To be clear from the very beginning, I didn’t finish the book. I dropped it somewhere in the middle.

General information about Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

This book is about the life and adventures of Washington Black, a man who was born a slave, became a person of science, escaped and travelled the world.

Doesn’t it sound exciting?! I thought so too. Besides, the book was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018. Doesn’t it guarantee a good book? Not for me, apparently.

I purchased the ebook together with the audio version. The plan was to alternate between reading and listening. The two versions are synchronised, so you can stop reading and continue listening from the same place where you stopped reading, and vice versa. Future has come!

Even though I thus paid a double price for the story, I knew it would be a bigger loss if I had continued wasting my time on the book. Having dragged through Washington Black for weeks, I finally dropped it.

Not only did I stop reading it, I did it at the moment when the protagonist was in mortal danger. I. did. not. care. That’s how generally boring it was.

What’s so bad about Washington Black

The story

Some descriptions mentioned that Washington Black was “inspired by a true story”. I’m not sure to what extent the story is true, it feels absolutely naive and sugar-coated.

The characters

There is no depth to the characters: villains are villains, good guys are good. The characters are absolutely predictable and do not seem to develop.

The writing

The writing is another curious detail of this book. It tries to be beautiful so it does sound sophisticated but quite pretentious. I see no reason for “the dying gold of morning” at a banal breakfast. To me it looks misplaced, like somebody wearing a ball gown for grocery shopping.

What’s good in Washington Black

Theoretically, a story about a person fighting his way to freedom while crossing different countries and meeting different people, should be interesting.

This theory didn’t work for me.

Final thought on Washington Black

I’m sure the book will find its readers, but I’m not one of them.

On Chesil Beach is a beautifully written eventless novella where graphic sex scenes are an essential part of the story. The writing style reminds me of those old classics created at times when authors didn’t care if they could interest the reader. They just immersed themselves in the process and those who were literate enough would read the result anyway. It’s a high quality writing but you have to exercise self-control to drag yourself through it because nothing at all is happening.

On Chesil Beach looks like a well prepared stage where action is about to take place. Then, suddenly, you hit the final page. All story could fit in 177 words.

The book was selected for 2007 Booker Prize shortlist which caused a few scandals because it’s not even a novel by size.

Another curious story happened when Ian McEwan mentioned that he kept two pebbles from Chesil beach while writing the book. It caused one more scandal. McEwan was threatened with a fine and had to apologise and return the pebbles back to the beach.

There’s now a movie adaptation of the story released in May 2018. Judging by the trailer, the characters look nothing like the ones described in the book. Unless the storyline was changed too I can’t even imagine what there was to film at all.

You will still like On Chesil Beach if you enjoy looking deeply into characters and dissecting their emotions, and if you don’t mind the complete absence of action.

My friend NeoWatercolour asked me this question. The first seemingly obvious answer was “no”. These are two different words, so they must mean two different things. Right? Apparently not.

I spent some time googling for the “goodness” criteria in Booker or Pulitzer prizes. Guess what? There’s none. It’s up to judges to choose the best book, and they choose the best book according to their personal opinions, i.e. they choose the one they like the most. Thus, the difference between “the best” and “favourite” comes to nothing here. The “official” best books are those that were simply liked the most by people who made books their profession. Thus, when it comes to best book lists the main question is who made those lists.

Human brain adapts to impressions. In 1896 a black-and-white silent movie about an approaching train horrified the audience in the theatre. Now they need a 3D system and surround sound to be that impressed. A similar thing happens in the world of books, although it’s not linear (Tolstoy wrote better than many modern authors). The more a person reads the more demanding she gets of characters, dialogues, language and plots. In Primary school a teacher asked me to speak about my favourite book in front of the class. I loved the book so much I accidentally persuaded the whole group of eight-year-olds, who hated reading, to line up to borrow my book. When I was eight that book was in my “best books ever” shortlist, but the list was indeed short. Today, the book wouldn’t get there.

Your personal experience influences your opinion too. People like the books that they can relate to. That creates a tricky situation when at one moment of your life you like the book and at another one you don’t.

Some best books were pioneers in a genre, so they stay in the lists out of respect to them or a habit. In the same way that the 50-second silent black-and-white movie about the train has 7.4 IMDb points.

Thus, there is no such thing as the best book ever. There are only lists of best books according to someone and then you have to choose whether to trust the source or not.

I, for example, stopped trusting Nobel Prize in Literature after it was awarded to Orhan Pamuk. I had only one encounter with his work but that was enough for me to never come close to his books again. It was a physical copy of Snow which I had to go and urgently discard, and wash my hands of it. The language was too primitive. It might have been a problem of translation but only if the translator had malignantly crippled the book.

In my experience I only once found the list that I could trust. I trusted the list because I tried several books from it and liked them all. The list was originally posted in a Wikipedia article called “100 best novels of all time” but then the article mysteriously disappeared. Only thanks to Reddit was I able to recover the list. Apparently, it has been posted in an article under a different name. I’d suggest to save the list in case it disappears again. It really has many worthwhile titles.

What about you? Which best books lists do you follow?

The book got critical acclaim, Man Booker Prize in 2017! In such situations it’s so easy to start thinking there’s something wrong with you. But I’d rather accept there is than listen to a single more minute of it. Maybe a big part of the problem was that it was an audiobook. Had it been a usual book with actual pages and words, I would have been able to take pauses, study the paragraphs trying to figure out crosseyed with confusion what the hell was going on.

There are, you see, one hundred and sixty-six voices in the audiobook! Calling it “the best audiobook of the year”, Audible still had to mention that the book creates “immersive cacophony effect”. Immersive cacophony effect it surely is. It is a romanticised way of saying that it bloody hurts your brain! The voices infest your thoughts, cripple your ability to think clearly or even to press the stop button when you can take it no more. The story in the beginning is composed of paragraphs cut out from different other books and documents, glued together the way kidnappers in old movies glued ransom notes from newspaper letters. There is even a computerized voice that reads all annotations to the clippings, loud and monotonously, and there are very many of them.

I should have given in to my suspicions early on, when I saw the book being described as “experimental”. A book may be described as experimental when it simply fails to fit basic aesthetics of writing. Besides, this book surely did feel like an experiment. On humans.

And that is a shame because the “cacophony” did bring in interesting voices from time to time. I even wrote down one of the lines. It’s about a meat dish that’s being taken away after a big party is over.  “…the animal carcasses, the meat […], trucked away to who knows where, clearly awful now, honest partial corpses once again, after brief elevation to the status of delight giving food”. That is genius, George Saunders can definitely write! I wish I was able to paddle through what he has done to his writing.