Disappointing reads, or ‘Lit in the Pits’
Since 1999, hundreds of my reviews have appeared in The Smoky Mountain News. Of those, I would guess that less than 25 were negative. The cause of this disparity is simple enough. My good editor at the SMN lets me choose the books I review, and so I generally pick ones I expect to enjoy.
Today is different. Maybe it’s my mood, maybe old age, but here are three different books — a novel read in its entirety, another barely skimmed and a guide on wisdom that wasn’t so wise — that left me cold.
First up is Stephen Hunter’s “The Gun Man Jackson Swagger” (Atria/Emily Bestler Books, 2025, 304 pages), one more installment in Hunter’s Swagger family chronicles, some of which I’ve read and enjoyed.
Set in the drought-stricken Arizona Territory in the 1890s, Jackson Swagger, Civil War veteran, shootist, and jack of all trades, arrives at the Callahan Ranch looking for work. Col. Callahan hires Swagger to serve as one of his gunmen, for a small gang employed to help defend the construction of a nearby railroad and intimidate, through violence if necessary, anyone interfering with the project and its supply lines.
Soon the flint-eyed Swagger begins investigating the suspicious death of a gentle-natured young man, nicknamed Teacher, who until recently had worked as a wrangler at the ranch. Swagger’s sleuthing takes him to brothels and bars, the Mexican military, and a radical group intent on destroying capitalism.
There’s much to like about this book — the descriptions of the land, for example, and some parts of cowboying that showed Hunter had done his homework. Yet here’s another one of those suspense novels, this one garbed in chaps and boots, where there are enough dead bodies littering the pages to fill a graveyard, which saps the story of credibility.
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In addition, the band of Marxist revolutionaries, led by a commander known as The Frenchman, beggars belief. Some of these men don’t know the meaning of “capital” or why they’re supposed to fight against it, while three of them are Ivy League students who seem lost in this scenario.
Writers of fiction create a dream where readers live, a world which dims the lights on the real world they inhabit. Incongruities like the ones cited above puncture this dream and let the air out. “The Gun Man Jackson Swagger” deflates as we read it.
Billed as The “New York Times” Phenomenon That Everybody’s Talking About, Colleen Hoover’s “Verity” (Grand Central Publishing, 2021, 336 pages) came to me via the recommendation of an acquaintance. When I opened the book for the first time, here’s what I read:
“I was burning inside for him. He had lit a fire in me, and I was determined to make sure it didn’t go out.
He fed me before he ****ed me.”
How sweet.
And yes, it’s another one of those “romances” written chiefly for women that once qualified as pornography. Flip to another page, as I did, and the narrator, who is expecting a baby, thinks, “If I could somehow figure out how to deliver early… maybe around thirty-three or thirty-four weeks, I could avoid the most detrimental part of pregnancy.” To heck with the kid in her belly; she wants to look good for the man she loves.
More sex follows along with murder, and ultimately, silliness and idiocy. Go to Amazon if you want to read the synopsis, go next to the comments section where many readers shower “Verity” with praise, and then go into mourning for our moribund American culture.
“Wisdom Takes Work” (Portfolio, 2025, 400 pages) is the final book in Ryan Holiday’s series on the four classical virtues: courage, temperance, justice and wisdom. The others were a pleasure to read — I gave “Discipline Is Destiny,” the book on temperance, to my four children for Christmas a year ago — and I opened this volume geared up for some good stuff.
All went well until I hit the chapter titled “The Storm Within Us…” In a book where the chapters average seven or eight pages and usually focus on some historic figure, Holiday in this chapter devotes 27 pages to Elon Musk, first praising him as a genius, then tearing him apart for his lifestyle, his purchase of Twitter, his supposed bigotry, his lack of concern for others and so on. Some of Holiday’s attacks are on target, but they don’t end with that chapter. He returns to Musk several times throughout the book, seemingly vindictive or obsessed in his criticism of the world’s richest man.
At the end of the book, after patting himself on the back for his courage in writing critically of Musk — “He is a thin-skinned, impulsive person. He could make things very painful for me” — Holiday then writes, “I’m sure a significant portion of my readers will disagree with my take entirely.” I’m one of those readers, but not because I care all that much about the politics or the wealth of Elon Musk, of whom I know little. But in a book whose subject is wisdom written by an author whose work I have enjoyed and praised, I found this beatdown of Musk lopsided and ugly when compared to the rest of the book.
Holiday then writes, defending his attacks on Musk, “But this is what we’re talking about, isn’t it? You gotta do what you think is right. You speak the truth as you see it.”
“You speak the truth as you see it.” Doesn’t that translate as “Your truth isn’t my truth”? Socrates would have a field day taking apart this sentence with its sloppy language and thinking.
As for the three mini-reviews I’ve just written, these are opinions, not truths.
Until next time, good reading.
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
