BrokenTune

 Tasks for Festivus: Post your personal list of 3 Festivus Miracles –OR– post a picture of your Festivus pole (NOTHING pornographic, please!), –OR– Perform the Airing of Grievances:  name 5 books you’ve read this year that have disappointed you - tell us in tongue-lashing detail why and how they failed to live up to expectations.

2017 has brought a great many books and thankfully most of them were good or entertaining or at least ok. However, there have also been some real stinkers*, and of those the following tomes have taken the proverbial Christmas cookie:

(* I have only considered books that I read in full. If I had considered DNF's, this list would be much longer.)

1. The Spy Who Loved Me - Ian Fleming

I thought I had already read the worst that Fleming could dream up when I tried to suppress to throw up all the way through From Russia With Love but this was nothing compared to the sick-fest that was The Spy Who Loved Me. I seriously would have liked to hit Bond and his creator with a shovel, repeatedly, hard, when reading that book. Even thinking about the book still brings up feelings of rage and nausea. 

2. The Unexpected Guest - Charles Osborne

I refuse to cite Agatha Christie as the author of this. She may have written the original play, but Osborne managed to destroy the original work as only Osborne can - with gusto and beyond any hope of repair. Even if Dame Agatha's works are sometimes a bit twisted, Osborne managed to turn this one into a farcical hot mess. Again. Like the other Christie books he turned his hand to.

3. The Courts of Babylon - Peter Bodo

Boy, oh boy, oh boy. This was the book that tried to set a new record of how many dumbass comments one author can cram into a book. I have no motivation to find out whether Bodo really did set a record here, and I am sorely disappointed that not only Bodo represented sports and sports reporting to thousands of viewers, readers, listeners who have over the years been subjected to his self-congratulatory, patronising, imperialist, sexist, and bigoted comments, but also that I actually finished reading this book.

4. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - John Tiffany & Jack Thorne

Well, this will be brief: the author's got pretty much all of the HP characters wrong and their plot had some serious holes. This was fan-fiction at best, which is an insult to fan-fiction because this was really bad fan-fiction. No, seriously, just give it a miss and enjoy a re-read of the original HP books. 

5. Two Serious Ladies - Jane Bowles

I don't even know what this book was. I'm still more puzzled that this book apparently made Jane Bowles into some sort of adored writer. I don't get it. At all. This was one of the most boring, underwhelming, inconsequential books about drama-lama main characters who were so wrapped up in their first-world not-even-close-to-real-problems that ...

Nah, I can't even be bothered to waste energy airing my grievances about this one.