Really, Really Bad Writing

In 2010, 328,259 new books were published in the United States. Most of these, one imagines, were not very good, but probably not so bad either. For all the pallets of titles demanding neither praise nor execration, there are bound to have been a few hundred genuine clunkers. Negative criticism is as fun to write as it is to read, but most reviewers end up sinking their fangs into only one or two really bad books per publishing season. This is probably a good thing: vitriol, like vegetables, is no good canned, as it tends to be when it appears with any real frequency in the books sections of newspapers and magazines. Still, it’s undeniably the case that a lot of us—not just professional reviewers but unpaid readers of taste—enjoy reading bad writing.