Today is the twenty-ninth day of the 30-day book challenge, in which I will be writing about a different book or book series every day for 30 days, with each book chosen according to the daily prompt. Today's prompt is: "a book everyone hated but you liked".
[Note: So I actually wrote this post about a month ago and was ready to post it, but given everything that has been happening around the world lately, it didn't seem quite right to post my frivolous book posts at a time when far more important things needed people's attention. That's why this post is so late and also why it lacks a proper introduction, as I had to delete the original, now-irrelevant one.]
Fun fact: This post marks the third in a row which focuses on a book with LGBT+ themes. Previously, we had the twisty novel Fingersmith and the poignant essay collection Sister Outsider. Today these two are joined by another novel, My Education by Susan Choi.
The plot of My Education, as explained by Goodreads, is as follows:
Regina Gottlieb had been warned about Professor Nicholas Brodeur long before arriving as a graduate student at his prestigious university high on a pastoral hill. He’s said to lie in the dark in his office while undergraduate women read couplets to him. He’s condemned on the walls of the women’s restroom, and enjoys films by Roman Polanski. But no one has warned Regina about his exceptional physical beauty—or his charismatic, volatile wife.So before I get into why I liked the book, let's address the first half of this prompt: why everyone hated it.
My Education is the story of Regina’s mistakes, which only begin in the bedroom, and end—if they do—fifteen years in the future and thousands of miles away. By turns erotic and completely catastrophic, Regina’s misadventures demonstrate what can happen when the chasm between desire and duty is too wide to bridge.
My Education seems to be nothing if not contentious, and not necessarily for the reasons you might expect. On a certain online shopping website that shall remain nameless but which you definitely know of and definitely begins with an A, My Education has an average rating of 3.4 stars out of 5. The distribution of reviews for each star rating is as follows:
Its ratings on Goodreads are a similar story, albeit with a greater proportion of reviews sitting around the middle of the scale, around 32% of these being rated 3 stars out of 5. Here is a chart of these ratings which I shamelessly stole from the Goodreads website:
So why the dislike? To get an idea of what people don't like about My Education, I have selected a few choice quotes from online reviews of the novel:
- "boring inarticulate book"
- "UNINTERESTING COULD NOT FINISH AS COULD NOT CARELESS WHAT HAPPENED"
- "how did this get published?"
- "one of the most boring and distasteful books that I have ever had the misfortune to read"
- "too wordy"
- "None of the characters are likable or sympathetic"
- "achingly dull"
- "overwrought [...] exaggerated and pretentious"
- "Hated, because annoying inconsistencies. Annoyed, because grammatically complex and faddy."
- "spectacularly bad. Overwritten, barely sensical in its flow, frivolous."
- "selfish, self-absorbed, whiney characters."
Beyond the general complaints that My Education is just a generally awful, objectively terrible book, I think there are three major complaints among its negative reviews: the book was boring, its writing was overdone, and the characters were unlikable. In order to best defend the novel, I'm going to go through these points one by one and explain why I don't agree with them and why I actually like the book, its plot, and its characters.
First of all, the writing. Ignoring the plot and characters for the minute, the most controversial aspect of My Education seems to be its writing style. A lot of this comes down to personal taste, but I would disagree with other reviewers' statements that the writing is "too wordy" or "barely sensical". I enjoyed the flow of the writing, its use of unusual words (the second page of the book alone gives us "esoterica" and "stultification"), and the expressive, detailed prose. If at times it veers slightly into pretention, I took that as a representation of the not wholly-likable main character (a graduate student attempting to fit in among the lives of successful academics) and her mindset at the time.
As for the book's characters and plot, I feel that these two must in some way be analysed together, as the book's plot revolves almost solely around the emotions and personal conflicts of its characters. This is not a book with events on the scale of saving the world or even having an impact on a community - most of its plot has its impact limited to three characters, perhaps five at a stretch. If you are disinterested in these characters and thus are not invested in the personal stories, the book's plot will naturally not be of interest to you either.
In my case, I found the plot intriguing because I found the characters to be so as well. None of them are intended to be likable, as some readers were disappointed to find out. They are deeply flawed people who make terrible mistakes. Yet for all the blurb seems determined to paint Brodeur as some sort of sexual predator, none of the characters are that far beyond redemption. They are tragically human people, whose desires and skewed moralities lead them to make equally tragic decisions. I understand that sort of plotline might not appeal to all readers, but I found it fascinating.
The funny thing about writing this post, and reviewing all of the negative things people have said about my chosen book, is that it made me question my own judgement of the book. It's been a while (a couple of years, to be precise) since I last read it, so I am not so well equipped to argue its merits as I would be had I read it only recently. However, the memory of loving the book when I first read it is still strong in my mind. Perhaps if I were to read it again today, with all of these criticisms lurking in my subconscious, I wouldn't enjoy it so much. Still, that doesn't change the fact that when I read it I felt as positively about it as many other people felt negatively.
First of all, the writing. Ignoring the plot and characters for the minute, the most controversial aspect of My Education seems to be its writing style. A lot of this comes down to personal taste, but I would disagree with other reviewers' statements that the writing is "too wordy" or "barely sensical". I enjoyed the flow of the writing, its use of unusual words (the second page of the book alone gives us "esoterica" and "stultification"), and the expressive, detailed prose. If at times it veers slightly into pretention, I took that as a representation of the not wholly-likable main character (a graduate student attempting to fit in among the lives of successful academics) and her mindset at the time.
As for the book's characters and plot, I feel that these two must in some way be analysed together, as the book's plot revolves almost solely around the emotions and personal conflicts of its characters. This is not a book with events on the scale of saving the world or even having an impact on a community - most of its plot has its impact limited to three characters, perhaps five at a stretch. If you are disinterested in these characters and thus are not invested in the personal stories, the book's plot will naturally not be of interest to you either.
In my case, I found the plot intriguing because I found the characters to be so as well. None of them are intended to be likable, as some readers were disappointed to find out. They are deeply flawed people who make terrible mistakes. Yet for all the blurb seems determined to paint Brodeur as some sort of sexual predator, none of the characters are that far beyond redemption. They are tragically human people, whose desires and skewed moralities lead them to make equally tragic decisions. I understand that sort of plotline might not appeal to all readers, but I found it fascinating.
The funny thing about writing this post, and reviewing all of the negative things people have said about my chosen book, is that it made me question my own judgement of the book. It's been a while (a couple of years, to be precise) since I last read it, so I am not so well equipped to argue its merits as I would be had I read it only recently. However, the memory of loving the book when I first read it is still strong in my mind. Perhaps if I were to read it again today, with all of these criticisms lurking in my subconscious, I wouldn't enjoy it so much. Still, that doesn't change the fact that when I read it I felt as positively about it as many other people felt negatively.
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