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| I still think this is funny. |
Stories have made me feel happy, amused, sad, melancholy, thrilled, frightened, sympathetic, and–above all-entertained. But I realized that I rarely read books that make me angry. I enjoy feeling angry even less than I enjoy being scared by horror movies. And I hate being scared.
There are two books that I can recall having made me so angry while reading them that I wanted to throw them across the room. I came close in both cases and only the fact that I might have damaged the books kept me from doing it. I finished one of them because I was reading it for an American literature class. The other, well, I’m still not sure why I finished reading it. I suspect it was because, no matter how pissed off I was, I just had the know what happened to the heroine.
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| Uncle Tom’s Cabin |
The first book that I can recall making me furious was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Published in 1852, it’s packed with stereotypes and one dimensional characters. But we still read it because it captures an important piece of American history. This book needs to be read, just as Roots and Huckleberry Finn and The Red Badge of Courage need be read, because I don’t know if any other book can show just how inhuman slavery was. I’m not going to argue that this book is realistic, because it’s not. But Uncle Tom’s Cabin‘s stereotypes are like characters in allegories or parables. They represent the extremes, to show the audience the problem in stark tones. Just reading about the history isn’t enough, not for something the magnitude of the crime of more than one hundred years of slavery.
I still wanted to throw this book across the room, though.
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| Sophie’s Choice |
The other book that made me so angry that I can recall the feeling even a decade after reading it was William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. I could make the argument that, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Sophie’s Choice is also meant to make you feel the reality of the Holocaust. But I just can’t. When I read it, the story just felt like Styron torturing Sophie. First, the appalling choice she faced, then a life of terrified misery with a schizophrenic boyfriend. I know making your characters’ lives difficult is one of the more frequently given pieces of writing advice, but damn. If Sophie’s travails had been one or the other, I probably would have been able to handle this book without wanting to hurl it into a wall. (I think I actually did toss this book at one point, now that I think about it.)
As I was thinking over this post, I wondered why you don’t hear readers talking about books that made them angry. I’ve heard people talk about books that made them laugh or cry–or both, which means I have to read that book. And I wonder why. I’ve heard readers talk about books that made them bored or frustrated, but not angry or furious. Is it because anger is personal? Is it because the book affected us so deeply that we can’t talk about it until we come to grips with it? I suppose, as the Credible Hulk would say: Need More Data.