Beth Carswell, writing for AbeBooks.com, has compiled a list of 25 books that make her mad. Before divulging her "seething reads," she offers some preliminary thoughts:
"…. Anger is passionate, powerful and comes in many guises. But what
would make a reader so angry they would hurl a book across the room? There are some books that make me mad by virtue of being so
promising and then falling disappointingly flat with a crappy ending or
plot holes big enough to herd cats through…. Sometimes a book makes me seethe with self-righteous indignation, which
can feel good now and again… Many books elicit fury by appealing to our sense of goodness and
justice….
Coming in at #1 on Carswell's list is Angela's Ashes. Among the other titles you'll recognize are To Kill a Mockingbird (#4), The Catcher in the Rye (#9), Bridge to Terabithia (#19), and The Return of the Native (#21). Her complete list (with brief commentary for her choices) is here.
What's on my list? Not sure I can suggest 25 books. But one comes to mind with ease: Cold Mountain (winner of the National Book Award in 1997). After taking the reader on an extended but beautiful journey that reunites Inman (injured soldier turned deserter) and Ada (whose world falls apart after she leaves behind the city life to join her father in a rural mountain community), author Charles Frazier unfolds a tragedy that left me shaking in disbelief. I still recall reading a particular passage over and over again because I wanted the words to change before my very eyes. They didn't, of course, leaving me bitter and angry. So Cold Mountain is on my list. (But I still highly recommend it!)
Yours?
That was a really weird list, as it was made up of books that made her mad because they were poorly written, 0nes that made her mad because of some flaw that spoiled an otherwise good book, books that made her mad because they were well-written and so had a strong effect on her, and books that made her mad because, well-written or not, they showed something bad about the world. As for me, the book that made me mad recently was Amartya Sen's _The Idea of Justice_, as it was a long book full of poorly made arguments by someone who can do much better, and who could have used the material to write several different very good or useful books, but instead wrote one bad one.
The Shipping News (Annie Proulx) – I just couldn't see what all the fuss was about.
Here’s my hastily assembled list under the heading of “books that make me seethe with self-righteous indignation or elicit fury by appealing to our sense of justice and goodness:”
Abramsky, Sasha. American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2007.
Barry, Brian. Why Social Justice Matters. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005.
Block, Fred, Richard A. Cloward, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Francis Fox Piven. The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987.
Brody, Howard. Hooked: Ethics, the Medical Profession, and the Pharmaceutical Industry. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.
Chomsky, Noam. The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel & The Palestinians. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983.
Cypel, Sylvain. Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse. New York: Other Press, 2006.
Dayan, Colin. The Story of Cruel & Unusual. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (A Boston Review Book), 2007.
Deloria Jr., Vine and David E. Wilkins. Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1999.
Drèze, Jean and Amartya Sen. Hunger and Public Action. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1989.
Drèze, Jean, Amartya Sen and Athar Hussain, eds. The Political Economy of Hunger. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995.
Farmer, Paul. Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999.
Greenberg, Karen, ed. The Torture Debate in America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Greenberg, Karen and Joshua L. Dratel, eds. The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Horwitz, Allan W. and Jerome C. Wakefield. The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Sorrow into Depressive Disorder. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Hitchens, Christopher. The Trial of Henry Kissinger. London: Verso, 2001.
Irwin, John. Prisons in Turmoil. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1980.
Kerbo, Harold R. World Poverty: The Roots of Global Inequality and the Modern World System. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005.
Lane, Christopher. Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
Makdisi, Saree. Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008.
Miles, Steven H. Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009 ed.
Murdoch, William W. The Poverty of Nations: The Political Economy of Hunger and Population. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
Patel, Raj. Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2007.
Pogge, Thomas W. World Poverty and Human Rights. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002/2nd ed., Polity Press, 2008.
Rhodes, Lorna A. Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004.
Sen, Amartya. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. London: Zed Books, 1988.
Shiva, Vandana. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1997.
Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. New York: The New York Review of Books, 1990 ed.
Wilkins, David E. and K. Tsianina Lomawaima. Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001.
*One novel: Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955).
Oh, and Fool by Christopher Moore. Don't think his brand of humor is really suited to lampooning Shakespeare. (And, yes, I'm embarrassed that my reading habits don't seem as highbrow as other law profs!)
Someone who makes you laugh until you can't stop; Someone who makes you believe that there really is good in the world. Someone who convinces you that there really is an unlocked door just waiting for you to open it. This is Forever Friendship.