen come together to defeat a Dark Lord.
The plot sounds boring, but the ideas sounded interesting enough for me to buy it, and it was clear that the plot was just a vessel for the ideas. The Chosen aren't chosen by fate; they're positions appointed to keep the Wizard Lord in check. We start out by getting a new Swordsman, who is a farm-boy, but not in a boring way; he then wanders around a fairly interesting world (no over-arching ruler or government, each village has very different customs, taboos, naming traditions) to try to find the other Chosen. It turns out, to no one's great surprise, that the Wizard Lord has gone bad - and cartoonishly bad at that. He killed an entire village because he was bullied as a child, which is the most boring attempt to make a grey villain I've ever read. One of the Chosen argues that maybe he should be left alone, since he hasn't done anything bad since then, which, again, is an incredibly shallow attempt at adding moral depth. There was also the obvious (even to this fairly oblivious reader) twist that one of the Chosen was working with the Wizard Lord. Everything about the book could be called shallow - plot, characters, morality, prose. Two stars, if only because I enjoyed it while I was reading it, and it seemed so...earnest.

4. Ekaterina Sedia, ed, Paper Cities
There were at least 15 stories in this collection, which was supposed to be about Cities, and I liked maybe two of them. A very poor ratio.
Much of the problem was expectations: I wanted city-as-character, as in Viriconium, the Paradys cycle, or even, though I don't particularly like it, Ambergis. What I got was things that...had cities in them, for the most part. Some of the stories were bad, some merely indifferent. Hal Duncan, for example, had decent ideas, but he thinks that the most obscure word is the best one, which is not always the case. I had high hopes for the collection, but they were dashed. Two stars, because I didn't hate everything.

5. Ciaran Carson, Fishing for Amber
Retellings of Greek myths and Irish stories and history, all connected somehow with amber.
This is mainly on my worst-of list for lost potential. It could have been amazing, but it ended up boring, because of flat prose and a derivative nature. The Greek sections were straight from Ovid, with the color stripped from them; the Irish were fairly lively retellings of fairy tales, but were only interesting because of the original story; the historical parts read like a school report. He never varied his voice: part of the story was told by an old sailor, who read exactly the same as the narrator. Good ideas were betrayed by lackluster prose. Two stars.