A Bad Book

The American Book Review has asked a number of pretty famous professors to identify a "bad book" (See http://americanbookreview.org/PDF/Top40BadBooks.pdf for their list). A number of the writers made it clear that a "bad book" has to be good enough to be worthy of getting angry with. In other words, they mean books that frustrate the reader because the writer could have clearly had the ability to do better and the topic warranted a better treatment.

My two nominees would be Percival Everett and James Kincaid's A History of the African American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond and Philip Roth's A Plot Against America. Both of these books began with fantastic, rich premises, but the authors seemed to get bored in the middle of the books. Because I love Everett and Roth, these were very disappointing to me.