I recently wrote about my 2023 Most Pleasantly Surprising Reads, therefore of course you know I would also highlight the five Most Disappointing Reads of 2023. Like my list for the most pleasantly surprising books, those mentioned here are not necessarily the worst or lowest rated books that I read of the year (though some definitely are). Sometimes a book may be questionable but at least it matches a less than good-looking marketing material or it fully knows it’s rubbish. Other books are those that look promising on the surface or have a lot going for them, yet are either not for me personally, have questionable execution, or take a nosedive over the course of the story. This list are those kind of books.
As a disclaimer, these are mostly subjective opinions and simply are what I thought about each book. By no means do I judge anyone who enjoyed these books, we can agree to disagree. With that warning aside, let’s get into my 2023 Most Disappointing Reads!
#5) Happy Place by Emily Henry
Easily my most controversial pick of the five books, this is one of those “hear me out” picks where I try to explain myself before being swallowed by the angry book influencer mob. I am a Emily Henry fan and have loved all of her books that I have read so far, scoring them all 4-stars or higher. In fact I even have her upcoming book Funny Story in my to-read queue. That being said, Happy Place is unfortunately the one exception and a novel that I flip flopped between being bored and irritated reading.
I had read both Book Lovers (solid) and Beach Read (a favorite of mine) which gave me a pretty good idea of Henry’s style, and I felt pretty good going into Happy Place considering its fake dating premise and vacation trip setup were fun concepts on paper. Unfortunately what I failed to consider was how Henry would tackle a fairly large friend group dynamic all while introducing the reader to Harriet and Wyn’s long history with each other. Subjectively, I had serious issues with both elements and it was the first Henry novel I actively struggled to finish. The gal pal banter didn’t really do much for me and the drama between the friends felt manufactured and distracting from Harriet and Wyn, not to mention the ridiculously rushed ending to tie-up all the loose plot threads. For how well plotted and written Henry’s usual works are, I was shocked at how crunched and messy this story’s ending that could’ve easily benefited from another fifty pages or so. I’m not sure why, but I was also uninterested in Harriet and Wyn’s relationship history and the flashbacks felt like they kept interrupting the momentum of the present vacation. Their eventual breakup was also quite anti-climatic and the solution that I already discussed in my review for the book was rather distasteful to me.
When you take away the focal shared relationship history and the friend group vacation dynamics, only the romcom bits are left and they simply weren’t enough to save the rest of the book for me. And that’s a shame because Henry is a great author and usually blends romance and drama seamlessly.
#4) A Flicker In the Dark by Stacy Willingham
While books sometimes are advertised as chick-lit or women’s fiction genres by certain publishers, the majority of the time they’re still enjoyable for non-female readers like yours truly. And then there’s books like A Flicker in the Dark that is the complete opposite which does not actually have any genre indicators that it’s so feminine-leaning. I had picked this up based on book influencer and book recommendations list primarily and because it ranked so high on Goodreads’ Favorite Mystery & Thriller category for 2022 (a mistake I eventually learn to avoid). Reading Stacy Willingham’s debut novel had never made me feel more alienated and clear that I am miles away from the group of readers this was written for.
From the get-go for nearly the first half of the book, the main character Chloe bashed me over the head about how dangerous it is to be a woman out on her own and how intelligent and careful she is. These are all considerations I’m well aware of being you know, not a boomer, and it got tiring fast, not to mention it cause the main story to drag and the focal mystery longer to get going. But even outside of the clearly feminine-leaning narrative (I hate calling it that but I don’t know how else to describe it), Chloe was insufferable. For how much she talks herself up for being smart and a psychologist, her actions and decisions indicating anything but. A Flicker in the Dark commits the thriller/horror story folly where the main character comes off as incredibly dumb and has laughably bad character decisions constantly. I get what Willingham was shooting for with the high-suspense, devolving into paranoia angle, but Chloe’s actions are so silly that it simply doesn’t work. Not only is it obvious how badly she’s doing in regards to the mystery, it’s also obvious where the story is going and who the culprit is. The reveal is anticlimactic, the epilogue feels misguided in its focus, and a sex scene near the conclusion is downright baffling. I has briefly considered buying a copy on sale prior to reading it and would’ve been horrified if I actually spent money on it rather than borrowing it.
If all else fails, I can thank A Flicker in the Dark for teaching me to take Goodread and book influencer recommendations with a grain of salt because this was not it. The sole redeeming factor was that the book was objectively well-written from a literary standpoint. I’m sure Willingham’s future works will be quite solid and maybe this one was just an unfortunate circumstance of the content and character not gelling with my taste, but I’m not willing to chance having to go through another novel like this one to find out.
#3) Plugged by Eoin Colfer
After the two most controversial and popular books on this list, #3 is the opposite as one of the least-known books (frankly, one of the least-known books on my entire reading list). I grew up reading Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series religiously as a preteen and enjoyed some of his standalone books. I stumbled upon Plugged which was Colfer’s adult novel debut which instantly caught my eye. Devoid of his usual scifi/fantasy elements and featuring a cheeky Irish main character, I was intrigued. Sadly, Plugged was a complete miss and one of the worst things I’ve read in a long time.
While Daniel McEvoy has cheeky one-liners that work perfectly with Colfer’s Irish heritage, nothing else about Plugged really worked for me. While the plot was initially interesting, it quickly devolved into endless non-stop plot twists and developments that increasingly made no sense. The action and character logic was at times incredibly poor and overall characterizations and developments were completely nonexistent. I go into more detail in my full review of Plugged but I was frankly shocked that this was written by Colfer by how messy and nonsensical it was. Fortunately his more recent fantasy adult novel Highfire was considerably better, but wow was Plugged a disappointment.
#2) Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Time and time again I find myself saying, do not trust book influencer/vloggers. I first heard about this book from book content creator Jack Edwards and on-paper, Before the Coffee Gets Cold sounded like the perfect novel for me. I love time-travel/drama stories and obviously love coffee and café culture, it was a match made in heaven! What I forgot was I generally don’t enjoy Japanese literature and tend to have issues with the lack of conclusions with a lot of their storytelling. But even that aside, I was not prepared for how forced this book would be.
While amazing in concept, the execution felt poor almost across the board. So much of the story was filled with unnecessary irrelevant mundane conversations (a recurring trend of popular Japanese literature) and the characterizations were shallow at best, stereotypically conservative and offensive at worst. The focal coffee time-travel scenes felt far too brief while the customers’ scenarios were expected, tired territory already covered by other works far better. To make matters worse, the character reactions and emotions were almost comically terrible. I felt like Kawaguchi was dead set on trying to make the reader feel something and cry but didn’t have the finesse to do it properly. Characters do complete 180 in terms of personality and spontaneously burst into tears hilariously at almost nothing. The whole affair is so dramatically over the top and completely contrived, it’s akin to watching a daytime soap opera but if the script was written by an amateur. To be fair, some of that could have potentially been attributed to this being a translated novel as I do not have the skills to read this in its original Japanese version, but surely it can’t be that much better.
The only plus side to reading this was I was able to borrow my friend’s hardcover copy so at least I didn’t spend money on it, but this was unfortunate. While I have not enjoyed very many Japanese novels, this one would be easily be my least favorite of the year if not for the next book and my #1 most disappointing read of 2023-
#1) 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
And in the #1 spot for my 2023 Most Disappoint Read is Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 and I honestly don’t even know where to start. 1Q84 is a speculative fiction/magical realism historical fiction novel that tells the dual stories of the vigilante hitwoman Aomane and the aspiring writer Tengo. Leading separate lives with seemingly no relation to each other, they both mysteriously enter a parallel universe of sorts that Aomame calls 1Q84. Appearing at a first glance to be similar to the real Japan of 1984, small unusual fantasy details are discovered as their lives become intertwined with each other. Oh, and there’s also storylines involving a dyslexic girl with unusual skills, a dowager sheltering abused woman, a religious/counter-culture lifestyle cult- I mean colony, a world with two moons, and little faerie-like people?
While those elements and the overall story sound interesting on paper, the novel itself is written in the most laborious, overwritten and monotonous style full of details and information that pertain to nothing. Perhaps as much as half the story is just Aomame and Tengo doing random slice of life things like cooking breakfast, thinking about going to the market, or having conversations with other characters that do not advance the plot or have any relevant contribution to the reading experience in anyway. There’s zero character subtlety, semblance of lyricism, and the entire book feels like a flatline. Haruki Murakami’s writing is one those styles that you either love or hate and I firmly fall in the latter camp. On top of that, 1Q84 clocks in at 950 pages in the hardcover edition and I felt that unnecessary length constantly as I trudged through this book. Besides being unnecessarily overwritten, it truly feels like Murakami doesn’t know where he’s going with the story and feels like it’s being made up on the fly. So many different plot elements are thrown in that grow increasingly random and bizarre (part of the appeal of the fantasy parallel universe thing going on) and the novel does a terrible job at addressing any of them in particular.
To make matters worse, Haruki Murakami’s writing has a very prominent old conservative male lean towards the story and characters most evident with his very questionable and for some, problematic portrayal of female characters. The underlying themes and takeaway messages can work when taken in the context of the traditional Japanese work/life balance, but for Western readers or the younger Asian generations, it simply feels out of touch with the 21st century lifestyle. Murakami also sidelines Aomame two thirds into the story and is essentially useless while Tengo takes the entire focus of the book which is a major issue considering Aomame’s story and character is considerably more interesting then Tengo. Tengo is described as being forgettable, agreeable, and content simply existing in life and Murakami was so successful at that, there’s very little reason to care or be interested in his story.
But the most grievous issue I had when reading 1Q84 is the way it failed to address any of the plot threads aside from getting Aomame and Tengo together from point A to point B and back into the real 1984. Literally every magical/speculative fiction storyline is left hanging with zero resolution or explanation. I was not only disappointed by 1Q84’s ending, I was outright angry at how little effort and poorly the story was resolved, exacerbated by the fact that I just read almost 1k pages of uneven and questionable content. For comparison, this book was almost double the length of Red Rising which was an already long novel on my 2023 Pleasantly Surprising Reads list and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books. I felt like I had wasted a part of my life that I will never get back and was livid at how the novel handled its length and ending. All that to say that although this is a cumulative ranking list for 2023, 1Q84 is really on it’s own level of disappointing.
And there you have it, that is my 2023 Most Disappoint Reads list. While these were a doozy, as a whole 2023 was a great year of rediscovery my love of reading as well expanding my genres in some unexpectedly new areas. And with that, here’s hoping that 2024 will have many more good reads to come and hopefully less disappointing ones; or at the very least, not as bad as 1Q84-